Table Time

 I have been doing some game table work lately. Originally when TQ made the first two tables we have been using they got wet during a long ride in the back of his pickup. For the most part they survived intact, but there were a few spots the sand fell off.

For a while I made mention of patching them up and recently in a burst of motivation I went for it. For the most part my repairs only consisted of slathering an ample layer of Elmer's glue over the areas that were showing bare wood and shaking an ample layer of Woodland Scenic's flock over top  Afterward I gently pressed it down and waited for it to dry before I put the table on its side and knocked the excess flock off. If you ever do this be sure to put something down to collect the excess static grass. I had enough to refill half of a container when I was done.

My handy helper. 

I also made a completely new snow themed table. My first one is slowly becoming a powdery mess and was only 4'x4' so it fit as an insert in my table at home. I am looking forward to making a few matching hills and possibly a mountain side with a waterfall to dominate one end with.

The snow on this table is woodland scenic's snow mixed with Elmer's glue and some water. You can sort of see from the picture that it is thinner in some places. I began with a more runny mixture and later went back with some extra thick snow to create piles and drifts.

Lastly I am working on a fleshed out version of my old Games Day mini battle arena. Hopefully in the end I will be able to paint the ground to match without too much of a difference. I want this table to have lots of vertical features and am debating whether or not I want to put a large building with a connecting bridge leading to it in the middle.

My friend Maal from across the pond has also caught my table making bug and is currently working on his own, much nicer, table. I am planning on getting a set of the legs he is using this week and seeing how they work out. I don't think I can make a set of sawhorses any cheaper than that and the store is on the way home from work. If the legs do work out I just might be making some nice routed stained and urethaned sides for all the of the tables!

Back to the Grim Dark Future

After the wrath of Sandy rocked the northeast last week our group got together for our second round of learning 6th edition. The games were good and the electricity and running water were even better for the guys from the NYC area! Sometimes living in the sticks of South Jersey has it's benefits.

After seven months of WARMACHINE it was good to get back to some 41st millennium action!

++FOR THE EMPEROR!++

Reaper BONES Pledge Manager Live!

The Bones Pledge Manager is live. If you participated and pledged for the Reaper Miniatures BONES Kickstarter you should have received an email last night giving you a personalized link to access and finalize all of your pledge details. If you didn't notice one, this is just our friendly PBL reminder to check your spam folders and any secondary email addresses you may have used! 

Good luck and we hope you're as excited about receiving your Reaper Miniatures as we are, even if we have to wait till the spring!

Reaper $25 Figure Case Deal

I'm not a fan of the Games Workshop hard figure cases. I think they are overpriced and minis don't fit too well in the foam if their arms aren't straight up and down. I like the idea of a hard case, just not for $60.

With the advent of the reaper kickstarter and their $25 figure cases I am considering getting a few. They hold the same amount as their GW counterparts and at half the price! The spaces for holding minis looks wider too.!

You can get as many as you like and there is no pledge level requirement. This means you can simply pick the $1 donation and then pay the amount needed to buy the cases you want.

On another note you now get 184+ minis with the $100 pledge level and at the rate the kickstarter is picking up I could easily see the number reaching 200. I don't know about you but I find the prospect of getting 200 minis for 50 cents each to be awesome!

There are only 4 days left to get these awesome deals...get em while they last!

184+ Minis For A Hundred Bucks!

My miniature addiction started with 2nd edition D&D back in the summer of '95. The biggest draw to the box set I eventually purchased was a bonus set of Ral Partha  metal minis, an astonishing $11.99 value! Over the years I have ended up with various minis for my role playing adventures and most of them were from Reaper.

Needless to say, when I found this kickstarter, I jumped on it.

For those who don't know about kickstarter you can learn more about it here.


In all honesty I will most likely end up buying everything they have available and a few of the figure cases to boot. Those dragons are just too tempting!

 So what are you waiting for? The more they end up with the more we all win!

Ready for War Games Con

As of now I am all set for War Games Con this weekend, at least game wise that is. I still have to get my rental car  set up, make my hotel reservation, and pack my bunker gear at work for the week after. Nothing like procrastination, right?

Almost Ready for WARgames Con

As of right now I am seven decals and some static grass away from being ready to rock down in Texas next week. I gotta say, getting a free flight to a gaming convention thanks to a work trip is the best idea ever!

