Cursed Treasures

Build it and they will come...

2012-01-21T11:58:00.000-08:00

Okay folks,

Well we are now under way with 2012 and for this update I wanted to show off some new buildings that I recently picked up for Gathering in the Desert and other projects.

The name of this awesome company is Game Craft Miniatures and they do terrain from as small as 6mm all the way up to 28mm. Mike over at Da Green Skins pointed me to these guys. Well after looking through their online store, I decided to pick up two kits for GitD for my Harad table. They offer middle eastern buildings that have that Harad look to them and they can also stand in for Pulp games or anything else. I also picked up the Gallows for some Legends of the Old West/High Seas gaming. All of these kits that I purchased were made out of MDF and cut with a laser.

It took about a week for my order to get to me and this is what I got below (all three kits).

First up is kit #28mmdf012 Middle East One Story Building.

Here it is all laid out, pretty simple.

Here is the building test fit together, total time to assemble, less than a minute! Nice thing I like about this one is the window and door openings, they have that Middle east feel to them, which once again is perfect for Harad.

Here is a 28mm figure to give you scale.

Here is the second kit#28mmdf015.

This one went together in the same time frame, less than a minute!

One other thing that I like is the brick effect that is laser cut into some of the spots on the building, here is a close up shot.

The last kit #28mwest014 took a bit more time to assemble as seen by the parts below.

One thing I did to change my kit up, was to install wood slates on the sides of the stairs. I did this for two reasons, one it would make the stairs a bit for sturdy and two, I broke some of the railing while assembling it. I always like to do some sort of modifications so it works for me.

Here are a few figures for scale, now all I need to do is make up a nice noose (that has the proper number of wraps) for it.

So there you go, a couple of new buildings and a nice Gallows. I really love these kits, they are sturdy, look good and are pretty cheap. All three kits cost $32.35 plus shipping. I will be doing some work on the Middle Eastern buildings tomorrow and will post up what I got done. so stay tuned...

New Year and New Ideas!

2012-01-03T17:11:00.000-08:00

Well,

We are now on the third of January and I have beaten to the punch by my fellow local gamers/bloggers, Oh well.

Anyhow, as my good friend Drunkensamurai pointed out to me the other day, my last blog post really did not say what my plans on the gaming front will be in 2012. As he put it, I was very vague in my post, so I thought I would go more in depth on this post. No surprise most of the things that Drunkensamurai mentioned in his post are going to be on my list, but with a twist. So here we go...

Terrain

Well, as Drunken mentioned, terrain will be a major focus this year. When I game, I want the table to have a Wow Factor to it. My obsession with nice terrain started many moons ago when I was big into Model Railroading and Military Modeling. I have also been inspired by many fellow gamers on the Lead Adventure Forum (LAF). Well I want to do some cool looking terrain for a couple of projects, WW2, Old West and a Caribbean town for Pirates. So stay tuned for more, but it looks like Drunken and I will be working on the WW2 stuff pretty soon.

Games

Well, I did cover this in my last post, but as of last night, thanks to my son, I had an interesting proposition thrown out to me. My son who is 22 (and home from college) said it would be cool to play Bang (a Old west card game) using miniatures. Well he and I talked and I brought up Legends of the Old West. Well my sons favorite game was Mordheim and he expressed interest in LotOW.

Also I saw that Drunken had mentioned that he was a little bummed that some of the guys moved on from LotOW. A good friend used to host a LotOW campaign day at his house where we would get together and play a few linked games. Well I think I will pick up the gauntlet and host a Legends of the Old West Campaign here at the old SPL.

Also I will be waiting to see what Warlord Games puts out for WW2 rules. I am hopeful that these will be a good set of rules that I can jump behind. I will also be trying a few other rule sets. We will see what the future holds.

One last thing, I did host a few games on New Year's Day, had a few guys over to play Blood Bowl (2 had never played it) . Everyone had a good time and I busted out the BBQ and we all did lunch together. Have to say, to me that's what gaming is all about, a good game, good food and a good friends rolling dice! I have to say that this was a great way to start off the new year!

TK

What Was, What Is and What Will Be!

2011-12-27T08:56:00.001-08:00

So,

It is that time of the year again where we all take a look back on what we did in our hobby for the year. I always love to look back to see just what I did over the year, because to be honest, I can't remember just what I did! So this year, I will look at what I did, what I am working on and where I intend to go. So lets take a look back shall we?

Lord of the Rings
Well once again this game seemed to be at the fore front of things. Gathering in the Desert 2011 went off without a hitch (except for the Ear Infection I had at the event!). Once again it got rave reviews from all that attended and everyone had a great time.

I also got invited to attend Games Workshops Throne of Skulls in Las Vegas (as a special invite for all the work I do for LotR) The only good things about ToS was getting to hang out with friends in Vegas and the fact that I got all of my Uruk-hai models painted.

This year I also convinced a couple of buddies (Rob, Jerry & Mike) to do a little painting challenge (Tale of Four LotR Gamers) and it was a great success! We each got 700 point new armies painted. In fact I got ALL of my Goblin models painted, that being well over 100 models!

I had planned on giving away my Easterling army to a buddies son, but as most teenage boys, he found girls more appealing and moved onto to that as opposed to playing with toy soldiers!

So what does 2012 mean for LotR, Well GitD 2012 is coming and I have been thinking of adding another Evil army, we will see. but 2012 will have more LotR in it for sure!

Legends of the Old West
Well I had ideas of grandeur of doing a Wild Bunch project with Rob using the LotOW rules. Well I got about as far with the project as blogging about it here and that was it. In fact Rob asked me a few weeks ago what happened with this and I was like "What Old West Project?". Wow totally blew this one!

Well I did do something drastic for my Old West gaming this year, I sold my Cowtown collection of buildings to the local shop. The reasoning was that I have a huge collection of Resin Old West buildings that I have been wanting to use. But the only problem was I kept pulling out the Cowtown buildings to use. So by selling this set it will hopefully get me to build and paint up the resin buildings, we will see.

Legends of the High Seas
So I actually got to play a few games of my own game this year. Over the summer my son wanted to play a few games. My buddy Jance and my son started a little campaign and actually got another guy to play. So there were a bunch of games played over the summer. Jance loved the game so much that he bought and painted his own Crew and also jumped into LotR as well.

I also started working on my Wicked Wench ship model a few weeks ago and it is almost ready for paint. it will be making the trip to Chicago to be used in the LotHS campaign game! And since I will be going to Adepticon in 2012, I plan to build and paint up a new Pirate Crew for said event. So LotHS will be played again in 2012!

Warhammer 40Kmunda
Well, this project was sort of worked on. I got in a few games of 40Kmunda with Jerry and we both loved it. Other than that, not much happened on this project. In fact 40K was not played as much this year as in the past. It dose not mean that I am done with this project (or 40K), in fact I am hatching a plan to do a War of Da Teeff project using the old Gorka Morka Rules. I am thinking of doing another Tale of Four Gamers sort of thing, but more on that later.

Gothic Horror/Pulp
Well I did move forward on this project, in fact I got a ton of figures painted for this. I even did a practice game with Jerry this year that was a blast. I had wanted to get the rest of the guys over to play, but the time got away from me.

Well 2012 will see me and Mike running a Pulp game at a local convention (Vul-con). So we will be running two games ( or Chapters). I will be using a modified Legends set of rules and I will be posting pics and details next month. So at least I did something for the Pulp/Horror gaming.

Other Gaming
Well this was a wide range of gaming mostly focused on WW2. The surprise game this year was the rise of Flames of War interest. In fact I played a ton of games of FoW with the rest of the guys. I actually got two armies finished up. I finished up my US Light Tank army as well as got my DAK German army finished. I actually bought a bunch of Plastic Soldier vehicles (Shermans and Half tracks). So FoW was the second most played game this year.

As for other games, I dabbled in a few new games (Infinity, Heavy Gear) but not enough to really keep my interest. Also Blood bowl has crept back onto the table (in fact as I write this I played a game just two days ago!) and it looks like it may be back strong for 2012. In fact I am running a small Blood Bowl tourney for a few guys and my son on January 1st, so we will see where it goes for 2012.

So what lies ahead?
Well, as last year, I think the theme will be Skirmish games again. Being a gamer for many many moons, I have decided that smaller games are the way of the future. So it will be interesting to see what happens and what my buddies are doing. So drop me a line telling me what your doing for 2012.

TK

What is going on????

2011-11-25T08:14:00.000-08:00

So,

As many of you know, I have a certain fondness for the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle game by Games Workshop. In fact I enjoy the game so much, I wrote a little pirate game based on the rules. I also run a Lord of the Rings tournament called Gathering in the Desert and it is going into it's 5th year.

But today I need to do a little ranting for a minute. It seems that Games Workshop has no clue what it is doing with the Lord of the Rings game. Let me explain, for years while the movies where out we (the LotR community) had support from Games Workshop with them releasing Source books. We also had articles in White Dwarf (which many WHFB and 40K players hated!) Times were good for Lord of the Rings players.

But recently GW has been doing some strange things with their 3rd Core Game (Yes GW thinks of LotR as a Core Game!). I started noticing that it was getting harder to get Source books. In fact many were taken off the GW web site. As someone who runs tournaments for the game, this made it hard to get new players into the game. But there was a bright spot, GW released a PDF of the special rules and stats for entries that were found in the source books.

The bad thing was that they did not include points cost, but we still had Legions of Middle Earth. But now, LoME is out of production! So where do players get the point cost? What the heck are they thinking??And how the heck do I as a tournament organizer, recruit new players? It seems that Games Workshop is letting LotR die a slow painful death.

So where does this leave us (LotR Players)? Well there is always hope that with the new Hobbit movies there may be a re-do of the game. I am hopeful that the new movies will be an new resurgence in the game. Although I am worried that GW's track record of late with rules may see some drastic changes to the game that I love. Only time will tell, but for now, I will be left scratching my head and wondering what the heck GW is doing with this game!

Sorry rant over...

TK

Heavy Gear Blitz! Say What???

2011-11-14T19:43:00.000-08:00

So,

What the heck is this you may ask, well I asked this of myself as I was walking out of my local store this weekend. Well, I have had my eye on this game for a long time, in fact about a year ago my buddy Mike G brought this over to my place to give it a spin, and I liked the game.

You see, way back when, I played a little game called Battletech (or Battle robots for those old enough to remember that!) I loved Battletech, I collected a ton of Mechs and had just about every source book and novelsthat FASA put out. The only problem was that my game group never really got involved with it. So the only time I got to play was in local Battletech tourneys. Soon I had shelved the game and moved onto something else.

Well when Mike G brought over Heavy Gear a year ago, I thought why not try it out. I fell in love with the game and was ready to jump into it with both feet. But life has a funny way of changing ones priorities. So alas I did not get into Heavy Gear.

Then this past weekend, while at my local shop, I kept eyeing the starter sets. So I decided what the hell, I have the money I better jump into this now. So I took the plunge and brought home the Northern Army starter box as well as a set of counters for the game.

So what did I get, well I am glad you asked, inside the box you will find two rulebooks, Locked and Loaded and the Field manual. You also get a set of dice and a tape measure. Also there are 4 Jaguar gears, 4 Hunter Gears and 2 Grizzly Gears as well as 2 drones and optional weapons.

The nice thing is that there seems to be a ton of support from the company (Dream Pod 9) . The other thing is that the scale of the game is 1/144th or N scale, so there is a ton of terrain out there (Model Railroad stuff!).

So stay tuned while I suit up into a Heavy Gear and give the game a whirl and building and painting some Gears.

TK

FoW US Armored Company

2011-10-10T21:00:00.000-07:00

So,

Way back in in August of 2010, I started my second Flames of War army, a US Armored Company. I took the plunge and purchased a ton of Old Glory Command Decision vehicles. Recently I picked up two boxes of the Plastic Soldier Sherman Tank kits.

For those who have not bought these awesome kits, I highly recommend them and the cost is perfect! (5 tanks for $30.00!) I got the M4A2 kit and M4A1 kits.

Once again these kits are perfect for building a quick force for very little money. While at my local shop I took a look at the price of the FoW tanks and I almost fell over, Plastic Soldier company will be getting a lot more money from me with there kits.

Now onto the US force I have been working on for about a year now. Now I approached building this force I went with a historical bent. You see when I first started this force I was reading a great book called Army at Dawn, which is about the US involvement in North Africa in WW2. There is a great part in the book that talks about how when the US force landed in North Africa they could not get the Sherman tanks out of the hold of the transport ships. The only tanks that hit the African coast first were light tanks.

So I decided to do M3A1 Stuarts as the main back bone of the army. So here is two Combat platoons of 5 M3A1's and the HQ with two Stuarts as well. These are all from Old Glory and are great little models with a lot of character.

To give the force some punch, I added in 5 M3 Lees with the shorter 75mm guns. These are from Old Glory as well.

Now we have the Sherman tanks from Plastic Soldier and will only be added at a later date to the list. These models are the M4A1 kits.

Here are the other Plastic Soldier kits, the M4A2 kits which like the other Sherman tanks will be added later.

Next up is my artillery command, Forward Observers and Staff teams. All the models are from Old Glory.

For my artillery I went with T19's which are going to be tough to play in the game do to the Awkward layout, meaning they can only move or shoot. So while they will be tough to play, it makes the force very historical. Once again these are from Old Glory as well.

Last up is some Anti-tank platoons, these are M3 75mm GMC half tracks. This unit is not done yet because I still have to finish painting 3 jeeps and the command stands for the unit. These are also from Old Glory.
Now this past weekend I got to get this force out onto the table against Robs Fallshirmjagers
that he is working on. Well I would like to say the US won, but it was a draw, which is not bad and is not a loss. Playing a all tank army for FoW is going to be tough and it is very different from a combined arms army. I am happy with how it is looking and is nice to learn how to play some different.

So there you go...

TK

Pulp Time!

2011-09-20T20:36:00.000-07:00

So,

For a long time I have been interested in doing some Pulp gaming and have been acquiring Pulp figures for a few years now. My particular interest has been to do some Egyptian gaming, or more to the point, some sort of game using Mummy's!

Well thanks to my good buddy Jerry of Jerry's Big Picture and a discussion we had last week I have started planning on doing a few games. Well our discussion lead to me coming up with a basic storyline and what characters I would develop for the game.

Next up would be the rules, this is something I have been wrestling with for years (see my other blog The Pulp Project ). Well I have decided that I am going to adapt the Lord of the Rings rules for a set of rules. The LotR rules or the Legends rules have enough variety that I am looking for and I am most familiar with.

So anyway, here are a few pictures of some of the figures that I will be using in the game. I of course will post up here as I work out d=some of the story arc and rules. But without further ado here are the figs (which are a mix of Artizan, Copplestone, West Wind, Blue Moon and a a couple of old Ral Partha figures).

So stay tuned Pulp adventures, there is more to come...

TK

Tanks in the Night!

2011-08-24T20:13:00.000-07:00

So on Sunday Jerry came over to play some Flames of War (and also get me sick!, Thanks man!) but we wanted to do a tank battle. You see Jerry and I have both been feeling the same way towards FoW, just sort of uhh towards it. In the last few years I think I have only got in about a dozen games.

So a few days before Jerry came over we were talking about why we do not play FoW more. Basically we had our own reasons which were somewhat the same, so I asked what is that attracted us to FoW? Well that was easy, it was the tanks! So I told Jerry lets just do some tank battles and build a few Tank armies. In fact this Tank idea had me talking with Rob about possibly doing some sort of Krusk battle with all tanks, more on that later.

Well back to this past Sunday, Jerry came over and we busted out some tank on tank action. Jerry Had 3 Sherman's and about 7 M5 Stuarts. I realized that my collection of vehicles would be lacking, I only have a 4 tank Platoon of Panzer II's, a Panzer III platoon and a F2 & F1 Mark IV.

Also this little game let us use my new Desert board that Jerry & I painted up last week, got to tell you, the tanks looked great rolling around on the table. So below are a few pictures from the game and just for the record, I lost to Jerry, of course I did not have the right tanks (come on Panzer II's against Sherman tanks!). All in all it was a fun game and now Jerry & I are looking at adding more tanks to our collections.

TK

It is Finished!

2011-08-22T18:33:00.000-07:00

Well,

The Moria Goblins are done! I started the last push on Thursday and I completed all 48 models on Sunday. Now as I said before, my goal was to finish up all of my Goblin models (some of them from the first release of the game!) and now I can say that I have done it!

So to recap the 48 models I had 20 Goblin Archers which you see below.

There were 17 Goblin spearmen.

