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Sounds excellent. I got a few WW2 Germans by Artizan and found some things to be left desired, but those Wild West minis looked really fun and very finely detailled.

Lovely Stuff Sigur! That carrion dragon is fantastic
I just bought the descent 2 box for myself and am looking forward to painting those little models. Not sure how theyll come out as the sculpts seem a little funny...but definitely a different experience.

Cheers
BB

@bebopdrums2424: Thanks muchly! Did you play 1st edition too and can compare the two? Yeah, the material is a bit different, but overall they're alright to paint.



Here's the last mini of the Space Hulk batch - the Librarian. He came without a left arm, so I had to convert one.



...and good luck trying to find a Terminator left arm with a stormbolter. Now the arm is a mix of bitz from 4 different kits and some green stuff.


Here's the first WIP picture:

Wowl Leave the inside empty/pitch black. it's very creepy that way.

@Gitsplitta: Not sure that would fly with the client.



The final WIP shots for the Librarian. When he's done there'll also be pictures with a proper white background. Sorry.


...and the rest of the gribblies to fight all those Marines (the broodlord I did a few months ago):


Hope you like them!

Man, that's a dynamic looking bunch. Both pose and paint.

The shadows on the libbys face are amazing

@Gitsplitta: Thanks muchly. Yeah, it's a bunch of fun little models.

@GiraffeX: Cheers!


Roight, to celebrate the release of Pike&Shotte's Thirty Years War supplement book - Devil's Playground (good title I think) - I decided to get those baggage train bases finished and painted! In that book you'll find photos of some of my 28mm and 10mm TYW stuff, so make sure you all buy several copies of the book, but not without letting the publishers know that it's ONLY because you can see pictures of my minis in there. That's important. :p



Due to photobucket's anachronistically small picture size limits the picture's got to be rather small. But so are the figures anyway. :p The bases are 45mm by 40mm in size if I remember correctly.

Earlier today I sculpted some more stuff like ...well, baggage to put on the carts, a little girl sitting on one of the carts and some more details. Hope you like it so far!

Update:

They look good Sigur, I like the animals.

@GiraffeX: Thanks very much! I don't 'squee' often, but I certainly did when I spotted 10mm scale sheep on Irregular Miniatures' website.

Heyhey people. Tonight we played a first test game of Blücher, the latest release in Sam Mustafa's Honour series.



Big army game set in the Napoleonic period, each unit represents either a brigade of infantry (3000-4000 men) or cavalry (1000-2000 men) or a massed battery of artillery (18-24 guns). Units, represented by cards in our game tonight, usually are organized in Corps. of four to eight units each. All these numbers and the organizations are to be viewed a bit flexibly due to how nations/empires back then organized their armies differently of course.

We played the free test scenario off Sam Mustafa's website. Along the Danube:


French versus Four objectives, two 'special ones'. If at any point French units control both these objectives (the central one on the Austrian side and the one on the right flank) they win instantly. Austrians pretty much have to make sure the French don't achieve that. We rolled who was to play which side, I ended up playing the Austrians.

Neither of us has any fitting 6mm terrain, so some ad-hoc stuff was quickly thrown together.

One of the central things about Blücher is this:


At the end of each player's turn he rolls three six-sided dice in secret and keeps them underneath a container (the rulebook suggests a Shako, but who has that at home?). The total is the number of Momentum points the other player may spend on activating his units next turn. Friction and all.

