Happy New Year 2010

I have decided to at least attempt to keep not one, but 2 resolutions this year.

1. The thousand sons. I WILL tweak this list into working for me. If I only keep one of my resolutions, this is likely it.

2. I want to lose weight. Everyone says this, I know it is a cliche, but I mean it. I am now heavier than I have ever been and my health has begun to suffer. Add in the family "biggest Loser" challenge going until March (250 purse) and I'm gonna make a real effort. Plus, I can't keep up with my girls, and that SUXX!

Happy new year everyone, best wishes to all!

Thousand sons

I have been toying with the idea of changing the specific gear of the Chosen squad in my Thousand Sons army. Would 4 plasma rifles and a power fist do better? Maybe change them from an assault unit to more like the chaos version of the sternguard?

What say you??

Merry Christmas

Happy Holidays all!!

Chaos Ascendant

I have been thinking about re-making my chaos marine list a lot recently. I have been doing a lot of reading and put quite a bit of thought into how to make it more competitive, yet stay away from lash builds or all plague builds. I want to make the army into something unique, with my own flair and still compete. I have something close now given the following units:

Chaos Sorcerer, Tzeentch mark, warptime and breath
9 thousand sons, sorcerer with bolt in rhino with havoc launcher
9 thousand sons, sorcerer with bolt in rhino with havoc launcher
9 thousand sons, sorcerer with bolt
8 chosen, icon of tzeentch, 3 pairs of lightening claws and a fist
Landraider
2 pair of obliterators.

This list is an approximate at point totals, shooting for 1850 points. The concept is rather simple. I have three groups within the army, assault, support and defense.

The assault unit (chosen and Sorcerer)advance quickly to tie up key elements of my opponents army. They are supported by the transported thousand sons shooting. These two support units can also contest/hold the mid-field objectives late game. The obliterators fall in here as well. Those I can deep-strike into the backfield or start on the board if I am facing a lot of armor.

The last element is the defense. That is the Thousand sons without a transport. Tough as nails and takes a dedicated effort to shift them off the objective. I like the idea behind this army. I am thinking this might be the ideal mix of my favorite tactics, so I'm going to make myself a promise:

Stay with this build out for one year. Don't change it from it's finalized form until you know that it is solid, and your play-style is set in with it. I have a year until the necrons arrive if the rumored release schedule holds. Lets give it until then.

What a week!!

Wow, it seems the world has been turned on it's head again in more ways than one this week.

Armoury games in Pickerington Ohio was robbed over the weekend. While this is sad news, this small store is not the only victim here. There is a family suffering because of it. The owner and his family rely on the income from the store to survive, and when there is no stock to sell, at the time of year it is needed most, a family suffers. I think about those kids and just cry that they will have a poor holiday because some jerk-off wants to have more toys for themselves....

Please watch the interwebs and your local groups for someone who suddenly has a large amount of new product to sell or play with.

Illness has also ripped through the family we all spent the weekend upside down praying to the porcelain gods this weekend. At least we all got it out of the way before the holiday proper.

The return of Apocalypse

Well...here I go again with the grand plans. This time I have gotten smart....invitation only event.

In the first corner we have necrons, with myself, Parker, Chris O.(maybe), and Todd (maybe) with about 10k points worth of necrons....

In the other corner we have William, Drew, and a few others (TBD) with Imperial Gaurd, and some space marine reinforcements.

The game is set on the jungle world of Sarlaxis 4. The Necrons had the world set as a tomb planet, and the imperials decided to move in. Of course the good old 'Crons wake up and don't like the humans camping on their lawn, so a fight ensues.

The tomb wakes slowly so the imperials hold the capitol city long enough for the Dark Angels chapter of marines to arrive in orbit and send in some reinforcements. Unfortunately the Dark angels are being pressed for other quarters by other campaigns and can only contribute a small relief force.

The Necrons are fully functional before the marines arrive and have the planet blockaded from orbit. The marines will need to run the blockade to drop in support for the beleaguered defenders.

The battle will be taking place on two tables. The first will be a space hulk style boarding action fought aboard the necron cruiser to disable it, and allow the marines to land reinforcements. This will be a standard 40k game using the following restrictions:

marines get 3k points using the standard 40k force organization charts. I will discuss a few exceptions with Will before the game. No tanks, as the battle is fought INSIDE the Necron cruiser. What ever survives of the marine force will be able to drop in to the follow up battle on the surface via Thunderhawks beginning on turn 3.

On the apocalypse board, the remaining imperial forces will be deployed using the following rules behind what ever planet strike terrain we can get our hands on. I have one bastion and a fortress, Will has promised more. The imperials will have one reaver titan, one warhound titan, a few flyers, and as many as three baneblades of various types in support. Al other imperial forces will be mustered from normal 40k army lists.

