Weekend Gaming

Real Life has meant that there's been precious little time for any gaming or hobby stuff (let alone time to blog about it). But over the weekend I did manage to catch up with the guys for some Saturday night gaming.

Due to the weather and a massive blackout, the group was a little different to normal. So we started the night with a game of Ticket to Ride. I started with two routes that took me from LA, across the top of the board and down to Chicago. They weren't huge scoring paths, but I figured they would set me up well for future routes.

However, it was the first game I've played with 5 people in a long time, so I'd forgotten that it takes longer to build up your hand and the board fills up quicker. It took me 3/4 of the game to make my first two routes. I picked up another two routes that both joined onto the ends of my existing track, so I was able to keep to my goal of having one long track.

I caused the game to end, and ended up with a very tight second place (the last route card I picked up that I couldn't do was the difference).

We then broke out a game that I'm calling Beananza, although the real name is in German (I think it's actually the same thing). It was a set-collecting card game were you tried to plant different types of beans. We all picked up the game pretty quickly, and it went really well. In the end there were only two points between the highest and the lowest scores - I finished in the middle of the pack.

We played a couple of extremely quick games of We Didn't Play Test This. Amusingly I didn't get to play a single card in either game.

The boys then had a go of Cutthroat Caverns, which is basically Munchkin without the puns. A bunch of adventures are trying to kill all the monsters, but want to make sure they're the one with the most kills.

It was a good mix of cooperative and backstabbing play. But unlike Munchkin, it wasn't so much a case of the winner being the last person who hadn't lost. We were able to use different tactics and plan to try and position ourselves best.

Partly because I was able to pull out the right cards when I needed them, and partly because W decided to try something foolish, I ended up winning.

We ended the night with a game of Dominion with the Prosperity expansion. I ended up winning quite comfortably. It wasn't until we were scoring at the end that I realised that I had played the entire game with only one action card in my deck (a Vault)! My money-making processes had just fallen into place so I hadn't needed to buy anything more.

As always, it was a great night!

Weekend Gaming: Ticket to Ride

My sister and her husband came to stay with us over the weekend, so on Saturday night we broke out a board game to play. Having been a little bit overdosed on Dominion, my brother-in-law suggested "anything else". I probably would have pushed for SmallWorld, except it (along with most of the other board games) had already been pack.

So we settled pretty quickly on Ticket to Ride.

It had been forever since I last played Ticket to Ride. It used to be the standard game for K and I to play until we got Dominion, but since then I don't think it's come out of the cupboard. So I had to check back to the rule book a few times to get us going (how many track cards do you start with? How many route cards to you have to keep? etc)

We ended up with a bit of drama when K deliberately went for a section that she knew I was about to grab, which meant my best option was to block her off. I was down to four trains, and so decided to gamble by grabbing some more route cards. I got one card that would have given me another 17 points if I'd had ONE more train - if I hadn't had to make the detour, I would have been fine.

I ended up winning thanks to the longest route card (all my trains in one long line), but it was only by a couple of points. It was a great game.

My Free Ghoul Came!

In the mail this evening was a small padded envelope. I didn't remember ordering anything recently, but it was addressed to me. Turned out it was from Wayland Games, and inside was my free ghoul sprue from Mantic Games.

If you were reading this blog back in June, you may remember that back then Mantic Games and Wayland Games were offering a deal - sign up for the Wayland Games email, and they'd send you one of the brand new ghoul models.

So I signed up, and waited. The emails came regularly, but no plastic monster. I'd actually forgotten all about it, so the package was a very nice surprise. What made it all even better was that it's not one but two ghouls, with three head options and some some extra bits (a couple of weapon hands that would take a bit of careful cutting to use and some other bits that I'm not quite sure about).

Hobby Skills in the Real World

Work and home life have both been crazy-busy the last few weeks, which has left me virtually no time for anything hobby-related. But in the whirlwind of packing, cleaning and generally getting ready to move inter-state, I have had a couple of opportunities to use my hobby skills.

Over the past two years of living in our house, our small dog has been working on scratching a hole through the laundry door. Most of the time she's fairly happy and placid, but then occasionally she decides that actually she doesn't want to be outside by her self while we're all at work.

Despite our best efforts to stop it, she's managed to inflict some serious damage to the door. This will probably surprise anyone who's actually met our dog, but she had managed to tear up a section that was about 10cm wide and 20cm tall, and dug almost half-way through the door.

Unfortunately, the pictures I took of the damage didn't come out, but this photo of after I'd filled most of the damage with wood putty should give you an idea of the area we're talking about. Basically, anything that's brown is what I had to patch up.

After the first lot of putty had dried, I went back over it with another layer to fill in any more gaps. I then scraped over the whole thing to make it level with the door, and sanded back the area to make it all seamless.
Then, through several trips to the hardware store, I was able to get a tin of paint that almost matched the door colour. Fortunately, the door is off on it's own, so it the colour was a little out it didn't matter too much. But I did have to paint the whole door.

I was pretty pleased with myself when it was all done - a few hours work (while I was doing lots of other cleaning), and it looked as good as new!