Blücher is designed so you can play it either with miniatures or with cards. Whilst my pal has a bunch of 6mm Prussians already, I have yet to get myself any 6mm Napoleonics (waiting for the GBP-EUR exchange rate to normalize again until I do that), but of course we'll go for minis. For now we made do with printing the unit cards supplied along with the scenario online:



Each card has the calssification of the unit (Cuirassiers, Grenadiers, Line Infantry, ...), the movement value in big white numbers (regular speed and speed in difficult terrain. Everything in this game is measured in Base Widths, thus making it suited for what ever basing you prefer. Infantry units usually move up to two BW, in our case 6"). In the lower left we got the number of the Corps the unit is part of and in the middle of the lower end of the card we got a bunch of boxes indicating the Élan of the unit. This is a mix of combat effectiveness and number of men in the unit. If the unit takes a hit you cross out the highest number and use the next number for all further rolls and such until the unit takes more damage. If the unit's Élan is reduced to 0 it routs off the table. Artillery works a bit differently in that one hit will make it retreat a little and if it takes two hits (but only if they were dealt by the same unit within one shooting phase) it will rout. Each time artillery fire you cross out one of their cannonball icons, reducing the number of dice you roll when firing the gun (they run out of ammo, the crew gets tired, the barrel takes damage, etc.).

In the first picture of our table you can see that most cards are turned upside down. These are units which have not been spotted or identified yet. Only if a Corps. or a unit moves, fires or takes a hit it is turned up (and/or miniatures are placed on the table).

Here's a picture of the situation late in the game:


As you can see, stuff's going down, especially in the centre where lots of cavalry are fighting it out.

In the end we had to cut the game short due to time.

Nice game, that Blücher. Not bad at all. I'm not as utterly impressed by it as I was with Longstreet (which was Mustafa's last year's release, an ACW ruleset), but I'm sure it will grow on me once I got minis. I'll be playing the French. Originally I would have liked to collect Austrians of course, but between my wargaming buddy and me we both wanted to play those and he already has quite a lot of Prussians, so we needed an opponent for those. So naturally I'm going French. Okay by me really.

Oh there's minis?? I thought is was a card game like MTG... only... sloppier.

Well, it can be played with cards or with minis. Of course 99% of people who get this game will play it with miniatures. I'm sure I mentioned a bunch of times on here already how i'm just waiting for exchange rates to normalize again before I order mine.

So far we (and by that I mean Mr.Wargaming Buddy) worked out a system for how to base the models: Just put everything on four 40x20mm bases. It's rather Warmaster style. But four bases perfectly fit on one card, and it's rather convenient having those on the board, especially as they all start just as blinds (ie hidden, with the back turned up) and the models are only put on the table once they're turned face up. The problem with setting up like that is that we don't get a LOT of units on the regular 6' by 4' table. If you want some space left for maneuvering it's going to be about 18 to 20 units max per side. Oh well.

I read a review of Blücher in the latest Wargames, Soldiers and Strategy magazine the other day in which an interesting point is made - the reviewer (forgot his name now) wrote that the attached campaign system to him is the more interesting aspect about the game than the game rules themselves. I have to admit that I still haven't read more of them than just a quick glance over. Appearantly it adds a lot to the game (and I'm inclined to believe that at an instant, because campaigns make everything better.), but if you mess up a campaign turn it leads to very 'unbalanced' games. Which makes sense too of course. I'd like to give that one a go once we all got our minis.


Last night I found another little cart for the wee baggage train in a box. I'd almost forgotten about it! (well, I had). It's a cart with a stack of hay on top (I guess that would make it a hay cart?).
Btw, here's what a typical cavalry mount required during the Thirty Years War on a daily basis: 4-5kg oats, 5-7kg hay (I assume that's either or), 15-40 litres of water, 1.5-2 kg straw for bedding. Feeding time per day: 1 hour.

Back on topic: Woohoo, variety in carts! painted it yesterday as I wasn't able to do anything more complex after a fine piece of dental surgery. (my head looks like a balloon, even more so than usual, after a painkilers/antibiotics induced coma during which I dreamt up things like a second hand miniatures sale in which I bought a four pack of metal Eldar Jetbikes made by Hasslefree and several weird Oldhammery items I made up in my hazy mind).

