A detailed account of my various commission/hobby projects.
Board Games – I’ve now painted the complete set of minis for The Others: Seven Sins. The final expansion bring out the four horsemen and the avatar of the apocalypse. Just like the rest of the models for this board game these are pretty amazing. The pictures pretty much speak for themselves, if you have any questions about the technique post in the comments below.
Read MoreWarhammer 40,000 – I've been paying a loose campaign with four of the guys in my regular play group. To ring in the New Year they wanted to play a massive game. Initially the discussion was to play 40k of 40k (20,000 per side) we lowered that to 16,000 as my partner could only make about 4,000 points. After the last larger game the four of us attempted to play Christmas Eve eve, I expressed my concern that in order to play this we'd need at minimum 10am-8pm to play. (assuming everything went smooth). The general consensus was it wouldn't be a problem.
We arrived at 10:00am and started setting up immediately, first the terrain and then the models, we had agreed prior to has the Chaos forces set up first and agreed on the first Apocalypse mission using the Maelstrom cards in addition to the scenario rules. By the time we got everything set up it was 12:30pm (that was a bit unexpected)
If we couldn't seize the initiative Chaos would be going first. A quick roll turned up a six and we prepared to start our turn when our opponent informed us that he bought a legacy of glory that causes your opponent to re-roll any attempt to seize. I picked up dice annoyed and manage to flip another six. The look on their face was priceless. We began to pummel their side with a ridiculous amount of fire power. As we continued to roll our turn lasted until almost 2:30pm.
During our opponents turn they needed to stop to take a phone call. It turns out someone wasn't clear with how long this would take and was getting questioned with how soon he'd be home. Turning this massive apocalypse battle to a hard stop at 6:30pm. Sadly they wrapped up their first turn right around 5:15pm.
Deeming it not fair to bring on our reserves and begin the second turn we called the game after one turn and totaled victory points. We had scored 11 points of the maelstrom cards and an additional 3 for holding objectives, the forces of chaos had scored 5 points and held 3 objectives. Surprisingly we managed to squeak out a win with well over 1/3 of our forces not on the table yet.
The small amount we played was fun but I can't see ever attempting that large of a game with four people ever again. The set-up and process just takes forever and having a random "emergency" pop up can really mess up the timetable. The general consensus after this event was we'd keep everything to 4,000 per person max. It's twice as big as a "normal" game but still something that should be able to play through 4-5 turns over the course of eight hours.
Warhammer 40,000 – Over the weekend I was able to play in my first official apocalypse size game. Big games are nothing new to me as my group have always played massive multiplayer games of 40K with each player playing their own army by itself. These affairs would take forever to wrap up and inevitably players lose interest in the game when it's not their turn. Which meant we typically only played until we were tired and called it so it was rare to finish a game.
With the current set of apocalypse rules we decided to give a big game a shot. One of my buddies was itching to use his Baneblade in a real apocalypse game so we set it up for a Sunday. Not knowing exactly who would be able to make it (face it with kids plans are always tentative) we came up with a lose point value and teams. This would serve as a kick-off for our Badab Campaign. Each player would bring a 40k legal 2000 point list with several 500 point add on lists that did not have to follow the Force Organization Chart. We also set a hard start of 1:00 pm and a hard stop of 8:00 pm. However many turns we could play in that time period would be the game.
Upon arriving at my friends house I was surprised to see not only a Baneblade but also a Warhound Titan. My teammate did bring his Plastic Thunderhawk Conversion so we did have a superheavy to fight against the hoard but things looked grim.
First turn, we managed to seize the initiative so we could go first. I dropped my Dreadnought at the feet of the titan and disembarked my grav cannon centurions as close as I could to the massive beast. Once it was all said and done we stripped it of 5 of its 9 hullpoints. We also killed a ton of troops but were unable to cause any to break and run. Unfortunately when the titan went it unleashed it's D-weapons and took out most of the things that could hurt it.
Turn two, with things looking grim we brought in the second line of tank killing weapons to take out the titan unfortunately there was little we could do to it and when it unleashed its massive death rays on our field it took out the rest of the things that could hurt it.
Turn three we changed focus to taking out the troops and bringing moving our troops toward the objectives in an attempt to claim some type of victory out of the bloodbath. The Titan found a less target rich environment so not as many things died this turn and the Baneblade was still stuck behind a wall of slow moving friendly troops.
Turn four the Thunderhawk arrived and eliminated the titan. (Moral Victory) We had reached our hard stop and it looked like we'd win on objectives. However to be fair we let our opponent finish their turn and lost miserably.
The game was fun but it did take a very long time to play, with the apocalypse rules however it did move faster than the old big games of 40k we used to play.
