LNOE plastic zombies

At this years Gauntlet event, run by Deeside Defenders,  I picked up a copy of the Last Night on Earth boardgame. I'd known about the game for a while and a big draw for me was all the figures that come with it, 8 survivors and 14 zombies in 3 poses. Here's some pics of the zombies I ended up painting and converting.

The first thing that I noticed about the figures was how bendy they were. These are real soft plastic. Most noticable around the ankles of the figures, very flexy. Now this is a good thing in terms of the figures as un-painted game pieces. You could probably tread on one of these figures and it would spring back into shape, very durable in that respect,  but the flex could cause problems if trying to paint them. Soft plastic can be really tricky to get paint to adhere to, and the flex in the plastic can cause the paint job to crack. Having had some revell 1/72 soft plastics resist every attempt at getting paint to stick to them I didn't hold out much hope.


Still, I'd seen enough decent paintjobs over on Boardgame Geeks for me to do a test on one of the figures to see how durable the paint job was. Just a quick simple job, I also used this figure to try out some blood techniques. As it turned out the paint went on really well.

Because I re-based the figures on coins, to match my metal figures, I tried drilling up into the legs and gluing some wire in place. This really strenghtened the figure, taking away most of the flex. I ended up doing this on the other six figures I plan to paint. Here is the painted figures with the 3 unpainted zombie poses, a the lower profile coin base.

Because there are only 3 poses there is limited variation... but this is where the soft plastic of the figures is a real bonus. The figures are so easy to cut and drill conversions take minutes. I played around with these over the course of a week, and few minutes here and there. I got 6 done and called it a day. The remaining 7 zombies I'll leave unpainted. Here are the six conversions.

These two had an right arm swap and one of the heads was repositioned with bit of wire. Gave the bare-chested guy a t-shirt with some green stuff.

Next two was a torso swap, this worked really well. Repositioned the arms. The zombie with the green body and brown legs is probably my favorite of the conversions.

There is less conversion options with the female since she's the only Z chick, so it was a case of re-positioning arms and twisting the torso around on one of them.... (looks like I need to put a bit more putty on one of the arms..)

All in all in was fun playing around with these, especially since they're so easy to cut and convert... not sure when I'll get a chance to paint them though....