Thinking Outside the Box

While I wait for the arrival of all my stuff from the  Kickstarter campaign for Pulp City Supreme Edition I decided to give the v1 rules another look. For that I'd need to paint some more figures. Way back when I painted my starter sets, I found that the person I got my figures from had shorted me on several models I'd paid for. One of which was the level 3 hero, Solar. Not being able to play a full battle with both of my starter sets was remedied when I painted Deadeye and his vigilantes. All the rest of the Pulp City figures I received had come in their boxes except Fright Train and Night Fright. If I were going to grow the villain's ranks I realized that I'd need to round out my heroes to match, so I picked the Crimson Oni / Foxxy Blade pack and laid them all out on my painting table. It was fully my intention to paint the villains before doing the heroes. However, once I got a closer look and realized both 'Frights' would need some assembly, the heroes...

Yesterday we played our first game of A Fistful of Kung Fu  by Andrea Sfiligoi, creator of A Song of Blades and Heroes . Unlike most of his Andrea's previous games based on the SOBH engine, this one was not published by Ganesha Games . It has several subtle differences that add up to make it quite a different game than the few I've played before. Our game was played at 300 points, using a trio of my ninja turtles against Shredder and some of his Foot clan ninja. The turtles were all pointed up as protagonists in an attempt to see if it would work. The rules intend that a list only has one protagonist, one bruiser and any number of extras. The main benefit of a protagonist is the ability to react to failed activation rolls. With more than one protagonist on my turtle list, even though they were heavily outnumbered, they were able to react with deadly intent several times during my opponent's turn. The game was fun, and it was a good learning opportunity, but I will defin...

I've been away for a while, but following on from my Exiles repaints last month I thought I might as well share the Power Legion profiles that I put together for those characters. Keep in mind that I haven't tested these in actual game play yet, so they might not be very balanced. If you do try any of the character profiles please let me know how they work out for you. I'm certainly open to hearing your feedback. Blink (502 pts) M: d6 A: d8 S: d4 K: d6 Lethal HTH Attack d6 Martial Arts d8 Ranged Damage d8 Teleport d8 (Trick: Instead of rolling damage after hitting with a ranged attack, teleport the target instead.  Trick: Teleport an adjacent, willing friend.   For both tricks, the passenger must make a Knockout roll vs. D8 or be Stunned. ) King Hyperion (1292 pts) M: d8 A: d10 S: d12 K: d12 Armor d12 Flight d12 Ranged Damage d12 Superspeed d12 X-Ray Vision d12 Morph (415 pts) M: d4 A: d12 S: d4 K: d8 Acrobat Difficult Target Entang...

I have a lot of Heroclix figures. Hundreds I'm sure. I don't actively play any more, but I do pick up extras from the current sets from my friends when I'm able. Most of these figures I'm showing off here are older ones from my collection. William provided me with a couple of newer ones like Sasquatch and Hyperion, so that I could do some conversions for an Exiles team to use with the  SuperSystem  v3 rules. This group has been in the works for a while now. We actually played a game using unmodified 'clix several months ago, which is what gave me the idea to jump in on the conversions. The first figure I painted was Heather Hudson: Sasquatch. You've seen this one before but since she's part of the team, here she is again. The other two Exiles we used were Nocturne and Blink. Both of these clix are actually very nicely sculpted and painted. I rebased them on 30mm rounds, and didn't do any initial paint cleanup on Nocturne. I added some detailing t...

Last winter I bought most of the then-available rule sets available from Ganesha Games. Recently they released Swatters  which is a set of squad based rules for soldiers vs. alien bug creatures. I haven't bought them yet, but they got me thinking about Mutants and Death Ray Guns . I love sci-fi and horror movies so naturally I've tried adding figures in that vein to my miniatures collection. Swatters ' release reminded me that I had a bunch of converted Aliens (from  Horrorclix ) sitting in a box in the closet. They had never been used in a game and thus were probably sad. Using the war band creator from Ganesha's website I put together four ~200 point lists: Aliens, Predators, Terminators and Zombies (wretched). In preparation for trying out my lists I also finished up a piece of terrain that had been sitting on my shelf for months! A few other pieces of terrain and the figures got dropped on the table and I was ready to go. The terminators were outnumbered by...

As I mentioned in my last post, I finished a whopping seventeen models last week. That's a personal best, and is likely one I won't be topping any time soon. However, I didn't show all of the models I painted in that article, simply because it didn't make thematic sense to do so. A few weeks ago I was looking around at Sentry Box, and happened upon a nice little box of figures from  Copplestone Castings . I'd heard positive things of the company but never seen any of their models in person. These were really nice, if a bit highly priced at 18-X (don't get me started on Sentry Box's ridiculous pricing scheme...), which on that day was about $19.25. I didn't really know what I was going to do with them at the time, but I couldn't pass on them even at nearly $4 per figure. Fast forward a few days and I had glued them to some bases; these ones are magnetic 25mm that bought a while ago and simply wanted to try them out. I had a window of pleasant weat...

Another box full of unpainted metal goodness showed up at the post office for me yesterday. After getting it home and dumping it all on the table (then cleaning up the resultant mess of green packing peanuts) here's what I found. What you see there is an assortment of the officially-produced 28mm Stargate miniatures by Phoenix Icons in (or around) 2007 or 2008. I ordered them from Cold War Miniatures in the UK and they arrived two weeks to the day after. They had quick service, nicely packed and shipped, and there was also a friendly little handwritten note inside saying thanks. In case you can't tell by looking at the full-size image here's a run down of what I picked up: 2x Stargate & DHD 1x Jaffa First Prime 2x Skull-capped Jaffa 4-pack 2x Serpent Guard Jaffa 4-pack 2x Hawk Guard Jaffa 4-pack 2x Jaffa Heavy Cannon w/ gunner 1x SG-1 Team (O'Neill, Teal'c, Jackson, Carter and Mitchell) 1x SG-9 Team (5 generic SGC dudes armed w/ P90s) In...

I've been asking around for a set of rules to play Weird War type scenario skirmish games with lately, and one of the suggestions I received was to try Flying Lead , which is based on the Song of Blades and Heroes  engine by Ganesha Games . I had never heard of the system or the publisher so I dug around a bit and found that there was a new edition of  Song of Blades and Heroes  released in September. A few moments, and $8 later, I was reading through the PDF book and wondering why I'd never heard of it before. The reason I decided on this book, rather than one of the themed books was pretty simple: other than Hordes , I don't own any skirmish rules for fantasy gaming...so I wanted that one. The book isn't very long but provides detailed, yet simple, rules for movement, melee and ranged combat, morale tests, larger scale battles, scenarios and campaign play. At the end of the book are several pages containing a very comprehensive list of profiles for all kin...