As mentioned in the last fantasy post, I've been working on stubby little dwarves. Here are some photos of the "army" in its current state.
The force so far is the basic contents of the newish starter box for The Old World though I've gone ahead and swapped out one gyrocopter for a Dwarf King from the Skull Pass set.
Believe it or not, it's that time again. July saw 33 games played, bringing the yearly total up to 187. I played a few favorites, (Toy Battle 4 times in a row for example) Scout, Ark Nova, Ironwood. I also played a few unplayed titles. As you can tell I'm sure, the pendulum has been swinging back towards wargaming though to me, its all linked. So as usual, let's begin with;
A dry euro from Capstone, designed by the same designer of SETI, sign me up. This is a game that I saw on several Origins haul posts. When it arrived at my FLGS I grabbed a copy and it hit the table pretty quick. There's not a ton to this game in terms of innovation but it is a solid Euro experience and it does what it does very well. The iconography was a lot to process at first but by the end I was quite impressed. A very solid game.
The first of two Kickstarter games on this months list, Farm hand is a small box trick taker. In a ever evolving world of "Trick taker games with a list of twists to the formula," Farm Hand sure is a "trick taker with a list of twists to the formula." I happen to love these but YMMV. In short, this is a trick taker that has things like, increasing number of cards each round, if two players play the same number they're out for the hand, and bigging on number of wins. Its also a solid experience and one I'd break out at any chance.
This is a classic I'm told. It uses a "I cut, you choose" mechanic which is pretty unique. It fits my usual theming, tile laying interests. There's not a ton to say about this one but I found it super enjoyable and different from most of what I've played lately. Each turn you take your tiles and split them. Each player then chooses to take either the large pile or the small pile from their neighbor. You keep what they don't take. It leads to a lot of interesting decisions in a very short time.
This is the latest kickstarter from Allplay to deliver. Twinkle, Twinkle is a tile laying tableau builder. Much like River Valley the game is simple but offers some fun "high score chasing" gameplay. Its quick to play and has rather nice clear tiles that allow for all sorts of placement. Theres a rather large expansion and my only real criticism of this one is that the core box is too small to fit the expansion content.
Two player trick taker. Trick taking games typically need more players or have some sort of core change to the rules to allow for two. This is a purpose built two player trick taker. The main mechanic involves what is effectively a dummy team mate but it all just works so well. I really enjoyed this one and it fits in my "break it out and get in a quick game on a school night" box. It's rather simple but the game is real snappy and I enjoy trick takers.
So there you have it. The games this month all fell on the simpler side but it was a nice batch to try out. The pendulum has been swinging hard back towards wargaming and painting lately so even though I've been keeping up on the board games my main interest is gravitating towards painting again. I've nearly got the dwarves totally done and am nearly ready to get in some games with them. I managed a horus heresy game as well as a barons war one. Lots of exciting stuff.
As mentioned in the original Fantasy Gaming post, there is a pretty long list of rulesets on my radar. One of the sort of "to-do" list items of my gaming and painting career as of late is to finally try Mordheim for example. I don't imagine it will be a ruleset I become obsessive over but as it does require quite a bit of terrain I figured it would make for a good project.
I have about half a table worth of terrain printed so far. The buildings are a mix of Printable Scenery's Shadowfey Ruins and the Hexengarde range. This first building was one of the "scatter ruins" pieces from Hexengarde.
There are about 3 of us who are going to end up painting the whole board eventually so I kept the paint jobs incredibly basic. Subscribing to my usual "quality, quantity etc" line of thinking I figure that even though I could take this piece quite a bit further, it makes more sense to make it quick and easily replicatable, even for non hobbyists.
I primed in black, drybrushed gray over the stones, wet brushed on the burnt umber and unbleached titanium colors. painted on the metal bits and called it a day.
I was a little hesitant to post this because I have no idea how soon were getting together to paint the rest of the stuff and it may be a while but because this building only took 33 minutes to paint and I could use a little more respite from the Dwarf project I wanted to crack this out and see how it looked.
