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The dynamic duo - Pulp City style

2012-02-04T21:13:00.003Z

Well, here they are, the newest dynamic duo to hit my painting table and bounce off, now fully painted ready to take to the streets of Pulp City - Riposte (with the sword) and Arquero (with the bow).

These are probably my favourite sculpts in a series of figures that just keeps getting better and I knew as soon as I saw the previews on the Pulp City website that I had to get them when they were released, so I did and wasn't disappointed!

They form a "super-duo" in that they give each other benefits when close to each other, so I wanted to paint them in the same colours to give a nod to that. Yellow is a great colour to be able to use on super heroes and I really enjoyed the painting and highlighting as I've not really used it much before. I think it may well have been the early X-Men, if memory serves, who had a yellow and grey scheme like this and I thought it'd look good on these two.

I went for a warmer colour on Riposte's hair to offset the colder grey and Arquero gets a neutral overcoat so as not to detract from the main colour scheme.

Another shot below to get a different angle on the figures.

Back on the Bayou

2012-01-23T14:34:00.000Z

So do you remember that I purchased a load of Malifaux figures on Ebay??

Somer Teeth Jones and his crew that had been assembled using blue tac and super glue and badly painted.

Heres the pic as a reminder.

Well, they had a little spell in detol and have been assembled properly put on the nice Wyrd Swamp bases and had a better paint job applied. Vallejo Still water has been put on the bases to give the watery effect.

I think you will agree there is a bit of change! But as ever, the photos don't do them justice.

The saga begins....

2012-01-03T17:55:00.005Z

I'll dispense with my traditional "Gosh, hasn't it been a long time since I posted on this blog" because it's always been a long time, so I should probably get used to it :)

Anyway, what I've been up to recently is painting lots and lots of 28mm Roman Legionaries from Warlord. Really nice figures, just right for batch painting. However, this post isn't about the 79 legionaries that I've painted.... Why not? well, two reasons. The first is that I haven't textured their bases and the second is that they're all packed away and it would mean getting them all back out again to photograph!

I have 20 more Romans to do t0 complete the 6 units, so I'll probably base and photograph them all then to prove that I've not been doing nothing ;)

Anyway, taking a break from the Romans I got my Saga warband painted up. 25 blokes, all batch painted again with coloured undercoat to make life slightly simpler for myself. You'll notice that some are still awaiting shields (they have blank shields), but they were dispatched today from little big men studios, so I'll finish them off as soon as they arrive.

So, what's up next? Well, after batch painting 104 figures between Romans and Saga, I decided I needed a break and to spend some time on some individual figures instead, so shown below are the next figures to make it to the magic table of painting+1....

6 Pulp City figures and 2 more Malifaux figures on the right (I'm also working on 3 Fire Gamin, but my plan to get them done quickly is scuppered by the fact my orange ink has all set!).

All of these figures will be painted and get some serious highlighting too as the super-hero figures practically demand it. I should probably then turn my attention to finishing the Pulp City scenery so we can get some more games in!

Malifaux Storm

2011-12-29T01:28:00.000Z

Firstly - Hope everyone enjoyed/is enjoying Xmas!
Secondly - Apologies for the quality of some of the photos: I need to sort out my lighting system.

On Boxing Day I was sat minding my own business with a box of chocolate biscuits when I decided I needed to paint something. Many choices on the shelves including my Dark Eldar army for 40K but in the end I plumped for completing one of the many new systems that turned up in 2011.

Malifaux stepped forward.

The Viktoria Twins

When we started Malifaux I picked up the Outcasts and prompty painted Von Schill and the Freikorps: a total of 6 models. As happens with wargamers I obviously bought more figures than I needed and ended up with 20.

Ronin

I added the Viktoria Twins Mercenary group and then picked up figures that I liked the look of. I know shocking - fancy buying figures because they look cool without any knowledge of what they do on the tabletop.

Johann + Taelor

I set myself a challenge to paint all 14 remaining figures before the end of 2011 just to prove that I can complete these new gaming systems!


Convict Gunslinger + Bishop

I painted them in batches to keep things quick and went for a wide selection of colours to keep things really interesting.

Misaki

I kept one colour the same throughout the models: they all have Tau Sept Ochre + Gryphonne Sepia somewhere on them. I chose this because the Outcasts colour on their cards is a deep yellow.

Hans + Desperate Mercenary

They are also all on the Graveyard bases except Johann and Misaki who come with their own bases.

Jack Daw + Student of Conflict

I have some tidying up to do on the bases but otherwise this lot are done.

Freikorp Trapper + Librarian

So that's 14 figures in 3 days which is good for me and a completed gaming system... well, until new figures appear!

Freikorpsmen

Next up I think will be Pulp City as I want to get these alternate systems up and running as fast as I can so I can then go back to my Dark Eldar.

Von Schill + Freikorp Specialist

Happy New Year!

Outcast Party

Back in the 40K groove

2011-11-14T13:19:00.000Z

So whilst the 'fox is flip flopping between different forces to do next, I thought I would leap on in there and bring my half finished Grek Knights off the shelf. Now, they were half finished about 3 years ago and so a bit of dusting has had to be done. Also, and annoyingly, it would appear that I had inadvertantly used a silver enamel spray to undercoat the figures. This has caused me one or two issues so far, but I am getting there is curing the problem.

So first things first, I updated the key parts of the force with 2 must haves, a Storm Raven (now with turret fitted properly) and the DreadKnight. I used the airbrush shading technique for the sword which has come out very well indeed.

Also, having read the codex, I love the idea of the dead Terminators coming back to life to defend their old boss, Grand Master Mordrak. So I have got some of the old metal terminators done to fulfill that role. I have acquired some new plastic ones to take their place in the troops section of the force. Mordrak is on the painting table now. I did try a black and silver half and half finish on one of them, but in all honesty, it look atrocious. So white and green wash for a classic LotR Army of the Dead finish.

First games of Pulp City!

2011-11-02T08:16:00.002Z

So, the Silverback and I were the only ones left standing for our usual Tuesday evening session and after much umming and ahhing over what to do, we plumped for trying out our first game of Pulp City!

The City streets are still under construction, so the encounter occurred in the Pulp City graveyard..... a pretty good choice given the proximity to halloween!

We went for a straight brawl and ignored resources to keep it simple. I was the villains and recruited Hellsmith, Tritonius and Stalker and faced off against the heavy Metal team of Dr. Mercury, Lady Cyburn and Androida. You can see my set up positions below at the edge of the graveyard (Heavy Metal all started hiding behind trees so the photos were rubbish!)

A mid game shot with all of the figures shown.....

Androida ran up the flank and then got charged by a raging Stalker who managed to cut her to pieces in a couple of turns. Lady Cyburn then turned on the flames and burned Tritonius badly and damaged Hellsmith - in a later turn she finished off poor Tritonius whose water nature made him vulnerable to her flames!

Hellsmith and Stalker then smashed her into the ground and turned on Dr Mercury..... Who promptly ripped them both a new one in very short order! He's an absolute monster who hits like an anvil (literally) and is really tough. He's the only supreme we found who was both strong and tough and didn't even break a sweat taking out 2 supremes on his own.

So, we reset and this time the villains must have fooled the heroes because it was hero on hero action! Iron Train, Cronin and Nuclear Jones faced off against Solar, Perun and Stalker (again).

Slower start for my heroes as perun called on the power of the storm to charge himself up and the others went forward. Solar and Perun started flying and Solar called upon the power of the sun to touch his friendly supremes and give them +1 to all opposed rolls (nice!).

Cronin ran forward and flurried on Perun who took a couple of points of damage and Solar and Nuclear Jones chucked sun rays and nuclear missiles at each other - comic book heaven :)

Iron train just huffed and puffed down one flank whilst Perun smashed up Cronin and Nuclear Jones dropped nuclear fallout and eventually detonated himself to cause Stalker and Solar a fair number of wounds. Iron Train then put the kitty out by spooking Stalker with a ghostly train bu the combined might of Solar and Perun were enough to finish him off and win the day. Pic below of the fight in progress.

So, what did we learn? Pulp City is good fun! The basic rules are simple and the exclusive actions really give each supreme their own flavour. There's plenty more for us to learn about combos and the like and getting into the streets to chuck cars about will be fun :)

Most rolls end up causing between 0-3 damage so careful plannng is needed, but when boosted though (or just if your name is Mercury) you can cause more (7-8) which can be a real game changer, taking out supremes in a punch or two.

Looking forward to a few more games, so expect to see the street scenery move up the to do list!

Through the Sea Mist they came...

2011-10-30T23:07:00.000Z

What's this? My blog posts are just like buses: none for ages and then 2 in rapid succession.

I finally found some time to crack on with my Prussian Fleet for Dystopian Wars. Now those of you who have been following the blog for a while will remember that I painted the fleet quite a while ago. Unfortunately when we used them on the table they were too dark and could not be seen.

Back to the drawing board then! Drawing inspiration from Eddy's and Silverback's fleets I added sea bases and set about lighter colours.

Now the room was a bit dark for these pictures but hopefully they come out all right! The sea has been painted Regal Blue and is to be finished this week with some highlights and washes to bring out the stormy conditions.

The Fleet set Sail

They all have to be named yet which is my next challenge. I shall delve into the DW backstory for the Prussians and also look back to history itself to gather inspiration. I shall not be naming the battleship Bismarck!

Squadron of Frigates - 3x3 Squadrons in the Fleet

The hulls and steel plates are Codex Grey, the "wooden" effect decking is Mechrite Red, the metallic pieces are Boltgun Metal.

Battleship Ho!

Battleship with Shield Generator

I think they look a lot better than the old dark and dingy ones! Now I need to get them into action again.

Cruisers - 3 of them in the Initial Fleet

So that leaves me with the Bombers and Little Planes to do before next weekend. The Airship will have to wait for now until I've at least had a couple of battles.

Next weekend the Necrons are released and I suspect the lure of the shiny will drag me away again so all hands to the pump this week!

Was that the sound of an Alarm Clock?

2011-10-30T01:35:00.000+01:00

They're back...

PX-0967 Army of Necrons

Sorry couldn't resist cos, y'know, resistance is futile.

Flayed Ones - Happy I have these as don't like the new Finecast ones

I'll stop now. If not then feel free to Delete...

Wraiths & Tomb Spyders just added

Ahem. I love Necrons. Have done ever since I got a free metal Necron on the cover of a White Dwarf a long time ago (2nd Edition?). I used an all metal army during the first "Codex" which I think was in White Dwarf again and consisted of Lord, Warriors, Immortals, Scarabs and Destroyers.

Then came the first real Codex and I bought the army box so that I could get the Codex early. The army you see in these pictures is the one that was awakened from that Codex. All except the Wraiths and Tomb Spyders which have been painted this weekend: well they were in a box and looking forlorn plus I need the army for Spoils of War Campaign at the end of November!

And then they went to sleep again. They were not too interesting to play at times because the Phase Out rule meant that your opponent usually ignored the mission and just tried to kill enough Necrons to make you lose.

But now they're back. Remember, remember the 5th of November because that's the day the Universe will shake as a thousand billion alarm clocks go off and the Necrons finally awaken from their slumber...

The Dark Eldar challenge continues......

2011-10-18T12:18:00.005+01:00

So, I thought an update was in order as to the feasibility of getting the DE done by the weekend.

First up, the unit of wyches and bloodbrides - not much left to do on these, the ones on the left have all had the jade highlight added to the green armour, so probably just the final 5 or so to finish, some touch ups on the Guard equipment that they're leaping over and that'll be the first figures finished.... With 4 evenings to go. Gulp.

This is the next unit of wyches. All washes done and just the red, brass and armour to highlight. I really want to get the wyches all finished because I'm sure I won't get the green armour highlighted on the rest of the army and I think it might just be a tad disheartening if I have to go back and add more paint to everything after the weekend.

Talking of not getting things finished, these are the 20 warriors + Archon. Still need to finish the armour washes on about half of them (on the right) and then highlights to do.

And finally a quick shot of some of the vehicles (there are another 4 in addition to these). My current approach to getting them painting is to stick my fingers in my ears, close my eyes and hum loudly and hope that when I take them out of their cases, they'll magically be finished. Always works that way, right?

I'm still really enjoying painting them and it always seems to be that I have to drag myself to the painting table when I just feel like slumping in front of the TV, but really enjoy the painting once I start. The tournament is definitely having a positive effect as there have now been hours of painting that I just wouldn't have done without the motivation of this weekend. I just need to make sure i don't need a new army every month :)

New Sarissa Stuff

2011-10-13T10:44:00.003+01:00

I'd got it into my head that this new laser etched stuff might be good for some other, non building, sorts of terrain. The primary thought was carts for Wild West games as the metal ones I'd seen were too small for scale or too expensive in metal.

HDF would seem to be perfect!

I was right as the nice man at Sarissa Precision kindly responded to my email with this lovely little teaser picture! Nice!

FoW Buildings

2011-10-13T10:32:00.003+01:00

I've been rather distracted of late what with the arrival of 'Shell. This is the Gog nickname for my firstborn child so named by the Gogs. Seemed fitting for the offspring of Mr & Mrs Artillery!

This said I have managed to grab five minutes here and there to do a (very) little hobby stuff. I've set up my airbrush finally and used it to undercoat a load of figures and to put the base coat onto one of the laser-etched buildings that I'd brought at Colours. Once dried I finished it off with dry-brushing.

It is a bit dark so I will make an effort to make the next one a lot lighter. When I get round to it.

Foxy Lady

2011-10-12T23:52:00.000+01:00

Hello.

Some of you may remember me from the Solo GoG Blog during the first six months of 2011....

.... and then I disappeared. I won't bore anyone with the details but suffice to say that I'm nearly, almost back but not quite yet. Once MAD (40K tournament alluded to by the esteemed Urn) is out of the way I'll have some more time to paint.

Expect November onwards to involve me hopefully getting my mojo back!

In the meantime I have been painting 1 figure and she's nearly done: highlights and the base to go.

Viktoria - Queen of Blades

Meet one of the Viktoria twins for Malifaux. Her sister has been started together with other members of the initial gang (Convict Gunslinger, Taelor, Ronin & Student of Conflict). Once done Von Schill will join them to make a 35 point gang.


Viktoria's Rear

She's usually painted blue but as my goal is to include the Ochre colour in all my Outcasts I eventually settled on using it as her base colour. It has merged a little with the flesh so some highlighting required. I think the blue armour has come out quite nice: very simple Boltgun metal with a Azurman Blue wash. I like simple...

Painting Progress

2011-10-12T14:23:00.000+01:00

Ok, so I have been slacker than a slack thing that has been repeatedly stretched when it comes to posting my pics of painted stuff.

