Thinking Outside the Box

We had brutal, brutal weather here yesterday. The temperature dropped throughout the day while we got hammered with even more snow starting about nine in the morning. By supper time several of the main routes around the city were closed due to accidents. My trip to the shop was uneventful, but took longer than I'd expected. I was also the only person to show up. I can certainly understand not wanting to brave the weather and road conditions to go out and play a game. I'd have encouraged folks not to come for their own safety, had I known what I was getting into before I got in my own car. On the plus side however, I did pick up wave 2, and had a quick look over the OP4 kit. When I finally arrived home I sat down to open up my new toys. Sitting next to my little Christmas tree it felt a little like an early Christmas present. A present I had to pay for, but still fun nonetheless! The first ship I opened was the USS Excelsior . On first glance I don't think that Captain...

Several months ago I mentioned having bought a set of rules for World War II era skirmish gaming called Operation Squad WW2 . Shortly after I picked up a set of 1:48 scale German Panzer Grenadier figures by Tamiya . Happy with the scale once I'd put a few together I headed off to pick up some more sets so that I could field squads from several different nations for the game. The second batch that I decided to put together was their Russian Infantry box. HMG and assistants The Tamiya figure sets are very price effective, costing anywhere between $12 and $16 Canadian. I put together 12 figures from the Russian set, and I believe there are still three figures left that can be constructed if I buy vehicles or want to add variety. sergeant and lieutenant Something to keep in mind is that these are not necessarily great gaming figures because they're a little fragile. They're models intended for display, not play. The construction time can be a little high due to th...

After playing in two tournaments for the Star Trek: Attack Wing OP3 last week, this week feels like a bit of a letdown. All the wave 2 previews have been released. The OP4 prizes have been spoiled. Now most of the players are simply awaiting the arrival of wave 2 in their local stores or in their mailboxes if they ordered online. And the next tournament seems far, far away. Wizkids Dominion War  tournaments have been a lot of fun through the first three months. With the various winter holidays and new year coming up OP4 is slated to run through Dec/Jan, which means fewer events. I know of one shop that is running theirs in December but it's on a day I can't attend. Another has scheduled theirs for mid-January. The shop I'll be running at hasn't gotten back to be to confirm if my suggested date is acceptable. December is a busy time for most folks, so I can understand. I'm quite looking forward to wave 2, which is sort of ironic actually because I've not use...

Just a quick follow-up to my post earlier this week after playing in my second OP3 event of the "Dominion War." With my Klingon fleet not performing as well as I'd hoped I decided to make some modifications for my second event by shuffling captains around to get access to another action. I replaced the 9-skill Martok with the 8-skill one, and swapped Nu'Daq out for Gowron. Not a surprise to anyone who plays Klingons, and also fairly reminiscent of the fleet I used in OP2. The first game was against our resident Romulan player with two Valdores and two science vessels packing cloaked mines. I was much more careful about my ships flying in formation in this event and was largely able to avoid the mines he dropped on either side of the planet. We fought over the planet but I was again hampered by my dice, although it was much closer. Martok's barrage of fire damaged Donatra's Valdore down to no shields and one hull, but her return volley punched through his...

The Plan So far in most of my games of Star Trek: Attack Wing I've stuck to in-faction builds wherever possible because I find that to be more fun than min-maxing across factions. So far I'd have to say that it's working out fairly well, as I've been able to come in second and take home a prize ship in the three organized play events; even giving away my second Ch'tang to a fellow player. Admittedly I have mixed Dominion and Ferengi  ships just so I could use my month 1 prize Krayton in a game, but it didn't prove very successful in my first test attempt. I haven't given up on the Ferengi yet though! Otherwise I've played faction-pure squads in all my other games. Ok, ok you caught me. I did sneak one Federation talent into my Romulan build last time, but in my defence I didn't use it in any of my games. I really enjoyed playing my Klingon list from last month. Cloaking ships with high attack values were very useful in the Month 2 event of th...

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...

