Army Painter to the Rescue

Once more unto the breach... or "How to do it right the first time".  Gus came by today and dropped off my Army Painter order.  $122 for the two cans of Quick Shade and a can of Anti Shine is a little more than I would have liked to pay but if they live up to the hype then it will be money well spent.

I've seen some of the Wargods Basti that Gus had done with the strong tone and they looked fantastic, I could not tell that they were dipped at all.  I'll go with the soft tone for my Heru, after I've tested a non critical miniature first.

Photos of the results to come.

Painting? Not so much...

Been pretty quiet on the painting front, lots of work going on in the backyard have left me absolutely buggered the last couple nights so Daddy's quiet painting time has been cut short by my bodies desire for sleep. I'm hoping that things will pick up next week but there's a lot of pavers that, unfortunatley, won't lay themselves.



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It burns ussssss.....

Good News: The delivery guy was late so rather than building a retaining wall I managed to get a bit of painting done. Two units of Anubi warriors are base coated and ready for detailing. Got a fewote characters to an "almost finished" stage.

The Bad News: Moving 50 sleepers from the front yard to the back yard seems like an easy enough job. And I got through the first 30 or so with little trouble. It all went down hill fast from there though.

Here's a picture just to give you an idea of the scope of my pain :)



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Grand Plans

Ok so I'm on three weeks leave, take away Christmas, a retaining wall I need to build and some special time with the Xbox/PS3 and what do I have?  Well hopefully enough time to paint some miniatures.  I won't list everything that needs painting but what I've got here are the miniatures I'm likely to actually use if finished:

Wargods

• 10 Heru Archers - pretty much done.
• 20 Heru Swordsmen - some base coat.
• 10 Heru Spearmen - based but still silver.
• 10 Anubi Archers - based but still silver.
• 10 Anubi Swordsmen - based but still silver.
• 10 Heru/Anubi Characters - big mixture here, some are pretty much done (Heru Harbinger) while others are simply undercoated (all the Anubi stuff).

Bag the Hun

• Around 50 mixed aircraft - mostly silver but these shouldn't take too long, epecially when/if the Army Painter stuff turns up and it works as avertised.

Wild West

• Around 20 miniatures in mixed states from undercoated to almost done.  I really want to get these done before next Badga.

WW2

• A squad or two of German Wehrmacht infantry.
• A platoon worth of German Fallschirmjager.
• A platoon of US Paras with a few support squads.
• A squad or two of British Infantry.
• 5 artillery pieces/guns/anti aircraft.
• 7 1/48 model kits in various states from unopened kits to "just paint me".

Hmmm glad this is just the "short" list.  Honestly I won't get through even a quarter of this but I would like to put a nice dent in it.  I think the big factor will be the Army Painter stuff.  If it gets here in time and I can make it work then I'm sure it will be the incentive to keep going.  The theory is that if I can do a decent job on the mini with moderate shading and highlighting then the Army Painter stuff should help bring out all the details I just couldn't be bothered painting.

Anyway we'll see how well I go in three weeks.

Disclaimer:
I know I'm getting both Uncharted 2 and Fallout 3 for Xmas so there is a teeny tiny chance that I'll spend a little more time in front of the PS3 than originally anticipated.

More Grand Fleets and some Nuts!

After reading through the rulebook for Grand Fleets I decided to pick up the first supplement King and Kaiser. 

For a 64 page supplement it's a little light on the scenarios, only having 6, but it does have around 10 pages of introductory material before all the scenarios that would allow players to expand on the scenarios presented.  To be fair though most scenarios are quite large with anything from 20-60 ships on the table so most scenarios will take up an evening.  So around 6 evenings worth of play for $11AUS is pretty good value if you ask me.  The rest of the book is 26 pages of ship data cards which makes the scenarios easier to just print and play.

Conclusion
I'm pretty happy with what I got.  Production quality is right where you want it with a pdf, nice layout and photos where needed but nothing that will hurt your printer.

My second purchase (third actually as I haven't got More Drums and Shakos in my inbox yet) was the Nuts! supplement The Big Hurt.

For $14US you get around 47 pages (the pdf comes with the maps in a seperate file) and contains 21 linked scenarios.  The book is intended for you to play the US forces and use the Nuts! system to manage the Germans.  However it does make note of how to play both sides if you so wish.  The book follows an unnamed US squad from September 1944 through to February 1945 during their attempt to take and secure the Hϋrtgen forest.  The layout is pretty much what you'd expect from any of the newer Two Hour Wargames publications, the books look sparse and the lack of artwork does make the book a bit of a drudge to read.  But!  The the important thing to remember here is that it's a scenario book.  You read it once and refer to it often.  More importantly is that it's printer friendly.

As for the scenarios themselves they are friendly to 28mm gamers with most scenarios only requiring a few squads aside.  The ctach here though is the reinforcements and the fact that most if not all of the German forces are determined randomly.  My only concern here is that I don't own a lot of vehicles and in the US case alone there is a 50% chance of a vehicle being rolled when determining reinforcements.  I can see a lot of proxies being used in these games.

The maps are probably where this scenario book improves over many of the books I've seen.  They're laid out on a grid and the terrain is labeled... thank you Darby, thank you.  There is nothing more frustrating than having to flip back to a map legend to work out what "white circles on a black background" represents on a map.

Conclusion
Another great Nuts! supplement that I'll be playing for sure.  Well... as soon as I finish my terrain, and finish painting the Germans... and start painting the US troops.  OK it'll probably be a while before I get this on the table.  But if you do have the miniatures painted then I'd recommend you pick this up.  Especially if you're a solo wargamer.