Space Hulk Redux

How do I love my wife? Let me count the ways...

Given that this has been an horrific couple of years at work for me, the Good Lady She Who Must Be Obeyed decided to celebrate the light at the end of the tunnel by buying me a present. And she bought me this:

Now we all know I love Space Hulk, but this new edition is something else. The tiles are beautiful and embossed so they have texture. The rules have been left as they were with a couple of tiny tweaks. And the miniatures.... oh, the miniatures are lovely. I think they may have been GW's first foray into CAD sculpting; in any case, they are delicious.

And obviously I had to get stuck in. I undercoated all the Terminators using the airbrush and then painted the first two:

Quite proud of the little motion tracker I painted on his arm, there. 

So another little fun project that should see me well into the summer. 

The Far Side of the World

"The Acheron is a tough nut to crack... more than twice our guns, more than twice our numbers, and they will sell their lives dearly. [...] Much will depend on your accuracy... however... even crippled, she will still be dangerous, like a wounded beast."

The second part of my little treat to myself. The difficulty with building the Acheron is that she never existed as a ship; in the book version of Fat Side of the World, the enemy is an American Privateer, more or less the Constitution. For the film, they replaced it with a french Frigate.

I bought a Langton French frigate and brass sails and set to work creating as close as I could version of the ship from the film:

I think, overall I got there. I haven't normally put flags and signals on these models, but for this one I decided to try and match the screen version.

So another two ships to add to my growing fleet.

Let the games begin!

Posts will get a little slow until the start of the summer holidays due to a variety of factors at work (we are going into special measures - again! - and my job is changing - again! - and the timetable is changing before the end of the year - again!) However, one bright spot is that I finally got around to starting up a wargames club at work again.

We've attracted a good spread of ages and genders. Interestingly, of all the games so far the girls have proved to be far and away the best commanders.

So far we have had a couple of games of Iron Cross which went down very well.

And then this last week we started a Wars of the Roses Lion Rampant campaign using the miniatures I put together waaaay back at the start of this blog.

Everything is going rather swimmingly; it also turns out that most the students play Bloodbowl, so it looks like we'll be getting a league up and running.

Overall. it's good to have come full circle. After all, it was a history teacher at my old school who got me into this habit lo those many moons ago!

You Dirty Rats!

Continuing my Bloodbowl adventures - still the most frequently played game I own by some considerable margin - with a new team.

But this time the team is not mine!

My regular opponent - an ex-professional rugby player who's never been one for toy soldiers - has completed his metamorphosis into the 'Full Geek' as he puts it by buying his own team. Obviously this meant that I had to paint them, but I'm not complaining. It gave me the rare opportunity to sus out the miniatures before I paint my own set.

Whether this means the Multiple Scoregasms are to be retired remains to be seen but when he looked at the Games Workshop page he decided to go Skaven. For team colours he sent me this:

I started construction but kept conversions to a minimum - just some headswaps and repositioning of tails to break up the silhouettes and make them look a little less uniform.

Painting was then done mainly with vallejo transparent paints for the uniform and inks for flesh. The flesh was given a couple of washes and glazes but the uniform wasn't to keep it vibrant.

I used the flourescent green to add a slight warpstone effect to the balls. 

Pretty happy with these: I'll be interested to see what they play like. He often plays a running game so they should suit him quite well. I'm tempted to put my dark elves up against them to see how that works out. Two runny/throwy teams should certainly make an interesting match....

Anyway, I hope he likes them. At the time of writing, he hasn't seen them.