This is Not Your Father's Incursion

Damn you Tas... Damn you to Heck!

I almost bought this:

Which would have inevitably led me to buying lots of these:

 

But I didn't... haven't... yet.  Well let me explain.  I would have bought the game except for two things:

1. Firstly money, the game + miniatures = lots of money.  AND MY WIFE WOULD NOT APPROVE.
2. Secondly you can download the game for free... legally I might add.  Grindhouse Games have found it in their hearts to offer a print and play version of the game available here.

"Meh" I initially thought, too much effort it won't look as good as the shop bought version.  Then I saw these (on Boardgame Geek):

 

 

 

Ok... now I'm interested.  Methinks to myself "I can make that... and better to boot!"

So now the plan is as follows (in no particular order):

1. To make a board and the components.
2. Buy the miniatures (shhh do NOT tell my wife about this bit)
3. Play the game.

Parts one and three should be pretty easy... part two has me worried.

P.S.
Tas: I didn't really mean what I said before.  Admittedly you are a bad influence but your blog still rocks.

10mm Buildings - Part 2

I had hoped that my latest Pendraken order would have arrived by now, 19 days and counting, so in between my far too infrequent sessions of painting what I do have I've been making more of the MicroTactix cardstock buildings.

Two of the most recent have been some of the more fiddly designs but they look great.  I'm seriously thinking about basing the church on a piece of plasticard and putting some gardens/trees around it.  Maybe even model up a companion piece with headstones and the like.

Here's some shots, I've put in some 10mm minis and a 28mm one for scale reference.

Here's a lower shot to show the height better.

A shot of everything so far.

Enough for a believable built up area, I'll keep making more though.  I'll stop when I either get sick of making them or my shoe box that I'm storing them in fills up, whichever comes first.  I'm so impressed with these that I'll have to print out some fantasy buildings for Warmaster.

I'm a d8

You are a d8: You are the true adventurer!  Dragons rescued, princesses slayed, and all that business while O Fortuna plays in the background.  Your social calender is crammed with heroic deeds, and you've personally saved the world from ultimate destruction at least twice.  You are reliable, perhaps a bit predictable, but overall a shining example of what happens when courage meets determination.




Take the quiz at dicepool.com

10mm Buildings

A little while ago I purchased the Battlelands 15mm Normandy Buildings and Ruins produced by Microtactix.  Initially the plan was to scale these up to 30mm and use them for my skirmish games.  This worked, well for the smaller buildings at least.  After a lot of wrangling the church ended up needing close to 10 A4 sheets to create just on it's own!  So these just ended up sitting on my hard drive... until now that is.  Reducing these down to 10mm I found that they fitted 2 original sheets perfect on a single A4 sheet of paper.  So after an afternoon of shrinking, cropping and rotating these pdf's I printed out around 20 sheets with anywhere from two to four buildings per sheet, more than I should need for any reasonable north west Europe scenario.

Gathering all the tools I needed I headed outside:

• PDF printouts
• Cardstock
• Gluesticks
• Spray Adhesive

Gluing the paper to the cardstock is simple enough, spray the back of your printout and the cardstock with spray adhesive, wait 10-15 seconds and then join the two sticky surfaces.  Most adhesives will still work if you only spray one surface but the bond won't be as strong.

Once all pages have been glued together I stacked them all up and piled as many big heavy books as I could find on them.  Glues differ on cure time so follow what the can says but I prefer to leave them overnight if possible.  What you should end up with is some fairly stiff card that is still fairly easy to cut.

I won't go into the details of how to cut, score, fold and glue a cardstock building as everyone will tell you different things and what works for me may not work for you.  One thing I can say is the first couple buildings you make will take ages and look crap.  The important thing to remember with cardstock buildings is that they're not supposed to look better than real terrain.  They're a cheap, replaceable piece of scenery.  If (when) they get smooshed then you simply sigh and print out another one.

There is one trick to cardstock buildings that makes a huge difference though: edging.  Edging is the process of colouring those white edges you see when you cut out your building.  These really detract from the overall look and they just scream "I'm not real".

When I've cut out my pieces and before I start gluing them together I simply paint the edges with hobby paint.  The colour doesn't need to be perfect and I find darker colours work better at defining the edges than lighter ones do.  There's no real need to be ultra careful here either, any splotches won't get noticed while they're on the table. 

Some edging examples.  The big grey splodge on the left hand side of the building in the second photo below is hardly noticeable on the table, in fact I had to point it out to someone while playing Blitzkrieg Commander.

Edging can take some time, especially on multipart buildings but it is worth it. 

Cowboys and Panzers

Managed to get in a game of both Blitzkrieg Commander and Gutshot at the club last night.  Mick and I started out with Blitzkrieg Commander and we played a fairly straight forward 1,000pt all out battle, mainly because we wanted to blow the cobwebs off the rules and see how the 10mm stuff fared on the table.

Unfortunately almost all of the photos I took last night turned out rubbish as I'd forgotten to switch the macro mode off and in turn all the long range table shots come out... well rubbish.  We both forgot to bring a green game mat so we had to play using my western one so north west Europe looks a little dry in the photos but the rest of the terrain and the minis (the painted ones at least) looked fantastic on the table.

Blitzkrieg Commander (1st edition) was a blast to play.  It's close enough to Warmaster that I don't have to unlearn any of the rules from that game and the extra WW2 stuff fits into the system nicely.  Sadly the Brits, played by myself didn't start out too well against the Germans who were superbly commanded by Mick.  I handed over command to James in turn two who managed to fare better than I did but was still unable to turn the tide.  Well we've got the main mechanics down now and I feel more comfortable that next time we can manage a bigger game.  The German reinforcements will hopefully have arrived by then and I think I'll have to base the Aussies up for use until I can get some more British.

I was too busy painting WW2 stuff yesterday and forgot to quickly reread the Gutshot rulebook, so play was a little slow to start with but move along quick enough, with most players not needing to refer to the rulebook by the end of the game.  We played the Last Man Standing scenario with two characters apiece.  Each player started in a respective corner of the table and very soon the gunfight, and knife fights, began.

Game play is fast, I like the card activation, and characters seem to take a bit of a beating without being bullet sponges.  The game play feels very Battletech-ish in the way the system handles combat modifiers for movement and damage with progressive negative modifiers to movement and accuracy is also very familiar.  This is not a bad thing though.  The game is simple and play is fast, it would get boring if all you played was shootouts week in week out but scenarios run by a referee are where this game shines.  I think I'll bring this may just become our choice of "quick game at the end of the night".

I'm happy too with the cardstock buildings, they've suffered in storage but I can fix that with a little balsa wood and glue.

Cards:  the card activation for Gutshot works a treat but the rulebook does recommend using name slips in a hat of something similar.  I went with cards and just assigned a number to each character.  This worked but slowed things down a little.  I think I'll get hold of some poker chips we'll use those in future.  A white sticker on one side with the characters name in pencil should do fine.  Also removing dead guys from the deck helps and it quickly got to the point of turning four or five cards before we got to a live fella.

My two characters below, Blackie and Ol' Gray, named after their hats of course.  Ol' Gray managed take take two hits from a revolver, got spat on and cursed at (twice), got stabbed in the back with a bowie knife before being shot for the final time  Blackie didn't last much longer but he did manage to take down the gringo that snuffed out Ol' Gray.

I had a few people asking about where to get miniatures from so I think things look bright for Gutshot.  Now all I need to do is find a Marty and Doc mini, I've got an idea for a "Mad Dog Mcree" scenario.