We spent the long weekend down at the beach, so I had a chunk of time to do some painting.
I made some progress on my Angels of Redemption test figures - I've got 5 tactical marines with their white/green coasts done. I still need to add the bolters and backpacks, do the details and the highlights. But I'm pretty happy with the way they've come out.
I tried two different methods. On two figures I tired painting the various sections of armour carefully leaving the joins untouched (so they stayed black). The other method was to paint large sections in the colour and then come back and paint over the joins. The second method was a lot quicker initially but then took a while to do the touching up. In the end I'm not sure which was actually faster.
I also started working on the Roman foot troops for Arcane Legions. Pretty simple paint job - flesh, then metal, then tunics. Shouldn't take too long to finish off next time I have a block of time.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Shadows Over Camelot: Adding the Tratior
Over the last year, K and I have been playing the occasional game of Shadows Over Camelot with K's cousin M.
I know SOC has a "solution" - once you work out how to beat the game you can fairly consistently pull off a win. But I've deliberately avoided trying to work it out mainly because I have fun playing it. It's also helped that I don't play it often enough for it to become obvious.
Since there were only three of us playing, and since both K and M were still getting used to the rules, we didn't play with the traitor. But for our most recent games we decided that it was time to add in the loyalty cards.
The game plays with up to 7 knights. At the start of the game, each knight draws a loyalty card from a deck of 8. 1 card in the deck says "traitor", the others say "loyal". If you draw the traitor card then you are actively working against all the other players trying to make them lose. So even by introducing the traitor card, in a 3-player game the odds of there actually being a traitor are pretty slim.
Game 1: At the beginning I thought to myself that on the off chance that there was a traitor in the game, I really hoped it would be me. Sure enough, it was! M has a tendency to put out siege engines rather than draw from the Progression of Evil deck, so I just waited for the little plastic catapults to surround Camelot, and then put out one of my own.
Game 2: I thought to myself that there almost certainly wouldn't be a traitor again. Turned out there was - K! She won pretty much the same way thanks to M pushing the siege engines. But she also managed to make sure she picked up both the grail and lost Excalibur.
I know SOC has a "solution" - once you work out how to beat the game you can fairly consistently pull off a win. But I've deliberately avoided trying to work it out mainly because I have fun playing it. It's also helped that I don't play it often enough for it to become obvious.
Since there were only three of us playing, and since both K and M were still getting used to the rules, we didn't play with the traitor. But for our most recent games we decided that it was time to add in the loyalty cards.
The game plays with up to 7 knights. At the start of the game, each knight draws a loyalty card from a deck of 8. 1 card in the deck says "traitor", the others say "loyal". If you draw the traitor card then you are actively working against all the other players trying to make them lose. So even by introducing the traitor card, in a 3-player game the odds of there actually being a traitor are pretty slim.
Game 1: At the beginning I thought to myself that on the off chance that there was a traitor in the game, I really hoped it would be me. Sure enough, it was! M has a tendency to put out siege engines rather than draw from the Progression of Evil deck, so I just waited for the little plastic catapults to surround Camelot, and then put out one of my own.
Game 2: I thought to myself that there almost certainly wouldn't be a traitor again. Turned out there was - K! She won pretty much the same way thanks to M pushing the siege engines. But she also managed to make sure she picked up both the grail and lost Excalibur.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Weekend Priming
It was a nice weekend, so we spent a bit of time out on the deck. B pottered around, K got some stuff ready for dinner and I took the time to prime the tactical squad I'm going to use as my Angels of Redemption test figures and whatever else I had assembled and ready to go - some scouts and three assault marines.
I also cleaned up all of the Roman legionaries from the Arcane Legions starter set I picked up just after Christmas and got them all primed. So now I'm ready for lots of painted!
I also cleaned up all of the Roman legionaries from the Arcane Legions starter set I picked up just after Christmas and got them all primed. So now I'm ready for lots of painted!
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Arcane Legions: Initial Impressions
I'd heard good things about Arcane Legions, and the starter box seemed like a pretty good deal. Opening it up, I was very pleased to see it full of plastic men!
Arcane Legions is a 15mm wargame. You've got three armies to pick from - Romans, Egyptians and Huns. Each army has it's own flavour of magic and magical creatures. The starter box has enough to field a basic force for the three different armies. So there are lots of legionaries, mummies and terracotta soldiers.
The troops came on sprues, so there is a bit of clipping and cleaning up needed. There's some assembly required for certain troops - shields and spear arms. They're also unpainted, except for the special characters for each army (and the roman shields). I was pleased with the level of detail on the figures, especially given the cost.
All and all, I'm quite happy with what I found inside.
Arcane Legions is a 15mm wargame. You've got three armies to pick from - Romans, Egyptians and Huns. Each army has it's own flavour of magic and magical creatures. The starter box has enough to field a basic force for the three different armies. So there are lots of legionaries, mummies and terracotta soldiers.
The troops came on sprues, so there is a bit of clipping and cleaning up needed. There's some assembly required for certain troops - shields and spear arms. They're also unpainted, except for the special characters for each army (and the roman shields). I was pleased with the level of detail on the figures, especially given the cost.
All and all, I'm quite happy with what I found inside.
