Thinking Outside the Box

What seems like a long, long time ago...I received some of these 6'x4' mats for my birthday (nope, not last year's). They're really good looking but the size makes them difficult to paint in my house. The only way I can do that is to put both of my large folding tables out together, push most of the living room furniture out of the way and try not to get paint on the floor. I've got my Broken Blacktop mat about halfway done...but that's not what I'm here to talk about today. A few days ago I stopped in at Trilogy  with the intent of picking up a  Gale Force 9 mat for playing Star Trek: Attack Wing  on. They were supposed to have gotten some in stock, and I was happy to find that the rumours were true. Looking around the shop a little more I saw that they had a "Scourged Forest" 2'x3' Zuzzy  mat. I have a 6'x4' one, but since I've been playing a lot of Strange Aeons  lately and all of my home-built scenery is of the grass-and-...

Last summer my gf ordered some Zuzzy mats for me for my birthday. The challenges I faced in actually getting them delivered to me have been well documented in various places on the internet already, so I'll simply reiterate: don't order from Zuzzy. They have awful customer service, which is a shame because their products are really quite nice. Ok on to the real stuff. When I did receive my items, also included in the package were several sample mats. They're not big enough to game on, but serve well as test pieces for trying out the techniques and colours for painting your large size game mats. I had tried doing a winter-themed test on one of the very small pieces I also received and had been unhappy with the results. So I decided to try out a desert kind of theme on one of the larger sample pieces. I've got two of these large mats and want to do one up for western or post-apocalyptic types of games. Yellows, browns, greys etc. Here's what I ended up with. ...

This post may not be of great interest to you, but I wanted to collect all my thoughts together about several items I've ordered, pledged for or am planning to do this year. Not really a resolution list, but more of an...itemized accounting I suppose. I supported a lot of crowd-funding efforts in 2012. Sadly the first one that I supported I've not yet seen anything from and they seem to be suffering delay upon delay: Sedition Wars . As of early this week though, it does sound like they're finally getting on track. This was the first time I really jumped in and pledged for stretch goals or extras, and the amount of stuff I will (eventually) receive for my money was pretty astounding. While I am looking forward to the game itself, I'm also looking at using the Vanguard figures for other things, more likely as Colonial Marines for some Aliens-related gaming. The next thing I jumped on was the now-ubiquitous DreadBall . I went way overboard throwing cash at this beast...