It Returns!

Back From The Dead....

Fear not I'm alive! It's been almost two months since my last post, apologies for that. Since then I've been to Morocco and back, tore up the back garden and laid turf and fitted a new fence, been to Glastonbury to work for Oxfam for the week, and been working my tits off in my job. Unfortunately with all of that happening I've had to put the blog on the backburner but I'm now back and hopefully it'll be better than ever!

So what have I been up to in the world of wargaming in the past two months? Well the Soviets are fully finished to a 1,000pts on the dot. Me and Jim had a game with his finished Brits a couple of weeks ago and while I took a very early lead by the end of the battle Jim had beaten me by about 2 points mainly by getting his units off the board. I'll get some pictures sorted out in the next week or so, at the moment they’re in a case and with another 1,000pt game on Sunday I don’t want to take them all out to then put them all back in.

Despite having the Welsh Open at the beginning of October I’ve made absolutely no progress on my Japanese, I’ve put the next couple of weeks aside for getting all the squads built and primed, weather permitting. I’m still trying to source a couple of the models as unfortunately Warlord doesn’t seem to have a lot of the artillery and anti-tank guns for sale yet. I’ll be trailing through the other companies of the web to try and source what I need hence why I’m going to focus on the troops first.

I’ve organised an Escalation League for Bolt Action at NAG, we’re going to be starting at 500pts before moving to 750pts and finally 1K. A couple of people haven’t exactly been happy about some of the rules but at the moment we’ve got five people signed up with a couple more showing interest so hopefully it’ll garner so more interest once a few of the games have begun. Full details and rules for the league can be found here.

Outside of Bolt Action, I went to the midnight launch of the 7^th Edition Warhammer 40K. Granted I was coming back from Morocco at the time but why not, I’ve still yet to play a game of 40K due to my recent time constraints but having read the rulebook quite a bit it seems like it’ll be decent once I pick it up and I get playing a bit more.

Warhammer Fantasy-wise I participated in the first tournament of the year a month ago, we had a no-comp 2,000pt competition and I decided to take my Ogres as usual. Two 20-0 losses and one 14-6 win wasn’t really what I had planned but I’ve finally decided to box up and store away the Ogres for the foreseeable future. After a little while they get a little boring and stale. I’ve started the process of clearing out some of my failed armies (Lizardmen will be the first to go, my Empire will either go into storage or be sold too), once I’ve cleared those out I’m going to be starting a Vampire Count army. They were my original choice when I returned to Fantasy last year until I was drawn into the Ogres because let’s be honest what’s cooler than; Vampires, Zombies, Ghouls, Skeletons and everything else that goes bump in the night? I know I’m going to need a big bunch of Zombies (thankfully Mantic Games do pretty well priced undead) and the thought of painting every one is a little daunting but I’m hoping the Army Painter Necrotic Flesh Spray will give me a decent basecoat to then give the skin a wash and colour the clothing. It’ll be a long project for sure to get done but I have a feeling the army is going to look pretty cool once they’re finished.

Gorgeous Models

A couple of weeks back I had my first training game for Infinity. Mike, one of the main advocates of Infinity at the club is now a Warcor who can teach players the rules. I used his beautifully painted Ariadna against his Toahaa army and loved the game. The small model count really helps the game flow especially with the reactive orders meaning that no player is ever sat twiddling their thumbs because everyone is always involved. Check out Mike’s great blog here for all things Infinity. I’ve bought the Morat Sectorial Starter Force and the Vanguard Infantry box, they’re two of the newest box sets to be launched and they’re beautiful sculpts. I’ve already got the Starter Force based and grey-primed with the Vanguard waiting in the wings for a spray. Once I get these all started I’ll be having another training game to learn some more of the advance rules of the game and I really cannot wait for whenever that will be.

Finally I’ve signed up for a Judge Dredd Campaign at the club! The models and rulebook is produced by Warlord in conjunction with Mongoose Publishing. I’ve started a Cursed Earth Desperadoes gang but I’m still working out what equipment to give to each person in the gang for the campaign. I originally had an idea of two heroes and multiple goons but after kitting out two heroes with all the bells and whistles it really limited my choice for how many men I could run. We’re kicking off the Campaign August 10^th so hopefully by then I’ll have a couple of games under my belt and the initial guys for my gang all painted and sorted.

So yeah it’s been an eventful couple of months, hopefully now I can settle down and focus on getting the Japanese in some sort of recognisable state and make a move on with everything else. More updates later this week once I have Banzai’d straight into my Japanese models.
Chalmers