Going Ape!

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?

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

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

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

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

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....

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

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.