Bear Cavalry

Hysterical Games has posted images of something every Khador player will want:

Panzerbär!

I have no idea how to purchase such a wonder, but one thing is certain: at last we shall have our bear cavalry!

Rust Tutorials

The most recent No Quarter painting challenge is all about weathering and battle damage. I don’t imagine I’ll get a suitable submission completed before the Sept 2 deadline, but the challenge got me searching for a better rust tutorial. My best attempt so far has been my plastic Beast 09. But, it still seems to be missing a lot.

One tutorial I found through searching contained a rust wash recipe, while another showed how to use MIG pigments. I might combine the two when I finally get around to painting another heavily weathered warjack (probably Ruin, because I’m working on a 3utcher list).

More as the story develops.

Great Synopsis of SDE Characters

Styfen over at BoardGameGeek has a great synopsis of Super Dungeon Explore characters, fully update for their 2.0 world (and including both Classic Consul and Arcade Mode information). It’s seriously super. For some reason I can’t get it to bookmark in my BGG account, so I’m linking to it here to spread the word.

External Link: Millennium Falcon Hack

There’s a tutorial at A Few Maneuvers on how to put LEDs into your YT-1300/Millennium Falcon. It’s highly unlikely I’ll make this upgrade myself, but dang if it doesn’t look pretty.

 

 

External Link: One Page Rules

I recently ran across a little corner of teh interwebs doing the gods’ work: One Page Rules.

 

 

These fine folks are trying to condense the rules for various GW games to one page. They currently have single-page rules for 40k, Kill Team, and Grimdark Racing. Their proposed docket includes: 40k/Infinity Hybrid, Blood Bowl, Epic Armageddon, Warmaster, Titanfall Wargame, XCOM Wargame, and generic rules to play with any miniatures. Personally, I’d love to to have a the rules to Blood Bowl on a single sheet—though I wonder if that can be done given the preponderance of charts involved.

Current Awesomeness on Kickstarter

So this week has been extremely detrimental to my wallet. The Kickstarters are in full swing with tasty, tasty options for the board game connoisseur.

First up is the expansion to Kingdom Builder.

I’m sad to say that I have not had a chance to play this Spiel des Jahres winner from the creator of Dominion. At a hefty $85 buy-in, I’m hoping to play a game or two in the next 10 days (!) to see if I want to lay down cash on this yummy expansion. The components look pretty. I’ve heard good things. I’m just not sure if I want to commit yet.

Another board game option is Tokaido.

This Kickstart just started today. As luck would have it, I played this game just last night since a friend of mine works for Iello.   So, here’s the run down: this game is gorgeous. It’s a true Euro with lovely components, very little randomness, a light theme, and the obligatory scoring track on the board. It runs a fine line between board control and worker placement with a dash of 7 Wonders for good measure.

I pretty much hated the entire game; but that might have been due to playing a new game, at a noisy game store, with the maximum number of players (all of which who are competitive, game-playing assholes). And, I won the game! The theme is religious pilgrimage along the Tokaido way; we quickly started referring to it as the conga line of hate. All that said, I’m still strangely drawn to it. Will definitely play again and might even back.

Next up is DreadBall Xtreme, a name with entirely too many grammatical errors (my eye is twitching).

I’ve played the original DreadBall (and will hopefully review it soon), but I’m not sure I need an “extreme” or… cough… xtreme… version. The original game had pretty, pretty miniatures and interesting rule set. I already found it a fair bit more violent than Blood Bowl (which, I also need to review… grrr). Taking out the referee and making DreadBall more violent really doesn’t appeal to me. I probably won’t back this one. One of my friends gets a regular supply of Mantic games to review so why buy the cow? But, it still calls to me like a siren’s song.

Finally, there’s Arcadia Quest.

This a second collaborative venture from Eric Lang and CoolMiniOrNot (the first being Kaosball). This game is beautiful. I love minis and dice. I love cute chibi characters. This game is awesome even if it plays like shit.

MOAR PICS!

It seems to be a semi-cooperative version of Super Dungeon Explore without a dedicated GM. I’m looking forward to someone on BGG coming up with alternate cards that allow full cross-pollination between the two games.

I know that there are at least another half-dozen fine board-game options out there right now on the kickstarters, but these are the best I’ve seen and will probably get me in financial trouble unless I manage not to pull the trigger before their timers expire.

Happy day, and good luck justifying your purchases to your family members!

Fantasy Flight: Still Taking my Money

Painting is coming along swimmingly, but what I’m posting about today is the lovely new ships that Fantasy Flight will use to take more of my money:
While the z-95 Headhunter and E-Wing are nice and all, I play Empire almost exclusively. The Tie Phantom looks interesting, but it was the Tie Defender that made me squeal. Having read all the X-Wing books, I had a hope deep in my heart that we’d finally see these beauties.

