January into February

January Overview

About the only regret I have looking back at the past month is that I didn't get any games played due to my inability to read a calendar, snow, flu... Other than that I'm a very happy gamer. I returned to the hobby after a rather lengthy hibernation period by reviving this blog and getting a shortlist of projects drawn up. With quite a bit of succes.

Pretty much all my time was devoted to Mantic Games' Dwarf King's Hold game, as you can read in my previous posts. Building this dungeon has been a victory of sorts: working for a whole month on a single project is quite an achievement for me. Though as the construction part is winding down (and at last I ran out of plaster) I'am looking forward to do something else...

It has been a rather expensive month, but with the annual club fees that was to be expected. Shopping for new stuff was limited and targeted, same for Ebay: a few back Issues of Captain's Logs for Starfleet Battles (costing me several times more on shipping than the actual items).

DKH Green Menace: 36.41

Magazines: 26.87

Ebay 10.74

Drums and Shakos Large Battles: 7.72

Club Fees 25.00

Beer and Pretzels 11.10

Total 117.84€ (yikes!)

February Plans

Errrm... Spend less??? By buying most of my magazines through Maelstrom, I'll be saving about half (High street magazine agents ask waaaay too much for foreign magazines). I have no plans for getting any new (boxed) games and will only be looking for some small odds and ends to complete ongoing projects.

I ran into a post on Fenris Games on TMP or TGN and checked out their Ebay store, and placed a small order for some barrels (I need these for my dungeon project) and a pair of Porta Potties (?) to add to my modern/zombie scenery collection. If they're any good, I'll probably order some more from this company, they have some interesting scenery items for reasonable prices.

Projectwise, I'll keep slaving on my dungeon but I Intend to start going through my WW Russian GHQ collection and start organising my FoW army. I'll have to paint up some more infantry but I'm looking forward to that. After the monotony of a grey dungeon, those Russkies will look as colourfull as an EE Space Marines Chapter :-)

And games? Play that elusive fourth scenario from DKH... Come hell or high water (or snow)...

Get a set of cards for Combat Cards and give the solo zombie scenario a go. For more info on this game, check out Mik's blog, he has a review and some AARs that got me interested in this game.

Happy gaming everybody and stay tuned!

And a Hi there! to the new followers of this blog...

Welcome to the Dungeon

Here it is in all its glory: the dungeon for scenario 4 of Dwarf King's Hold. Getting it ready for last Friday's game called for a lot of last minute painting (the construction crew suffered from a flu outbreak, shutting down operations for several days), but sadly, it was not to be...

With a snow front moving over the country on Friday afternoon shutting down the roads and my friend coming down with the flu as well, my dungeon has yet to see first blood being spilt in its dank corridors :-(

With my construction crew back on their feet, work on the last parts of the tile set is coming along nicely. All the bases have been sawn, all the tiles have been cast and only the big 6 by 6 room, one of the odd shaped ones and a small room need to glued (and painted and sprayed and aaaaaarrrrgggghhhh...)

And when that is done, there are only (who am I kidding, only???) many many many feet of walls to be made. But WYSIWYG, that's all the bricks I have available for this as I ran out of plaster an hour or two ago, woohoo.

And I'm not planning on getting a new one in the near future :-)

Good news, bad news and WTF!!!

Just a quick update on the Dwarf King's Hold dungeon project...

First the good news:

The first batch of tiles for scenario 4 has reached "playable without having to apologize for not being unpainted" state. Still far from finished, still needs more painting, drybrushing and varnishing, but it looks good enough as it is.

Then there is the bad news:

The next batch of bases and I still need to saw a few more (five, mostly small ones). In the time between taking the picture and writing this, I managed to complete the 6 by 4 room. So the news isn't as bad anymore.

But I grossly underestimated the amount of tiles I needed to cast. I've got 50 of them on the heater, drying and from the inventory I made I will need another 66 to finish the entire set of tiles. Without miscasts that another 11 times...

Now where did I leave that bag of plaster???

Hard Hat Area

As I said, I've been hard at work on my project list, or at least the Dwarf King's hold part of it anyway. For some reason the "buy Green Menace" part was the easiest by far... Last Friday's game didn't happen because it seems I'm too stupid to read the club calendar (and yes Stef, so are you for not correcting me :-p )

At least the dungeon construction is proceeding quite rapidly and by the time we get together for that game of DKH we will be playing it on my homemade terrain.

