Thinking Outside the Box

With play underway for the  Calgary Dreadball League's third season I had a finished season 2 human team, or a season 4 martian team that I could have used, but I didn't really want to play either of those teams in league play. This is the final of my four original season 1 teams to be painted. If you've stopped by and read any of my posts about other teams, you've have seen that many of them are based on characters from Masters of the Universe. The "Berserker Island Beasts" are based Beastman, who is also serving as their offensive coach. Despite looking through lots of reference images, I struggled to find a colour I liked for the fur and ended up using the bright P3 Ember Orange. Selecting uniform colours for the team was also a challenge as Beastman doesn't have much in the way of accessories or colours other than orange, and those he does have vary widely depending on the depiction. The Beastman figure I'll be using is an old Grena...

With a few local players expressing interest in playing another season of Dreadball , I put together a quick outline of the rules, posted some dates and within a few days we had people arranging and playing their games. This season I elected to play Veer-myn from the debut season. I had to dig around in my copious amount of unbuilt models for the game to find my booster pack and build the remaining figures before I could start painting the Berserker Island Beasts . Including the core team, booster, downed figure and keeper model I think I have 15 Veer-myn models. They're currently about half painted. Yep, halfway through the season with two wins, and they're not even fully dressed! My first game was against a new player running an Orx team, the Atomic Smashers . It was a heavy hitting hard fought game in which I was able to win by 2. I was able to roll enough income to add an offensive coach, which I've always wanted to try. For the second game I was up against an U...

When I got my first shipment of stuff for Dreadball from Mantic Games  and played a few games I was hooked. It's hard to believe it was over three years ago! The models, especially the early seasons, are a little fiddly and some folks don't like them, but I do. I think they are nicely sculpted and affordable, and the game itself is very solid. If anything they're almost too detailed for my skill set to do them justice. Of course being a sports game I needed to come up with team names and colours. They should be bright, with high contrast, and have a logo of some kind. But what to do...? My first team didn't start out with a name, simply a couple of colours that I chose thinking they would look good. I ended up with the "Avion Yellowhawks". Why 'Avion' you ask? Well, because I'm a child of the 80s who grew up watch poor quality animation that were thinly veiled toy commercials. Anyone remember Masters of the Universe ? You know, He-Man and Sk...

A bevy of new stuff has arrived at my door since the month started. In my excitement I didn't take much in the way of photos, but here's a quick recap. Mantic Games sent a combined package with the final pieces from the Dreadball Xtreme Kickstarter campaign. It included the season 5 and 6 books, loads of new teams, a campaign set, a lovely mouse-mat style Dreadball original board and all the stuff for building new teams and playing multiplayer in Dreadball Xtreme. The amount of stuff I have for these two games is embarrassing, and a little sad, since I've not played Xtreme yet despite having it in my possession since last December. That same package also included a few bits and bobs from the more recent Kings of War  second edition campaign. No army sets yet, but some tokens and templates, the KS-exclusive Blaine and Ronaldino the Bard all showed up. Additionally I received both the hardcover and the gamer's edition of the rule books. I have an older starter set ...

Hobby seemed to take a bit of a back seat through July. I split my time amongst five projects, which is a quite few more than I'd promised myself I would work on. Here's what happened in my hobby realms...with far fewer photos than I'd like! The first thing I recall finishing in July was actually painting my MDF DreadBall pitch from start to finish. You can read more about that by clicking here . Stuff built for Batman Miniatures Game : - Black Canary and Batgirl - Victor Zsasz and Arkham Inmates set (4) - Titan Bane - Blackgate Prisoners set I (4) - Blackgate Prisoners set II for BMG (4) When I bought my Terminator Genisys starter set I built them the same day. This month I put some basing material on them and got everything primed in black. Although not fully complete I've painted all the endoskeletons (15) who simply lack a few finishing touches. We even had a chance to play through a few games. I may or may not do some kind of game recap or review...

First off, I hate UPS. They're thieves who charge an insane amount of 'brokerage fees' to pay my GST for me. In this case I shouldn't even have had to pay GST, since the Badger Minitaire  line of paints are made in the USA. Anyway, they're here, and UPS still sucks balls. The paints however, do not. Here is a wonky-angled shot of the contents after I started sorting them out. I've had my airbrush for almost two years now but don't use it often. Occasional priming duty in the dead of winter is about the extent of the work my Badger Patriot had put in, until now. One of the biggest troubles with airbrushing is thinning the paints. I have paints from Army Painter, Games Workshop, P3, Tamiya, Vallejo and even some Testors acrylics. I've experimented a bit with mixing them and thinning them down and getting a consistent result is nigh impossible, and made me think that airbrushing wasn't for me. I picked up some Vallejo Model Air last summer and ...

