It happened. It finally happened. I played my first game of Nemesis, by Zenit Miniatures! It took over a decade after getting my first minis, but it finally happened.
Lennard, an old gaming buddy from multiple FLGS ago, mentioned liking the Orphans numerous times in the past, and recently asked about the game again to show the models to a friend. I mentioned that I now had enough models for a game, and a date was set to give it a try!
I started to paint my Rocavivas last year, to have an opposing force to my Orphans and finally try out Némesis. I was doing quite well early on, until everything stopped due to the flooding. Since my second batch of Rocavivas was already primed, I kept those on the side and didn’t pack them off to go in storage, to have something to work on in case I could get some free time. I didn’t paint much during the cleaning and reconstruction, but when we had some quieter evenings, I worked a bit on them on a corner of the kitchen table.
Painting in a shared zone that I had to keep clear afterward wasn’t as effective as with a dedicated hobby zone, but it was that or nothing, so I made do. Even if it was shorter periods, because of the time required to set up and tear down after each session, it brought some peace of mind in an otherwise stressful period. I managed to paint all my second batch over a couple of months (which is long even for me), but I couldn’t finish them, as all my basing material and varnish were still in storage.
Now that I have enough Orphans painted for a small force, all they were missing was an opposing force. Since I initially got into the game with the Arbonte’s Menace two-player starter, I already owned the start of a Rocavivas army, which I reinforced with a faction starter back in the 2010s. I wasn’t looking at the rules when I bought them, but by a strange happenstance, both my collections come to about the same point size, so that was perfect.
The recent announcement by Zenit Miniatures that they are relaunching the game couldn’t have come at a better moment for me, as I was already invested in painting and trying the game. That also meant that I want to play it sooner than later, to know if I really like it, before they launch the upcoming Kickstarter project. That made me make the decision to try out painting the Rocavivas a bit faster than the Orphans, in a more army scale way, starting with a test unit of Kyanites.
Over the last month, I started working on my second Nemesis faction, the Rocavivas, as I mentioned in the last post, cleaning, assembling and priming them. However, I’m not sure yet on the colour scheme or basing, so I decided to continue painting the other Orphans I already had prepared, to keep the motivation going.
These new additions round out my small force quite well in terms of gaming diversity, and also continue the theme of having an extremely colourful warband. Luckily, the forest bases tie them up together visually.
Back in 2012-2013, I bought into Nemesis, by the Spanish company Zenit Miniatures. What really sold it to me was the Orphans faction, a group of unaging kids disguising themselves as insects, protecting the living forest Arbonte. I painted a single model back then, one of the Mantis, for a painting contest, but the lack of opponents, combined with other priorities, relegated them to the back of the pile.
Flash forward to last month. I was doing some digging in my pile of opportunities, to clear out and sell some projects I now know I won’t get to, or lost interest into, when I stumbled upon the box containing my Nemesis models. Being between projects, and wanting to paint something colourful, I decided to get them out again, and finally paint enough to try out the game. It just took a decade to get back to it…