On the dwarf front. I have just half a unit of warriors and the copter left to paint from the original batch. However disaster struck yesterday. Like a moron I had been keeping the box of dwarves on the same bench as the printer. I guess it finally shook them loose and after picking up the pieces I was left with this
I have since reglued almost all of it back together. The bolt thrower is damaged and I havent tried to repair it yet. The king lost his arm and has been mended. Almost everything else was just regluing to bases thankfully. I had just stuck the figures directly into the wet vallejo putty which as you can see was not a strong enough bond at all.
Anyway, we're nearing the end of this first milestone with them and I'm looking forward to showing the "completed" force pretty soon.
I managed to get my hands on a copy of the 2nd edition Barons War Starter box from Wargames Atlantic. I guess the demand has been so high for this box that WA pulled it from sale while they catch back up on casting it. I was going to wait, possibly even skip it entirely however with the announcement that it could be potentially difficult to find I decided to grab a box now.
I had ordered the 1st edition rule book along with some Test of Honor stuff quite a while ago and had intentions of playing the game anyway but never got a chance. Once Wargames Atlantic made the announcement they were doing plastic figures I picked up the first box of knights. I have a growing collection of Crusades era stuff as well though it's my understanding that the rules for all of the supplemental stuff will be updated later. As of the time of this post there are official bridging documents to get version one supplements to version 2.
Paul has wildly beaten me to the punch and already has something rediculous like 2k points done so I decided to tackle this project next. This is the start of one of the two "demo" forces supplied with the quick start guide. A unit of peasants with hand weapons and a unit of knights with swords and large shields. I decided that much like the Napoleonic project I'm not too fussed with the accuracy so i've decided to go with a Green/Cream colored force and a Yellow/Black to oppose. Loosely using the Game of Thrones Baratheon colors but frankly theyre both just schemes I like.
Returning for a bit to the Napoleonic Era. I printed up a batch of figures for Silver Bayonet. These are from Kool Kiwi. I think they're pretty nice. The sculpting is pretty good and they were super fun to paint.
I used more or less the regular French palette I've been using.
The sculpts are all unique and the price was right. In particular I like this vivandiere. I did a tiny bit of "freehand" on the details which worked nicely with the marine juice.
I have Spanish on the workbench next.
Over my time collecting in this hobby, one love I've really had has been Garage Kits. I've collected some models kits, some figure kits by companies like Andrea Miniatures or AK Interactive. Lots of little one off 28mm figures that I've bought solely to paint as what I've referred to as "cabinet pieces." Nothing with gaming intent just stuff to paint and look neat in a display cabinet.
This is one such piece.
I was in a manic mood yesterday and ended up spending quite a bit of time cleaning and organizing my hobby dungeon. I've run out of shelf space to store unfinished kits and such and now have some piles of boxes accumulating "near" the shelves. I bought some more storage tubs but had to make a decision to move another shelf to a large storage tote. After a lot of deliberation I decided it was time to box up all the plastic Bandai kits as well as a shelf or so of figure kits. I'm not sure why but it felt a little heartbreaking and a bit like a failure on my part. I think a lot of hardcore hobbyists may be able to relate. We buy these kits with good intention to paint them. As they accumulate dust and sit unopened it feels a bit like a wasted opportunity. So as I took each kit, wrote down what it was, and sent it to the bin I kept thinking "Oh! I can't bin this, I need to paint it." Then the rational part of me goes "then just take it out of the bin when you want to paint it you idiot." Still it's had me in a weird mood.
Now on to the awkward genesis of this piece itself.
This was a bust purchased probably some time around the first season of the Mandalorian from Blackheart Models at Wonderfest. Like all of my purchases I fully intended to paint it. I had just come hot off the heels of my Hannibal bust (from the hit TV show, Hannibal) and was itching to dive into another kit. I broke out this wonderful sculpt. I think it was maybe 3 parts? I said, this will be cake, have it done in a couple of days.
