Author: michael

Gearing Up For The Weekend

On 11th March 2016

I write this as I am lying in bed shattered and a bit nervous about the forthcoming weekend.

It’s our Horus Heresy weekender and if all goes well the past five months of planning and work will result in an awesome weekend.

I started the week off with a trip to Costco to grab the pop and sweets I am going to be selling (trying to raise a little bit more cash so the event is not a financial loss for me), and we got a lot of stuff, ending up spending £90 on 168 cans of Pepsi Max, 12 cans of Monster, 40 packs of crisps, 32 Twix and 48 Mars Bars.

With that done I set my mind to finishing off the last bit of terrain I had to paint, this time it was some stuff from Secret Weapons Minitures, three Imperial Generators and a Control Panel. The terrain is lovely and detailed but sadly Royal Mail got me on the customs and took £13 as thier ransom to let me have them.

They weren’t as big as I expected, for some reason I thought they would be twice the size, but they are lovely none the less, and I am very happy that Secret Weapon Minitures helped us out with this little bit of scenery sponsorship.

I managed to get them painted up today, not my best ever paint job and I think a better painter would have got much better results from them, my biggest mistake was using too much Gulliman Blue on the plasma parts as I was in too much of a rush to finish them off.

I also received some aquarium plants that I had ordered quite some time ago not realising they were coming from China, anyway they were supposed to be 5 packs of 10, but what I actually had delivered were 5 individual plants, an eBay case was opened as soon as they arrived as I feel pretty ripped off and think a substation so refund is justified.

But the five plants I have will need to be put to use as Adam (writer of the event pack) has his heart set on a jungle table, luckily we have son coloured aquarium plants that were meant to go alongside these ones. Plan is that they will go on a green mat alongside my LotR terrain, which is painted up in a sandstone effect to try and stimulate a long abandoned settlement that the jungle has reclaimed.

Sadly we had one player drop out of the event this week, so I had to quickly press gang my friend Harry to play with his Knigjts, some borrow off a friend and a Warhound Titan to give him a nasty Questoris Knight army!

The weekend will be his first ever games of the Horus Heresy and I am playing him first, so should be interesting to see how it goes, I mean he has played his Knights in local 40k tournaments as an army and not performed fantastically so will be interesting to see how they play in 30k.

Army Painter Wargaming Set Unboxing

By michael

On 10th March 2016

In Reviews, Videos

A Week With Scenery and Looking Forward to the Weekender

By michael

On 6th March 2016

In Blog

In preparation for our Heresy Weekender, now less than a week away, I have been working on some scenery.
Our good friend at Amera Plastic Mouldings, a rather excellent North East company, gifted us some scenery. We got a Z250 Battlefield Crater Set, a Z230 Redoubt and a Z211 Bombed-Out Building.
So I took a day to get these painted up, they do require cutting off the plastic sheet but that’s nothing major, and once off they took primer nicely and were very quick to get painted up. I mostly used washes and dry bushing, keeping the scheme very simple overall.

I also got painted up a set of Promethium Relay Pipes, again keeping it rather simple, I painted it with Warplock Bronze, Balthasar Gold & Leadbelcher, then washing it with Agrax Earthshade then dry brushing it all with Necron Compound, which I found gives them a nice weathered look.

Other Models I Got Painted

I did manage to get a few more models painted up this week starting with some Corpuscarii Electro-Priests, meaning that for my escalation league March list I need to now paint up 10 Skitarii Rangers, so that’s something for me to start on this week.

The other model I managed to get round to finishing was my Spartan Assault Tank, now I didn’t have the best cast for this and as I bought it online from a third party, I was unable to go to Forgeworld and ask for replacements, but using lots of forum posts I was able to figure out how to best build it. I will say however that putting the tracks on was a right faff on and I am glad that Forgeworld now send it out with them already attached, so when I go to them to purchase another vehicle in this class I can avoid that palaver.

Annoyingly the round bit of the hinge on one side of the assault ramp broke in transit, so I had to glue the doors shut, but I am glad I got the Ultramarines Land Raider Doors, they really do add something to the model. I still have to decide on what transfers if any I am going to put on the model, but at some point I will be adding the obligatory Heavy Support symbols.

