GeG Swap meet

The FLGs had the fall swap meet this Sunday, and despite shopping there for something like 24 years this was the first time I actually attended.

All of the very sizable game space was full of tables with people selling things, some new, some used, and a few vendors selling wares as well (mostly 3d printed stuff).  The very first table was a guy selling effectively a whole game store of stuff, mostly new in box, some partly built or painted, as well as six plus boxes of citadel paints which were new/used. 

Loads of people getting out of Horus Heresy, which is a shame.  Not much in the way of historicals, and far less Flames of War than you would expect as well. Lots of old board games, including a two pack of the original boxed CityTech and AeroTech for Battletech (unpunched, so $$$$).

So what did we get? Well... sort of a lot. 

The kid got:
Plastic chaplain, banner bit, five partial assault intercessors, and six partial blade guard, $20.  Same guy was selling a stack of Horus Heresy marines, as well as a nicely painted fleet for Victory at Sea (with the thick bases).

I got the OOP ruins new in box ($20), some opened contrast paints ($1 each), a brand new shade ($3), and a Harlequin star weaver with a hull that had been used for an airbrush test ($25).  The same seller had a few other terrain sets, and what seemed like a dozen Eldar Avatars new in box, but I passed on getting more. 

The real find though was the shoe box above.  Complete partly painted Imperial Knight for $30.  The kid is pretty excited about that one, even if it is partly painted and is the original model with fewer options.  The seller also had a large stack of never read Games Workshop publications, so we picked up an issue of the short lived "visions" magazine as well. 

So we got out comparatively cheaply, and it really makes you wonder what was available at the beginning of the sale, and what the deals were like as the sale was coming to an end and people were wanting to go home...

We were there an hour and a half, and the kid and I could have spent another hour there picking through bins of miniatures, but we had to hurry along before going to pick up kid #2 from water polo practice.  I am sure that we will plan to go again next year. 

Summer 2024

So uh, wow, have not posted for a while.  Usual excuses of being busy with summer and not wanting to post because it is too darn hot to do anything (over 40 degrees for what felt like weeks), PLUS one of my kid's teams made it to the Junior Olympics for water polo, so that was a ton more practice and an additional week away from the house. 

I do have some things to post about, which I will schedule for this week... then it will at least look like I have been doing some hobby.  Which I have!  Just not blogging about it, or finishing anything to make it feel like it was worth blogging about. 

How has your summer been? (or Winter if you are on the other side of the planet) 

And just so this has SOME hobby content, here is my birthday loot for the year:

Hobby clipper two pack, an Eldar Spirit Seer, Dune: a game of Conquest, Diplomacy & Betrayal, and coincidentally a Reaper Bones Great worm. (there are something like 100 Dune games out right now, so you have to specify which with a subtitle or it gets confusing)  I also got $50 at Barnes and Noble from my Mother-in-Law, which might turn itself into a couple of games too, we will see. 

Holidaze 2024

Well hello again. 

Happy New year and Merry Christmas to you my dear reader(s)! 

Hopefully everyone is well, and you got what you wanted from Santa.

As for myself, my family was very generous, and I got a few gaming related items.

Dark Reapers are nearly built, just need to magnetize the Exarch's gun options

Santa brought the family a Nintendo Switch, and I am not sure if that is a good idea or not... the kid got enough Space Marines to be a whole new army AND an Imperial Knight kit, which is just too much.  I will have to get some more brightlances out to compensate.  Maybe a Fireprism is needed?

Inbetween early November and now I have played a couple of games, both thanks to the local library:

Godzilla Tokyo Clash! (obligatory exclamation point)

Flamecraft

Neither was something that we needed to own, although Flamecraft was an interesting cooperative engine builder that I could see being fun to play more.  The "board" was a neoprene mat, which was cool, and certainly easier to put away. 

I also managed to squeeze in a couple of short D&D sessions with the kids and their cousins, which was great, except that now the level 3 party is left between sessions facing down a green dragon... TPK for the new year?

As for upcoming projects, I have a lot more Eldar in various stages of completion, a couple of updated D&D character figures, and as I mentioned LAST year, I would like to get back to my WWII Normandy stuff... we will see what actually gets accomplished.

What about you?  What are you planning on working on this year?

Marching forward

I have been quite busy lately with dealing with my uncle's estate issues, so I have had little time for painting and other hobby activities.

I did recently receive a very generous gift from Dai, a whole British platoon for Chain of Command, painted and with extras. (such as the MMG teams in the bag on the right).  With just a bit of work on the bases they will match up with my Americans and Germans very nicely, and since I have a pack of Motorized British somewhere, I can add a few more extra items.

So you would think that painting more figures for Chain of Command and its related terrain would be in the forefront of my mind, and indeed it has been largely so.