Then, not really thinking about it, we all went to work on Tuesday. When we got home, I opened up the back door and discovered this

Really, it should have occurred to me that this might happen. But I was pretty close to turning the dog into sausages.

So that evening I repeated the process. I filled in the hole with putty again, sanded it back, and then filled in any remaining holes before sanding it back yet again.

The I broke out the tin of paint again, and re-did the area. Fortunately I didn't have to re-do the whole door, since I knew the colour was going to match

The second time around doesn't look quite as good - if you look really carefully, you can see where the area was filled. But you probably wouldn't notice if you didn't know it was already there.

Now, every time we go out, I make sure the door is VERY well protected!

Fantasy Flight's Excellent Customer Service

When I opened up the Wardens of the West expansion pack to Battles of Westeros, I discovered that I had an extra Daven Lannister figure, but was missing a pikeman figure. I had the right numbers of bases (the pikemen use the longer sized base, Daven the normal one), but I was able to mount the extra Daven on the spare base I had from the core box.

I emailed Fantasy Flight's customer support explaining what was in the box. The next day I got an email back saying that an extra pikeman was packaged up and would be in the post on Monday.

About a week and a half later, a small envelope arrived for me in the mail. This is what was inside:

The Fantasy Flight Games card had a hand-written note on the back

Really, you can't ask for better than that!

Island of Blood: Griffin Rider Part II - Rider Finished

I finished off the rider a few weeks ago, but I'm only just now getting around to posting pictures.

I'm really pleased with how he's turned out - so now I'm going to focus on the bits I don't like.

Like I said last time, the gold armour came out much more bronze then I'd intended. In places where I highlighted with silver, it make it look more like the gear is damaged and worn rather than super shiny.

I'm also aware that some of the highlights on the cloak look a bit odd. I need more practice in dealing with large areas of cloth.

I was quite happy with his face - it was the first time I've managed to paint eyes that didn't look completely stupid. He does look a little crazy, but in a "I'm about to fly over and ram my lance through your chest!" kind of way.

Now I just have to find some time to finish off the griffin itself!

Melbourne Cup Dominion

Yesterday was Melbourne Cup day, which meant everyone had the day off (if you live in Victoria anyway). F came over for lunch, so afterwards we introduced her to Dominion.

F is definitely no gamer. She was initially a little weirded out by not having a board ("I like to see my piece move all around the table!"). But pretty soon she got over that and picked up the game really quickly.

We played the first game with the standard starting deck. Both K and I agreed that for some reason it seemed like it took a long time for things to get up and running - money seemed to be a really tight for a lot longer than normal. But this might have just been because the game was slower while F got her head around it all. I scored a fairly convincing victory - getting 6 Provinces in a 3 player game is always a pretty good sign.

We then played two random decks. In the first game, the cards I was most interested in were the Bureaucrat (I love that card) and the Chapel. I've always struggled to work out the point of the Chapel (aside from getting ride of any Curse cards). But recently I read about a deck minimization tactic. The basic idea is to try and keep your deck as small as possible so your best cards come around more often.

So I decided I would give that a try.

I didn't get off to a very good start - it wasn't until about half way through the game that I started getting rid of cards, and my Chapels had a tendency to clump together in the same hand. I managed to win by 1 point, but that was really much more because of the Bureaucrat than the Chapel.

In the next game we played, the Chapel came out again. So I decided to give my tactic another try. This time I was a lot more aggressive with trashing cards. I also picked up a Money Lender, so when I could I was trashing Coppers for Silvers, or just trashing them outright. I was also pretty ruthless about getting rid of action cards as soon as they outlived their usefulness. So by the end, I was regularly getting hands of 3 or 4 Golds.

Ideally I would have liked to get some extra buys or something like a remodel (turn Gold into a Provence) into my hand, but it ended up being a pretty quick game. I had 5 Provinces, which was enough to beat F by about 5 points.

By the end of the second game, I was pretty happy with the Chapel tactic. It's quite different to how I normally play, and it's certainly not for anyone who doesn't like shuffling. But I liked it a lot.

Island of Blood: Griffin Rider

Having got my Camelot Knights to a point where I'm happy to leave them, this weekend I eagerly jumped into painting up the griffin rider from the Island of Blood box set I got for my birthday. While I'm probably more excited by the skaven then the elves (I'd like to use Mantic elves if I ever built an army), this was easily my favourite model in the box.

I quickly decided that trying to paint it full assembled would have been a nightmare. So I primed up the three main pieces and got to work. As it turned out, I wish I'd left the wings off as well, but that's only caused problems with a few tiny areas.

I figured I'd paint up the rider, then I could finish putting it all together before I painted the griffin. I started with the gold. I base coated the golden areas with a mix of brown, red and gold. - the result was a little redder then I wanted. I then went over everything with straight gold, then gave it a wash of Delvin mud. Finally I highlighted with silver.

It came out looking more bronze then I was planning (due to the red base coat), but I was happy with the look. Plus, now I know how to make an awesome-looking bronze!

I hit the silver areas with straight silver, then a wash of Badab Black before a highlight of 1:1 silver:white. I was pretty happy with the results, especially on the mail areas (I carefully tried to put a dot of highlight on each scale, which was actually a pretty quick process and looks really good).