And there were 6 Goblin Swordsmen with shields.

Here is a shot of all 48 models together finished.

And here is a shot of the whole models completed for the challenge.

So, I took a picture of all of my Goblin collection together, that is 116 total models in the collection! I did not know that I had this many Goblins and it is a nice looking army (too bad I can only field 75 models in most games!) and it gives me many options when I do field the army.

Here are a few close ups of the whole army.

So now, all I have to do is play some various point games (175, 350, 525 & 700). We are all (Rob, Jerry, Mike and Myself) going to get together and try to play through our catch up games to see how the points shake out.

I have to say, that this little challenge was very fun to do. At first some people were worried that they could not stay focused to do this, but in the end we all did a great job of staying focused. And this show just how easy it is to paint up a army over a few months time. I have heard that our little challenge has sparked a few other LotR SBG gamers to do the same sort of thing. Once I here for sure I will post a link to their little challenge.

So there you go, I will post up more photos once we play our catch up games and off course I will let you all know who won and where we went to eat! I hope you guys enjoyed the coverage and I will leave you with one last shot of the whole Moria Goblin Army...
TK

Tera forming in progress

2011-08-19T08:27:00.000-07:00

So,

In a previous post you saw the terrain ordered for GitD 2012, well last weekend I dived into some little world building. So where to start? Well I decided that the best place to start would be with the Realm of Battle boards, these are the largest pieces and these would set the tone for what I would need for these in the future.

So before I got started I enlisted a few friends to come over to help, (Rob, Mike & Jerry) but only Jerry could make it over (Mike had to work and Rob was out Jeeping). Also one reason for inviting Jerry was the fact he had just recently painted up his GW hills and I really liked the colors he used. The base color was Krylon Flat Brown, then a heavy dry brush of Americana Honey Brown followed up with Americana Desert Sand color. The rocks were painted with Americana Burnt Sienna and wet brushed with a mix of Burnt Sienna and Desert Sand. The paved stones were dry brushed with Desert Sand and Americana Sand.

The red rocks remind me of Sedona Arizona's red rocks and are a nice color contrast to the rest of the board. Once again a big thanks to Jerry for doing the work on the rocks.

Finally here is a shot of 6 out of the 8 tiles with my cat Gabby inspecting our work!

After letting the boards sit for a few days I realized that I do not have any other terrain for this board! Most of the other terrain ordered were to supplement other GitD boards. Then I noticed the crash lander kit I ordered, it would be perfect for the board (not for LotR but for the Combat Patrol for 40K). So I had nothing to do so I busted out the crashed lander and got started, here are the results. Let me say that this older kit (from the 4th Ed. of 40K) is a great little piece, I have been wanting to paint one up for some time and I really had fun working on this.

Here is the cockpit of the lander.

Here are a couple of the wing sections.

Here is the other wing.

Here is the other engine section with a wing.

Overall the board looks great as well as the crashed lander and I am looking forward to doing more for these boards.

TK

The Final Stretch

2011-08-18T20:43:00.000-07:00

So we are all now in the final stretch of our Tale of Four Lord of the Rings Gamers, and it has been a great success. While talking to Rob (Drunkensamurai) the other day, he mentioned that he was amazed that we have all been able to keep this little challenge going. As of yesterday two people (Rob & Jerry) have completed their armies and that leaves Mike & I to catch up before the end of the month.

So today I decided to put together my last 175 points for the challenge. But my motivation with this challenge was for me to paint up all of my Goblins from the start, in which there are more than 700 points worth! So after pointing out my next 175 (which would be 35 more models!), I noticed that I still had 13 models left over out of my collection. So I have decided to paint up all 48 models by the end of the month! I will still only use the 35 models for my list, but now I will have extra options.

So here are 6 more Sword and shield equipped Goblins that will be in the list.

Next up are 17 spear armed goblins, a bunch of these are going into the list as well.

Next up are more bow equipped goblins that I can really use, there are a total of 25 of these little buggers.

Here is the group shot of all 48 models ready to go to the paint desk! So wish me luck since I have less than 2 weeks to get these little guys ready. Once we get to the end of the month, the four of us need to play a few more games (since we have not had time to do them) to see how the armies shake out at the various point levels.

One last thing, you may have noticed that these guys are sitting on desert terrain, well these will be covered in the next post and these are two new boards for GitD 2012. If you remember the last post, I had just gotten in a 4'x8' Realm of Battle table. Well last weekend with the help of Jerry, we got them all painted up, so stay tuned for that coverage and a few other bits I did.

TK

So it begins..again!

2011-08-08T18:31:00.001-07:00

So loyal fans, it starts again, that's right, the gearing up for Gathering in the Desert 2012. So with that means you will be seeing a lot of work here at Cursed Treasures about building terrain for the event.

Now as some know, this will be the 5th year in a row that GitD 2012 has been going on. For those that do not know what Gathering in the Desert (GitD) is, let me explain. GitD is a Independent Grand Tournament for Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game (Feb 17 -19th, 2012). It all start when I was frustrated at the lack of good local LotR tournaments here in the Valley of the Sun, so I organized my own.

So around this time every year I start turning my attention towards the next event, and this includes what terrain will I have at said event. To start things off, I place an order with Games Workshop for terrain. Below you will see this years haul of GW product that will morph into Middle Earth.

Now over the years I have accumulated quite a bit of terrain (which the wife always wants to know where it will go in the house!) for the event. This year there are a few large items that I ordered, below you will see one Realm of Battle board, with two extra panels (making it a 8'x4' board or two 4x4 boards). The new Sorcery tower along with two ruined towers, three sets of GW "Creapy Trees" and 5 bags of the GW jungle trees.

The plane is to paint the RoB boards in a desert color to represent Harad and use some of the trees for that. The other creepy trees will be pressed into service on other existing boards and so will the towers. I am thinking I might be able to turn the Sorcery tower into something less WHFB looking and give it more of a LotR feel.

But wait a minute, some of you might have spotted some very 40K terrain sections on the right of the RoB board. And you may be asking how are these going to be used for LotR? Well fear not folks, the 40K terrain is going to be used for...wait for it...40K! Whhhhaaaatttt!!!!

You see this year GitD will be expanding it's boarders a bit and GitD will be hosting a small Combat Patrol 40K event the first weekend of March (the 3rd to be exact). Which is two weeks after GitD. So it is time to start building some 40K terrain for this new venture, so once again you will be seeing some progress reports here at Cursed Treasures. So below there is a Fortress of Redemption, a Imperial Bastion kit (which has two kits!). Two Imperial statues, 3 bags of 40K accessories, two boxes of the wrecked rhinos and one crashed Imperial shuttle.

But wait a minute, why are we doing this? Well it is quite simple really, I am frustrated at the local 40K events here in Phoenix. I am looking at bringing everything I know about running events to the 40K side here in the valley. So that means cool and well built terrain, smooth running event, and for folks to have a good time.

So stay tuned for more information concerning both events as well as progress on all this terrain!

TK

ToFLotR Gamers 3rd Installment

2011-07-30T14:22:00.000-07:00

So here is my next installment for the Tale of Four Lord of the Rings Gamers Series. The deadline for this month is August 1st and since last month I was late, I figured I better get my rear end in gear.

So Monday I will post up the standings to date. We did get together and play a few games last Friday and we had some interesting battles, but I will cover that on Monday.

TK

A Return To LotHS of Sorts.

2011-07-18T21:29:00.000-07:00

So,

As some know my son is home from college and is working at our church on the weekends. Well this gives him time all during the week to lounge around and usually means he is bored. This has been the same thing for the last few years while he has been home, but this year it is different.

You see this year he has wanted to play some miniature games (Yes!) and the first game he wanted to play was his fathers game, Legends of the High Seas! So first thing I told him was that he had to pick a Captain figure from all my Pirates and start creating a Crew. Well that was not good enough for him and he wanted to paint his own miniatures! (Yes Score Again!)

So I said go for it and he started looking at my unpainted miniatures. So along with my son wanting to play, another Friend of mine & my son wanted to play as well and he is not a minis gamer. So a few weeks ago my buddy was over and along with my Son I did a mini painting clinic. I showed them how to dry brush, use washes, block paint and how to "Dip paint" figures.

Well here is my son's first miniature that he painted in well over 10 years, it is a Black Scorpion Rogue figure. He did an awesome job and this is an awesome figure. By the way he is playing a Privateer Crew.

His second paint job is his First Mate which is another Black Scorpion figure. My only comment for him was his color selection. In my opinion he used to colors (Blue and Green) which are to similar and the figure just looks washed out and has no "Pop".

His Third Figure is a Foundry Swashbuckler which he is using as his Proctor for his Crew. Once again he did a great job.

Now the rest of the pictures are the figures primed than dry brushed with an off white color. Here are two Mercenaries with Flintlocks that are from Black Scorpion.

Here is another Cutthroat from Black Scorpion.

The next batch of figures are from Privateer Press and are the Press Gangers. Now my son wanted me to convert the figures to add swords to them (They have belaying pins on the stock models). So he had some help from his old dad for these.

So there you go, my sons LotHS Crew and a post about LotHS. As he finishes up the Crew I will post more shots.

TK

Better Late than Never!

2011-07-15T15:01:00.000-07:00

So my last update was back on June 24th and I only had a few days to get my next installment of 175 points four our little competition. Well as luck would have it, Life got in the way and I missed getting my troops painted by 7/1 by only one figure.

You see the one model happened to be the Cave Troll, for some reason I hate painting cave trolls. No other model in the LotR range gives me more issues other than the Cave Troll. I don't know what it is, it is not a hard paint scheme, I just have built up this weird mental painters block for the Cave troll.

Anyway, on to my 175 points, first up are the 10 Goblin archers. I needed some long range fire support and these little guys are it.

After that comes the Shaman, although as I admitted in the last post, this model was already painted. In fact this little guy was part of my Dwellers Below list that one best painted in the Mayhem in the Mountains in 2010. but since I have only one Shaman, I was not going to strip him and re-paint him for our little challenge.

Last but not least is the one model that held me up, yep it is the Cave Troll! I went with the Spear armed model just because I liked how it looked and I hope to stick some Elves ad Dwarves with it!

So here is the whole army all 32models (346 points) all together. So far the army is looking pretty good on the table and these little guys have been waiting forever to get painted!

Now just to clarify, since the Cave Troll gave me so much issues, I also decided to paint my last Cave Troll along with this one. Now here is a shot of all three of my Cave Trolls. The model on the right was painted about 5 years ago, the center one is this months and the one on the left was an added bonus so I would not have to paint him later on. Now all my Cave Trolls are painted!

So what next you ask? Well first up are 36 points of Goblins with Shields. This will add a few more goblins to the army and these are the last of the few I used converted shields on.

Next up is a Goblin Drum for 100 points! What you say? Why is he taking this you ask? Well part of the reason why I choose Goblins for this little challenge was to get the army painted. I bought the Goblin Drum some time ago and heck, I just thought it looked cool, so there you go!

So I am up to 136 points spent out of 178 (3 points left from last month) so I purchased a Goblin Captain with shield for 40 points.

So for this month that gives us this break down as follows

Rob has 30 points
Mike has 25 points
I have 16 points
Jerry has 15 points

So stay tuned for more action...

TK

June LotR Update

2011-06-24T15:42:00.000-07:00

Wow,

Where has June gone?? It seems that I am the last one again to try to get my next installment up for our little contest. Well I thought I could sneak in some painted stuff already done, but I have been warned that I will be ridiculed beyond belief. So I dove into my LotR box for my additions.

So first up is 50 points of archers, that means 10 goblin bowmen & Yes Jerry, I will be able to Volley fire on your precious elves! So here are the boys in bare metal.

Next up I needed a heavy hitter, so time to bust out a Cave Troll, yes, he has a cave troll! I have two models one with hammer and this one with spear, so I choose the spear armed model and that means he is 81 points.

Now one more addition was to add a Shaman to the force, but they only problem is he was already painted. So this is the only painted model that will be introduced into the army. I did add more highlights to the figure so I did put some paint on him.

So here is the motley crew in all of their glory, now to get them painted before the end of the month.
TK

Throne of Skulls Recap

2011-06-22T21:10:00.000-07:00

So,

I am back for the Throne of Skulls and here are a few pictures from the event, first up my army list that I entered. Since I was taking the Uruk-hai from the White Hand list, I came up with a unique army list. I wanted my list to be a piece of skin, as if the Uruk-hai had cut it of of one of their victims. So I contacted my good friend Eric in CA, who used to do make up effects for a certain movie studio and asked him to make me up a latex "skin"army list. This is what it looks like front and back. The funny thing is he used his wife's own back for the mold and he used cold water to get her skin to raise so he could get that goose bump look. Creepy but cool!

By the way, everyone that saw my list loved it and I think they were a bit creeped out by it, which means Eric did an awesome job!

Now on to my army, the Uruk-hai, which was very themed but not over the top (which would be an issue at this event). The list had:

1 Uruk-hai Captain
1 Uruk-hai Shaman
22 Uruk-hai warriors
10 Uruk-hai pikemen
10 Uruk-hai scouts
10 Orcs
1 Isengard Troll

55 models and a very themed list. I also built a custom display board that would make the army look like it was marching out of the pits of Isengard. I carved all the rock work out of blue foam and spent at least a day building and painting it. I think it turned out pretty good and I had a bunch of people take pictures of it.

The event was held at the Tropicana Hotel and the room for the event was large and spacious. The tables had plenty of room between them and each table was made out of Games Workshop Realm of Battle and current GW terrain. Now most followers here at Cursed Treasures know that I love terrain and I love a ton of terrain on my LotR tables. When I walked into the venue and saw the terrain for the LotR tables my heart sank, here is what all the tables looked like for LotR.

Not what I expected but at least they were all the same on each board. The 40K and Fantasy Battle tables were pretty much the same. I understand that John Scaffer did all the work on all the tables and while I was in Memphis I saw much of this stuff being built. John did a great job but I would have liked more terrain as well as other folks in the other games.

I got in on Friday with Tom O and his wife around noon, we did lunch and got checked in at the Excalibur, across the street from the Tropicana. I headed over around 5:30 to hang out and get registered for the weekend. I also hung out with Kyle, Chris, John, Brent and a few others, did dinner and then participated in the conversion building contest. Built a shoulder pad chaos marine and that was about it. Then headed back to my hotel to crash for the night.

Saturday morning saw me up and ready to play, headed out to the Tropicana and started looking for food and my first opponent. After a decent breakfast, I headed over to the postings and was glad to see that I got Chris Thomas as my first game. I met Chris this year at GitD and he is an awesome guy, plus he loves Big Bang Theory, Bazinga!

First game was Clash of Piquets against Chris and his wood elf's with Treebeard. Chris noticed that I had the Troll so we decided to charge the Troll up against Treebeard to see who would win, we agreed not to use any other models or to shoot at the large monsters and sent them charging towards each other. Needless to say I lost and the troll died after two rounds of fighting.

Well not to bore you, but the Fighting Uruk-hai lost and Chris got the win. This was the best game of the whole event and Chris is an awesome guy to play, he had a very balanced list and it was well themed.

My second game was against Marc R's Mordor list that was rather interesting. The scenario was Storm the camp and I felt pretty good about going into this game. Now Marc's list had a ton of Black guard orcs as well as regular orcs and Black Numenorians. It also had a a ring wraith or two as well as a captain. The thing that made this game tough is that the whole army was painted the same! I mean everything was painted in the same colors, the same way, Blue and black. It did look cool, but you could not tell what was what. The game was okay, but there were a few issues with movement in this game. Needless to say I lost, but was glad to have the game over with. Here is a blury shot of the army.

Game three was against Tom Keegan and his 21 model all mounted Dol Amoroth army with Gandalf the Grey leading the way. To make matters tough for Tom, we were playing Domination, which I thought I had in the bag. Tom's army was awesome looking, it is a wonder why he did not win a best painted award.

Tom is a great guy to play and he made me laugh the whole game. I need to make it down to Florida for his event. Tom thought I had the game, but then the unthinkable happened. My cheating dice (Adepticon Dice that everyone has coined Cheating Dice) decided that it was time to roll 1's and 2's the rest of the game. So once again I took a loss to a 21 model army but I had a blast, not the most fun (since Tom Kicked my butt, thanks Tom!) but it was a close second.

Well I was now 0 & 3 with the day ending, I noticed that I was feeling wiped out again and decided to skip the Pub quiz and crash in my hotel room. I was wrangled into hanging out with Tom Keegan and a few others to play an interesting game of Prostitute or No Prostitute while watching folks pass by. But after an hour of laughing I finally headed back to my room.

