Thinking Outside the Box

I mentioned a bunch of items that I pushed across my hobby desk earlier this month, but here's a full recap of what I accomplished during the month of November. - Re-based two Heroclix for repainting: purple jumpsuit Luthor and Black Mask - Built Poison Ivy starter set for Batman Miniature Game ; started painting (4) - Built and based more serpent worshipper cultists (4) - Built new cultist minis for a brand new group, likely for Kulten (11) - Built safe box objectives for BMG (2) - Built all my Joker minis for BMG (14) - Built Arkham Inmates I booster for BMG (2) - Cleaned and based my remaining Threshold agents for Strange Aeons (9) In terms of painting I am nearly finished a 10-man Ork squad for Warhammer 40,000 . I also ordered and have received some stuff, but haven't had a chance to actually open the boxes for my Knights of Dice buildings & props or Ghostbusters Kickstarter pledge package. I've had word that my Pulp City ...

As a miniature wargamer, Mordheim is one of those games that you hear about quite often. It's like that popular movie from the 80s that everyone seems to have seen except you. What little I knew about Mordhiem before last week amounted to this: It's a fantasy skirmish game It's based on Games Workshop 's mass battle fantasy game Warhammer Fantasy Battles (you can see how they really stretched for a name on that one...) It's yet another game that people seemed to love that GW no longer supports Like some of the other specialist GW games, the rules took on a life of their own and were, for a brief time, available for free download from their website. I was given a copy of the rules and built a warband. I fully admit that I only skimmed through the book until I found the undead section, where I set about building a team based on figures I actually owned. We played a three player game last night. After only one game my overall thoughts on th...

Man oh man I sooooo don't need to buy any new stuff, but I keep doing it anyway. On the plus side, I've actually been playing a bunch of my games. Played my 2nd round exhibition match for our new Dreadball league. It was the Etherian Horde vs. the Broadstreet Bullies. Another game that went into OT, another win for me. I just can't earn enough cash to buy a seventh player, so I opted for another coaching die. Not a great investment, but it feels better than just having cash as part of my roster. Wrapping up a week of work before the Family Day weekend, I wrangled some co-workers into a lunch-time game of Lords of Waterdeep . They all really enjoyed it, and I only won by 3 points! I'm looking forward to getting that game on the table again. During the long weekend had the first game of AT-43 using my Cogs army box and a few boosters. We played 3000 points against Karmans. I'm considering adding a few more squads to my army, because having so many heroes in th...

I apparently have no fiscal fortitude, willpower, or whatever else you want to call it. As I've made mention of before I have a massive pile of figures awaiting construction and paint. Not to mention that they cover what seems to be dozens of genres, time periods and rule sets. But they keep on coming...because I keep on pledging. This year alone I've supported over a half dozen more Kickstarter campaigns: Wild West Exodus , Empire of the Dead - Requiem , Hell Dorado - Inferno , Zombicide Season 2 , Acthung!Cthulhu , Secret Weapons Tablescapes ,  Deadzone and Guardians Chronicles  which ended today. While technically yes, a few of those are not miniature games per se, I am in fact going to receive minis from the A!C pledge too. Another 25 figures in fact. Six new mythos investigators, six new monster figures, and 10 Nazi zombies. I doubt I'll get to actually play the role playing game but the books look fantastic and I'm sure I'll enjoy reading all that fluffy ...

Since I returned last weekend I haven't really done much hobby stuff, as my time has been occupied by holiday preparations, band rehearsals, work, and being sick. I haven't let that icky 'real world' stuff keep me completely away from the realm of geekdom however. On Thursday night I made the trek down to Trilogy to play some games with Uncle Mike and James. It was their regular monthly night for Strange Aeons . Rather than just play a straight up game of Strange Aeons though, James and I ended up doing a play test game of Kulten  instead. I was going to pit my lowly snake man cult up against his mighty Cobra army...but after looking at the massive point difference, we decided to try one of the Alert the Authorities  options instead. So I opted for having my cult sit  out, and an elite Threshold team worth a whopping 60 points took their place. Long story short James was able to achieve victory with minimal damages. We found a possible rule that needs some tweaking ...

For the last few weeks I've been trying to decrease the number of items on my painting table, without a lot of success. That's probably because I keep adding more stuff to the backlog than I actually clear off! I've got several pieces of scenery and markers, a 'hero' model for SuperSystem which will also serve in my Nazi Death Cult for Kulten , plus the Lycaon and Vampire starter boxes for Empire of the Dead sitting up there. There are also a ton of primed figures-in-waiting up on top of the fridge (to keep them out of reach from both the cat and curious little-people fingers). Sunday turned out to be a lazy sleep-in-then-stay-home day, which was pretty nice as they don't seem to happen terribly often. I did a few things around the house that required doing, watched some TV and then continued work on a few things from the miniature projects to-do list. As you may have seen in my previous post I also received a large batch of stuff for a  Stargate  ...