Since the release of Star Trek: Attack Wing , any regular visitors to my blog has probably noticed a rather high frequency of posts by me about the game. If anything, that should tell you simply that I think it's a good game. A very good game in fact. There are several things that I think it has going for it: 1. The universe - Star Trek has been around for decades and has a rich history to pull from, which makes it extremely good for gaming. With new releases every two months, it would still take YEARS to cover off all the ships we've seen on screen, let alone ships like Riker's USS Titan . 2. The engine - WizKids decision to license a proven system for the game was a good one. I feel that this has allowed them to concentrate on building on a good system by truly embracing the subject matter when making changes. 3. The factions - Directly linked to the universe, Star Trek offers numerous factions to explore. Mixing and matching factions is allowable (which I thin...

I already wrote this article once and lost it due to some very odd incident where an article I had edited just before coming back to this one overwrote all my text with its own and then saved itself. Hitting undo did...nothing. So here I am writing it again, in a much briefer form. Here's the brief painting step-by-step: First I primed the figure with Vallejo airbrush grey primer, then the faces were painted with GW Elf Flesh. The rest of the figures painted grey with a mix of 6:6:2:1 of GW Skull White, water, AP Ash Grey and AP Deep Blue. I then added AP Dark Tone ink to the above paint until it was a slightly darker colour than the ash grey and used it as a wash on all of the grey base coat. The metallic pink base colour is a 2:2:3:3:4 mix of GW Skull White, AP Alien Purple, Vallejo Metal Medium, water and AP Pure Red. Not only was this team an experiment with white, but also creating metallics out of regular colours and some more aggressive mixes to obtain unique colours...

With this squad I'm thinking about a few changes. First being that I'm looking at taking two ships instead of the normal three. The second change is actually trying to load up most of the available ship slots without wasting too many actions. That's much easier to do at 100 points with three ships because the load outs are much more minimalistic. With the release of the Defiant, I've only played against it once and it didn't fare so well. I came up with the following 100 point TNG/DS9-era Federation squad to see if I could do better: - Enterprise D w/ Picard and Engage, Photon Torpedoes, Data, Geordi and Worf (core set) - Defiant w/ Sisko and Attack Pattern Omega, Cloaking Device, Quantum Torpedoes and O'Brien (core set) - Elite Attack Die Not having to be concerned about those evil orbital weapons platforms from month two's event, high defence values (such as those provided by cloaking) aren't nearly as important. That's not to say good d...

On Tuesday I arrived home to find two parcel cards in my mailbox. Having forgotten that I'd received tracking numbers from Cool Mini Or Not  a little over a week earlier, I wasn't expecting these massive things. I missed out on the first Zombicide  campaign on Kickstarter, so for their second one I went all in, not realizing quite what I was getting into. "What did you order THIS time?" "Ok, let's see what's in box number one..." "Cool artwork. Gross, but cool." "Wow, that's a LOT of zombies." "So that's everything in box 1. What's in the other one?" Oddly enough, the second package was exactly the same as the first. Even down to the zombie dogs and dog companions boxes being slightly squashed. As far as I can tell I was only charged for one set... Double the zombies double the fun? Not sure what happened, but I'll not complain too loudly about it.

If you stopped by yesterday you read my plans to try out a Romulan build in my second month 2 Dominion War  event. We played that tonight so here's the quick run down. Round 1 was against another Romulan build, two Valdore-class and an Apnex. He had cloaked mines which really did a number on me. I took out the Apnex and the named Valdore in turn 4, but was utterly unable to avoid the combined firepower of the weapons platforms, mines and the lone enemy ship and be able to maneuver myself into decent position after the initial fly-by. I lost this game due to those damned mines! Round 2 pitted me against a two-ship Enterprise build of the Defiant and the Reliant. My opponent's rolls were not good, and we both suffered from loss of action due to poor planning. I was able to take out the Reliant quickly. The Defiant was destroyed the next turn with a well-placed Muon token but Cheat Death, O'Brien and Scotty kept it alive a little longer. My three ships gave chase and moppe...