I originally did the whole lance shaft in silver, then decided that looked a bit poo. So I went over the lower part with light brown. The result is a kind of brassy-woody look that I'm pretty happy with.

I base coated his face with light brown, ready to try layering up the skin tone.

The last bit I've done was to hit all the cloth areas with navy blue. I think just the non-metallic colour instantly lifted the look of the figure. Adding the highlights will only make it look even better.

The next step is to hit the cloth areas with something (I'll probably keep them white), then I'll be ready to move onto the rest of the model. So far it's been quite a quick process considering how good it looks.

Shadows Over Camelot: Almost Done

I managed to finish most of the highlighting and touching up that I wanted to do. There's still a couple of bits that I need to fix up before I seal them, but I'm pretty happy with these guys. It's far from a brilliant paint job, but I'm fairly happy with it as something that was meant to be simple and quick.

I need to decide what to do with the bases - repaint them the block colour or properly base them. But that's something for another project.

This guy is one of my favourites. I was quite happy with the shading I managed on his cloak (which I really should have taken a photo of). I would have liked to do a better job on the trim, but none of my brushes are up to the task.

I need to do something with the heart in the centre of his chest, and he could probably do with a bit more work on his face. But otherwise he's sorted. This was probably the quickest and easiest model to paint. I'm not super happy with the colours I ended up getting on his cloak (a bit too pinky), but it's good enough.

I'm probably least happy with this guy. He's ended up looking like all the fairly dodgie models people post as examples of their early (read "shit") work.
Sir Kay has a very demented face (which is the way the model is - all the Sir Kays look like this). While I'm not super happy with his skin tone, I'm please with the shadowing (particularly around his eyes). He also could have really done with me cleaning up the mould lines across the top of his head, but I was extremely lazy.

Sir Gwain came out fine. I quite liked the colour I got for his hair. He needs a bit more work around his bags, and looking at the photo, the knife on his shield need some cleaning up!

I was pretty happy with how he came out. A lot of the colouring was achieved just using washes (Griffin Sepia and Delvin Mud mostly). I was also happy with the checked shield. The gold could probably use an additional highlight, but whatever.

Arthur is the figure I'm most happy with. His armour came out really well, especially with the gold edging. I was also extremely happy with the highlighting of his cloak. I guess it's fitting that he's the best looking figure!

Painting Shadows Over Camelot Part 3 - Washing Day

I haven't had a lot of spare time since the weekend, but I did manage to find 15mins to hit all the knights with a couple of quick washes.

I went over all the metal area with Badab Black, and hit a few other areas (any black clothing, Arthur's shield, etc) and Arthur's cloak. I followed that up with some Delvin Mud on the gold, wood and flesh areas.

It's quite impressive how different these figured look to the last photos. My next step is to hit some of the coloured (green, yellow) and the white parts with Griffin Sepia. Then I'll add some highlights, and do some touching up and I should be done!

Painting Shadows Over Camelot Update

I only had a bit of time this weekend to continue my work on the Shadows Over Camelot knights. But I did manage to take a picture!


After adding the primary colour to each model, I filled in the areas that needed black. I wasn't too concerned about any tiny white patches still peaking through because I'm planning on hitting everything with a black wash soon enough.

I did the skin areas of each knight, and just added the gold to a few areas (like the trim on Arthur's armour). The next step is to apply some washes (hopefully tonight), then highlights.

Painting Shadows Over Camelot

After playing Shadows Over Camelot on Friday, I decided that I really needed to get around to painting up the knights.

Saturday was a gloriously sunny day, and I had a heap of gardening to do. So I pulled out all the knights and the special markers, set myself up on the deck and primed them all with white gesso. Thanks to the perfect weather, they were all dry by the time I'd finished with the weeds.

For the rest of the weekend, whenever I had a bit of time, I spent it adding colour. The models were pretty straight forward to paint - thanks to the stat cards, I already had the colour scheme worked out. I started by hitting all the metal areas. Then I did the primary colour for each figure. I wasn't happy with my purple (I clearly need to get a different shade of purple paint), but otherwise they all came up okay.

So far this hasn't been a time consuming project, but my work on it has been very spread out. Hopefully I'll be able to get some more work done during the week.

Weekend Gaming: Shadows After Dinner

K, M and I sat down on Friday night to have another game of Shadows Over Camelot. After our impressive victory last time, we were feeling a little cocky.

We ended up with a strange selection of cards. Everyone - especially me, playing a Gawain who could draw an extra white card - seemed to always have plenty of cards. But they never seemed to be quite the right cards.

We came extremely close to the grail a couple of times, but each time the black deck seemed to surge with Despair cards just at the right time to exhaust the available Grail cards. We managed to get Excalibur and succeed in a couple of minor quests, but we were also losing quests at about the same rate.

We were playing with the traitor deck, but we were pretty sure that no one had drawn the traitor card - if they had, they were doing a very bad job!

When a 7th black sword hit the table, we decided to change the rules slightly to say that to end the game, there must be 12 or more swords, and the majority had to be white. This meant that we still had a chance to win - if only we could get the grail.

