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!

On the painting table

As I predicted a few weeks ago, painting would slow done significantly after last month's bmper harvest. With all the other gaming related activities (and real life) taking up most of my time I have hardly touched my brushes and have finished only three figures so far. And that was more because they were figures that I had meant to finish in January. The little bit of time I did spend painting were used on my Space Marines and my Russians for Blitzkrieg Commander.


After I built up my infantry forces I decided to focus on my vehicles. I cleaned, mounted and started on my SU122s and 152s and I hope to rebase my T34/85s to the club standard of 20 by 40mm bases before adding the finishing touches. Given my limited available time this is looking more and more ambitious every day...

The other project, my "finish 100 points of SM each month" challenge is progressing slightly better. But that is the result of looking up points values in the latest edition of the codex. I was working with my 4th edition copy to get a rough idea of what I would need to paint, but checking the latest edition I found that the costs have gone up for infantry while vehicles are now slightly cheaper.



This meant that my force commander, a lowly captain, has gone from 65 to 100 points. January goal reached! And with a five man squad jumping from 75 to 90 points all I have to do is finish the weapons and backpacks of the four troopers (the sergeant is finished) in the second row to meet this month's deadline.

All I have to do this, is next weekend and one day off work next week. And then it's off to Reihndahlen for "Action 2010"....

1000 Euro

Did you ever wonder what a 1000 Euro worth of GW miniatures looks like? Here is the answer!

So what happened to frugal gaming, what happened to spending less, you must be wondering? Well, there is spending less but there is also earning more... Yes, I intend to make money by selling GW miniatures that do not belong to my (extensive) private collection.

While running the bring and buy stand at "Full Tilt" I noticed one of the club members dumping quite a few shrink wrapped boxes onto the table. Later on he told me he bought them a few months ago at our local toy store. Last summer they decided to stop carrying GW and have been putting their stock on sale. I took advantage of that sale back when they started it, but even now they still have a huge stockpile of boxes and (to a lesser extent) blisters left.

So my friend went in an asked how much he would have to buy to get a 50% discount. He ended up buying 2000 Euro (at retail price) and three months later he sold the last of his stuff at my bring and buy stand. With "Action 2010" coming up in a few weeks, I decided to follow suit. And now I am the proud owner of 1000 Euro (retail) of GW's finest. Most of it is Space Marines and their Chaos colleagues, with some scenery, Necron, demons andEldar thrown in.

With all the items my fellow club members have asked me to keep aside, I have already regained more than 20% of my investment after bringing my collection along at last week's club night. I also used the opportunity to do some market research to find out what would be other good buys. Guess I'll be getting lots of Dark Eldar on a second run... to my own surprise.

Everything has been labeled, my list is ready, now I just have to wait another day or ten and then we'll find if the gamble pays off...

Things I've done, things I need to do

I've been pretty busy lately and I have lots of things to post about and I'll try to get around to it in the coming days. Look forward to:

-Last month's painting in pictures

-Current painting, very limited because of a lot of other gaming activities like

-Our club's Warhammer tournament: "Full Tilt"

-Busy club nights spent gaming and discussing...

-My Space Marines challenge

-My new life as a GW dealer

I'm aiming to get one post done every day for the next week. That way I should have caught up by this weekend...

-

Februari Forecast

I'll post a look back on Januari when I have applied the matt varnish spray, but because I have to do this at work it'll be a few days before I can take pictures... but it was a great month.

And Februari is looking good as well, full with all kind of wargames activities. This weekend my club will be hosting its annual Warhammer 40K and Fantasy tournament: Full Tilt. With well over 100 players it is one of the biggest in Belgium. I won't be taking part myself but will be running the bring and buy stand. Last year we tried this for the first time during a tournament and though it was a late addition and only few people brought stuff, it was a succes. Now it has been added to the registration process, so everyone knows about and I'm expecting lots more goods on offer.

The weekend after that we'll be running a two day playtest of our Blitzkrieg Commander game on the Battle of Hechtel. That way we'll be able to play all 15 turns for the first time ever and see what needs to be "fixed" now that the second edition has been published. At the end of the month we'll be running this game during Action 2010 in Rheindahlen (Germany), the only two day wargames event in our region that I know about, allowing us to play the game to the finish. So we need to be prepared...

Conventions, bad for the bank account and the lead pile... but then again...
I don't really have anything that I am planning to buy, no major new projects or big expansions to existing ones. I'm mainly looking to buy some scenery stuff, mostly buildings in a variety of scales. I'll be browsing for some books, most likely for the seven years war period and picking up some magazines. And maybe, just maybe I'll pick up a copy of "Black Powder". Some impulse buying might always happen, most likely at the bring and buy.

When it comes to painting there will be a slow down. With a lot of activities planned on the weekends, when I do most of my painting, I'll have less time to spend on that. I'll be giving 6mm infantry a break for now and will move to the vehicles for a while. The Space Marine project will continue and, sometime this week, my test order of Minden Miniatures will arrive. These will be cleaned and primed in no time, I'm looking forward to start painting them.

In short, it will be a busy month.
I'll keep you posted on how it goes,
happy gaming!