Relic Knights

You may not have heard of Relic Knights. It launched via Kickstarter a few years ago and had a few teething problems. Happily it's second edition Kickstarter finished relatively recently and looks to have solved the main issues with the game.

Relic Knights is fairly unique in that it feels like a blend of table top wargaming and a card game. Now, being a Malifaux player the idea of using cards in a game is not new to me, however the way in which relic knights uses them is quite unique.

In Relic Knights you very rarely flip randomly off the top of your deck to see what happens, instead if you can pay for an action on a units card, it goes off. Your opponent can mitigate some of the damage dealt with defensive abilities; if they can afford to play them. Your models stats dictate how many cards you can pick up while performing an action, and the game is about sculpting your hand so you have the cards you need for your upcoming activations, which you have to declare in advance.

Anyway, the advent of the Relic Knights V2 Kickstarter inspired me to go back and paint up some of the models I got with the original Kickstarter.

One Shot and Fritz

This is One Shot, a Black Diamond Relic Knight. This was one of the models that got me interested in Relic Knights, slightly infuriatingly some of the V1 Relic Knights had scaling issues and One Shot and Fritz are quite a bit smaller then it seems like they should be.

Black Dragons

Black Dragons are the Black Diamond heavy infantry. A fairly generic power armoured design. However, I like that sort of thing which is another reason I collect Black Diamond. Other sides exploit other anime styles and tropes.

Sofia Drake

Sofia Drake is the Black Dragons officer. Taken in the same list as her unit she gets some additional synergy.

Diamondback

The Diamondback is a big (very big) mech. I'm quite pleased with the way the crackle medium came out on the blade of the energy axe.

M8 Tank

M8 Tank. Small kinda cute looking AI drone tank thingy. Quite pleased with how this is painted. 

Suspect 7

A trio of ninjas, who are in fact dimensional clones. Which is pretty interesting. I'm pleased with how the hair came out, but I'm never clear why they decided to make two look very similar, and the one on the right looks quite different.

Codebreaker

Codebreaker, and his slaved cypher. Now, this was not one of the Kickstarter V1 kits, and is one of the sort of V1.5 resin models. It's a much much nicer model, though my terrible paint job may not be doing it justice.

Boost Tokens

In Relic Knights, you can spend your odd numbers of points on boosts to give you small benefits. The V1 Kickstarter came with cool sculpted tokens to use for these, though I think you are supposed to use just flat tokens in the new rules.

Amelial

Now, everything I have shown so far is a Black Diamond faction model. Not so Amelial. Amelial belongs to the 'void' faction which is one of the two 'prismatic' factions which ally with the six main factions. You can either ally in void heroes and minions into an aligned army, such as Black Diamond, or you can use a Void Relic Knight or Questing Knight as your leader, and ally in heros from the three Void aligned factions.

Quite pleased with Amelials wings. Not 100% sold on the armour. 

Darkspace Iron Chef

Now, here is something interesting. In Relic Knights they have a small series of Darkspace miniatures which are in theory versions of existing Heroes from alternate universes. In practice they are existing Heros in Cosplay as a character from an Anime or Japanese video game. The Hero also usually has a faction swap. This is Iron Chef dressed as Solid Snake, he is a Black Diamond hero. 

Darkspace Rin Farah

Darkspace Isabeau

Here are the other two Darkspace models. Not Black Diamond characters, but as these plastic darkspace minis are in danger of disappearing, I thought I would pick up the two for the other void aligned factions. 

Finally and slightly embarrassingly, I have uploaded pictures of models I did not repaint recently. This is because they will be replaced with V2 resin miniatures as soon as the Kickstarter arrives. However, it is sometimes interesting to see how far painting has come.

Leopold Magnus

Diamondcorp & Breaker team

Addendum: Followers of my blog (who?) may have noticed that all the updates lately have been painted miniatures. I'm not totally certain if I want to continue with random other socio-political rambles. Or if those things are better sidelined to another blog or what. Then again, there has been rather a lot of politics to talk about lately so I have no shortage of things to talk about. If anyone has any thoughts on this (or anything else for that matter) you can comment or email.