F&IW update

Right a quick one with SALUTE2011 progress.

The Cabin is pretty much finished, and I am quite pleased with it. The lid comes of to reveal a fully detailed interior. Plenty of room for figures indoors. Now working on a Conestoga Wagon. First playtest later this week:0)
Furniture from Eureka miniatures or scratch built. food and other items a collection of Eureka, GW and others.

Wot no pictures?

OK so no picture to go with this entry which is kind of anathema to me but...

This entry is a quick one and it's a moan! Probably the thing that annoys me the most about the internet age and buying most of the toys for my hobby online is the figure manufacturers who can't be arsed to put images (decent or otherwise) of their products on their websites. I am not prepared to accept that it is complicated or 'We have so many figures we will get round to it one day' I want to look at what I am buying.

In some cases there are some companies who I trust and will buy from them even if they don't have a full compliment of photos, but there are many more who don't appear to have cottoned on to the idea that if I can't see what I am buying I am not going to. I am not going to shell out a large sum of cash on a gamble that the toys in question might be ok. So come on you lot, pull your finger out and post those pics. Who knows they might even sell more toys.

Right rant over, next time will be a F&IW update and I really need to get on with my Wargames Illustrated articles. Later:0)

French and Indian War progress already.

Well I am making quick progress with models for my Salute game for this year. The first section of the board only needs a frontier cabin to make a farmstead. I was going to make a log cabin from balsa dowel but as I want the whole model to come apart, as does all my skirmish scenery, I decided that logs would be way too much hassle. So I settled on balsa planking.


The model has been designed with various bits of furniture (which will feature in a future post) so it must come apart. It is only one large room, as it should be and a stone fire place made from plaster bricks. Balsa floor boards and plastic windows help to give detail.


The roof comes off, leaving the roof of the verandah and on the animal shed that is attached.



I aim to paint this model in the next week, then I will have everything ready fro the first third of the board and can be play testing the scenario for this part of the game. Come back and see this in its finished form next week.

Blast from the past!

Happy New Year!
Well it's a new year and it started pretty well from a gaming point of view, as my first game of anything took place on the 2nd of January, huzzah! I invited a few friends over to play some Warhammer Quest.


Quest... Quest..? Yep Warhammer Quest. When I worked for GW in 1995/96 it was the game I found the easiest to sell. It just sold itself, truely a complete game in a box, and packed with great (for the time) plastic figures, many of which I have now replaced or am replacing with the current generation of great plastic figures. It was the game to sell to people who didn't know what army to collect and whatever figures they bought they could use in the game somewhere.

Last night's game was the first time I had played Quest for five years or so, which is daft really as I have everything just sitting in cases in the garage. Anyway to cut a long blog short, a good time was had by all. A fun game with good friends. They were mostly hopeless; excellent when fighting an ogre terrible when fighting a bunch of night goblins. Eventually managed to make it through the first level of a dungeon. Many laughs on the way and NEXT time we'll add another player. I was hoping that it wouldn't be lame and would be fun at least. It turned out much better than I expected, we will definitely play more and ,I hope, regularly. And if that happens I might just have to make those 3d boards I always fancied making, sod it another project.


Warhammer Quest a game that stands up to the test of time. A game that GW could really look at again, but probably/definitetly won't. Still that means old geezers like me get to keep it to our selves:0)

Salute 2011 Here I come!

Never before have I really planned four months ahead for a war games show. But now I have:0) I booked my table at Salute2011 in August, and wrote a speculative blurb about a 40mm French & Indian War game. Today it took shape.

I managed to get a game played today, an achievement in its own right these days. Ant one of my re-enacting wargaming buddies arrived at my house with some painted F&IW British figures and I broke out the Indians and Courier de Bois figures I have painted so far and within a short time we were skirmishing in the forests of up state New York.