Of course, if we lost any other quest, the game was over. And the siege engines were building up pretty quickly. So it was really only a matter of time before we all lost.

I'm still quite happy not working out what the "winning solution" to Shadows Over Camelot is. That, combined with the fact that I try to let K and M drive what we do means that this stays a game we can play without ever quite knowing how it will turn out.

Lots of Updates and a MetaPost

Metaposts are boring. Possibly more boring then no posts. But here's one anything.

I've been extremely slack with my posts of late. Partly that's been due of real life stuff has meant I've had hardly any hobby time and even less time to post about it. Hopefully things will settle down a bit now.

I've gone through and finished off a few draft posts I've had waiting for a while, and written up some of the gaming and hobby things I've done over the last few months. I've back dated everything, so you might want to go back and take a look at the older posts again to make sure you haven't missed anything.

Birthday Shopping: Battles of Westeros

Having a day off today, I hit Milsims to exchange some of my birthday money for games. I had two things on my shopping list - Battles of Westeros and Ex Illis. I decided that I wouldn't bother with Ex Illis just yet, mostly because with the Island of Blood box I've got more than enough little plastic men to make fight for the moment.

So that just left Battle of Westeros. The combination of BattleLore and A Game of Thrones made this one game that I simply had to possess. So I very quickly tracked down the box. I also grabbed a copy of the Wardens of the West, which is the first expansion pack. I wasn't going to get the expansion pack until I decided if I liked the core game or not, but it was such a reasonable deal that I figured what the hell.

Cracking open the box revealed a stack of tokens to punch and models to base. It's like the perfect christmas present - something that you open and get to spend the rest of the day putting together and getting ready.

I'm assuming that one of the ways Fantasy Flight has tried to save some money on the production of the game is to not pre-base the models. I had to push each figure onto it's appropriate base which took me most of the evening. I was happy to do that sort of work, especially if it meant they could produce the figures with the detail they have. But I'm sure it would turn some people off.

I also ended up with one extra Lannister heavy infantry figure, and two spare bases. So that was nice to discover.

One of the very nice things about the BattleLore base set was that the box had dividers to store all of the components. Unfortunately, Battles of Westeros just divided the box into three sections. I sorted all the tokens into snap lock bags to make setup easier, but I'm not quite sure how to store the cards without damaging them.

There was so much going on with the base set that I haven't even had a chance to open the Wardens of the West yet, so I've still got that to look forward to!

Birthday Gaming Night

As part of my turning 30 celebrations, I organised a gaming night. We got through a reasonable number of games, some new and some old favourites.

Agricola

Despite being considered a modern classic (at least by BoardGameGeek, who rate it #2 of all time), I'd never had even had the chance to look at the rules before. It definitely seemed like one of those games where describing the rules was a lot harder than just playing the game. We seemed to get the hang of it fairly quickly, but it also quickly became apparent to me that some early decisions were going to cost me the game.

A couple of times I just managed to avoid not having enough food at harvest time, and a stupid decision about fence placement ended up costing me a few points. But overall it was a pretty fun game. I'd love to have another go at it, now I know a bit more about what I'm trying to do.

We Didn't Playtest This At All

WDPTAA is a card game. The object is to win - if you lose, you haven't won. Each card does something that either helps you to win or helps someone else to lose. Or sometimes the other way around. It's one of those crazy, extremely random games that goes so well with mates and alcohol. Certainly not something you'd want to spend a night playing, but great for in between games.

Last Night on Earth

Two players control the zombies while everyone else controls a human trying to survive/escape the zombie horde. Pretty straight forward - move around the board, get cards, do stuff with the cards, roll some dice to fight.

We (the humans) got thoroughly owned - despite cheating about the number of characters who could die, we lost less than halfway through the game.

I didn't love it, and I'm not sure if it adds much over something like Zombies!!!, but I'd happily give it another go.

StarCraft

We knew it wasn't the best game to start at 10pm when everyone had been drinking and only one person had even read the rules. But we decided to try it anyway. We made it most of the way through the first turn before we gave up.

There was a lot to take in as a first impression. The sheer number of different pieces, different cards and different turn options had some of us groaning before we'd even got everything out of the box. Personally, I was following enough of what was going on that I would have been happy to keep playing, and I'm very keen to give it a proper go. But we're going to save it for next time we can arrange a morning gaming session.

Munchkin

The classic (at least for us) card game of dungeon crawling and back stabbing. It pretty much always ends the same way - you don't so much win as survive until everyone else has run out of ways to stop you. You always have that same let down feeling at the end, unless you won, in which case you feel awesome.

Somehow I managed to get to level 9 extremely quickly and stayed at around 8-9 for the whole game, despite virtually never having any item cards (I got my first level thanks to a potion, but I think that was it). Naturally I didn't win, but I was impressed never the less.

Birthday Loot

For my birthday, some of my very awesome friends got me some very awesome games.

Dominion: Alchemy

K and I love a game of Dominion. It's quick and easy and always different. So getting one of the expansions was awesome. I'm looking forward to trying it.

Pandemic

R has told me a lot about this game, but since he doesn't have a copy, I haven't had a chance to play. So I was pretty excited when I unwrapped the present from him and S. What's more, it's two-four players, so I should be able to convince K to give it a go.