Anyway, to make amends here are the latest bits of output. I always wonder why the figures don't look as good in the pics as they do in real life.

So, in order of precedence, are

Dystopian Wars reinforcements of a couple of Scout Gyros, Big Airplatform and the sexy Ika Submarines :)

Pulp City 4 lovely little figures (can you tell I had just watched the Watchmen with the Harrier figure?)

Hell Dorado - a Female cook that could come from any fantasy novel. A great figure to paint and looks stunning in the flesh so to speak - very happy with her.

My Dark Eldar tournament challenge

2011-10-12T09:31:00.005+01:00

Right, in the picture below you'll see the scale of the challenge that I have set myself. Do you remember those 19 basecoated wyches who were cast asside in favour of painting some malifaux and Pulp City figures a couple of months ago? Well, they're back.

I've entered Nick's tournament and with it looming large on the horizon, I was trying to work out which army to use from the many I have available. Imperial Guard? Too cheesy and disappointing for opponents. Sisters of Battle? new WD codex is totally uninspiring. Dark Eldar? Not painted....

But then it occured to me that they should be painted. They've been sitting around for ages and I've been using a combination of unpainted, old and undercoated figures when playing recently, which frankly is a disgrace to the hobby (unless you're actually painting as you go so each time you play something else has advanced.... Which wasn't the case for me(.

I also came to the conclusion that I never painted an army unless there was a tournament looming to make me do it, so if I didn't do them now it could be years until they were done. So, with a week off in hand (although most of it would be spent with the family) I went for it! The picture you see below is the state of the army a couple of weeks ago near the end of my holiday. There are 19 wyches basecoated with 9 undercoated, 2 venoms with the glue still drying, 20 warriors (3 undercoated) and 1 Archon (I couldn't resist building one after I liked the pose of one of the warriors so much that I had to do a quick weapon swap and promote him!). There are also 2 ravagers and 4 raiders to spruce up to match the new figures.

I'll post more updates as I go along as there's only about 10 days left now...... Yikes!

Some more Pulp City

2011-10-12T09:13:00.004+01:00

So, here they are, the latest Pulp City figures to roll off the production line The flash photography doesn't do them any favours, but such is life!

As I mentioned in my last post, I needed more level 1 supremes, so here are two more with 1 unique minion (the zombie wolf).

The sculpt of Red Riding Hoodoo is one of my favourites of the PC line. I also couldn't improve upon the standard colour scheme and I like the light bandages contrasting with the dark skin. I'm pleased with the final figure and the detail is really nice, she's holding a little voodoo doll in her left hand for example.

The Zombie Wolf was.... average. Lots of green stuff to fill the large gap where the left and right side went together and a quick paint job to get it done. 'Nuff said.

Stalker was an interesting decision for me. Technically, he/she is a black panther. But I hate painting black. I tried and really didn't like where it was going, so took the decision that she was now a she-lion as I had some colours I wanted to use which would work for that. Mostly pleased with the final result, although the wash colour was a little strong (but looks fine at tabletop distance). A word of thanks must also go to the Silverback for painting the mailbox which was originally intended as street furniture. The Stalker figure comes with an Incan column to be climbing off, but I decided that might look a little silly in the streets of PC, so I used the mailbox which was the perfect height and the rounded top fitted the leg shape perfectly :) I see it that she climbed up there for a recce and is climbng down to move in for the attack.

Building No.2

2011-09-21T09:37:00.003+01:00

I still need to finish the rear side of the roof (out of shot) but other than that I have nearly finished the second building. I used this one to experiment with the roof as some of the other things I am planning have more detail in the way of roof windows etc.

I'll get this finished, hopefully soon, and start painting this and the other one.

A very quick post on buildings....

2011-09-20T08:20:00.002+01:00

Scratch building for Pulp City is great fun. I'm really enjoying doing a couple of shops and a skyscraper, but I thought I'd take the plunge and buy a couple of the Sarrisa precision buildings as they'd be fairly useful for bulking out terrain and giving us different buildings to fight over.

And you can colour me impressed. The one below was dry fitted in around 5 minutes and all I need to do tonight is break it down and glue the various floors together. There are tabs to keep the floors and roof in place during play but you can also then take them apart to move figures around the different floors. And you can see the windows & door detailing sitting next to them that will get glued inside the walls to complete the look.

I got this one and a slightly larger one as testers and I expect they'll both be built tonight ready for some painting.

Finally, some spandex clad heroes!

2011-09-18T19:36:00.005+01:00

So, these guys (and 1 gal) took me a little longer than I anticipated. I know, I know, it's because you think I was working on other weird and wonderful miniatures, right?

Well, yes and no. Yes because there were a few Malifaux figures, etc. that have been painted, but no because I found myself wanting to try new things with them. When painting this few figures I found myself wanting to highlight them much more than I normally do. And with all the colours required when painting spandex, I spent a little more time thinking about the colours that I'd use to make sure they only looked as brightly coloured as super heroes should be and hopefully not too garish or dull.

So, the first two are my flying supremes. I wanted a different scheme for Solar and the red and green came to me when thinking of an old school DC hero whose name escapes me. I went with the blond hair to give a splash of something different in him.

Perun is a super hero harnesing the power of storms, so I wanted to paint to those colours. But I didn't want him to seem cold, so I gave him a warm flesh tone and hair colour to try to balance out the grey, blue and silver. Lots of layered highlighting on this one and I really enjoyed it! normally I'm a base colour-wash-base colour as a highlight painter, which works for armies, but I found myself taking more time with these and really enjoying it.

Next up is Hellsmith. he's a baddy and again, I wanted to mix the warm flesh and warm accent colour (red) with the cold silver weapons. Pleased with the result and multiple layered flesh highlights as I'm trying to improve my flesh colours after being given some advice that I couldn't paint flesh properly....

The final two are aliens, so I decided to go with livid green skin and torquiose/jade clothing as I could be as bright as I liked and hopefully it would all tie in. Really enjoyed the painting again as I think the extreme highlights suit the genre well. Happier with the big chap, but then his sculpt was a lot nicer IMO so that probably both helped and influenced where I spent my time. The big chap also got a shock of blond hair as he is half human so I wanted to play to that ancestry too.

So, 5 painted and only 1 level one amongst them. Oops. I had to go where the paintbrush led me, and it led me to brightly coloured spandex and pseudo Greek gods. Love it :)

Couple more level ones on their way to round the figures out and then it'll be on with the buildings.

A.R.C membership is growing

2011-09-18T16:37:00.004+01:00

Guerilla reporting for duty! I'd seen the figure behind Guerilla on Westwinds website and decided that I'd have a look at it at Colours and once I saw it I knew I wanted it. HUGH!

Still only a 40mm base but he must be three times the mass of the Guerilla! Want will I use him for? Well I thought he might become an alternative to the Guerilla figure or a level 3 Supreme once some Hero design rules are released. A.R.C. are mising a Lvl 3 big hitter and this fella would seem to qualify!

I would challenge Urn to a game of Pulp City but he hasn't painted any of his figures yet......still.

;-)

This an appeal...

2011-09-17T15:02:00.005+01:00

Please take the time to read all of this appeal. By the end of it, you just may just have changed somebody's life......

At this time of year, with Autumn closing in, there is a neglected species who can suffer greatly if attention is not paid to them. Yes, I speak of the Lesser Blogging Silver Fox (which may, or may not, look like the picture above).

The LBSF has kept this blog going through some tough times, including about 6 months ago when the only blog posts came from the LBSF and the blog was kept going almost single handedly.

And now? Nothing seen from the LBSF for a number of weeks, hence the appeal. So please, take the time to look behind your sheds, underneath leaf piles in your garden and in the middle of blackberry bushes to see if a LBSF has taken residence there. If one has, please coax them out with some bread soaked in milk and put them in a quiet spot in your house with a painting table, some shiny figures and access to the internet. Only then will the LBSF be coxed back into it's native habits of painting and blogging the results.

Please. Your help may be all that a LBSF near you needs.

Here come the girls!

2011-09-17T12:13:00.003+01:00

I also got these two young ladies at the Colours Show to be civilians for Pulp City. They were from the Crooked Dice stand and are forr the 7TV game. They are lovely sculpts and whilst being sold under slightly different names they look strangely familiar. A certain Doctors companions perhaps?

;-)

So it has been a week and I have put together two buildings that I got at Colours and also painted seven figures. How you getting on Urn?

Urn? Any figures painted? ;-)

Look out for the civilians!

2011-09-16T20:59:00.003+01:00

I picked up some civilians for Pulp City at the Colours show in Newbury. I saw them and they grabbed my eye because the sculpts have quite a lot of character for simple bystanders.

Anyhooo. Here are the first five.

JUNT is mad.

2011-09-16T15:17:00.002+01:00

One of our followers on here is an old friend. He is mad. The photo is evidence enough as it depicts the first 19 of his buildings currently under construction.

Juntsville appears to be very close to the painting stage. This is good because I think some softly spoken gentlemen have turned up outside Junt's gaff with a sedative and a new long sleaved jacket for him!

;-)

Malifaux Scenery

2011-09-16T11:23:00.004+01:00

Just a quick up date on my progress with my test house for Malifaux. Quite a simple one really but it has giving me the confidence to try adding extra details like loft windows etc on the next one.

The roof is time consuming but quite relaxing to do.

Just the windows to stick on and it will be ready to paint!

Another new gaming system? Yes please!

2011-09-15T08:20:00.001+01:00

Quick update to show the Immortals that I got for the Hell Dorado game system at Colours. 10 figures for £15, as they were selling off the old French boxes so I decided that you couldn't really fall off!

Turns out the old boxes were set to be 200 points, which is the recommended size for the game, so looks like I'm all set and don't need to buy any more for it....... Reckon that'll stop me? ;)

Overall they're really nice little figures. True scale, so tiny little arms and hands which made some of the sticking fairly perilous, but hopefully the super glue will be super as pinning really wasn't an option for most of the joins.

Getting excited about buying these and sticking them together did mean the Pulp City heroes were put to one side, but I'll hopefully be going back to finish the first few of those this week, although I do now need to get some more of the GW wash now I got some good advice on doing the bases from Pulp Citizen.

The rulebook also looks very professional and with only 40 odd pages of actual rules, expect the Silverback and I to be getting in a game at some point.

On the Painting table this week!

2011-09-12T20:59:00.000+01:00

Just a quick post to show what is on the table this week.

In no particular order are:

16 Hell Dorado Figures
4 new Pulp City Heroes
6 pieces of wall terrain to supplement the Graveyard
9 smaller DW ships,
2 x Scout Flyers
and
the 2 mighty behemoths of the air and sea for the EoBS for DW.

I love Colours.....

2011-09-11T17:49:00.004+01:00

...the wargaming show that is! I always find something new there every year. This year for me it was the laser etched scenery that seems to be sneaking into gaming more and more.

Is it a good thing? I had to find out. I got two 15mm kits from Warbases.com to try out. They were reasonably priced at £8 & £7 and I got started on the first on Saturday night. The first kit I did wasn't as precisly cut as I would have imagined but it went together after a bit of work. Thankfully the second, which I tackled today, went together like a charm. The 15mm kits are a little fiddly but not complicated. My overall thoughts on them?

CONS

Dirty. The laser etching leaves the edges of the HDF sooty. I assume this is from the heat of the laser. But they smell like lovely BBQs!!

A Fair bit of work. Whilst being quicker than a scratch build they are not a quick job to finish as the roof on each will take some time to fit the tiles. I suppose that it might be possible to find pasticard with a tile texture to speed this up but that will obviously add to the cost.

Detail. Resin cast stuff does have more detail but once painted I don't think there will be a great deal of difference.

PROS

Value. I enjoy puting things like this toether so I am more than happy with the price. For me it is almost like a double win as £7 or £8 seems like a good deal for a model kit that keeps me entertained for a few hours AND which I can then use again and again.

Weight. A good size building for the scale without the potential for many of them to turn into dead weight in a scenery box.

Robustness. I think the HDF will stand up well over time as it is pretty hard stuff. I don't know if paint will change this with the addition of moisture but I can't imagine it would make a great deal of difference.

I think I can safely say that I would be happy to buy HDF kits in future and having seen some nice ones already I think this is an area of the hobby that could expand quickly over the next year or so. With brands like Sarissa and Warbases generating new designs all the time, I will be keeping my eye out for any HDF releases.

I think I'm a convert. I also think Sarissa will be graced by my patronage in the not so distant future.

Malifaux - Branching Out 2

2011-09-08T12:28:00.000+01:00

Finally, my ebay purchase of the Somer Teeth Jones crew has turned up. I must admit I am truly dissappointed with the seller as they were all loose in a large jiffy bag, so they are pretty beat up. It would also appear that in the absence of superglu, he has used plastic glue and blue tack to assemble all the figures. So, this post is to show you a pic and let you see the transformation to them over the coming week or so. The paint job is... adequate to be kind, so these are going for a dip in detol (other paint stripping products are available) once I have got the blu-tack out their little crevices.

Call me the Gok of Gaming !!!!

You can see the blu tack undercoated around the base of each piglet and the white on the back of the warpig.

The final throes

2011-09-08T08:17:00.004+01:00

So, when we got back to the game we realised that we'd done more than we thought and we had only got two of my turns and 1 of Dave's to go! This was going to be close.

We started with my reserves rolls.... And I'm not sure why I bothered. One 6 out of 8 dice meant I had rolled a grand total of two 6s in 36 dice. I only needed 4 to have got all my reserves on as well! So sadly, this left my 4 Panzer IVs off the table just when I needed them most.... Undeterred, my lone platoon rushed towards the objective as the luftwaffe infantry platoon (too late to get near the objective now) sauntered on the edge of the table. The heroic observer called down a bombardment on the infantry platoon who were rushing towards the objective and killed one stand and more importantly, pinning them down......

After getting close enough to the infantry platoon defending the objective, they shot and assaulted.... And missed. The British swung back.... and missed. More Germans from the platoon piled in and assaulted and forced the British to fall back, but they passed their break test and so would be there to try to force the Germans off the objective next turn (pic below).

There were going to be some huge rolls this turn, starting with the pinned platoon rolling to unpin themselves on a 4+...... which they did! They then moved forward to get good firing positions on the Germans holding the objective. The British observer called in the Priests on the plucky platoon and spotted first time, hitting three. I then rolled my saves needing a 3+...... and got triple 1! There then followed a fusilade of shots from all the British, and making only 1 save out of 5 (again, on a 3+) the platoon was destroyed, leaving on the HQ to contest the objective. 3 shots from the AVRE later, only 1 hit and needing a 3+ to save.......I rolled a 1. I could see this turn wasn't going to go my way!

