Some Shout-Outs and Some Thanks!

First things first, where the hell did the first half of October go?  I'd swear it should only be the fifth or sixth today, not the sixteenth.

Anyway, I wanted to promote a couple bloggers who are running prize draws  Carl over at Hitting on a Double 1 has a bunch of WW2 books up for grabs to celebrate 25K hits on his blog.  By the same token, Jonathan at Palouse Wargaming Journal is marking his blog's anniversary by giving away a variety bundle of earlier books.  Make sure you head over and check out each blog.

Next up I'd like to thank Ian (or more accurately, Ian's wife) at The Blog With No Name for running a Blogger's secret santa this year.  I now know who I'm getting a gift for, although I've no idea what to get them yet!  I'm looking forward to seeing who gets what later on in the year.

Lastly, big thanks to Jody over at Frontline Gamer for hooking me up with the a couple new games; Dwarf Kings Hold and Green Menace by Mantic Games.  Jody is moving shorty to another country and, in an extremely generous move, is offering a lot of games to "good homes" rather than put them into storage.  Jody and I started blogging at roughly the same time as each other and his blog has been a constant inspiration to me.  Best of luck on the move fella.

I love dungeon crawl games, but most of those I own are pretty meaty affairs taking quite a while to set up and play (Descent 2nd and the D&D adventure games in particular.) These Mantic games are a real scoop to pick up, nice and light rules and, best of all, the miniatures have already been assembled and the cards have already been punched out.  Result.

Thanks to all these bloggers, keep up the good work everyone!

Look! I Actually Picked Up A Brush

After what seems like weeks of procrastinating (ok it was after weeks of procrastinating) I managed to pick up a paint brush again today.  Originally, the plan was to do some prep work on a couple different projects and get a lot of priming done.  There's some rather wet weather on the way, so I'd like enough figures primed to do me over the winter.  The rain arrived early so forced me to change my mind and out came the paints.

First things first,  I had to spend a good wee while shaking and stirring the neglected tubs and bottles to even the paint out.  Fortunately, my right arm has developed considerable stamina in that motion, so it wasn't a problem.  Without getting all emo-whiny on you, I normally only paint when I'm happy and relaxed;  I haven't been either in a while, so it was quite a surprise how enjoyable the couple hours with the brush were this afternoon.

These are the first eight warriors for a Saga Viking warband that have been kicking around for a few months. Just the base colours so far, I'll add some decoration before the shading and highlighting begins.  As Odin is my witness, I will get this warband painted this year, before this:

Just fyi, for anyone who hasn't finished season one, there's a big spoiler in the trailer.

New X-Wing Ship - The Tie Bomber

So what's better than buying yourself a little geeky something (or Mr Visa buying you something?)  Well it's getting something bought for you!

Cheers then for my mate Adam for picking me up a Tie Bomber for X-Wing! Nice.

Fantasy Flight obviously know their audience; the TIE Bomber is easily the least cool ship from the original films, so they've compensated by making the rules for it terrific.  Cheap and loaded with ordnance seems to be the way to go with it.

The usual FFG bundle of cards and cardboard features.

A nice enough pre-painted model, but, like the rest of the X-Wing range, would benefit from some touch ups or insignia markings. It'll get to the table in a couple of weeks hopefully, up against another new model, the B-Wing.

Dropzone Commander Starter Set

Mr Visa has kindly provided another new shiny wargame project, the Dropzone Commander Starter set. Now I already have two of the starter faction boxes, so this was a bit of an extravagance, but as it's such a great deal, it was hard to refuse.  Besides, I might try and rope someone from the club to help paint these up.  Btw, Mr Visa is great for this kind of purchase, coming just before payday, but he does have an annoying habit of demanding to be paid on time!  Come on, lighten up...

Dropzone Commander has been out for about a year now and, judging from various forums and the blogosphere, has gained a fair player base.  Despite a lot of positive reviews, DZC initially drew attention to itself by simply being very expensive, in terms of cash, to get into. The resin starter sets were a touch on the pricey side, but the big issue was the range of resin buildings (no need to go over old ground, but they were phenomenally expensive.)

One of three identical UCM Sprues.  Lots of small, plastic parts!

