Assembling an invasion force.

Six weeks to go, and it's time to put a dent in the pile of shame. For this year's convention game we are doing Holland 1940 with lots of dastardly German fallschirmjäger raining down on the happless Dutch defenders. I actually had more than a platoon of German paratroopers bought about 20 years ago; a mix of Wargames Foundry and Crusader miniatures. About a squad were painted and another squad and a half basecoated and in various stages of completion. Unfortunately all were based on standard Games Workshop bases which I have since abandondoned for historical games. So rebaseing were in order.

Oh the joys of rebasing. At the same time I fitted the figures on to team bases from Sarissa.

The Dwarfs of Whatever

So despite my opinions on the Oathmark Dwarfs in my previous blogpost I soldiered on and assembled the whole box of figures. The problem was I had no clue what rules I'm going to use with these figures. Now the actual rules doesn't matter as much as the army lists for said ruleset which dictates how many figures you need in a unit and how many figures you can have a maximum of.

My top contenders for the rulesets are, in alphabetical order:

• Dragon Rampant
• Dux Britanniarum (with the unofficial Dux Arda mod).
• Oathmarks
• Warlords of Erehwon

I'm actually not counting Games Workshop's Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game because I think they sort of jumped the gun with the Hobbit movie rules, and I have no interest in forking out £35 for the new rulebook to see if they have changed anything, and then £35 for the army book of each army I want to play. (I'm not criticising their business model but I already buy the big expensive books for 40k so I'm thinking enough is enough.)

I arranged the figures into units while assembling them.

Oathmark Dwarves, a review and some thoughts.

As a long time dwarf afficionado -- the fantasy literature kind of dwarf -- I was very curious when Northstar brought out a set of plastic dwarves. The set is in the same vein as their Frostgrave plastics, but geared towards unit building rather than skirmish warband. Thus it contains a whopping 30 miniatures (compared to the 20 in a Frostgrave box) but with more limited equipment options.

The box art. Nice innit?

Apparently the nice Mr McCullough of Frostgrave fame is writing a set of fantasy battle rules for Osprey, due out later this year, but the figures were released in 2018 already. There are also goblins, elves and human sets out already.

Build me an army worthy of Mordor!

Dear Internet, I haven't written in a long time. It's not you, it's me. Truth to be told there haven't been much to write about, but I though the new year would be a nice time to make an effort and restart the blog. We'll see how long it lasts this time, but at least I have something to write about right now. (I also painted something, skip to the end if you just want to see the pretty pictures.)

Just before the new year I met up with my fellow Scandinavian Lardies (or Lardie Penguins) Jocke, Koen and Thomas for our annual shits and giggles game. In a moment of hubris we decided to play Dux Gondorianum -- which is more or less just Dux Britanniarum with Lord of the Rings figures.

The forces of go.. evil I mean.

Dux Brit is a large dark age skirmish game from Too Fat Lardies which is quite brilliant if you fancy playing saxons vs romano-britons. Which is nice, I guess, but we don't have any of those kinds of miniatures or any connection to that bit of history. What we do have is a lot of Games Workshop's  Uruk Hai, Gondorians and Rohirrim. The biggest hordes of painted stuff belongs to Koen and Thomas as I sold most of my Uruks and Riders of Rohan to Thomas a while back. Still, I had a handful of painted Mordor Orcs and a bunch of Wargames Foundry viking archers that didn't look too out of place in a Rohan Army. For some reason I even had two Grishnak!

One of my Grishnaks leads the charge!

Kill Team Surprise

So I got a surprise package from the mailman yesterday.

I spent some time assembling the small ruins from the 'C' sprues while the video was uploading.

All the "small" ruins from the box.

There were three of these sprues, allowing you to make all of the above. In the box their are five more sprues of three different types allowing you to build higher ruins with full height walls.

Happy gaming!

DarkOps townhouse build and review

Hi gang! As I said in my last post I ordered the What a Tanker! dashboard from DarkOps. Now they have a lot of MDF buildings as well, so I thought I'd try one out as I hadn't heard of them previously.

All the parts for the house except the base (which didn't fit into the picture).

The townhouse comes on 7 sheets of MDF, one of which is the base. Four are 2mm MDF and three are 3mm thick; upon closer inspection the base and outer walls (and the inside partitioning wall) are all on the thicker sheets. Now, here's the first drawback: there weren't any instructions included! I searched on the DarkOps site but couldn't find any downloads. But how hard can it be? I decided to crack on.

What a Tanker accessories

They say when it rains it pours. Only two days after I received Blood Red Skies, What a Tanker arrived in my mailbox with a resounding thud. If you haven't been around, What a Tanker is Too Fat Lardies' answer to the Tanks game that was released about a year ago.

There's a German tank with the commander in the open hatch on both covers. The similarities end there.

A mousterious package arrives...

So this package landed on my doorstep. Or in my mailbox, but you get the meaning.

Nice little Thank you sticker inside the lid, and lots of bubble wrap! Weeee!

