To Paint or Not to Paint?

I have been motivated to play more of GW awesome Lord of the Rings game lately, not sure why, but having a blast with it. So for the longest time my figures have been largely unpainted for this, but I have been bitten by the painting bug to get them finished. I think this is partly due to me not wanting to play with unpainted minis out in public. Let me explain.

The guys I game with are for the most part Historical players and we have an unspoken rule about using unpainted stuff. Well it’s really not a rule, we just don’t do it! This unspoken rule has a plus & a negative to it. The plus side is that you get to face off against nicely painted armies or figures. The negative side is that you usually don’t get to play much because you are painting most of the time.

I started wondering why that is and I think I might have figured it out, well why I don’t anyway. Besides gaming, I have been an avid model builder & model railroader. This seems to be the reason why I don’t like playing with unpainted stuff. I have noticed that whenever I go to a game shop I always will stop and watch a game with painted figures over non painted stuff. The best way to advertise your “game” is to have nice looking stuff on the table. Eye appeal is everything, and nice looking stuff will always catch people’s eyes. Take for instance a few weeks ago while I was at my local game shop, there was a huge mega-game of 40K going on. It had about 6 or 8 people playing. The only thing I could tell you was that there was a lot of grey plastic & silver metal on the board. I couldn’t even tell you what armies were being used.

Now there was a game of Battle Fleet Gothic being played as well with two fully painted Imperial fleets slugging it out over some distant planet. Both players were new to the game and were playing on a nice space board that was reversed painted on Plexiglas (painted on the bottom side). The each had two cruisers and a few escorts and played for about 45 minutes. This game was going on at the same time as the huge Mega-battle but you can tell which one I watched.

So to make a long story short, this is why I have been busting my butt on getting the Mordor Orcs painted. I figure if I have nicely painted stuff, than other people will stop and watch our game and maybe inspired to paint up there stuff. I will try and post pictures in the next few days of my progress since I have a game coming up on Monday against a few friends…