Steel Rift is an indie wargame, originally designed by Ash Barker and now designed and published by Death Ray Designs. It’s a mech skirmish game with games involving about half a dozen models. I’ve not gotten around to trying it yet but would like to at some point.

The game exhibits at the Nova Open and after picking some stuff up last year this year I picked up more but promised myself I’d actually get around to painting it. One thing that helped is this year I picked up some of their “quick build” sets, these are sets of 4 mechs that are mono-pose (all Steel Rift mechs are 3d prints) and I like these more than the fully customizable models they make. The quick builds tend to have more interesting poses and generally are a bit more dynamic than the full kits.

The 67th is one of the quick build boxes I picked up this year and I just love their missile bits. Steel Rift sets itself apart with customizable weapons. Mechs have small hardpoints (the untrained eye would mistake these as holes) where you can slot in weapon bits. I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand it’s cool, and with a bit of blue tac, or painfully small magnets you can make these hot-swappable. One of the big downsides however is it can lead to a bit of analysis paralysis when building the mechs. I decided with my new quick builds that I was going to match the box art for which weapons to use and I have no regrets on that.

Painting these was a ton of fun, I got most of the basecoats done while at a weekend away for an RPG campaign. Waking up early lead to some very nice early morning painting sessions on the back patio of our beach house. I finished these up at home. One thing I want to shout out is that Death Ray are including small transfer sheets with these boxes and I really love them. I had a ton of fun with this small project and want to do a couple more Steel Rift forces. I think I should probably add another mech or two matching this paint scheme just so I can more realistically play a full sized game, but I’ve not really looked into points yet to worry about that.