Seasons greetings and a review of 2012

A belated merry Christmas and an early Happy New Year to everyone.

I hope Santa brought you all nice toys and that the forthcoming year is a prosperous one.

Mine was relaxing and it was great to see friends and family.

Hobby wise, I received nothing for Christmas but a cheeky purchase of some Plastic Soldier Company Tigers from York and box of Panzer III's from Bridlington has eased the shock of that somewhat. I also finally spent the GW vouchers I received when I left Rapid in July on an Empire War Altar.



Looking back at the year, I did get to do some gaming and some painting. I started playing WFB again (ok, one game, but I painted up 30 Teutogen Guard), a game of 40k (pics of that game to come soon) and numerous games of flames of war and Warmachine. I also picked up the Dystopian Wars fleet that I had long been hankering for.



The biggest change hobby wise was finally dipping my toes in with Warmachine, and I am well on my way to a sizable force thanks to a bit of luck with the Maelstrom games firesale and some lucky ebay bidding.

From a personal perspective my hobby time was limited due to the birth of my son and my wife being redundant whilst on maternity leave.  Although she found a job very quickly, it was for a large international firm that demanded long hours leaving me to hold the baby... Thankfully, she now has a new job closer to home so 2013 may be better hobby-wise.

Aims for 2013:
Finish my Empire (2400 points to be fully painted);
Play some Dystopian Wars;
Finish painting my Menoth and win a game!
Finish my Tyranids and play some games;
Play more 40k and WFB;

So, quite a boring post, but there will be lots of pictures to come as I have a half painted FSA fleet and some pics from my game against Mark to post in the next few days.

Please check out my other "sister" blog

As well as this more general painting blog, I also have a Warhammer Empire specific one. Please check it out!

http://apaintingape-middenlandsfinest.blogspot.co.uk/

A long slog...

Bit of a pun in the title as it makes reference to both the slow speed of the models in question in-game, but also how it's taken me to finish them!

Finishing my Cinerators concludes the Menoth contents of the 2-player box set. Hurrah!

Nice models but far too much detail on them to paint quickly, which is why its taken so long.  I painted these without resorting to devlan mud and badab black i.e. my usual cheat methods.  All the highlighting and shading is by hand...

The photos are a bit crap and don't really show the highlighting off that well... But on the other side, it does hide a few of the flaws... :)













Comments/criticisms welcome as always

A bit of commission work(!)

Stop laughing!!! Yeah I know... me, commission work... I barely have time to paint my own models so why I did take on some extra models? And who was daft enough to pay me?!

Well the lucky individual was Doug from Hulls Angels, and he had picked up a couple of car-crashes of leman russes cheap off ebay.  I offered to paint them for the bargain sum of £10.

So how did they turn out? Quite well I think. I spent a weeks worth of free evenings working on these, so about 3 - 4 hours in total. The colour scheme was different compared to how I normally paint my tanks, but I think the general look upon completion is a decent one.

WIP




Finished Leman Russ







Demolisher Body







Completed Demolisher

Whoops! I did it again...

Yeah, I need another gaming system like I need a self-inflicted gun shot wound to the head. Nevertheless with an upcoming birthday and the influx of funds that seems to bring (despite being in my 30's) (not that I'm complaining) I decided to pick up some Dystopian Wars.

Why you ask? Well, any background where the South wins the American Civil War usually intrigues me (I'm a big civil war buff-I even used to dress up and fire cannons) and combine this with 15mm gaming (which thanks to Epic, I love) a bit of naval/space combat (again, specialist games-BFG) then I'm sold...

So I've picked up an FSA starter fleet and will expand it to 800 points in due course.



So what does this mean for my other gaming systems? I'm still "into" warmachine and am hastily painting up my menoth. Ive recently expanded it to at least 35 points and possibly a bit more if I am not fussy about composition. I've also started gluing my Khador together.  I'm working on my Teutogen Guard for my Empire and with 6th Ed 40k making more of an appearance at the club, then I've got several k of Imperial Guard already painted up, so no worries on that front :)

More soon :)

The Three Brothers Grim(m)

Since my last blog post I've only managed to get one game of warmachine in, this time against Ben and his Skorne in a 20 point game.  It was a tough game and I made a few errors, mainly in the initial deployment of my cinerators.  Now cinerators generally get a lot of bad press compared to say Bastions, but I ended up using them as a bodyguard for Kreoss, and they performed that role very well, holding up Ben for some time before he was finally able to get enough firepower to create a hole and rip Kreoss a new one.

Anyhow, in between trips to the olympics, taking care of the boy and both me & the mrs starting new jobs, I've finally got some more painting done and I present to you my finished warjacks.  I have attempted to paint these in the same fashion as here which as anyone who has seen my painting style of base colours then devlan mud/badab black, will know, is quite a departure. So whilst they are a bit rough and by no means "pro-painted" overall I am reasonably happy with how they look.

The Three Brothers


Vanquisher








Redeemer









Vanquisher









As always, any comments/criticisms are welcome :)

Warmachine fever

So maybe that's a slight overstatement but these last few weeks I've been getting in to warmachine pretty much to the exclusion of everything else gaming wise. 

Played my first game with Mark who talked me through the rules (and very kindly let me win) two weeks ago and am set to test myself again tonight.  The aim is not to get my caster assassinated in the first two turns :D

I'm not really big into tournaments as, with the Warhammer games I have always been about creating a "fluffy" list and not picking the latest internet cookie-cutter list (although ironically my 4th edition mech guard ended up being just such a list in 5th edition), however with Warmachine the intention of the game is to be as dirty as possible, so I can roll with that, and will be aiming to make a tournament or two in the future. 

My initial objective is to get a painted list ready for a tournament being run at my old stomping ground in Leicester in November. Whether or not I end up attending is another matter but it helps to have an objective to aim towards.

Well enough waffle - first model finished - eKreoss

Next up will be three warjacks...

Wartorn Scarborough

So I managed to con persuade the wife that a trip to Scarborough would be a good idea, especially with all the uncharacteristically nice weather we are having.   Purely by coincidence it was the 2nd annual gaming convention run by the local club, Wartorn, at the Scarborough Spa rooms.

I won't go in to too much detail other than to say it was quite small BUT it seemed to be very well attended.  There was a decent mix of games going on as well as some good retailers selling a variety of very cool models that I was very tempted to purchase, had I had the funds.  One retailer even had sealed copies of Space Crusade and Advanced Heroquest for £55 a pop.  Given Space Crusade was what started the plastic crack addiction I was very tempted to pick it up and keep it on standby until my boy is old enough to similarly corrupt introduce.

As it happens, I was all set to purchase one of the above when the Warmachine 2 player starter set caught my eye.  I've been umming and ahhhing about starting this for some time, and well for £55 I figured why the hell not?? Especially as a very quick glance on ebay suggested it retails for over £60...  And if I end up hating Warmachine, well it's not too big a loss and I should be able to get the cost back fairly easily.

So what do you get?  Apparently quite a lot - over £100 worth of models if bought seperately and a mini rulebook, starter guide and dice.

Here are some very brief pics:








There'll be more when I get started on the models.  The models are all plastic but look like resin, I've had a brief look at them and they look incredibly detailed.

So this is something that I'll be looking at, at the same time as I paint up my Warhammer Empire army - see the link here for the blog

Mr Boombastic (part 2)

Here we go. My US artillery for Flames of War is finally done and dusted, and effectively allows me to draw a line under any major 15mm painting projects for a while.  I've still got a box of German infantry and some M4A4 Shermans/Fireflys but they will be side projects.

So without further waffle

















Any comments/criticisms/advice always appreciated