The game will start with the imperials deployed in the fortress and Bastions, and the Necrons walking on from the jungle at the edge of the table, or teleporting in from reserve as normal.

This is the plan, and we all know what happens when people come into contact with plans...

So Armoury games guys, I have a couple of imperial guard spots open. Any takers? You will need to provide your own army to play, I can't ask Will to pony up that much stuff, and I don't have enough myself.

Back to basics

When I started playing 40k, lord 17 odd years ago, my first army was Chaos. Now, I can't completely revisit those days under the current rules, but I can come close.

I have been talking with a few friends and thinking about how I game. By that I mean my play style. I like my lists to have some sort of oddball trick, feel fluffy and play fairly aggressively. Some of my early lists were daemon bombs, sonic assault, and the early thousand sons weapon immunity.

All of those lists twisted the local meta game and were fairly fluffy in context to the parent list. I feel that they were indeed trick lists, but you know what? I had the most fun playing THOSE LISTS....

With this stuff on my mind lately, and the local group seeming to be interested in nothing but the super killy internet lists, and being the creative guy I am, I have decided that it is about time to do something about it.

I can't make those guys play lists they don't want to, and let's face it, I don't want to try. SO I keep myself interested with those crazy ideas bouncing around in my head. Basically I came up with this idea about a year ago, after the current Chaos/Renegade marines codex was published.

I won't go into detail here, beyond that this will be a Nurgle list. Maneman knows what is in it, but I'm not talking beyond that. The models are about 4 months of collecting so you'll all just have to wait and see.

Here come the Holidays....

Boy it has been crazy already. Things didn't seem to be picking up at work and now I know why...17 people laid off out of 90 in my division, including my supervisor. Now I work in the health insurance industry, and you can see stuff like this happening a mile away...but it still sucks when it happens.

I made, I still have a job, and certainly something to be thankful for this year. Now we get news that my wife's grandfather died this morning. That means a trip out of state for the funeral right before the holiday and even more family in town for the holiday. (thanks the gods it isn't at my house....)

Anyway I am still going to have a good holiday even if it looks like it's gonna kill me!!

Have a good holiday season!!

Rejoice Brothers. Your slavery to the false emperor ends today!!

Happy Halloween!!

We had a great one here. I hope you all did too!

Bon Voyage mon amie

Well A good friend is moving out of the country for a few months, so what to do...go to his house and get in some 40k before he leaves of course!!! I went to play IG on IG and boy did I get in a game. we rolled an anhiliation mission and pitched battle deployment. I lost BAD. I have had this army for almost a year now, but this is only about the third game with them. Basically I didn't castle up,and my flanks got rolled by a heavy flamer toting sentinel and some veterans in a valkyrie....not pretty. Oh well take the good with the bad, I learned a valuable lesson about basic 5th ed play...watch your game more than the Buckeyes....

While i'm here, Congrats to Craig and Beri!!! Many happy years to you my friends!

And now for something COMPLETELY different...

I'm keeping this one short, promise....

I worked on my Volscani Traitor guard today for about 2 hours. I got about 40 of them tabletop base coated. I consider this major progress, and I hope I can do the same tomorrow to get all of the infantry to that standard.

I am still working on the command for Fluffy's vampire blood knights as well. I am putting some hand stenciled detail on the barding of the unit champion and redoing the banner. I have a crazy amount of detail to pick out yet, but progress is being made.

I should have seen this one coming....

Well, I posted the suggestions from my last post to the message boards at out FLGS and wouldn't you know it the ONLY people to come out to play were the local power-gamers....I should have seen that coming....Oh well. The way I see it is that they are an important part of the community even if I do not support that play style (and accompanying attitude).

That said, I feel like I need to explain. The way I see it, our hobby has three main parts. Part one is the game itself, and by extension the competition that comes with it. We all want to win and do as well as we can at anything we do...but this can sometimes take over and turn into an evil thing I call the power-gamer. We all know the type, meta gaming, min-maxed units, optimized lists, refusing to use a unit because isn't the "best" choice....you get the idea.

The second part is the hobby. This includes the models themselves. collecting, assembling and painting them, converting them, and of course the fluff, or story, associated with them. This is my favorite part of the hobby, and I know that everyone enjoys seeing a fully painted army on nice terrain more than grey plastic on a tablecloth and rocks. I tend to compensate for gamer creep with this aspect of the hobby, as it is easier to define than the third main part of our hobby...social interaction.

We all enjoy hanging out with our friends. Our hobby is great in that we get to game and hang out all at the same time. Now, there are specific things I want to point out here. Chief among these things is sportsmanship. I cannot stress enough how important it is to understand that everyone takes something different away from our hobby, and this is universal to most things we do in life. I can't imagine some one with a bad attitude keeping many friends around long enough to really enjoy themselves. I can say this, I have fallen into this before, and have been fortunate enough to have friends point it out to me, then give me the chance to change. The second aspect of this is community. We are all part of a community of people that go into their FLGS and participate in events, spend time with friends and support our FLGS and hobby through our purchases there.

