May Gaming

Kept on truckin' with our Mordheim campaign this month. Managed to kill one of the Lizardmen's Saurus heroes.... hehehehe!

Serves them right for turning my henchmen into pin cushions. Here's a pic of a whole group of Skinks lining up their shots through a tunnel and into my henchmen.





And an aerial view of the whole battle.




There was a demon guarding a magical artifact inside the temple. Fortunately for me, my Chaos Magister was able to posses the demon and use him to attack the Lizardmen!





Once the Lizardmen all got engaged though, it was tough going. I would have been toast if most of my troops hadn't already gotten upgraded to have 2 wounds. This is counteracted by the fact that all of the Skinks have gotten upgrades to get 2 attacks!



Once he defeated the demon and took a wound off all of my troops, I turned tail and ran!






In addition to getting in another Mordheim game this month, I also made it over to my buddy's place to see a full size game of Kings of War.

This game is all the rage now with my local gaming group and has definitely taken Warhammer's plae since Age of Crapmar came out.

I definitely want to to try it out. It looks like fun. That being said, I think I totally prefer skirmish games overall since I'm such a slow painter. Not sure I'll get up the nerve to paint an army for this game. Might motivate me to finish painting my Warhammer armies though! I have half painted armies of Lizardmen and Vampire Counts. I also have huge, mostly unpainted armies of Empire and Bretonnians, of which I've only painted up a few units. The rest of my armies are still in their boxes :(

 



This game was Empire vs. Dwarves... the Dwarves were mostly unpainted, so they got the beating they deserved!

The Empire troops were nicely painted though, so their victory was a foregone conclusion:

April Painting

Just barely managed to get my 10 model goal in last month.

Already doubting I'm going to make this month!

Last month was a big focus on fantasy stuff... mainly Reaper Bones and some more Wizards and Apprentices for Frostgrave games (by Copplestone Castings).

I also painted up a Skink Chief on a Cold One for my son's Lizardmen warband in out Mordheim campaign... Had to do it! He bought one and I had no model to represent it. Perfect excuse to paint one.

I have been sitting on at least a dozen of the old Skink Cold One Riders from before Games Workshop GOT RID of Skink Cold One Riders for Warhammer in the Lizardmen Army List.... I remember being angry when that happened - although, in hindsight that seems like a small gripe compared to them killing the ENTIRE game system and universe! Haha.... Oh well. On to Kings of War!

In addition to my fantasy stuff, I realized on April 30th that I was one model short of my goal and had only completed 9. I whipped up one more with a one-day paint job, and in the process, also kept it from being a 100% fantasy month! Now I can say I made progress on my FIW project last month too.

I found an old captive from Wargames Foundry's Pirate range in my closet, and he looked like he'd be easy to paint up quickly, and also a perfect model to represent a captive in various 18th century game scenarios!

April Gaming

Wow... all of April went by with no Blog updates! Fortunately that doesn't mean nothing was happening. I actually got in some painting and some gaming.

It's been a tough year so far to get any games in with my local gaming group, but fortunately I have been raising my own in-house wargame opponent for the past 10 years.

Even though I haven't gotten together with my buddies, my son and I started a new Mordheim campaign this year. He is playing Lizardmen (he ALWAYS takes Lizardmen!) and I am trying out the Possessed.

I painted up this Possessed warband a while ago for one of my buddies (who likes to play but doesn't paint) to use in our annual campaign, but I've never actually played them until now. They are pretty awesome! With some lucky rolls, I've got almost every model in my warband up to 2 wounds. Ouch...

Although the Lizardmen recently got quite a boost too: After searching for just one game, one of the Skink Chiefs has located a Cold One mount to ride into battle. We had to put the campaign on hiatus while I painted that one up :)

Here are some in-game shots from our games...

Starting warbands:





Battle is joined!




I also managed to get a game in of Pirates of the Spanish Main with my daughter. As much as I hate to admit it, my kids would probably love the X-Wing game that is all over the place now. Last thing I need is another game to focus on!

March Terrain

Also got a bunch done on a terrain piece I've been working on for the past couple of months. It's a scratch build; not that complicated but pretty big for an individual terrain piece. In fact, I'm not really sure whether to classify it as a terrain piece or a game board! I plan on using it more as the latter.

In January I bought a cool tool that I had read about on other blogs called a Proxxon Thermocut wire cutter. It is like a standard hot wire cutter for foam, but in the form of a "table saw" rather than a hand held tool.

http://www.amazon.com/Proxxon-37080-Wire-Cutter-THERMOCUT/dp/B0017NS8H6

Of course I had to test it when I got it... it's funny what will inspire you to work on something. Although I've got a few dozen ideas in my head at any one time of projects I'd "like" to do, this one came about from buying the Proxxon Thermocut and having tons of foam and a piece of 30" square mdf laying around!