Look what arrived on Monday:



It's the Thirty Years War supplement for Pike&Shotte! To which, amongst others, I had the honour to contribute a few pictures. I'm very glad that the people who designed this book were capable enough to turn my photos into something printable. Very chuffed to see my stuff in there (all three pictures were put in there). Which isn't bad for 10mm stuff, because all the other photos of course show 28mm minis because those look sexier in promo pictures and Warlord Games sell that scale figures and all. My name and webbysite are also credited in the book, so things are well. Seems like the author forgot to put my name in bold letters and two sizes bigger than those of the other people who contributed, but I'll let that slide for now.

This actually is my first supplement book ever for any of the Warlord Games battle games (Pike&Shotte, Black Powder, Hail Caesar). It's got a bunch of army lists, some scenarios (one for each phase of the war, so not too many), a fun looking little campaign system for running your own company of mercenaries during the war and a bunch of siege rules which are very welcome. I mean people were all about sieges then, weren't they. Hope to post a more in-depth review some time in the future when I found out where to put it and when I can justify putting the time into it, because TYW stuff usually isn't the biggest blockbuster possible.


So yea, still no proper update again now, but I'll put up a proper update as soon as possible!

Awesome! Grats on the book deal sample!

This last post raises a question you are probably both perfectly great and perfectly horribly able to answer: Are there any good, non-company owned wargaming magazines in English? I could really use a good magazine that covers new games, gives reviews, etc. to read when I am "away from the computer", but I don't know of any. I considered a subscription to Scale Modeler, but that was really pricey and I am more into the wargaming side, not the obsessively comparing details on 1:72 scale tanks side.

Any recommendations on English speaking game magazines from the German speaker on the other side of the world?

(Or anyone else)

Congratulations Sigur!

Thats great news Sigur.

@Wehrkind: Cheers. I had a look at a few issues of Wargames Illustrated, and while it's high quality and all it naturally is rther biased towards stuff I don't care for too much. It also seems to be awfully picture-heavy and in some instanced low on content. I got a few issues of Miniature Wargames With Battlegames and it's really, really good. Big fan of the editor and I would say that it's very independant and often full of cool ideas. Today I renewed my subscription to Wargames, Soldiers and Strategy which probably is my favourite these days (amongst other reasons due to the fact that I did some work for them and got another article due for release in the near future). It's a bi-monthly magazine, it's got a good mix of stuff on new games, they got a very good miniatures overview for each issue's theme, amongst the regular authors are Jervis Johnson and Richard Clarke of Too Fat Lardies, it's got a section with small miniature reviews and in the back rules sets and book reviews, interviews with rules authors and so on. Very pretty pictures, good modelling and painting section, lots of different scenarios and mini campaigns for all kinds of games and suggestions for how to apply these scenarios for other rules sets and so on. Good stuff. The other thing of course which to me basically is as useful as a proper magazine is the Meeples&Miniatures podcast. Superb stuff. Highly recommended, supergood, got me into 90% of the rules sets and periods I'm stuck in today.

@Gitsplitta: Thanks!

@GiraffeX: Cheers.

Well, to be honest the book author asked for people to submit pictures because Warlord Games didn't feel like painting all the stuff and taking the pictures and all. So it's no great achievement, but oh well. It's at least a bit of an achievement.

Great, thanks for the leads, Sigur! Now to rob a bank... preferably one that stocks pounds sterling.

Don't pretend you didn't plan that anyway. But do give the Meeples and Miniatures podcast a listen. Really good stuff. Lots of variety in topics.

Funnily enough there are no German wargaming magazines at all. Well, there is Tabletop Insider, but they deal with ...well, mostly "the latest in mainstream sci-fi/fantasy" and their releases are rather uneven. Thing is that 'playing war' still to large extents is a no-no in German-speaking areas. It's perfectly accepted in video games (they are rather harsh on age restrictions when it comes to violent games though), but there are stories of store owners who got into trouble with parents after they saw Flames of War stuff being sold and such. It's all understandable to an extent, but on the other hand there's some silliness going on.