Sunday started and I forgot my camera in my room so no other pictures from here on out. game 4 was against John Adams from Florida playing Seize the Prize. Needless to say, this was the worst game I played all weekend. I will not go into it here and just leave it at that. I lost this game by just one model but that is all that it took.

Game 5 was against the ringer army being Lead by Don, a GW staffer from Memphis. This game was a blast but my dice were still being mean to me (or the Dice Karma finally caught up to me) and I lost the game. Great game but still a loss.

So out of 5 games, I had three great games, one okay game and one game that I wish I could forget. But all in all not a bad weekend.

Os there you go, my adventures in Vegas. Now that ToS is over, I can get to planning GitD 2012 and get working on my June installment for Tale of Four LotR gamers.

TK

2011-06-15T20:17:00.000-07:00

So,

In just a few days the Throne of Skulls event run by Games Workshop will be happening in Las Vegas. As many know, this is the first "National" event that GW is running for all the winners that qualified on the 2010 - 2011 tournament for Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Warhammer 40000 and Lord of the Rings.

Well about a month ago I got an invite from Games Workshop asking if I would (as well as other Tournament organizers) would be interested in playing and attending. Well after talking to the wife, I shoot back a email stating I would be there. Since I run Gathering in the Desert, I usually do not get to play since I am running the event. And since there are no other LotR events, that means I don't get to play much LotR in tourneys.

Well with the decision to go cleared with the boss, it was time for me to decide what army to take. Well I would love to tell you what I am taking (and in fact a few close people know) but I will not reveal what I am taking until after the event. Yeah yeah, I know, but I want it to be a surprise for some of the players. I will tell you that I have never played this army before and that I have not showed here before. The other clue or hint is that I am playing an evil army!

So when will I show off what I am taking, well after the event. I plan to cover the event and have full coverage for all you cursed treasures followers. So wish me luck and I will see you all Monday with coverage from the event. So stay tuned folks...

TK

Results for April of ToFLOTR Gamers

2011-06-12T21:54:00.000-07:00

As some may have read here and on a few other Blogs, we are running a Tale of Four Lord of the Rings Gamers.Well June first was the first deadline for the four of us to get our first batch of 175 point models done.

Just to recap, if you got your models completed by June 1st, you got 5 points. If they were submitted after the June 1st deadline then you got 3 points and if you did not paint anything, you got 0 points.

So how did we do?

Well I got 5 points for my Goblin Mob

Rob got 5 points for his dwarf's.

Mike got 5 points for his Uruk-hai

And Jerry also got 5 points for his elf's.

Now we also got in at least one game this month (some of us more) and we would be adding the points from painting to the points won during games. Now for each game there would be a set number of points handed out and I used the scoring method from Gathering in the Desert and was broken down as follows:

Major Win 20 points
Minor Win 15 points
Draw 10 points
Minor Loss 7 points
Major Loss 5 points.

So last week Rob's Dwarf's faced off against Jerry's Elf's in a High Ground game. Rob and his Dwarf's walked away with a Major win while Jerry got the Major Loss. Tonight Mike and I got in a game (due to Mike having life issues last week) and we played Seize the Prize, well the Uruk-hai beat the Goblins and Mike got a Minor victory while I took a Minor Loss.

So here is how the Battle points shook out:

Rob's Dwarf's 20 points
Mike Uruk-hai 15 points
Tim's Goblins 7 points
Jerry's Elf's 5 points

So for April this is how it stands:

Rob has 25 points
Mike has 20 points
Tim has 13 points
Jerry has 10 points

So there you go, that is the first month totals. We are going to try to get everyone together before next weekend to play a doubles game with the two good players (Jerry & Rob) vs the two Evil players (Myself & Mike) to throw in some bonus points. So stay tuned for that and the next few updates to our armies.

TK

Goblins Galore!

2011-05-30T21:41:00.000-07:00

Well,

It is almost June 1st and that is the deadline for the four of us competing in this challenge. So far Mike over at Da Green Skins has his first models ready. Jerry at Jerry's Big Picture has his models finished, that leaves me and Rob of Drunken Samurai painting Blog to get our acts in gear to be finished by the 1st.

Well I am happy to report that I have finished up my first 175 points this weekend and with out further ado here is my Goblin army!

First up Durburz, the Goblin King!

Next up is the Goblin Kings bodyguard, 8 Prowlers with two handed weapons. I had a chance last week to pick up another 8 Prowlers while I was down in Memphis, but I passed, now I wish I had!
Next we have 6 Goblins with hand weapons and shields, these guys will be the core of the army, so that means there is going to be a ton of them to paint!

Lastly our 5 spear armed Goblins, like the hand weapons goblins, these guys will make up the bulk of the army as well.
So here is the gang all together, all 20 of them ready to unleash terror on the world of Middle Earth!
My next 175 points will see me adding some bowmen as well as more troops, or perhaps a Goblin Shaman to add some magic to the list.

So stay tuned, next up will be the points for this month, we are now waiting for Rob to get his Dwarfs done, than we can play some games while we work on our next increase.

TK

18 Miles To Memphis!!!

2011-05-25T23:03:00.000-07:00

Well,

As some folks may know, last week I made a pilgrimage to Games Workshop Headquarters in Memphis to do a week of training for the on call program.

While I would have loved to been able to talk about what I saw while inside of GW HQ, I am not at liberty to discuss it. I would have also loved to have been able to take pictures while inside, but alas, could not do that either.

But I did get some shots of the Games Workshop Memphis Battle Bunker and the outside of the GW HQ. As seen below, you can't miss the building, it has a huge Imperial Eagle on the front as well as a seven foot tall Space Marine statue out front! The main entrance to the HQ is on the left while the Bunker is on the right.

Inside you find a small but well stocked GW store that had most products (what they did not have they could order from the warehouse in the other part of the building). They also had a few tables set up for painting as well as vending machines. But adjacent to the store was the bunker with all the tables. Here is a shot of the overall set up from the store.

All of the tables were GW's Realm of Battle tables with stock GW terrain on them. Now I was a little disappointed in the quality of the tables. They were good, don't get me wrong, but they all looked the same with a few exceptions. Take for example this awesome Epic table that had a ton of the old buildings on it. I know Mike from the Da Green Skins blog would have loved this table!

Also there was the cool table from Gamesday a few years ago as well as an other Space Marine statue.
Along the front of the bunker were display cabinets with just about every army that is currently out, from 40K, WHFB and LotR/WotR. I tried getting some pictures but the glare from the outside kept washing out the pictures.

Now one thing that did catch my attention was these 3 huge campaign maps that were hanging from the wall. They had three of them (40K, WHFB & LotR) and they used the Mighty Empire tiles. Just to give you scale, each board was at least 8'x4' in size, so just imagine how many tiles it took to build these! man it must be nice to run to the back to get whatever you need!

All in all it was nice to visit and get to see the Bunker as well as GW HQ. My training went well and now I just wait for the Emperor to call, which will probably be for Gamesday in Chicago.

Wish I could talk more about what I did, but unfortunately being a sort of employee means some things you just can't talk about. Sorry folks.

On a side note, I will be making another update for the Tale of Four LotR Gamers in a day or two, my 175 points are done and ready, just need to take pictures...

TK

AWI & GW

2011-05-05T23:04:00.000-07:00

Well,

Thought I would let you folks in on a few updates here at Cursed Treasures, so here we go!

Last weekend Rob and I went driving around the Valley of the Sun looking to buy some models. Recently Rob has taken interest into the Napoleon era and has been thinking about jumping into doing Napoleonic Wars in 28mm. With companies like the Perry Miniatures and Victrix it is hard not to get into gaming this period. But I have to tell you, the Napoleonic Wars just do not do anything for me. In fact I was going to buy some Victrix models but Rob talked me out of it since I was only buying them to have something to use against Rob.

Well anyway, on the ride back, we talked about what period do I really like, well I have always had an interest in the Revolutionary War (or American War of Independence). So Rob suggested that instead of Napoleonic Wars, why not do what I have an interest in and do AWI. Wow, sometimes I can be so blind, I did not see it even though it was right there in front of me. Suddenly I knew what I had to do, it was time to start looking to do an AWI army or two!

So once I got home I did what most people would do, is head to the internet to see what sort of problem I could get into with this new venture. Well first up was rules, after talking to Rob that day, he finally sold me on the Warlord Games rules called Black Powder!

I have borrowed Robs copy of the rules, but could not read them due to all the cool pictures in it. In fact, I refer to the Black Powder rule book as either Lead Crack or Lead Porn! I may have wanted to read the rules, but the pictures in the book just kept calling to me! So a trip to old Amazon and I had the rules ordered. (Will be here in the next few days).

My next stop was Old Glory Miniatures to take a look at their range and it seems that OG has AWI figures in the Old Glory Second Edition line as well as their original line. Also saw that the Perrys have a nice range and they are going to be releasing plastics! So while I wish I could tell you that I bought some new minis, I didn't. I am waiting to see what the Perry's come out with. Plus I want to read the rules first. So stay tuned for more AWI goodness soon.

The other small bit of news is that as of May 16th, I will be working for Games Workshop! That's right, you heard right, I will be going to work for GW. It seems that GW is going to open a new store here in the Valley of the Sun this summer and they need folks to run the store. Well I wish I could tell you I am the guy, but alas I am not. GW offered me an interesting program called the On-Call program.

The Program is to help with coverage of the store and with events for GW. Basically if the manager has to take a day off or needs to go out of town, GW will give me a call. If it does not interfere with my regular job, than I will go in. The nice thing is that I will be paid and I am considered a GW employee. So that means that in the next few weeks GW will be flying me down to Memphis TN for training just like a regular manager. Now I wish I could go into more, but that's all I can really say for now, if you want the whole story you are just going to have to talk to me in person.

So there you go...

TK

2011-04-24T13:48:00.000-07:00

So, since my last post was detailing the rules, I thought I would start assembling my Moria Army and give you some thoughts.

Well as I said, this army will be based off of the Moria army list and since I only have 175 points to spend, I thought why not go with the Durburz, the Goblin King of Moria.

(Sorry for the blurry picture, but my cameras batteries died after taking these pictures!)

At 60 points, that took my points down to 115 points to spend. So what better way than to take some elite Goblins, so I opted for 8 Goblin Prowler at 7 points a piece. Prowlers fit the fluff since Goblin kings take these guys since they are loyal and the fact that they have two-handed weapons was a plus. Add the Backstabber rule which gives them a +1 to wound added on top of the +1 for having two handed weapons, and you have some scary goblins that can dish out damage. So eight of these guys come in at 56 points, leaving me with 59 points to spend.

So I spent 30 points to pick up 6 Goblins with shields for 30 points. Now these goblins have left over shields from other kits, I figured that I wanted some variety in my goblin force and these guys sure add that.
So that left me with 29 points out of the 175, so I went with 5 Goblins with spear leaving me with 4 points left over. I decided that I wanted to go with spear over bows since at this lower level game, there would not be too many bows (although with Jerry Playing Elves that could be a problem!).

So there you go, 171 points spent, that leaves me with an extra 4 points to add to next months points. (Yes guys, if you don't spend all your points you can bank them until next month!) So now with the army picked, now to get painting!

TK

A Tale of Four Lord of the Rings Gamers

2011-04-18T18:30:00.000-07:00

So, well over 13 years ago, Games Workshop had an article in White Dwarf called "A Tale of Four Gamers" that focused on four Staff members while they built 4 separate Warhammer Fantasy armies. The article was a huge success and it even caused White Dwarf to re-run the article but with four staffers that would build four Warhammer 40K armies, which once again was a huge success.

Well that got me thinking, hey why not do one for Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game. Well that's what I am going to do, so in the next few months you will see a few articles that are going to follow me building a LotR army. Now in order for this to work, I needed three other folks to join me on this little crazy quest. So who did I con..I mean convince, well here are the other three suckers that will be joining me.

DrunkenSamurai (aka Robert) from Drunken Samurai Painting Blog. It is no surprise that Robert would be one of the folks I invited, he has been itching to start on a Dwarf force, but I will let him talk about that.

Next up is Jerry of Jerry's Big Picture. Jerry is a great guy and had been hounding me for about a year to buy my Elf army from me, so about a month ago I broke down sold it to him. So that should be his army.

We also have Mike from Da Green Skins. Mike has been a recent addition to our little game group and has jumped in to the LotR gaming all the way. His army was outstanding at GitD this year and he is planning on building a Uruk-hai army.

Now as for me, well I have decided to build a Moria Goblin army. I figure I have about 100+ goblins waiting to get painted and it is about time that they see some paint.

So with that here are the rules that are self imposed.

This little quest will last for the next 4 months and we will start out with 175 points and each month we will increase it by 175 points to a grand total of 700 points.

Each person will be responsible for getting an update out of there progress by the first of the next month. So the May month will be posted June 1st and so on with the final update being on September 1st. Each person can do more updates but they must have one showing what they got done for that month.

We will also be using the point system that was in the 2008 White Dwarf article of the following:

Models painted on time +5pts
Models painted late +3pts
Models Not painted +0pts.

So, you may be asking what is the winner going to get? What are the stakes? Well the losers will have to take the winner out to dinner at his favorite eatery and they will have to pick up the tab for him.

So stay tuned to this and the other blogs as we do brief introductions and what we are planning on doing...

TK

Adepticon 2011 or bust...Well bust for me!

2011-03-30T22:26:00.001-07:00

No this is not a rant or prediction of Adepticon 2011, it is a post about how I will not be able to attend this awesome event this year. For those regular viewers here at Cursed Treasures, you know that I have attended Adepticon for the past 3 years and have posted coverage about my travels to the Windy City.

But alas, this year I will have to sit on the sidelines and watch get my Adepticon fix like many people from other folks. You see, it has been a rather tough 2 years for me (out of work for almost that entire time) and the "play budget" for traveling has been used for more important things that real life throws at you (like keeping my house and paying my bills!). So I had too make a rather easy decision and tell my good friend Hank, that I would not be able to attend this year.

Well as luck would have it, I found a new job (yeah!!!) but do not have the time saved up for any sort of vacation trip to the Windy City. As a side note, my good friend Hank, kept sending me e-mails about cheap airfares that he found on some airlines even days before this event. But it still comes back to being responsible and doing the grown up thing and pay my bills. You see there are a few reasons why I am depressed that I do not get to go this year.

First up, as some know, I was the guy that helped get the Warhammer Ancient Battles tournament (Singles and Doubles) event off the ground in Chicago. The guys playing WAB are some of the nicest guys and the event is growing. When I had to bow out, I turned over the event to Rich Nelson of the Chicago Terrain Factory blog. Last year Rich and I (well Rich really) launched a successful WAB Campaign at the event for the singles event. Well Last year after years of belly aching, I got them to do a Dark Age Campaign (my favorite era) for this year. So the year I can't make it, there will be more than a few players playing Dark Age Armies!

Secondly, my other good friend John over at Plastic Legions is running a Legends of the High Seas Campaign event at Adepticon this year!

(Picture from Plastic Legions Blog)

John ran a successful Legends of the High Seas Campaign a few years ago for his local gaming buddies. Last year while John and I had down time in between events, I talked him into co-running a LotHS event for this year. But once again the bad economy laid to waste my plans to attend. I had hoped to support John by painting up my Old Glory ship and shipping it out to him to use for the Boarding action scenario. But once again best made plans sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Time and an issue with my Old Glory ship kept me from sending the model to him to use. So another cool event that I will not get to participate in.

Thirdly, I will be missing the awesome Lord of the Rings event run By Jamie from the Blog of Five Armies Jamie is one of the reasons why Gathering in the Desert happened 4 years ago. It was because of his love for Lord of the Rings game that inspired me to run my event. So once again I am going to miss one of the coolest LotR events in the country!

And lastly and probably the biggest one really, is I will miss out on hanging out with all the friends that I have made over the years while attending Adepticon. The main reason why I play games is for the social aspect of it. And Adepticon is the peek of social gaming, yes there are hard core gamers there doing the tourney thing, but a lot of guys go year after year because of the same reason I go, to hang out with friends once a year. So I will not get to hang out with some great friends.

So there you go, as I stated above, I will be like everyone else that can't make Adepticon this year and following all the coverage from other folks that got to go to one of the coolest game events on the planet!

TK

Hello...Anyone Home?

2011-03-21T23:44:00.000-07:00

Well,

What have I been up to since Gathering in the Desert you might be asking (or maybe not)? Well I have been pretty busy. Saguaro Painting Services is keeping me very busy, which is a good thing. Only down side is that I do not have time for my own models!

