FTW dice

Look what came in the mail today! My From The Warp dice. Thanks Ron.

Spear chukkas and new project (Azhag)

I finished up the ropes on the spear chukkas and the skin highlights on the crew. Now its just the fungus and the crew's clothes, hair, teeth and other small details.



New project: Azhag
I started another project... So far I've pinned most of the joints and glued him together. I'm going to paint Skullmuncha the wyvern separately, probably mostly with my airbrush.

Apocalyse Game: Tyranid invasion

Well, Saturday's apoc game was a success for me... I managed to distract close to 6000 points of dark angels and Eldar with 3000 points of orks. The game was the finale to a campaign we've been playing at miniwargaming.com. It started with some space hulk missions. This was followed by some city fight missions and then planet strike, all coming to a close with this Apocalypse game. There were 10,000 points of Imperial verses 10,000 points of Tyranids with an additional 3000 points of Orks and Eldar thrown into the mix.

Anyway, my ork army was fairly simple and was only there to serve as a distraction to the imperium.

3000 points:
2 stompas
2 Big meks with Kustom Force Fields
3 Battle wagons with deff rollas and big shootas
1 Skulla Hamma battlefortress
30 ork boyz with nob (Power klaw, boss pole)
19 ork boyz with nob (power klaw, boss pole)
19 ork boyz with nob (power klaw, boss pole)
19 gretchin with runtheard
19 gretchin with runtheard
14 gretchin with runtheard

I ended up having Andrew's 50 death wing terminators teleport in behind me, and Joe's eldar were in front. In the end it was a sort of mutually assured distruction. Both my stompas went Apocalyptic and after all was said and done there were only 2 terminators left. I also made a decent dent in the Eldar.

Videos will be posted at Miniwargaming.com's members area in the near future, and in three months those will migrate over to youtube. I'll be posting whatever is available when that happens on here (I should have some other videos moving over to youtube shortly).

Black Friday Bonanza reminder

Just a friendly reminder that miniwargaming.com is having their Black Friday Bonanza this weekend... 25% off all battle forces, black reach and skull pass, Warmachine and hordes battle groups. Oh, and free shipping to the US and Canada for orders over $100.

I'm heading over tomorrow for the Apocalypse game that's going to wrap up the Tyranid invasion campaign they've been running. The first installment of my space hulk game was posted earlier this week in their members section (will be available on youtube in 3 months).

Spear Chukkas almost done

Lots of progress. I did a devlin mud wash, followed by bleached bone drybrush on the wood, and chain mail edging on the metal. The red was layered with GW's blood red then blazing orange. I still need to do the fungus and ropes.

The bases were done with Mike's basing material, which is an amazing mixture of turf, static grass, rocks and sand. He made a tub of it for his 100 orks in 8 days challenge, and there's still tons of it at the club. Oh, and there's cork on each of the bases. I got these used (assembled but unpainted), and that's how they came.




I've done the scorpion green highlight on one of the crews. The second crew only has snot green over ork hide shade.

Spear Chukka base coats done

I managed a bit of time last night working on the spear chukkas. The base coat is a mix of bestial brown and fortress grey drybrushed with fortress grey then washed with scorched brown. The metal is boltgun, and the red is reaper deep red followed by blood red. Next they will get a devlin mud wash (everything).


First red highlight


I also want to mention some great deals over at store.miniwargaming.com. Of course they have the black friday deal, but I just checked their clearence section, and see the Fortress of Redemption for 30% off ($83.13 CDN) as well as the Ork megaforce ($164.50 CDN). There are a couple other deals in there (free shipping over $100 of course), but those two really stuck out to me. ***update*** it appears that this was a stocking issue with the store inventory system, and was corrected when the MWG staff arrived at work in the morning. I don't know if anybody was able to get those prices, but the stock levels (5 of each) appear the same, so I don't think anybody jumped on it in time.***

Here's what I've done with the goblins to keep track of where they go... used a paint marker to label them. "A" is the first rank, "B" second, "C" third, etc.

Next up: Spear Chukkas

I think I'm ok with the goblin bases now. I ended up with all 20mm bases, but since its pretty easy to slice them off I may revisit the 40mm base thing in the future. I've done them up right now for 8 wide, but I'm going to make sure that its easy enough to do 6 wide. I'll number the bottom of the bases when I put magnets on them and make up a magnetized movement tray.