With the furthest objective taken, all eyes turned to the strongpoint Cod objective. Woud the plucky observer be enough to repel the might of the British army?

The pioneers managed to unpin themselves and storm towards the objective as fast as they could (bottom platoon). One British base from the infantry platoons trying to get into Cod managed to fight his way over the barbed wire and get into combat with the observer who was contesting the objective. We reckoned the Pioneers were probably out of claiming range of the objective and so this one base needed to kill the observer and occupy the house to get it.

My defensive fire hit... but the team saved it. This was it then, Dave's chance to get the win and all he needed was a 4+...... and rolled a 3! As he hadn't hit, my observer automatically counter-attacked and needed a 3+ to finish it...... and you won't be surprised to hear that I rolled a 1..... The British team then surged into the house again..... and rolled another 3! They must have over stretched themselves as the Observer then rolled a 5 to finish them in close combat and finish the game holding the objective!

............

.........Or so we thought...... I then thought I'd check the rules given we hadn't played in a while and there it was, independent teams could neither claim nor contest objectives and an observer was an independent team. So it all came down to how close the pioneer team at the bottom of the picture was from the objective!

After measuring it, they were in that area where there was only millimetres in it one way or the other, so we agreed that the British had shown enough pluck, vim and vigour to win the day and so the beach head was established and the kettles were put on for a brew by exhausted British infantry all along the beach....

A great game all told that really re-invigorated our interest in Flames of War and should catapault us nicely into the next stage of the landings - the battle for Caen and surroundings with a lot of the more esoteric stuff that we have in our collections for this very purpose.

Dave also has the US landing forces and so is keen to give Omaha beach a run, along with a couple of other beach landing scenarios from the books. There's also the chance to run a "what if" battle with the German operation Sea Lion not stopped by the weather this time around.....

Malifaux - Branching Out

2011-09-06T13:30:00.000+01:00

So I recently added Rusty Alice to my arcansists pool of figures to use, one of the things that she can do is summon a Steampunk Abomination.

Well when I went to research these beauties I found a couple of other figures that fitted with the Construct/M&SU gang that I am building up.

So I present to you the following (from left to right)

Renegade Steamfitter Johan
Desolation Engine
4 x Steampunk abominations

Here you can see the creepiest boys band to hit the victorian streets

And of course the big 2..

Pulp City - Dr Mercury

2011-09-06T13:12:00.000+01:00

This figure was on my original order from the Pulp City boys but has only just arrived.

Very easy to paint, the base took longer. May introduce Dr Mercury....

D-Day re-fought

2011-09-05T08:19:00.002+01:00

So, Dave and I managed to get some time in our diaries to play Flames of War for the first time in quite a while and, having obtained the requisite passes from our commander-in-chiefs, we decided to make it a big one - D-Day :)

(Well, not actually all of it, just the Queen Red sector of sword beach for those of you with a historical bent)

We have played this before, but since then our scenery collections have improved somewhat, with new bunkers, landing craft, buildings, roads, etc. We set up the day before remembering how long it took last time.

This is a shot the British troops would get in their rolling ride up to the beach.

The key points were Strongpoint Cod on the right just of the beach (bottom right of this next photo) with lots of Germans in and an 88 bunker trained along the beach, and Strongpoint Sole in the top left (you may just be able to see the MG team and CiC who were it's only occupants at the start of the game if you squint hard enough!). To win, the British had to take objectives in both strongpoints and my reserves would be coming on to reinforce Sole later in the game.....

The picture above was the British first wave, with the sea playing havoc with getting things onto the beach in good time. Fortunately, Dave's prelim bombardment had pinned all of strongpoint Cod and it took them 4 turns to recover, much denting their ability to shoot the British! There's an artillery observer in the white house with the red roof and he would prove to be my man of the match as he could spot whilst pinned down, but more on him later......

This is more like it, with the drift of the current meaning a lot of Dave's troops came in right next to each other and hampered their ability to deploy and advance. It certainly proved to be a "target rich environment" for my artillery observer though :) You'll see the smoking flail Sherman at the top of the beach - he came into the sights of the 88 bunker!

And watch out for the sandy based platoon who've made it off the beach, more on them later....

This is further into the game and the artillery has been absolutely brutal, the smoking wrecks of 4 M-10s, MG carriers, AVREs and Shermans litter the beach, hindering line of sight, as the infantry try in vain to take Cod with it's minefields, barbed wire and trenches. You'll also see my KwK bunker in the middle of the beach is down, destroyed by a bunker busting shell from an AVRE.

Just following this, the commandoes stormed past the cowering infantry, ran through the minefield and the barbed wire, losing only a few to lots and lots of shooting (Dave's saves were just inspired) and smashed the defenders of Cod to pieces (I was too shell shocked to take pictures at this point I think, Dave used to be in a Commando regiment so this performance didn't surprise him at all!).

The brave commandoes were thrown back by the lone remaining platoon commander and then returned to their ships due to casualties suffered, but their intervention meant Cod was left undefended apart from my arty observer (my main platoon defending Cod also broke due to casualties suffered in the assault) who was cowering in the house having suffered 8 turns of absolutely everything thrown at him to try to get rid of him.

With Cod all but lost, attention turned to Strongpoint Sole...... Now, my reserves were rolled for from turn 3 onwards, needing a 6 to get a platoon and with 1 extra dice per turn (starting with 1 die on turn 3). Now that's a whole heap of dice. How many 6s have I got with 9 turns gone? One. Uno. Ein. I get 8 dice this turn and I'm not expecting to get any 6s in that lot either!

Anyway, below is the current state of play of the objective. The MG team died to a lucky machine gun shot before they got to fire and my plucky CiC (left of picture) is currently engaged in a game of cat & mouse with the AVRE who is shooting and assaulting him, but he has led a charmed life and refuses to lay down :) My one reserve platoon is storm-trooping towards the objective (top right of picture) and are taking fire from the Sherman flail tank as they do so. Dave's sand based assault troop (remember them?) are on the bottom of the picture. Took them a while to get up here as the they were hit by arty and then wouldn't unpin themselves for 3 turns!

So, it's all going to come down to whether my reserves actually arrive along the road at left top of the picture and whether Dave can keep me from contesting the objective (within 10cm).

It was such a long game that we didn't get to finish it in a day so will hopefully finish it this week sometime. I think it's fair to say that it's on a knife edge :)

The fun thing about re-fighting a historical scenario like this is that you care much less about winning and it's more about which little figures pull off heroic manuoevres.... or run away screaming at the first sign of trouble!

Stay tuned for the next blog post later this week to see how it all ends.....

Next please!

2011-09-04T15:25:00.003+01:00

A.R.C. member no. 2 reporting for duty. I do like the sculpt for howler. He looks like something from a seventies cop show crossed with an episode of The A-Team!

The A.R.C are coming!

2011-09-03T17:14:00.003+01:00

First of the A.R.C. is painted. He still needs army painter and a spray of Testors but that'll have to wait until I've got a few more painted.

He was quick to do as I used a mix of red and chainmail to get a metallic pink (as predicted by the Silverback) over which I used Baal Red & Badab Black. This reduced the brightness. The details were quick to pick out and I decided to put on some transfers to break up the belly area because the model does have quite a few large smooth areas.

As he has a large base I was able to put a curb corner on for a bit of base detailing. Hmmm not sure what I'm going to be able to do on the small ones bases.

Nearly finished

2011-09-03T16:14:00.001+01:00

Nearly done now. I've got to cover the roof in sand for texture and i'd like to add some details like clocks etc inside.

Then onto painting it!

A little progress...

2011-09-01T09:26:00.004+01:00

but only a little. Tuesday night i got a chance to tinker with the warehouse whilst the Silverback and Urn tried to duff each other up. I've not added the pavement/base for the building and I've only really got a bit more detailing to do before I paint it. I have decided to PVA sand to the roof to make it look like a tar and gravel flat roof.

I'm also going to add capping stones to the side wall and also a large advertising sign for the roof. That probably will not be fix but I'll decide once I've knocked it together.

I managed, last night, finally to get my PC figs based and hopefully I'll be able to squirt some undercoat on them tonight ready for painting at the weekend.

Pulp City - Scenery

2011-08-31T16:15:00.000+01:00

Righty-o,

In an effort to keep the pressure up on people to move their Pulp City figures forward, I took on the task of painting the "street furniture" bits and pieces that we have acquired for the game. Now these are more than just aesthetics, these will be thrown, grappled and generally lobbed at opponents in the game.

Next up is some pavement/sidewalks...

PS. Eddie was saying last night that although he loves his monkeys, he is a little gutted at not having any Spandex/lycra action in his crew, so watch this space...

Say hello to my leetle friends....

2011-08-30T11:07:00.007+01:00

So, updation blog entry here to show off firstly the Gunslinger Ortega crew for malifaux, ready to re-claim the night from all those horrible mechanical spiders, undead zombettes and mercenary scumbags :)

As with Criid's crew, I've used the red to tie them into the faction and the long coats were great fun to paint.

The second update is the Pulp City figures, all stuck together and ready for painting. The bases on these were holding me up as I didn't want to use the old "sand + wash + highlight" on them as they should be in the middle of an american city. I eventually decided just to bite the bullet and make my own, so you may be able to see that they're plasticard inserts with pavement slabs etched in. Simple, but I'm pleased with the results and it saved me a bundle on custom bases :)

I also decided that the flying heroes should, well, fly! So I used magnets to attach them to some spare GW flying bases (the diameter is only 1mm out from the normal bases) and you can see the effects on perun and Solar above. I magnetised them on the basis we don't know how to play the game, so they can be take off for LoS checking if needed and I may even do them normal bases that they can be stuck to if I'm feeling creative and get the time....

Some green stuff needed on most of these guys before painting (especially the zombie wolf whose right and left sides are only vaguely acquianted) but shouldn't take too long and then they'll get on the table!

Pulp City

2011-08-29T16:53:00.000+01:00

So as you are now aware the latest game to hit the GOG group with regards figures and scenery is Pulp City.

This is a game of super heroes and villians set in the 1980s. Se we have had to explain to Urn about the 1980s as he doesn't remember the first half of them due to his tender age.

Anyway, onto the figures. Whilst the 3 more comic mad GOGs grabbed at various charcters that they could relate to I chose the Heavy Metal team/crew/gang/informal arrangement for 2 reasons:

1. I like Heavy Metal music.
2. They seemed like a good old round crew with regards models and theme.

They are now painted and ready to hit the streets to kick some super-villian/alien/APE butt.

A couple of close ups, and for those of you familiar with the game, you will notice I have 2 unusual additions to the team in the form of the glorious Kitty Cheshire and the Grimm. These figures are really exceptional and bags full of character - a big well done to the sculptor. Figures like that are so easy to paint.

A thumbs up from the GoGs!

2011-08-26T11:26:00.004+01:00

How cool are these Super-special Pulp City diced? Kindly sourced by our Tea Urn from the chap who is behind the wonderful "Pulp Citizen" blog.

We really are rather weak when it comes to all the fringe goodies available for gaming.

;-)

Nice one Citizen!!!

We built this city....

2011-08-17T11:32:00.006+01:00

we built this city on rock and rollllll!!!!!!

Urmm. Sorry.

I couldn't help it.

Anyhooo. As the Silverback pointed out, the GoGs have been getting organised and after the Silverbacks cheeky (but accurate) summation of my recent efforts I was galvanised into action.

I'd spotted a really nice terrain set on Ainsty's website. It was nice. The price wasn't. £75 for one warehouse. Don't get me wrong...it is very nice. So are knee caps that don't have rolling pin shaped dents in them.

Needless to say budget dictated a build, rather than buy, approach to my first piece of Pulp City terrain. After seeing the jaw-dropping work of Emmanuel Nouaillier I decided to try a foamcore & bluefoam construction to maximise strength vs detail.

So here is the first work in progress piccie. You can see the inner walls which are made from foamcore. I've etched breeze block sized gridding into these to represent the internal walls and then the blue foam has been etched with a more brick like sized grid. The walls aren't stuck together yet as I need to do some trim work on the doorways and also make some removable doors for the big loading bays.

I'm quite please with the direction it is taking so far. I'm intending to mount it on board which will be shaped and detailed to be the pavement around the building and I'm going to make a flat detachable roof with a surrounding wall to finish it off.

In game I'm intending to use some general cargo bits and bobs to add to the internal space to make it look 'in use'.

Undead ladies of the night!

2011-08-17T11:10:00.005+01:00

Not often you type that!

Here are Seamus and the girls ready to take their special brand of lovin' out onto the street. Game one vs Urn went okay but I was still getting to grips with the rules so it was far from decisive!

Same could be said for game two vs the Silverfox (Von on this blog). He did mange to errmmm kill(?) on of my undead ladies but she turned out to be a favorite of Seamus's so he just reanimated her. The Silverfox really liked that bit. ;-)

Tee hee.

Going Ape!

2011-08-16T18:40:00.004+01:00

No paint on them yet but here are the members of A.R.C in preperation for unleasing some ape based fury upon Pulp City. I'm really quite looking forward to painting these but I am still in a quandary over whether I should paint them all as angry albinos or stick more to the Pulp City colour schemes.

Hmm. What do you guys think?

My word is that a finished Project?

2011-08-15T18:55:00.000+01:00

By golly it's busy on here all of a sudden!

No I haven't done the scenery bit yet but before I shut up shop for a couple of weeks to concentrate on other things I thought I'd better get a couple of projects finished (or damn close).

Malifaux
Finally got the Von Schill gang finished: been waiting on final highlights and basing for a while now! Luckily had a spare couple of hours over the weekend so cracked on.

Von Schill

Trapper

Librarian

Specialist

Freikorps

And now Dystopian Wars... I painted the Prussian Fleet originally in what I thought was a pretty good scheme. And it was - until it met the table and suddenly we couldn't see them as they are tiny models and dark colours just don't work. Also there was the small matter of Eddie's sea bases.

So I set myself the task of bettering what I'd done before and the first 3 Frigates have now rolled out of the paint shop. The sea bases are designed to show fairly rough oceans and need highlighting, washing, highlighting and the ships require a final tidy up but you should get the idea from the pictures. Enjoy :-)

Scenery Challenge

2011-08-15T16:27:00.000+01:00

Right then, we have set ourselves a challenge borne out of laziness.