Also, for those who have not heard, I got an invite to the Throne of Skulls Games Workshop Event in June. It seems that they kept a few places open for Tournament Organizers as a way to say thanks for all the hard work we do. Well the wife and I will be going, I will be playing with toy soldiers, while she will be playing the slots!

As for the army I am taking, well it was a toss up and I actually lost sleep over it. I finally decided that I would take a 62 figure Mirkwood Wood Elf list. The only issue is I have to paint them and God knows when I will have time!

Also been busy tinkering around with 40K and had a few friends over last Friday for some Combat Patrol action. It looks like I will be planning a Combat Patrol event in September with a buddy of mine.

Also this weekend I am suppose to make a trip out to another friends place for some LotOW. I will have a small write up after this weekend.

The only problem with being so busy, is that I don't have time to write it up here. And to bust out the camera is a chore! I will need to step it up from here out, so stay tuned...

TK

State of Lord of the Rings Game in Phoenix

2011-02-27T13:28:00.000-08:00

So,

If you have not guessed yet I have been a bit busy this month, hence the lack of posts.

So lets see, if you have not heard, Gathering in the Desert 2011 happened last weekend. We had 22 players signed up this year with only 2 not being able to make it and it was a blast. Gathering in the Desert is a Lord of the Rings Independent Grand Tournament that is on the Games Workshop Circuit.

As readers of this blog know, I am a big fan and champion of this game and have been running this GT for the last 4 years. Wow, 4 years now and I am pleased to announce that Gathering in the Desert will be back next year in 2012.

And that fact got me thinking about the local tournament scene here in Phoenix AZ. A friend pointed out that this is in his recollection, the longest running tournament and to boot it is the Lord of the Rings game! Now granted, I am not sure if this is the longest running tournament here in the valley, but ever since I have been here in the valley, it is. I could be wrong and if you know of another event here in Phoenix let me know. I know for sure that this is the longest running LotR tournament here in the valley (in fact the only one!).

So I was wondering why is that? Maybe it is because LotR is such a small part of the GW family. I know that most folks either play Warhammer Fantasy Battle or Warhammer 40K but it has been hard to find LotR players here in the valley. This year at GitD, we had a equal split of players being local and from out of state. It seems that Phoenix is not much different from other parts of the country in the fact that there is not a lot of LotR players. That is why most folks travel all over the country to play LotR. I am hopefully that the Hobbit movies will breath a new breath of life into the LotR game, in fact Games Workshop signed a 6 year deal to produce miniatures for the game, which is a great sign for the game.

So with that being said, it is time for the LotRSBG community to start to stepping it up. If we want more players to play this awesome game, we need to get out there and start playing the game. I will admit that I have been bad at this. In fact I have not really done a very good job of promoting LotR SBG in Phoenix. My good buddy Drunkensamurai and I were talking about this just today. We need to do a better job at this and if I want to see LotR grow (as well as GitD) I need to do more. Hell I even did a post on this, but I have not really done anything except run a practice event as well as GitD.

Now I heard that there was a LotR league being run out of Empire Games, but sadly the person running it has lost interest in LotR. From what I have heard, there was something like 14 players in the league and most lived in the east side of the valley. So it seems that there are more LotR players here in the valley, it just means that someone needs to rally them all together.

So I guess that means I need to get off of my butt and start doing more things for LotR here in the valley. I have tried (and failed miserably) at running a map based campaign (don't remind me Howard!). I have also talked about doing something with the Battle Companies stuff that GW put out for LotR, but once again it was nothing but talk.

So where does this leave me? Well it means I need to step up and do more for the game I love. So my plan is to try to get something going like my buddy Keith is doing up in Colorado. He is running a quarterly series of mini one day events that will track the best player and eventually will crown one person as the Champion of the series. So I am planning to get this going within the next few weeks, with GitD being the one for the first quarter with three others happening throughout the year.

So there you have it, stay tuned for more info on the Phoenix LotR Championship...

TK

Moria Table Done!

2011-02-12T21:26:00.000-08:00

So,

Khazad - Dum, 'the Dwarrowdelf or Mines of Moria, this is the second new board for Gathering in the Desert 2011. Here is an overall shot of the new board.

It may seem that the board is pretty open and lite on terrain, but it is rather a tough board to play on. First up is the main road that runs down the middle of the board. It has no few than 12 pillars running down each side of the road, giving you 24 total pillars. Were this may seem like a no big deal, if you try to get line of sight for shooting it starts to become a mess. Also would like to thank Mike from Da Green Skins blog for helping me lay all the tiles on the road and gluing down the pillars.

I also include this hallway that has dwarven doors on both ends of it, which once again creates either a great place to hide or chock points to defend. Nice things is that I it is removable and I can use it for other projects.

On the other side of the board is Balins Tomb, which I followed the plans loosely from the Fellowship of the Rings Journey book. The pillars have enough room for a single 25mm based figure to hid behind (from a troll perhaps?) as well as having a ledge that runs around the inside of the tomb. The only thing that is different came from Drunkensamurai, that there is no back door to get out. In the journey book there is a collapsed exit that you can leave from. But in the movie I swore that the Fellowship leaves from the main door! Anyway, this will make an interesting feature on the board with only one way in. Do you hold up and defend or pass it by, hmm the decisions.

Also on the board are a few rock castings from a Woodland Scenic mold set that I have. Once again Mike from Da Green Skins stepped up to help me cast these bad boys. The are made with dental plaster castings and blue foam for the backing. Than they are mounted on Masonite and painted, so that means they have a pretty good weight to them.

I also made them to go in he corners and the edge of the table. This was done to give the feeling of being in an underground environment like in the movie.

So there you have it, another board for GitD 2011, if you are in town, stop by to see these in person...

TK

Isengard Finished

2011-01-23T17:04:00.000-08:00

Well,

It has been a few days since the last post, been busy working on two new tables for Gathering in the Desert. You may remember the an older post that showed the basic construction of the new boards.

Well as of today one board is just about ready to go, here is a overall shot of the board. This board was inspired by a board that one of the local guys did up in Colorado. I had a chance to play on it and it was a blast, so I molded it after that one.

I did two towers or scaffolding's but i wanted one to extend out into one of the pits. It is a separate piece and gives more playability to the board.

Besides the pits and the scaffolding's I also did a few pieces to block line of sight. So there is a few lumber piles, a Loose dirt pile, as well as a pile of boulders. I am also finishing up three rock piles to throw onto the board.

Here is a shot to show you just how much the lumber piles block line of sight. This is a standard two handed orc hiding behind the lumber pile.

Also with the pits there is a inner ledge that models can stand on to get more cover, here you see a two handed orc standing on the lower edge. An just an FYI, one of the pits has a ledge big enough for at least a 40mm base, so that means mounted models will fit.

The only thing missing are the smoke plumes that DrunkenSamurai built, so those will add to the line of sight blockage. So there you go, a new board for Gathering in the Desert 2011...

TK

Small is Big This year

2011-01-09T17:53:00.000-08:00

So,

It's about the ninth of January now and I have been thinking about what 2011 will hold for me in the new year for gaming. Well after some thought I think I may have narrowed down what I will be working on. As some may know, I am still searching for regular work, so finances are tight and there is no room for any expenses on the gaming front.

So with that I have decided that this year will be the Year of the Skirmish game. You see my interest in gaming has always been in skirmishing style games (Necromunda, Mordheim, LotR SBG, LotOW, LotHS). The nice thing about skirmish games is that you do not need a ton of figures to play and I happen to have more than enough figures for this sort of gaming.

So here are the games I am thinking about focusing on this year.

Lord of the Rings SBG
Well this one is a no brainer, with Gathering in the Desert just around the corner, the next month will be focused on finishing up terrain and models. I have decided that I will be giving away an 600 point Easterling army to on of my friends son. He has taken an interest in gaming and he played in the practice LotR event and had a great time. So that means that I need to finish up painting the army, it is currently around 500 points and I have about 500 more points to paint up.

Legends of the Old West
As with DrunkenSamurai, I played a few games of LotOW at a friends house. It was a good time and really made me miss this game. So I think it is about time to bust out all the Old West terrain I have sitting in the closet and get to making a proper town. Also DrunkenSamurai has peeked my interest with the idea of doing the Wild Bunch idea based on the movie. So I think I will be joining DrunkenSamurai on this venture.

Warhammer 40Kmunda
Well, I have had this idea floating around my head for awhile now about playing smaller games of 40K. Last year I found a few guys doing ]I[munda stuff on the web and DrunkenSamurai and I found it very interesting. Well this year I would like to get back to playing smaller games of 40K and blending it with the Necromunda campaign stuff. I am talking about doing Kill teams, Kill Zone and 40K in 40 minutes (or Combat Patrol) stuff with 40K. Another friend is trying to talk me into running a 40K Combat/Kill Mission tourney and this may happen with a select set of people. I also started acquiring 40K Orks and would love to try out some old Gorka Morka stuff for this game.

Legends of the High Seas
Well, I have not had much interest in my own game of late, but after seeing the trailer to the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the pirate spark is back in me. Also with me working on my Wicked Wench ship model I see myself getting back into my own game. I think I will invite a few select folks over for a Campaign day at the end of February, so stay tuned for more on that.

Gothic Horror/ Pulp
For awhile now I have had an interest in doing something with the Horror/Pulp setting. I have even started collecting up stuff for a Pulp game in the desert with mummies. I hopefully will get something to the table this year. The owner of my local game store is also interested in this and has purchased a bunch of terrain that I may be painting up for him, this will feed the Pulp idea further, so we shall see. I also have another friend that purchased some stuff for Chaos in Carpathia and that may hit the table as well.

Other Gaming
I will also keep working on my 28mm WWII stuff as well as my Flames of War project and I am sure other games will creep in from time to time.

So there you go, Small is Big this year, it will be interesting to see how the year pans out so stay tuned...

TK

Rocks and Passageways

2011-01-07T09:54:00.001-08:00

Okay,

To go along with the Osgiliath revamp I did a few rock piles for the table at GitD. Nothing special just a few rocks on some bases painted to match the rest of the terrain. So here are a few shots of them.

Here is a group shots of the piles, each piece is about 4" to 6" long and they will provide line of sight blockers for the table.

Also to go along with the Osgiliath table I decided to build a quick fountain for the the center of the table. It is made out of PVC plastic sheeting, 4 3/4" wood blocks and 5 statues from the GW kit. I also used Liqutex to add texture to the fountain. The inside of the fountain has a simple cobblestone sheeting and I poured some Gloss varnish into the fountain (it is still wet in the pictures).

Also for a couple of friends across the pound I have a few shots from some old passageway boards for the old GW Warhammer Quest game. First up is a picture of the original stairway tile that came with the game.

Here is the replacement tile that I made out of cork and matte board. The cork is great to work with since it has a natural rock look and it is easy to add cracks to it.

Here is another Objective room tile (the Tomb room).

And here is my replacement, once again it is cork and matte board. The coffin is made out of foam core and matte board. I was going to add a dead knight to the top but never got around to it.

Here is another shot with two sections together. Warhammer Quest is a great game and I only bust it out when either my son is home (he grew up watching us play until he learned how) or when my brother visits.

So there you go...

TK

Osgiliath Revamped

2011-01-04T10:18:00.001-08:00

So,

The New Year and the first post for 2011 and it is a terrain post. As loyal readers are aware, I run Gathering in the Desert, a Lord of the Rings Independent Grand Tournament. We are going on our 4th year and in a manner to bring some awesome terrain to the event I started to revamp some of the terrain. The past two years Tom O supplied the terrain for the Osgiliath table which was greeted with some interesting comments (From we love it to I hate that table!). Tom is looking at selling off his terrain so it was up to me to re-do the table.

Well I started with 8 of the Osgiliath terrain kits from Gamesworkshop. here are a few of the completed terrain pieces for the table.

DrunkenSamurai is working on at least two other sections for this table, so the table looks a little bare in the below picture.

I also have a fountain and a few rubble piles to finish up but all in all the table looks good. Now I just have to finish a few other tables before GitD 2011. So stay tuned...

TK

Top Eleven in 2010

2010-12-29T09:37:00.000-08:00

Well it that time of year again, that's right, time for the Top Eleven count down of what I did for the year. So here is what I wanted to do starting with number 11.

#11 To Document My Games - I have done a lot of things that never make it to the Blog. I get lazy about getting things up, sorry no better excuse. So I want to be able to bring folks more in 2010 about what I am doing & playing, so hopefully I will get over being lazy and document what I am doing.

Well it looks like I did not do a great job, I only had 50 posts this year compared to last year with 72 posts. Although I think I did do a better job on the post that I did (they were not all over the place and stayed on topic). Also 50 posts means that I averaged about two post a month which was one of my goals. So not all bad.

#10 To Play More! - Pretty simple really, I need to play more games. DrunkenSamurai and I only get to play once a month if that, but I want to increase that this year. I have all these games, if they are not getting played than why did I buy them?? So I want to increase my game playing this year. So I guess I will be throwing the doors open at the old SPL (Secret Pirate Lair) more often for games.

Well this looks like another miss, since time has always been an issue for gaming. I think I averaged one day a month for gaming, not good. I did open the SPL doors but life has a way of getting in the way. Hopefully this will change in the new coming year.

#9 No New Game Systems! - With me still out of work, I do not have much of a income, so I want to use 2010 to focus on the games I already have. You see I am like most gamers and when the newest thing comes out I want it, but I need to have some self control. I guess that's the sign of maturity, when you see something you can say no. So I will not get into any new game systems this year.

Well this one was easy, I did not get into any new games at all this year. With my work situation it was rather easy. Trust me it was tough to do since there were all kinds of games I wanted to start, but not having any extra income helped. So I would say this one was a huge success!

#8 To grow Gathering in the Desert - My idea for GitD started a few years ago and I would like to expand it from LotR to other systems of 40K & WHFB. I am not looking at running the other two systems, but to find people who share the vision of GitD which is to have the very best events we can run. I have spoken to a few people for both 40K & WHFB and I think we can grow GitD into a big 3 event. So 2010 will be about expanding GitD.

Well I had hopes for growing GitD to add the other game systems, but plans fell through for this. And to be honest, I think I will keep GitD just to Lord of the Rings. So GitD will happen in 2011 and it will be the best that it can be and we will see how well it goes after 2011.

#7 To Run a successful Campaign - In years past I have tried to run many game campaigns but have always either bit of more than I can chew, or participation waned. This year I would like to run a simple WHFB & a narrative 40K Campaign. I am very interested in both but 40K seems to be taking the lead, I love the Inquisition stuff and I would love to develop a nice storyline campaign for a few friends.

Well this was a complete failure! I had plans but life kept getting in the way. Also finding people that wanted to play and be able to play was tough. I still have plans for a cool ongoing campaign so perhaps in 2011 you will see something here.

#6 To Attend Adepticon - This is really a no brainier, but with me still out of work, it is hard to justify making the trip again to Chicago. All I have to do is cover the airfare and spending money, but with me not working it is starting to stress me out a bit about going. I love the event and have made some great friends in Chi Town, but need to find the funds to make the trip. So I add this to the list for 2010.
Well as luck would have it I was able to make Adepticon thanks in part to my parents. Had a blast with friends there and made some new ones. But sadly I will not be going in 2011, it looks like the next Adepticon I get to go to will be in 2012 on there 10 year anniversary. So this up coming year I will be enjoying Adepticon like most readers of my blog, from the Internet!

#5 To write up Articles for LotHS - Ever since I wrote Legends of the High Seas, I wanted to add more to the game. I thought that Warhammer historical would want another book since the first did so well and I have a ton of ideas for a second book. But when Warhammer Historical went over to the guys doing Forgeworld, there has been no talk of another book. So because of this and a few other issues, I have not been overly excited about writing lately. But I would like to get a few articles out there in 2010, I just need to buckle down and write.

Well, this never happened and I can tell you I have not been excited to do anything for LotHS. This feeling comes from the sure lack of anything coming out of the Forgeworld crew as well and just not wanting to work on anything for it. I am proud of LotHS and still have a ton of other ideas, but I can't get excited about writing anything. Maybe I will get bitten by the "writing bug" in 2011, who knows.

#4 To add more Units to my 40K armies - This one is interesting, you see both of my armies are at the level of being done to me. The IG army has about 3000 points painted and the Sisters of Battle are at 2000 points of painted stuff. I still have a ton of SoB stuff left(about 3000 more points unpainted) and a ton of Armour for the IG unpainted. But I have this mental block about painting up more stuff. In my mind I think the armies are done, so why do I need to add to them, but in reality both armies could use more different troop choices. So starting with 2010, I plan to add more units to both armies.

