Monday, May 23, 2016

New Acquisition

It just goes to show that you never know what you're going to get. Just this Sunday, I went to a bits swap at a local game shop where I tried to sell my old Warhammer 40k Tyranid army. Possible deals for the Tyranids fell through, but I noticed something interesting among one of the bits piles being sold...

Yes, I found one of those elusive epic scale Tau Mantas! The little gun turrets were all missing, but otherwise the ship was assembled and in great shape. Those things are always broken off Forgeworld models anyways, being incredibly brittle, so it wasn't that big of a deal. On top of all that, the model ended up costing just $15 Cdn. Considering that last time I saw it on eBay, it was $100 US and being bid on...

Here's a comparison with an Orca dropship (right) and a Devilfish APC (middle). This is a pretty big model. I'll have to think about how to paint it properly - there are lots of panel lines. Anyhow, this will be a great centerpiece for my upcoming Tau army.

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Mayday 2016

Yet another year has come and gone, and I went to Mayday 2016 over the weekend. Even though this year had somewhat lower attendance than usual, Mayday has become enough of a fixture that most of the usual suspects were there.

I ran my typical Strange Aeons: X-Com game, with the boards mixed up a little bit from usual to provide some variety. I hosted Wiley and Andy in a couple of introductory games - Andy had been interested in Strange Aeons for a while but had never played my game, whereas Wiley had played once before.

The rural board, which I modified to add a farm house.

The urban board, which is now a UFO crash site.

Here Wiley and Andy were trying to figure out the rules on the urban board.
They ended up winning one game each and had a good time. We talked about possibly running a campaign on normal game nights, which is where the base system really shines.

In the afternoon, I played in a series of DBA games with Dennis. Due to low turnout, we were the only ones in the DBA time slot, originally meant for a British-themed tournament. We went through three games, with me playing an ancient British army and Dennis using a sub-Roman Briton army.



We played through slightly different terrain set-ups using the same armies. Dennis ended up winning 2 to 1 and won the "tournament".

In the evening, Terry hosted several players in a Frostgrave game. Frostgrave seems to be the new thing around here, being a fairly simple skirmish campaign game. A lot of people are building their own warbands, and I'll probably modify my Mordheim warband to add some wizards.

The scenario we played had each of us trying to get our wizard to a fountain in the center of the board, to drink its magical waters. Of course, we had to kill each other (and random monsters) along the way.

We played quite late into the evening, and I ended up winning after killing another wizard, which gave a lot of experience. I really liked the rules, since they're both simple and quite flavourful, with everything you'd want in a fantasy system. Time to dust off my Mordheim stuff!

So another enjoyable Mayday has come and gone, and I can't wait until the next one. Maybe I'll run something other than X-Com...