We have all these different systems that we play, but we always seem to play on 40k based terrain. One of the appeals to us as gamers for the Legends of the Old West, was the amount of Wild West terrain we made or found (especially the Old West train in a charity shop :) )

So we decided that as we have added a number of smaller skirmish games to our portfolio we ought to add to the secenery that makes the games play more in keeping with the fluff. We have each made a choice, apart from Eddie who seems to be doing a bit of everything as usual.

Silverfox = Steampunk Refinery for Malifaux
Tea Urn = 80s american city block for Pulp City
Silverback = Graveyard for Malifaux
Eddie = Starting a number of projects whilst whirling around like a fizzing ball of designing madness with half drawn images, of things like gastanks made out of corned beef tins or forest made out of broccoli, flying everywhere.

Now you know how Malifaux is played on a 3' by 3' board, and at the moment we all end up playing in a 12" x 12" square of close combat. Well I kind of forget those when I started making the scenery.

The church is from a company called Pegasus miniatures, the majority of the graveyard is from Ainsty (nice guys who sent me scraps out of their bin to pack the parcel out - which sounds bad but wasn't.... I mean they sent me extra bits they were going to throw away) and lastly I have added the new Garden of Morr from GW as well as some of their twisted trees.

To come is a gravediggers hovel, some bushes & paths and anything else I can think of.

After a lot of nagging I was encouraged to put this on the blog today rather then when painted and based etc.

Over to you.

Malifaux - The Miners and Steamfitters Union

2011-08-15T16:13:00.000+01:00

Having purchased the Ramos starter pack for the Arcanists in Malifaux I wanted to expand these.

So, Ramos, the Steampunk beastie and the spiders (not a name for a 60s rockband) have been joined by

Mobile toolkit
Brass Arachnid
Injun Joss
Rusty Alice
Electrical Creation
Ice Golem - not sure why yet, apart from he is cool model.
and of course... more spiders.

Empire of the Blazing Sun Fleet sighted

2011-08-15T16:07:00.000+01:00

So after caving into some pressure, which succeeded on the roll of an exploding 6. I chose my fleet and leapt into the orient. Not Leyton, the Empire of the Blazing Sun, the far east contigent from the Spartan Miniatures game Dystopian Wars.

I picked them as they were not taken by anyone else and the by the news that they would be receiving a kraken submersible.

Sold to the Silverback.

So here you go. After seeing the great bases that Eddie did, I had to follow suit. Spackle and 4 layers of Klear floor polish later.

The Plan....

2011-07-02T23:55:00.000+01:00

So I've been thinking recently about all things gaming. As you'll have seen from the recent posts from my esteemed colleagues we're branching out into a lot more non-GW games. This is mainly because we've looked at the costs involved and blanched.

Instead of £50 on a Land Raider we're spending £50 on a starter set and rulebook for a new game. In the last 6 weeks I've acquired Kings of War, Flames of War and Malifaux. We've also now played Dystopian Wars and Uncharted Seas so I'll be expanding them and taking a look at Firestorm Armada.

I've decided that I have enough 40K stuff for this year so instead I'm going to spend the next 6 months getting all these other game systems completely up to speed. Expect pictures very soon as today I've built my Malifaux Crew, painted 5 Dwarfs for Kings of War and stuck my fingers together with a base of Fallschirmjaeger for Flames of War. I shall also be basing and repainting my Prussian Empire fleet for Dystopian Wars soon: Eddie made such a good job of his that I need to up my game - which is brill cos that's why we do this right???

6 months of non-GW building and painting starts here. Watch this space!

Putting the F back into the hobby

2011-06-19T20:04:00.004+01:00

So, back with another blog. And this time, there are some words..... We've been discussing what to play recently and have stumbled across a number of new games. Whilst 40k will probably remain our staple game withall the armies we have and the fun that we have playing it, The recent GW price rises have really opened other games up to us (and

it's not like we were shy about them before!) but when you consider that you can get a gang/crew/posse for a whole host of other games for the same price as a Rhino or even a Land Raider for the larger games, it suddenly becomes all you need to enable yourself to play all the games you've seen lurking on the internet or admired the figures for. So, on that note, enter Malifaux!

This is my first crew, that of Sonnia Criid, the Witch Hunter. her crew works against people who cast spells mainly and she's a member of the Guild, who try to bring law to the lawless steampunk victoriana game that is malifaux. I decided that I just had to get her painted, so here she is along with her gang. I'm not a huge fan of the sculpt of the taller guy with her, but her sculpt is great and the Witchling stalkers in the front are fantastic, really deep cloaks. I went with red on all the figures to tie them together (red is the faction colour of the guild) and she also gets a purple dress as she's the leader ;)

And that brings me nicely onto the title of my post. The F is for "fun" you see and that's what I'm having with all these new figures. And I've learnt that now I have less time for hobbying with a 1 year old toddling around the place, I need to choose things to work on that are fun. There are 19 base coated Wyches on my painting table, 3 half built ravagars in the garage and 4 raiders that need finishing off, not to mention the 20 warriors that I need to build. But for some reason i couldn't face doing them, so I did my malifaux crew. And now I've started on four 8th Army deacons and 2 german Vielferwachers that I found whilst putting the deacons together. I have no particular plan for when I'll use any of them, but they really got my enthusiasm going, so I started on them!

I do need to get my Dark Eldar army done, but I'm sure I'll get enthusiastic about them at some point, but right now I'm bouncing all over my miniatures collection, building and painting the stuff that looks like fun, as opposed to working to an army list. Mighty refreshing and heck, fun is what this hobby is all about after all! So hopefully there'll be many and varied posts about lots of random miniatures that I'm finishing over the coming months.

Air Support!!!

2011-05-31T12:42:00.003+01:00

I got my bombers and fighters finished for DW at the weekend.

I have to say that painting the DW has been really enjoyable. A real divergance from the sorts of things I usually do. Can't wait for the range to be expanded!

Dystopian Wars is here!

2011-05-24T11:16:00.004+01:00

After a lengthly DIY induced gaming hiatus I am back. First up is My Kingdon of Britannia fleet for Dystopian Wars.

I wanted to do a sort of disruption camo for the ships. It didn't turn out quite how I'd imagined it but its okay. Just need to paint the fighter squadrons and two bombers then I can think about adding extra stuff once The Silverfox and I have had a trial game.

Jumping onto the queue next will be a couple of Malifaux figs that are on there way because my resolve crumpled like an old balloon when the GoGs started ooo'ing and aahhh'ing over the figures.

ASMOH & Prussian Steampunk Sets Sail

2011-05-09T00:16:00.000+01:00

ASMOH 2011 has been and gone. I took the World Eaters with the addition of the Raptors and suffice to say my last game was fought on table 25. Out of 25. More detail after the jump thingy...

I've also added some pictures of my first Dystopian Wars Prussian Frigate and the Rhino I completed today for my Tzeentch meltagun squad.

ASMOH
Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures as I was far too excited with playing around on tables 6-24-22-25 and the 6 was purely because that was a randomly drawn first game.

Game 1 v Blood Angels (1250) - Annihilation
I lasted until turn 6 before my army was completely wiped out. I faced 10 Assault Marines and a Librarian in Razorbacks; 2 Furioso Dreads; 2 Predators with Autocannon and Lascannon Sponsons and 2 Baals. Yes that's right - 11 men and 8 vehicles. We killed a Dread and immobilised a Razorback: wiped out in return.

Game 2 v Eldar (1250) - Bases
This one went to turn 7. If it had ended on turn 5 I'd have scraped a draw but them's the breaks! Eldrad and his Striking Scorpions eventually destroyed my Defiler in combat having ripped off every weapon (that's 4 claws and a battle cannon); then they ran away from my scary Lord. Unfortunately the Lord was all that was left of my army and thus not a hope.

Game 3 v Marines (1750) - 4 Obj
This went to turn 6 before I was wiped out (definately a theme developing through out the day). Lysander was in charge of these marines and again my luck deserted me with the turn 5 game ending requirement: I had 2 obj to his 0 at the end of turn 5 but did I roll a 1 or 2? Nope... bugger.

Great game though and my Raptors proved to be the best unit in the game taking out 2 Attack bikes and an entire tactical squad before catching a Vindie shell on the head. It was one of those games where my Land Raider was taken out with the first shot of the game and you just know right there and then that's it not going to go well :-)

Game 4 v Dark Angels (1750) - 6 Obj
So to the bottom table and a fight for the wooden spoon against Callum. He only found out the day before that he was coming along so he picked up the nearest box and turned up with an entire foot slogging DA army. Belial leading it together with a mix of Termies and Marines. Not a vehicle in sight - they were probably on loan to all the Blood Angels players to be honest.

This was a cracking game where my Bezerkers finally had a chance to charge and boy did they enjoy it! One unit of 10 went through a Deathwing squad and 3 combat squads. The Raptors again surprised me by taking out a Deathwing squad and 2 combat squads in hand-to-hand. In the end we wiped him out and he did go on to collect the wooden spoon.

So that was my ASMOH experience until the awards were announced and suddenly I found myself with the Most Sporting Trophy. This is definately my favourite award to win at events as it's voted for by my opponents and I'd like to thank them all for making all my games so much fun.

Oh and I will sort out a photo of the Raptors as they did me proud. Next up I really need a killy HQ and some firepower that isn't a Land Raider. Expect a Daemon Prince and Obliterators at some point in the future.

Dystopian Wars
Finally broken open the box for the Prussian Empire Fleet and I'm impressed by the detail on the ships. Decided to paint up one of the frigates to see if the colour scheme worked.

Not too bad and I've now started on the other 8 frigates with 3 cruisers and 1 battleship undercoated and awaiting my attention.

Paintscheme: Hull - Fenris Grey; Deck - Calthan Brown; Gun/Trim - Boltgun Metal; Tesla Coil - Brazen Brass. All washed down with Badab Black. May have to add funnel markings so I can remember who is who and perhaps a base at some point.
Hopefully get this fleet finished before the end of May as DIY is looming...

Finally a bit of 40K completed today: a Rhino for my Tzeentch Meltagun squad who have been borrowing one from the Thousand Sons who were not impressed.

Dystopian Wars to continue, then DIY, then Sir's Land Raider for his Youngblood tournament. Not sure after that - so much on the shelves needing attention. Might have to start drawing lots...

Events listing

2011-04-12T01:28:00.003+01:00

Played around with the blog settings - someone gave me access. I had a computer. Dangerous combo...

Added an Events list to the sidebar just over to your right. I'll add links soon but in the meantime give me a shout at vonjenk@ntlworld.com if you'd like info on any event.

Edit: Links Added and they all seem to work!!! :-)
If you come across another event then give me a shout.

Come in Raptors; your time is now

2011-04-12T00:20:00.012+01:00

First weekend in April was Vanquish over in Bristol. The results and pictures are over on the Bristol Vanguard site. Suffice to say I took the World Eaters, lost all 3 games on the Saturday and was in the bottom 4 and then won both games on the Sunday to finish 47th out of 67. I'm happy with that to be honest.

Even happier with an honourable mention for the army itself!

However, I now realise the army doesn't quite work (what's new eh?) so changes are a-foot. Or a-wing depending on your viewpoint. I'll detail what I'm planning in a later post but for now meet the new Raptors.

First the completed one...
As you can see I've gone for a Chaos Marine model with World Eater shoulder pad and Imperial Jump Pack. I don't like the metal Raptor model and I do like the imperial jump pack so what the heck - mix n match, let bygones be bygones and all that!

Now meet the Production Line.
So this is the Desert Yellow that they all start as before the washes are added. The five colours that are used on every model are standing behind them... Mechrite Red, Boltgun Metal, Chaos Black, Gryphonne Sepia and Baal Red.
Couple of Meltaguns. One thing I've learnt is that we struggle with Mech so some fast moving meltaguns seems to be the ticket.
You'll note the boltgun metal has not reached these guys yet...
And at the end of the line are the Icon of Chaos Glory because, let's face it, this bunch will try to run early and a Power Fist champion. He's in Bezerker gear as befits a Champion of the World Eaters.

I'll continue with this lot this week and hopefully get close to finishing them before I'm away this weekend just outside Salisbury for X-Legion Master Strategist: I'm taking the Daemons to that one. No I don't know why either...!

It's all gone evil. With spikes on...

2011-04-01T17:13:00.009+01:00

My weekly post is either early as it is normally Sunday or late as I didn't post last Sunday. I'm going with early as it sounds like I have a degree of skill at clock watching...

Anyway... last weekend was all a bit Napoleonic so no real painting time and this weekend is Vanquish so again a lack of time to daub paint on models. Having said that I have completed 5 figures and who'd have guessed that Dark Eldar who have been missing for 12 years presumed squatted would suddenly be involved in the last 2 posts. More on the Kabal in a minute...

First we have 4 Raptors for my Tzeentch Army. These boys have been in the bitz box for nigh on a lot of years.
I built 6 and then purchased 4 old DE Hellions (ok they weren't old at the time) and then well put them in a box. Fast forward to Planetstrike campaigns and suddenly I fancy a large block of fast attack so now they are 10 strong!

Talking of Dark Eldar....
Meet the one Kabalite Warrior that I've built so far.
Goddam purple again eh? Er yes...
Very nice figure to paint and I'll leave him now to collect a bit of dust to see if the paint scheme works as I have a few other projects to be getting on with before coming back to these.

Next? Haven't a clue actually. Possibly Dystopian Wars or Planetstrike Terrain or Chaos Raptors for my World Eaters army.... decisions eh?

I'm baaaaaaaack!

2011-03-28T12:26:00.003+01:00

Well, it's been a long time coming, but I've not been idle... Well, not totally. Anyhow, since my last post I've completed a Flames of War 8th army (to be posted sometime) and started work on the dark eldar.

I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I bought a load of dark eldar when they first came out (November '10?) and then, like all good wargamers, let them sit in their shrink wrap in boxes for ages. I find that if I don't open something as soon as I buy it and put it together and paint it, it stays on the shelf for an age, behind all the other things in my painting queue.

So, first order of business was the 30 or so wyches. Now, I like the new wyches, which are streets ahead of those crappy old ones GW put out, but with them all in a running pose, I didn't want the tabletop to turn into an 80's nightclub dancefloor with everyone doing "the running man" dance move..... You remember the running man, right? Anyone? Errr, ok, moving on....

So, I decided that as these were supposed to be uber-athletic crazy space elfs I'd chop some of them up and give them other dynamic poses. So, mixing the legs with those from the hellion and raider passenger sprue I made a whole load of crazy poses! And yes, it did involve chopping some eldar arms into three and pinning them back together. I'm a little nuts like that you see.....

I needed something for them to be athletic over, so I reasoned that they were attacking an Imperial Guard outpost and hence the fact they're leaping over things from the imperial guard tank sprue :)

Also attached is a photo of the hellions, which are "straight off the sprue", which was a nice change of pace after the wych conversions.