Well this is a hit and a miss, I did add new units to my Sisters of Battle army with getting a few new Rhinos and Immolaters as well as painted up a few more troops. But I did nothing with the Imperial Guard except take out the armour units and look at them. So not too bad at least I added units to one new army.

#3 To Play in Some Local Tourneys - For the last two years now I have been running Gathering in the Desert, a LotR Independent GT style tourney. This takes up a lot of time with planning and such and I never get to play in the tournament since I am running it. In fact, I have not played in many tourneys because I was the guy running them. Well this year I want to be able to play in a few of the local events, so this year I would like to enter at least one WHFB and one 40K tourney held here in the valley. This should be pretty easy since there are a bunch of local events here in the valley of the sunstroke.

This one is a utter fail! I think the problem is that I hold other local tourneys up to what I do for GitD and in my mind they all fall short. Not saying that GitD is done better, it is just my own issues is all. As Drunkensamurai has said, "how will I know if I don't play in them?" I did make a trip to Colorado to play in a local LotR tourney (Mayhem in the Mountains) up there, does this count???

#2 To play Warhammer Fantasy - I used to play WHFB about ten years ago, but left it for Warhammer Historical. I had about 6 different armies of various sizes, but sold them all off to get into other things. As some will know, I had a huge Tomb Kings army that I had acquired a few years ago, but could not get excited about it. Well thanks to Rob (aka DrunkenSamurai) he planted the seed in my head to play WHFB since he has been building a beautiful Beastman army. So I made a deal with another friend and I am now the proud owner of a 2500+ point Orc & Goblin army.

Well this one went down in flames! Not only did I get a 2500 Orc & Goblin army, but after only a few months I sold it off! You see I got the army and had the current rules (7th at that time) and army book and was all ready to play. Then the 8th edition came out and I was stuck with having to buy another set of rules. Couple that with the fact that the local AZ forum I was on had a ton of WHFB players on it and they all basically soured my mood on playing WHFB. All they did was seem to bitch about the rules and how this is broken and that is wrong, it just turned me off even before I played a game. I also came to the realization that LotR was my Fantasy game and that was all it took.

And now for the number One out of the Top Eleven...

#1 To play more 40K - Hmm, this seems interesting since it looks like I played a lot of 40K last year. My goal is to be as comfortable with 40K rules as I am with the LotR rules. The only way this will happen is if I play more 40K. I have two armies already (Imperial Guard & Sisters of Battle) so there is no reason why I can't play more games. So we hopefully 40K will hit the table more often in 2010.

Well, I think I only got in 6 to 8 games this year of 40K, so it looks like I failed here again. I had thought 2010 would be the year for 40K, but once again life had interesting things to throw at me and I just never got this game out that often. All the times I had 40K on the table, I had a blast, but it just never got out much. This in itself is funny because Drunken Samurai and I both wanted to play but just could not find the time.

So there you go, I have 7 1/2 failures out of eleven. Not too good really but that's how things work out I guess. I think some of this happens to be because of the work thing and struggling to pay bills. On a more positive note, Saguaro Painting Service is doing well and business is starting to pick up. This month alone I have painted well over 500+ figures and the money has all gone to the household budget. So even though I may not be playing games and doing my own hobby thing, at least I am making some money doing hobby related work.

So stay tuned for whats coming in the new year, all I can say now is it is looking to be a very Orky New Year around here...

TK

Merry Christmas

2010-12-24T19:49:00.000-08:00

Well,

Hobby stuff has slowed down due to the Holidays, will be back in 2011 with more fun posts.

So Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night, see you in 2011...

TK

World War II with Legends

2010-12-13T08:23:00.000-08:00

So,

Last weekend Drunkensamurai and I got together over at his place to play some WWII in 28mm. We have both been in the mood to bust out our collections of stuff and play some games, but there is one problem, what rules to use?

Drunken & I have been on a quest for finding a good set of WWII rules for 28mm for years now. We have tried many rules but there was always something that was not just right with them. Heck we even collaborated on writing a set of rules using 40K 5th edition to pitch to Warhammer Historical which they choose not to pursue. (Hmm sound familiar for Flames of War???) Anyhow the rules we worked on (Called Hammer & Anvil) work rather well, but Drunken wanted a rule set that was commercially sold to the public.

Basically we did not want to be "those Old Guys" playing with their own rules, you know who I am talking about, we have all seen them in our local game stores. The have their huge 3 ring binders with poorly hand written rules that only they can explain.

So the search goes on for a good set of WWII rules. Now the other day Drunken calls me and states he has an idea, since we both love playing Lord of the Rings from Games Workshop, why don't we use the Legends (the LotR rule set for Old West and my High Seas game) for WWII? Well it could work I thought as long as we thought out a few things (like vehicles!).

So with us coming up with a few simple conversions and stats for guns, we busted out the collections and some terrain and went for it.

We each took about 45 models, Drunken using his British Commandos and me taking a German force. Here are the basic stats we came up for the troops (using the LotR/Legends stat line).

F3/5+, S 3, D 3, A 3, W 1, C 3, M 0/F 0/W 0

We also came up with some basic weapon stats:
Kar 98 24"range, Strength 3, Half Move Penalty, RoF 1
SLR 24" range, Strength 3, Half Move Penalty, RoF 1, May Reroll Miss's
LMG 30" range, Strength 3, Half Move Penalty, RoF 3, Cause Terror
HMG 36" range, Strength 4, Full Movement Penalty, RoF 6, Cause Terror

The game played rather well and we only had a few issues come up, like how to deal with weapon teams and such (Can you target the gunner of a HMG and stop it from shooting that turn?) but other wise it worked very well.

We set the objective as the Crossroads in the center of the table which was a modified King of the hill scenario from the Legions of Middle earth scenario for LotR. So basically you had to have more troops within a few inches of the crossroads in order to win.

Anyway we called it a Draw since Drunken had more Commandos moving towards the crossroads than I had Germans left. All in all it was a great game. As you may notice there was a large amount of terrain on the table and for the first half of the game we used the standard In the Way rules from LotR. Meaning that if your shot passed over any sort of obstacle that you had to make a separate roll of 4+ to clear the obstacle and your shot would go on to the next obstacle or target. If you rolled 3 or less than your shot hit the obstacle.

The second half of the game (we broke for lunch) we tried the modified In the Way rules from the Legends rules that assign a different value to the obstacle, from a bush being a 3+ to a brick wall being 5+. This seemed to work better than the LotR In the Way rules and we saw more troops being taken out of action and seemed to have a better feel for the game.

All in all it was a good game and we are now both thinking about how to incorporate armoured vehicles into the rules. This can be easy or tough depending on how we approach tanks and we are still kicking some ideas around. So stay tuned for more thoughts and ideas of using the Legend rules for WWII.

One last thing I will leave you with today, while scrolling through my usual Blogs and websites, I found a new Blog dealing with some awesome Flames of War Terrain, called TheTerrainguys I was totally blown away by this site and this guys You Tube channel, finally someone doing awesome terrain for war gaming that reviles model railroad terrain. Here is a shot of his terrain from his blog.
This is the sort of stuff that really makes a game come alive! Needless to say I wasted about 2 hours this morning watching his videos and going through his blog. If you have a weakness for nice looking games, than don't look at this stuff, it will blow your mind away! Like a bad train wreck, I keep going back for inspiration, so be warned!

TK

Sail on the Horizon

2010-12-05T18:21:00.001-08:00

So,

As most followers of this blog know, I usually make the trip out to Adepticon in Chicago. In years past I have run a few Legends of the High Seas Demos as well as a multi-player games. Well this year I got together with my friend John over at Plastic Legions and threw out the idea about running a LotHS mini campaign. You see John ran a campaign day for his regular game group awhile ago and I thought he would be the perfect person to pair up with for an event at Adepticon.

Well unfortunately it seems that I will not be able to make it out to Adepticon this year. But I still will be supporting John and his event from afar, so all is not lost. Now last year I was able to acquire a (Thanks to another friend Merle Dellinger) a Old Glory Miniatures 25mm Pirate ship, the Pirate Hunter.

Now one idea that I had for the campaign was to use two of these cool Old Glory Ships for the Boarding Action scenario from LotHS. John is up for it and has access to another ship in Chicago, so that means that my ship will need to make the trip out to Adepticon without me. That means that I need to assemble my ship and get it painted before Adepticon in April.

So as I un-boxed the beast that is the Pirate Hunter I noticed that there were no instructions and I could only find a few pictures of the model. So I thought I would document building this beast and getting it painted. So over the next few weeks I will post up shots of this thing as it gets built and painted.

So first up is the un-boxing of this huge ship, which I shall call the Wicked Wench, named after the Pirate ship in the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. The ship is made out of a high density foam and it comes with a bag of white metal parts, which I will get to later.

This thing is huge and has plenty of room on the decks for figures to move around on. Here is a shot with a few Artizan 28mm figures on it.

This ship measures out to be about 28 1/2 inches long, which is definitely a large ship in LotHS terms as well as just being plain big on the table top.

She is also 7 inches wide at the mid-ship and as you can see there is a lot of room, even taking into account that there will be 8 cannons on this part of the deck alone.

Here is the white metal parts that are included, it has 16 full cannons and 36 partial cannons to go below decks. It also comes with one decorative railing, 3 smaller railings with belaying pins, a capsin, 4 deck ladders, 1 ornamental lamp for the back of the ship and 3 sets of parts for the main masts along with wooden dowel for the actual masts. It also comes with one Helmsman with 4 separate heads so you can create a unique helmsman.

My only issue with this is that there is no instructions for anything. It would be helpful for at least some description of where items have to go. But if you know ships, it is pretty easy to guess where items belong. But other than that this a great model and will be an awesome ship for Legends of the High Seas games.

Next post on this will be assemble and preparing for paint.

TK

Archos Fianlly Done!

2010-11-29T15:00:00.000-08:00

So back in August of 2009, I started working on some Arco-Flagellants but they fell by the wayside on the painting bench. Well this week I decided to bust them back out and get to painting them. So here they are in all of their painted glory!

Here is my Puritan Witchunter that I painted a while ago, but never got to taking pictures of him. I call him Inquisitor Bane and he has had a few adventures, the most recent being sent to drive out Ork looters.

Here is a shot of Lord Bane and his retinue which was also painted a while ago.

And the final shot is with the arcos being released onto some foul Witch cult!

Hope you enjoyed...

TK

Return of 40K to the table!

2010-11-28T17:38:00.001-08:00

So, after a long break, 40K finally got back on the table today with Drunkensamurai and I playing not one, not two, but three linked games! We played a 200 point Kill team mission, than did a 400 point Combat patrol mission followed by a 1500 point battle.

Before I go on, let me tell you what I have been thinking about for 40K. You see as some may know, this year was to be the 40K year for me. I had planned on playing more games than in 2009 and even wanted to play in a local 40K tournament. But life has a funny way of getting in the way and other gaming interests always took the spotlight. Also this week Drunkensamurai and I were talking about how we just do not get to play as much as we like and 40K was one game that we wanted to see more of.

My interest in 40K this year was also going to be towards doing some sort of narrative campaign and another friend said he was working toward getting one together. But alas, nothing ever happened. So with talking with Drunkensamurai we decided to just get together and play 40K this weekend. I would take my Sisters of Battle, while Drunkensamurai would take his new Orks. So what follows are pictures from two out of the three games we played today.

First up. 200 point Kill Team mission. My force included 15 Sisters of Battle against 20 Orks. We set the town up as a small settlement and the story was that the Orks were raiding it for loot. My Sisters were to try to stop the vile orks from looting the storage containers.

The Orks swarmed into the town taking the Sisters by surprise. The orks brought a buggy to haul off some of the loot that they hoped to scavenge from the settlement.

The Sisters took up positions at the walls around the containers and tried to keep the orks out. Seeing how the Sisters were caught unawares, they scrambled to fend off the invaders.

Two Sisters made a break for the communications office to radio for assistance and to warn the surrounding area of the invaders.

The Sisters put up a valiant fight trying to defend the storage containers, but the orks were all over their positions and were over running them.

The two sisters that made it to the communications office held off the orks in a brutal hand to hand fight and the warning was able to get sent out, which was received by a local Sisters of Battle Patrol in the area. Needless to say, out of 15 Sisters, only 4 made it out alive and the orks began their looting of the containers.

Game two was a 400 point Combat patrol mission on the same table as the kill team game. This time the Sisters showed up with one Imolater with a Dominion squad inside and 15 more Battle Sisters. The Orks also reinforced their position by bring in 3 Killer Kans, two buggies and a truck with some boys in it.

The 15 Sisters took up defensive positions inside the central building while the Imolater swept to the left flank to try to stop the killer kans.

The Imolater was ineffective against the killer kans but the meltas in the Dominions squad blew two of the machines to pieces.

But a bitter fight broke out as the boys in the truck engaged the Sisters in the middle of town and beat them to a bloody pulp and sending them racing out of town. Needless to say, the Orks defended the settlement and beat back the Sisters.

Game three saw us playing a new scenario out of the missions book, Cut & Run. This scenario has the Orks trying to leave the table while trying not to lose too many kill points. This scenario fit perfectly for the third game as it seemed fit to have the Orks making off with the loot.

I wish I would have taken pictures but I was too caught up in the game to worry about pictures. Needless to say, the Sisters of Battle took their revenge on the orks doing a total of 9 Kill points vs them loosing only three. It seemed that the Sisters wanted the settlement back.

It was a great day of gaming even though I lost two of of the three games against Drunkensamurai. My mind is already spinning about the next time Drunken & I can play. I think it will be another Kill Team game with the Sisters trying to get back the stolen loot that the Orks took. So stay tuned...

TK

Gathering in the Desert Practice Event Results.

2010-11-21T17:51:00.001-08:00

Well today we had the First Practice event for Gathering in the Desert 2011. Seven local players came out for the event (3 others had work and Family commitments) but seven was a good showing.

The players and their armies were:

Dominic Winton (new player) with Isengard Uruk-hai
Mike Wilster (new player) with Cirith Ungol Orcs
Howard Beam with High Elves
CJ Beam (new player) with Gondor
Robert Brightwell with Rohon
Tom Opalka with Isengard Scouts
Anthony Pigatti with Gladerhim Elves
Ringer army (me) Isengard Scouts

So here are a few shots from the event:

So here are the results from the event:
Best Overall - Robert Brightwell
Best Sportsmen - Mike Wilster
Best Appearance - Howard Beam

Name Battle Sports Paint Overall
Robert Brightwell 50 18 23 91
Howard Beam 27 18 44 89
Tom Opalka 37 16 27 80
Anthony Pigatti 45 16 17 78
CJ Beam 23 18 27 68
Mike Wilster 20 18 25 63
Dominic Winton 28 13 15 56
Ringer Army 28 15 0 43

A Big thank you to Darren Johnson of Imperial Outpost Games and to all the players that came out.

TK

Gathering in the Desert 2011 Practice Event

2010-11-14T17:05:00.000-08:00

Well in one week from today, I am happy to announce the first Gathering in the Desert 2011 Practice event.

When: November 21th, 2010 (Sunday) Start time 10:00am

Where: Imperial Outpost Games (4920 W Thunderbird Rd # 121 Glendale, AZ 85306) Cost: $10.00 What: 600 Points, 3 games, Painted Models optional Maximum 600 Points
Forces must be chosen from one of the army lists from the Legions in Middle Earth supplement or from a valid army list in White Dwarf.

You may use un-painted models for this event since this is a practice event for the Grand Tournament in February.

WYSIWYG, Weapons, armor and upgrades chosen from the army list Must be shown on the models used. In other words What you see is what you get!

All army list must be turned into the organizers the day of the event, if you do not have a army list you may not play. If your army list does not match what you are playing anytime during the event, you will automatically be disqualified and have all your games reported as Major Loss' and you may be asked to leave the event without a refund.

Forces must follow all rules and restrictions on force selection detailed in "Mustering the Legions of Middle Earth" pages 4-8 in the Legions of Middle Earth supplement.

Named characters (Gandalf, Lurtz, the Witch King, Spider Queen, etc) can only be taken once.

A set of Errata and FAQ's for Lord of the Rings source books will be used and these are maintained on the Games Workshop website. We are aware that many issues may come up in a game that are not covered by the Erratas or FAQ's, If you ask for a rules clarification from the organizers their decision will be final on the situation.

