Blood Bowl Back in the House!

So,

A few weeks ago now, I succumbed to pressure and purchased a GW product. You see, for the past few years I have pretty much given up on GW games as most of my favorites went away. I sold off most armies or collections I had. But as the world now knows, GW updated and brought back a classic game that I always loved, Blood Bowl!

a moment of weakness overtook me!

I knew it was coming out and I had mixed feelings about it, as well as having kept two versions safely in the closet (and from the great GW purge) I told myself I did not really need the same game I already had. I also kept telling myself that I would not have anyone to play against, because the two versions I had (and many teams by the way) went in-played for years, so why should I buy this yet again?

Well before I knew what I was doing, I was walking out of my local store with a copy of the game and the Death Zone Season one book in my arms! As I drove home, I kept asking myself what had I done? How was I so weak? And would anyone play the game with me? I am weak, I know it!

Once I got home, I carefully unwrapped the shrink wrapping and took off the lid, it was like Christmas of days gone by when I opened up the 2nd box all those years ago! There were cool new models, a cool new board, a cool set of templates, everything was so cool looking, GW had done a great job with this update and there was a WOW factor of opening the box like old GW games used to have.

Well a few nights ago I started working on assembling the new Orc models, you get two identical frames of 6 orcs, so I quickly assembled the 6 just as they were. But I knew that the next 6 would be converted into different poses and have a few head swaps. The first conversion was the Throwers.

Stock model on the Left, Converted on the Right.

It was a pretty easy conversion, just had to do a few cuts to alter the look of the model. All the models in the new game are two or three piece kits that really only go together one way. You have to do so thinking about what you want to do to them. Next up was the Blitzer, he had his arms removed and had to Black Orc arms added to him, I pictured him smashing through a line slugging and swinging as he went.

Stock on Right, Converted on Left.

But then, I remembered I had some after market Orc heads and I went crazy with head swaps and re positioning of the rest of the models. I even went and took off the heads on the two above models, I just loved how they look.

New Heads!

Group Shot

 My plan is to paint these guys up like my favorite NFL team, the Arizona Cardinals, but in typical Orc fashion, the will be called the AZog Orcinals! So they will be getting painted Red and White uniforms, I am just hoping that with the green skin, they will not look like the Christmas Orcs! We will see!

So there you go, I am weak and yes world, I am a GW addict, God help me if Necromunda comes back, I will be totally lost!

TK

Point 213 - Progress

Well,

I am making progress on my contribution to the Point 213 game for next year. As of my last post on the game, I had just gotten all of my British tanks and had assembled the Firefly. Well I got the three Cromwell's assembled, so now I have one British troop for the game.

One British Troop assembled, all Warlord Models.

 I have to say, these Cromwell's went together pretty fast and were a joy to build. I remember how long it took me to build the Tamyia kit, and these were much faster and easier to assemble.

So with that done, I based painted them in Testors spray enamel (the same can I used on the Tamyia kits from ten years ago!) which is Dark Green.

Base colors on!

 So sometime this week I will start cutting in the other colors and doing my washes on them. Besides the British armor, I said I would supply two German Tigers. I had one Warlord Tiger as well as a Rubicon Tiger, but I had apprehensions about using one none Warlord model out of all the armor kits. So this weekend I picked up a second Warlord Tiger so that all models would be Warlord and that the Tigers would look similar.

Three big Kitties, only two will be used together.

So with the purchase of that last Tiger, I now have all the models for the Point 213 game that I committed to. Now I need to get painting, but I think I will be picking up the Rubicon German Stowage set to plus up my Tigers before I start painting.

So there you have it...

TK

More Troops join the Conflict

So,

While this week has been a rather tough one, I did manage to get a few more models done for our ACW game in February. So here are the two new units. Most of the figures are all Perry Miniature plastics, although there are a few Old Glory Second Edition models in there, mostly command models. These two units are considered Large units for Black Powder, being 7 stands large, which is 28 models in each unit. I usually do 5 stand units, but wanted something a little larger, this way I can take units away to make them smaller.

Perry Miniatures black pants

 The above unit I decided to paint them with Black English Uniform pants, I wanted something a tad different and while looking at the Perry drawings, they had this as an option. Plus it is something different than all grey.

Perry Miniature with Federal Blue Pants.

The second unit is painted from another piece of art that is supplied in the Perry box set. This one has the unit wearing Federal blue pants. I envisioned a unit having looted or stole a military bag train and equipped themselves with the new pants. May not be historical, but hey, I like it.

Perry Miniature Metal commanders

A few weeks ago, DrunkenSamurai gave me two old Perry Metal command figures since I was lacking some commanders on horseback. Both were the same so I did a simple head swap using one of the Perry Plastic command heads. A quick snip and pin job and I had a different looking commander. Oh and one thing that does bother me is that they are based on plastic beveled bases instead of my laser cut MDF bases which I ran out of while getting these two painted!

I still have three cannons to paint as well as two more units and I will be ready for the game in February.

