Near future assault team

About 14 years ago I got back into gaming again after the usual hiatus of late teens/early twenties and luckily picked up a bulk load of GW figures off someone clearing out their cupboards. Sorting through them at the time I find these non GW guys and thought "ooh they'll come in handy".

Roll forward 14 years and I've happily abandoned the evil empire, broadened my interests and dug these out with the intention of doing some near future  gaming using black ops (hence the crazy uniform colors).

On painting these I quickly realised that they're really cool models with a nice level off chunky detail, however I have no idea who the manufacturer is so if anyone knows please drop me a line as I'd like to see what else they may have done and maybe pick up a few more. 

K47 - Totenkorps

First off the blocks in this new game are my Totenkorps (reanimated soldiers). I really liked the sculpts on these models, they do have that shambling undead look. I painted them in a pretty muted colour scheme to reflect their rotting, dead for some time nature as I picture some Nazi special services team collecting up dead bodies and recycling them through a fancy thingumajig to spit out fresh meat!

I've played K47 a couple of times and I have to say that I'm quite underwhelmed with it. A major cut and paste job, some nice new mechanics that have been shoe horned in and don't mesh well with the existing core Bolt Action rules. Oh hang on, that would be the old Bolt Action rules as within the space of a month of releasing K47 Warlord then release version 2 with some significant changes!.

So, although I like these models I'm not sure how much I will use them, unless Warlord update K47 an address some of the problems.

Demo Game at Call To Arms

Call To Arms (CTA) is the annual Wellington gaming event, many dice are rolled, distances measured and cups of tea/coffee drunk. To fit my very busy personal life, Mrs Off t'Club and I have an agreement that once a year I can devote a weekend to my hobby and this year it was going to be Panzerschreck, unfortunately my health disagreed this year and both mine and teammate Ashley's work diaries decided to get rammed and therefore we had to bow out this year (and my 4th Indian were coming along so nicely!)
So at quite short notice we both decided to devote a day to demoing Bolt Action and therefore booked ourselves a table at CTA (we also thought it may help out mate Scott's sales of hobby related crack!).

So we rolled up early to set up in the drizzling sleet with our bundles of terrain. For anyone that didn't know Bolt Action is Warlord Games WW2 game and has been instrumental in attracting whole swathes of 40k players from the ranks of the evil empire across to historical gaming due to its neat, clean mechanic and competitive army lists (of which I am not a big fan). BA is commonly referred to as WW2 lite primarily because of the aforementioned competitive army lists that don't necessarily reflect the historical reality.
However if you play a game that feels like WW2 and if you don't obsess over the minutia of points values and damage points, then it gives quite a satisfying game. I must say that Chain of Command is probably a better game for the period, but it just doesn't gel well with my neanderthal brain!

Anyway we demoed BA for the day playing 3 games with pretty equal forces (we didn't use points values) and managed to garner a reasonable amount of interest.

Below is a pic dump of our table to give you a feel for what went down! 
Ash provided the German forces, I the Brits. All vehicles were Ash's (he's so much better than me at painting tanks!) and he also provided the ruined buildings and base boards. All other terrain came from my collection (yayy I finished my Sarissa buildings).

Unfortunately I didn't get much chance to take photos of any of the other splendid display games that were there however I shall endeavour to rectify that next year. There was however a very nice demo game of Sharp Practice 2 being played next to us, which almost convinced Ash to enter the wonderful world of Napoleonic's (I'll keep working on him), for an entertaining write up (with pics) head on over to von Peter Himself.

Grrrr – damaged house

No dear friends, do not fear, my family home is still intact. Even though we’ve had earthquakes and driving wind, torrential rain and weird lightning storms our house has weathered it all without so much as a whimper. 

No the title of this post refers to my hobby and in particular the below mathematical formula, of which many of you are familiar;

Children + Party at your house = damaged Sarissa Building

So what is my lesson learned from this little experience? Don’t let a 4 and 6 year old you don’t know go anywhere near your prized wargames scenery!

Oh and bottling up your rage and fury is really flippng hard whilst the little demons are standing innocently behind their parents as I say (for political, must keep the neighbours happy reasons) “don’t worry, I can fix it”.

Ho hum!

BFG Transports

You know when you've completed a plastic model and the pesky manufacturer provides you with oodles of extra's that you don't use, well I decided to use some. Yes this is another take on my building something from nothing insanity.

As I was recently painting up my BFG ships I thought it might be fun to have some transports as objectives, a quick trawl through the t'interweb for inspiration resulted in me gleefully diving into my bits box looking for old bits of sprue to kit bash together.

So what we have here are parts from GW's Tau, Space Marines and Imperial Guard Range cobbled together to create what I think are perfectly acceptable transports for BFG. I did manage to squeeze a few left over weapons batteries and comms towers in there too to keep the scale right and overall I'm quite happy with how they've turned out.

Here's a shot with my recently completed Frigates to show scale, I'll add them to the group shot once I get round to taking one.

Oooh, Spaceships

So I’ve just managed to get finished the final batch of ships for my Battlefleet Gothic Imperial Fleet. These little babies are the Sword and Firestorm frigates, nice little models with plenty of character.

The Sword is armed with a weapons battery (think naval broadside) whilst the firestorm has a forward firing lance, easily enough to handle those pesky chaos raiders.

 
As I said this finishes off my BFG fleet however I do need to go back and do some more detailing on the bigger models, that’s the curse I guess of painting stuff over a ten year period. You end up getting better and need to redo stuff!

So once I’ve touched up the older stuff I’ll do a group shot, then it’ll be time to get out the space sheet and play a few games of space warfare!

More recycling - but not hobby related

Its amazing what you can pull together from junk you find lying about. This workbench took me about 3 hours to build and cost me $5 in total. All the materials were either left in the garage by the previous owners when we bought the house or sourced from the junk pile at my kids school. The only thing I had to buy were the nails. I guess this is vaguely hobby related as I can now crack on with boarding the garage and turning half of it into a gaming room. My garage is currently a disaster area with things strewn everywhere, however this workbench is the start of a general tidy up that should result in a rumpus/gaming room! I already have a pool table, just need a dart board and games console!

And yes it is very tall however I am 6ft 2" so ti means I can work on things without getting a bad back

More stuff from nowt (Part 2)

We've been watching a Brit drama series called Happy Valley that's based in Halifax, which is a couple of miles from where we lived in the Uk so I've found myself becoming incredibly "Yorkshire", hence the "nowt" in the title (which for all you none Yorkshire speakers means "nothing")

Anyway here's the second installment of my "somert fo nowt" (or something from nothing) post - Ruins. As Ash and I got into Frostgrave I decided to build a ruin, which I posted about a while ago. Then Scott got me thinking about making some Osgiliath/Ithilien ruins so I set to with sharp knife and scrap poly and hey presto, more ruins.

Beanomir still searching for that elusive "precious"

"Oi Sean..... er I mean Beanomir don't go in there, you might get jumped by a Hobbit"

Beanomir continues to wander about, bloody hell Sean it ain't in there!



Posing dramatically!

"this looks a bit like the pub!"


"I know, up them there steps, thats why the pie shop....err I mean the ring is"

"Yup definitely in there" and the strange Yorkshireman marches off on to the moors for a ramble!

And here's the latest batch of recycling all together. I do have some more ruins in the pipline and I may have to build something that is a little bit more 3d, do we can play on different levels.