Holy Gamer Pals Batman!

Apparently the gods want me to play Warhammer 40K. Or at least my friends do. Anyhow one of my gamer friends came up with a brand new 5th edition rule book that he couldn't account for. He also had a Terminator Assault Squad with Thunder Hammer and Storm Shield and a spare Librarian so he just gave them to me. Over a hundred bucks worth of stuff for nothing.

So the same friends girlfriend also paints minis and she gave me a great tip for mold line removal. This is an electric manicure tool and it's like a dremmil with a very low power motor. It's perfect for removing mold lines and light flash without damaging the figure you are working on. It was about $7.00 at Walmart.

Got Fist?

Well I've done it. I've started painting Warhammer 40K figs again. Here are some Marines from the "Assault of Black Reach" boxed set I'm painting up as the Crimson Fist chapter. I'm in the process of heavily weathering them at the moment. I used a lot of drybrushing and cheap craft paints. Suck it GW! I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out.

Here's a shot of them prior to the weather and wash.

Quick and Dirty Com Stations

Here's another "Evening Project". These actually took me a couple of nights but that's mostly because I dropped one during basecoating and had to put it back together. I also started them late the first night I built them. These only took a couple hours to build none the less and they are made almost entirely from junk.



Here you can see the parts. The antena are made from a couple of wooden beads and a toothpick. The dish is from the guts of a deodorant dispenser. The arm holding the dish up is the top of a plastic disposable shaving razor handle. The white part is a soda bottle cap and the clear part is a tub from a powdered drink mix container. The hardest part was using a razor saw to cut the plastic razor handles down. Very simple.

Quick and Dirty Bunker

We needed a bunker for the AE Bounty Scenario "Hold the Fort" and despite 20+ years of miniature gaming I didn't really have one. My wife made this one out of foam core and I painted it. It only took a couple hours most of which as waiting for glue and washes to dry.

A lot of the time I will sit around thinking that I need to build some piece of terrain for a game or scenario I'd like to run but then I start over thinking the project and it doesn't even get started. A lot of the time these are simple projects that I just need to get stuck in on and do start to finish in a few hours like we did with this bunker.

I've decided I want to try a new project called "Evening Projects" based on simple terrain projects that can be finished in a few hours. Hopefully I will have at least one of these projects a week so keep an eye out.

AE Bounty Battle Report "Pirate Raid"

We played our second game of AE Bounty Thursday night playing with pretty much the same crews as we did in our first report. The only major change in the list was that the green squads in Boon's Irregulars replaced their grenades with AP rounds.

We randomly selected the "Robbery" scenario from the book. The pirates has the secondary objective "Assassination" and the militia had the secondary objective "Capture".

I was playing the pirates and my objective was steeling loot from the militia's warehouse in the center of the table. The dirty trick I had selected for the battle was "scouts" which allowed me to set up the "Duct Rats" in hidden deployment. In the last battle this served me having three pirates with sub machineguns gunning down militia from turn one however the battlefield condition we rolled was "darkness" so they needed a 6 on a d6 to hit anything. Still with a rate of fire of 3 it seemed like a good idea.

Rolling 9 dice helped the "Duct Rats" score hits but their targets all had medium cover which added quit a bit to their armor saves. Redjack the militia sniper has the "Hunter" ability with "human" chosen as the target race. That gave him +1 strength to his shots. He was also a crack shot and he also had the "Crack Shot" ability which allowed him to ignore up to 2 points of cover. With two shots and a better ranged combat skill than the pirates he quickly started eliminating them.

By the 2nd turn Captain Cyclopes had managed to pick up a bag of loot and head for the table edge. I had to get two bags of loot off the table to achieve the primary objective of the battle. I chose to use my captain and my two quarter masters to be my looters because they had more action points than my crew and just picking up a bag of loot cost an action point.

Things just kept getting nastier for the "Duct Rats". My wife moved two militia around to flank me and I managed to shoot one down but Redjack dropped another pirate.

By the third turn Carson Boon had got into the fight. Fortunately for the pirates Vinnie the Quartermaster had picked up another bag of loot and was heading off with it. Grim was not so lucky and ended up in hand to hand with the militia leader so "Da Gurlz" charged down the hill to help him. Boon was wounded in the first turn due to being highly outnumbered.