Warhammer: The Island of Blood

I'd been tempted by the new starter box for Warhammer Fantasy, but with W's help, I'd successfully managed to talk myself out of it. Now I understand why he was doing such a good job of telling me not to buy it.

My initial impressions are that the box is full of amazingly detailed figures. I was impressed by the Assault on Black Reach box set, but I think this has gone above and beyond even that. I'm really looking forward to building and painting it all up

Weekend Gaming with a New Group

While I was in Canberra over the weekend, R arranged a board game night with some of his friends and kindly invited me along to try a couple of the games I haven't had a chance to play before.

Race for the Galaxy

After playing the solitaire PC version, I finally got a chance to play the actual card game against real humans. It all made a bit more sense, and was a lot easier to follow in real life.

I didn't win, but I was reasonably pleased with how I played. Ultimately I didn't end up with enough production cards (as always), so I wasn't able to get enough victory points happening.

Battlestar Galacitca

I was so excited to finally get a chance to play this! I decided to play as Apollo, mostly because I thought being able to get out in a viper and do something useful would be lots of fun. We had R and Adama, S as Roslin (mostly because S wanted to know what it would be like to play Roslin), E as Chief Tyroll and D as Boomer. My first loyalty card had me as a human.

Things progressed reasonably well. We even managed to go above our starting fuel fairly early on. The only problem was that we weren't jumping very far.

We managed to fend off a couple of cylon attacks - D wiped out a stupid number of raiders, and I even managed to take out a Basestar with my viper. And then slowly things started to get worse and worse. S started to suspect various people as being the cyclon, which made me suspect that it was actually her. We kept jumping very small distances, and the damage to Galactica was starting to build up while our resources were quickly failing.

Eventually R revealed himself to be the cylon, and escaped to the resurrection ship. Soon after, we discovered that D was also a cylon, having changed sides in the sleeper phase. A couple more setbacks, and me ending up in the brigg meant that there really wasn't any hope for us. But we did manage to put up an excelled fight

I really enjoyed the game, and can't wait to try it again. I thought it captured the feel of the show amazingly well, with the impending doom and not knowing who to trust. Lots of fun!

Elves: Nearly Finished

I managed to do some more work on my elves over the weekend, and finally got around to taking some photos. Here you go!

Father's Day

For Father's Day, B gave me a wooden model plane kit. It's a bunch of pre-cut pieces with some paints, brushes, glue and sandpaper. In other words, everything you need to build a wooden plane.

So we sat down to build it together.

First step was obviously getting all the bits sanded down. So I did that bit, then B helped me paint it up. We followed the paint scheme on the box, which was a pretty red and yellow colouring. Most of the pieces are a single colour, so it was the perfect sort of stuff for B to help with. He sat on my lap and help the brush while I helped make sure we didn't get paint everywhere.

After B's nap, we sat down to do the actual assembly. The biggest problem was that some of the pieces didn't line up properly. I think the main body section hadn't been cut correctly. Naturally, I didn't realise this until it was too late to do anything about it. So the wings aren't attached to the body correctly. We were also missing the piece that holds the propeller onto the plane, but that's not a huge deal.

Now B has a plane to play with that he built with his daddy! Awesome Father's day present!

Ex Illis

My latest discovery is Ex Illis. Ex Illis describes itself as the next generation in table top gaming. It seems to be a traditional miniatures game - two players sit down with their own little plastic men and make them fight. But the game is accompanied by an app (run on a laptop or iPhone) that takes care of all the hard stuff (combat, keeping track of in-game effects, etc).

There is a starter set for the game (two version - one with a fold-out paper game mat, and another with a modular plastic game board), but you can also increase your army with other miniature packs. Apparently the individual miniatures can level up and advance through out their lives (or through a campaign or something), so even just getting the starter pack gives you a living, evolving experience.

The app also keeps track of your previous battles, and there seems to be some online component.

Apparently it's been around since last year, and I think I may have noticed it in various banner ads around the place. But what caught my eye was a post on TableTopGamingNews about a free trial. This free trial seems to give you access to everything except the miniatures for 30 days. So basically you can play the whole game with proxies to see if you like it.

All of this has piqued my interest enough to want to look into it further. I've been thinking about the idea of merging physical games with various tech for a little while now, and from what I've read today, this seems like the most integration approach I've seen.

My research has been a little limited so far. Despite having a chunk of free time this lunch time, I'm currently stuck behind a filter that will let me get to BoardGameGeek and MaelstromGames (not to mention Facebook), but won't let me get to www.ex-illis.com or http://gameralone.blogspot.com because they're about "Games".

I know the starter set is available from Milsims for about $80, which from what I've seen of the models sounds like a pretty reasonable deal.

It's been a while since I did an update - real life hasn't left a lot of time for gaming/hobby stuff. Or writing about gaming/hobby stuff. But I do have a bunch of posts in the works, so I'm aiming to put them up over the weekend.

Quick Update on My Elves

I've got the elves primed and I've made a very small start to the painting job.

I'm aiming to keep my colour palette pretty simple - 3 colours (with washes and highlights) for the troops and maybe an extra colour of two for the captain. I know I want blue with a silver/white look, so maybe with a splash of orange somewhere on each figure.