From the link:

When it was first released shortly before the Battle of Endor, the TIE defender was perhaps the most technologically advanced starfighter in the galaxy. It improved upon the design of the TIE fighter by adding shields, a hyperdrive, and more powerful weaponry.

In X-Wing, the TIE defender is a lethal starfighter that features three attack, three agility, three hull, and three shields. Imperial players can further load it up with both cannon and missile upgrades, and because only the Empire’s most elite pilots were allowed to fly the TIE defender during the Galatic Civil War, both of the unique pilots among the expansion’s four ship cards come with the elite talent upgrade.

Squeeeeee!

 

GW Took Slightly Less of your Money Last Year

New financial report out from Games Workshop today. Apparently, they aren’t taking as much money of your money as they used to (according to Bell of Lost Souls). Their revenue is down from £67.5m 2012 to £60.5m in 2013, but this meant a drop of almost a third to the profit margin:  from £11.1m last year to £7.7m in 2013. Still a nice chunk of change, but cue wild speculation that this will cause a radical uptick in GW prices this upcoming year.

Incorporeal Tutorial

I love the Googles. I was looking for a tutorial on making forest terrain (because I received some tiny trees for Christmas), and ran across a wonderful, completely unrelated tutorial on an apparently abandoned blog called Apartment Wargaming.

Clicking back through the blog I ran into a post on painting incorporeal models. I encourage you to click the link because this is the end result:

I know they aren’t incorporeal, but I might paint my Alexia and the Risen in this scheme (if I ever get around to purchasing them).

Kicking around Kickstarter

So I was kicking around the Kickstarter this morning after my daily check-in to see how ridiculously over-funded the Warmachine: Tactics game is. Yes, I’m a supporter. I look forward to picking up the Motherland’s new novice warcaster. The smug youngster might just be what Khador needs to be competitive in the new meta. But more to the point: as a scholar who has dabbled in the social sciences, I find Kickstarter a fascinating microcosm of people’s hopes and dreams. Come with me and stare deeply into humanity’s collective unconscious.

Take, for instance, the Badger Forest Tarot kickstarter. As a gnome ranger with a penchant for animal companions of the burrowing variety, I’m a huge fan of badgers. But the lowest pledge to get an actual deck is $38 US, a little steep to pull out at the gaming group once for shits and giggles. Supposedly these decks would run about $60 if not for the kickstarter to help offset printing costs, but this does make me wonder who the hell is this interested in badgers AND the tarot to make this happen? About a hundred people is the answer, since Ms. VanderHoeven has managed to get her project funded with a little over a day to go (who knew?).

If you find woodland creatures predicting your future a little to pagan, there’s always the Treasure in Heaven board game. “Players share gifts of Hope, Faith and Love in a battle against Sin and Deception on a journey to New Jerusalem. A fun Christian game.” This looks like less of a game and more of an activity. I’m not sure that Sin and Deception (I love the fact their capitalized) can actually win; so this is basically just Candyland with biblical art and Scripture memorization. The video is as painful to watch as a mega-church sermon or youth group talk about the dangers of rock music (yes, I had flash backs). I’d be really surprised if this actually gets funded.

Keeping (vaguely) to the religious theme, have you accepter Dominion and your Lord and Boardgame Saviour? If so, you might be interest at the Dominion Storage Box kickstarter. It seems every month or so another one of these reliquaries appear to house your most cherished of boardgame icons. Seriously, I love Dominion. It’s a great gateway game, but the number of these storage boxes on Kickstarter goes way beyond the demand for a better container (which I freely admit! Rio Grande Games should have taken a page out of AEG’s gamebook here). The only group of boardgame fans that can now compete with Dominion-ites are the followers of Catan—a cult that prompts the same response in me as Jehovah’s Witnesses at my door. Seriously, I don’t even think the followers of the way of the Munchkin can now compete. Dominion: you’re on notice!

Finally, there’s this wonderful piece of terrain by Iron Hill Miniatures: a Dwarf Brewery. You need to watch the video, it’s hilarious and endearing. Apparently, Dwarven Breweries are such a common trope in RPGs that the oversight of custom terrain for this scenario can no longer be tolerated! I can’t see spending $225 US to get the brewery, but the terrain does look pretty sweet. They also have some nice funding goals at lower levels that would provided one with a shit-load of drunken dwarves (a redundant statement? perhaps). I hope they meet their goals. The world needs more drunken dwarf miniatures.

So there are my ramblings for today. I’ve got a weekend of Convergence of Cyris release events. Hopefully I’ll remember to take some pics (and win some games).