Thinking Outside the Box

On Monday night I was able to play in another Collective OP1 event at Sentry Box . I was quite surprised to see a large jump in numbers. In the past few months we've had four or maybe five attendees, but this time we had eight players. I'll take credit for one of them, other than myself. But anyway. Independents With No Regard to Timelines (90pts) - S'Gorn w/ Khan Sing & Invaluable Advice, Joachim, Polarized Hull Plating and Positron Beam - Soong w/ Lore & Counter Attack, Bosus and Goval I got another copy of the Dominion ship and built a named version with Gul Damar, First Strike and Seskal on it. Sentry Box has always had full mixed faction fleets allowed, so there was a lot of faction mixing going on. My first match was against a Dominion attack ship, a fully loaded Breen Cruiser and the Romulan booster ship. I concentrated my fire on the Breen ship first to remove the energy dissipators from play. After that I was able to split my fire out between t...

Last night we played our "First Contact" OP event at Trilogy Games . I have a bunch of expansions that I've not yet used, so I wanted to start working through the backlog of those. It's been a while since I played Federation, and the new Enterprise had some good looking stuff in it. "Mostly" Movie-TOS Federation (90pts): - USS Excelsior w/ Spock & Attack Pattern Omega, Valtane and Quantum Torpedoes - USS Enterprise (refit) w/ Kirk (8) & Disobey Orders, Worf, McCoy, Lojur and Photon Torpedoes - Command Tokens I ended up with the Dominion booster pack and kitted it out with: - 3rd Wing Attack Ship w/ Gul Damar & First Strike, Ion Thrusters and Photon Torpedoes I was matched up against a Dominion battleship/Koranak fleet that had a Maquis Raider booster pack and a loaded up side-board. My opponent set up the raider and Koranak on opposite ends of his starting area. I set up all of my ships in formation opposite the raider. ...

When I made my huge order from  West Wind Productions  for the first wave of  Empire of the Dead  gang boxes (seems like ages ago, because it was) I included a Victorian citizens pack. Ten models that I can use as fodder for various scenarios, or just to dress up the gaming table a little bit. The sculpts are characterful yet simple which makes them easy to paint. One thing I will say is that these took much longer than I'd like to admit to finish. It's not like when you paint a full unit where you paint each part of each figure the same colour. With each figure being unique, I had to spend time choosing colours that suited. I also decided to give the dipping technique another try, this time using Army Painter 's "Strong Tone" quickshade. Every time I use varnish as a shading medium I freak out a tiny bit when it dries. The glossy finish plus the high pigmentation always makes me think "oh sh*t, I've ruined my base coat!" for just a few sec...

On Wednesday evening I played my first three-player game of AT-43 . Each of the players put together an army list of 3000 points: Karmans, Red Blok and UNA/ONI. I had to use the ONI as mercenaries because I didn't bring enough UNA forces to fill out a list of that size. I was expecting to play at maybe  2000 points. I had also missed a few figures from some of my infantry when I was getting my stuff to bring, so I had to field incomplete squads of fighters in several of them. I don't have an exact list, here's an approximate list of what I played: - Steel Troopers x9 w/ a missile launcher and MSgt - Wing Troopers x9 w/ a missile launcher and Sgt - Shock Troopers x9 w/ grenades and Sgt - Zombies (alpha?) x12 w/ medics & mortar guns x2, and Samurai - Death Dealer TacArms x3 - Steel TacArms x3 - Zombie TacArms beta x3 - Bokor w/ Vlad We set up the table with an improvised scenario. The MedTec were stranded (placed in the middle of the table) and all of the arm...

Most of the world probably doesn't care about lacrosse, right? Isn't everyone completely and totally enamoured with soccer right now? Let's say almost  everyone. If you're like me, you'd rather be watching lacrosse. Today the FIL World Lacrosse Championship  tournament begins with what should be a bruiser of a game: Canada versus the US! The 2014 Team Canada roster includes a player from the Calgary Roughnecks  pro NLL team, Geoff Snider, who also happens to be a local Calgarian. With over 40 countries competing it should be well worth catching a few matches for folks with even a slight interest in lacrosse. I'm particularly interested in seeing how the Asian countries' play style differs from the North Americans. If you aren't in Denver but want to watch some games on TV or the web you'll want to look at the links below to see what's available in your country. - Broadcast schedule - Streaming schedule

I've been filling out armies and adding more to my growing collection of AT-43  miniatures. Last weekend I picked up some Red Blok  models and a few army books from another local gamer. Also included in that batch of stuff were some UNA  Death Dealer TacArms. I quite like the TacArm models, but had never seen the Death Dealers and was keen to give them a try! One of the things that I had trouble wrapping my head around was the army structures being different for each faction. So I decided that I'd sit down and put together a list using the Death Dealer TacArms platoon structure, which is as follows: ! Unit of Death Dealer TacArms • Unit of soldiers (*/**) • Unit of soldiers (*/**) • Unit of striders (**) • Unit of striders (**) Deciding on 1500AP netted me a platoon of 3x Death Dealer TacArms, 9x Steel Troopers w/ grenades and two missile launchers, 2x Fire Toads with Captain Newton commanding, and 9x Wing Troopers with a Master Sergeant. Rick decided to pl...

Second OP "The Arena" event at Sentry Box . This time we had four players total, three of them being the same folks from last week's event at Trilogy. Shane's fleet was a three-ship Federation list using the new Spock captain card. Lewis was playing Romulans and Bill was also playing Federation (as per usual). Me, once again I did the unexpected (or perhaps just foolish) and took a pure 100pt Bajoran fleet. Yeah you heard me: Bajorans ! Here's the list if you can't read the text in the photo: - Akorem w/ Kira & Militia, Li Nalas and Neela - Bajoran Scout Ship w/ Tahna Los and Feedback Pulse - Interceptor 5 w/ Hazar & Blockade - Bajoran Interceptor w/ Lenaris Holem and Phaser Strike So I bet you're wondering how it went aren't you? Well, it went almost exactly as you would expect. Round 1 was against Shane and amazingly I won the captain's battle. I mixed up two of his ships however and ended up focusing my fire on the wrong ...

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...