The Wolves reach 500

2011-03-20T21:46:00.006Z

Little bit quieter this week with only 6 figures and a bit of scenery completed. In my defence I did have 3 days without painting this week. Well I think it's a pretty good excuse...

Anyway. I decided to stick to the Space Wolves and complete the 500 points so that at least they're useable. Evil Monkey and I are planning to go to Calneage in September and these chaps will be my 1/2 of the team up!

First the Wolf Priest:

Then I completed the Long Fangs. 5 man unit with the Leader, 2 Lascannons and 2 Heavy Bolters:

I have noticed that the red fur on some of them has come up quite brightly so evidently ye olde Blood Red was a little too think on the brush. A coat of Red Wash coming up soon...

Here is the whole 500 points: all 21 figures of it!
I'm aware I was supposed to be doing Planetstrike terrain but, erm, got slightly distracted. I have completed the Aegis Line and here's 1 piece of it:
To keep my sanity I'm now going for Unit followed by scenery followed by unit etc.
The current plan sees 4 Tzeentch Raptors on the table to make the unit up to 10; then the Skyshield, then possibly 10 Tzeentch Havocs and then the Fortress.

After that will be the Prussian Fleet for Dystopian Wars.

That's the plan as of tonight. No doubt it'll change as soon as those pesky Grey Knights come out because having looked through the Codex today I'm sorely tempted. What do you mean that's no surprise??! Cheek...

They're behind you...

2011-03-14T00:32:00.005Z

Another weekend and another blitz of projects completed, started or somewhere in between!

(Pictures seem darker this week so either my camera hates the after midnight show or my eyes are going. Again.)

Whilst waiting for various glues to dry (more on that in a minute) I took the opportunity to complete the first 5 Wolf Scouts. 4 normal guys and 1 with a Meltagun are in my initial 500 points with the previously spotted Grey Hunters.

These guys were originally started up in Lenton during last Summer's Hobby Camp and I've finally completed them. The only change really is the red hair which was grey once.

Elsewhere I've started on the Wolf Priest kindly donated by the Silverback. Very nice figure and hopefully the final paintjob will do him justice. Black armour as befits a Priest.

So what happened to all the Planetstrike stuff then I hear you cry?
Here's the completed Bastion. Well, complete for now. I will probably need to add some weathering but it will do for the initial campaign!
I also basecoated the Aegis Defence Line and the Skyshield Landing Pad. They are now ready for painting so this week will be busy.

Whilst the paint was drying on all the above I've also built 10 Havocs and 4 Raptors for my Tzeentch army for Planetstrike. Not sure when they'll be painted but they're undercoated and ready when I am!

And just to prove that it's been a lovely quiet weekend I also managed to build the Fortress of Redemption. To say it's effin huge would be an understatement! Below is just the tower piece with the poor old Scout as a scale comparison... I even had to turn the camera on its side for this shot.
I'll probably keep this one black and drybrush/highlight up with various greys. I went through a tin and half this weekend of Army Painter Black Spray. Think I'm still a bit high to be honest on the fumes :-)

So can I get the above painted? You'll have to tune in next week for another exciting installment of GoGOnline!

The Holy Wolf Brigade

2011-03-09T22:37:00.004Z

OK so I wasn't expecting to finish them quite this quickly after the last post but that's 2011 for you!

I've used a mix of black lining and highlighting and washes to see what happens really; so consider this bunch my experimentation marines.

You're probably wondering about the colour scheme and why aren't they grey? To be honest if you need to ask me why something isn't painted in the suggested colour scheme then you've not been paying attention for the last, erm, 11 years since I started this 40K lark. I come from a historical wargaming background where everything needs to be painted exactly right or there will be tutting - I rebelled :-)
Anyway I used Scorched Brown as I've not used a brown basecoat before plus I wanted a dark colour so I could then get some contrasts in place. I've gone for Red and Blue and muted Boltgun as the contrasts.

Scorched Brown is highlighted with Bestial Brown. Mechrite Red with Blood Red. Mordian Blue is black-lined. Boltgun is washed with Badab Black except any chest plates - these have been washed with Asurman Blue.
Someone once told me - and I can't remember who so apologies - that triangles of colour are what draws the eye. Now I'm not saying I've got triangles involved here but I've tried to use the colours in strategic locations on each model.

Blue on the shoulder and knee pads only. Red on the weapons and hair. Boltgun on the metal bits (hey I'm original sometimes). The red fur came about because I tried it with grey and I suddenly had too many colours. So I decided that all the feral wolves on the home planet of this pack have red fur; when the pack go through their initiation they then dye their hair red in respect to the wolves. Or somesuch....

The basing is Army Painter Ash Grey flock; it's quite muted and I like it lots. Nice and easy!

Oh and the faces are Tallarn Flesh, Ogryn Flesh wash and then a drybrush of Tallarn Flesh over that again.

I have no idea yet how I'll tell the squads apart; might be something painted on the backpacks. I'll worry about it when the second Grey Hunter squad appears which as it's not built yet will be a while.

Next up Planetstrike stuff . We had a game last night and it was a lot of fun. It looks like I need to paint the Bastion, Landing Pad and Fortress together with some additions to my Tzeentch force. All in the next couple of weeks. Um well I'd better be getting on with it then.

Bye.....

The Wolves are coming out to play

2011-03-03T23:34:00.003Z

Well this lot have been sat on the shelves for a while now; actually since the Codex came out. Real Life got in the way plus other projects so they've sat patiently, biding their time.

So here are some WIP shots of the first squad of Grey Hunters.

Armour is Scorched Brown. Shoulder Pads = Mordian Blue with Boltgun Metal rims.
Mechrite Red on hair and fur.
Two of these dudes with Plasma Guns. This squad is designed to sit 24" from the enemy and blat away; they will eventually be joined by a Wolf Guard in Terminator Armour carrying an Assault Cannon.

And the full squad posing for their picture...
All the block colours are on. Next step is to tidy up the edges with Chaos Black and then it's onto highlights (yes I'm going to give them a go) and washes.

The full 500 points will be these Grey Hunters + Wolf Priest + Long Fangs + Scouts. However, once this squad is complete I'm moving onto some scenery for Planetstrike and then a Dystopian Wars fleet.

Then it'll be back to this lot.

In other news I've finally secured some more Humbrol Desert Yellow spray paint so my World Eaters are finally able to acquire reinforcements. Raptors coming soon. Ish.

Right. Now where did I put Killzone 3?

Deathskullz reach their first Objective

2011-02-27T18:21:00.004Z

Here's what I did this week.

I've added another 20 Boyz and 3 Kans to the fledgling Ork Deathskullz Army to give me 500 points in total. Hurrah they're now at a useable level!
I've kept the painting very simple for this army with washes forming the mainstay of depth perception; easier for a horde army!
The full 500....
Yes they are blue. I didn't want green Orks so mine have gone blue - afterall it's supposed to be a lucky colour for Orks right??

How do I tell the 2 squads apart? I paint the gloves/wristbands different colours :-)

Yellow...
Red...
The 2 Nobz... One Yellow and One Red... the third squad will use green...
The outfits of both squads are mainly yellow but with various other foundation colours thrown in for good measure.

Kans - new plastic ones which are very spiky and do hurt. Washed with Black for the oily look...

So 2011 continues to be a good year for completing projects. I also completed the basing on the final Daemons so they're complete and done. Yay.

I'm finding that mixing up my painting is really helping: a unit for the Orks, then a World Eater unit then a marine unit etc. Enjoying the variation.

Next up: 500 points of Space Wolves, Planetstrike scenery for a GoG mini-campaign and Prussians for Dystopian Wars. After that I need to be looking at Dark Eldar, World Eaters, Tzeentch and Shrike's Marines. This assumes I don't get sidetracked by those shiny Grey Knights in April....

The Unit that took 18 months to complete

2011-02-03T23:08:00.003Z

2011 continues to be the year of project completion.

Back in August 2009 I half painted a 10 man Chaos Space Marine unit for my Tzeentch army and then, well actually I can't remember what distracted me but it must have been shiny!

Jump forward to Jan 2011 and after fixing the broken pieces of the army after the car crash I decided they deserved some additions so up popped this unit and over the course of a couple of weekends they've been completed.

So that's a double meltagun unit with power fist and icon of Tzeentch (5+ invulnerable is good right??)

And yes that is a bug head from the Spawn sprue and a Bezerker arm. Well I had spares...

Rhino on order to complete the unit as we can't have the poor dears walking into the enemy fire now can we?

Over the weekend I built Abaddon for CJ, Warp Spiders for CJ and some Havocs for the Tzeentch boys.

Painting wise I'm waiting for some Desert Yellow spray for the World Eaters so meanwhile the Ork Kans have arrived on the painting table to get me up to 500 points of painted Orks.

World Eaters recruitment drive

2011-01-26T23:31:00.005Z

Please welcome some new recruits to the ranks of the World Eaters.

Evil Monkey and I are off to Cardiff in Feb and we need 2,000 point armies so I had to acquire a couple of hundred extra points. I love Choas Termies and with some Christmas money burning a hole in my pocket I ended up in GW Southampton and a box of Termies appeared.

4 of them will be taking part and joining the Chaos Lord in his Land Raider.

Heavy Flamer Dude
Combi-Flamer & Chainfist
Lightning Claws
Power Fist (he's the odd one out for Cardiff)
Icon of Chaos Glory to help out as these ancient warriors of Chaos are not fearless...
Next up I'm going for finishing projects that started a while back and adding more stuff to the World Eaters as I'm enjoying the painting a great deal at the moment.

In the future expect to see Tzeentch Marines, WE Bezerkers, WE Possessed, WE Raptors, WE Bikers, Cryx Warmachine expansion and Dystopian Wars Prussians.

Also Evil Monkey and I are going for a Tale of 2 armies in an effort to encourage me to complete my Orks. He's doing an Eldar army based on Spider-Man so expect lots of red and blue + Warp Spiders. We aim to have 500 points each completed by the end of Feb and then 250 points every couple of months. Expect regular updates as we make progress.

Holiday pics

2011-01-24T21:47:00.000Z

So as you will know we have been away enjoying ourselves. We hope that some of the pictures below will help you understand what we have been doing for the last two weeks.

We have been on the white beaches of paradise, snorkelling, kayaking, been in bed :), been in the disco and enjoyed some beautiful sunsets. All in all a great holiday.

Now back to reality!

What I did at Christmas...

2011-01-06T14:01:00.002Z

...well mainly eat, drink & paint Germans.

23 bases of LMG infantry 2 command stands and 4 HMG support stands.

Left to paint is......

3 Anti Tank guns

4 Panzerfaust teams

11 Half tracks

6 Inf command stands

4 Nebelwefer bases + command & observers

4 10.5cm Arty guns

Arty HQ and numerous observers

2 88s with command squad

4 Inf morter teams + command & Obs

3 AA guns + Command.

Oh. Thats quite a lot really isn't it.

I won't mention the 7 tanks that I haven't even put together yet!

Or the scenery that needs painting.

Well at least I know what I'm doing in 2011.

Ultramarine the Movie

2010-12-20T14:42:00.002Z

Is it any good?

Well I'm going to say yes it is. Am I Bias? Yes I'm bound to be!

I remember as a teenager leafing through White Dwarf, issue 92 I think, and I was blown away at the launch of 40K Rogue Trader. 20 Years later and someone has finally based a film on it! Great!

The film itself isn't very strong story-wise but it is enough to carry it along. Characters are generally weak but not so much that you want them to die. The animation is quite clunky in places but you'd have to be a real pedant to let it bother you.

I'm making it sound like a mediocre film aren't I. Well it is but I still like it.

Why?

Simple.

The clatter of a heavy bolter, the bobbing whoosh of a scouting landspeeder and the rocket burn of a thunderhawk dropping planetward from a huge marine battle barge. All are the sort of things that bring the game to life for us. This film brings them to life.

It has been a long wait but I think it was worth it.

I hope it paves the way for more.

FoW continues!

2010-12-10T12:53:00.003Z

Some more (slow) progress with my FoW germans. I've painted three snipers before any other infantry in order to get a feel for painting camo on figures at this scale. Not brilliant but it will definately do!

Official German Camo Schemes....

2010-12-06T11:56:00.004Z

....are right out of the window.

I've decided to paint my FoW Germans in all sorts of camo schemes which rely more on my mood at the time of painting than any real historical inspiration. More photos to follow but here is one of my Panzer IVs.

Tiger to follow!

;-)

Oi - Stop Shovin at the Back!

2010-12-05T13:14:00.003Z

Now that the Daemons are done (well ok nearly done) I needed a new project. So, so tempted to get my Dark Eldar going but decided that since I have 3000 points (old book) already up and running that I can use that for now.

So it's time to clear the shelves.

That means either Orks, Wolves, Eldar or Warmachine. The Nids have gone to that great bring and buy in the sky and back to GW for changing into Dark Eldar.

Warmachine: not yet.
Wolves: don't fancy power armour.
Eldar: not going to happen and as it is Evil Monkey has decided to he wants to do Eldar alongside his new Blood Angels (chip off the old block: I'm so proud). So he's already done a test Guardian and has done a good job (must organise photo).

That leaves Orks. I fancy a horde army so with 40 Boyz already undergoing painting I decided to build everything else up. I will spray this once the weather warms up a little!

Here you'll find: 19 Boyz + Nob with Power Klaw, 10 Nobz including Painboy, Big Mek (well who can't resist the KFF?), Warboss, 5 Deffkoptas, 3 Killa Kans (lovely spiky new models), Deff Dread (gorgeous new plastic) and 8 Lootas. This leaves me with a Battlewagon to build and that will be 1750 done. All the Boyz have come from Black Reach swaps and I've still got another 22 left!!

To get to 2000 I expect I'll add some Stormboyz for the fun and some normal Boyz to boost the 3 squads to 25...

Expect Blue Orks on a tabletop near you in the coming months!!

When Daemons come out to play

2010-11-24T22:01:00.008Z

I want to see a show of hands then for all those that thought my next post would be about the Dark Eldar! Come on. I'm waiting....

.... anyway tough cos they're not even out of their boxes yet. Instead we have the latest additions to my Daemon army featuring all the new plastics (and 1 metal) figures that came out during the heady days of Summer.

So first up are my Pink Horrors:
Now the more astute amongst you may notice that they lack pink pigmentation: well their tongues have a bit of pink so does that count?

Seriously though you didn't expect me to paint them in GW colours did you? Actually to be more accurate they're blue because Tzeentch are based around blue in my Daemon army so I needed these to fit!