Hopefully I'll be able to make some solid progress tonight and have some exciting pictures for tomorrow!

Triangle Bit for Mantic Elves

When I was putting together the Mantic elves, there was one pieces I couldn't work out. This little triangle thing.

There are 6 or 8 of them on the sprue, but I couldn't see anything similar modelled on any of the "special" bodies - the one without any arms and the one with the cloak, and I also couldn't spot the piece in any of the photos on the building instructions.

I wondered if it was a faceplate for the helms, but it seems to big. It also didn't seem to fit right as a shoulder pad.

Building Mantic Elves

I have a bit of time at home to myself this week, so I thought I'd tackle something a little ambitious. With all the talk of Warhammer flying around the modelling parts of the internet that I frequent, I've been getting the urge to play with something fantasy based. So I figured it was about time I broke out the Mantic Elves I picked up earlier in the year.

The box has 10 multi-part elves on a single sprue. I was hoping to get them all clipped, assembled and primed on Monday night, but I ended up only getting everything clipped. Last night I cleaned the parts up and assembled all the models, so first thing this evening I'll prime them, and hopefully be able to start painting tonight!

Finally, Some Photos!

I mentioned before that I'd improved my Angels of Redemption painting technique, but failed to actually post any images of it. Well, I've finally gotten around to it now!

This was taken after I was happy with the base coats, but before I'd added the black lining.

I still really like the extreme contrast that the black lining gives the armour, so despite it being a bit of a pain to do, I'm going to stick with it. You'll also (hopefully) notice that spent a bit more time on the faces.

I spent some time trying to get the hairy guy's skin to not look like his hair. I'm still not happy with how his eyes look, but I decided to stop trying. I was much happier with the bald guy's head.

It's a Smallworld After All

A few months ago I got a copy of Smallworld by Days of Wonder. Probably as a result of having wiped the floor with them both in whatever we played that weekend, both K and M forbid me from even reading the rules until we all had a chance to sit down and try it together.

Finally, such a chance came around on Friday night. So after dinner, we cleared the table and lifted the lid. I was a bit amused by K and M asking was each component was for and what we were meant to do while I was still trying to set up the board - if they'd let me read the rules before hand I could have answered all their questions!

It took us a little bit to get started, but we got into the flow of things pretty well. We all agreed that K had the pointiest ears, so she got to start and chose the Heroic Elves. M went for the Skeletons with a power I don't remember, and I started with Wealth Skaven Ratmen. K quickly took one side of the board, and M took the other leaving me to squeeze in between them both.

The skeletons proved to be quite effective at claiming territory - mostly mine. So after about 4 turns I was the first to opt to go into decline and grabbed myself the Spirit Hobbits Halflings. Since the Hobbits can start the game anywhere, I popped up in the middle of the skeleton lands and started to clear out the undead infestation.

Shortly after, M decided to go into decline as well, and grabbed herself some Mounted Giants. Unfortunately, I don't think she quite realised that if you have a civilization in decline you can still get victory points for them, because she came into the board on some skeletons, and in her efforts to attack me wiped out a few more skeleton lands.

Meanwhile, K was mostly leaving us to fight amongst ourselves, but eventually decided she'd expanded as far as she could. So she picked up the Sorcerers (again, I forget their special power). She quickly started stomping all over the giants and my hobbits, so I decided to go into decline again.

I emerged as Commando Dwarves ("so they're not wearing any undies?" quipped K), and in the last two turns frantically tried to claim as many mountains as I could while watching my hobbits continue to be hunted down by K, who ended up winning comfortably.

I really enjoyed the game, and can see there's a fair bit of depth to be explored. I think we all held onto our civilizations too long - I should have gone into decline a lot earlier, especially since I didn't get anywhere near close enough to take advantage of the Spirit part of my hobbits. I'm also looking forward to seeing how the game goes in two-player mode.

Improving my Angels of Redemption Painting

In between playing Torchlight and the family and life stuff we had happening over the weekend, I managed to fit in a bit of hobby time. I pulled my landspeeder bits out again with the aim of getting the two crew members painted up.

While I've been pretty happy with my Angels of Redemption colour scheme, it's far to time consuming - I've spent hours and hours and turned out 5 almost complete models and a bunch of half-done ones. So I decided to try streamlining it a bit more.

I primed the two crew with white gesso rather than black - previously having to build up the white half from black took ages, and I was hopeful that it would make getting the green a bit easier too. I then put down a layer of gnarloc green on the green half, followed by dark angels green.

I should have tried just straight dark angels green on the white gesso, because the result was still too dark. I tried a quick coat of clover green, but it looked messy and the wrong colour. So I did a 1:1 mix of dark angels green and clover green, thinned it down a fair bit and slapped it on. I was pretty happy with the results.

I hit the white half with skull white, and then all but the deepest recesses with a slightly lighter skull white. The second coat didn't really change the colour very much, and it was still far to yellow. So I then hit it all with an almost 2:1 bright white/skull white mix, which came out much better.