Another box full of unpainted metal goodness showed up at the post office for me yesterday. After getting it home and dumping it all on the table (then cleaning up the resultant mess of green packing peanuts) here's what I found. What you see there is an assortment of the officially-produced 28mm Stargate miniatures by Phoenix Icons in (or around) 2007 or 2008. I ordered them from Cold War Miniatures in the UK and they arrived two weeks to the day after. They had quick service, nicely packed and shipped, and there was also a friendly little handwritten note inside saying thanks. In case you can't tell by looking at the full-size image here's a run down of what I picked up: 2x Stargate & DHD 1x Jaffa First Prime 2x Skull-capped Jaffa 4-pack 2x Serpent Guard Jaffa 4-pack 2x Hawk Guard Jaffa 4-pack 2x Jaffa Heavy Cannon w/ gunner 1x SG-1 Team (O'Neill, Teal'c, Jackson, Carter and Mitchell) 1x SG-9 Team (5 generic SGC dudes armed w/ P90s) In...

I've always been the kind of person who has too many things on the go. Or at least that's what people often tell me, wondering how I can ever keep it all straight, or finish anything. The truth is that, for me, I need to have all those things happening so that I can keep myself entertained. I almost wrote focused  instead of entertained, but even I'm not so self-deluded to think that I possess much in the way of focus when it comes to my hobbies. Obsessive perhaps, but not focused. You see, I know I have too many hobbies and the reality is that I don't have time for all of them. Nowhere near really, but that's part of the appeal. For some reason, the way my brain is wired, I will zero in on some activity or concept for a length of time, produce some interesting or cool stuff (yep, aren't I modest), and then move on to something else. For the past 6~7 months I've been pretty firmly rooted in working on miniatures and terrain building. However, I regularl...

Last week Uncle Mike and James made their regular monthly visit to Trilogy , despite the awful weather we were having. I was the only player to show up (which is not unusual), so we ran through a few play test games of Kulten . I was playing with an unpainted army, and these are play test games, so there are no photos...sorry folks. The first game was a "chance encounter" between my Nazi Death Cult and James' Cobra troopers. I rolled five of my cultists onto the table and James got a measly three. A few bad moves by me allowed James to take out three of my figures, dropping me to below 50% of my starting members and won him the game. In the post-game phase I was able to roll up skills on both of my surviving cultists, which worked out really well for me, and I didn't end up with any lasting or terrible injuries to worry about. Just a note however, that James' Cobra army/cult is really cool looking. He's done a great job converting all kinds of stuff, ...

When I started testing the Kulten beta rules I thought it would be fun to put together a "Weird War" style list using some Nazi troopers, a mad scientist and some zombies. I had already picked up a really cool squad of Nazi Gestapo troopers and a leader from Bob Murch's Pulp Figures line. The leader came in a pack with a scientist figure, and I had dozens of zombie miniatures floating around so in reality I was already all set to go. I used the Strange Aeons rules for human cultists to equip my troopers and their leader. The resulting six profiles were a nice even 25 points. The mad scientist and his batch of test zombies worked out perfectly at 15 points to round out the 40 points starting cult size. Since these models weren't properly painted, I only used them once in a test game. They won that game and the list was a lot of fun to play, so I've been itching to use them again ever since. I do hope to finish painting them shortly after Halloween, which is the...

Canada Day this year fell on a Sunday, which meant that I got Monday off in lieu.  In order to make the best of things I added the Friday to it and was able to enjoy a nice four-day weekend.  The weather here was particularly nice as well, which we sort of deserved after the rain-filled monstrosity that was June. Strange Aeons / VUK Starting things off on Thursday evening was a quick, as in almost light-speed, game of Uncle Mike's WIP Kulten rules. We played his 60 point ghoul cult against my 23 point Arcanists. Due to the massive point differential I gained some sorely needed resource points to help bolster my ranks.  I was able to add four new cultists to the sad and lonely three that had survived from the last game.  I also gained two favour points, and a dirty trick. I used the dirty trick to alert the authorities and one of my favour points to modify Mike's roll from a 1 to a 6.  This meant that he could only field three models total, so he chose a g...

I really enjoy the locally-developed miniature game  Strange Aeons, which is probably no secret by now.  I was able to play a 4-player game at last week's club night with the "Old Man" scenario.  We had two players on each side and the lurkers were able to get away with the information they pried from the old man, before mercilessly killing him. Seeing how much fun the lurker players were having I decided to download the beta test rules for Uncle Mike's in-development game Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten .  Don't worry, I can't pronounce it either, even though I am 99.9% sure it's German.  According to the text on the front of the book it means "Of Unspeakable Cults". After returning home from work I sat down to read through the rules and make up two starting cult lists to give things a try.  I'll give some details of the game here, then follow it up with my thoughts afterward. The Game I rolled the "Fight" scenario and set up...