Hawk Wargames, the publishers, have obviously taken this to heart and, over the course of the last few months, taken steps to mitigate these criticisms.  Firstly, they reduced the price of the resin buildings; still expensive but a welcome decision.  Secondly, they released templates for gamers to print out their own card buildings and table at home, for free, great stuff.  Thirdly, they released a card building and terrain box for those who couldn't or wouldn't print their own.  This new starter box caps this off this process by producing two of the four starter factions in plastic.

To illustrate the saving, the RRP of this starter set and any of the original faction boxes are the same, but this new box gives you double the number of miniatures as well as all the extras.  As I understand it, Hawk Wargames are, or were, originally something of a one man band, so I can only commend them on producing a fantastic game.

An excellent rulebook; concise, clear, filled with great pics and background material.

So, what do you get in the box?  Well, first off there are the two sets of miniatures, the United Colonies of Mankind (UCM) and the Scourge.  Each force consists of three dropships, six tanks, two APCs and six bases of infantry.  The miniatures are identical in design to the original resin models, but the detail to my eyes is slightly shallower on the plastic.  In particular, the infantry seem to suffer from this more than the vehicles. Bear in mind that DZC is a 10mm scale game, so on the tabletop, you won't see any different between the two materials.

In addition to the figures is the rulebook.  It's an updated 1.1 rulebook, so those of you who own the original rulebook will notice some changes.  Just so you know, all the rule and unit stat changes in the new rulebook are and have been available on the DZC website, so you're not missing any crucial information here.  The rulebook itself is pretty lush (do the kids still say lush?)  156 pages long, 53 of those being introduction, rules and scenarios.  The remainder covers the game background, the individual factions and their army lists. Plenty of gamer porn is on display; some of the displays are gorgeous.  Topping things off, the rulebook has a brief contents and a comprehensive index.  Nice.

The Scourge sprue, only the dropship needs any real assembly.

The two paper maps are placed next to each other to create a 4x3' urban table, on which the ten card buildings can be arranged to suit. The buildings are all from a fairly hard cardstock and, although they stand up on their own, will need glued together for an actual game.  DZC has a distinctive, almost art-deco style for the buildings; I personally think they look great, but I can see how they wouldn't be to everyone's taste. The buildings are a fair old size too, not like the old card Epic 40K buildings, the skyscraper is a good 9" tall. As this size of a building has an impact in game with the different flying units, it's good to see this this in the starter box.

In addition to the rulebook and terrain, are there three reference sheets, an assembly guide and a sheet of cardboard tokens and templates.  The reference sheets haven't appeared as is before and are very clear and well laid out.  The reference sheets cover the turn sequence, the main combat tables and all profiles and rules for the forces in the box.  Although there are several scenarios in the main rulebook, the reverse of the main reference sheet has a scenario specifically balanced for the starter armies, again, great attention to detail.

The UCM Bear APC.  Although it's in six parts, I put this together in a couple minutes.

The tokens are a handy addition.  Although many gamers will have a fair collection of tokens and blast markers (GW?) their inclusion here makes that a moot point.  I'd have preferred a thicker cardstock here, but that really is splitting hairs.  There are plenty of tokens, more than you'd likely need for even a large game.

Rounding off the box is a bag of ten D6s and, charmingly, a miniature Hawk-branded tape measure.  A lovely touch.

10mm scale.  Small, but an impressive level of detail.

In my opinion, this is easily the single best starter box available for any wargame, ever.  The Warmachine/Hordes are pretty close, but the fact that everything you need to start playing is here, terrain included, coupled with the price, means this is a real winner.  Actually, not only does the box have everything you need to play a small game, but there has been enough attention to detail for you to easily play a small game; tokens, reference sheets, scenario, even a tape measure.  Great stuff.

Obviously I haven't yet touched on the background or the rules mechanics; I'll have another post at some point covering these.  Until next time...

Blood Bowl Team Manager

We didn't have anything definite arranged at the club this week, so I took along Blood Bowl Team Manager for a trial run.  This is one of Fantasy Flight's Games Workshop licensed games, based on the classic fantasy American football tabletop game.