TK

Point 213 in 28MM

So,

About ten years ago Drunkensamurai and I had this grand idea to play a historical scenario for the battle of Point 213 during the Normandy campaign. The Battle was the German 101. Schwere SS-Panzerabteilung of four Tiger 1's against the British 4th County of London Yeomanry with at least 17 tanks. The battle in a nutshell had the four Tigers ambushing the British that had stopped along a road in column to conference since they did not see any German activity all day. This however changed as the Tigers unleashed hell on them and surprised the British column virtually wiping them all out.

It didn't help that Battlefront put up a PDF of the battle for Flames of War with a nice map and detailing of the armored units that fought in the battle. So Drunken and I both agreed that this would be a cool game to do in 28mm on a 8'x8' table. At the time though, there were not many good WW2 vehicles on the market in 1/56th scale. So we decided on using Tamiya 1/48th scale tanks, they fit in better with the mostly Black Tree Design forces we had, so off we went buying tanks.

Tamiya 1/48th Firefly

Tamiya 1/48th Cromwell

I got as far as collecting the two tanks above, Drunken had a couple of more tanks then me, but right about the time we were buying these vehicles is when Japan had the serious earthquake and tsunami. This caused problems for distributors and it became tough to get Tamiya models at a good price. So we shelved the project for a later date and knew we would come back to this project. Well as these things happen, we never did anything with it and just kept the project shelved until earlier this year.

You see, earlier this year I decided that it was time to liquidate my 1/48th scale armor for more of the 1/56th scale plastic armor kits that companies like Rubicon and Warlord have out. It made it tough to mix 1/48th tanks with 1/56th tanks of the same type, so I sold off all my 1/48th scale stuff to a local friend. With the funds I decided to replace all my existing models I sold in the new scale along with a few other kits. That's when Drunken and I started talking about reviving the Point 213 game again. He committed to replacing his tanks to the new scale and we started talking about doing this project once more. But we were looking at least 23 vehicles and that was a bit steep in pricing for us when your talking $30.00 a tank. So we happened to be talking to another friend and he said he would help out with the game by purchasing some of the tanks for the game.

Drunkens British armor

  So now with another sucker lucky gamer joining us, we set out to acquire all the models needed for the game. Each one of us would build one build at least one British troop of tanks being one Sherman VC Firefly and three Cromwell tanks. Drunken and I purchased the Tigers and Drunken picked up a couple of other vehicles and tanks. All of the vehicles are Warlord kits, I had picked up a Rubicon and Warlord Tiger, but will be picking up one more Warlord Tiger to keep it all Warlord models.

Rubicon Tiger and Warlord Tiger

So with that goal in mind, my wife got me a belated birthday gift of one Warlord Firefly and three Warlord Cromwell's. They arrived last night and I jumped straight in to assembling the Firefly, which I have to say was a great little kit to put together.

Warlord Firefly!

So with that, we are only missing three tanks (Cromwell CS tanks) that Drunken will be picking up in the very near future. So last weekend we got out what tanks we had at the time and play tested the game in our local shop. The response we got to the play test game was amazing, people were blown away by the number of tanks (which was only half!) we had on the table. One Flames of War player thought we were playing Flames in 28mm and absolutely loved the look of the table and the idea.

8'x4' table!

Cromwells running away from the Tigers!

But one thing that we both realized after the play test game, we need terrain, lots and lots of terrain, specifically Bocage! We are estimating we will need at least 48 linear feet of bocage sections, each section will be 6" long, which means about 96 pieces of terrain! Luckily another friend of ours just did up a few bocage pieces for our local shop and we will be using his technique of using insulation foam, Woodland Scenic course ground foam and lots and lots of glue!

So there you have it, another big project lined up for 2017, so stay tuned...

TK
 

Field Works Complete and other stuff

So,

Here are the completed field works that we will be using for the ACW Black Powder game in February. Drunkensamurai got all of them painted up and flocked, do have to say these look awesome on the tabletop.

Side view of filed works

Defenders side of Field Works

 

Close Up shots of the defenders side.

Attacking sides view, along with last group that charged!

Also to go along with this game, I am working on adding 6 regiments to my current Confederate force. Here below is the first new completed regiment.

1st new regiment raised!

This is an all Perry Miniature unit and is basically the left overs of two other boxes I had lying around. I really love the rag tag look of these figures, feels very Confederate to me.

Besides the unit, I finished up half of my dying or wounded models for the game. We use causality figures to represent wounds caused to the unit as opposed to using beads or similar markers. When not being used for the game, we usually have a make shift aid station with them all sitting around. DrunkenSamurai has these and will hopefully get them all finished up by game time.

Old Glory wounded ACW figures.

 SO there you have it, another quick update for our ACW game for February.

Oh one last thing...

BB in the House!

I caved and picked up the new Blood Bowl set, I had been trying to not pick it up, but I am weak! So you will be seeing more of this and the new Ork Team I am planning called Azog's Ardinals, based off of the AZ Cardinals!

TK