Thursday, 26 April 2012

Mandalorian Mercenary Sniper Rifle - A not 40k project :O

As one of my other hobbies I occasionally dress up as a Stormtrooper from Star Wars with a bunch of other costumers to raise money for charity. My father costumes as Darth Vader with me tagging along as the stormy. Strangely it was me that got my Dad into it not the other way round.

 I'm the one in the middle front, my Dad is Vader.

Recently my Dad did a 160 mile walk dressed as Darth Vader from Ormond St. in Stoke to Great Ormond Street childrens hospital in London. He did it over 10 days, averaging about 16 miles per day. I helped by driving ahead of him for a mile then waiting for him to catch up, then de-helmet him, give him a drink etc. On the last day I walked with him in costume from Edgware to the hospital. It was a long 9 mile walk with lots of people stopping us on the way.

Anyway, getting onto what the post is actually about. My sister helped on the last day, seeing the attention we were getting and wanting a piece of the action, she decided she wanted a Mandalorian Mercenary costume. Mandalorians are quite easy and fun to do as there is a lot of flexibility in their outfits unlike Vader or stormys which have no flexibility at all. She decided on a white and red mandalorian with a rifle and pistols. My task in all this was to produce a rifle.

Knowing how my sister loves sniper rifles in FPS games like UT3, Call of duty etc. I decided to make her a sniper rifle.

I've wanted to convert a nerf gun to look more realistic for quite a while now and I finally had an excuse. I decided to work on a Nerf Longstrike, it was horrendously bright orange and blue and covered in logos and annoying paterns. I had my work cut out.



With the help of a power sander I removed all the annoying bits and flattened the surfaces. I then painted the rifle with silver primer and satin black. I then did the weathering with devlan mud on the silver bits. The weathering for the black was done by spraying a sock with silver paint and rubbing it all over to pick up the edges. I then fitted the sniper scope I bought off ebay. Luckily the nerf guns have the same size accessory rails as real guns so you can fit pretty much anything to them.





Best of all, it still works as a nerf gun! Not to be used in public without wearing a costume around a bunch of other costumers or you're likely to get the police on to you....

2000 point Necrons vs Nurgle CSM

Last Monday I played a large game with my crons led by Imotekh vs a big pile of deathguard with a few daemons. There's no point in a lengthy battle report suffice to say that I generated a ton of scarabs and almost all of the damage in game was down to combat. Imotekh killed 2 rhinos with lightning, my derpstar squad of lords killed a termy squad half of which died to mindshackle scarabs hehe. My wraiths were proving to be great as usual. My scarab squad munched a 2nd squad of termys. In the end the crons won by a couple of kill points, mainly due to the unstoppable pile of scarabs and the 9 spiders with them.

Jons CSM are awesomely painted by the way.

PICS!!!

Thursday, 19 April 2012

40k Tournaments in Northampton



Hi all,

There's a bi-monthly tournament happening in Northampton, UK at Wargames Workshop (not GW, its an independent shop). Each tournament in the year is counting towards a champion for the year too.

The next event is on 17th June and it an escalation one. 1st game 1000 points, 2nd 1500, 3rd 2000, each game just adds points to the previous army.

There is a trophy for the event too.

There is an entrance fee but its cheaper if you book a place in advance.

Details for the tournaments are at http://www.guardiansoftyr.com/40k-series.html or http://www.wargamesworkshop.com/

The events are organised by a couple of my mates that I've known for years now and they do a good job running campaigns etc.

I won the last one btw.

Tuesday, 17 April 2012

WOWTCG - I've been sucked into a card game - Aaaaaahhhhh

After many years of avoiding card games like Magic and the Wow (World of Warcraft for anyone living under a rock in a cave) card game I've finally caved in and bought a couple of decks for the Wow game. I've played Warhammer Invasion for a couple of years but its different in that you know what you're getting in a pack of cards, there aren't any boosters to gamble with. Now I've been sucked into the WoW game and I find myself buying 4 booster packs on amazon before work.....

In game terms the WoW card game isn't that hard to pick up. I'd say Invasion is much more complex; you have 3 zones which gives a possible 3 different roles for each card and there's buildings, units, heros, legends.... it all gets quite complicated. But in the WoW game you only pickup 1 card per turn, so thats simpler, your money is based on 1 per card rather than hammers etc, so thats simpler, there aren't any zones, you just kill the hero, so thats simpler too. Admittedly there's still tactics, attachments, weapons, armour and a plethora of other things too but its still easier to pick up than Invasion.