Here is a photo from August of 2022
Looming. Watching. Judging. One last one to sell the point, this ones from February of '23
Last night I had Scott over for some board games and made a joke about how it isn't finished yet in the context of all that organizing and realized I should probably just finish the thing. Applying a similar "quantity has a quality of it's own" rational to the bigger stuff is sort of a waste to me because the whole point is to look "pretty" but at some point something needs to give.
The base was a struggle but I chose to trust that process and after going to bed and looking again this morning I'm happy with it. Over a black base I used a blister pack sponge to mottle on Vallejo Tan Earth, Beige brown, and then Iraqi sand. I thinned out some Vallejo grey blue to do the rune looking bits.
I'm calling it done for now to move on to something else and clear off the desk. The next cabinet piece is partially primed and will see some paint this week maybe. Eagle eyed readers can probably see it in some of the other photos I've posted.
As a lot of (1) posts this one starts with a story.
Way back in the day, when I first dipped my toes into this hobby, I started with GW. After a trip to the mall resulted in a demo of 40k (Battle for Macragge specifically) and a stern "no that's way too expensive" from the parents I had the itch. A friend and I experimented with DND and a rudimentary skirmish game using legos that we made up but years later I dove head first into the hobby proper. I ended up going way off the deep end and purchasing the starter boxes for LOTR, Battle for Macragge and the WHF Battle for Skull Pass. A year or two after that I ended up getting the batallion box, as well as few odds and ends to add to those Dwarves.
Now here's the thing. Very shortly after buying all this stuff we ended up discovering Malifaux which resulted in my effectively not touching GW for years. The dwarves and the other projects were boxed up and moved into the back part of the closet as my journey took me from Malifaux to Infinity, to historical wargaming and then many years later, into Age of Sigmar.
During the awkward transisiton of editions, I ended up digging out the dwarves. Some of them had basic serviceably paintjobs for someone who at the time didnt know what he was doing. Ultimately though, I had moved on from them. I sold them for a penny to a friend of ours who wanted to get into Age of Sigmar with us. At the time I had left it at, "if you ever want to move them on again hit me up first and ill buy them back."
Another year or so and I broke out a couple dozen of them to try Warlords of Erewhon with Scott. At this point I did finish the scheme and update some of the models to match the new improved but still basic scheme. We tried the game a couple times and then back into storage they went.
These are some of the oldest models I own. Purchased at the dawn of my hobby career with my own money. This was one of my earliest steps into a world I had no idea would become so all consuming. There are grand plans this time around and my hope is that the journey will be part of the magic.
So what is this plan?
My plan is to take these dwarves, build an army out of them and then try the full suite of games. The first part of this plan is relatively simple. I'm going to start by "recreating" the newest starter box for the Warhammer Old World Dwarven army. This is 2 units of melee dwarves, 2 of shooty dwarves and 2 gyrocopters. There is one caveat which is that I only have 1 copter and don't really intend to buy a second.
That said, we're going to finish these dwarves and then Scott and I are going to play a series of games trying out a pretty long list of rulesets. I've split the list into two general categories; big battle and skirmish. See below
Big Battle:
Warhammer Old World
Battlecry
Warlords of Erewhon
Hobgoblin
Kings of War
OPR Fantasy, and OPR Regiments
Fantastic Battles
Skirmish:
OPR Skirmish
Thud and Blunder
Sword Weirdos
Saga Age of Magic
Warhost
Song of Blades and Heroes
Now this list is by no means comprehensive but it's a start. If you have a fantasy game that you love please let me know what it is and I'll give it a shot.
Now in all the years of fantasy gaming I've done I've also collected other armies for various projects. My hope is that in finishing these dwarves I'll be able to spark something and be able to use that momentum to finish a few other projects as well. In addition to that, I've always wanted a wood elf army and now that I have the ball rolling, if I'm able to finish this project I think I'll treat myself to that.
For now though, I leave you with a side by side shot of the earliest figures I've painted alongside the updated version on the left.
As of the time of writing this, I have the king and the warriors above fully painted with just their bases left to do. I also have the Thunderers rebased and about halfway painted. Will probably have more done between writing this but will wait to show it off as a completed force in the next post.
