Whitewash City - First Town Test

With the first lot of Whitewash City buildings completed I thought I should get them all out on the table to get a better idea of how many, if any, more I should be putting together. And here's the results. The blanket is the only sandy/desert one I could find in the laundry and it did not want to lay flat.

I'm pretty chuffed with the look of the table. Maybe a couple more buildings to help fill out the bigger tables at BADGA. With a bigger table I'd go for a layout where the main street branches off to the left and right in a Y shape. Yes it would get rid of the classic western main street look but it would add a few more places to hide.

Now I really should put the cardstock away and pick up the paintbrush, them lawmen and varmints ain't gunna paint themselves now are they.

Whitewash City - Bakery and Cafe

Continuing the trend, I've completed another two buildings for Whitewash City. This time the bakery and cafe.

I've also started work on the water tower for the train station, it's mostly done I only have to add the water pipe on the side. I'm not sure I like the way the design has the pipe sticking out in a gooseneck type fashion so I'll have a think about it and see if I can come up with my own implementation.

I've probably got enough buildings for some small games so I'll put them all out on the table tomorrow and work out how many more, if any, I need to put together.

Whitewash City - Bank and Ranch House

Two more Whitewash buildings tonight, well... actually it was just the one building tonight (the bank) while the ranch house was done earlier this morning. Around 5pm in fact. I woke up extra early and had to choose between this and cleaning up the kitchen... nuff said.

The ranch house was probably the trickiest building to put together so far. The fact that it's three seperate boxes that attach to each other means that if you get one edge wrong then everything that hangs off it is wrong as well. A slower setting glue helped here as it gave me time to jostle the pieces into position.

I'm really starting to get through the buildings now and it just begs the question: where am I going to put them all? I'm really not sure, where I am putting them right now is here:

And up here.

Another solution is needed, I'm thinking of a couple of those 20L plastic storage bins with some form of shelfing. What and how eludes me at the moment, a project for the weekend I think.

I want to get these all out on the table this weekend and run through the Six Gun Sound rules a few times to get a better grasp of the rules before I try to teach everyone else how to play. I'll post photos and an AAR.

Whitewash City - Sheriff's Office and Some More Shacks

Only one building tonight, still haven't gotten over the worst of this cough. Should provide a focal point for many Six Gun Sound scenarios.

With only a couple buildings left in the Whitewash City sets I picked up Set 9 and Set 4 which should give me enough to make a nice looking table. It's not that Six Gun Sound actually needs a lot of terrain but the more cover you have then the longer your characters will live.

I also picked up two sets of Precis Intermedia's Disposable Heroes standees: Western Statix 1 and Critters Statix 2: Domestic Animals. Some cardstock townsfolk and animals should help the town come alive, and you can't go past them at $4.72 a set for 30 standees. The quality is excellent and they offer all the standees in flat, triangle and token formats. They also offer army versions where each character is repeated on a single page and each one is numbered. Should be very useful for my When Chickens Go Bad and Cows With Guns scenarios.

Whitewash City - Train Station and Tool Sheds

Not a large update tonight but I managed to get the train station and some tool sheds finished.

With only 5 buildings, a few smaller sheds and a sheet or two of tents left to go I may have to order those other sets sooner rather than later.

Whitewash City - Grand Hotel and Dry Goods

It's been a few days since I worked on these, work and a cough so rough that it would be just plain foolish to put a sharp blade anywhere near my fingers. With my coughing fits becoming fairly predictable I decided to finish off the Grand Hotel that I started a few nights ago. The veranda on this model is fairly tricky and the whole building took me close to 2 hours this time. The Dry Goods took on 15 minutes this time though as I've worked out a few construction tricks, especially with attaching the roof. I even attempted to attach the chimney to the Grand Hotel. I think I've thrown out the chimney cap with the offcuts from the other night so I'll have to print another one out.

The veranda on the hotel is strong, it took six metal miniatures with no visible sagging or bending.

The bending you can see in the hotel veranda is due to me bending the tabs too short and in turn making the upright struts too long, the uprights are really eye candy and offer little to no real support to the veranda.

