Assimilation Alien Host: Alien Queens, Guards and Eggs

 

The new year in a few days will mark eleven years gone by since the now-defunct Ed Fortae as Troll Forged Games ran his Assimilation Alien Host kickstarter, a project that could safely be called ill-fated.  Ed has long since left the industry following some health issues without managing total fulfillment, and Impact Miniatures (one of my fellow backers who went in big on the project) stepped up and volunteered to try to finish it off, which still isn't entirely done.  Looking at the most recent comments shipping costs seem to be the main sticking point, and it seems unlikely that these sculpts will ever be on sales at retail.

Now, I have no personal complaint about the project, but that's only because I was one relentlessly pushy SOB back when it started to show signs of having problems, and managed to not only pester my own pledge out of them, I bought another backer's pledge on the TFG market page and managed to get that too.  People who weren't as demanding are still waiting and have been for over a decade.  It's not something that has a good fix, but it does serve as an excellent cautionary tale when considering backing a crowdfunding project.

Anyway, in the interest of preserving some memory of Fortae's sculpting for posterity, I've done a full gallery page of the stuff I painted from the range which covers about 80% of the minis that were promised, not all of which were finished and produced.  I've still got a fair number of figs unfinished even after all this time, but I did do a few of them this years so I'm adding them to the record.

   These are the Alien Queen and the Queen's Guard sculpts, along with a couple of bases of Eggs.

The Queen is a seven piece model - thorax, abdomen, head, two arms, two pairs of legs - and is one of my favorite sculpts in the whole range thanks to its truly creepy design.

The Guards are five pieces - serpentine lower body, torso, head, two arms.  The eggs are all separate castings, I've just clumped them together here on 45mm bases from Reaper.  I believe there are three or four different variations of them. 

The bigger models are quite large, fitting comfortably on 60mm bases.  Everything is made of a restic material that was a proprietary formulation of TFG as far as I know.  It's light and pretty durable, although its flexibility seems a bit variable.  There was (and maybe is) a vid of Ed bending the heck out of a goblin spearman fig without the stuff deforming permanently or breaking, but I've had small protrusions snap off while cleaning off the excess from casting.

Still had enough of them to do two sets with minor pose variations.

Started with three sets, you can see the other ones on the gallery page.

The arms on these figs (and the majority of the rest of the range) are simple spur and socket affairs, very easy to position as you like.

Truly a shame this project went as badly as it did, the minis probably would have done well at retail.  Still, I give some credit to both TFG and Impact for not selling them until the project fulfillment was complete, despite the fact that it most likely would have led to a cash influx that could have concluded fulfillment many years ago now.

If they ever do become available on the general market (most likely through Impact) I heartily recommend picking some up.  They go well beyond merely being Tyranid proxies and show some real creativity.

Couple of shots to give a feel for their size.  The gentleman with the pistols is an old Mordheim fig, so pretty much 28mm scale.

Say, what's that other thing there in the center?  Guess we'll find out next time...