However, I also recently got this for a hefty discount...

Yet more Eldar (and chaos bound for Ebay)

Holidaze 2022

 Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you dear reader(s).  I hope that you had a lovely festive season.

Santa (or my family) was very kind to me this year with a nice stack of gaming related items.  Most surprising was that my sister ordered Chain of Command direct from Too Fat Lardies. which coincides nicely with my desire to work on 15mm WWII again this year. 

9th Edition Eldar Codex, Chain of Command, Random Encounters, Agon, and Banshees.

This year, like last, I managed to get away from work for a whole week. Little was accomplished, but I did mange to prepare and prime a few more Battletech figures on one of our few dry days.

Wintertime expedient of a portable heater

Most of these are intended to go with the gift set I started preparing back in the fall, including this Phoenix Hawk painted for my buddy who is a major Robotech fan:

This is a poor picture that somehow enhances all of the flaws of the figure, but hey, Jolly Roger on a PHX-1

We did get away to the mountains with cousins again, and we played a few more sessions of the very long running D&D game.  This time there were at least a few calls of "we should finish the main quest before doing these other things!"  They then promptly went on a new side quest, after ordering equipment for another one. 

The kid managed to get enough new space marines to basically double his current level of space marines, which would worry me more if he managed to also paint them... he did already build them all though, which was shocking, so we could see some progress on that front.

Hopefully 2023 treats everyone well. 

Holidaze

Happy Christmas and New Year to you, dear reader(s).

This year I was able to take off the whole week between Christmas and New Years, which was almost enough to relax, despite the best unmentioned here efforts of 2021 to drag us down right at the end.  

I got some good loot this year as well, and hope you did too. 

Putrid Blightkings, clay shapers, a D&D battle mat flip book, and some figures for a project I am definitely not doing. 

We managed to escape town for a few days to the mountains with the cousins, and I ran the kids through another two sessions of D&D.  Being kids they are a bit easy to distract, and being numerous, they argue about what to do, so we are not that far in the campaign.  They did get to roll dice though, so it was good. 

Flip book in action

Which did not stop me from introducing more side quests, some political intrigue, and to allow them to dual class when they leveled up. 

Aside from the stuff I got personally, we also got some family games, including family favorite Mille Bornes, as well as a few others that the kids got which are not shown here (an escape room puzzle, and a Nancy Drew mystery game).  

The kid also got a combat patrol, dreadnaught, and librarian, so at some point there will be enough marines to viciously slaughter my Eldar.  Of course by the time they are painted, the new Eldar codex and miniatures will be out, so maybe I can regain the upper hand?

Here is to a better 2022 for you and yours. 

Happy Christmas/New Year

So, you may have noticed that 2020 was a wee bit different than previous years, and I for one, am glad to see the back of it.

In any case, I hope you had an enjoyable Holiday season.  I was working for most of it, but I did get the specific holidays off, which this year at least added up to a couple of long weekends. 

I made out pretty well in terms of gifts this year too:

Not pictured are a few more Reaper figures (including the paint your own Krampus kit), and a couple of other things that will get their own posts later.

My oldest got a large box of Space Marines from Santa, so he was pretty excited about that, and got most of them assembled already. 

As for 2021, all signs look as if at least the first half of the year will be the same as 2020, which is to say, no face to face time, busy at work, and very little gaming.  

Happy Christmas!

I hope Santa brought you what you wanted. (or if not that there are post Christmas sales that you took advantage of).

I spent the weekend prior to Christmas safely ensconced in the family mountain retreat, and managed to get a few games in.  We played a ton of Codenames, and a round of Risk Legacy.  Checking the board, it was the first time we played Risk Legacy since 1/1/2017!

All those games and I have never won...

Risk legacy still is not my favorite game, but it is great fun to play with the same people over and over, and see what happens in the game as we unlock or otherwise change things on the board.

While we were playing other games, the younger girls got their own game of Stragego together.

They assured me that they knew what they were doing.

I managed to convince my wife that my nephews needed Blitz Bowl for Christmas, and they were more than a little bit excited about it.

They could not wait to open it, and got it assembled before Christmas Dinner!  Three of us assembled figures, and all three were stabbed with the blades and spikes, so working as intended I guess. I tried not to be too much of a stickler for cleaning off the sprues and such, but I may show up with a hobby knife and a file sometime and smooth those figures out!

As far as my own loot, I got the D&D Art and Arcana book, a gift card to the FLGS from my mother in law, and Saw's Renegades for X-Wing from my sister.

And this little guy was under the tree too!

With daughter for scale... Halloween costume for 2019?

Anyway, hope you had a great holiday and a Happy New Year.