Audio Book

This week I have been listening to Thousand Sons by Graham McNeil, which is frankly an amazing book, although it does fail to explain a few little things, in particular what the Tutelaries are, my own theory is that they are minor daemons of Tzeentch, the perfect sleeper agents ready to help drive the Sons of Magnus into the arms of Tzeentch. The Thousand Sons come across as very arrogant in the book and their downfall feels almost inevitable though out the entire book.

The only real criticism I would have of the book is that you don’t really get to see much of the non-psychic Thousand Sons, the ordinary bolster wielding line troops, and that would have been nice to see. My main Space Marine army are Blood Ravens so I do have a soft spot for crusade and heresy era Thousand Sons fluff.

Am about halfway through it at this point, not sure if I will finish it before the weekender, but who knows.

Gaming

I got in agave this week against Christians Mechanicum army, we took the game quite slowly as we were double checking rules to make sure we are 100% ready for the weekender. It was a very enjoyable game however and I surprised myself by having a humble Assault Squad Sgt with a Power Fist take down a Cerastus Knight-Atrapos, after a good number of its hull points had already been whittled down by the Fellblade of course.

From that game I learnt a lot of things, my Invictarus Suzerains need a transport to get them into combat, I need to remember my FNP rolls and to take advantage of the Interlocking Tactics.

As the game ended at turn 3, as I said we were taking it slow, the game was beginning to turn in Christians favour. He was using the Onslaught detachment so he had two Lords of War, in this case a Knight Errant, which managed to finish off my Fellblade which had been ravaged by the Conversion Beamers of his Myrmidon Destructor. Both warlords were dead, and I still had a full tactical squad in a Storm Eagle, but the high wounds of his units was really pushing my ability to deal with them, so although I had a great start to the game, I think it was going to end up as a loss for me.

My wife picked up a new card game on Saturday in Travelling Man, my FLGS, called Elevensies, now she is a bit of a tea drinking geek and she basically picked up the box, said “ooh its about tea”, and promptly bought it.

So today we gave it a go, and you know what its quite a good game, the idea being to prepare the best morning tea, you get 11 cards, each with either 1 spoon or 2 spoons, the aim is to have the morning tea with the most spoons. You get bonuses for placing down the 1 spoon cards, and you give bonuses to your opponents with 2 spoon cards, its a very tactical game, and for a completely random purchase its a pretty decent addition to my games collection.

Heresy Weekender

So next weekend is our Horus Heresy Weekender, myself and 17 other guys are taking over Moor House Adventure Centre and having ourselves a little narrative campaign, don’t worry there will be lots of photos and updates for it, and it’s also being covered by The Dark Artisan.

I did the first game draw earlier and if you are interested, here are the pairings.

Table 1. Jens Träff – World Eaters vs Arran Morgan – Salamanders
Table 2. Gareth Wilson – Night Lords vs Oliver Anderson – White Scars
Table 3. Philip Sanderson – Solar Auxilia & World Eaters vs Richard Slee – Ultramarines & Imperial Fists
Table 4. Graham Mills – Iron Warriors vs Martin Swaffield – Raven Guard
Table 5. Aidan Connor – Sons of Horus & Mechanicum vs Chris Mills – Imperial Fists
Table 6. Christian Preston – Mechanicum vs Adam Sellars – Raven Guard
Table 7. Mark Pears – World Eaters vs Graham Campbell – Salamanders
Table 8. Connor Mark Pears – Mechanicum vs Michael Botterill – Ultramarines
Table 9. Steven Henry – Sons of Horus vs Harry Scarr – Mechanicum

Don’t worry I fully intend to keep people up to date with how the weekender goes with plenty of updates both here and on Facebook.

So until then have fun guys.

Couple of Games and Some Painting

By michael

On 29th February 2016

In Blog

This week I have been mostly painting Ultramarines!

With our Horus Heresy Weekender now under two weeks away I stepped up my painting work for it. So I got on with and finished a Storm Eagle which completed my 3500pts for the weekend.