Here is about half the setup for scenario four in various stages of completion. All rooms and corridors will be at least painted with a first coat of grey. Bottle of paint permitting, it will be empty pretty soon so I need to find someone online who sells Foundry paints without the Foundry shipping charges.



The plaster tiles are glued on some left over pieces of 3mm acrylic sheet that I found at work and apart from two more rooms, I've got all the pieces for this scenario ready. Now all I need to do is cast another 70 or so tiles... All???

Constructing the walls will be the second phase for this project and right now I'm not even wanting to consider the amount of casting that will be needed to get a dungeon this size walled up.

More updates soon(ish)

Incomiiiiiiing!!!

Maelstrom games just kept bugging me about their January sale and even decided to extend it when they saw I hadn't ordered anything yet... How can you keep saying no, I'm not made of stone after all?

So I ordered a copy of Dwarf King's Hold: Green menace. This means I'm well on track when it comes to the top item on my projects list (see my previous post). Not only did I order the expansion but I have been working all week on the 3D scenery (sawing, casting, glueing, painting, more on that in another post) and tomorrow I'll be playing it at the club.

A good start to the new gaming year;

What's this? A blog? And it's mine? Not Again...

Has it really been this long? Guess real life has been sucking the errm... life out of me even more than I thought...

Not that gaming was out of the picture completely, there still were the (irregular) club nights, drooling over the glossy magazines and attending the usual wargame shows (and a visit to Salute as well) and the unavoidable "ooh shiny" moments. I'm happy to say that those moments didn't get acted upon though... most of the time anyway. And those that did were limited to buying a set of rules only, my lead version of Mt Everest is able to supply most figures anyway.

But the time has come to perform some CPR on this blog and my hobby in general. I'm not planning on starting anything big for the foreseeable future, but I'm sure that when I finish typing what I do plan to do/am interested in, I'll be cursing myself (again).

• Dwarf King's Hold from Mantic games: play some more games, work on some 3D terrain, buy the first expansion .
• Wait for Project Pandora from Mantic Games: a SF twin to the above, slated for an April release.
• While waiting for the above, maybe dig out my copy of Space Hulk (Stef?).
• SAGA: I knew I bought those Foundry Vikings for something back then...
  
• Ganesha Games: play some more of their excellent skirmish games.
• Wait for the Napoleonic and fantasy mass battle games from Ganesha Games, due any moment now
• Flames of War: sort out my Blitzkrieg Commander Russian army and join the others playing at the club (playing FoW in 6mm looks a lot better).
• Start playing something from Two Hour Wargames.

All things considered, I guess the main issue will be time... The only things I don't own already are the Mantic games and a few PDFs from Ganesha Games.

Stay tuned!

What's this? A blog? And it's mine?

What's this hiding beneath all those cobwebs and dust? That's right, I have a blog, nearly forgot about it. Well, not really... My friend has been bugging me constantly with "I've looked at your blog but..."

Like pretty much everything else wargames related other than the occasional club night, my blog went into a belated period of hibernation. But a few weeks ago, I felt the itch coming back. And of all things it was the latest edition of Warhammer that started it all (yes, I do feel dirty...)

After running into the "Beasts of War" youtube channel and watching a feature length review (was it 90 minutes?) I felt like dusting off my High Elf army. By now, however, I started a new army...

On that youtube channel I also ran into reviews of figures produced by Mantic Games. Further investigation into the matter led me to their site and blog and I was astounded to find goodlooking and cheap fantasy figures. I liked their mission statement and communication from the word go and after a quick look on Maelstrom, I ordered a box of their skeletons.... 20 of them for less than 13 Euro!!!

I've started putting them together as a lunchtime project and have come up with this after about a week

In all stages as they roll onto the painting line, more suited for my stile of working, I just can't get started on doing 10 tunics in a row. Way to monotonous for me and I'll lose interest soon. They paint up pretty nice without spending too much time on them, just a few basic colours and some GW washes and this is what you'll get (95% finished)

I'll be doing this as a bitesize project, with Maelstrom's very low free shipping threshold, I can order just one box at a time... rather than flooding myself with an army deal (even that would be cheaper).

Oh, and did I mention that in two months they'll be releasing their own rules in two months? And that they will be free? For ever and ever? Move over EE, errm GW...

Just heard the free for ever promise made by the founder of Mantic on a Gencon special podcast.

Hope to show and tell you more in the near future,

Happy gaming!