I should easily get through both sets of the buildings before the next Badga meet in under a fortnight, I may even grab another set or two and try for a really impressive table.

Artizan Wins!

My Artizan cowbows arrived today and they were definatley worth the wait. The casting is nice and sharp with little to no flash. The only complain is a minor one and that's that the bases of some of the minis are quite small, may 10mm around for the smallest. This made it a little tricky to mount them onto washers. I was tempted to drag out some of the 20mm GW round bases but the height of those just looks wrong now that I've switched to washers.

One pleasant surprise is that the miniatures all came in blister packs. This is a rarity amongst Internet based suppliers but it mean that all the miniatures came nice and safe in their original packing.

I'm keen to get some games of Six Gun Sound going this week so I think I'll have to get the paints out and get started on a couple of these.

Artizan Update

3 hours after I placed my order with Artizan it was confirmed that the miniatures would be shipping that afternoon. That is hands down the best service I've had from any online miniatures store, even the local ones here on Oz. So to Nick and everyone at Artizan: I tip my hat to you all.

So with a little luck I should have these early to mid next week. Hmmm if I start building some terrain now then I could run a few games of Six Gun Sound at the next Badga meet.

Artizan Cowboys

I actually went online to buy an airbrush and ended up getting these... how do I explain this one to my wife?

Each pack has three minis which should give me more than enough for most Six Gun Sound scenarios.

The Good
AWW009 Lawmen II, The Earps
AWW016 Doc Holliday & Wild Bill Hickock

The Bad
AWW007 Bandito's I
AWW012 Bandito's II
AWW008 Desperadoes

The Misunderstood ?
AWW001 Ill Buono, Ill Brutto, Ill Cattivo (which translates to... ah I'm sure you can work it out)
AWW002 Gunmen I

So the race is on, my Black Tree Design order has got a little over a week head start on this one so it'll be interesting to see which gets here first. I'll post pics of the winner when they arrive.

Artizan 28mm British Commandos

I've almost finished painting my German Wehrmacht (photos to come) and decided I'd celebrate by buying some more minis. Until now I've bought all my WW2 minis from Black Tree Design. The main reason I buy from Black Tree is the price and in fact I've yet to find any company that can beat their pricing.

This time however I'm getting my miniatures from Artizan Designs. Before I get into why I've decided to buy elsewhere let's compare the products.

Pricing
On average the price per mini when buying a platoon is 0.92p for Black Tree vs 1.13p for Artizan, not an overly huge difference but it can add up when you're buying a couple platoons at a time. So not suprisingly Black Tree wins here.

Range of Figures
Black Tree really wins here too, they have a larger range troop types and the number of poses for each type is quite impressive (16-24 different poses in most cases). That's not to say that Artizan has missed out on any minis they simply have one British Vickers MMG whereas Black Tree has two, and so on. Black Tree wins here.

Quality of Figures
I'm not going to give a judgement on this point yet as I don't have the Artizan minis here to do a proper comparison. But what I can say is that the photos of the painted minis on the Artizan website really look good, fantastic even. The Black Tree site has photos of unpainted miniatures that look good but they aren't really inspiring.

So two votes to nill for Black Tree, but why am I'm buying Artizan I hear you ask. It's simple: customer service. Both times I've placed orders with Black Tree my order has been listed with a status of "queued". Weeks passed on both orders and the status stayed listed as queued. In both cases part of my order was on back order or the stock was lost on a warehouse somewhere.. or something but my order stayed listed as 'queued'. It took numerous emails to the company to get any response whatsoever from them. Once I had their attention things happened quickly and good started to arrive but it was a lot of work on my behalf.

Artizan on the other hand responded to my email in about 10 minutes and were more than acommodating with answering my questions and even sorting out a custom order for me. It was refreshing and reassuring. I'm still struggling with getting everything I want in the order with my 'allocated funds' but I feel confident that this purchase will be a lot smoother that the previous two.

So the bottom line here is be careful when you buy based on price alone.