By the end of the third turn Captain Cyclopes had made it off the tabled edge. Vinnie looked close behind with the 2nd bag.

By the fourth turn militia members Smith and Jones charged into the combat at the warehouse. During the fighting "Da Gurlz" were wiped out but Grimm the quartermaster managed to put another wound of Boon.

By the end of the 4th turn Vinnie was right at the tables edge with the 2nd bag of loot but it would be another turn before he could get off the table with it.

Grim managed to hold off the militia with some amazing hand to hand combat rolls. He even managed to take Jones down. What really helped him was that Quartermasters get a natural 4 armor value and he had a light armor suit with made his armor value 5. Since no one in the fight had any hand to hand combat weapons it was pretty easy for him to resist strength 2 attacks.

At the end of the battle the pirates had achieved the primary objective of getting two bags of loot off the table. The militia had achieved their faction objective of 1000 creds due largely to the 500 cred bonus for wiping out two thirds of the pirates. According to the rules it was a tie. Playing this scenario was quite a bit of fun and I think you could easily add it into a story or map based campaign. We will hopefully be starting some kind of AE Bounty campaign soon in our "Station 42" setting.

Perils of the Warp?

Way back about 14-16 years ago I was an avid Warhammer 40k player. My primary army was Space Marines and my wife's primary army was Orks although we dabbled in most of the other armies that were part of 2nd edition. I had a 500 space marines with over 150 painted and My wife probably had 500 Orks with even more painted. Then 3rd edition came out and we sold off everything after about 4 games. Well almost everything. Stuff lingers. I still had a formitable force of Battle sisters and some odds and ends. Anyway we've barely touched the stuff since we 3rd edition came out. I think I could count the number of games of 40K I've played since then on one hand. We have played fantasy off and on for year but we were done with 40K.

We picked up Assault on Black Reach when it came out before the rediculas price hike. I probably also got a discount on it from my FLGS. Anyhow I played one battle with my Sisters over a year ago and put together five of the Marines. A friend of ours who we use to play 40K with quite a bit has kept playing this entire time and ammased more figures than any 12 players need to play the game. Quite a bit of it was our old stuff. He finally convinced me to play a couple 1000 point games last night and I felt they weren't bad. The new eddition of the game is better although still not as interesting as 2nd edition. It seems to run ok and of course there are t0ns of local players for it.

For mostly social gaming reasons we've decided to give it another try. I have a pretty good Sisters army and we have enough Space Marines and Orks to get started. I've got two tactical squads of marines, a scout squad, and three terminator squads, plus two drednaughts and the captain from the boxed set. My wife has the Orks from the boxed set plus hundereds of fantasy Orks and Goblins that could be converted for 40K easily. So our plan is to build slowly and smartly on these three armies only for at least a year before we start "buying" new stuff. Almost all the OrK vehicles and a lot of troops will be scratch built or converted from toys and junk. The only thing I'm buying for the Space Marines will be vehicles and a perhaps and Assault and Devistator squad. The Sisters are only getting vehicles and in fact we may even paint up what imperial vehicles we get with a generic scheme so they can do double duty.

That's my plan for not getting bent over the barrel by GW prices. We plan to play games mostly at home with friends to avoid the asshat fanboys and tournament mentality that makes a game with a decent setting no fun to play. Basically I refuse to pay $33.00 for an Ork truck when I can convert one from a $2.00 toy and some plastic junk.

Statio 42: More Venture Star Vehicles

Just making a quick post to show off a couple new vehicles for the Venture Star prospecting company from my space station project. First up is the company shuttle which is a G.I. Joe Shark Tooth submarine toy. It's basically just a re-paint. I did basically nothing to the model in terms of conversion. There was already a plastic ridge in the canopy that was about where I would have put one to re-scale it so all I really did was paint it up. I'm really quite happy with the way it turned out and I'll likely be picking up a few more Shark Tooth toys for the project.

Next up is this flying car I picked up at Wal-Mart. It's a Hot Wheels kit car that is about 1/43rd scale I would assume. I think it makes an awesome air speeder/flying car. Check out my previous post for more details.

This car will be the personal vehicle of Mr. John J. Biggs the CEO of Venture Star. It is pictured here with two Copplestone "Babes"