It turned out to be that Oathsworn Burrows and Badgers kickstarter I backed. Oathsworn did a royal screw-up and delivered all the stuff one month before the planned completion date. Those guys must be amateurs. (Real pros like Flying Frog Production let their customers wait more than three years for their stuff.)

But what's inside?

The Plague Brethren

... or Stink bros?

I couldn't resist this "limited" boxed set with three more plague marines. I love the new plague marines, and despite knowing that a proper plastic boxed set is on the horizon, and despite having about 50 old and semi-old metal plague marines, these were a must buy. Prize-wise they are 25 quid (or 300 Swedish Krona) for three ordinary plastic figures which is a bit steep. But who cares, money will be worthless when the Trumpocalypse comes anyway.

They come in this snazzy box. Can I please have this as a giant poster, pretty please with sugar on top?

The first thing you see when you open the box is a booklet with the same illustration on.

There are actually two booklets. One is the designer's notes and the other is the building instructions.

...underneath the booklets is a flap that lifts up to reveal some art cards.

All feature art by John Blance, but none is actually of any of the models in this box.

Ok, a quick break here, I have to get something off my chest. I'm a big fan of John Blanche's visions and style, but some of his art is actually very bad. I like the plague marine and the pox walker on the art cards above, they are quite evocative and disturbing. If you look closer though, you realise John's method of colouring his art is just drawing some swathes of water colours in the general area he wants colour, hoping most of it will be inside the lines he drew. One is actually of Mortarion, the great Death Guard primarch, but you couldn't tell if the picture didn't have the caption. I stared at the picture for like five minutes without being able to tell where his head is. I suppose it's a case of the Emperor's new clothes syndrome, nobody dares criticise John Blanche at GW and just prints whatever he produces.

Back to the box though, are there actually any minis inside?

Back To Basics: Wargames Foundry Home Guard

(Warning: a small rant ahead. Pictures of models after the break, if you want to skip ahead.)

So I've sort of hit painter's block... I do paint... but I seem to take ages, not finish stuff other than the occasional odd miniature here and there. I buy stuff, build them, start paint a couple and then... I loose interest. It's just not the Wargamer's Attention Deficit Disorder, otherwise known as the Magpie or "OOh shiny" syndrome. Oh I got that too, but this is something else.

I was thinking back to when I started in the hobby. You bought a thing. Built it. Painted it. Played with it within a week or so. Sometimes you had a big project (like that Tamiya 1:35 Möbelwagen). If you didn't have the correct paint you used another, or mixed a couple of paints to a rough estimate of the box cover art. Things were simpler back then, I thought.

No this isn't a "Things were better before" post.

But no... things weren't simpler, my methods were. Now we have 200 or somewhere abouts paints in the GW range, many of them technical paints, some are dry, some are layer paints, some are washes and some are glazes, some are base paints. Back then you had paints, and inks. You could thin the paints to make washes, use the inks for pin washes or glazes, and you could wipe all of your paint from the brush for drybrushing. You drybrushed or highlighted, washed or pin washed, and that was it.

Don't get me wrong, all the new techniques, all the new kinds of paints are fantastic. You can do some amazing things. But they also lead to overcomplication. Do I need to paint every model like it could belong in the 'Eavy Metal section of White Dwarf? No, but I try to. It's partially because the models have become better and more detailed so they lure you into a complicated paint job. Back then the models often had unadorned armour, maybe the odd spike or symbol somewhere. If you wanted to you could freehand something or put a decal on it. Nowadays the armours are sculpted with lots of details and 3d insignia that beckons to be painted, highlighted, washed, weathered and then some git are doing them in non-metallic metallics. (Don't get me started about that... the Emperor's new paint scheme I call it.) But I'm setting my ambitions too high. It's not that I can't paint that fine, I can. But I don't need to, and it takes too long time.

My stash of Home Guard. Also includes some Crusader and Warlord figures in the top rows.

So I dug up a bunch of Wargames Foundry British Home Guard that I have had in my stash for a while, and decided to go back to the basics with them.

Bases and blisters

This blog post feels like it has been a thousand years in the making...

 A couple of days weeks months ago I reviewed the Age of Sigmar Hero Bases, and now the time has come to take a look at the Warhammer 40k Hero Bases. I bought them shortly after the AoS ones, now that the 8th edition of 40k is looming around the corner I was reminded about these bases and dug up the photos I took back then.

The first sprue with some large pieces on it. Is that a Leman Russ turret? (Yes it is...)

The second sprue also has a bunch of large stuff on it, although not as large as the first.

Unlike the AoS set there are no single piece bases in this set. There are also only eight bases compared to the eleven in the AoS set.

All your base are belong to... swine?

I was not much impressed by the scenic bases GW had released before christmas, but the hero bases recently released piqued my interest. As my FLGS was out of the 40k one I bought the Fantasy version to review.

(Note: the sprues are really the same size, some sort of trickery with the photographs have ensued.)

The first sprue. Some interesting stuff, lots of skulls.

Second sprue. The giant sarcophagus lid on the right was what drew my eye originally.