About three months ago I realized my annual industrial fire fighting school was the week after WAR Games Con and the plan began to materialize in my mind. We normally fly down on Monday but I told my Chief I would like to go down on Thursday for the con. I also  mentioned it may be cheaper than a Monday ticket. This plan was a good one! After about a month of wondering they told me I got my early ticket!




I cant wait for next week to get here. If any of you want to play a game Thursday evening or Friday at the con let me know in the comments or shoot me an email. Otherwise I will have to spend my time stalking Brent.

Warmachine Slow Grow Update

We finished up our last round of 25 point games last time we got together and are looking forward to moving up to 35 point armies this weekend. As you can see some of the armies are really beginning to come together as our group spends more time working on them. 

 Everyone has been slowly working on their armies over the course of four months now and we are at the half way point as far as our competition goes. Hopefully when the next Warstore Weekend or Mechanicon happens a good portion of us will be able to play in their steamroller events.

 After the "completely within" debacle we had previously, the group has been a lot more conscious and deliberate in their positioning. As a group I think everyone has moved past the "newbie mistakes" phase of learning the new system and our games are starting to show more strategy and depth. I can't wait to see what people bring for our games this weekend, because my legions need more enemies to crush!

How to Play King of the Trukk

During one our previous gaming sessions a new game was born. Joey V. and Rob were milling about during the "after dinner lets not play and think about how much pizza we just ate phase". Jordan left his ork army sitting on the edge of the table and a discussion came up. Just how many boyz can you fit in a trukk? Competitive shenanigans ensued.

The concept of the game is quite simple. Players alternate placing ork models on the trukk. When you run out of boyz to stack move on to bigger models. Place HQ models last so they feel more important. The first player to  make the boyz fall is the loser. The winner gets the right to be called the king of the north...err trukk for the rest of the day!

The game is fast, simple, and fun!

Jordan only had a few orks this day and the game was a draw.
Doesn't that war boss look so proud though?

Space Marine is $10.19 on Steam Today!

The title pretty much says it all. If you don't have this game yet, and you like 40k, THIS IS $10.19 WELL SPENT! But hey, after 189 hours logged I may be biased.

 You can get it on steam here.

Warmachine Slow Grow Update

 Last time our group got together for our day of gaming Dan may have broken his arm and had pokéballs thrown at him while he was down, but we also played a lot of games! We moved up to 25 points this session and played the No Mans Land scenario. This week saw a big difference in how peoples armies were able to react to threats and cover the table.

One of the biggest things to come up during the day was the fact that you need to be completely within the scoring zone to contest or capture it. People either were not in it fast enough or they would move / be pushed out and lose the game. Some people liked the strategy involved and some people felt cheated by this. TQ made a post about this on his new blog. He won a game because his opponent moved out of the scoring zone and he felt like it was a dirty win. What are your thoughts on winning on such a fluke? TQ personally wanted to just keep playing even though he was about to be crushed but as the keeper of the league I called it as I saw it and told him he won due to his opponent getting kill hungry.

 

 I also owned my brother after he bragged about how I would never assassinate his caster with my eThagrosh all beast list. Manifest Destiny HO!

He had the nerve to tell me I would not assassinate his caster.

We are looking forward to playing again soon and when we do I will be sure to update on  the groups progress as we move toward our goal of painted 50point armies!

We Came, We Played, We Went To The Hospital

In my last post I mentioned our upcoming day of gaming. Well it happened and I'll post pictures and talk about the progression of the league later. There are more pressing issues.

Before we started, when everyone was carrying their stuff in, Defrolla Dan tripped up the steps and fell onto the porch. Only two models were injured after this monumental fall. Defrolla Dan saved them with his body. He also broke his arm. It was his birthday and he could have cried if he wanted to.

BUT HE STILL PLAYED LIKE HE HAD A PAIR!

 (In a gown...)

Paul's Legion Progress Snapshot

I am pretty terrible when it comes to staying focused on a project for very long. I'm even worse at taking progress shots when i actually get a chance to work on something. Usually my wife has the camera hidden away from little hands and she has been asleep too long to risk waking her up. Getting my hobby time in while staying up late for night shifts has its downsides and all.

Recently though, I ventured into the world of smart phones and my new galaxy 2 has a decent camera and a blogger app! Since I've now run out of excuses not to post, here is a quick update on what's been going on at my painting station.

Lately my new legion of everblight army has been filling my hobby time. I have had good luck with Privateer Press models so far and only recently got a few with missing or miscast parts. My raek in the front of the picture came with the back half of his head armor miscast. Sadly I did not notice when I first opened the model and lost the little paper with the number you need to enter on the site. Luckily for me  all that was needed was a little green stuff to get it back into shape.