I want to point out that all three of these "pillars" of our community effect and react to the other two. If a few people are nasty to others, people withdraw and don't contribute as much to that group. If people don't contribute to one aspect or another, the hobby as a whole gets hurt. Let's work together to make this OUR community a better place and help each other with keeping all three "pillars" in place.

About time....

We ( my local area group) haven't done much as a group lately, other than Will's great combat patrol tournament. I want us to do more as a group and I think smaller point level tournaments level the playing field for newer player (a bit). I propose a monthly, or bi-monthly 1k point tournament as a "keep it real" tournament. Now I haven't asked the FLGS owner about this yet, and I'm in no hurry to get this started before the first of the year because I will be swamped until then.

Here are the things I have been thinking about, and would LIKE to include in this little recurring tournament/meeting. You tell me if you think it is good or bad on a point by point basis, and we'll find a common ground to get this going. Upfront, NO flaming. If you don't like an idea, and that's cool, just be prepared to not only provide details and maybe an example of why it's a bad idea, and then provide an alternative. Feel free to add other suggestions if I miss something here, and I will keep a running tally update of what we have so far.

1. I think 1000 points per army. I don't want to get bigger because we are aiming this at players with either new armies, or are new to the hobby, and let's face it we kinda have to stick to a 4x4 board for more than a few of us to play.

2. I think we need to try crazy missions to shake things up, and be okay with it when they don't work perfectly. I think we need to expose ourselves to something other than the 3 missions in the book ever once in a while to stay flexible and competitive

3. Competition: It is just that, BUT NOT AT THE EXPENSE OF FUN I want to play a game and enjoy myself. That means not necessarily running the "best" force or "optimized" lists. Maybe run some not so normal units just to try them, or dust off some stuff I haven't used in a while to try a crazy idea and not get laughed at for it.

4. Positive atmosphere...I can't emphasize this enough, I WANT THIS TO BE ABOUT ENJOYING THE GAME, and my time relaxing. I have a right to not hear people bitching...they can do that while i'm at work.

5. Hobby as a whole. We all enjoy playing games, but lots of us really like the look of a fully painted army on the table (MEMEMEMEMEME) Lets face it, it just looks better and you get more of a sense of pride from playing with something you put real effort into....at least I do.

6. small armies actually force you to think more tactically, as every model means more to you. 5 points has a much larger impact when you only have a 1000 to start than when you have nearly twice that.

7. Develop The Armoury gaming groups as a community regardless of what game they play. I want to be able to get out and play more than one opponent without worrying about a schedule. If I know that a certain day is 40k tourney day, then I have a reason to be there for more than a single game (read as wife will better understand)... lol

8. Hobby days like the one the later this month where we meet to paint and model, and help each other out with modeling and painting projects....like Jerome for example I KNOW could use help with his 130 boy ork horde.

9. Rotating event staff. I like to think I do fairly well running tournaments for you guys, but I know there are at least a few of you who would like it, and lets face it, I wanna play some too....If you want to see what it's like to run an event this would be a good place to get your feet wet!


Okay guys have at it. What would you like to see happen at these "regular" tournaments/meetings?

New Albany Classic

So I finally decided it is high time I started getting in shape.....and as as usual I did it all backwards....I walked in this today:

http://www.newalbanywalkingclassic.com/event-info.html#expo

Thats 10k folks....6 miles to you and me. While my feet are killing me, I actually had a great time. All the registration fees go a great cause. Check out the facebook links on the homepage for a photo album!

I almost forgot...I played my Daemons against a frequent opponent of mine. He was trying out his new 'Nidzilla list and I thought I would surprise him....which it did. We fought to a bloody draw in a kill-point mission, though to be fair he had more models left after the game ended at 5 turns. I forgot how much I love that army....

Well, I went and did it...I play tested my guard and as the saying goes, "no plan survives contact with the enemy"....So I had to redo the list. After consideration, I dropped the penal legion squads and added a Medusa. While the tank doesn't fit into a light recon army, I think It goes better than prison troopers. I think of it as more of a firebase for the army, along with the Psyker squads. Basically I added some heavy weapons to the foot platoon squads, and added the Medusa....

So now I need a medusa....from Forgeworld...Oh well, it will only take two paychecks to save for it....

Back in Black

Well, I am finally back to working on my own stuff for a while. My Volscani 4th traitor guard are down to building a single Vendetta model, and then painting. The whole army is primed and the first layer of flock is done. Now I need to settle on a paint scheme. I opened this blog with the one I think I am going with, but i'm not sure.

I even base-coated about 30 ghouls today for my vampire counts fantasy army! wow, progress for once!!