Trying to paint the Aquilas gold over white failed, so I went over them with black before going the gold again. Since I had the black going, I also touched up the soft areas of the knees, elbows and necks (as well as tidied up some of the sloppy areas.

I took to the faces with light brown, then 1:1 light brown and flesh. I then hit the raised areas with flesh and the top of the bald head with skull white. I was pretty pleased with the initial result. I then hit the eyes with black, which worked nicely on the bald head, but caused me more problems with the hairy head.

All up, I probably spent about 2-3 hours. I'd estimate there's probably another hour in highlighting, black lining and other detailing. If I fix a few of the mistake I made this time, I should be able to knock that paint time down even more.

The biggest issue I had was I wish I had left the arms and maybe the heads off until after I'd painted the torsos. I also have issues with the white in hard to reach parts - if it was black, then you just wouldn't notice. All lessons for next time!

Currently Playing: Torchlight

A little while ago I decided to sit down and start playing Torchlight again. I was feeling in the mood for bashing some monsters, and it's pretty perfect for that. As others have said, it's like they took Diablo and took out all the boring bits.

This time around I decided to roll up a Destroyer, having previously played a Vanquisher. And then I proceeded to run down through the levels of the dungeon, splattering anything that crossed my path. I was initially making really good progress, but then I realised that I'd missed killing a monster on one of the earlier levels. I tried to backtrack, but after working my way up a level I discovered I couldn't get back through a locked gate. So I had to return to the very start of the mine, fight my way back down again, kill the monster in question and then continue on my way.

On the plus side, re-fighting a few levels was pretty easy as a higher level character, and the extra XP was very nice.

I've also rediscovered my other big love in Diablo and Torchlight - gems. Turns out, I have the soul of a dwarf. I have this obsession with hording every gem I come across and trying to turn them into the next highest level. Thanks to the shared stash, I had access to all the gems from my previous character as well. So all my gold goes towards buying more gems, and all my magical items get transmuted into gems. I don't want to actually put the gems into any equipment until I have the very best quality ones. So really they're just something pretty to look at. My preciouses...

I've managed to push deeper into the dungeon then I did last time, and I think I'm nearing the end. Which really just means getting closer to rolling up another character!

Weekend Hobbying

I got a reasonable amount of gaming-related time this weekend, largely thanks to the mother-in-law staying.

After meaning to for a couple of weeks now, I finally sat down with B and let him have a go painting. This is his first job - he spent a lot of time painting the ground and one of the horses' back legs. I was actually really impressed by his fine motor skills! I think his favourite bit was putting his brush in the water and wiping it clean. I might do a more detailed post about it all later.

While I didn't do any painting of my own, I finally got around to taking some photos of my (nearly) finished Angels of Redemption (clicking the images should show you slightly bigger ones).


I'm quite pleased with how the highlights have come out, particularly the white and the purity seals. For the most part you can't "see" them, but they make the lighting of the figures look a lot more natural. I'm also reasonably happy with the basing - I was trying for something simple and effective, and that's what I think I got. You don't really notice it until you see them standing next to something with a plain base.

Most of my gaming time this weekend was spent playing Torchlight! I was really in the mood for some monster killing, and that's what Torchlight does the best! I started a new character (A Destroyer), and in no time had cleared the mines and was halfway to the sunken gardens. Then I remembered that I'd missed a quest back on level 3, and had to back track. Which pretty much involved going back to the beginning. But it does mean I've been cutting a bloody path through all that come before me!

I also spent a bit of time hacking away at my 4X project. I'm reasonably happy with how it's progressing. I now have planets with resources that you can exploit through various facilities. Or at least, I've got the code to support that - I need to add the actual details.

Weekend Update

I spent a bit of time modelling over the weekend. I really need to post some pictures, but I haven't been bothered to take any.

My Angels of Redemption still need a chapter emblem. I really don't like the actual Angels of Redemption logo, and the Dark Angels logo decal is white, which obviously won't show up on a while shoulder pad.

I had a go a painting a free-hand celtic design, but it quickly turning to rubbish. I also tried a ying-yang symbol which came out better but still didn't look very good. I think I would like to do something celtic-themed, so I'll have to keep thinking about it.

I pulled out the bits of my partially assembled speeder, and primed some of the parts the will need to be painted before I finish assembling it. I'm going to try priming the marines in white to see if I have an easier time with my paint scheme.

I also cracked open the box of Space Wolves troops I picked up a little while ago, and started to clip and clean the pieces. Those sprues are jam packed full of bits! It actually really makes me want to start building a Space Wolves force, except I don't like the colour scheme. I had picked up the troop box for something else, but now I'm seriously tempted to use a whole lot of the bits with my Angels of Redemption.

Getting Started with My 4X Project

I mentioned a little while ago that I'd been back over some of my mental notes about a 4X game, so I thought I'd briefly write about where I'm going.

Core Idea

The idea I've had for a while now is the player acting as a fleet commander. The player issues orders to the other ships in the fleet, and relies on the abilities and competence of the captain and crew on board each ship to complete their missions. Due to the way communications will work, it may take several turns of orders to even reach other ships, and knowing where each ship currently is may be an issue.