Now we have the Horrors with the Changeling:
He's a nice shade of Grey to make him stand out a little but with the same skin tone and metallic blue sheen as the Horrors...

And here he is on his own:

The Seekers of Slaanesh. I ended up with 10 of these because they're lovely. My normal Daemonettes have green hair but frankly that just didn't fit with these and so I went with Warlock Purple hair instead (for the Daemonettes, not me)

And finally, but by no means least, some Bloodcrushers. Loving the plastic as these I can carry without needing weight training!

Really enjoyed painting this lot in between Mafia II and Fallout: New Vegas. Evidently they still need basing but together with an extra Flamer and the Daemon Prince they've added a nice hefty chunk of points and bodycount to my Daemons.

That leaves Masque and Skulltaker to be done and, well, they've fallen foul of me wanting to move on and so will languish in the nearly painted pile.

Next up........... Orks. See bet that got you as well eh?? I want to try and get 500 points done by the end of the year and then get some terrain painted up. I've built the Skyshield and bloody hell that thing is somewhat small deficient.

What I did this weekend....

2010-11-01T12:15:00.003Z

...very little.

I managed to paint 2 trucks and 4 RSO tractors for my FoW Germans. I'm still not sure what compelled me to start with the transports but painting them was really fun!

I've gone for wacky camo on some of the RSO tractors but trucks are fairly muted.

The Dark Eldar Return

2010-10-06T00:05:00.006+01:00

Christmas is early this year.

My favourite 40K Army is back and this time they've done themselves up real well like. Go visit the Games Workshop website to see all of this lot up in lights on the Advance Orders section. I'll wait :-)
Oh you're back eh? Pretty good? I've played Dark Eldar since I first bought 3rd edition back in the summer of 1999 (I'll add the 19 bit there in case any of these youngsters on here start with their smart comments). I've always liked an army that is seen as an underdog and boy the DE sure are.
However, when you nail how to use the army they are currently very lethal and my proudest achievement is probably finishing 2nd and gaining most sporting at a tournie in Cardiff a good few years back: I remember taking a White Scars army apart in 3 turns and at that moment realised how much I'd learnt since losing all my games at the beginning. Learning curve? More like a learning cliff!
And then they went into hibernation. I have used them once in about 4/5 years. Why? Well cos they became samey; some units were unusable in any list (friendly or competative) and I lost interest in an army that I wasn't going to expand.
The units that ended up collecting dust included Grotesques, Mandrakes, Hellions and Scourges. Even Reaver Jetbikes and Warp Beasts weren't seen very often. I do like the Talos though no matter what everyone else says!
So now they're back. My 3000 points are confused by the daylight creeping in to their boxes. It's time to see if I can remember what all the units are. Time to draw back the curtains and see if the DE are as deadly as they used to be.

I've pre-ordered the Codex and a box of Warriors (hey it could have been everything so I did really well!). Now I'm ready for the 6th November. Step aside Guy Fawkes, the real burn in hell merchants are here...

Avanti La Spaghetti!!

2010-10-03T19:16:00.000+01:00

So after my recent blitz on Blood Angels, for those who have not yet seen them please look here http://secretgogblog.blogspot.com/ , I decided to clear some of my own backlog next.

So up stepped my Italian desert force. So far I have assembled all the tanks and heavy AT truck mounted Lancias, and the first 6 MGs and 4 Inf guns.

La Bocage..........c'est Fini!

2010-10-01T12:25:00.003+01:00

Yup Bocage is all finished. I might still go back and add some patches of static grass.

Starting the Bocage

2010-09-27T17:10:00.003+01:00

Now I've taken the plunge and gotten myself a load of FoW it seems only right to make some scenery so I've started some bases to put hedges on top of to from some bocage.

About 6 foot of the stuff!

I've also based and put together a 15mm Radar station that I got at Colours a few weeks ago. Lovely little model.

Some thoughts on scenery........

2010-09-27T16:45:00.003+01:00

I read some time ago the thoughts of one scenery maker who was of the opionion that scenery should never just be a lump that sits blocking LOS. I cna't remember who it was but they instilled in me the ernest belief that the figures should be interacting with the terrain not just edging round it. I'm also of the opinion that if your theme your scenery it, quite obviously, adds an extra narrative element to the games. I tend to approach my scenery making with these things in mind now.

I've had an idea to build some sort of church for some time and when I ended up owing the Silverfox a favour (thanks for the figs Fox!) it struck me that I could combine the urge to unleash this idea along with meeting the promise I had made to Da Fox.

The post I made on the 03/09/10 shows the basic design but I hadn't giving much thought to the roles each piece would fill as a piece of scenery. By roll I mean what impact each one would have upon the game. I came to the conclusion it is important to have some areas that give light cover and difficult terrain tests but not block LOS at all. Others should offer limited LOS blocking for troops but not vehicles and then others should be able to block LOS for both troops and vehicles.

I think the end result actually met these requirements and I think it will lead me to include this requirements in plans for any future sets. Plans? Oh yes.....we have plans!

GoG's Septemberama 2010

2010-09-26T15:44:00.015+01:00

Clash of the Titans...or not!

Well this last weekend has seen a whole gammut of activity taking place at the GoG's resident gaming hall..Tea Urns garage!

Here we have Eddie artillery's Howling Griffons taking on the Silverbacks Blood Angels, what a slugging match this turned out to be! The Angels brought Dante and Astorath with them, while the Griffons brought most of their company artillery! The 10 strong Terminator squad going toe to toe with Dante, a Sanguinary Priest and 10 assault marines! The Blood Angels army is a product of the SiverBacks hard work over the last month, painting and building the army pretty much from scratch....all of the painting predominantly having been done with his new airbrush...obviously the finer detail has been done with the brush, but the majority has been air brushed! A very fine job indeed my friend, Astorath's wings are a real work of art, having a real look about them!! Fantastic.....He's also got a Drop pod and a couple of Baal Predators in the army that have been weathered and detailed with the airbrush and I intend to get these on the Blog in the next few days, they have to be seen to be believed!

The Terminator squad took quick refuge in one of the burned out ruins!

One of our most proficient scenery makers, Eddie Artillery has quietly been working on a project foe the Silverfox. This is a themed piece of a bombed out Cathedral, there are several pieces to this model, all the sections are modular allowing the terrain piece to be either a relatively small piece, or stretching to encompass pretty much the whole table top!

During the early part of the weekend Tea Urns Chaos Marine army was duking it out with Silverfox's Daemon army.

Here you can see the lay out of some of the terrain pieces.

One of our junior members CJ, has just finished a week in Lenton with his Father, the Silverfox and during this week they both undertook the painting and modelling masterclass, CJ has now got a fine Imperial Guard army in the making...My Ork army took on the might of this army in my first game, and a right royal ding dong it turned out to be! The Manticore is very nasty!!

Overall three games a piece and 2,000 pts a side saw a very busy day for all, the overall winner being Tea Urn with his Wordbearers army. Hopefully this will get finished in the near future as it has a lot of beautifully converted models within it's ranks. The arrival of little Urness has mean't that Fatherly duties have taken a president obviously, but hopefully he will find the time to pick up a brush and get a unit at a time finished!

Watch this space!!!

Landing in a Battlefield near you

2010-09-24T00:28:00.005+01:00

With one day to go until our September Saturday kicks in I've completed my Slaanesh DP (well ok completed apart from the basing... sheesh so picky:-)).

Anyway I wanted to try out mixing paints on this guy and because GW go for the Heroic Size models with bulging muscles I've gone for large swathes of deepened recesses to try and exaggerate the build even further.

I think under normal lighting conditions that he looks fine, up close I'm not too sure. I'll let you chaps out there in the Blogoverse be the judge of that.

Getting a decent picture also proved painful...

So front on:
The skin is Hormagaunt Purple, then a Leviathan Purple Wash, then a 2:1 mix of Hormagaunt Purple & Space Wolf Grey and a final 1:1 mix of the previous combo. I didn't quite mix enough so some areas are a little sparse but hopefully those are hidden away!

The Horns have Warlock Purple mixed in and I even ended up using good old Tentacle Pink at certain points.

The wings...
I wanted the membranes to be toned down so that the pinky bone stands out more. The membranes are Liche Purple, Leviathan Purple Wash, Azurman Blue Wash, Regal Blue, Mordian Blue, Ultramarines Blue, Enchanted Blue and a final Azurman Blue wash. Phew.

The Sword...
I played around with this and painted it Regal Blue then Ultramarines Blue around the lightning design. Enchanted Blue and then Ice Blue were painted into the Lightning. This was a little bright and distracted from the model so I then washed it again with good old Azurman Blue.

Once again I've enjoyed experimenting and I can't wait to see if all the time spent painting him is worth it when he takes to the field of battle on Saturday.

Hmmm the above pictures are not really doing it for me so here's one taken under normal lighting conditions and from a more leisurely distance...
Is it Saturday yet????

You can teach an old fox new tricks...

2010-09-09T23:38:00.005+01:00

Good day to one and all. For those that know me I've been doing this hobby for more years than I care to mention and have improved the collecting, building and playing sides over those many years.

You'll note that painting is missing from that list. Although it has probably improved I don't think I've ever really knuckled down to learning painting and this was something I wanted to address. You see I have so many armies now that speed painting a new one doesn't appeal so much: what I really want to do is take my time and paint up a new and improved army. The next one to be done are the Space Wolves.

During the Summer my son and I spent a week at Warhammer World on what they call a Hobby Camp. You basically spend the whole week from 9 to 5 every day doing your hobby: so you'll build, paint and play. You have access to the staff who will show you how to do whatever it is you want to do. So I decided I really wanted to take my 2D painting and turn it 3D.

My Wolf Scouts won me a Best Painted Unit award at the end of the week as they liked the improvements I'd shown - that was special! I will post them but they're not yet finished and so you'll have to wait.

In the meantime I then decided I needed to practice what I learnt and so the cowboys you see in the pictures below have been painted in the last 2 weeks.

So what's new? Layering. Note the shading in the trousers and shirts - done with layering primarily rather than washes.
Highlighting - although I knew the concept I'd never studied the colour hierarchy. Here you'll note highlights on the trench coats, jackets and hats primarily.
Strong Colours - I've used the red shirts on all the models to tie them together as a posse rather than a bunch of individuals. Up to now red has always been a pain to paint for me but with layering and working up to Blood Red it's so much easier!
This shot gives a better view of the hat highlighting. The bases are a simple sand washed with Devlan Mud and then drybrushed lightly with Graveyard Earth.
One of the biggest things I learnt was watering down the paints. I know this sounds so simple but I've never really bothered before as I wanted the one-coat solution. I was taught how to water the paint in the lid so that you don't need a tile and when you've finished the watered paint falls into the pot thus keeping it fresh and also keeping the wastage down. So these models are all done using thinned paints as well.

Some of these pictures blurred a bit - must get used to the camera.

All figures are from Black Scorpion.
5 Indians including the Outlaw Chief.
5 Mexicans
5 Outlaws

And there you have it. I also learnt how to mix colours so expect that on my next paint job - the Daemon Prince pictured previously. Oh and I will be experimenting with faces more soon as well.

I was asked the other day what the one best tip was that I learnt during my week at GW HQ. Having had a chance to think about it I have to say that the best thing for me is the fact I've been given the confidence to experiment and push myself with painting. I'm energised again!!

Stoking the Flames of War

2010-09-06T13:15:00.002+01:00

I have decided to chip away at the prep work for my new FoW collection at the same time as working on the church terrain project. This way I can nibble away at the tedious work of filing, trimming and basing of all the figs in the spare half hours I have here and there.

Hopefully it should all be done around the same time as the church is finished and I can throw myself into getting it all painted. Done so far are several bases of Artillery Observers and Staff and these two bad-ass 88s!

The latest scenery project.

2010-09-06T12:47:00.003+01:00

The Silverfox recently gave me some Tau goodies to help with my newly expanding force. In thanks I commited to building him some scenery. Thankfully I managed to convince him to let me build something that I've had kicking around in my head for a while.

The diagram above is my design sketch for the project with a few of the details noted that I intend to include in the build. I actually started construction a week ago but I'm going to hold off posting piccies until I have finished and the Fox has seen it in person.

The central idea behind the design is that the basic church, which measures 3 foot by 2 foot, can have all of its parts spaced out even further so that the entire church could be spaced out to be the entire table. It also leaves the possibility open for extra sections to be added for special occasions like Apocalypse games.

So far I have made the Aquila floor section, the central columned section and the wall section to the left of the columns. I'm using a mix of blue foam and Hirst Arts blocks which has, so far, proven to be a good combination as the Hirst Arts blocks provide a nice level of details and the blue foam keeps the weight down.

I must say that I am really enjoying building this one!

Airbrush-tastic

2010-09-03T21:22:00.000+01:00

Now you all know I have banging on about my new airbrush and I have spent a lot of time pounding the web looking for 'How to' videos. So I have used what I have learnt and produced 2 pieces of work to date that I thought to share with you. Now, as ever the pics won't do these justice, so please bear that in mind.

The first is an Ork Battlewagon. I promise you this took less than 25 minutes to paint 3 different coats of red on. The effect is lovely to behold. I then used a piece of blister sponge and some 'Smoke' effect from Vallejo, to produce a bit of weathering on the plates. I have not done any true detailing on this yet, except pick out some of the metal bits. The three reds were sprayed in reducing areas on each plate, thus giving the illusion of shading.

Next up, and I think you might be a little surprised at this. But this model is entirely sprayed - no paint brush has been applied to the model yet.....

The effects on this was based on three different blues. These were sprayed in 6 reducing coats to give highlights, the last of which was mixed with white! Again this took no more than 30 minutes in total achieve. Next step is to pick out the details, and maybe add a light wash to certain areas. So what do you think?

Veterans R Us

2010-09-03T21:11:00.001+01:00

So here are my IG veterans. 2 squads with 3 meltas and 3 plasma respectively.

Now, there are 2 points to note when you look at these...

1. The heads are from Westwind; their SGS WW2 Germans with gasmasks.

2. I used my new found airbrush skills to spray the sandy colour uniform. I then used the airbrush to paint the shoulder pads, the chest and back plates and weapons. There was minimal overspray which was easily sorted with the sandy colour on a brush. 20 guardsmen with detailing in less than 3 hours..... awesome!

Finishing things.......

2010-08-31T12:40:00.005+01:00

Need to finish things.......its the only way that I'll allow myself to start my FoW Germans. Still in the production list are.....

Scenery set for Silverfox - Started.

SotTR figures - Nearly finished.

Tyranids Pods - Started.