My list is now currently as follows using The Logos Lectora as a Rite of War

Captain Remus Ventanus
Master of Signals with Damocles Command Rhino

Troops

Legion Assault Squad with 9 Marines, Sgt in Artificer Armour with Plasma Psitol and Power Fist
Legion Tactical Squad with 18 Marines equiped with an additional Combat Blade, Vexilla and Nuncio-Vox, Sgt in Artificer Armour with Plasma Pistol
Legion Tactical Squad with 18 Marines equiped with an additional Combat Blade, Vexilla and Nuncio-Vox, Sgt in Artificer Armour with Power Fist

Elites

Apothecarion Detachment – 2 Apothecaries both with Artificer Armour
Invictarius Suzerain Squad
Legion Rapier Weapons Battery x 2 both with Quad Mortars

Fast Attack

Legion Storm Eagle Assault Gunship with Armoured Ceramite and two Twin-Linked Lascannons
Legion Storm Eagle Assault Gunship with Armoured Ceramite and two Twin-Linked Lascannons

Heavy Support

Deredeo Pattern Dreadnought with Armoured Ceramite and Aiolos Missile Launcher
Legion Fire Raptor Gunship with Armoured Ceramite and Reaper Autocannon Battery
Legion Sicaran Battle Tank with Armoured Ceramite and Lascannon Sponsons

Lord of War

Legion Fellblade with Space Marine Crew, Pintle Mounted Twin-Linked Bolter, and Armoured Ceramite

So lots of ways to mess around with the reserve rolls, but probably not a hugely competitive list, but its not about being competitive, the weekender is about fun, and some interesting narrative games, anyway we play as a team and we win or lose as a team!

I managed to get Leviathan Pattern Dreadnought painted up as well, a really nice model to paint, my ability simply doesn’t do it justice I am afraid.

I also got a the Corpuscarii Electro-Priests for my AdMech Escalation League army painted to the point of being about 95% finished and should get those finished at some point this week.

Games

I got two games in this week, the first was a 3500pt test game for the Heresy Weekender against Grahams Iron Warriors, a game I lost quite badly, Graham loves his tanks, and the Typhon is a very nasty tank to play against, and it did a lot of damage to me early in the game, and his Comms Relay negated the impact of my negative effects on his reserve rolls. Oh and there were lots of fliers on the board, 2 Storm Ealges and a Fire Raptor each, so there was some cool aerial combat going on.

But the game served its purpose, despite the pasting I took losing including losing my Assault Squad and Sicaran in the first turn, and stupidly sending my Suzerain up against a Leman Russ. I learnt some stuff, he learnt some stuff, when he played a game on Sunday, I saw he had taken the additional combat weapon that my marines always do and had dropped the Typhon for a Fellblade. All in all a very fun game.

Then yesterday I played in a 3 way apocalypse game with James and Arran, 4500 points each , which was a very fun silly game in which me and Arran used our Horus Heresy armies to take on James Chaos warband, we managed to play that game and near wipe out all 13500pts in 3 1/2 hours which was pretty good, a very very enjoyable game in which despite throwing absolutely everything at him, I failed to kill Vulcan, he really is a perpetual.

Its always fun to play a huge games now and then, its hard to get around to doing, but it makes me want to play another one sooner rather than later.

Audio Book

I personally find it really difficult to watch something when painting so I prefer to listen to a good audio book instead, and last week I got through Fallen Angels, the second of the Horus Heresy Dark Angels book, a huge improvement on the first book Descent of Angels. Anyway this book got me well on my way this week and was quite pleasant to listen to, though I do hope they return to finish off the story of Caliban because its been a number of years now and that part of the story feels a little neglected.

Anyway that is me for the week, hope you are all doing well and who knows what this week will bring eh.

Building up the AdMech and a Battle Report

By michael

On 19th February 2016

In Blog

OK so here is my first hobby post in a long time, but here goes!

At my local gaming club, the Durham Raiders, we are running a little escalation league for Warhammer 40,000, you start at 500pts, then 850pts, followed by 1250pts, and finally 1850pts. we are doing this in order to encourage people who got a new army for Christmas, or might have a long term project that has sat on the shelf for a while unstarted.

I fall into the later category, when the Skitarii and later the Cult Mechanicus armies hit the shelves, I ended up buying a load of units for each, I had always wanted an Adeptus Mechanicus army, but like many things it got put on the shelf, though they did get further than most of my stalled projects in that they got built and primed, well all bar the Kastelan Robots which are still sealed in the box on my shelf.