Back Story

The idea that started it all is trying to rebuild a galactic empire after some catastrophic event. The player starts on what was some distant backwater that has managed to survive, and only has a basic shipyard and one ship at his disposal. The player needs to send the ship out to rediscover other colonies, trade with the friendly ones, resettle the destroyed ones and conquer the unfriendly ones. The planets will provide the resources needed to develop the various industries on the colonies, start rebuilding a fleet and the empire.

Getting Started

I've got lots of ideas about features I'd like to see, but I've decided I'm try for an extremely iterative approach. I'm going to start by focusing just a few core elements to begin with, and then once that's done, add the next few features.

Planets

I'm going to start with the planetary governing stuff. Each planet has some traits that describe it (an earth-like world is very different from a gas giant, but both may be equally useful to control) - environment, size, natural resources, existing facilities and current population.

• The population is the pool from which you can draw workers to build stuff, research stuff, extract stuff or fight stuff. Some planets naturally support a large population, others can't support any population.
• Facilities are the buildings that have been built on the planet. Farms, mines, generators, research facilities, ship yards, etc. Different planets will need different facilities built.
• Resources are the raw materials you can extract from the planet to use. They can either be used right there (so food grown on the planet might go straight to feeding the planet's population) or shipped off else where (metal mined on one planet may be transferred to another plant to be turned into more ships).
• Size and Environment determine the how large a population can be supported, how many facilities and how large the natural resources are.

And that's where I'm at so far!

Wish List

The end of the financial year in my house typically means it's bonus time, and this year (thank goodness) was no exception. While the majority of my bonus automatically goes straight to boring real-life expenses, I've managed to skim a small proportion off for toys!

As always, there's a lot of stuff around at the moment that I've very much like to have. But leaving aside the extremely valid questions of time to enjoy them and space to store them, there's the simple fact that my toy budget won't stretch anywhere near that far. Plus, it's no fun if there's nothing left to look longingly at.

So, partly to help me prioritise, and partly to keep track of things, here's a list of the stuff I want at the moment. Other than vague groupings, there's no real order to this list:

40K

Ironclad & Venerable Dreadnoughts - what can I say, I like dreadnaughts

Space Wolves Battleforce - perhaps combined with a regular Space Marine battleforce

40k Battle Missions - I suspect this would be more useful than the standard game for me

Terrain

Imperial Bastion - or two

Watchtower & Fortified Manor - to build this (bottom left, one in)

Malifaux

Rule book

A Starter Set or Two - enough to paint up and play

Mantic Games

A Skeleton Troop box - so I can see if I can put them together in 11mins or less

Warhammer

Warhammer Rule Book (8th Edition) - it's a beautiful book that's sparked my interest.

Boardgames

Battles of Westeros - I will possess this game, but I'm going to hold off until after September in case someone wants to give me a copy for my birthday

Battlestar Galactica

Living Card Games

Game of Thrones - I love some SoF&I action!

Warhammer: Invasion - mostly because I know I can get it from Maelstrom Games pretty cheaply

Update Time

Things have been fairly quiet on the gaming front lately - mostly because things have been extremely busy on several other fronts! But here's an update on what I have been doing.

Modeling

I've got my first 5 Angels of Redemption marines almost done. Finally. I've even done the basing already. I've got a few little details left to do (including the chapter markings, which is another post entirely) and then I can seal them and move on.

Board Games

I haven't played anything for weeks. I've still got SmallWorld sitting unused and unloved in its box, but I'm vaguely hopeful there'll be a chance to finally break it out sometime in the next few weeks.

PC Games

I've been playing a lot of Race for the Galaxy, mostly because it only takes about 10mins to play. I'm still fairly rubbish at it, but it's fun.

New Stuff

I haven't picked up anything new lately - which, given the lack of free time, that's probably for the best. But it is end of financial year bonus time, which means I can do some shopping. The question is, what to get!

WHFB 8th

So this morning I have 3 emails from different companies all telling me that Warhammer Fantasy Batter 8th edition is about to come out, and suggesting that I give them some money for some finely sculpted plastic men.

Really not what I need a couple of days after doing a new budget...

I spent most of my free time this weekend playing Race for the Galaxy. It's a card game by Rio Grande games that is thematically right up my alley. You take the role of one of Earth's former colonies, now equipped with faster-than-light travel and ready to build a galactic empire of your own.

The basic game play is pretty straight forward. You have two types of cards - planets and technologies. To play a card, you need to discard cards from your hand - better cards cost more discarded cards. Each turn, you have a choice of 7 different options (the game describes it as 5, but really it's 7). Each player secretly picks an option and then all players get to perform that option.

I had be seriously tempted to buy it a little while ago, but at the last minute put it back on the shelf knowing that it would be a good 12 months before I actually got to play. But Race for the Galaxy AI is a free application that lets you play by yourself, and Rio Grande have the rules available online.

A game against the AI takes around 10-15mins, which makes it perfect for killing a little bit of time. I had a little bit of an issue resizing the window to be able to play it on my netbook, but now I've got that sorted, it's on all the computers I regularly use. I just wish there was an iPhone app.

This weekend has convinced me that I really do want to buy the physical game. So next time there's a sale on, Race for the Galaxy will be going into my shopping basket.