Thinking Outside the Box

I've seen Motley Crue before. Several times. A lot of folks think it's cheezy or lame that I'd pay cash to go see these dudes. Washed up, too old, untalented...those labels and more have been levelled at Crue, by friends, the media and everyone on between. Fair enough, but in response I'd simply say "you just don't get it." Motley shouldn't have survived past the early nineties, as a band or perhaps even as people. They were self-destructive in the extreme, just read "The Dirt" if you don't believe me. Whatever you might think of their music, or the members themselves however, they're far better at what they do, even now, than most people have ever given them credit for. As a musician myself I think it's an important thing. People can listen to your music anytime, especially with digital ubiquity and all that. What you won't get from many bands is an experience you will remember. This is the third time I've seen Motl...

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...

With all the painting and miniatures stuff I've been talking about it might seem that I'm not playing any board games. That's quite simply not true! While I have had some trouble getting people out to play with any regularity, there have been a few games played. King of Tokyo I bought this about a month ago after having looked at the box probably a half-dozen times previously. Since then it's been hauled out and played 9 times. NINE plays in less than a month is pretty impressive for any game in my collection. In fact I owned games for years that don't have anywhere near that amount of play time. It's a quick, easy, and very fun dice game. My mom can play it, have fun, AND win! I'll be looking to add the Power Up!  expansion to my collection soon. Touch of Evil Played a short two-player cooperative game of this a few weeks ago. The gf likes this game, so it must be good. I haven't picked up the second hero pack, or The Coast  expansion yet. The...

Yup, more zombies. I painted most of this set at the same time as the RAFM zombies box I posted earlier. The only additional figures here were the zombie judge and zombie mistress, which I'll talk about at the end of the article. As I mentioned in my review of this set , the contents consist of two sprues of Mantic zombies with some custom metal bits mixed in, plus original sculpts for the zombie mistress and zombie judge in metal. I've already discussed the construction of the figures and components in that post. Overall the figures turned out very well and were quite a lot of fun to paint. I do have another JDMG Zombie Horde set but when I build my next batch of zombies I think I'll add in some parts from my box of Wargames Factory male zombies too. There are plenty of parts to go around, and mixing them all together should provide me with some really unique figures. Since all the metal torsos in the set were the same I didn't want to use them for ever...

Received these 12 days after placing my order directly from Wargames Factory  in the US. They responded quickly, the same day in fact, with a shipping confirmation. Strangely enough, and through no fault of WGF at all, the package ended up traveling all the way from Utah to Los Angeles, before finally being shipped up here to Canada (where it also passed through Richmond, BC). Not exactly effective logistics being exercised by the US Postal service there. Why would you send something 1000 km farther away from it's destination first!? However, back to the topic at hand. I ordered four different boxes and after shipping and exchange they cost approximately $26 CAD each. One shop in town does stock a few of the WGF products, but not their full range. Were I to purchase them locally they would cost almost exactly the same price after taxes, but I wouldn't be able to get all the sets I wanted when I wanted them. Either way really...order online and wait, or buy locally immediate...

I'm obviously getting old. The grey hairs I keeping find in my beard seem to be an indication of my un-young-ness. However, I was a kid once and as a kid, I loved cartoons and toys. The first cartoon I actually recall was naturally He-Man and the Masters of the Universe . I recall quite vividly the Christmas morning that I received the original Castle Greyskull and a bevy of heroes and villains to wage war over it. I felt so magnanimous and kind that I even remember telling my sister she could play with it whenever she wanted! Quite a gesture from a 7 year-old. Naturally she tested that promise and I wasn't nearly as gracious as I'd like to say I was...but shut up, I was only seven. Fast forward...a while...and here we are now. A revival of the show has come and gone, itself now over ten years in the past. The redo provided another excellent cartoon and a top-notch toy line, but that came to a rather abrupt end. I do have a fairly extensive collection of said line howev...

Well folks, with all the zombies out there in games, on TV and in the popular media these days, you'd think I would have painted dozens of them by now. Amazingly enough however these are my first but I'm pretty sure there are going to be hordes  more of them! (Ha ha, see what I did there?) Here's my work with a box of RAFM zombies I bought late last summer at Sentry Box for $30. There were ten in the box, and I admit to being a little annoyed at getting duplicates of two of the figures inside. A little creative painting though and hopefully they won't be too obvious among a mass of undead flesh eaters. Congratulations, you've just had twins...twice! The lone female in the set is massive  in stature. If she were standing upright she'd tower over top of the rest of the figures, and that right arm is almost as long as she is tall. The gore and wounds on her are well sculpted, but do think that she's rather over the top (as are her 'endowments...

Uncle Mike and James dropped by Trilogy again last night, on their regularly scheduled 2nd-Thursday-of-the-Month visit for Strange Aeons . As per usual they brought along some beautiful hand-crafted scenery, as well as lots of lavishly painted miniatures. Of particular note was the new giant fishman model. I had seen this figure before a few weeks back but we hadn't tried using it in a game until tonight. Also, as a member of the Cult of the Black Goat, I was very happy to receive my free submerged monster model. Mike brought a cast of the full-sized beastie for me as well, which looks amazing. It's huge, very well sculpted and the cast is super-clean. I have a feeling it will be jumping into my painting queue pretty soon. With the Calgary Expo coming up in a few weeks Mike and I played through their demo scenario twice. I have to say, the board and scenery looked top notch, as per usual. Oh and the game scenario was pretty damn fun too. The basic gist is that the Lurke...

I've had this blog for a lot longer than I realized, going on almost a decade now. In that time it's gone through periods of high output, sometimes over a dozen articles in a single month, and lows where I haven't written anything for several months at a time. Over the past year I think it's taken on a life of its own and more often than not the articles seem to almost write themselves for me. In a sense that's pretty good thing, because if something isn't enjoyable to do, it becomes very difficult to stick with it. You all know what I'm talking about I'm sure. So anyway, I was taking a quick look at my stats dashboard today and was surprised at some of the numbers for my little corner of the interwebs and wanted to share them with you. Pageviews today: 43 Pageviews yesterday: 16 Pageviews last month: 1,205 Pageviews all time history: 19,757 Published comments: 503 Posts: 325 Followers : 10 Here's what I find interesting about these.....

League Play I wasn't planning on using the  Avion Yellowhawks  (Corporation humans) in the first DreadBall  league I ran from January thru March. When assessing interest in the league it sounded as though we were going to have two Corporation teams and two Orx teams from our four coaches. Not having a single Veer-myn or Forge Fathers teams didn't sit well with me, so Sebastien volunteered to play the Veer-myn and I opted for Forge Fathers. In the end we ended up with six teams registered: 2 Orx, 2 Forge Fathers, 1 Veer-Myn and 1 Corporation. After two rounds of play, our lone human player opted not to continue so we were human-less and sitting at an odd-number of players. I was already coaching  The Royal Eternian Rams  but also added my Yellowhawks in to round out the teams and provide a full representation of the core four teams. League Finals The top four teams were a good mix, with only the Orx going unrepresented for a prize. The third place game w...