Thursday 28 December 2017

Terraforming Mars

Something a little different.

I occasionally play boardgames as well as wargames. There's so many of these available now it's hard to keep track and I usually find that someone else at the club has bought the a game before me, so to be honest I just don't. However I do sometimes root around in Boardgame Geek to see what the latest thing is.

One recent game that got my interest was Terraforming Mars. It went out of print for a while but when it started to be restocked I bought a copy. The thing about Terraforming Mars is though it's pretty it's not amazingly pretty. Unlike with some games the effort seems to have gone into the game itself and not the look of it. This has given me chance to improve on that look in particular the tiles.

I'd seen various 3d printer versions of the tiles and then someone's own hand made items. So I looked in my bits box and found that the hexes I used in my Dreadball pitch which I made before starting this blog, were exactly the same size as the Terraforming Mars hexes and I had loads left over. This made my mind up.

I first created the sea, city and greenery tiles and we've been using those for a while now. Over the Christmas break I've extended the collection to include all the special tiles. Now I just need to get another game in...






Friday 22 December 2017

Burgundian Pikemen

I've just finished some Burgundian Pikemen for my Wars of the Roses army. 

I decided to put extra banners in these as it fits in with the masses of vertical pikes.

Here they are along with all the other parts of the army including all the fantasy elements.






Saturday 2 December 2017

Big Kings of War game at Red on Blue in Nottingham (Robin)

We'll be running one of our massive Kings of War games at the Robin show in Nottingham on Sunday 11th February 2018.

We have 20ft x 6ft of table space for us this time with plenty of miniatures and terrain already available. What we really need help with is players. From experience a game of this size really needs at least 5 players a side.

So if you can help please let me know!

If you have armies to bring as well, then that's a bonus, but it's not a requirement! Also knowledge of Kings of War rules is not needed.

Even if you can't attend all day then we'll be letting passing players help out as well on the day.




Tuesday 28 November 2017

Doom Bunny!!!

I picked up this Ral Partha model a while ago now. But since I needed a special model to use as "Matt the Muted" for the upcoming Four Foot Snake - Kings of War tournament I decided it was time to paint it up.



Sunday 19 November 2017

Captured Dragon Turtle

As part of the fantasy elements for my Kings of War - Wars of the Roses army I decided I'd like to add a Beast of War. These are normally great beasts, like elephants or mammoths with howdahs so I looked around for something suitable.

I plumped for the Reaper Bones dragon turtle, but when playing around with it decided I thought a howdah would probably look pretty silly. However I didn't give up on it and came up with the idea that the beast would be goaded into battle by troops with spears and pole arms.

Following on from the Pegasus Knight in the last post, this one has been based around Burgundians. It's been my first attempt at painting standard Burgundian troops. I have a lot more of them to do yet.






Sunday 12 November 2017

Pegasus Knight

I'm really very pleased how this has come out...

It's a Pegasus Knight for use with my Kings of War - Wars of the Roses army that I've been working on. The first of the fantasy elements. The idea is that this army will be usable both in historical games and fantasy ones.

The model itself is one of the Fireforge Pegasus Knights but with a Perry Wars of the Roses Knight rider on it. The hand-painted heraldry is based on that of the Charles the Bold of Burgundy, Edward IV's brother-in-law. Future additions to the army will consist of Burgundian pike-men, hand gunners and crossbowmen, so Charles makes a good leader. I'll probably also do some other fantasy elements for the Burgundians. I like the idea that Edward has brought in strange foreign beasts to help him.







Wednesday 8 November 2017

Animals!

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago I bought some farm animals from Warbases. I just finished painting them all last night. These will be used as general scatter to set the theme of my terrain for games such as Lion Rampant.

My daughter loves them and I'm rather pleased. I may have to get more of the range.





The ducks will eventually be glued onto a pond I have.


Also whilst at Derby World Wargames I picked up a few packs of scenery from Iron Gate Scenery. These are all excellent value 3d printed pieces. So far all I've painted is their "Torture Cage" which I've populated with a Wargames Factory plastic skeleton. This is wonderful value for what you get and I don't think the structure would have been easy to replicate using any other technology.