We played a simple raid type scenario using the Legends system. I keep threatening to write my own skirmish system for this type of game but there really is little point Warhammer Historical’s Legends/GW’s LOTR system is pretty much the ultimate skirmish system in my opinion, apart from tweaking for stats for different troops and making sure the weapon rules suit the kind of game you want there just doesn’t seem any point messing with anything else.

The figures we us are mostly Sash & Saber 40mm figures with a few Honourable Lead Boiler Suit Company figures as well. I was delighted to find that most of my existing terrain collection worked very well and with only a few additions in the future we will have everything we need for playing F&IW games.

Anyway the upshot of the game was that, I LOST:0( my French & Indians were beaten by a bunch of rangers and local militiamen. However it was great fun game, which led into a discussion about exactly what we are going to do for Salute. By the end of the session not only did we decide what the game would consist of, we had come up with a painting schedule (Yeah, I know!) and a modelling plan, and rough dates for when we will TEST? each part of the game.

Who knows it might even go to plan. I will be chuffed if it does as it will be a game produced in a year. We bought the figures at Salute 2010 and hopefully will have everything finished for Salute 2011. We will also aim to supply Old Glory UK ? Sash and Saber with some photos for their websites. Now I wonder if OGUK would like to sponsor us, we need some British Infantry and a Wagon afterall.

Make sure you come back and see how the plan progress.

Sorry about the quality of the photos they were taken in a rather ad hoc manner in dying light. I will try and take some better ones next time.

Warhammer Ahoy! Progress

Just a quick entry today.
Finally, after being down for nearly a year, the WARHAMMER AHOY! website is back up and running.

It is not complete as yet, I am using its state of uncompleteness as a carrot to get it finished. However I am really enjoying putting it together and working with various photos has reminded me what a cool game it is. I might be forced to put an undead ship and some high elf ships on my to do list.

So if you get time have a look

http://www.spiritofthegame.org.uk/warhammerahoy/index.htm

Me distracted... Hell yeah.

Ok It's December and there is more snow on the ground than I have seen in this part of the world for decades. Recently I have made some progress with my EOE article for Wargames Illustrated, but otherwise wargaming has been on the work bench as I have been working on more NERF guns. the one I most pleased with is my Steampunked Maverick. Many Steampunked NERF guns on the net just have suitable paint job, usually brass and bronze. Like my NIte Finder I wanted to do something a little more. So diving in to my bitzbox that had previously had been reserved for Warhammer Ahoy! dwarf ships I set to work.


Steampunking this gun was great fun, I only had one thing in mind which was to use the funny twisty handle Burger King toy, but how I had no idea. this is how it turned out...

A friend of mine gave me a Dremel recently and my word is it a good tool, various bits got cut up with it and a quick swap of tool heads allowed me to grind off all the NERF logos. The picture above shows the various components glued on waiting for paint.


The sprayed gun. I LOVE CHAOS BLACK SPRAY! When I make models whether it is a piece of gaming scenery or a modded NERF gun, it is the addition of the undercoat that I love as it is this point where the whole thing comes together and starts to look like all one item that is meant to be.


The finished weapon. I love this view, the skull on the front is from a cheap Halloween toy. I have another one of these which will definitely feature on another gun in the future. You can also see small cross detail on the piping on the top of the gun. I used several Warhammer Empire shield bosses for some nice little details. In many ways the small details like this are more fun than the big features like the skull and the crank handle.

The finished item. I am dead pleased with this gun. It works quite well. This is the one that I experimented with various mods to imporve performance, some of which definitely didn't work. However I can't see me using this gun too much. It certainly wont take the kind of bashing that other guns will, so its performance is not quite as important.

And then not being satisfied with producing this gun I fancied using a wooden box that I had sitting around. Some Foamcore and green wool off cuts later and we have a display case. the outside pf the box needs some attention and a nice latch. I also have a box for my Steampunk Nitefinder.

Now all I need is some more guns. I fancy steampunking a NERF Longstrike with a wooden stock and telescopic site and then howz about a 40K Bolt Pistol, hmmm.