Hooray, it’s another post about some niche mechanics/tokens for the Shadows, because they weren’t exactly complicated enough at this point. Today’s post is about the miniatures used to represent the Shadow Portal equipment, all of which look pretty cool.

Shadow Portals

These were incredibly simple to paint – start with a basecoat of dark umber, then gradually drybrushing up using a tan brown, a yellow ochre, Iraqi Sand, and Pale Sand. After that has dried, there were a whole ton of washes added – greens, browns, sepia, and even a hint of turquoise in some of the shadows.

The mystic fog was done in the usual fashion: blue, turquoise, and Hellbound Flesh, followed by some glazes to smooth everything out. These weren’t complicated to sort out at all, so I’m looking forward to when I need to paint a few more of them.

What do Shadow Portals do?

Since this post would be pretty short without any analysis, I figure talking about how Shadow Portals work is necessary to really understand why you’d want to paint them. A Shadow Portal is a 10 doubloon piece of equipment that you’ll want to hire at least two of to make use of them. They can also be upgraded to provide additional effects to the Shadows crew, but we’ll be concentrating on the main use of these portals.

So long as there are at least two Shadow Portals deployed on the board, allied Shadow characters can step into one portal and emerge at any of the other portals. While they have to take the time to actually set up the portals during the game, this is incredible in terms of how much it increases the crew’s mobility. Suddenly, you can advance much faster once you’ve got a couple portals up, and you’re able to quickly retreat back to other portals in case you need to defend where the first one was set up. While this seems incredible at first brush, it’s not all upsides: models cannot carry scenario items through portals, you need a valid exit to actually go through them, and the various upgrades can start to get expensive if you get too excited about them.

A few of the wonderful upgrades you can add to these portals include generating Shadow Force each turn they’re open, allowing Shadow Portals to be deployed outside of base-to-base contact with models, allow smoke to act as an exit point, and even lets you use them to summon additional Wisps. There’s a lot of utility there, and your whole crew’s strategies can change depending on how you set up the gates. I’m a huge fan of them, even if I had to revise my list after realizing I’d only brought one and showing them off for the demo is more important than bringing extra models, at least in my opinion.

Hobby Progress

I finished up getting the final paint on this crew’s Leader last night, so I’m getting closer to having more demo crews prepped. I’ve also learned that my FLGS will be able to advertise for the demo night when I actually run it thanks to another interested player, so I’m working on sleeving all of my cards and trying to decide at good multi-crew scenarios.

This also means that I’ll need more Imperial Armada and Pirate crews, because if there’s anything I know about games, it’s that having extra sets of the easiest demo crews to explain is going to be a big advantage in helping people dive into things.