Home made Drones for Mars Code Aurora

 My mates and I have recently purchased another set of rules. Why? Why not! This one's called Mars Code Aurora, from a French designer. We're intending on playing a series of games in early May - my club (Axes & Ales) is having a Swap Meet on Sunday morning and that afternoon and evening, the club has the Thornbury Bowls Club to ourselves.

Anyway, Mars is a skirmish sci-fi game and one of the devices it employs is Drones. Without going into the full setting's details, Drones patrol Mars, monitoring the population on behalf of a huge surveillance operation. In the game, they patrol the board, drawn toward combat. The kicker is, if a Drone's within 10cm of a Unit, that Unit is pacified and cannot perform any shooting action. The game employs one game for each player - so a 2-player game means 2 drones are required.

My first thought was to make some Games Workshop Tau Drones - as it happens, I have three blisters of them sitting in my pile of shame.

BUT I felt like being a bit more creative. So I hunted into my bits boxes and found a whole lot of small plastic electrical bits I looted from a skip bin some 5 years ago :-D

I quickly put together a mock-up - I glued two of the black ones together, cut eight pieces of plastic tubing and jammed it into body, angling some like jet nozzles or something. A thumbtack was inserted on top, and on top of that, I put a small rhinestone. Four small nails made for good antennas, and I used another plastic bit for the bottom - luckily it has a hollow recess, which meant I could insert it into a stand.

That didn't take too long. Next step was to spray them with a black primer - suddenly they were looking good...

The black was followed with a misting of white...

With the units primed, I then used a blue-green and orange glaze for the bodies, a silver glaze for the nozzles and antennas, and used a bright yellow on the antennas' tips and bright orange for the sensor bump (?) on the top of the thumbtack. And the result? I reckon it was great! I'm looking forward to getting them out on the tables in a month's time!