Models with stat lines and point values included in the forces section of the following rulebooks, journey books, source books or any White Dwarfs will be used:

* The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game rules manual (aka The One Rulebook)
* The Fellowship of the Ring
* The Two Towers
* Return of the King
* A Shadow in the East
* The Fall of the Necromancer
* The Ruin of Arnor
* Khazad -Dum
* Gondor in Flames
* Harad
* Mordor
* Any White Dwarf Article lists (such as WD#354).

Evil Forces cannot include Gollum.

Good Forces cannot include Tom Bombadil or Goldberry.

Where the points value differ between a source book and the Legions of Middle Earth supplement, the points value in the source books takes precedence.

Special Rule - Good vs Evil!
The Lord of The Rings is a modern classic of the tale of Good against Evil. As such the Strategy Battle Game is designed for battles between two forces, one Good and one Evil. This causes
a few problems for a format like the GitD where your Evil army of Uruk-hai could conceivably face five other Evil armies over the course of the weekend.

While this may seem like it would not be an issue, there are some problems that arise with the wording of various Special Rules and the effects of various artifacts wielded by powerful Heroes. These rules are typically worded in terms of affecting Good or Evil forces, or affecting a particular race like Orcs or Goblins.

For the purposes of games at the GitD we ask that players determine reasonably who is affected by the rule or item. In almost all cases players can easily determine who is affected by substituting the words Friendly or Enemy models for Good or Evil and when it comes to rules that affect a particular race, that rule will only be applied to one side or the other.

Here are a couple of examples:
• Both players are fielding armies drawn from the Fiefdoms list,
both armies contain Knights of Dol Amroth, and Player A has
Prince Imrahil. While Player B’s Knights of Dol Amroth also
have the Dol Amroth for Gondor! special rule, they would be
unable to take advantage of it, as the Prince Imrahil on the
table is their “enemy” for the purposes of this game.

• Both players are fielding Evil armies. Player A has a
Ringwraith that has the Harbingers of Evil special rule. In
typical play this rule only affects Good models, reducing their
Courage value while the Ringwraith is nearby). For the
purposes of the GT, this rule would affect “enemy” models,
those fielded by Player B.

We know you guys are reasonable players, and we look to you to make the right decision in the myriad of situations this issue could arise. If you are unable to, please call over the Organizers to make the call for you.

***Also if you choose to use any of the new models as detailed in White Dwarf under the Reinforcements section, than you must provide a copy of the article for the event organizers (if they do not have a copy) and as well as your opponents. This is to make it fair for folks that may not be able to get these articles to be able to see the special rules that apply to these new models.***

Scoring for the event will be a combination of Battle Points, Sportsmanship and Paint scores for Overall placement. In order to be eligible for Best Painted, you must have painted the army yourself and you must disclose the fact that someone else painted your army.

Gathering in the Desert organizers will accept payment and sign ups for Gathering in the Desert in February if you are unable to pay via Paypal.

So here is your chance to try out that new army you have been thinking about or to try out LotR for the first time.

TK

Osgilith starts to Rise

2010-11-03T11:47:00.000-07:00

First off, sorry for the lack of posts, been busy with work and life, but I have been pretty busy on the game front.

Secondly, thanks to all the folks that made comments on my What Does it Take post on LotR. Some very interesting thoughts and comments. I was going to answer all the negative points about the game, but really that would not help with changing peoples thoughts on LotR. The only way folks will change their minds is if they go out and play it. I will continue to blog about it here so have no fear and I will be doing more posts on Gathering in the Desert as well as other LotR events.

And now lastly onto what has been going on on the game side of things. Well I have been working on terrain for GitD 2011 and started working on the new Osgilith terrain. Now Tom O had donated his terrain for the last two years which has been great, but this year Tom was thinking of letting some of his stuff go for sale. So I decided that I would start to invest in some terrain to replace his. Well I ordered 8 of the new Osgilith terrain boxes from Gamesworkshop and this past weekend started to build some ruins.

Two kits went to Drunkensamurai to build while I worked on the other six kits. below is a shot of the table with seven out of the eight pieces of terrain that I knocked together.

The new kits are nice and with a few extra pieces from other kits (LotR terrain kits) they start to come to life. Now these are still missing the smaller texture but you get the idea.

You may notice some extra bricks that I made out of Masonite to add to the kit, these were cut from 1/4" thick by 1" long by 1/2" tall to match the brick pattern on the kits. All in all these are coming together nicely. So stay tuned for more shots of these and the other terrain projects that I am working on...

TK

What does it take???

2010-10-07T16:52:00.000-07:00

So I have been wondering about a few things lately and figured I would post them here.

Now as most of you folks know, I love Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game by Games Workshop. I love it so much that for the last three years I have run Gathering in the Desert, an Independent Grand Tournament for LotRSBG. What I am wondering is what does it take to get more folks into this game?

LotRSBG was considered one of Games Workshops "Big Three" core games while the movies were out. Now that the movies have come and gone, there does not seem to be much buzz about this game anymore. In fact even GW is lack luster in promoting it themselves, this is of course has to do with sales of the game I am sure. So we really can't blame GW for the reason why sales are down or their lack of support.

So what is it? I have been wondering this since 2001 when the game came out. I have been a cheerleader for this game since day one here in the valley. Heck Drunkensamurai and I were both screaming it from the mountain tops about this game. But no one seemed to be listening. Sure there are a few people that heard us, but I would say out here in Phoenix we may only have about 16 players that play LotR.

It is even so bad that the folks that travel from outside of the state out number the locals. Out of the 24 people last year at GitD, we had only seven local players! And it doesn't seem to be any better anywhere else in the country. My good friend Brent Sinclair has to travel at least two hours to find anyone to play and he lives in the Chicago area!

So what is it? Is it the rules? I have heard people locally say that LotR is about rolling 6's. Well hell, isn't that any game that uses a six sided dice? Most people that I teach the game to fall in love with it. As I like to say, it is a easy game to learn, but hard to master. It is after all a skirmish game and is fairly complex in what it can do, so what is it with the rules??

Is it the miniatures? Hell most of them are sculpted by the Perry Twins and if you have to ask who they are then you do not play GW games. To boot the minis are mostly in plastic and compared to GW's other games, you get more figures for the buck! Also LotRSBG has a model cap of about 75 figures for most games. So that means you could buy three box sets and nearly have all the figures you need. And once again they are cheaper than other GW ranges.

Could it be the playing surface or area needed to play? Well hell, most games are fought on a 4'x4' table or smaller. Take a look at the LotR Journey books and some of the scenarios take place on a 18"x24" board! Maybe it is the amount of terrain needed as this is a skirmish game. And that's another thing, most people I see that do play LotR play on wide open tables like WHFB. Come on folks, load the tables up and have some fun.

Is it the cost? As I mentioned above, LotRSBG is the cheapest game that GW puts out. Now I do know that their has been price increases, but overall it is cheaper to play LotRSBG than it is to play 40K or WHFB.

So what is it and what does it take for people to notice this game? I fear that when GW discontinues this game, many people will be crying out for it to come back like Space Hulk, Blood Bowl and countless other games that have gone away.

So what am I trying to say here? Well it should be pretty simple, why don't you try playing LotRSBG. And if you had and liked it, than get out there and play it some more. Hell this Sunday I am headed out to my local store (Imperial Outpost Games here in Phoenix) to throw down a few games...

TK

Isengard Takes Shape!

2010-10-03T19:31:00.001-07:00

So,

Yesterday I started working on the new terrain modules for Gathering in the Desert 2011 and being inspired by a few of the tables I saw at the Mayhem in the Mountains event I came home wanting to build a Isengard table. Here is the board that gave me the inspiration to build a table for GitD 2011.

One thing that I have noticed while being a gamer and a builder of terrain is that terrain gets beaten up pretty badly. In fact I built a few terrain boards years ago for Imperial Outpost Games and it is starting to show it's age from constant use (sorry no pictures, just go to Imperial Outpost and take a look). So they have to be repaired pretty regularly.

The other thing that I have noticed is with 2'x4' modules is that they tend to move around while on the table. Players may bump them and they separate and models may move. I noticed this up in Parker at MitM.

So I set out to try to combat both of these problems with these new boards. Also these would be test boards for my Pirate town that I want to build (yes it is still planned!) So on Friday I went out to Home Depot & Lowes and picked up the necessary materials (4, 2'x4' MDF boards, 8 sheets of Dow Blue foam 2'x8'x1" and 8, 2"x2"x8' sticks of lumber). All in all it cost about $60.00 in materials.

I enlisted my good friend Mike Papa to help assemble these boards. Mike is in the wood working industry doing high end woodworking and he is precis about any woodworking. So early Saturday morning I met him at his shop so we could start construction. The first thing Mike said to me was "You bought the wrong size lumber!" As soon as he said that I knew what he was talking about, you see I wanted the sides to be 2" tall since I wanted to be able to carve into the foam and I bought 2"x2" which are more like a 1 3/4" tall! So before we started anything we went back to Lowes to return the lumber and pick up 8, 2"x4"X8". Now Mike had a plan, that we would cut down the 2"x4"s into the right size that we needed.

Now the process of cutting down and milling down the 2"x4"s took us about an hour or so. Once we had the right size and straight lumber we got to assembly pretty quickly. Remember when I said that Mike is precis about his woodworking, well he treated this like a piece of high end furniture. We trimmed and did a rough sanding on the boards and they are dead on straight and level, it almost a shame that I am going to make a mess of these when I texture the boards!

Anyway, here is a completed shot of 2 of the boards done and awaiting blue foam. So now I have four 2'x4' terrain modules for use.

Now as Mike and I were assembling these, I told him about the issues of the boards moving and what would he suggest. Mike said we could do two things, first we could use biscuits to keep the boards from moving, so he pulled out a biscuit cutter and we cut two slots for biscuits. Nice thing is that these fit nice and snug and keep the boards from moving.

And the second thing was to attach a few hasps to lock all the boards together. With the combination of the biscuits and the hasps, these boards do not move at all.

One thing I was concerned about was the weight and these things only weigh about 4lbs each. Once the foam goes in and the groundwork I am guessing that these are going to come in at around 6lbs each, which is not too bad. The one thing that I would do different is to go with Mike's suggestion and use poplar wood instead of the fir 2"x4"s, it is a much harder wood and takes paint rather well.

So there you have it, Isengard is taking shape (sort of anyway) for GitD 2011, next up will be the laying down of the foam and the carving, so stay tuned.

TK

"Meats back on the Menu Boys!"

2010-09-27T17:44:00.000-07:00

Okay,

Here is my winning Diorama from Mayhem in the Mountains, "Meats back on the Menu boys!"

As I posted previously, I was the only entry, so it was a sort of a shallow victory, hopefully next year there will be more entries.

Now the inspiration for this came from a few places, first up it came from the Two Towers LotR movie and books. It also came from a friend Frank Brown. You see Frank made a comment on the Mayhem in the mountains forum stating that Meat was back on the Menu since he and a few of us "Ringers" were coming to Parker for the event.

Now the other thing about this diorama is that I used a few left over figures from my collection. I had two scouts left and a extra Uruk-hai Captain left, so I used them for Ugluk and his boys. The orcs were just left overs and the headless orc came from the new Ent Plastic model.

I also tried something new for blood, I used Liqutex Matte Medium mixed with red and brown ink for the blood. It came out pretty well, in fact my wife asked if I had cut myself by accident!

All in all I think it came out pretty well.

TK

Slow Dancer at Mayhem in the Mountains

2010-09-22T17:40:00.000-07:00

So,

I am finally recovered from the long road trip this past weekend to attend Mayhem in the Mountains with DrunkenSamurai. Our trip started at 4:13 am on Friday, with Drunken's car loaded with terrain and a whole pantry full of food (packed by Mrs. DrunkenSamurai) we headed out to the song of Slow Dancer by Robert Plant. The trip was pretty uneventful and we arrived in Parker Colorado around 6:00pm Colorado time.

First up was to check in with my friends, the Goodmans & Carr's and them Drunken and I headed for Collectormania in Parker. We met up with Tim McKnight & Aaron Hunt to hand off the events shirts and then Drunken and I headed back to crash for the night.

Saturday saw us up at the shop to set terrain up and I snapped few pictures of the tables. I brought the Amon Hen & Mirkwood table from GitD and the rest of the tables were built by the local LotR group in the last few weeks.

First up my Amon Hen table from GitD.

Next was a table put together by Aaron Hunt to represent the town of Bree.

Here we have a Mordor table built by Russ Brown, this was one tough table to fight on!

Here is a Isengard table, this table gave me inspiration to build one for GitD 2011.

Next up we have the Shire by Tim McKnight.

Here is the Mirkwood table I brought from GitD.

So with that we got our table assignments and who we would play for the first round. I got Russ Brown on the Shire table. The First scenario was called The Foothills of Khazad Dum and was a modified Ill Met By Moonlight scenario.
Russ was playing a Minas Morgul army with two Nazgul's (one generic and the Undying) Russ was a great person to play against and I voted for him as my Favorite player in the event.
Unfortunately Russ deployed his weaker troops (Orcs!) up on the center line with his tougher troops 3" back from his baseline. Needless to say my Spiders deployed right up front and I was all over him in the first turn. Russ played a good game but by the time the Nazgul got up close to support the game was pretty much over, although he did kill the Spider Queen! So I got a Major Win and Russ actually got 3 bonus points for doing more wounds with his Hero.

My second game was against John Hess from the Chicago area, one of the other "Ringers" that traveled to the event to play. John was playing a Dol Guldur force that had nothing but Easterlings and a few Black Guard Orcs. The scenario was Reinforcements which was a modified Clash of Piquets scenario. The only chance I had was the fact I was on my Mirkwood table and I knew I had to use the terrain to my advantage.

Needless to say, I was a bit brash and rushed my Spiders up to quickly without the support of the goblins and I ended up loosing pretty bad which meant I got a Major Loss!

My third game was against Aaron Hunt and his Gondor army. Well as luck would have it my camera batteries died so I did not get a picture of Aaron or his army. We played a modified Domination scenario with three objectives. Well the game ended up as a Draw due to the fact that Aaron forgot to move his troops up to take a objective on his side of the board. Most of his army killed all but 6 Goblins in my army and he outnumbered me in the middle and I held one objective on my side. So when I rolled for the game to end it looked like Aaron won, but since he forgot to move his troops he had only one objective in the center while I had mine. So it was a Draw and I only had 6 Goblins left out of 48 models!! What a cool game!

At this point my son made it to the store and changed out my batteries and than he took a few pictures while the event was going on, here is DrunkenSamurai (In Orange Shirt & Green Hat!) playing against Will's "Ice Dwarf's".

Russ Brown & Tim McKnight fighting it out on the Amon Hen table.

Here is Rob Farallo & Downtown Frank Brown doing battle.

Chris Langland Easterlings vs Aaron Hunt's Gondor force.

Not sure who's Isengard force fighting against Corey O'Brian's Goblin hoard.

Corey (On the Left!) smiling while his Goblins kill something!

Here I am (on the left) not liking what is happening, must have been getting beaten up!

DrunkenSamurai trying to figure out how to deal with the Mordor table.

Well after three rounds I was 1 Major Win, 1 Major Loss & a Draw, not to bad, not great, but not bad. After the three games all of us went to Old Chicago for Pizza & Beers. Can't tell you what we talked about (and I was not drinking!) but it was a great time. And Keith did not fall asleep at all during dinner, way to go Keith the Hobbit!

Sunday came and we were back at the shop for game 4, The Artifact, which is a modified Seize the Prize scenario that GitD introduced 3 years ago. I got Rob Farallo and his Easterling force. Having played this scenario many times (I mean many times in three years) I had this scenario figured out. To make things even better, we played this on the Isengard table which meant that the artifact was in between the two large pits, so I knew where the fight would happen.
Rob was a great guy and he had a tough army, but since I played this scenario many times I knew what I had to do. Needless to say I flanked his army with a few spiders and proceeded to take apart his force.
Rob had a few Kataphrakt's and that's what I decided had to die first so that he could not get off the table with the artifact.
I also liked that Rob painted his army vary similar to the movie Easterlings which was also the same way I painted mine.

Well after the dust settled, I walked away with a Major Win and was feeling pretty good about how the army was doing. But than I realized that I was sitting pretty far at the top of the rankings which meant I could draw Chris L or Frank Brown in the last round.

