July Hobby Roundup

Well July continues and COVID lockdowns in other parts of the country mean that there have been no gaming with Reilly or my usual mates in Sydney. But we have been lucky where I am and I have started a small 6 player Blood Bowl league with club mates which has been a blast!  

The new Man Cave Stadium can facilitate 3 matches concurrently

As Commissioner, my focus has been getting everyone onto the new BB2020 rules and doing some player development. We have a broad range from experienced to brand new coaches, and everyone has a different race so there is quite a bit of diversity.

To help the coaches enjoy the league experience, I have been publishing a newsletter after each round, which has been well received

This season I have resurrected (!) my Vampire Team as the Capital Crusaders. As you expect from a Tier 2 team, they have been a bit slow off the mark but I am having fun with them.

Separately, I have been playing with Tabletop Simulator with some of the Sydney lads. To be honest I'm not enamoured with the pseudo miniatures games part of that, but the board wargame modules are superb - like upgunned versions on Vassal really. Hoping we can get a few more games going semi-regularly.

Back to the Deathwing

Getting out Space Hulk last week got me in the groove to add some jazz up my Deathwing models. I painted them over a decade ago now in a deliberately grimy style. Having recently discovered the "Grimdark" style of painting, I decided to experiment with enamel washes and chipping effects.

Here is how they were...

and a comparison mid project

Overall I'm very happy and have some characters in progress, but I had forgotten what a pain enamels can be and how long they take to fully dry and cure.

June Hobby Round up

June saw my terrain painting focus continue, though we did play a variety of games along the way.

Really visually exciting was this great 40k Necrons v AdMech thowdown with my mate Patch and his 10 year old apprentice Commanders. This was the christening of the big urban battle terrain tiles and I was really pleased with how it all came out, with the colours in both lovely armies really popping on the light and desaturated tiles.

Also played a big game of General d'Armee at club buddy John's house, in which I commanded a wonderful looking French Division and marched it to its spectacular doom while assaulting an allied British and Spanish defensive line

Along the way Reilly did some work on our old Tyranid Army, adding a few more units to the Swarm and pitting them again a few of his University mates.

I also introduced two new gamers to our gaming group and have been playing soem games with them. Markus has a lovely Deathwatch Kill Team and we hav played 2 and 3 playr games of that recently which was fun.

This was the Necron that just wouldn't die - he soaked up 4 flesh wounds and kept repairing the damage! Reilly painted a honour mark on his after the battle

These are my Space Hulk terminators, most decades old. The Blood Angels on the left are from the original metal box release that I got in my University days

Comrade James and I unearthed our classic Terminators and threw down for a few Space Hulk missions. We tried to dial in Reilly (in Sydney COVID lockdown)  to command the Genestealers but we need to work on the tech to enable that better

I also help my mate Gavin start to base his Ancient. Now Gav never does anything by halves, so I'm talking about 500 Spartans, 500 Athenians plus some Cavalry and skirmishers. He is using 32 figure units on 2 bases, and all the figures are painted so we had to work out a way of basing that looks good, is storable, and is easily repeatable.  We potted about for a few hours and settled on this process:

This is the completed test unit on the table and looking the business, arrayed for battle. Gavin has now industrialised the process and I cant wait to see them all finished! He is now muttering about adding another few hundred Thebans to the mx...

And finally, I have been running some demo games of Blood Bowl so we can get a small League running in July. Cant wait!

Urban Terrain Table - completd!

Upon scheduling a game of 40k this week, I decided enough was enough and that they were going to be done to a playing standard. In the end it took just 2 days to complete the 32 tiles and finish an 8 x 4 board which we played on today. As always it was much simpler in practice than from overthinking it.

One of my WIP test pics

Earlier this year I bought a second hand set of the Secret Weapon Damaged Urban Tiles set- unpainted and very nice - also sadly OOP now (their website states that the manufacturer stole their moulds!). the 16 1 foot square tiles build a very nice 4 x 4 table - not quite big enough, so I put them to one side before finding another set a few months later. I had Ideas for them but as you know, perfect is the enemy of good enough and so nothing happened.

Upon scheduling a game of 40k this week, I decided enough was enough and that they were going to be done to a playing standard. In the end it took just 2 days to complete the 32 tiles and finish an 8 x 4 board which we played on today- much simpler in practice than through overthinking it.

Spray painted - generic grey, with a flat black on the roadways. Just cheap spray primer from the hardware store.

Base coated with a stippling and heavy drybrushing techniques. Reilly helped me and we got all of this done in about 5 hours.  We used sample paint pots: British Paints "Knowledge" for the roads and XXX for the tiles. This deliberately kept the whole board fairly bright, but also unsaturated in colour so that miniatures and building will really pop.

Even at this stage the initial test look was pretty satisfying.

Then we did a few washes and highlights, added some ocre colours into a few muddy shell holes for colours, and silvered up the manhole covers, drainage grills.

While at it, I did some scatter terrain in the same colours to match

And thus we were away today with some friends and had a lot of fun on a great looking table.

I quite like how they are period generic and genre agnostic - no skulls etc so they are as applicable for Stalingrad or Berlin in WW2, as they are for the Defence of Cadia in the Grimdark future.  I'd like to find a few of the undamaged tiles to give me a few more options and some larger, flat areas for key terrain. Overall though, a great project to do (and complete) in just a few days.