Pound Pounded

Well, in light of the surprising results of the referendum on Thursday, it is unsurprising to find that the Pound to USD exchange rate has collapsed. ($1.37 to the £ as of this writing [and a similar collapse against the Euro])

Here are some great British companies you should patronize in a show of solidarity (and to get some great deals on great figures)

Perry Miniatures Home of the fabulous Perry Brothers.

GZG Astounding 15mm scifi, as well as 6mm and space ships

Pendraken Miniatures 10mm

Hasslefree miniatures  fantastic 28mm figures

Brigade Models 6mm/space/15mm

I know that there are ton of smaller companies out there, so let me know in comments where you plan to shop.

Plastic Landsknechts - IndieGoGo

Pro Gloria's Indiegogo campaign

€24 gets you a box of figures, including 20 regular pikemen on two sprues, and four command figures on two command sprues. Enough arms to equip with halberds, spears, or pikes, and more than two heads per figure so you can have plenty of variety. Shipped worldwide, some time in mid 2015, although it may be longer...

Higher level rewards and add-ons are of course available. As of this writing the campaign is at ~15% of its goal, but I think it will make it, if not here, than later, since the figures are already sculpted.

I do not think I am going to be taking part in this, since I have plenty of pikemen currently, but I hope that this comes to fruition sooner or later... because I will eventually need more, and they look great.

Knights

No, not the kind with horses, the kind that are striding battle machines from the universe of Warhammer 40k.  You know, like this one:

Scanned from next week's White Dwarf, not by me.

This is an Imperial Knight Errant, which is apparently coming out in a couple of weeks from GW.  Knights Errant and Knights in general were part of the Epic game, but obviously were too large for Warhammer 40k back in the day... and now they are being released in glorious plastic.  I said previously that a DakkaJet would be my next big kit (was it really nearly two years ago?), but one of these guys, with banners flying and on a modeled display base is going to have to be it instead.  Wow. 

 

[more rumors suggest that a rule book is forthcoming (with more variants and equipment options?) and other scans from this White Dwarf say that it can be taken as a allied detachment. If the price is less than $100 US, I expect these to sell very very well]

Figure Fanatic Giveaway

Lief, over at the Figure Fanatic blog is giving away some miniatures and models in honor of his 200th post. Usual rule apply, must be a follower, comment on the post etc, so get on over and dilute my chances of winning... wait a tick, why am I telling you about this?

In other news, the holiday weekend is nearly upon us, and I will be away from the blog soon, but hope to have some great presents and hopefully some gaming to talk about when I return.  I have been too busy to paint lately, but hope to have some time for it soon.

Evil-bay

I have been on what might be termed "an eBay Binge" lately, which seems more substantial than usual because I have been actually winning auctions.  In any case, the total money spent has gotten to the level where I could have put the money to more productive use, such as buying that Chaos Battalion I was bleating on about, or the bulk of the forces I had planned for Napoleonic skirmish, or a couple of 15mm sci-fi forces, or any other new project really, rather than just odds and ends for existing projects.

I am not sure what it is about eBay that bypasses my planning instinct, but it does... must be the allure of the deal, or in some cases old lead. (I did at least get some nice old figures though)

In painting news, I have nearly completed my Neo-Soviets, and they only need a few more touch ups, sealing, and basing to be "complete".

Plastic Soldier Company Sale

The Plastic Soldier Company, which makes various World War II figures in 1/100, 1/72 scale and 28mm size, is currently running a sale on their 1/100 scale models, which are suitable for 15mm gaming.  30% off, which works out to 10% off after shipping to the US. (unless they discount for VAT for out of EU folks?)

A nice thing about their models, at least in the 15mm compatible 1/100 models, is that they usually come with more than one vehicle variant on the sprue, so if you only need one Panther A, and three Panther Ds, you can do that with the parts included in the box.

Panther Sprue guide

Now, since I have a 15mm army "in box only" I should not be buying more tanks or anything for it, but it would be nice to flesh out that Panzer grenadier platoon to a full company replete with Pak 36 vehicles, mortar carriers, and other support variants.  And I have always wanted a US armored company, and a Soviet Tank company...

Just because I should not, does not mean you can not, so go on over to the Plastic Soldier company and pick something up. (And they also sell models by other companies like Zvezda to fill in gaps in their line)

Laughing Ferret - Give away

Laughing Ferret, of Laughing Ferret Lab, is having a 200,000th hit give-away.  Merely commenting on the blog gives you an entry, and plugging the contest gives you another.  There are some very nice prizes, including a sprue of Mordor orcs, dice, and some old codexs [codices?].

200k hits is pretty great, and the blog is interesting, even if you do not play Bloodbowl...  I seem to recall first reading the blog a while back with an article about Lord of the Ring dwarf ranger conversions, and started following there after.