Warmachine and just about everything else is being benched so I can have good crack at doing my FoW stuff and producing scenery to go with them.

Eddy

Flames of War!

2010-08-31T12:32:00.002+01:00

My will power was finally eroded last weekend. One cracking game of Flames of war and I was helpless to resist. It didn't help with Urn and the Silverback talking about a new webstore selling FoW cheap but the final blow was the offering of a discount voucher (thanks to the Silverback).

The toys were ordered within hours of the game and arrived a few days later...........

....just need to resist starting them until I've finished one or two other projects.

Incoming! Daemon Prince

2010-08-08T17:54:00.003+01:00

Good afternoon and welcome to a lazy Sunday here in August.

So yesterday Clinton and I spent the day playing 40K over at Triple Helix in Westbury. We used 1950 points a side of his Wolves v my Daemons. I took the Daemons as I noticed I haven't used them all year and fancied throwing something different at the Wolves.

In the end we had 2 very, very close games and the Daemons came out on top twice! The second game we managed to win even though only 8 Bloodletters were left on the table; you have to love objective missions right...

Whilst there we popped into their shop and lo and behold they had some of the new Daemon stuff on sale. Now this was most upsetting obviously and in order to appease my wallet I ended up buying just the Daemon Prince.

Today I decided to spend an hour putting him together and, in line with all the latest plastics from GW, he's blooming marvellous. Mine is going to have the Mark of Slaanesh and as you can see below he's fully winged up. He's since been undercoated but will not be painted until the cowboys are done.

Thousand Son is included for scale comparisons...

Of course the only problem now is that with 3 other Chaos Marine armies sat in boxes I just know that I could do with a couple more of these lovely beasties!

I think I saw a ship sir!

2010-07-31T22:41:00.004+01:00

Well it's been a while! Tonight I have something a little different; Uncharted Seas has set sail. I originally bought these back at Warfare 08.... yes indeed. I'm between 40K armies at the moment so thought I'd get on with some other systems (well I have to appease the wife!)

Warmachine is ongoing and some pics to follow of my Cryx. Also I'm about to embark on my new Cowboy Posse which has also been sat waiting for a couple of years...

So here we have the Dragon Lords Battleship...
... and Frigates....
Here's the starter fleet (10 ships, 6 frigates, 3 cruisers, 1 battleship)
Orc Raiders for the Evil Monkey. Yes this game needs you to roll high on dice; Evil Monkey can still roll 6s like they're going out of fashion. I've no chance right?

Note all the guns at the front of the ship.... guess how Orcs approach their enemy?

Battleship...
The Fleet...
Sailing into a port near you soon. If the game's any good expect more ships soon!

Right - where's those Cowboys???

Abaddon... but with a twist.

2010-06-05T16:50:00.004+01:00

Well, third post in three days - which tends to pretty much be the way I work to be honest!

Ok, so, from my post below you'll have seen that I made up 7 terminators from the AoBR termies, plus some bits I scavenged plus some parts from the Chaos terminator Lord....

....So you're probably wondering what happened to the chaos lord, right?

Piccies at the top, as I turned him into Abaddon the Despoiler!

Now, I love the Jes Goodwin sculpt of Abaddon. As with all of Jes's stuff, it's top quality and bursting with character. He used to even be a little bigger than the old metal terminators, which is absolutely right and proper in my eyes. Then GW brought out the spiffing new plastic terminators, which were a little larger and suddenly Abaddon was somewhat on the puny side.

I'd bought the Abaddon figure ages ago and turned him into a lightning-claw-wielding champion of a slaaneshi terminator unit. So I ended up with the talon of Horus, Abaddon's head and his daemon weapon in my bits box. With the lovely new plastic termi lord, I'd have been made not to put the two together, right?

So, I started with a rather nice display base I'd picked up from Heresy miniatures a good while ago that matched the flagstones of my chaos army and had a step to allow abaddon to stand out. Some pinning of the legs allowed him to just be stepping up to the top step. I then chopped down two chaos terminator arms to take the talon and daemon weapon and stuck them in appropriate poses. I was intending to use the original head, but it felt a little small on the new plastic model, so I used the rather spiffing bare head from the lord box (I like the expression a lot) and just pinned abddon's top knot to it instead.

The termies in the post below will now be Black legion ones to form their Lord's bodyguard and hey presto, a whole load of terminators! Quite how I'll fit them in a carry case is a little beyond me right now, but that's a problem for another day :)

Another project I'd been meaning to do for ages....

2010-06-05T16:38:00.003+01:00

....was turning my AoBR termies into Chaos termies. I am something of a trader when it comes to GW stuff lying around, and from my box of AoBR I ended up left with the 5 termies, plus the free one I got from White Dwarf.

So, on the basis that if I didn't do something to fit them into an existing army I'd make a new Space marine army just to use them (I'm a wargamer - that makes perfectly logical sense to me!) i decided to make them Chaos termies. So, I'd bought the Chaos terminator lord some time ago to build a lord and so I decided to use some of the weapon options from that with these dudes.

In addition to that, there are various bits from other chaos models and some scratch built chaos symbols with arrows cut from the metal around the top of a wine bottle and some tiny nuts and bolts I bought from Atenocenti ages ago.

I decided to go with non-terminator looking heads, as I think this really marks them out as not regular terminators and went for the spiky bits on the shoulders to enhance that impression.

Along the way I managed to build one to go atop a pair of Dark Angel termi

legs that come on the veteran sprue (and hid the back with the lord's cloak) and so I ended up with 7 terminators!

In addition to being a trader, I'm also a bits box raider, so special thanks goes to Nick for the trade/lend/theft of the leftovers from all his chaos terminators.

First post in I don't know how long.....

2010-06-03T18:21:00.004+01:00

...So I'd better make it a good 'un, right?

Ok, so whilst my hobby time has been rather cut down by the birth of my daughter (my best miniature yet, even if I do say so myself!), I did manage to get started on my Ork army right before she was born.

"What Ork army?" I hear you cry "I thought you'd decided not to start new armies because they take too much time and you have enough already!"

Yes, i did indeed say all that. But in my defense, I am a wargamer and am therefore totally incapable of resisting anything even vaguely shiny. Even if it's plastic, and that stuff don't shone much.....

Anyhoo - here are the fruits of my early labour. I decided that as I was intending to pile into combat a lot (yippee!) I should try to make the units easily distinguishable. The Ork Clan regime was my saviour here as I decided each mob would come from a different clan. Different colour schemes weren't quite enough, so I made sure that the headgear on the first three units was also different, so top-knots for snake-bites, bare heads for evil suns and helmets for goffs (I also added some little goblin shields to the snake-bites to emphasis their clan and these were small enough to be bucklers as opposed to full on medieval shields). Spray them the appropriate colour, add some Knarloc Green and metal and a couple of other colours and there they were! 12 each of the snake bites and evil suns for Trukk mobs and 20 goffs for a battlewagon mob, or the start of a 30 man walking mob.

For support I changed the arms on three old-school killer kans as the triple joints looked a bit rubbish imo. So, one joint less was more in my eyes and after covering the "shoulder" with orky bits to hide the new join, they only needed a quick red spray and metal and bits and power cables picked out and they were ready to go!

Hopefully coming soon are my chaos termies and then onto more Orks - gotta love 'em :)

Tyranid Test Infestation

2010-06-03T00:00:00.003+01:00

As you all know I have an inability to keep away from starting new armies; during an email chain today I worked out that I have 11 painted armies totalling around 25,000 points. So that's enough right??

er no. A while back I swapped my Guard that never happened with my son for his Nids that never happened. I put them on the back burner. Then I managed to acquire a cheap Trygon and suddenly I fancied trying a paint scheme out on the Nids.

But not just any old paint scheme. Oh no. Not for me. I set myself a challenge: is it possible to create a paint scheme entirely using the Citadel Washes? Well judge for yourselves because the Genestealer pictured here is just that.

Spray Skull White. Then a layer of Thraka Green. Then 2 layers of Gryphonne Sepia over the skin. A 2nd coat of Thraka Green over the armour. Finally a coat of Leviathan Purple over the claws. Done. He took longer to dry between coats than he did to paint.

What do you think?

Transfer Season now open for Shrike Army

2010-05-21T20:33:00.004+01:00

It all started last Saturday. Twas a lovely day. Sun was shining and I was on my way down South to have a couple of games of 40K against the Silverback. A splendid way to spend a Saturday...

... so whilst Evil Monkey was let loose on "Left for Dead 2" we prepared to see if Shrike and his friends could stand up against the Fatecrusher list. The answer is no. The first battle we managed a draw although that was more thanks to the never ending scenario and my Land Speeders than it was any skill on Shrike's part.

The second game ended 4-1 on obj to the Daemons. End of Turn 5 we had a draw but it was not to be this time. So this got me thinking: why am I always playing for the draw? Why isn't the army hard enough to make the Daemons play for the draw?

This was the army (2,000 points):
Shrike
Chaplain in Termie Armour
6 x Assault Termies in LRC
10 x Marines w/plasma cannon, meltagun and pfist in Razorback
10 x Marines w/missile launcher, meltagun and pfist in Razorback
10 x Marines w/lascannon, meltagun and pfist in Razorback
10 x Assault Marines w/Thunder Hammer and 2 plasma pistols
2 x Land Speeder w/Hvy Bolter & Assault Cannon

2 Hard hitting units. 30 marines in vehicles behind them and skimmers bouncing around. So during the drive home whilst Evil monkey slept and dreamt of zombies I considered what was lacking.

Shrike - he's good, not game breaking and gives Fleet. Does tend to run away: can make him fearless by adding a Chaplain but, erm, no. Pass
Chaplain - gives fearless to Assault Termies but can be insta-killed and is weak. Fail
Assault Termies - fabulous unit. hard hitting and with fleet they are scary. Pass
Marines - 30 is a good number: gives me 6 scoring units. Power Fist, Meltaguns in Razors are excellent. Missile Launcher and Larry Lascannon are good. Plasma Cannon is pants. Misses too often. Pass in general; Fail on plasma cannon
Assault Marines - good unit with Shrike. Infiltrating or Outflank are cool. Bit weak at times when they hit but Thunder Hammer is good fun. Plasma Pistols are rubbish. Invariably 1 overheats and most of the time they don't even get to fire them. Pass in general; Fail on plasma pistols
Land Speeders - oh dear. Ideally I like units to have a job: these boys can't decide if they're light vehicle killers or infantry killers. They also have to move only 6" in order to use both guns. Not good - I want them zinging around and offering a bigger threat radius. Very good, however, at last minute land grabs. Pass for missions; Fail for job well done
Land Raider Crusader - love this. Drops off Termies and then proceeds to annoy the heck out of everyone. Pass

I decided that I needed another hard hitting unit that can appear in the enemy deployment zone on turn 1 alongside Assault Termies in LRC and Shrike + Assault Marines. To get this unit I needed 170 points.... so how do you get 170 points without losing any units?

Like this....
Remove Chaplain and replace with Chaplain Cassius. He's Toughness 6. 6!! He gives me everything the other one does and more. Ok he's only power armour but then most attacks against him are power weapons so that's no issue. He's also 5 points cheaper.

Drop Plasma Cannon marine and replace with Missile Launcher. Save 5 points.

Cassius is made up of Space Marine Commander and Space Wolf bits.

Drop 1 Assault Termie. 5 or 6 in the unit are neither here nor there. So lose one with LClaws. 40 points saved.

Drop 2 Assault Marines with Plasma Pistols. Save 66 points.

Drop 2 Land Speeders with Assault Cannon/Hvy Bolter. Replace with Land Speeders with Multi-Meltas. Save 60 points.

One on the left is an old one handed to me during an exchange with the Silverback years ago. One on the right is a new one and boy do they go together much better now they've been remoulded? Yes. They do! Multi-Meltas give me a 36" threat radius. Tank Hunters or Monstrous Creature killers.

So that's 176 points saved. So now I can introduce my brand new Ironclad Dreadnought in a Drop Pod. Yummy.

Yes that is a Furioso Dread with Warmachine bits attached. He wasn't being used anymore so a quick repaint and he's ready for action.

Drop Pod stolen from the Space Wolf battleforce; have to replace that one day! Nice Statue? Big ain't it?? Statue is work in progress.

So that's it then. Brand new 2,000 point Shrike army:
Shrike
Chaplain Cassius
5 Assault Termies
Ironclad Dread in Drop Pod
10 Marines (PF, ML, Meltagun) & Razorback
10 Marines (PF, ML, Meltagun) & Razorback
10 Marines (PF, Larry, Meltagun) & Razorback
8 Assault Marines (Thunder Hammer)
2 Land Speeders w/Multi Meltas
Land Raider Crusader

All the above added in 5 days since I started this on Monday. Spiffing. Now let's see how they deal with nasty stuff!

Daemons and the future

2010-05-17T16:25:00.000+01:00

So here are the latest batch of Daemons to make the battlefield a pretty and pleasing place. The silverfox has already been in contact with these little beauties and loves them. In fact he loves them sooo much, he came back for more.

The scheme couldn't have been simpler. Army Painter red spray, Dwarf Bronze on the Jugger and sword. Pick out some small bits of detail and then Purple Wash on the Bronze & Black Wash on the Bloodletter. A quick before and after shoot for you to see the difference!

So with regards the future, just take a look at the new NCP carpark that has filled up my shelves.....

Busy Weekend Part 3

2010-04-20T12:44:00.003+01:00

Yeap! Still more to come!

I'd brought these 10mm buildings ages ago and finally managed to get round to them. I've got some others that can up really well and was fairly pleased with how these came up just with lots of heavy dry brushing.

Busy Weekend Part 2

2010-04-20T12:33:00.004+01:00

The Silverback kindly gave me some excellent terrain stuff absolutely ages ago.

He'd found some small scale walls and hedges. Like a thin sort of foam with flock stuck to it making it look like hedges and walls.

Finaly got round to doing something with it. Thought I'd make two fields and the rest as separate wall sections for more versatility.

Thanks Silverback for those!

As both the Silverback and I both have some (very dusty) BKC 10mm WWii stuff, I thought it would be good to try and play FoW in the 10mm scale.

Also managed to finish some walls which are for 28mm but I'm going to use them as high ones for BKC.

Oh - and some planky fences which will be perfect for Pirates and SotTR!

Busy Weekend Part 1

2010-04-20T12:26:00.003+01:00

Been productive this weekend!

I am really starting to get loads of little project cleared that have been hanging around for ages.