And so they sat unloved in a box with just a few units getting painted, specifically the Kataphron Destroyers which ended up being used as allies to my Space Wolves in a cheesetastic list so that I got some Grav weapons in my list, and being the cheapskate I am, I just used the Magos Dominus with Rad-Cleanser from Forgeworld, from my on-again, off-again Mechanicum army for The Horus Heresy, rather than go out and buy the admittedly quite nice Tech-Priest Dominus in plastic.

So for the first month, I present my army!

So we have here a Tech-Priest Dominus, and two units of three Kataphron Destroyers, one with Heavy Grav-Cannons and Cognis Flamers and one with Plasma Culverins and Phosphor Blasters, and these all together come in at 470pts.

Played three games with them, one against Tyranids in which I was quite quickly beaten mostly by a flying Hive Tyrant and a Carnifex all on their own which was fairly brutal. My second game was against Dark Eldar, in which I pretty much dominated the game, despite losing the three Grav Kataphron Destroyers in turn two, I ended up tearing apart my opponents Archon, Kalibite Warriors, Raider and Venom in the following two turns.

My last game was one where they really shone, I fought against Space Marines, for which the army contained a Chapter Master, Sternguard Squad, Drop Pod, and two squads of Scouts, one with Sniper Rifles, again I lost two Kataphron Destroyers quite quickly, this time the Plasma ones, but after that my Grav Destroyers just rolled around the board sweeping up the rest of his army. I really felt bad about it, but there came a moment when he had an objective, I had none and we had to roll to continue the game, had it ended there I would have lost, but thankfully for my, the game continued which allowed me to clear the objective of that last troublesome Scout squad and claim victory for myself by tabling him.

So the games went well, and I still get the feeling that Cult Mechanicus is very much a glass hammer of an army, when it hits well, it hurts my opponents badly, but when it takes a lot of fire, it can struggle to stay in the game.

Moving Forwards to 850pts

For the next stage I am adding a unit each of Fulgurite Electro-Priests and Corpuscarii Electro-Priests as well as add a detachment of Skitarii with a unit of Vanguard and a unit of Rangers.

So onward with the painting and this week I started with getting the Fulgurite Electro-Priests painted up whilst I watched The Man in the High Castle on Amazon Prime.

I am not going to even pretend to be a great painter, or even a good painter, but I am rather pleased with these. And if you look in the background you can see the next unit, some Vanguard in various stages of completion. I had already completed 5 of the Vanguard in June last year and figured it would be easy enough to work on these and bring them up to full strength, so that is what I did, and I am pleased to say that I finished them tonight.

This unit of Vanguard have been equipped with an Enhanced Data Tether, Plasma Caliver and Arc Rifle, whilst the Vanguard Alpha has an Arc Maul and a Phosphor Blast Pistol. I know its not an optimal set-up, but I liked the way the bits looked on the models and for me that is quite important.

So that’s where I am at the moment, sitting on the painting tray right now I have an Ultramarines Storm Eagle, something I want to finish off for the Horus Heresy Weekender I am putting on in 3 weeks time, for which there are still two tickets available if anyone fancies coming along to it, you can find info on the event Facebook page here, or on the Folkvangr Events website here.

Oh and my Ultramarines were featured on a battle report by the Dark Artisan yesterday, which you can view below.

I picked the scenario for this one, purposefully giving myself a huge disadvantage, but it fitted the fluff of our game, and that’s something which I love, I don’t play Horus Heresy to win, I play it for fluffy narrative games, and this was a particularly good one.

Until Next Time

Secret Hitler & Newcastle Gamers

By michael

On 2nd January 2016

In Blog

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Today has been a rather fun day, firstly we drove to Newcastle to see my adorable little nephew who was born on Christmas Eve, and as per usual I was a puddle of mush with him. We left him with a Serenity plush toy, just to make sure we have a future browncoat in the making.

Then I went along to Newcastle Gamers whilst the girls went up to see Lindsay’s granddad, and my awesome mates, Drew, Kyle and Steven (Geek Apocalypse) were there. Upon arrival we quickly began with a couple of games of Drew’s print and play version of Secret Hitler.