Tomorrow is another Star Trek: Attack Wing   Dominion War  Month 2 event at one of the local shops. In OP2 event a few weeks ago I played a pure Klingon build. For this event I wanted to use something different. Here we have a pretty bare-bones 100pt Romulan squad with one  out-of-faction upgrade: - IRW Valdore w/ Toreth, Counter Attack and Tactical Officer - IRW Khazara w/ Donatra, Attack Pattern Delta and Polarized Hull Plating - RIS Apnex w/ Mirok and Muon Feedback Wave The Valdore will always be firing 4 or 5 attack dice (sometime even 6!) and Toreth can convert one normal damage into a critical hit. Her tactical officer will be allowing extra re-rolls when spending a target lock, so the strategy for the Valdore is essentially: cloak, target lock, fire...repeat. I expect this ship to be my opponent's primary target if they want to take out my heaviest hitter. If I'm in a position where I feel the Valdore is going to come under fire, opting to use Counter At...

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...

I'll keep this one pretty brief. On Saturday we played a day-long tournament of Strange Aeons at Imaginary Wars  hosted by Uncle Mike. It was a three-round custom Black Dossier set up. Each player started a new Threshold list at the standard 15BP. Each round was composed of two games where you played once as Lurkers and once as Threshold. Due to the random pairings I only played one game against a new opponent. It would have been nice to play against some new people. I was not one of the folks who took home a prize. I'll blame it on the dice for at least one game, but I really wasn't fully engaged in the games. Snowy Saturday weather, not a great night sleep etc etc. All that said, it was pretty good fun and very nice to see so many players come out for the event. We did finish early which was a nice bonus. I generally don't do well playing the same game for a full day, but with a break for lunch after the first two rounds I managed to survive. I forgot to take...

Star Trek: Attack Wing is the first game I've bought into in quite some time that has any kind of tournament or organized play program. With each expansion ship coming with an included scenario to play, I'd probably be happy playing the game without the OP, but I do have to admit that I've enjoyed having an event  to go to for the game. Not only does it allow me to get use out of the game components I've purchased but I also get to play against other interested folks, rather than me foisting the game onto my friends. I'll sadly admit however that I have not actually played any of the ~16 scenarios that I have from the booster packages... The current play program is a six month long campaign recreating the Dominion War which took place during the Deep Space Nine television show. I'll admit to having not watched all of that series, so my knowledge of the actual story is rather limited. However, I have had the chance to play in an event for each of the first t...

Even though I've been playing a lot of Star Trek: Attack Wing in the past few weeks, I have also been painting. With Fallcon fast approaching and me slated to be running a tournament / demos for Dreadball , I wanted to get another team finished up. To my disappointment, I wasn't able to conjure up the energy to get them completely done. After almost a week of required rest following Fallcon (required because I caught a brutal cold during the event), I finally mustered up the fortitude to finish another season 1 team: The Royal Eternian Rams ! When I played in my first league early this year (January thru March) I decided to play with this team so that the Forge Fathers would be represented. We had one player drop out and I took up the slack by also playing a human team as well. ( The Avion Warriors have already been showcased on my blog, you can read about them here .) Like most of the other players in that league, none of us had fully painted teams. A few were primed i...

So far I've only had time to put together a few of the wave 2 items. The Hurley drones are very nice. I'm not sure why they're the only ones done in that blue plastic, but they are excellent. There was almost no clean up needed on them. They're a little large compared to the Hurley model itself...I don't see any way he could store more than one of them! I've also cleaned up and put together all of the bone crabs. These things have pretty prevalent mould lines, made worse by the fact that they have lots of legs. After being cleaned up they look good. Over the top disgusting, but good. I do wish the tails were a little heavier, because they're quite fragile to bending and having stress marks. I might prime these using gesso instead of spray primer just to give them a little extra protection. The last items I tackled were Ramirez and her necroform model. My casting of the necroform was almost flash-free and has good detail. I'm not thrilled with the nec...

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...

A few months back my boss purchased himself a 3D printer. He's brought in some samples of things he's printed: a coffee mug, a pill bottle, and most interestingly...some geographic layered tiles based on 3D models from our CAD department. Those were pretty neat. This week he brought in something quite a bit different. Can you guess what it is from this printing-in-progress shot? I wouldn't be surprised if you had a hard time guessing. The shape is there, but it's hidden underneath several support structures that had to be removed after the printing was complete. After removing all of those,and spending a little time with my airbrush and paints, we ended up with this. You might be able to tell that it's not full scale by comparing it to the size of my hand. The texture of the print is a little rough, and I certainly could have cleaned it up some more with a little sanding and filing. However since we're planning on implanting it inside a pumpkin an...