I ran across an interesting idea from Frostgrave designer, Joe McCullough, called Operation Last Train. The game is a new miniatures game set in a future world, doomed and overrun with voracious predators. Your team of volunteer soldiers are the only hope remaining to the scant survivors left on a planet scheduled for destruction.
What made me sit up and take notice of the project is that McCullough tied the project creation to the charity organization, Save the Children. While the rules are free, I hope that you decide it is worth a few bucks to support the designer’s wishes to use our fun, brutal hobby to do some good around the world. I’ve already donated and I’m starting to read through the rules to see what all it needs. Like a lot of McCullough’s work, it only requires what you have on hand or what miniatures you want to buy.
Since it requires sci-fi soldiers, I’m looking at a few options I have on hand. Initially, I was thinking of using my Dropzone Commander minis in 10mm but then I realized I would need to pick up a lot more to separate off their standard 5-to-a-base requirement (I’m not wrecking my currently built armies). Thinking on it more it suddenly hit me- I have all soldiers I’ll need already in my mothballed collection of AT-43 minis.
I wasn’t sure how many old Red Blok soldiers I had but was excited to see I had well over the recommended 100 figures necessary. I imagine you won’t need that many soldiers because you can reuse but one of the other ideas that McCullough put forth is treating each casualty as unique and gone for the remainder of the campaign. This “Ironman” method is pretty fun so I’ll be running through these poor Red Blok infantrymen as unique and individual characters in the campaign narrative.
There is a lot of sculpt reuse but those old Rackham pre-paints are still of a quality level the industry can take note of.