Wargames Factory Surviors

By now you have probably seen the new Wargames Factory Survivors:Male, which are aimed mostly at a sort of "early zombie apocalypse", era if such a thing can be posited to exist.

Here is what they look like:

I particularly like the thickset dude with flip flops and AK

Sprue shots came out today, and the best news is that there is a separate weapons sprue in addition to the ones pictured above:

This includes 7 loose AK-47s, 7 M-16/ARs, shotguns, rifles, machine pistols, chain saws, and more.  Provided the scale works out to anything useful for Warhammer 40k/Inquisitor 28/Necromunda, I can foresee getting a few of these...  [this comparison shot of the vixens shows them to be slightly taller and slimmer than GW standard, which means that the guns should work just fine]

Even better news is that a female version of these sprues is expected to come out later this year, which if they look as good as the zombie vixens, should be quite excellent.

Nurgle Plague Drones

Like most GW watchers, I saw the tiny scanned pictures from the latest White Dwarf, and scoffed at most of the forthcoming Daemon figures.  They seemed uniformly terrible, and certainly overpriced.  What a difference a clear picture makes:

Instead of this:

Now with mangy elephant trunks!

Now I must have them.  I fancy mounting chaos knights on them, or making them scary alien mega-bugs or something.  I do not even know, but I know I love them, and loath only that they cost so very much ($60 for the box, which has WHFB options as well)

And with an ogre head, and some ork arms in the front, they could be some sort of horrid creature to fight in Inq28 too...

The Tau

Yesterday, I was browsing bits on ebay (as one does), and came across a good deal for Tau legs.  That started me thinking about the "reserve army" of Tau I have.  I call it a reserve army, because it is still in boxes... most of those are still shrink wrapped.  (just like my Eldar, Dwarves, DOW, and enough marines to be a whole second army)

I have: Two of the old battleforce boxes [each has 3 battle suits, 12 kroot, 12 Tau, 10 drones, and a sprue of jungle trees], 2 more battle suits, 2 broadsides, 2 devil fish, 1 hammer head, and a couple of blisters of kroot hounds.  All bought on ebay long ago, for substantial discounts.

Crummy picture of an old Battleforce box



New box ($120, 1 battle suit, 12 kroot, 12 tau, 1 devilfish, 3 stealth suits, 7 drones) 

The funny thing is, that at current prices, just the battle suits alone would cost more than I paid for the battle forces, making the kroot and tau firewarriors "free".  ($24.5 each for a total of $73.5, and I paid $50-$60 for my battle forces) For that matter, the current battleforce is $120 US, which is roughly twice as much as I paid for the previous one.

Another interesting aspect of the Tau firewarrior sprue (the basic infantry of the Tau), is that it has 5 sets of legs, 5 heads, 6 guns, but only 4 torsos and shoulder pads.  So for the bitz buy of a torso, you can get a whole new figure, provided you are willing to forgo the shoulder pad... which the pathfinders do not have anyway.  Since I plan to have this army work for StarGrunt II as well, it makes sense for me to do that, as I want to have a couple of heavy weapons teams and officers, which would not fit into the normal 40k army list.

I am really curious to see what the army will be like when the new codex and models come out (rumored for early this year).  Aside from the now obligatory flyer and large stompy robot (or Kroot monster?), it would be nice if they had a pathfinder box...

For the traveling DM

If you are a DM on the go, like analogue vs. digital products, and have a problem with losing dice, this may be a kickstarter that you are interested in...

Dice rings.  The outer ring spins around the inner ring, and then the number "rolled" is indicated by the arrow marks. 

$15 for the kickstarter buys you one "die", $90 to get a full D&D set, which is obviously a bit pricy.  However, a d100 ring is useful for quite a number of games, and also for making up statistics...

Hawk Wargames Terrain

Hawk Wargames, makers of the hot new 10mm sci-fi game Dropzone Commander, is coming out with a lovely line of buildings made from cast resin tiles.  The tiles are made in either commercial or residential sizes, and have a sort of vague 1930's art deco sci-fi look to them that I really fancy.  By mixing and matching the various lobby, wall, and cornice tiles, you get a pretty unique look for each building that still looks coherent.  Tiles are 36mm wide by 17mm or 21mm depending if they are commercial or residential, and the ground floors are double height.

Here are a few pictures linked from their site.

Expensive at roughly 75p a tile, but they look great, and while filling up a town would be costly, they could probably be used to "sci-fi" a N scale cityscape pretty easily, and certainly a backdrop of just building facades could be done reasonably.

Wish someone made this sort of terrain in 6mm... although I am afraid I would have to buy quite a lot of it if they did!