Well as luck would have it I got Chris Langland and his Easterling force on the wide open Mordor table! Now Chris has been out to the GitD a couple of times but i never got to play against him. So with that we squared of in a Kill them all scenario called Red Horn Pass.
It was a tough game and I ended up making a few errors that lead to Chris winning the game with a Major Win while I took a Major Loss! Good Game Chris.
So after the game came the awards presentation and the announcement of the Durin's Axe painting competition which I entered 3 entries, a Goblin Shaman, a Morannon Orc Captain and the Meats Back on the Menu diorama.

Now I have one negative thing about this event and it was the two tools that were judging the painting for the armies and the paint competition. First off they did not really look at any models in the armies and from what I heard they graded everyone low. Secondly the choice's for the Durin's Axe was a little wonky. I did not make the cut and was beaten by Chris Langlands Gandalf that was okay, Drunken Samurai Saurmon took 2nd and a Undying model that looked like a 6 year old dry brushed it! Clearly these "judges" had no frickin clue and I would love to see some of there models! Hell I think they may need glass's!

Anyhow I ended up winning the Diorama since I was the only one that entered! it felt like a hollow victory since no one else entered.

Now Keith got to the main announcements and I was surprised to see that I won Best Appearance for my army. I also came in second in the Sportsmenship and I was 4th overall! The results can be seen here. DrunkenSamurai took 8th overall. So not too bad for the Arizonians, although I know DrunkenSamurai wish's he did better.

So to celebrate Drunken & I went to dinner at the Chill's in Parker that has some very interesting looking Chill's out front. We than headed back to crash for the night so we could get up early on Monday, which we did at 4:00am again. This time the Road Trip song was Rush, Finding my way Home! Not too much to say about the return trip, we both just wanted to get home.

So to wrap it up, it was a great trip and a great run event, I look forward to going again next year.

TK

Back from Mayhem in the Mountains

2010-09-20T17:51:00.000-07:00

Well back from Mayhem in the Mountains in Parker Colorado, had a great time! I came in 4th overall and got Best Appearance with my army. Also won the Durin's Axe for my Diorama.

Will post more details in a few days, tired and need to eat and crash, so stay tuned for pictures and a full report. By the way, thanks to Robert Brightwell, he and I drove his car up to Parker and back.

TK

Mayhem in the Mountains

2010-09-12T18:40:00.000-07:00

So,

Next weekend Drunkensamurai and I are headed up to Colorado to play in Mayhem in the Mountains, a Lord of the Rings tourney that my buddy Keith is running. You see I talked Keith into setting up a LotR event much like Gathering in the Desert while at Adepticon this year. Really it was an easy thing to do when Keith had a few beers in him!

Anyway, I also talked Drunkensamurai into driving up and playing in the event. So next Friday we load up his car and head up to Parker Colorado for some LotR action. Nice thing about this event is that besides the locals and Drunken & I, Frank Brown and a few other "Ringers" are coming into town for this event.

So with myself committed to going to the event, the next thing was what to take to play? Well I could go ultra competitive or I could go with fun. So I went with something sort of both, the list is called Denizens of Mirkwood and is shown below.

I thought I would keep the army list under wraps, but heck, I am just going to have some fun and I am curious on how well the army will do. I have played a few games with it so far and I have to Major Wins under my belt. One was against Tom O's Gondor force and the other was against Jerry's Corsairs list. I think it will be a fun set of games.

Besides the LotR tourney, Keith is running the Durins Axe painting competition, which is much like the Red Dragons we run at GitD. Below are two out of the three entries that I plan on entering. First up a Goblin Shaman.

The other is a Morannon Orc Captain that was going to be part of the above force but I dropped him from the list.

My other entry is still being worked on and it is for the Diorama entry and it is called "Meats back on the Menu Boys!". Once it is done I will post a few pictures.

Anyhow, I will have full coverage of the trip and the event next week after I get back, so stay tuned...

TK

Old Glory M3A1 Stuart assembly.

2010-08-28T14:18:00.000-07:00

So,

In my last post, I mentioned that I went crazy and started a new Flames of War army. I went with Old Glory Miniatures for my tanks and unfortunately their site had no pictures of the tanks, so I was taking a chance on ordering them. A few years ago I assembled and painted a few Old Glory German tanks for my buddy Tom, and I was not impressed with these models. They all looked like they had been stepped on and smashed. They just did not look right to me, but with Battlefront Miniatures getting ready to raise prices, I took a chance on Old Glory and hoped my previous encounter with the models was a fluke.

Now below is a picture of what the real M3A1 Stuart looks like.

And here is a shot of what you get from Old Glory, notice there is no instructions in the bag.

So when I got the minis I did what most people do, I went to the Internet to see if there was some sort of instructions for assembly. Guess what? There wasn't, so I decided to do one here on my blog. I also know a buddy of mine (Jerry) purchased these same models and will need help with them.

So lets take a look at what is in the bag, below is a shot with everything laid out, you get three vehicles per bag and most parts are pretty clear as to what and where they go. But there is a few pieces that I had no clue of what they were for.

Here are some of the pieces that were unclear, on the top right are some sort of barrels, on the top left are some sort of storage box and the center are the hatch's for the turret.

First up was gluing the tracks to the hull, this was pretty easy since they only go on one way. I used thick super glue and clamped the tracks to the hull while the glue set up. There was very little flash on the hull and some minor flash on the tracks that was easy to clean up.

Next up came the turret assembly with the main gun. The turret front has a hole for the gun & mantel to line up, although I did have to trim the mounting pin on the mantel down as well as file some of the front of the turret down to get a flush fit.

Here is a shot of the Hatch's and turret, you will notice that there are 6 hatch's, 2 for each turret. The hatch's on the left are for the left hatch and the 3 hatch's on the right go on the the right side.

Now next up is mounting the machine gun on the turret, you will notice on the right is the MG and you have to carefully cut it off the sprue. I also used a 1/32" drill to make a small hole for the MG to mount to. I had to look at real pictures on the M3A1 to find out where it has mounted. Come to find out it mounts to the back of the turret. The Drill bit is pointing at the spot.
Here you can see it better, it is the tube stuck on the back of the turret behind the right hatch.

Here is how it looks once mounted on the turret. I am not sure about the piece sticking off the bottom so I left it on.

After the MG was mounted I secured the gun mantle to the front. Something I had to look at real pictures was how the gun mounts. Did the MG on the mantle go on the right or left? Well it goes on the left side, also the gun mantle has a very unique front that is larger on the top than the bottom, if you mount it the other way it looks like it is too big on the bottom and to small on the top. It's hard to see in these pictures, so just mount it with the MG on the left if your looking at it from the front end.

So here is what you should have at this time, looks pretty much done, but wait there is more!

What are these parts and where do they go? Well it seems that the barrel looking things on the left are extra fuel barrels. Most pictures you do not see them on the tank, but early non war pictures and other scale models show them on the vehicles. On the right are extra storage bins that go towards the rear which I will show you.

First up the fuel barrels, I painted the areas where these mount too.
Here is what they look like mounted in place.

Next up the extra storage bins, well once again looking at real pictures, these mount to the rear on both sides in the area painted red.
So here is a shot from the rear showing you how they mount. You will notice that the storage box has a slant that should be facing towards the rear of the tank.
And here is a side shot with them in place towards the rear deck of the tank.

So there you have it, a quick lesson on how to assemble the Old Glory M3A1 Stuart Tank.

I have to say, that these Old Glory models did not have any of the same issues like the ones I did for Tom. In fact I like these better than the Battlefront minis M3A1's, I am very happy that I purchased these vehicles.

Next up will be the assembly on the M3 Lee tanks I purchased from Old Glory, so stay tuned...

TK

Operation TORCH

2010-08-23T20:33:00.001-07:00

So, a few blog post ago I talked about my growing Flames of War DAK army and I also said I was going to show off some pictures of it. Well I never got around to doing that, but I will so hold on since I am about to add two more armies to my Flames of War collection!

A few of us here in Phoenix have started building Mid-War Desert War armies (DAK, 8th Army, Americans, Italians) for FoW. I only have my DAK which means I can only play a few of my friends (I do not like to play out of period or fight the same armies against each other.) So I had been thinking of building another army so I can play a few other folks in our little group.

Now I have always loved the Desert War of WWII and it may have to do with all the stories my Grandfather told me since he was in Operation Torch. Well a few years ago I picked up this awesome book by Rick Atkinson called An Army at Dawn, The War in North Africa, 1942-1943. This is an awesome book and I only got through half of the book. Well about 4 weeks ago I grabbed the book of the shelf and started to re-read it again. Now with our little group playing FoW in North Africa, this book fueled the passion to build an American force for FoW.

The only problem was which army do I start to collect and seeing how funds are extremely tight, how do I acquire said army? As some know too, Battlefront has either, or is going to raise their prices on their products. So what is a gamer to do???

Well enter Old Glory Miniatures and their wonderful Army Deals! Some of the guys were about to order a few things for Robs Civil War game for Black Powder. So armed with a 40% off deal I set out to purchase a army. I had decided that I wanted an American Tank Company but with a twist. You see during Operation TORCH, the US sent various armoured vehicles (aka Tanks) to fight the Germans. Most of these were the Sherman's, but other smaller tanks were sent such as the M3 A1 Stuart Tanks. Now as luck would have it, when the Americans went to unload the Sherman Tanks, they found that the access hatch to unload them was 4" too small and the bigger tanks could not fit. So I thought why not use some M3A1's for my tank company!

So there you go, a light tank company is born, below is a shot of all the vehicles that I acquired. (4 packs of 3 M3A1 Stuarts, 2 packs of M3 Lees, 2 packs of T19 mobile artillery and a few M3 75mm guns). This will be the basis for my Tank Company.

But wait, it does not stop there! You see, the 40% off suckered me into buying a Motorised Rifle company for the Americans as well! So below is the total haul form the OG order! Now I did also order a few 105cm Artillery guns for my DAK troops, but for the most part it is all Americans baby!
So there you go, a glimpse into madness that is my FoW addiction. I plan on showing the assembly and painting of this army as well, so stay tuned for that...

TK

Sixguns Ablazing!

2010-08-15T16:17:00.000-07:00

So yesterday I was invited to a friends house for some Legends of the Old West gaming for a sort of LotOW Campaign day. A few of the usual suspects (Rob B, Mike G, Tom O) were also invited out as well. There was a total of 8 of us playing various Posse's, I took an Outlaw gang called El Rojo Diablos.

My Desperado leader named William Blackhart who started out with a Heavy Pistol and a knife.

Next up are two Kids, on the left is TJ and on the right is Billy, both armed with Sixgun's and knives.

I also had 4 Toughs to start but ended up with 5 Toughs at the end. Starting on the right is Cisco with a Rifle, Bart, Red, Whittey and Slick were all armed with Sixgun's and knives.

I had one Rowdie which was Lawrence with a Shotgun and knife.

After my second game, I Hired a Mexican Bandido named Jose' and had him for my last two games.

We each got in 4 games against each other and we used the Posse with the highest Infamy rating to determine who would play who from round to round.

First game I played was Jailbreak against Rob E friend Mike. He was playing a Lawmen Posse. I was the attacker trying to rescue Billy from jail. Well I lost with everyone in the Posse having to test for injuries.

Second game was against Rob E playing his Cowboys in the Bar Room Brawl scenario. After my Rojo Diablos beat the Cowpokes to a bloody pulp I had a win.

Third game was against Mike G and his awesome looking Lawmen Posse playing another Jail Break scenario. This time I was able to at least get into the jail and look for the keys but ended up having to bail out and Head for the hills since the Lawmen were dropping my Posse like no ones business.

Last game was against Tom O's Desperado posse. We rolled up the High Noon scenario and set about shooting each other up! In the end I made him Head for the Hills and came out of the scenario as the winner. By the way, Tom's Posse and mine were the highest Infamy ratings and it was a battle for 1st & 2nd place.

Well after the battle Tom edged me out in Infamy with a rating of 111 to my 107! So even though I won, I still lost! But all in all it was a great day of gaming with some great guys.

TK

Some News and Supers!

2010-07-25T10:46:00.000-07:00

So,

Been pretty quite here, that's because I finally secured a job after being out of work for almost a year! So that means I can finally get back to building, painting and gaming! It feels great to be employed again which means that I can also start looking at purchasing more toys!

Even though I have been a little slow on posting, I have been doing some gaming. A few weeks ago my buddy Mike and I got together to play some Super Hero's using the Super System rules. I went to Mikes place and we played a few games on his table.

Now most of the figures I painted for Mike a few years ago, he just needs to finish the basing on the figures.

I have also been bitten by the Flames of War bug, I am planning on showcasing my DAK army as well as my plan to build a Mid War US Tank Company following what would have been tanks in Operation Torch.

I am also working on a few terrain pieces for Lord of the Rings which I will also post. So stay tuned.

TK

"Why's the Rum Gone?"

2010-06-22T00:02:00.001-07:00

So,

tonight while talking to Drunkensamurai, he mentions if I saw the Quindia Studios blog? I have been following Clarence's work for some time on his website but had not seen his blog update today. He featured a Spanish village that he was working on for a Nappy game he is taking to Historicon this year. This sparked an interest for me to do something similar.

As some folks know, I am the author of Legends of the High Seas by Warhammer Historicals. Some folks also know I am an avid Disneyland fan and love the theme parks (having worked at Disneyland for over ten years in attractions). So when I wrote LotHS, some inspiration came from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Anaheim as well as the PotC movies.

Now for the longest time I wanted to build a Spanish town inspired by the PotC attraction ride and I have been gathering pictures for a while now. But I have always put off the project due to other projects (and life) getting in the way. But thanks to Quindia Studios, I think I am going to move forward with this project.

For those of you who have not been to Disneyland (or any other of the Disney theme Parks) here are a few photos that I am using for inspiration. All the photos by the way came from Daveland. Dave is a freelance artist and another avid Disney fan.

Here is a shot of the 1965 model of PotC

This is of the auction scene as seen when the attraction opened to the public.

Here is another model shot.

The next few pictures are from the ride in Disneyland, you will notice the overly bright paint on the walls. With the theme lighting on it is toned way down, but with a flash you see just how bright everything is painted.

My plan is to build a table that has this "Disney PotC" feel to it. I am going to build most of the buildings like Quindia Studios did for his Spanish village. My goal is to have enough buildings to cover a 4'x4' table top for games of Legends of the High Seas. I also plan to transport this board to Adepticon in 2011 where I am going to be running with John at Plastic Legions a LotHS campaign.

So stay tuned to seeing more of the Spanish town I am planning on building...

TK

Kill Teams!

2010-06-13T20:18:00.001-07:00

So today DrunkenSamurai, my son and I did some 40K playing the Kill Teams out of the new Battle Missions book. I was also inspired by Johns Blog review of it, so Drunken and I decided today would be a good day for a few games.

First game up was my Sisters of Battle against Drunkens Orcs. He took about 11 Ard Boys and 4 Lootas. I had 16Sisters with one equipped with a Melta Gun and one with a Heavy Flamer. We set up a 4'x4' board with a Imperial supply depot on it. Here are a few shots from the game.

Here is a overall shot of the board, with the Sisters ready to take control of the Depot with the O'rcs in the trees.

The Orcs advance and the Sisters take up guarding positions in the Depot.

The Orc's make a break for the Depot unaware of the danger within.

But the Sister's are ready for the advancing Orc's.

A second squad sweeps around a flank to clear it of foul Orc's.

While some of the Orc's creep closer trying to ambush the Sisters.

Orc's jump out to make their attack.

But the Sisters make short work of the foul green skins and clear the depot.

I was able to break Drunken's Orc's pretty quickly with bolter fire. Thanks to the lack of shooting ability of the Orc's I only lost three Sisters out of 16. Overall it was a good game and the Kill team mission played very well.

So after a quick lunch at Filabertos, Drunken decide to play against my Son using Imperial Guard. My Son took a ten man squad of Veterans with a Grenade Launcher, Heavy Flamer and a Melta Gun. He also took a 10 man Penal Legion squad that were gunslingers. We decided that the guardsmen were taking over the watch from the Sisters.

Needless to say the Orc's made quick work of the poor Imperial Guardsmen sent to guard the Depot. My son had a blast and so did Drunkensamurai.

So we got in two games of Kill Teams and they were both a blast. While playing I could see how this one mission could be a great way to get folks into new armies since it only takes a few figures to play. I can tell you that this will be hitting the table again.

By the way I was going to e-mail these pictures to Drunkensamurai to post over on his blog. But my e-mail service was acting up, so I decided to post them here, sorry Rob, but at least we have a new post here.