Chicago Golden Daemon Fraud!!

Well it turns out that the winner of THREE golden daemons presented himself as far more than he really is. That gorgeous chaos lord was painted by someone else.....why do people need to be douche bags like this???

I Picked up Bloodbowl for the PC this week, and I am more hooked on this than I was the boardgame 10 years ago!!! Check this Goblin team trailer out!

Video Game - E3 2009 - Video Game Trailers

This game us American rules Football with fouling encouraged....and brutal!!

The New "gunnery Sgt. Harker" from the European August 2009 White Dwarf.

On to bigger and more numerous things....

Well, I finally finished the Blood Knights....sort of. While I am never fully satisfied with my work, these guys just leave me wanting. I wish I had more tie to relly give them some more love, but I just don't.

Well, on to my own work now for a while. I will be starting on the Volscani 4th legion in the next few weeks. I have my work cut out for me with so many to paint. 164 to be exact. With such a big project I am going to go slow and break it down into manage-able pieces, like 10 men at a time.

Since my intent from the start was for this to be my main army for some time to come I intend to lavish the details into them and really make them shine. I will post some pictures of my progress as I can.

Makin headway....

Fluffy those knights are now 99% done. I need to detail the horses for you, and then go back and do a quick clean up on the reds to finish. I will hopefully have them in the shop display case held for you in the next 7 days.

SOOO far behind

Well Life has been crazy. I took the kids to Disney, blew a fortune on bottled water and had an absolute blast doing it! Unfortunately it has taken a toll on poor Mike waiting on his Vampire Bloodknights...well 3 more are done and I'm down to 3 to go.

Once I get to this point in a project I would normally be saying "hey, you are ALMOST done, why not push to the end and get it done?"....Well as usual it isn't that simple. I am working with some other great guys at Origins game fair this coming weekend. That will blow another week as I furiusly work to get terrain assembled and painted for those games. That said I have still been making slow progress and I have only final detail and highlight left to do on 6 of the knights.

I'm ALMOST there. Please be patient with me Mike. I do apologize, I know you are itching to get these guys on the table. My new (self imposed) deadline on them is July 4th weekend so I can get them off my desk and start work on the Volscani....all 180 of them.....and the WHFB campaign, and WHFB tournament, and the 40k World Wide war prep, and the.....oh heck you get the idea....

Armoury Games Open Painting Competition

I am going to be holding an open painting competition at Armoury Games for you guys and gals. This will be an open competition, meaning no specific game system, no size requirements, and no restrictions on unit type.

This means anything from a single 25mm D+D model, to a baneblade or giant dragon from confrontation. You can do a unit of FOW tanks on a diorama base (no bigger than 12"x12" base please) or a battle scene or challenges....the possibilities are endless. Basically be reasonable with the size of your entry, pick a mini and get painting!!


Entry fee is $10 (to cover prize support)
Entry must be submitted to Bruce at the Armoury by no later than August 1st.
Entries will be displayed in the case at the Armoury until August 15th for the judging at 1pm.
Prize support for this will vary depending on the number of entrants, so everyone get painting!!!

Contact me here with a comment with questions, or Bruce at the Armoury at 614-833-1331 to get registered.

VC WIP preview

Well I like the models but....

Well, I am not going to get those blood knights finished before vacation like I had hoped. There is just too much detail.....besides, I can't bear to not do them justice for the cost of the models.

Here are a few details from the unit champion. He is farther along tan the others, and should be done before I leave, but the others are waiting in line now. I hope to have them completed in a few weeks after I return from our family trip.

Incoming new Hellhound

Well another metal and plastic kit has hit the dustbin. In August we'll see this new all plastic hellhound hit the shelves. It has parts for all three hellhound variants. They also changed all sorts of little details on the hull, and IMHO this is a really pretty kit.....except the oldschool heavy flamer on the hull that somehow got overlooked.....

While I have the 180+ model Volscani army working, I am also finishing up some work for a customer. The vampire counts army has come a long way, and after doing more than 60 zombies I am finishing with 9 Blood Knights. These models are gorgeous, and have a lot of detail to them This pic is an early color blocking shot, but it gives you an idea of where I am heading with them.

Volscani 4th Recon element in progress

The Rift Opens...

After talking to a longtime friend by phone last night, I realized that I do not get to hang out with, or even communicate with a lot of the people I care about nearly enough. Now, I do a lot of things mostly revolving around my hobbies and my family. While have have several hobbies, I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about, and playing miniatures based wargames. The modeling, painting, and collecting are all VERY important to me, but my friends, most of which I have met in conjunction with gaming are the whole reason that I'm here. While this is a great way for me to do simple updates for my friends, it also works for me to communicate with the people I am doing commission work for, or those who are interested in my work. So here I go, the first pic of my work in progress: The volscani 4th Traitor legions recon batallion.