Next up: Spear Chukkas. I actually have three of these puppys laying around, but I'm only going to do two for now. I'm probably going to use the wood technique that GW posted for the new skaven screaming bell painting article, so we'll see how that looks for this.

Goblin - Basing question

Ok, I've finished off the skull shields and am ready to tackle the basing issue with the goblins. I have two questions for anybody to chime in about...

With 40 goblins, what is the best formation to run? I'm still pretty new with fantasy, but I know it needs to be at least 5 wide and 4 deep, but since I have 40 goblins neither of those is a limiting factor.

Second question is regarding bases. I've been toying with the idea of regiment bases, but then it occurred to me that I could use 40mm square bases (which I happen to have few extra lying around). Does it make sense to use either of these, or should I just reglue the guys to their 20mm square bases in a way that they fit together in formation?

Goblin's shields

Today I decided that the goblins were finished enough to add the shields. This turned out a little worse than I had hoped. I initially glued the shields to their forearms thinking that there would be more surface to glue, and they would look more realistic. This turned out to be a mistake because when I tried to rank them all together nothing fit. This added to the challenges I had with the spears meant that nothing would fit. So, I decided to rip them off and glue them on the front of their left hands as shown on the GW site. I'm hoping they will rank up better. The part that sucks is that I'm going to have to touch up the paint on their left arms where the glue is left over.

I still have to paint the skulls on half the shields, finish off the champion, musician and standard bearer.

Goblins skin and brown done

I was able to manage a couple hours of painting and made some good progress. I finished the 1st highlight of brown and put a second highlight on. Then I moved on to the skin with a scorpion green highlight followed by thraka green wash. The guys (except the banner bearer, musician and champion) are basically table top ready. Since taking these pictures I picked out the teeth on half of them, and I still need to do something with the metal (probably devlin mud) and eyes. I might give the brown a wash... either devlin mud or sepia. And of course, I need to add magnets to their bases and make a movement tray.

Black Friday specials at miniwargaming.com

Seeing as this Friday is black friday, my friends over at miniwargaming.com are having a large Black Friday sale. These are probably some of the best deals out there for Canadians, and is a decent deal for our neighbors to the south. Shipping is $8 for orders under $100, or $10 for orders over $100 (USA and Canada) **UPDATE** Free shipping for orders over $100 to the USA and Canada**. They also have the new Tyranid battle force on advanced order, so I think it will apply for this sale.

Anyway, check it out if you're interested... sale starts Friday at noon and ends Monday at noon. store.miniwargaming.com

They also have a wish list contest (kind of like GW's, but with 10 winners being announced before Christmas).

Here are some of the advertised deals:
-40k Battleforces (up to $33 off)
-Fantasy Battalions (up to $33 off)
-Assault on Black Reach ($23 off)
-Battle for Skull Pass ($23 off)
-Mines of Moria ($26 off)
-Warmachine Battle Boxes ($16 off)
-Hordes Warpacks ($16 off)
-Flames of War Starter Set ($12 off)
-Monsterpocalypse Starter Sets ($7.50 off)
-All main rulebooks - 40k, Fantasy, LoTR, Monsterpocalypse,
Flames of War, Warmachine, and Hordes (up to $20 off)

Goblins brown 1st highlight

Yesterday I was able to finish the red highlight and start the 1st layer of brown highlight. The red was just reaper blood red on top of the deep red, and the brown is reaper leather brown on top of GW scorched brown.

I just received a huge lot of stuff I bought off of a person on a forum... including the mega paint set, so it looks like I'll have even more GW colours to choose from going forward. I'll probably buy some more reaper paints because I like the triad format, but now I should be able to do some interesting stuff with all the paints I would never have bought otherwise.

Goblins base colours done

I've been working on the goblins during the last couple posts. I made a couple changes from feedback here and from the fixtures at my FLGS. I removed the command section from the regiment base and decided to go with spears and shields. I figure that'll work fine for my purposes, and if O&G get the refresh that the rumour mill seems to be saying perhaps GW will make new goblin sprues.

Anyway, base colours include: Reaper deep red (pants, shields, spear shafts), GW Knarloc green (skin), GW bolt gun metal (spear and armour), and GW scorched brown (boots, shirts, hats, everything else). I'll be using reaper paints to highlight the reds and browns and GW paints for the greens and washes.