TK

Flames of War Tourney - Shifting Sands 2010

2010-06-04T14:57:00.001-07:00

Well a few weeks ago Drunkensamurai & I went out to Gamers Inn for the Flames of War Shifting Sands 2010 tournament. Neither one of us we entered to play, we just wanted to go and check out the local FoW scene. This was the first year that the Shifting Sands event was held in a store and in my opinion it was a bit of a let down from years past.

Now I am not saying the event was a let down, it was the venue. In years past the event was in a large meeting room in a city building. The venue was large and there was plenty of space to move all around the tables. This year with it being at Gamers Inn, you only had access to three sides of the tables and there was not a lot of space to walk around.

Most of the terrain was nice looking as well as most of the armies. Mark who runs this event does a good job of coming up with interesting events that are based on certain campaigns during WW2, this year it was the Allied push into Italy.

I am hoping that one year Mark will run a Desert War event which would get me out to play, since my interest is North Africa. So here are a few more shots from the event.

Here are the results from this years event:

Anzio PlayersAllies:

Jake DeMenna 24 Best Allied Anzio

David Kurnik 23

Art Mehler 22

Aaron Hanten 21

Andrew Haught 20

Matt Campbell 19

Jake Halter 18

Mike Mclane 15

Bryan Wade 9

AxisBrendan Tobin 22Best Axis Anzio

Jesse Archbold 19

Tim Dvorak 17

Mark Riney 16

Kevin Neeley 15

Tom Tobin 12

Hugo Montes 12

Jeff Plaine 11

Chris $%^

Cassino PlayersAllies

Mike McMann 18 Best Allied Cassino

Steve Schortgen 16

Nick De Pippo 15

Mitch Balicki 14 Tied for Best Sport

John Harrison 14 Tied for Best Sport

Mark Francis 14

Matt Overstreet 13

Marco Quesada 10

Axis

Jon Cleaves 27 Best Overall/Best Axis Cassino/Best Painted

Justin Gibbs 23

Ken O'Keefe 22

Cliff Gleason 21

Tim Parker 18

Bill Bushong 18

James Studer 17

John Curran 11

Flames of War Weekend!

2010-05-19T10:53:00.000-07:00

Well, this past weekend was another FoW sort of weekend. Rob & Tom came over on Saturday to throw down with some desert early warfare action. Rob brought his 8th army Tom brought his 8th army and his DAK. Of course I was using my DAK as well.

The first game I played was against Robs British 8th Army on the table below and we played the Free-For-All game out of the Fow main rulebook. This would be my third official game of Fow and we each had 1500 points. I made a push for the objective on the left side while Rob bulked up this side. I had thought my Panzer Platoon and I quickly routed most of the troops on the left until Rob rolled three Matilda's up to stop my tanks. Needless to say, Panzer III's had a tough time punching through the Matilda's armour. The game ended as a draw with neither one of us getting to the objectives. Was a great game and was hard fought.

My second game was against Tom's 8th army that made up a ton of Cruiser Tanks! I have to say I was a bit intimidated by his force. We once again played Free-For-All and I used the same force. Like I mentioned Tom had a ton of tanks, one infantry platoon and a artillery platoon of 25 ponders. But the thing I was afraid of was all of his tanks. Now my force included a 5 Tank Panzer platoon, 3 Full Infantry Platoons, a platoon of PaK38's, a Platoon of 2 8.8's and a platoon of 7.5cm guns along with a HQ platoon.

Tom sent his armoured cars up to the village and also brought up his infantry while his tanks were everywhere. Now I know how the DAK troops must have felt being out gunned and out numbered in the desert!

But as in real life, I realized just what 3 Pak38's could do in a short time as seen by this picture of all the brewed up vehicles! I soon had confidence again and was feeling pretty good about the battle.

Needless to say, the DAK troops held off the British armoured attack and walked away with a slight victory under there belt. We had a great game and I learned a lot about my force. As Tom & Rob left, I felt pretty good about both games and finished up basing my troops and was itching for another game. So I waited for about 30 minutes and called Rob at his house to set up a game for Sunday at his place, it seems that the FoW bug had bitten me pretty good.

So Sunday rolls around and I pick up my army (two small containers) and head or Robs place for the third game of Fow. We decided to try the Breakthrough scenario with Rob being the attacker. As seen by this photo, I split my force into two with all my anti armour units in one section. My infantry started the game Dug in and in foxholes. Robs job was to have all of his force break out of the upper right corner to get to the lower left corner where the two objectives were. The rest of his force would come on after turn three if he rolled well.

I had placed all my armour and anti tank units all around his deployment zone waiting for him to try to bust out.

Here is a shot with Robs force deployed at the beginning of the turn, you can see he was pretty packed in on his corner on the upper right side.

The first turn my Panzer's rolled forward to try to stop his Matilda's again and except for the Panzer IVF1, I did not do so well. It was my Pak38's that were eventually able to stop them.

The battle raged on for 6 turns before Rob was able to get his reinforcements to enter the table. By this time I had positioned on of my Infantry units on a hill overlooking where he would enter and started dumping fire down on him as the British marched on to the board.

My dug in infantry had stalled Robs attack on the north side of the board for most of the game so it all depended on the reinforcements to try to breakthrough.

Robs artillery started to fire directly onto my Panzer's and they started to drop like flies. The North side was starting to falter and Rob finally broke my dug in Infantry out after turn 7.

By this time I was starting to loose too many platoons and had to test for my Company Moral, it seems that the DAK Commander had seen enough and pulled out of the battle. This left the British reinforcements only 12" from one of the objectives, which meant Rob got the win.

All in all it was a great game, I thought for sure I had Rob on the ropes and it looked like I was going to be getting the Win, but alas it was not meant to be. This sort of game reminded me of just how a real battle can be won or lost in just a few moments. I had a blast and look forward to playing again.

So since FoW seems to have taken me over, I would like to mention an event happening this weekend (May 22nd & 23rd) which is Shifting Sands 10 http://members.cox.net/shifting-sands/index.htm which is run by a few local Fow guys here in the valley. Rob & I are planning on going out to check this out this weekend to give us more inspiration for our FoW addictions.

DAK

2010-05-09T08:26:00.000-07:00

Well,

It is no surprise that I have been working on my Flames of War Afrika Korps army. With Rob getting his British 8th army going I thought it was about time to get the Afrika Korps up and going. Now these are just work in progress and still need to be finished up, all of these have been dipped and are waiting for decals and dullcoate.

So first up is an objective counter of fuel drums. After reading Brazen Chariots by Major Robert Crisp (awesome book by the way!) I knew I had to paint up these fuel drums since petrol was in limited quantities for both sides of the war in Afrika.

Next up is a dreaded 88's, I have to confess, I bought this model after FoW came out in first edition since I love the look of the 88's. I put it together and stuck it away until just recently. Now it seems I have 5 of these models! To bad I can only have 3!

Another item I am working on are three PAK 38's. The one in the middle is from Old Glory and the two on either side are from Battlefront. I think they blend together nicely. The crews are being painted now.

Now we get to the good stuff...Tanks! Here are three Panzer III's that are awaiting decals and there final weathering. I plan to model the Panzer 15 Division so these will be marked appropriately.

Here is another group of models that were purchased a long time ago with the 88's, another Panzer III and a Tiger Tank. I plan to expand my army to cover Tunisia so the Tiger will see action in that army list. Plus what good German armour fan would not have at least one Tiger Tank!

And the last shot is of the infantry, the base colors are being blocked in now and I plan to have these done by next weekend.

So there you go, the start of my North Afrika korps.

What are you?

2010-05-06T13:42:00.000-07:00

So today Rob (Drunkensamurai) and I were chatting at lunch, it seems that the new Black Powder Rules from Warlord Games have his interest. It seems that he is finding the rules rather refreshing and it may be something we both start playing around with.

But one part of the conversation peaked my interest, What sort of gamer are you? It seems there are three types of figure gamers (yes I know there may be more), that most folks fall into. The three types are, the Modeler, the Collector and the Gamer. Now most figure gamers tend to have all three of these types in their hobby makeup and one of these three types is most important to the person. I will try to explain the three different types.

The Modeler - You have seen this guy, he is the one that scratch builds everything and can not leave a stock model alone. This would also be the guy that loves to paint as well. They love everything about the experience of the "Hobby" as long as it fits this part of the hobby. Usually they don't play with their creations and usually build them as showpieces but some do use their creations.

The Collector - This is the guy that buys everything and I mean everything! It does not matter what it is for, they will buy it and they love collecting huge stashes of stuff. Usually the Collector is also viewed as a completest, since he has to have everything. It's the sort of person that would say something like "I am going to build every army from 40K!" and they usually do it. And it also means if someone is getting ride of something they are usually the first ones to grab or buy it.

The Gamer - This guy is the person who plays everything! He will play every minis game out there and most of the time his stuff is either not painted or assembled (which drives the Modeler crazy!). This is the guy that one week will be playing 40K and than a few days later is playing DBM, than Bloodbowl and than... you get the idea, he plays everything.

Now most miniature gamers like I mentioned above have some sort of each type in their gaming DNA. Although some types are more important than others, all of us gamers have these three traits in some form or the other. A example of a gamers DNA will look something like this, Gamer/Modeler/Collector or Collector/Modeler/Gamer or some other form, but you should get the picture. This is what people talk about when they mention "the Hobby" and what is important to them. It's good to understand what is important to you in "the Hobby" and you usually have friends that have the same sort of DNA.

Reason I bring this up is partly due to the conversation with Rob today about the Black Powder rules. It seems that Rick Priestly, Jervis Johnson and Paul Sawyer have a refreshing look at how they play games. They refer to playing "the Game" and not worrying about the little stuff with the rules. From what I have seen and heard from Rob, the Black Powder rules are very straight forward and pretty easy. It is clear that Rick, Jervis & Paul are of the Collector/Modeler/Gamer DNA makeup and you can tell from the rules. They are more interested in playing with their collections of nicely painted up stuff and not worrying about every little rule. They enjoy getting together to show off their stuff and hang out with each other. The "Game" is about having a good time with friends pushing nicely painted minis instead of worrying about all the troubles in the world.

I think this (Gamer DNA) is important to know about yourself and the other folks you game with. For the Rick,Jervis, Paul group, it is pretty clear where their interests are. If you understand how your DNA is it allows you to be able to enjoy the games more. I know there have been times that some folks rub me the wrong way and it was because of one of these traits was different from mine.

Will use me and my game group as another example, I am a Modeler/Collector/Gamer. I like nice looking models and rarely put anything down on the table unless it has been painted (yeah I am a paint Snob!). I tend to try to keep to the same manufacturer on all my builds and rarely mix and match figure companies. I also like having a good time and knowing that little rule that is easily forgotten is no big deal to me. Rob is the same sort of person, we both like the same sort of things.

Now my friend Mike is a Gamer/Collector/Modeler. He enjoys playing a different game each week and buys just about every (I know Mike I am exaggerating!) rulebook that comes out. He also doesn't care if he has paint on a figure or not, he just wants to play games.

Another friend Tom is a Collector/Modeler/Gamer. Tom like to buy stuff and is always working on getting a new something. He has so many trades going on he should be on the stock exchange! Tom likes to paint his own stuff when he has time and it is usually pretty hard to get a game in him since life is always keeping him busy.

So what's the point you ask? Well it is important to understand what each persons take of the "Hobby" is. For the crew who wrote Black Powder, it's about having a good time and pushing lead around. Once you understand your own groups game DNA, you may find you enjoy the games and time with them more.

Adepticon Sunday - WAB Doubles Event

2010-04-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, I ran the WAB Team Event which comprises two teammates each bringing 1000 points to the table to play against two other players. This event is more about having fun and pushing metal & plastic models around. We had 12 teams signed up (24 players) and this is up from last year. The main purpose like I said is to have a good time and play against some old friends. Everyone loves this event and guys look forward to it each year. So here are a few shots from the event.

Here are the winners from this years event:

Best Team Generals

Irving Mindel and Jeff Baxendale

Best Sportsmen

Tony Strahota and Abe Warpinski

Best Appearance

Bennett Blalock-Doane and Eric Hagen (Not pictured)

Now the last award goes to the worst team with the lowest standings. These guys are also two good friends of mine that I was able to talk into playing this year.

I'm in Charge, I thought You were in Charge??

Jeremy Williams and Jay Ryan

Once again thanks for everyone coming out to play in this event. I plan on running this one again next year so I look forward to seeing you all there.

Adepticon - Cool Things!

2010-04-27T11:55:00.000-07:00

One of the coolest things I like about going to Adepticon is checking out the terrain and what other folks are doing in the hobby. here are a few shots of terrain that caught my eye while I wandered around the convention.

First up this cool Roman city table from the boys over at Gorgon Studios. It is for the soon to be released Vox Populi skirmish game, Matt Weeks is responsible for this cool table.

The other thing I was looking forward to seeing was the Flames of War events that made their appearance to Adepticon. With DrunkenSamurai and I getting into Flames of War, I wanted to see the tables. I was not disappointed in what I found at Adepticon for FoW!

There was also a cool Omaha Beach table which was a Historical re-fight game that was about 4'x8' long. It included some cool off table models to simulate some of the ships for the amphibious landings.

This table caught my eye, it was rather simple but yet effective and I would love to do a table like this in 28mm!

Another thing that I saw was the Old Glory hard foam terrain sections. Each piece is 2'x2' and comes painted already. They are very sturdy and light weight and I look forward to picking some of these up for GitD.

Another piece that caught my eye was this Damm that Brent Sinclair built for the WotR Demo game. it fit on one of the corners of the GW Realm of Battle boards and looked great, I may have to steal this idea for a future project I am thinking about.

Each year Sabol Designs brings a cool looking team event display board, this year was no exception. In fact it was the 2010 winner for Best Display. This thing was huge and looked awesome! One thing I have always wanted to do was to incorporate working lights into some of my terrain, but someone (DrunkenSamurai!) thinks that's too geeky! Well after seeing this he may change his tune.

Here was another cool display board that could be used for a regular table. Each year the displays keep getting bigger and better and I look forward to seeing what will turn up next.

Also Adepticon has a painting competition called the Rogue Demon each year. I have read that some folks would like to see this event broken down into two different events, one for anyone to enter and one for previous winners to enter. Regardless I love looking at the entries.

Here is my friend and fellow blogger Dave Taylors entry which he featured on his blog a few months ago.

This entry caught my eye since I love WW2 and this was a 28mm vehicle, I think it is a Bolt Action miniature.

This shot was a bit blurry, but I liked the paint job and the figure, it is some sort of sea creature.

And this Land Raider was way cool, I love the whole effect on this model. Some really nice painting on this.

I will leave you with one last picture, this was taken on Saturday during the 40K team event, the whole room is full up of 40k gamers! If you have never been to Adepticon, you are missing out on one heck of a weekend!

Adepticon Saturday - WAB Singels Event

2010-04-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

Well It has been a while since I got back to posting here, life has a tendency to get in the way. Last week I had to fly down to North Carolina to visit my Grandfather who was in the Hospital with a stroke. I got to visit with family and comfort my grandfather, good news is he will be released this Friday to come home, although will be wheel chair bound for the rest of his life.

Anyway, not much went on on Saturday except for the WAB event I ran. It was a great event and we had 14 players. Here are the winners of the event:

The Classical Campaign Winners playing for the Greeks/Successors faction

Mike Butcher and Michael Cosentino

Best Painted Army

Bennett Blalock-Doane

Best General

Mark Henry

Best SportsmenMike Butcher

The following pictures are from the event on Saturday, the painting for the event is getting to be amazing and I look forward to seeing what shows up next year!

Sorry for the lack of Posts

2010-04-12T15:35:00.000-07:00

But Life has a funny way of getting in the way. Been real busy with other things that have not pertained to war gaming. But I will be getting back to regular programming soon, so stay tuned...

TK

An Apology

2010-04-01T15:42:00.000-07:00

Folks,

It came to my attention that my last blog post on the LotR Championships came across as a bit harsh. That was not my intention, Jamie Welling runs an outstanding event and he does an awesome job keeping the Lord of the Rings Community together in the Chicago area.

My personal bias on terrain is well known (I love lots of terrain!) and Jamie had tons of it at his event. Not as much as I like, but defiantly more than most GW run LotR events I have seen run.

Also Jamie does an outstanding job of coming up with great scenarios, which if most folks know, are tough to write. He had a few items that I was not hip on but my comments were to try to make them better. In hindsight, I should have let Jamie know personally rather than on my blog.

So I apologize to Jamie, I am not perfect and I am sorry if my comments came of putting your event in a bad light, that was not my purpose, I value our friendship.

TK