Each player takes control of one of six teams for the course of a season, draws players, drafts star players, recruits coaching and backroom staff and participates in each game week.  It's quite an odd affair, especially considering the original game; players don't complete individual matches.  Instead, each turn consists of the players drawing a highlights reel - a row of cards with different combinations of rewards - representing something like a a sports summary television show like Match of the Day or NFL Gameday.  Individual player cards are placed next to a highlight in an effort to collect the reward on that card.

Essentially, you're getting a snapshot of what happened over a course of series of games, not winning and losing specific matches.  The aim of the game is also a little left of centre; instead of accruing the most points or "winning" most game weeks, the aim is to accumulate the most fans.  Not a problem in the game (in fact, the fan mechanic is handled very well,) but these two factors make Blood Bowl Team Manager a little counter-intuitive.

Still, once you've got your head around the unorthodox set up and premise, quite an entertaining little game unfolds. BBTM plays pretty quickly and, as every player regularly acquires new cards to use, there is very little down time in the game.  There are a nice mix of mechanics in the game; most cards have optional abilities to use, tackling uses dice, cheating needs a risk/reward decision, star players are (unsurprisingly) powerful.  Even the scoring system gives you some interesting choices to make; do you take the fans to get an early lead, or do you forgo fans to try and recruit better players or coaching staff.

Six teams are available to choose from in the base game, all from the Warhamer world; humans, dwarves, wood elves, orcs, skaven and chaos.  FFG have done a great job in differentiating between the different teams, the Skaven for instance, sneaky and underhand, make heavy use the cheating mechanic, the Orcs favour bludgeoning their opponents while the humans, who can do a bit of everything, are simultaneously great at nothing!

FFG say this game is for 2-4 players, but we realised very quickly that the two player experience is very disappointing.  Simply put, there's only one real tactic for both players in a two player game and once one player gets ahead, it's nigh on impossible for the other player to catch up.  However, I've no doubt that in a three or four player game, neither of these issues would be a problem.

Overall, Blood Bowl Team Manager is a decent enough game, one I really want to like, but would need to play a larger game to make sure.  The game itself is full of Blood Bowl humour and flavour; two commentators appear and have witty banter printed on many of the cards and the artwork overall is excellent.

I picked up the base game and the expansion well below the RRP.  I can't say I would pay full price for them, but if you get a cheap enough copy and enjoy multi-player board or card games, Blood Bowl Team Manager is a pretty good deal.

Dark Age Church

One thing that is noticeably lacking from my collection is decent amount of scenery.  To correct that, I've been gradually picking up some pre-painted bits and pieces, primarily dark age buildings.

The latest and potentially final building is this Church or Manor building.

I picked it up on eBay buy a company called PMC Games for a very reasonable price.  It's a fairly hefty chunk of resin with a decent enough paint job   Actually, as the first model was damaged in the mail, so I should point out the excellent service from PMC, who provided an immediate replacement.  Thanks. 

I might do some work on it, as the walls and ground are a bit too similar to my eyes, but it's usable enough as is.  The roof is separate, which is handy for any games that involve entering buildings.

With this, I've now got enough buildings for a reasonable sized game of Saga or Dux Bel/Brit. Still on the shopping list are some linear obstacles (Renedra do a wattle fence sprue which might do) and some areas of rough terrain (which I think I'll try and do myself.)  I'd also like a well for the small village, anyone know of a suitable 28mm scale model? 

This week's posts have been rescheduled due to. . . pain.

I've put on a wee bit of beef that last couple months, culminating in topping 14 stone (only briefly though!) in July. Well, "that's enough of that" I said, so I've been cycling and doing some weights recently, but the other day I started back running.

The only plausible explanation I can think of is that I suddenly gained twenty or so years, because I'm an absolute wreck!  Cricket is my sport of choice, so running more than 22 yards in one go is a bit unusual for me.  Still, I ran for the university athletics club and that wasn't that long ago, was it?  In fact, I feel pretty good during the runs, it's when everything seizes up afterwards that's the problem; legs (obviously,) arse, abs, shoulders, neck, everything.  I even slept on the couch last night, instead of facing the torture of the staircase! Ugh.

So, I do have a couple posts to put up, but every time I've sat down to write this week, I've fallen asleep (to be fair, work is unexpectedly hectic, so that's not helping.)  Some pics should hopefully appear here soon then as well as some thoughts on a new card game I've picked up. Until then, zzzzzzzzzzzz.