Secret Hitler is a secret identity deduction game, much like The Resistance or Warewolf, but is set in the days of the Weimar Republic, its written by Max Temkin of Cards Against Humanity fame. The basics of the game are that you are secretly divided into two teams, liberals and fascists, with the fascists having Hitler on their team as well, in each round a player takes on the role of president and he nominates a chancellor, who the players then vote to accept or not. Once that is done, the president picks up three policy cards, and discards one, he hands the remaining two over to the chancellor who puts one into law. These policies could be liberal or fascist policies, the aim of each side being to introduce more policies of their group, but there are more fascist policies out there than liberal, and fascist laws can be beneficial to the liberals as they allow them to for example identify which party a player belongs to, or allow the outgoing president to select his successor.

The aim for the fascist side is to introduce 5 fascist laws, or get Hitler into power once 3 fascist laws have been enacted, for the liberals, they need to pass 6 liberal policies into law, both are more difficult than they sound. I understand the subject matter may be uncomfortable for some people, but the theme fits, it shows us the dangers of slipping into fascism and how people like Hitler were able to take advantage of the Weimar Republic and its imperfect form of democracy.

Secret Hitler successfully Kickstarted at the end of 2015, and I am pleased to say I am a backer, in at a level which gets me the game in a lovely wooden box, but once its published in the second half of this year, I seriously recommend you take a look at it because there are serious lessons to be learned from Hitler’s rise to power even today, and to top it all off, it just so happens to be a brilliant game, that takes the idea of The Resistance and completely improves that games issues.

Whilst I was there I also got in a game of Superfight and Ladies and Gentlemen, games I played for the first time and very much enjoyed, particularly Ladies and Gentlemen which has been on my radar for some time now.

12 Days

By michael

On 1st January 2016

In Blog

Today myself and the girls I live with had a game of 12 Days, a game I have been trying to get hold of for a couple of years now, and got a reprint in December 2015 thanks to Calliope Games.

Its a charming little game written by James Ernest of Cheapass Games and Mike Selinker of Lone Shark Games, ands despite the PnP version having been available for ages, the art of Echo Chernik has a certain appeal.

The game is described on Board Game Geek as

The holiday-themed 12 Days takes the familiar “Twelve Days of Christmas” song and twists it into a quick-playing card game. Over twelve rounds, players try to re-gift unpopular cards while keeping cards that are strong enough to win the day, while also keeping a careful eye for bonus scoring at the end of the game.

The gift deck consists of eighty cards: one partridge in a pear tree, two turtle doves, and so on up to twelve drummers drumming, as well as one card each for Mr. and Mrs. Claus. Shuffle this deck, then deal each player twelve cards. Each round a new holiday card is up for grabs, with the cards ranked from 1 to 12 and being worth 1-12 points. In a round, a player:

Gifts a present to the player to his left,

Opens presents and tries to win the day with the best present, and

Buys a new gift to refill his hand.

More specifically, all players simultaneously pass one face-down gift card to their left-hand neighbor. Then everyone chooses one gift card in hand and reveals them simultaneously. Whoever plays the lowest gift card wins that round’s holiday card; in the event of a tie for lowest, with the Clauses counting as zero, then the next lowest card wins. Each player then draws one card to bring their hand back to twelve cards.

After twelve rounds, players score points for each holiday card they’ve collected. In addition, whoever holds the most gift cards for each rank scores as many points as that rank, with all tied players scoring in the event of a tie. Whoever has the most points wins. Happy holidays!

So we set the game up and had a little game, I focused on collecting the 11 and 12 sets which Lindsay was handing over to me without issue, but I wasn’t winning many day cards, so I ended up passing some 11 cards to Megan, and playing some low cards too early on.

Later in the game I noticed Megan was on low day card points and Lindsay was racing ahead, so I played a Mrs Clause to give Megan points in order to deny them to Lindsay.

In the end, I was on 42 points, Megan 43 and Lindsay 52.

I really enjoyed playing the game and although its going to get packed away in the Christmas box and put away in the attic until December, I expect a good number of games when it comes out.