A short while ago we had our Season 2 championship day for the Calgary DreadBall League . After five rounds of league play Lar's season 1 human team, the "Massive Dynamic Iron Curtain" was in first place with 9 league points. This granted his team a bye into the championship game. The rest of the teams would vie for victory in a multiplayer game of DreadBall Ultimate . Only three coaches were able to attend, so the semi-final game was played between" - the "Keldoran Krushers" (Orx) - the "Dwarf Fathers" (Forge Fathers) and - the "Dread Monkeys" (Zees) The DBU game was a first for all the coaches, and was a lot of fun. My Krushers got an early lead by scoring in one of the Zees' strike zones. A little bit of jockeying for points by both teams cut my score down to 1. In the 5th rush however I was able to push my total to 6, making me a target of both teams. Even with a concerted effort between them I was able to weather the s...

When I completed my pledge for the DreadBall Xtreme campaign on Kickstarter a while back, I added a Martian team. It sounded like fun, having the scrawny little dome-heads running around the pitch shooting at people and/or getting smashed to death. The team pack came with the shipment that had all of the Season 4 items. It included a set of ten Martian figures equipped for DreadBall - 2 strikers, 2 guards, 4 jacks and 2 down markers. The figures aren't a huge departure from the ones in my Mars Attacks! core game, at least the jacks aren't. The guards and strikers look to be different, but I think they might be based on the science team from one of the expansions. Sadly I only have the Mars Attacks! base game so I can't really be sure. I wanted to make them interesting, and always try to think about who the coaches might be for a team. In this case I decided that DC Comics' Martian Manhunter would be a fun choice. It's a departure from my Masters of the Univers...

When the flooding hit our city last summer, I was evacuated from my home. This meant I didn't have much of my hobby stuff with me while I was displaced. I did have enough time to pack up some clothes and my kitty and still have a few minutes to spare. I grabbed a few paints and my Orx team, knowing that I'd have a fair bit of time to fill while waiting for news about returning home. Being without all of my regular equipment meant either suffering with bad lighting and crappy brushes, or finding some new materials. A trip to Wal-Mart yielded a $17 alternative to my Ott lamp. My two brushes didn't survive the escape from home intact, so a stop at the Michael's next to the Wal-Mart and a 40% off coupon got me a set of nice (albeit synthetic) brushes for $5. Finally the nearby dollar store provided me with the one colour I forgot to bring: black. Some excellent interlocking plastic cups and some small paint trays rounded out my materials. I was ready to go; for about $25 ...

I haven't had much time for hobby and gaming lately. Well, perhaps that's not true. It might be more of a case time and motivation not aligning for me. Our Dreadball league recently started up, but I've only played one game. Without a set schedule it's up to the players to arrange their own games. While I can understand why that is being tried, I'm unconvinced that it will work. I have a feeling that I'll have to be the one contacting other players in order to play the games I need to for the league, and in all likelihood most players won't finish this one. That'll be a shame, because the game really is a good one. I should have some photos of my team (The Keldorian Krushers) posted this week, as I'm almost finished them. I just have some highlighting and numbers to add and they'll be all finished. In an effort to cross some games off of my waiting-to-be-played list I invited a bunch of folks over yesterday. It was a short-notice invitatio...

Back in January of this year we started playing a new league setup, organized by Zac. I'd run a short league the previous year and had tried unsuccessfully to garner interest in a new one late in the summer. Since starting up things seem to be going quite well, and there are eight regular players signed up, with a few more looking to join in from what I hear. This time around I decided to try playing one of my season 2 teams, The Etherian Horde. I've only been able to paint four of my twelve teams, and didn't really fancy playing my S2 female team (The Synergy City Holograms). I was looking for something a little different and I thought the females wouldn't be enough of a departure from the S1 humans. I had played a few one-off games with the robots and knew that my core game strategy would have to change. The starting roster is six players only, so I'm immediately left at a disadvantage: I have no substitute players to bring onto the pitch during the match! Thi...

Whew now sorting through the massive box of Deadzone stuff...that was a lot of work. I had gone through the package shortly after I received it in December and organized the various bags into their appropriate factions, but beyond that I hadn't actually checked all the figures and parts. The pictures in this post are largely collected from Mantic 's promotional materials, as I haven't constructed any of my own toys yet. I really wish they've just labeled the damn bags. It would have made things a lots easier for all the Kickstarter supporters. I started off trying to figure out what was default to the core box game, then the extra items I ordered, and finally all of the stuff I got as bonus items for supporting the Kickstarter campaign. After going through the base game I counted up all the parts for my "Enforcers" faction bag. I really like the look of these figures, although the image from Mantic's website shows some expertly painted samples....