It's here!!! After a very bumpy journey involving two different kickstarters and three round the world trips, IDW's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles finally have a faithful board game that recreates some of the epic moments from the first few comic arcs, including Change is Constant and City Fall.
The game finally arrived last Monday and I've been painting it up ever since. Kicking things off are our heroes, the Turtles themselves and their close friend and ally, Casey Jones.
First up we have our leader, Leonardo, strong, capable but with the world on his shoulders, Leo rarely gets to be the fun one, but he does dual wield katana and that is awesome. Each Turtle, as well as having their own bandana colour also has a unique skintone. For Leo that is a green that shifts slightly towards the blue end of the scale.
Next we have Donatello, the brains of the outfit, Donnie has always been slightly separate from his brothers, coming at the world from a more clinical angle, viewing their lives through the crucial of science and reason. With Donnie's skintone we shift more towards an olive colour adding brown to the mix and adding in yellows for highlights.
If Donnie is the brain then Raphael is the heart of the group. In IDW's run of the TMNT, Raphael grew up separately from his brothers, lost and confused in a world determined to rub him out, Raph needed to be hard as stone, but on the inside he has a heart of gold. With Raph the colour is as close to primary green as you can get, with yellow added for vivid highlights.
Where would the Turtles be without a sense of fun and while IDW's Michelangelo might not have actually uttered the word Cowabunga, he certainly embodies the spirit of it. Like Raph, Mikey is a sensitive soul, but he wears his heart on his sleeve and he's not afraid to stand up and fight for what he thinks is right. With Mikey his skintone has a blue shift like Leo's but it's a darker richer turquoise.
Lastly we have Casey Jones. After losing his mother, Casey lives with his abusive, drunken father and blows off steam playing hockey and defending the innocent. However his life changes forever when he meets a mutant turtle called Raphael and the rest, as they say, is history. I love how Casey turned out, I added quite a few details like the wood grain on the bats and the thread bare patches on his jeans.
And that's it for this week, I'm sure I'll be showing off more TMNT over the coming weeks, but you can stay up to date with daily updates on the facebook and twitter feeds. Until next time, have fun painting,
The Duke
The Duke has been a TMNT fan for the last thirty plus years... this could a deep rabbit we're going down!