Plus a couple of new ones.......;-)

The Vanquish Tournament Bristol Vanguard 2010

2010-04-05T15:48:00.044+01:00

Well a sunny weekend in Bristol and 5 games of my favourite gaming pastime, 40K, along with my ol' chum Andy "The Bear" Powell. I have been to this tournie for the last 3 years and as I have said each and every time, it has to be the best I have been to...that includes Lenton! The terrain is second to none, the scenarios and referee interaction is spot on....anyway enough about this....on to the armies and games!

First up was Chris from Cardiff, I have seen Chris here and the Cardiff events before and he's a larger than life character and embodies the spirit of the hobby! Even if he is a little carried away with the exuberance of just how well he's doing! Well it's true Chris! ;-)

Suffice to say that with Dawn of War and Annihiltion, I didn't want to lose the first turn, great I got to choose deployment....oh bollox, Chris seized the initiative!! So the first turn saw the battlewagon and trukks charge across the table pile out and kick seven bails of hay out of my marines!! Good game with some great moments, shawn the sheep has a lot to answer for!!!
Loss for me 9 to 3 on KP's

Second was a game against one of the ref's Andrew Tailor, what a treat this was, he is a really astute guy when it comes to the game and I was expecting a shoeing!! "Nope" he said, "I wanted to take a really average army" out came his Grey Knight army....being an old Grey Knight player myself I realise they have been left way behind with the 5th edition of the rules, so was hopeful of a win!!

Two large Knight units each with 2 Psycannons, a unit of Terminators with 3 Psycannons in the unit including the masters and 2 Dreadnoughts, left me a little nervous, this was a Cleanse mission using Spearhead deployment and thats a lot of fire power to be moving towards!

Flamer Marine was ordered forward into the charging Dreadnought with the Power Fist.....MUMMY!!!

The Grand Master of the Grey Knights strode forward with his retinue.

A really well converted and painted army, this was a really great part of my day. The best part of the game was spent by Andrew teling me how he achieved some of the effects and as is typical of people that have a God given talent, he was very under played about the whole thing!

The amusing part of the game for us was the fact that I poured so much fire into the accursed HQ and Andrew kept saving them, that they were making good ground across the table toward the quarter I was hiding in! Andrew had captured the other quarter on my side of the table, so my reserve rhino and squad were going to have to deal with this, while the other Marine squad tried to stop the remaining Knight squad capturing the quarter opposite my deployment.

The one scary thing for these marines was the bloody Terminators.....ah ha don't worry the

Demon Prince will deal with them, he launched forward toward the charging dreadnought, only to get taken by surprise when my Obliterators destroyed it! Ahhhh now I am in the open!! That's okay, I will run and use the hulk of the Dread for cover...anyhoo 3 failed saves later he was bleeding warp shite like you wouldn't believe! The Grey Knight squad then got a last round of fire in just as the Terminators were lining up to finish him off in close combat! He went down like he'd been pole axed! Great I get another round of firing at the Termies and the Greater Demon has turned up! Where I didn't miss Andrew saved them! Bollox! Okay the Greater Demon will have to rely on his 4+ invulnerable! What do you mean he can't make a single save....another pole-axed monster!! Much to the furstration of the Terminators!

Great game with ANdrew finally pointing out the error of my ways in my moving my Plague marines out of my quarter to claim the adjacent quarter and suggesting a draw! Thank you Sir!

So a draw for the second game...not too shoddy!

Game three was up against Alan, sorry Al I didn't get your second name! This was another Chaos Marine army with a strong Slaanesh influence, 2 DP's with lash and 6 Oblit's khorne marines in a LR' and two squads of Marines in rhinos. 1 being plague marines! I hadn't played against a configration like this before although obviously I had heard about them.

The mission was recon with a pitched battle deployment, so I needed to get my Rhino across the table and into Alan's deployment zone, everything was foot slogging it's way across the table.

I got embroiled in a right ol' duff up in the centre of the table, with my DP and GD piling in with the Chaos Lord, Plague marines and a squad of Black Legionaires...the lash did for me though, pulling my squads here and there! It didn't help that when my lord and the Black Legion charged the Berzerkers I killed only two from over 30 attacks, then lost 4 marines myself...9 on the Ld roll...bugger! Oh no hang on "Chaos Glory" rolls an 11.....mmmm...double bugger! Roll to break off...."1". I'll get my coat! Oh hang on the GD has trned up and can assault the turn he comes forth! 6 attacks on 3's......what do you mean he's missed!! Shit! Ow he's now dead as well! Curse my saving throws! My remaining troop choice was then lashed closer to the demons, then lashed again into t line directly away from the target...this mean't that I would only get 60% of my squad into the resulting assault! They died!!!! This left me somewhat jaded I must admit....oh well back to the drawing board! There's always tomorrow!

I lost this, with Alan succeeding in getting 2 troop choices into my deployment zone.

Sunday morning, well rested, bright eyed and bushy tailed!

First game was up against Tim Bland and his Blood Angels, Tim is from the Exeter Inquisitors and I enjoyed this game immensely, the mission was Spearhead with Capture and Control

Tim was taken a little by surprise initially as my reserves came on from my entire board edge, he'd forgotten about that, probably due to the "Cleanse" mission the day before, the opening part of the game saw me take out the Vindicator and blow the arm off of the Dreadnought, the 5 man combat squad nearest my deployment line dies to the Plague Marines, while the other half of this combat tema gt embroiled in an assault with my other Chaos Marine squad, the GD and the Devastator squad, along with the fist less Dread....ultimatley I won this and managed to make my way over the table and was 6" away from his objective when the game ended on turn 5! Tim had awful luck with his 2 terminator squads, 1 not turning up until turn 5 and both scattering 11" and 12" respectively when they struck on to the table! The first dying to 4 Plasma cannon shots killing all of them!

Due to the initial mix up with Cleanse and Spearhead, I thought I had done enough and another draw was lined up!! "Errrr no" Tim said, "I hold my objective with this remaining troop choice, and you.....errr have nothing on yours....a win to me I think.." he said somewhat sheepishly!! Oh Pooh....how stoopid!

So another loss!! I scored lots more points as well!! Boooo Hooooo!!

The last game was against a young man from the other Bristol club I believe "Big 'Uns", Matt.

Imperial Guard with ratlings, Ogryns...I like Ogryn...(I think I have said this before!) a Vendetta and Valkyrie, a couple of chimera conversions, as Humvees and a Leman Russ!!

The mission is Pitched Battle and Seize Ground, 4 objectives placed. Lovely army as well with some interesting conversions.

The Humvee's are die cast models he picked up for £8 1/27th scale.

The game was a real blast, with lots of moments worth note, the most laughable one being my DP running into cover and the ensuing discussion over cover meaning that one side was exposed and yes the Vendetta could move over to this side and shoot him with it's Lascannons...which it duly did, then lots of laughs about how I might roll "1" when I leapt out of the wood!! You can guess what I rolled! That and the plague marines that moved out of their cover to negate the threat of the Ogryn, only for me to forget that Plasma guns are rapid fire weapons, even though I fired them twice and the other marines only fired their pistols, to make sure I could assault them....oh hang on they are rpid fore aren't they!! Maybe I should have stayed in the cover! As luck would have it, they assaulted me and I won the ensuing combat consolidating back into the cover and my objective.
The result was 3 objectives to none to me! Great game and a fantastic opponent, thank you Matt.

I will be posting the best painted armies in a future post.

So keep tuned in!

BFG

A weekend of productivity

2010-03-28T21:52:00.001+01:00

So as you all know the long haired general went away this weekend so I had 2 full days of me time. I vowed not to play any computer games and get on with some good hobby time. So apart from eating, watching movies and research adult educational movies on the magical interweb, I spent the time assembling, basing and painting. These are the fruits of my labours.

2 Bastions (1 was nearly finished already)
8 Long Sections and 8 Short Sections of Barricades.
4 x Large 15mm ruins from a company called Fieldworks for FoW.
My latest recruiting drive for the americans yielded, (all based with filler and undercoated)

10 Bazooka Teams
4 x Heavy MG teams, HQ and Spotter.
4 x 81mm Chemical Mortar teams with HQ and Spotter.
2 x Arty Staff teams
3 jeeps for Recce
1 x AA 37mm HQ M3 Half track - M13
1 x AA Quad .50cal M3 Halftack.

and 20 Bloodletters painted - they had previously been undercoated.

So there you go - so what have I learned. Investing in sending the good lady to a Spa for the weekend does wonders for clearing your hobby backlog and also ruins your eyesight ;)

A GoG Weekend

2010-03-24T11:30:00.032Z

Well the last weekend was fraught with danger for the armies involved in the GoG weekend. For those of you new to the Blog this is where a few mates get together once...or twice a year (if we can get away with it) on a grand scale and hold our very own tournament.

We all look to bring new armies, which we have worked on over the last year, this year seeing some fine additions to our already large collections!

Eddie Artillery brought a new Tyranid army, SilverBack brought a new Tyranid army, Silverfox brought his World Eaters chapter of chaos marines, Varistat (Tea Urn to his mates) brought along his revised and renovated Dark Eldar and I brought a combined force of Deathwing and Ravenwing from the Dark Angels chapter.

Over the course of two days we slugged it out in 5 games, with the winner being Urn, just pipping the Silverback and Eddie to the post in the final game!

Great weekend hosted at Urn's place, a night out at the local boozer on the Friday, an all day session of gaming on the Saturday, followed up with Rugby, cider and cash for guns!! Oh and lots of Pizza!!

So here are some of the clips from the weekend.

Siverbacks nasty Swarmlord, all the conversions were done by the great Simian, fantastic job it has to be said, all from plasticard and greenstuff! Although I think he's hiding here, from Urn's nasty Dark Eldar lances!

The genestealers on the right here suffer a slight dose of "disintegrator badness"

The Dark Eldar coming over in waves!!

Meanwhile the battle rages between the World Eater chapter and the Dark Angels. I think this was all that was left of my army at this point...they were just debating who should take on the frothing monstrosity just over the hill!! Uh oh...there's two of them!

Suffice to say that they all died except the chapter master on the land speeder!

My terminators just couldn't stand up to the 5 attacks from the Chaos Dreadnought! My dreadnought having fainted before them!

The poor Venerable Dreadnought on the other side of the table was literally run over by the rampaging Defiler, someone suggested that it would be a good idea to shoot the Battle cannon of it!! This just made it mad!

On the right here, Eddie has just heard that Silverback is getting close to drawingthe last game with Urn!

This is a more panoramic picture of the game between myself and the Silverfox!

The start up of our game looked slightly more promising, well right up until the Vindicator, blew the legs off my Venerable Dread...this quickly becoming his head once I had asked him to re-roll the hit on the chart, due to him being "Venerable"....oh well!
Here is the Silverbacks Tyrannofex!

Another really nasty gribblie from the new Tyranid codex!

Here is another better shot of the Swarmlord, he managed to survive all the game against Urn's Dark Eldar! A real feat against that many Dark Lances!!

Earlier in the day the Nids of Eddies swarm took on the Dark Eldar, a win for Urn I believe! Here's the Carnifex about to chew through a squad of Witches.....whaadddayaa mean they've taken drugs!! Ouch!

At the same time on another planet my Dark Eldar took on the Swarm of the Simian......here I realised that taking on the Swarmlord with the Emporers finest just wasn't the thing to do!! Just shoot it next time! I got duffed even after killing all the guards with it! WS9 and the "Paroxysm" mean't I needed 5's to hit and 6@ to wound!! :-(

I thought I had a chance with all my Tough bikers and Terminators....not so though...the Silverback showed me the error of my ways...little recce mean't a number of surprises for my brave chaps!!

Here is the moment Eddie adorned the GoG sombrero, a time honored relic, worn and jealousy guarded by the current leader of the tournament!

And here on the left is the moment we told him that Urn may be getting it back!

There was an interesting opening battle between the two Nid armies, these Mycetic spores (All hand made by Eddie) were really tricky, having lash whips to reduce the number of attacks you could put in and then hitting back as a monstrous creature!

These really, really hurt, dropping into the main part of the enemy, they then deliver their shooty pay load and attack anything close by!

The carnifex above is hiding behind the fuel depot! The twin linked devourers were also a nasty addition to both Nid armies!
Here is eddie's Tervigon conversion, the torso has been created from "Super Sculpy" the rest being from the Nid "Bits box". A really nice looking model!

The other opener was the nasty Dark Eldar taking on the even nastier Kharn and his World Eaters!!

The Vindicator rumbles forward to deliver it's collossal payload! Supported by the Lord with his retinue in the Chaos Landraider.

The two dark armies square up for the off!!

There were so many Dark Lances any army spent a lot of time hiding and looking for the quick counter strike...much like Bristol City on the day!

So in the end a good time was had by all....the nominal prizes were dished out, with the ubiquitous Ogryn making another appearance! Along with a really nice Vostroyan Command and Khorne Berzerker box set, all for the loser to pick first! I got two of these prizes!! (Go Figure)!

Last but not least, I had taken a fine conversion for this game using a figure out together by a talented mate of mine Mr Scott! This figure was of the Chapter Master of the Deathwing....Belial...the toughest of all the elite first company!! The slayer of tyrants....the annihalator of the swarms!! He paints his armour Bone as he never expects to come back from battle...to the Death! Only he's PINK!! Curse this brown/green colour blindness!! I thought he looked cool until the sniggering sarted!! Probably explained why he died a lot!

Oh well, I'll re-paint him and get him on e-bay with the rest of his mates!

Until another time

TTFN

BFG

World Eaters ready for PMBE

2010-03-16T00:38:00.005Z

Tonight I'm chuffed. I've finished my GoG army for the PMBE this weekend. 1800 points from scratch in 2 and a half months. Wow. And do you know what? I've really enjoyed painting this lot up; so much so that I want to finish off the 4th squad of Bezerkers and a squad of Possessed (that I've had since the plastics were released...)

Anyway on to a couple of pictures of the army; not the best quality pictures but they convey that the army is all together. You might notice a couple of Dreadnoughts in there and think "they're not World Eater Dreads!". You'd be correct: had lots of trouble getting the Forgeworld Dreads to stick so ended up raiding the boxes of bits and converting up 2 Assault on Black Reach Dreads that I recently swapped with VariStat. Necessity is the mother of invention and/or deadlines focus the mind!

... and Kharn. What can we say about Kharn? Whilst he was maiming my army the other week Silverback suggested I should put some kind of scorecard on his base: then paint on the new Betrayer kill total after each battle. I liked this idea so took it away, mulled it over and came to the conclusion that a scoreboard of some sort was definately required; something to stand out and advertise Kharn's lethality.

So this is what I came up with:
"Look what I did, Ma!"

Anyway, 1800 points. Done. Fantastic. Just in time for those rather spiffing looking Blood Angels...