So far I have the models in the picture base coated with PP frostbite, washed with a 5/10/30 mix of leviathan purple, asurmen blue, and water, then lightly sprayed with the airbrush from the top with skull white. I later went back with PP carnal pink but did not like the way it looked on the carnivian and tried baal red wash straight from the pot. The baal red looked good to me so using a wet brush I pulled it back into the skin to make a little transition gradient and called it a night.

Currently I am trying to decide how to go about the armor plates and spikes. The PP coal black seems pretty thin. I'm thinking if I start with scorched brown I can use the black as a wash to get an effect similar to the one on the box. If that doesn't work too well I also have a new bottle of secret weapon soft body black to try out.

Hopefully I will be posting some finished shots soon! I would love to get a massive chunk of paint points when we meet up for our league games this weekend!

WARMACHINE & HORDES Charge into PBL

     Our WARMACHINE / HORDES escalation league kicked off a few weeks ago and while we all made lots of mistakes in our first games we all also had a blast! The plan is to begin with a fifteen point army and every two months the point value of our games will increase by ten points. Originally the plan was to end at 35 points but after having played a few rounds at fifteen most of the group has expressed interest in moving up to finish at 50 points.

     As we play we are keeping track of our league using a simple points system. You get 10 points for a win, 4 for a draw and 1 for a loss. There are also points to be had for painting your models.  We are using the following values for painting points.

30mm base – 1
40mm base – 2
50 mm base – 4
Battle engine – 5
Colossal – 6 

In addition everyone gets a few points for attendance and there is a list of achievements with varying point values. When we finish the player with the most points will be the winner!

Here are a few more pictures from our first games. I'll post more as we continue playing and painting like we got a pair!

Spreading the 40K Infection

Having just sent the email to cancel our game day due to my little girl getting pink eye I was pretty bummed. Especially since I know my other two kids will most likely have it over the next few days. But, posting inspiration comes from odd places and one of my buddies from my online gaming circles has recently caught an infection of a different sort.


Duranias and I have been playing games together for years and when space marine came out he cried and cried that he wanted it but could not afford it at the time. Eventually it was cheap enough that I just bought it for him and he was gone from there. He asked me a few weeks ago how to best go about getting an army and I pointed him to the cheap pieces of black reach on eBay. Now hes making good progress on his salamanders and I thought I would share his progress so far. I have to say I wish my first guys looked that good. He watched some how to paint salamander videos and cranked out an awesome bunch of first minis!

Like all good infections his local friends are now also taking the dive and this weekend they are planning to play their first games! I have to say, "Isn't papa Nurgle's plastic infection grand?"

How Penitent Engines Killed My Hobby

Many months ago I put up a post expressing my desire to try taking on a whole army painting commission. I was fresh out of work and waiting to get my job back. After putting my self out there (And deleting my first nasty comment.) one of the guys from the club came over with his old 1500 point Sister of Battle army. We decided on a stupid cheap price and I began to boast about how quickly I was going to knock this army out! The next month, when we got together to play, I had cleaned and prepped all of the infantry and gotten a few squads painted. (The army came to me with and old chipped white base coat and some nasty glue jobs.) Things were going smoothly. The motivation was there. Then all of the real life duties started to sneak in. I had recently had my teen brothers move in and had to take them all over for appointments and attend foster care classes. My wife was pregnant with baby three and constantly sick for six months. Meet up after meetup I made little to no progress on the army. I began wanting to paint different models but instead doing nothing. I felt that I couldn't paint anything else until the sisters were done.

Warmachine Slow-Grow Incoming!

Look at your Caster. Now back to me.

Now back at your Caster. Now back to me.

Sadly, he isn’t me, but if you stopped using cookie-cutter-Casters and switched to Captain Jeremiah Kraye, he could win like he’s me.

Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on a battlefield with the army your army could be as awesome as.

What’s in your hand, back at me. I have it, it’s an army of Warjacks that have cavalry rules, making a Light Jack run-n-gun list not only possible but gloriously attainable.

Look again, the Light Warjacks are now Heavy Warjacks charging for free at +5 inches with boosted attack rolls.

Anything is possible when your Caster plays like Captain Jeremiah Kraye and not sissy traditional Casters.

I’m on a horse.

NOW GET READY TO PLAY LIKE YOU GOT A PAIR ON JANUARY 28TH!