Then there's the language barrier. Many gamers either aren't so good with English (despite the fact that everybody has at least 6 years or so of English at school and I have NO idea how people get around the internet without English), which is why the big fantasy things pretty much have a monopoly in German-speaking areas. At least much more so than in the UK, the US and so on. After a Kickstarter Saga just got a German release and it's just silly how many people flog to the Saga-standards now. Two, three years ago, everybody got into Saga for a bit and got out of it again. Now we have the same thing with large groups of people in German speaking countries, simply due to that German language release. This is why since a while I've been curious about the question whether or not more diversity in wargaming could be achieved with German language releases or if the people who want something different already got their stuff in English and there wouldn't be much of a market for "the other stuff" anyway. And I have no idea how to find out about that. I did some polls on wargaming forums and on facebook and such, but it always turned out the way it was to be expected really depending on which forum you ask. And those translations aren't cheap, mind you. They're so expensive that a small-time rules publisher couldn't just do it on a whim to give it a try.

Maybe with kickstarter and pdf versions it might be possible.

When I was young we used to play Napoleonic’s (similar to the cards in you game) back in the 90's, The rule were somewhat simple but you could do large battles. I don't even remember the name we called it. ( yes I'm that old! )

When I was young I never needed anyone. And gaming war was just for fun. Those days are gone.

The little paper sheets are a good stand-in for minis for testing the rules and such. Worked rather well. Last night I worked out how much the full army I had in mind would cost. It indeed is not cheap. :/ That's what you get for units which consist of 96 infantry figures.

Okay, back to bizness.

Raven Guard Scouts:


They're 10 with Boltguns (incl. one with heavy Bolter) and 10 more with sniper rifles. They aren't all pictured in this WIP shot. Hope you like them so far.

Same goes for this illustrous gang here:


Some more Freebooter's Fate Brotherhood minis! See the big guy? That's Senor Nefando. It's a bit hard to conceive, but that's good old Dottore after he, following an old theme, his own crazy medicine!



Of course you'll also recognize the lovely Raven in the middle. This mini above is a kind of 'epic' version of her. In the left you can see her regular old self:


Anyway, fun minis I think. I like them a lot.

What a nice collection of scouts. Very consistant.

Love the Fems.

Nice scouts Sigur, camo is excellent.

Nice to see some more Freebooter minis as well, always a favourite.

The gals at the bottom are just spectacular sir!

@Solar_lion: Thanks. Consistency is what these Scout minis are all about, isn't it.

@GiraffeX: Cheers. Those Freebooter minis are a favourite of mine too. I usually get them in very small batches lobbed at me from various people so they tend to mess with my schedules, but oh well. They're mighty pretty, so it's okay.

@Gitsplitta: Thanks muchly, Sir! They are indeed.


Okay, the Raven Guard Scouts are finished but I kinda botched the first photos of them, have to reshoot them. In the mean time here are the final pictures of the latest set of Space Hulk minis I painted:









































..tried something new with the power sword.







Now I got some mighty fine Guardsmen on the table! It's been a while since I painted IG dudes, so it's cool to do those again.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
Alright, proper Scout pictures!






...and here we got a WIP shot of the Guardsmen veteran squad plus two advisors:



What's everybody's opinion on the Maelstrom's Edge kickstarter and minis?

Interesting to note the Genestealers and the Marines are the same base color. I assume Clients wishes?

@Solar_lion: Indeed so. The marines I think are meant mostly to face off against the red chaos space marines I painted around the end of last year.



Okay, here's a little in-between thing... (cue the theme!)






Here we got the whole group all together. A bunch of Stormtroopers, Vader and five rebels (Soldier Guy, Joe Camel, Fem Solo, that old guy from lots of sci-fi shows, Not-Chewie Wookie, Twi'leg Yedi girl).















Hope you like them! Next up - finished guardsmen!

Wow they look great, the highlighting on Vader is just amazing.

That's pretty stunning work Sigur. Color me impressed.