Dominion: Initial Impressions
I got the opportunity to play Dominion (Rio Grande games) over Christmas, and instantly liked it. While I only played one actual game, I got to start playing it three times (each time we'd get part way through and then someone else would want to join in, so we'd restart). So when we got home, I went straight out and got our own copy.
The quick overview if you've never seen it (and didn't follow the link above) is that Dominion is a card game based around the concept of deck building. Each player has their own deck of cards that they draw from, and during the course of play you can add cards to your deck. At the end of the game, the winner is the person who has the most victory points in their deck (certain cards give you victory points). The trick is that the victory point cards don't actually do anything in the game except take up space. The other cards are much more useful - action cards that let you do things and money cards that let you buy other cards. But they don't count at the end of the game.
It's one of those games that you could spent ages trying to describe, but is extremely easy to pick up if someone shows you how to play. Plus, others can describe it much better than I can.
The thing I really love about Dominion is that it manages to cross the line between a casual game and a gamer game. By which I really mean it appeals of both K and myself. There's a lot of strategic depth in terms of which cards interact will with others and what's available on the table. But the random setup means that every game is going to be different and it's not just a case of "oh, now I've worked out how to win it's boring". The other really appealing factor is that the game plays out in about 45mins. So in an evening you can happily have three or four games without spending the whole night.
The quick overview if you've never seen it (and didn't follow the link above) is that Dominion is a card game based around the concept of deck building. Each player has their own deck of cards that they draw from, and during the course of play you can add cards to your deck. At the end of the game, the winner is the person who has the most victory points in their deck (certain cards give you victory points). The trick is that the victory point cards don't actually do anything in the game except take up space. The other cards are much more useful - action cards that let you do things and money cards that let you buy other cards. But they don't count at the end of the game.
It's one of those games that you could spent ages trying to describe, but is extremely easy to pick up if someone shows you how to play. Plus, others can describe it much better than I can.
The thing I really love about Dominion is that it manages to cross the line between a casual game and a gamer game. By which I really mean it appeals of both K and myself. There's a lot of strategic depth in terms of which cards interact will with others and what's available on the table. But the random setup means that every game is going to be different and it's not just a case of "oh, now I've worked out how to win it's boring". The other really appealing factor is that the game plays out in about 45mins. So in an evening you can happily have three or four games without spending the whole night.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Angels of Redemption
I've finally decided on a colour scheme for my space marine army (again). The Angels of Redemption are a successor chapter of the Dark Angels. Apparently they have a reputation for being a bit unreliable (they tend to pursue their own agendas, regardless of what anyone else around might need). But mostly I picked them because I liked the colours.I've found a couple of cool references - obviously the Dark Angels codex and places like Lexicanum, but also this thread on Warseer is pretty much exactly what I'm hoping to produce
I've had been painting some stuff green, but also really liked the look of while power armour. So the halved green/white seemed like the perfect compromise. Plus it will be something fairly unique and should look pretty cool. I think my painting skills are up to it, but I'll be doing some test marines just to make sure.
I have a vague plan of getting a playable force assembled by the end of March. So we'll see how that goes!
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Post Xmas Shopping
I dropped into Milsims just after we got back from Christmas to see what I could get. I played Dominion over Christmas and thought K would really enjoy it.I also walked out with an Arcane Legions starter pack. The startings of three different armies and enough to play a two player game, all for $50? How couldn't I!
Awesome!
Introductions
One thing I always knew I was leaving behind when I moved to Melbourne was my gaming group. My gaming group was made up of some of my close friends, so I wasn't worried about losing touch with any of the individuals. And there was always the opportunity for online gaming or the odd night when we all happened to be back in the same place. But without a regular group of players to tap into, I knew that part of my life was going to be very different.
Two years later, and it's not just that part of my life that's different. Lots of stuff happens in two year - houses, kids, police, adventure, gardening, coffee. And still no gaming group. But "gaming" is still something that's important to me and tends to occupy a lot of my mind and a large portion of my (fairly limited) free time.
So I've decided to start a blog about my general gaming life. Minus the actual gaming part (mostly). I'm going to talk about the various games I'm looking into and trying to get involved with, my thoughts on game design, the hobby aspect of gaming, notes on random ideas I have and, hopefully, posts about actual games I've played. That is assuming of course that this blog doesn't just become another one of those countless blogs that are four posts in total, three of which apologies for not posting more often. My interests in "gaming" are fairly broad, so topics will range from roleplaying and war games to boardgames and computer games, although the focus will tend towards tabletop games.
Lets see if I can keep this up for more than a month or two...
Two years later, and it's not just that part of my life that's different. Lots of stuff happens in two year - houses, kids, police, adventure, gardening, coffee. And still no gaming group. But "gaming" is still something that's important to me and tends to occupy a lot of my mind and a large portion of my (fairly limited) free time.
So I've decided to start a blog about my general gaming life. Minus the actual gaming part (mostly). I'm going to talk about the various games I'm looking into and trying to get involved with, my thoughts on game design, the hobby aspect of gaming, notes on random ideas I have and, hopefully, posts about actual games I've played. That is assuming of course that this blog doesn't just become another one of those countless blogs that are four posts in total, three of which apologies for not posting more often. My interests in "gaming" are fairly broad, so topics will range from roleplaying and war games to boardgames and computer games, although the focus will tend towards tabletop games.
Lets see if I can keep this up for more than a month or two...
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