A detailed account of my various commission/hobby projects.
Terrain – 3D printing is all the rage these days. There are some amazing designers selling stuff on Shapeways, super creative generous people that upload designs to thingiverse and a plethora of etsy shops that specialize in table top accessories. In fact there’s so much cool stuff out there it’s sometimes hard to cut through the clutter and find the best stuff.
Read MoreTerrain Building – Blade Runner really set the tone for me as to what a dystopian future would look like. Dirty, crowded and dark. Ultimately that's the look I'm going for with my city table. Ideally this terrain will be "useable" across several different rules sets like 40K, Necromunda and Batman as well as any other random "near-future" sci-fi games I might find myself interested in.
Read MoreTerrain Building – Last Christmas I received several buildings from Knights of Dice in their Sentry City Chinatown Range. For some reason I had shelved these with some other "rainy-day" projects. I pulled these out while I was looking for another box and decided to make some time to get a simple paint job on them and assemble the buildings so I can use them for some games.
Read MoreRandom – Several years ago there was a huge boom in new Skirmish games, it seemed like every few months something new and exciting was catching on or being Kickstarted. I'm not sure if it was because Warhammer of both varieties was feeling stale or if it was just the market was ripe for something fresh and new. Today let's take a look back at some of the stars that seem to have burned out too soon (at least in my area, if these are booming where you are let me know why).
Read MoreWarhammer 40,000 - Terrain is vital to create a immersive game. Miniatures can only take you so far. I've always been a terrain guy, no matter the system I build at least one new terrain set anytime I start anew game. It's been forever since my group played Necromunda so any terrain I had has long since been trashed or donated. While I really like the new terrain kits Games Workshophas put out I wanted to do something different. I still had a bunch of Mantic terrain from the first Deadzone Kickstarter that I never did anything with so I took that, some cans I've been saving, pink foam and some parts from the industrial terrain to build a new battlefield.
This terrain set is going to go on an Alpine FAT Mat that I picked up before FLG and Tablewar went their separate ways. It's a nice thick mouse pad style mat with a beautiful snow/rock print. When I resurface the top of my gaming table I think I'm going to invest in a few of these to replace the textured boards I usually use. Dice roll better on them, they're easier to store and the flat surface makes it easier to place terrain in various positions without getting caught up on some random rock of sand bit.
Once I finish painting all the pieces for this terrain set I'll add some snow effect to the edges of each base to help them blend in to the mat and tie the whole theme together.
The first piece I built for this set is the landing pad. It's primarily made out of Mantic Battlefields panels with a MDF hexagon for the landing pad. I detailed it out with some Games Workshop bits from my bits box and other random resin pieces I've made copies of over the years. (I've found that if I find a cool bit its best to make a silicone mold of it because I'll inevitably forget where it came from or be unable to track down more in the future.)
After laying out the panels in a rough idea of what I wanted to do I used a jigsaw to cut a piece of MDF that I textured previously with drywall tape and cardstock. I then glued pink foam to the base and used a razor knife to carve out the shapes I wanted. From there it's just a matter of gluing the parts in place and painting.
I base coat everything with a Behr paint and primer that I had the guys at Home depot match to the hobby paint I use. The wash is a Minwax water based stain that I thin down 2 parts water to 1 part stain. A base coat, dry brush and wash gets this piece to a playable state quickly and I'll detail it out after I've tested it in game to be sure nothing needs to change.
Relic Knights – Again this took me longer than I would have liked but I've finally wrapped up the Void Models I've been working on for my current project. These are tied in with a bigger commission that has been simmering on my back burner as I try to crank through as much stuff ass possible.
Read MoreRelic Knights – I haven't gotten this on the table recently and I part of the issue is that I subconsciously don't like to play with bare gray models (or primer white for that matter). So to rectify that situation I decided that I'm going to get the base colors down on all the Relic Knights stuff I own. Painting each faction to completion (or at least the level I want) is going to take to long with the other painting projects I have in my que.
Read MoreRelic Knights - I'm plugging away at the Void commission for Relic Knights. After wrestling with the assembly, I finished cleaning up and primed the models white. With all the Soda Pop stuff I prime white as it helps the colors be more vibrant.
Read MoreRelic Knights – Moving right along here's the Black Diamond with a basic coat of paint. I'm running low on the Adeptus Battle Gray that I like to use for dark gray/black models as a base coat so I'm going to need to look into a replacement color. Again I'm pretty bummed it was discontinued as I really liked this line of paint.
Read MoreTerrain Making – This project got pushed back after the plague tore threw my house last month. But I'm feeling better and back with a vengeance to get some of these projects done.
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Relic Knights – The Star Nebula Corsairs are finally wrapped up and photos are posted in my gallery. Overall I'm happy with how they turned out. Still having issues with the material they're cast in but overall they look good at arms length.
Still loving the game and moving on to paint up some of my own models soon. My goal is to get a starter force painted up for each of the five factions I won before the end of the year. We'll see how this works out with my commission schedule but I'm staying positive I can get it done.
Relic Knights – Wow I'm getting rusty. These took a bit longer to wrap up than usual. But the basic grunts for the Star Nebula are done.
Read MoreTerrain Making – I finally had a chance to get back to the series I started a few weeks ago. As I mentioned then I have a mold I made for craters back when they were a thing needed for Warhammer 40K. As such i don't want it to go to waste so I'm working on various terrain sets that use some or all of the crater to create unique items from a common mold.
Read MoreRelic Knights – One of the cooler thing about Relic Knights is the idea of boosts. These are small tokens/models you can buy with extra points to fill out your list. Not only does this give you something to spend that random 1-3 points on but it also adds a cool little "power-up" that you put out on the field.