I should probably point out that I used to play the actual WoW on the computer. A lot. A hell of a lot. So I'm very familiar with the names of everything and all the in jokes like "LEEEERRROOOYY JEEEENNNKKINS!!!!". My sister still plays WoW a fair bit too. I hate to sound a bit cliché but I got a girlfriend and suddenly wow seemed less important. My girlfriend has shown some interest in the WoW card game when I was at a local tournament, so that have given me a fair bit of impetus to explore it.

For my first 2 decks I bought the Sylvanas Windrunner (hunter) for me and Jaina Proudmore (Mage) for my girlfriend. In each pack was a free booster pack with a bunch of random cards. There was a couple of hero cards, a shaman and one that I found quite weird for a hero, Iso'rath, a giant tentacle beast in the ground with a giant mouth. He's a bit like a Sarlacc from Star Wars but bigger, I think he uses mind control to make stuff work for him if I remember correctly from the computer game. There was also a loot card for a pet cat in the computer game, I gave it to my sister.

The game plays quite simply. You and your opponent start with 7 cards. You can put down cards as either face down money/resource cards or for their proper use. Quest cards get put down as esource cards too and you can pay resources to flip them over and complete the quest. Your other cards are allies, that you put in your ally zone for attacking etc, abilities (like tactics in Invasion) and equipment that you attach to your hero, like weapons or armour.

Its a fun game thats quite easy to pick up and probably hard and possibly expensive to master. I have 1 gripe about it though, why do I have to pay resources for my hero to attack?? It annoys me that I pay 1 resource to do one point of damage when I can pay for an ally that attacks for free! Nevermind, I'm sure someone will explain why its good at some point. Now I just want my 4 new booster packs to turn up, hooked on plastic crack and card crack now :(

Saturday, 7 April 2012

Last game of the Alaris Dream campaign

The end is upon us!


This week saw the last game of the 40k Alaris Dream campaign at my club. Throughout the campaign we had been fighting to get relics for our special characters. Now it was time to see who'd win them in the end. 

Imotekh makes it night time. My camera makes it sunset.

The last game was a 6v6 game with 1000 points each. We had to field our special characters if they were alive. The objective of the game was to collect relics from the other characters. All of the relics were on the same side though....... so we had to kill each other to get them..... 

For this mission the special rules were: 
   Your character had to move as quickly as possible to the nearest relic
   You were allowed to attack your allies
   After turn 1 your character must roll a reserves roll. If it is passed then they teleport away from the battle to a 2'x2' table to duke it out with the other characters

 Necron Warrior: I though you were our friends
Ork: Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggghhhh

As I had a relic I knew that my allies would turn on me. I kitted out Imotekh with a derpstar squad of lords, crypteks and an overlord. One cryptek had veil of darkness so I could teleport to whichever objective I wanted, one had a chronometron for re-rolls (which came very much in handy), one with an eldritch lance. The rest of my army was 3x5 warriors and 2 wraiths to annoy Mark because he loves them so much.

Imotekh has his lightning ability. As I knew everyone and their pet dog might be attacking me I decided to use his lightning  on every unit on the table that wasn't mine. All this did was kill an immolator that was nowhere near me and annoy a lot of people hehe.

A wraith proxied as my overlord because I'd left my overlord attached to his command barge at home. Doh!

The derpstar squad and Imotekh did really well. They almost killed a chaos lord who had 2 relics, killed most of his squad of CSM, killed a squad of 8 chaos termys too!! After all that they hadn't lost a single man (er necron?). The chronometron came in handy to re-roll Imotekhs teleporting away roll when I didn't want him to go. 


By turn 5 Imotekh teleported onto the small table of doom. On there already was an Ork warboss, a Chaos Lord, Typhus, a Grey Knight character, The Swarmlord and a guard Psyker character. Imotekh sucks in combat so I knew I was doomed.

Crazy things happened though. The Swarmlords psychic powers killed a 2 or 3 of the enemy characters. Imotekh killed the warboss. Imotekh then got stuck into combat with the chaos lord he'd been trying to kill all game. The chaos lord had other ideas though. He had a relic that let him re-roll failed saves and I didn't have a power weapon, so he effectively had a 2+/2+FNP! We failed to kill each other and eventually the swarmlord killed us all.
So in the end the Swarmlord won the campaign by only winning the last game. Congrats to Matt Franklin who normally doesn't have much luck playing 40k. I'm happy with how Imotekh did, he was fielded in 6 out of the 7 games in the campaign and only died at the end. He did fail his one and only we'll be back roll though grrrr.