Planet Strike battle report

Saturday was part 3 of the Tyranid campaign thewelland warhammer club (miniwargaming.com) is running right now. I played the attacking orks in the morning, and Dan played a defending Ork planet strike game in the afternoon. We combined our models for the games to help take full advantage of the force org charts for planet strike. I wasn't able to stick around for the afternoon, but the attacking force we had was (2000 pts):
Warboss in mega armour
Big mek with Kustom force field
Nobz mob (8 nobz plus painboy, with full wound allocation and battle wagon)
Mega nobz (3 plus battle wagon)
18 storm boyz with nob
20 storm boyz with nob
5 deff koptas with Twin linked rokkits
10 bikers

We were playing against Dave's black templars and managed to pull off a victory by blowing up a couple bastions and taking one over.

Deff Rolla 3

In preparation for Saturday's Planet Strike game I painted up my 3rd deff rolla. Dan and I will be playing Orks, and part of our plan is to maximize the number of battle wagons. I have two of the GW deff rollas and one scratch built one. All are magnetized, and interchangeable.

CMON

Just added my first pic to Cool Mini Or Not... big mek with KFF. I could probably put a little more effort into the picture (and add some more angles), but maybe next time.

Vote Here

Next project: Goblins

Here's the next big project I'll be undertaking... 40 goblins. I'm expecting to get side tracked along the way, but that's ok with a unit this size. The one thing I'm debating is whether or not to convert hand weapons for them. It seems the way to go for the +1 save in close combat as opposed to the 2nd rank getting in there with spears. Hey, does anybody know if the 2nd rank gets to fight if they are charged? The rules say something about not moving that turn. Too bad GW doesn't provide hand weapons on the sprue.
And I'm using one of the regiment bases for the command section... I'm not sure if this is a good idea... anybody have suggestions about this as well?

Spider Riders done

Finally. These guys got bumped due to the space hulk game last week, but I've finally finished them off. I decided on blue for the feathers (reaper Sapphire, true and sky blue triad), and the moss green for the shields. I did the skin a little different than usual, and also used reaper greens for it.

Anyway, here they are. They already have magnets on their bases, so I just need to make a movement tray and add some magnetic paint to it.

Campaign part 2 - City fight

After Saturday's Space Hulk games (3 were run at the same time) gears shifted to city fight. Miniwargaming.com built this table for this special event.

Matt and his space marines were paired up against Gary and his Tyranids. The story will be posted over at Miniwargaming.com in the near future, much like their last Apoc game. Here's a couple more pics I took.

Back to the Spider riders

Well, now that that Space Hulk distraction has passed, I'm back working on the Spider riders (I'll finish the terminators soon). Saturday afternoon I finished off the spiders and moved onto the riders. Turns out they have very little red on them, so the base coat isn't helping much. All that's left is the skin highlight and wash, red highlights, black and silver highlights and whatever colour I do the feathers (haven't decided yet). While that sounds like a lot it shouldn't actually take too long. They are basically table top ready at this point, but the little bits left will really add a lot.

Space Hulk Battle Report

So, after that week of trying to get my terminators table top ready I faced off against Joe at Miniwargaming.com (you may remember him from: Joe on the Road, Eldar Tatica X, and Orktoberfest). Of course, because of the recent threat of H1N1, Joe insisted on playing with a mask and gloves until it was established that I didn't have a recent or worsening cough or fever.

Joe decided to keep the gloves on to help prevent giving the dice the usual curse that he seems to have.

Anyway, in the narriative campaign that Matt has lined up it was decided that we would play mission IV. I was the marine player, and Joe the Tyranids. In setting up I put my sergents last because I was going to leave them behind to cover my flanks and put the flamer and assault cannon in the lead.


Anyway, I ended up losing my assault cannon, and 3 other terminators, but won the game with my flamer taking out both rooms. It came down to the wire, and if I hadn't drawn 4 command points in the last turn I probably would have lost (I needed some extra because it takes 2 for the flamer to fire). It was a lot of fun, and much more enjoyable with (almost) painted terminators. After the space hulk games were done a bunch of city fight games were played (I didn't participate in those). Next weekend is Planet assault, and in three weeks an Apocalypse game.