Thinking Outside the Box

With all of my shiny new Tannhauser toys arriving late in May I had to spend some time thinking about how to organize everything. Those booster box expansion look great and I thought it might be fun to open them slowly. You know, savour the feeling of adding new components to my game over time...but then I realized the sad truth: it'll take me years to get through all of that stuff. In the meantime, I'd be forced to store all of those packages until they were all open. As storage space always seems to be a major concern with my gaming items, I decided to plunge in instead. Opening, punching and sorting everything was quite the chore, but it was also a lot of fun. Going through all the components reminded me over and over again just how great looking this game is. When everything was finally all opened up I sorted the figures out into four groups: 1. Union 2. Reich 3. Matriarchy 4. Shogunate and Mercenaries I was happy to see that that "Operation: Novgorod" b...

I arrived home from a vacation a little while back and smartly enough, I had booked a couple of extra days off so that I could recover from any possible jet-lag. Also, I really didn't feel like going to work on my birthday. I had to run some errands in the morning, and on my way home I decided to stop in at Revolution Games to pick up some goodies. I figured I might as well get a present I knew I'd like for myself, just in case! I didn't end up with any new games, but did find plenty of expansions. I haven't played any of them yet, but I really hope to do so soon! My aunt also dropped in from out of town while I was post-vacationing. I had shipped some stuff to her place to save some postage fees during the past year. I was also planning go to pick it up myself, but hadn't been able to make the timing work. I'd forgotten just how much stuff was waiting for me. It was like Christmas all over again (or more birthday presents), once again courtesy of my own...

Jeremiah over at  Front Toward Enemy has a ton of great content for Tannhauser . If you've ever had any interest in the game itself, check out the extensive video collection he's put together. If you're looking for custom content for the game the most notable creation of theirs is, in my opinion, the excellent Mercenaries team and accompanying mummies put together using the figures from The Adventurers: Pyramid of Horus  board game. However, I noticed that he used all of the Adventurers figures except for Rasputin! So I set about trying to create some statistics, objects and a scenario. Thanks to Jeremiah for the help and feedback. Please feel free to give the profile and scenario a try and let me know if you have any feedback. I'll be putting together proper tokens and card images for download as soon as I paint my figure. Aleksandr Rasputin Aleksandr is the disgraced son of the Matriarch and her husband Grigory Rasputin. When it was found out that the young m...

Part 1: More New Sh...er Stuff Two more packages showed up last week. Both unassuming little parcels shipping via Royal Mail. With all the  Kickstarter  campaigns I've supported lately they could have been any number of things. It turns out these are the shipments for season 3 of  Dreadball  and the one and only package for  Empire of the Dead: Requiem . I've had a chance to go through the  Dreadball  stuff in detail and everything I ordered was included minus a few extras. The packing manifest and included note explained why they were missing and I'm fine with it. I know they'll be sent out to me as soon as possible. Besides, I have so much Dreadball stuff to work on now the extra few missing bits won't even be noticed for a few months at the very least! The very next day another box was waiting. Once again I was stumped as to what it could be...there didn't seem to be a return address on it anywhere. I did find the little sticker on the side af...

Since getting into Tannhauser  earlier this month I have been casting my net far and wide across the internet trying to find fan-made materials to add to my games. With Halloween fast approaching I happened upon a fun sounding "Zombie Survival" scenario created by Miah999 over at Front Toward Enemy . If you want to have a look at the scenario rules for yourself you can find it here . I downloaded the zombie card and glued it to a piece of cardboard off the back of one of my notepads. When I cut the backing cardboard piece, I cut it a little larger to allow for a border around the card. Once it was glued down I finished the edges of it with black electrical tape. I didn't think to take a photo of my card, but you can see it in the photos below, on the left hand side of the game board. I decided to set up the scenario on the crypt map from the core game set, and grabbed some of my painted zombies that I showed off earlier this year.  With the board set up, zombies and ...

Not too long ago I mentioned that I picked up a copy of the Tannhauser core game, a set of equipment cards and the revised rule book. It was pretty much a "hey that box looks spiffy" kind of purchase. I had never to my knowledge heard of the game, so before I bought it I watched some videos online and read a few reviews. It sounded like with the revised core rules, a game I could enjoy. If you look at the tags I classified this post with, you might ask why it's marked as "Weird WWII" instead of WWI. Based on the fluff, I think it sort of falls into being the same thing in this case. In the story line the great war (WWI) ended up continuing all the way into the late 1940s and early 1950s. It's just the Reich instead of Nazis playing the role of bad guys, so the WWWII label seemed close enough. During my web travels, I happened upon an online US retailer with a huge amount of Tannhauser stuff on discount. Miniature Market 's sale was pretty comprehen...

As I mentioned last time, I was at Fallcon during the last weekend of September. One of the big parts of the convention for me is the game auction. There are a few hundred games up for grabs in the auction every year, and I had looked over the list to see what gems I might be able to pick up. I had a list, but only ended up with one item from my list, that being Doom: The Board Game . I played a lot of Castle Wolfenstein , Doom and eventually Quake during my teens. I'd heard of the board game and that it was quite good, but had never given it much thought. When I saw there were a few copies of it up for grabs in the auction I decided that if I could get one for less that $40 I would. My copy cost me $35, and the second one went for $28. I know at this point it's unlikely I'll find a copy of the expansion, but maybe someday! The figures are quite nice and there are a lot of them. I'm sure they'd take paint well, although it's unlikely I'll be doing tha...