Fun with magnets!

I'm becoming more and more fond of converting stuff with magnets. It's partly because I can't make my mind up about the various options available, and with magnets you can swap around parts between games.

I do realise this increases the list or army building time since if I just build stuff to a fixed specification I can't change my force between games that much. On the other hand my games are few and far between so I usually don't remember how my figures are kitted out, this way I can do the army list first and then change the figures to suit.

Oota-goota Santa?

My hobby life naturally took a hit last year when I had most of my stuff in storage. Still, I did manage to paint a couple of things. The last thing I completed in 2016 was a figure for our local Secret Santa. I have held off showing it since I wanted to be sure the recipient had received it, however the obligatory "Thank you Santa"-post didn't materialise so I was a bit worried. A couple of eBay buys had gone missing just before Christmas and for a moment I suspected a dishonest postal worker had decided to nick my packages.

In the end I flat out asked if it had arrived, and yes it had. (My eBay buys were refunded by the seller too, so all is well that ends well, as the bard wrote.) But what was it, I hear you ask? Well, the title is a clue, as the figure was Greedo for Imperial Assault.

Oota-Goota Solo?

The Walking Dead: All Out War review

As you may have noticed earlier I backed the TWD: AOW kickstarter (if you read that out aloud it sounds like when you stub your toe in the middle of the night -- "Twudd! Aowww!"). If you didn't know, you can read a slight rant about the kickstarter and look at my first painted figures here with some more figures here.

Anyway, if you haven't been living under a rock for the last ten years you can't have missed The Walking Dead -- either the TV show or the comic. There have been boardgames based on both, and there's a cooperative miniatures game in the works based on the TV show. Like the LotR and Hobbit franchise, there are licenses for both the books and the movies. Hence the long title, The Walking Dead: All Out War, to set the game apart from the other games. This game is not cooperative, instead groups of survivors clash against each other with the zombies as sort of moving hazardous terrain.

The comic. The TV show is slightly more colourful. Slightly.

I must confess that I haven't read the comic and only watched a couple of episodes of the TV show. But who doesn't love a good zombie game? Well I do, and I liked how the game looked in the kickstarter. I didn't go all in like most people, but I got the base game and quite a lot of stretch goals for the princely sum of 75 dollars. I think I got a good deal. For the purposes of this review though, I'm only going to look at the core game.

Warning, lots of rambling and pictures ahead! (Maybe also some spoilers, I don't know.)

More dipped zombies!

Hi gang!

A quickie, just want to show off more zombies and survivors from The Walking Dead. These were all sprayed white, block painted and then dipped in Army Painter Strong Tone. I will do the blood spatter and gore later on all the zombies together.

Reggie, Amy, Sandra and Carol.

Sandra is a big lady. I don't know if it's intentional or scale creep at work.

Not having read the comic I have no idea what roles they play, but I've tried to follow the painted examples in the rule book. Reggie however didn't feature so I winged it and gave him what I hope looks like a red flannel shirt. I like how the red trainers and socks on Amy came out.

Ghartastic!

As I've mentioned previously, our little gaming group has gotten into Beyond the Gates of Antares.

Or rather... we bought the rules about a year ago and have been slowly collecting figures... but never played the game. Until now! Assembling a 500 point scout force each we gathered at Mats' cat's house (Mats insists he's only the caretaker and pet slave) on Sunday to try this new malarkey.

Tectorist scouts. They use their scanners to point out targets to the other Ghar.

Ghar are bred for war, riding in giant three-legged battlesuits. Failure means you are relegated to outcast status and have to footslog it without the big suit, but still expected to do your bit and die for the Ghar Empire. As I play horde armies in 40k I didn't want another horde army for Gates of Antares, but only using battlesuits means I get few units and few activations, which limits my tactical flexibility (as if I had any tactics).

Mantic actually delivers!

Well, I suppose I owe Mantic Games an apology, as I got a package from them recently.

I got stuff, I got stuff!!!

But first a little digression.

I backed their The Walking Dead: All Out War kickstarter this spring. Right after backing I received the stuff from their Deadzone 2 kickstarter from last year and was very disappointed. My main critique against Mantic's kickstarters have always been two-fold.

October is... where the bleep did October go???

Previous years, October has been Orktober... or Tanktober... and I've seen some people this year that has treated October as Dreadtober. For me October is Gonetober.

Not as in "I'm gone" or "Where have all my hobby time gone?", but as in "Dang October is gone before I figured out what October is this year". You could say that October became Culttober since the Genestealer Cults were released at the end of September and I spent the beginning of October building hybrids...

A couple of old metal Acolytes that have borrowed arms from their DW:OK brethren.

I had aquired an extra set of Deathwatch Overkill genestealers. While gorgeous they have very repetetive poses and equipment. However I bought one of each hybrid box that were released with the codex and all the extra options in them allowed me to convert the extra set of DW:OK figures.

And the heavens will deliver our reward!

So Warhammer TV dropped another trailer...



OMG! OMG! OMG!