Saturday 4 November 2017

120 Gun French Napoleonic Ship 1/1200

With more games of Fighting Sail expected soon I decided it was time to get the last ship of my French fleet completed.

She's a 120 gun 1st Rate ship from Langton's. I do love putting these together, they're quite a bit of effort, but the effort put in really is rewarded well with the final product.


This was the first ship I built according to the guidelines in the assembly guide that Langton's sell on their website. Previously I'd been following a article from a very, very, very old wargames magazine.

I also spent some extra time researching it online. I'm really pleased with how this one has come out.




My entire fleet...


Next up is some Spanish...

Two Months...

Just over two months since the last post... oops!

Well to be honest it's not because I've been lazy, more that I've been exceptionally busy. A lot of this was with non-wargaming stuff. i.e. re-enactments of various types. However there have been a few notable Wargames going on in that time. A quick run-down...

A Lion Rampant game with Ed. A favourite game of ours, but one I've posted photos of before. This decided me that I really needed to get some animals for my farms and village. These  have bought from Warbases and am actually just about to start painting.




A new game in the last couple of months has been Warpath: Firefight. We've played it a couple of times at the club and also demoed it at Derby World Wargames. I really like the game, but either I'm a superb player (doubtful) or the balance isn't quite sorted out for the Plague. I needs some mods I think.

It's been fun getting this table together, but tremendously easy. The buildings are from Deadzone and the boards & hills actually date back to games of Battletech and Starship Troopers I ran at shows many, many, many years ago.





I got a new display cabinet for my miniatures... The less used ones that I still want to see. The idea was that this would make space for me to make a display board for my Kings of War armies, but that project has been shelved for the time being.




I did remember finally to take photos of the bombed out church that my son Brendan made for his school project last year!




I got a game in of Fighting Sail with Ed and that prompted me to get my last French ship painted and rigged. See the next post for photos of that.




And of course there have been a few games of Kings of War including two tournaments, Battlemasters and Clash of Kings. Both enjoyable events that I took my Abyssals to. I now have plans to extend my Wars of the Roses army.


But yes... most of my efforts in the last two months have been re-enactment and bicycle related...



Those are just about finished now... and since it's out-of-season I'm hopefully going to be back on track with modelling.





Saturday 26 August 2017

Plague Ready for Warpath:Firefight

One of the great things about Deadzone, as well as it being a great game in itself, is that Mantic have made their new system, Warpath (and Firefight it's skirmish ruleset) completely compatible with the same models.

This has meant that it's been a doddle to extend my existing Deadzone Plague collection to make a usable force for Firefight.

I've just completed the few models I needed to make myself a 1000pt (actually 999) force ready for a my first game next Monday. The force might be completely rubbish. I have no idea. It's just what I managed to make up using as many of the painted models I already had.


The force consists of:
  • 3rd Gens
    • 3x 3rd Gen
    • 2x Dog/Swarm
    • 2x 3rd Gen Flamethrower
  • 3rd Gens
    • 3x 3rd Gen
    • 2x Dog/Swarm
    • 1x 3rd Gen Grenade Launcher
    • 1x 3rd Gen HMG
  • 3rd Gens Mortar Battery
    • 4x 3rd Gen
    • 1x 3rd Gen Mortar Team
  • 3x 2nd Gen "Leapers"
  • 20x Plague Zombies
  • 1x Aberration
  • 1x Strider
  • 1x Teraton
  • 1x 1st Gen Mutant

Thursday 6 July 2017

Some new Hirst Arts bits

A while back I posted some work-in-progress shots of my latest Hirst Arts creations. Well I actually finished them a month or so back, but have only just got around to photoing them.

First is the octagonal tower. This is an exact copy of the one on the Hirst Arts site, following the guide on there. I did it in order to get used to using the octagonal tower mould before using it for other projects. I added in an internal staircase as suggested on the Hirst Arts site.




As well as this I also made some more dungeon pieces. These should now mean I can make a 3ft x 3ft dungeon without having to use any of the Master Maze bits.






I'll be using these new pieces with the rest of the stuff when we're running our Frostgrave games at the Barrage Wargames Show this coming Sunday in Stafford.