Resuming blogging

It I about time I started writing stuff down. Sadly I missed the last few weeks of the APC this year and dropped in the rankings. I had grand plans to finish lots of different projects, but in the end got sidetracked with a number of new clients at work that required travel. Thankfully I did manage to close off a couple of projects and start the long awaited terrain project. The full gallery of bits and pieces can be found on my Google Photos.

The plus side to this year is that I have already achieved two of my secret goals. The first was to get one of my figures up on the GW main site. You can still see it there along side the official Great Unclean One images :D

The second was to actually enter a painting competition in my local GW. Just after the end of APC they ran a competition where everyone had to paint the special edition terminator captain. I was the only one that did any updates to the figure, by including the Deathwatch pad and icon on the Iron Halo.

I'm very pleased to say that he came in second place, much to the slight disgust (I'm sure) of all the regulars as I only ever go in to buy paint and leave straight away. They must have been "Who is this guy and why is he entering our competition?!" The guy who came in first had done some very very smooth transitions on the armour and some freehand iconography, so I'm not surprised he came in first. People did assume the shoulder pad on mine was a transfer though, which is a nice compliment. I wasn't convinced the red circle was quite good enough, which is why there are scratches and chips all over it.

Next self-challenge is to enter more of the local competitions and improve the smoothness of the painting a bit more.

Calth musings

I grew up on GW games, I love the universes that they created (until the Warhammer world went kablooey, but that is another matter)... but a while back I stopped buying anything except paint from them as the prices were just too darn expensive. When the Horus Heresy game came out late last year I was interested, but managed to hold off on buying it as I need space marines like a hole in the head... pretty though they may be.

Today Aidan picked up a copy and we've been looking through the very very heavy box full of goodies. Damn it looks nice. The rules are very simple, but that works nicely as a board game, and the scenarios look like fun, especially the dual board one.  I'm still managing to hold off on picking up a copy, but it did make me stop and think... about the same time that Betrayal at Calth was released, GW announced the return of Specialist Games.

I can't help but wonder if Calth was a calculated way of experimenting with a simple ruleset and people's willingness to build multipart models for a board game. The box contains so many Heresy era marines that it was a guaranteed sell to a massive proportion of their current and past followers. 

I can just imagine playing a version of Necromunda on boards like these...

I can see the turn sequence and card mechanics working really well for Necromunda and Mordheim as they add a lot of interactions between the sides and interesting events through the card decks. It wouldn't take too much work to include multiple layers by saying the red outlined items can't be directly passed through, but can be accessed via ladders or walk ways (for example). We shall have to see what happens with Specialist Games over the coming months...