Thinking Outside the Box

I received my first shipment a while back, two buildings, from my pledge on last year's Kickstarter campaign for Blackwater Gulch . Monday morning on my way out the door to work I found another package lying on my doorstep. Not having time to go through it, I tossed it in my backpack to await cataloging...either during my lunch hour or at home when I returned. I went in for a Marshall pledge of $150, but added on some extras as well. Here's what I got. Starter gang boxes: -  Banditos Mexicanos -  Bloodwolf Tribe -  Widowmakers -  Tranquility Crew -  Wilde's Rangers Unlocked extras: - 6 colt-45 dice (these are a lot nicer than I'd expected!) - The Norwegian - John Blackwood - Mickey Finn - Kurt Wyatt - Doctor Kilmer - Nevada Dave - Father Al - Marshall Stewart - Rooster Morrison - Clinton Wales - Doc Lloyd I also splurged out for some add-ons: - Secret Weapon bases: #1 (desert mesa), and #2 rocky bluff - Shamus McFox: an unreached st...

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...

I've been around a lot of gaming in the past few weeks, but not actually done much myself. Let's get started with last weekend. Fallcon 26 ran Friday thru Sunday and I was lined up to help host three events on the first two days. Friday night's event was Dreadball . Unfortunately we only had one person registered for Dreadball, which I found to be quite disappointing, not in that the fellow was there, but in that none of the local players who've bought into the game bothered to come out to support it. It's really hard to build a gaming community when the players don't help out. On the plus side we did end up running three full games and everyone seemed to enjoy them. Saturday morning was Hordes / Warmachine . There were two guys from out of town in with their armies to play and Sebastien and I ran a demo game for another attendee. Well received, but lightly attended. Part of the trouble might be that it's a miniature game at a board game heavy conv...

More Heroclix conversions here. While looking through the figures I'd already converted, I realized that my character selection to date pretty much amounted to Alpha Flight exclusively. I've painted a few Pulp City models (heroes and villains starter boxes) from scratch, but no villains from either the  Marvel or DC Comics universes. I decided that needed to be remedied. I dug through my copious amount of Heroclix figures to find some interesting characters, not necessarily the best models, just characters that I thought would be fun to play with in games using  SuperSystem  rules. The three I chose were Lightning Lord, Cosmic King and Saturn Queen, because I want to start on a Legion of Superheroes batch soon and they will need villains to battle. The sculpts on the figures are pretty good, and the paint work is actually decent, especially when you consider that they're mass produced. As usual I applied some washes to the figures, and this time also did so...

Last summer my gf ordered some Zuzzy mats for me for my birthday. The challenges I faced in actually getting them delivered to me have been well documented in various places on the internet already, so I'll simply reiterate: don't order from Zuzzy. They have awful customer service, which is a shame because their products are really quite nice. Ok on to the real stuff. When I did receive my items, also included in the package were several sample mats. They're not big enough to game on, but serve well as test pieces for trying out the techniques and colours for painting your large size game mats. I had tried doing a winter-themed test on one of the very small pieces I also received and had been unhappy with the results. So I decided to try out a desert kind of theme on one of the larger sample pieces. I've got two of these large mats and want to do one up for western or post-apocalyptic types of games. Yellows, browns, greys etc. Here's what I ended up with. ...

My space marine chapter The Obsidian Fists are getting close to a strength of 1000 points. Most of the figures in my army come from the 4th and 5th edition starter boxes. The only real addition to those I've made are a chaplain and a devastator squad for heavy support. I also have the 6th edition starter box, but rather than doing Dark Angels I'll probably add them into my Obsidian Fists. It seems silly to start another space marine army...I have plenty of other models for other armies that I could and should work on instead. Regardless of what I do with the Dark Angels, I just picked up two drop pods for less than 50% of retail. Those additions would push my roster up to 1500 points without too much trouble. I'm only interested in having forces of around 1500 points or less, because I find anything much bigger than that to be a) WAY too expensive to collect, especially with GW's current prices, and b) cause the game to be longer than I enjoy. Games of around 1500 ...

Recently we made the change from SVN to Git for source control in my software development team. We've all been using SVN for years and, while not without its own serious flaws, it works. Managing the archive and access to it is simple, and people can easily check out and contribute with a minimum or effort and training. Yes, they can screw things up, but that's what source control is for...to cover your ass when you've left it hanging out in the wind. While SVN does require you to pay for the Visual add-in for Visual Studio, that's not so bad. I can see which files I've changed within my dev environment at a glance. Git does not have this feature, but it's not a deal breaker. I can live without this nicety. Now we have Git in place and holy christ if it isn't the most convoluted and arcane piece of ... software I've ever had the misfortune of using. As someone who grew up with DOS and UNIX command line operating systems, that's saying something. ...