Read MoreRelic Knights – This month has been a real bear to get anything done. Real life has been kicking my ass lately so my hobby/second job has been taking a back seat for a bit.
Read MoreRelic Knights – I'm really happy with the Pro Dual Tower Deck boxes I picked up to store my Relic Knights stuff, however the black boxes are pretty plain. It's also a bit of an annoyance to have to open each box to see what's inside. In an effort to dress them up a bit I created some stickers to apply to the boxes. These help to distinguish the boxes from one another as they're all solid black.
I used some Avery Full Sheet Laser labels to print stickers of each faction symbol and the Relic Knights logo. This paper is supposed to stand up to the terrors the USPS puts packages through so I'm hoping it will stand up to some use. I may wind up reprinting them and sealing the stickers with a gloss varnish if they don't hold up, but I was in a hurry and just stuck them down. (Sometimes you just have to try something to see how it will look before you go back and do it right)
The adhesive seems to be holding pretty well so if the ink does the same I'll be happy. (Although I'm not holding my breath, this will be good enough for now.)
I also picked up a few keychain tape measures that I made little faction logos for and applied. I like that I know have a complete box with everything needed to play for the five factions I own. If I can ever get back out to other stores this will make it easy to demo the game and help build back the excitement of a few years ago when the kickstarter was live.
I really hope this game does well as I really like it and feel like there's plenty of potential for it to grow and have a decent market share in the already crowded skirmish game market.
Relic Knights – There are a lot of cards associate with Relic Knights; the deck, each character has 2 cards, the reference cards, objective cards, boost cards etc. There are also a bunch of acrylic tokens to mark the various thing you might need to mark during a game. And of course the Knight cards are oversized and need something to put them in as well. Oh yeah and you need a marker as well. That's a significant amount of stuff to keep together and transport. Here's the various solutions I've tried:
Read MoreGame Night – This week the stars aligned and four guys from my gaming group were all free on Sunday to play some games. With everyone busy with their families and various summer obligations its been hard to get together to play some mulitplayer games.
We started off the evening with a quick teaching game of Relic Knights. Everyone caught on to the core concepts really quickly and seemed to enjoy the game. for this game we used the starter boxes of Black Diamond, Noh Empire, Doctrine and for the Speed Circuit: (2) Belles, Marie Claude and Ryn.
The game scales really well to multiple players since the objectives are unique to each player. I also think that the card mechanic is done better than it is in Malifaux, particularly in mulitplayer. Anytime you're attacked or burn through cards you draw up to five during the clean-up step. This means you don't get those situations where a player runs out of cards in hand and gets ganged up on by everyone else because they don't have a had to defend with.
We opted to just play to 5 VP to speed up the game and just get everyone to understand the core mechanics. Because of how fast this game plays and how well it scales, I think it may see plenty of rotation on Thursday nights.
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We then set-up to play a 2vs2 game of Warhammer 40K seventh edition. For this game each player brought 1500 points and was randomly assigned a partner. We set up a fairly sparse desert board with a few LOS blocking pieces in the center of the table and some smaller areas of cover scattered around the perimeter. My space marines were partnered up with a Chaos Space Marine force and we fought against two tank heavy guard forces.
The game was fun and honestly the changes to the rules didn't seem to impact the speed of play. Of course no one had a psyker so we ignored that phase completely which may have been the reason we didn't see that drug out into the mess I've read about online. The changes to the vehicle tables and D weapon tables were really nice, one of out players has a landraider that hasn't made it past the first turn in the last 15 or so games we've played actually got to use it and make an impact on the game. It did die around turn 3 or 4 but that was due to losing hull points and not a random Lascannon shot.
Having everything be able to score objectives was nice because most everything on the field was moving to try and capture them. Unlike the previous edition where your goal was to kill troops as fast as possible so your opponent couldn't score. No one opted to build an Unbound list so we all had the benefit of Objective Secured on our troops which also made for a more tactical game.
My first impression from my first game of seventh edition is pretty positive, they did a nice job tweaking the rules slightly to eliminate some of the more annoying aspects of sixth. The changes however are minor enough in practice to draw out the game or over complicate it. I may however need to build a different list to see if the psyker phase is worth caring about or not.
Terrain Building – So back in sixth edition 40K I made a crater and created a mold of it so I'd have something to represent all the exploded rhinos and other vehicles on the table top. Now seventh edition doesn't leave a crater when vehicles explode so I have to figure out something to do with all the plaster casts I made of my crater. Perhaps I can do a "101 Things to Do with Craters" series of articles.
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Relic Knights – I'm still cranking away at getting my Relic Knights assembled. I'm trying to get them done ASAP so I can send a complete list of missing parts over to Soda Pop to get them sorted out. It's a bit of a bummer that even though CMON is the company that took the money for this and handled the packing that I have to go to Soda Pop to get the missing parts. It's a weird dynamic that I hope winds up working for everyone involved. It still blows my mind with the amount of negativity on the kickstarter page as well as in Soda Pop's own forum. It's unfortunate as the game is really fun and the models are pretty good considering the cost of them during the kickstarter.
Anyway the Black Diamond starter was pretty straightforward to assemble. The troopers have this shield that I'm guessing fits on their shoulder (at least that's were I put it). But other that that one wonky part everything else went together fine.
The tank seems a little odd as there is this one area that looks blank almost like it's missing a part but I can't really tell from any of the product shots because it's on the rear of the tank.
Magnus is really a cool model and I'm really happy with how he turned out, super easy to assemble with mold line that were easy to remove.
I was also able to put together the Diamondback Mech and this was a dream to assemble everything fit just right and mold lines were easy to remove.
Overall so far these models seem to work fine in this material. I do however still have the other half of this faction to assemble.