I bought some 1x6 wood for the walls, used the mdf as the floor, and started slicing up foam to come up with this:

My Possessed warband for Mordheim served as models to show the scale. The raised terrace, stairs, and columns are all cut from foam and covered in Foam Coat (exterior) from Hot Wire Foam Factory.

The flooring is textured wallpaper. This was quite an adventure in and of itself... I couldn't decide on a pattern for the flooring but I knew I didn't just want to leave it plain. I ended up buying several different rolls of textured wallpaper before settling on this one. Now I have lots for future projects!

It's looking OK so far but I wish I would have figured out a way to add some more detail to the build. I got lazy with the columns and only did one level of relief on them, I could have added more. Not sure what else though. I'm happy I added the molding to the tops of the walls. Didn't want to add piles of bones and debris because I want it to be a more generic piece that can be used for multiple settings.

I have to build an entrance way for the front hall, but I wanted it to be removable so I'll do it separately.

The idea of this board is that it's loosely based on this one, which is itself loosely based on the Balin's Tomb scene from the Fellowship of the Ring.

http://thomarillion.de/index.php?seite=katalog&sprache=gb_&modell=dunklesreich&pos=2

Mine is bigger though! And instead of spending all that money on the Thomarillion one I got the Proxxon instead, which I can use on other projects. I did order from Thomarillion anyway and used the money I "saved" to buy other stuff hehe.

My plan is to use this for at least a few different things. I want to use the tomb and well from the Games Workshop Mines of Moria boxed set to fill it out as Balin's Tomb. I'm going to build a bunch of book shelves and use them for this to represent the Library scenario in the main Frostgrave rulebook, and thought it could also be used for the Ghoul King's lair/throne room in the Thaw of the Lich Lord book. I've also been thinking of making up some modular 3D Dungeon boards for dungeon crawls... if I do, I can add this as a large room to add on to those.

I took a bunch of work in progress shots, which is something I normally forget to do!

March painting

Phew! Been a long time. I had a great start to February and was on track to really get ahead for the year... but unfortunately the second half of the month got to be insanely busy so nothing else got painted after the first 2 weeks.

First half of March was more of the same, but for the past week I've been back in the saddle getting some painting and terrain done.

First off the painting desk was a new unit for my FIW collection, Canadian Militia by Old Glory.

 

The sculpting was a bit crude compared to most of the other models I've been painting up so far. As opposed to the Warlord/Conquest models where I really think it was just the casting that was the problem, I get the sense these were mediocre sculpts to begin with. Not terrible, but definitely less than the Crusader and Conquest models I've been using.

I like the fact that they have the long "tuques" that makes them instantly recognizable as Canadians, though, so they were worth getting. They also fit in well size-wise with my other FIW stuff, as opposed to Redoubt or Galloping Major which seem to be a bit bigger. I think I'm going to have to go with Old Glory for my British Light Infantry for the same reasons that I went with these guys.


I also painted up a few fantasy models over the past month.

This is a Reaper vampire model that I've had for quite a while, since before Bones existed as a line... he's a metal model in a wide stance, so wouldn't fit on a standard base.

I only plan on using him in Frostgrave / Song of Blades & Heroes anyway though, so fortunately both of those games are "low stress" when it comes to basing.

Next up is a Barbarian, also for FG/SoBH. He's a Rackham model that was produced for the game Confrontation, which I bought but never played. The model line is awesome though. I have a good number of their minis but have avoided painting them because they intimidate me!

The sculpting is so fine and the studio paint jobs were so incredible that I never felt I could come close to the image I have in my head of these models. This guy sat on my painting desk for over a year. I base coated his skin and weapon and originally planned to do a non-metallic metal on him. That didn't go to well though, so back to the drawing board. He sat there untouched for many months and finally I finished him off this weekend, figuring since he wasn't going to live up to my expectations I might as well get him done and add him to the display case.

Even though he didn't come out as I hoped, he looks pretty cool and I'm happy with him. Definitely spent a lot more time on him than most of my Bones models!


Finally, I got a "bonus" model done as my buddy James sent me a whole bunch of Warhammer Fantasy models that he apparently no longer wants. I will store them in my basement until he changes his mind... but in the mean time, there was a High Elf Mage in the lot that I had painted for him over a year ago and left the base undone so he could base it to match his army.

Well... the army will now never be completed, so I threw some flock on him, varnished him, and "bam!" instant extra model completed this month!

I took some additional shots of these guys in a new terrain piece I was working on too, using a much more "serious" camera. Most of my pics are done with my cell phone so I wanted to see if there was a noticeable difference. Unfortunately I haven't downloaded them yet so I'll have to do that in another post.