Thanks to Ian and Barrie Wardle of Guardians of Tyr, it was great fun. If I did the campaign again I'd probably choose Mephiston instead as there was a lot of character combat involved. Now I need to finish writing the campaign I was planning......

RAFWA weekend 40k tournament fun

Last weekend I went to my first RAFWA (Royal Air Force Wargaming Association) event. It was a 3 day event at a hotel from Friday night to Sunday. There was all sorts of games being played including aerial combat, boats, historical, sci-fi, rpg and other things too. 

Mmm tasty trophies

I was taking part in the 40k tournament. 5 games over the 3 days. The first game was a combat patrol mission to decide who would go against who in the first proper game. The proper games were 1750 points, 2 objective missions and 2 annihilation missions. I used my Necron scarab farm army.
Imotekh, cryptek with chronometron, 7 warriors all in a ghost ark.
7 warriors in a ghost ark.
Overlord with warscythe in a command barge.
6 wraiths with whip coils.
11 scarabs in 2 squads.
9 canoptek spyders in 3 squads. 

 Canoptek Goodness

The first game I played was against Dark Angels. It was a 400 point combat patrol mission with victory points (not kp). I won this game using some warriors and 6 wraiths with whip coils. Wraiths are still awesome!

The 2nd game (1750) I played was against Dark Eldar. We had a dawn of war annihilation mission. I decided to go 2nd and keep my entire army off table. The Dark Eldar came right up close to my board edge on turn 1, big mistake. 1st thing I did was bring on my command barge, 24 inches and sweep attack over his transport holding a bunch of incubi. The transport died, yay. Then I brought on the rest of my army. By the first turn assault phase I had my 6 wraiths in combat with one wych squad, 6 tomb spyders in combat with his incubi and his other wych squad had been decimated by gauss fire. In the 2nd turn he charged his archon into combat with my spyders, prompty failed to wound them and failed all but one of his 2+ inv saves, getting instant squished in the process. The rest of the game pretty much carried on like this except for his flyer which refused to die even with a whole necron army trying to kill it for 2 turns.

3rd game was against Dark Angels. I didn't know anyone still played DA and I got to play against 2 at this event! His army had 3 squads of termys as troops and some other shooty stuff. First couple of turns I took a pummelling from his shooting. Then the termys came down and I thought it was game over. But I still had a formidable amount of scarabs being built. I'd built of a squad of 30+ scarab bases and they'd pretty much taken the entire right half of the table by themselves, this was the area with no termys though. From the middle to the left half of the table 2 squads of termys held 2 objectives and there was a squad between them. Somehow my scarabs in the space of 3 turns managed to wipe through these 3 squads. Eventually I was contesting the far left objective with about 10 bases of scarabs and one terminator. There were no other Dark Angels left alive and I held one objective with about 4 warriors and Imotekh. Victory!


4th game was a particularly laboured and painful exercise. It was a game against a guard mech army. So far every opponent he'd played against got really pissed off with him and I was no exception. I nearly scraped a draw. It was a game of 2 objectives, one in each deployment zone. I had managed to destroy his troops controlling his one and nearly contested the one in my zone but he had a chimera with a vet squad in it. Sometimes I have fun loosing and sometimes I don't enjoy winning. This was definitely a game I did not enjoy at all. I'm not going to make any accusations about things being done wrong on here.

Instant killing power weapons...... oh crap....

I love command barges now!

5th game was a kill point game against Grey Knights being played by a GW manager. I lost this game entirely but I had fun doing it and that's what matters in a game. He didn't use any vehicles, it was mostly terminators. His army was the best painted army I played against too which made it better. I did manage to do some strange things in this game. Imotekh single handedly beat a squad of terminators in combat, bear in mind he doesn't have a power weapon. My scarabs managed to remove the armour save from his boss character before they died, he then got shot by gauss and died. 


 Whats that coming over the hill? Is it a Grey Knight, is it a Grey Kniiiiight?

It was a great event. We had dinner provided and other things to keep us occupied in the evenings. My gf had a bit too much to drink and we went to a very bizarre chinese restaurant where the waiter didn't know what soy sauce was or what green tea looked like. In the tournament I came 3rd somehow and got a nice trophy, the annoying guard army came first and the Grey Knights I lost to came 2nd. I did manage to claim 2nd in 2 painting categories as well but I didn't get a trophy for that :(   I found that canoptek scarabs and spyders aren't as good in a tournament as I thought they'd be, too many people know how to kill them quickly for my liking.



I look forward to the next RAFWA event in October.