Game Night Oct. 20, 2015

Since I've been taking pictures with my phone on Tuesday gaming nights, I think I'll be posting more of them on here. Tonight Dave B from the gaming group ran an interesting game, Clay-O-Rama.

These rules are from an old issue of Dragon magazine. In the game, players build their own monsters using play dough (!) and assign stats to them according to their design. For example their size determines their hitpoints, their number of legs determines their movement speed (in handspans!), and their number of other appendages determines their attacks. All in all it's a great and silly game, and it's a lot of fun to play.

Here's S Harper, Bruce's monster.

My monster Centipedor attacked Phil's green guy.

Justin's orange turtle-like monster was hit with the "drop" super power, i.e. it was actually dropped from three feet above the table! The monster's name was Eeyore, so I guess it fell apart.

Phil's monster suffered a "splat" attack, where someone actually pounded on it with a fist, with predictable results...

We played a second game after the first one with different types of monsters, and more wackiness ensued.

On a more serious note, I got in with a growing trend and started using a kanban board to keep track of my miniatures projects. If anything, this organizes my current painting items in progress. There are other features such as recording time spent, etc. that I might use later if needed. I use an online free tool called Kanbanflow to do all this.

This is the board for my current project, an Epic scale Tyranid army.

FallCon 2015

In what has become a tradition for me, I went down to Calgary for this year's FallCon gaming convention. There was effort from the organizers to increase numbers and participation on the miniature side of the games. However, they were still a tiny minority of the games played, most of which were board games.

On Friday night I played in Sean's GASLIGHT game, which was a steam punk adventure involving two factions looking for artifacts and facing monsters.

The map had various ancient ruins and artifacts scattered around. The "skull mountain" terrain piece was the final objective, and the various small bits of artifacts were additional goals.

Our faction consisted of various outlaws and renegades, trying to race against British imperials and random monsters. Here, my band of pirates were attacked by a horde of blue lizard men. However, that was as far as I got. My force was severely depleted by lizard men attacks, and I had no strength to fight other enemies.

The ultimate show down came from the steam tank and robot from our side fighting camel-mounted British soldiers. A long struggle later, the imperialists captured the skull and won the game.

On Saturday morning, I ran my familiar X-Com game again. This was designated a walk-up demo game, so there was no pre-signup. Fortunately, a couple of guys from a nearby painting event came and played an urban scenario.

The rest of the convention was filled with DBA events for me. Saturday afternoon was the learn DBA event, which was actually mostly old hands trying to get used to DBA 3.0. Sunday morning consisted of the Alberta Open Tournament. Dennis and I played against a couple of guys from Calgary, Vic and Mark, and we came out on top. Dennis ended up first place and I took second. It was nice to get into 3.0 in a big way and play people from Calgary. I took some pictures of my games in progress, hopefully showing off the participants' armies.

 

Some familiar faces from Edmonton were at FallCon. Here is the excellent Martian Front game run by Terry and Scott, with their impressive signature piece, the land ironclad.

At the Sunday flea market, I also picked up a  couple of games at bargain prices. One was the classic naval game Harpoon, which I've always wanted to try. I might have to get some more naval miniatures... The other one was the highly scientifically realistic space combat game Attack Vector: Tactical. I already own the game rules in PDF form, but I jumped at the chance to get hard copies of the original rules and fleet book. Odds are though, I won't be able to play the game, since I already have enough trouble to get people playing its simpler cousin, Squadron Strike. The rules and background make for great reading material though.

So it's been another great convention and fun weekend for me. Now I have to get going on my next project, my Epic armies.

More Shapeways

Last month, Shapeways had a sale where they provided free shipping, so I took the opportunity to get some items that I've always wanted. Since I've been looking for Battlefleet Gothic miniatures as orbital support markers for my Epic armies, and the original BFG miniatures are long out of print, I got some BFG-inspired space ship miniatures as proxies. Not only can they be used for Epic, but I can also start building BFG fleets with them.

This miniature is based on a Space Marine strike cruiser from BFG. The design is very similar but not quite exactly the same as the original, and it has somewhat less detail. However, the Frosted Ultra Detail material from Shapeways is quite nice and avoids most of the "texture" problems from cheaper materials. The clear material doesn't photograph well, but after getting painted it'll look a lot nicer.

This one is based on the original Forge World Grey Knight strike cruiser. Again, it's not as "baroque" as the BFG miniature, and it's missing some trademark GW items, like shields and swords on the fins. With some Warhammer bits, I think I can "Gothicize" it.

These are very small gunships that can be used as proxies for Thunderhawks in BFG. To give a sense of scale, the base is a Wargames Factory 20X20mm square. They have a lot of detail for their size and the FUD material really comes through.

This time, I'm quite impressed by Shapeway's 3D prints. The more expensive FUD material really makes a difference. I can't wait to get these painted.

Mayday 2015

This past weekend, I attended the Mayday gaming convention here in Edmonton again.  This year, due to the lack of conflicting Warmachine tournaments, we had both the Warhammer 40k and the Warmachine crowds, and the community center was packed.

The room was so full of tables that my X-Com game had to be moved outside in the hallway.

I ran the same scenarios from last year, but with some gray aliens (sectoids) filling in as the enemies for the UFO crash site, and humans with medium armour fighting the snakemen in the urban scenario.

I hosted a local player who was also here last year through the urban scenario, and it proved to be a lot easier for the humans this time around. Here is a shot of X-Com troops taking cover behind the convenience store.

Since there was time after the first game, we played through the UFO crash site again. The sectoids were weaker opponents, but this time the humans were not so lucky.

At the end, the humans were wiped out and failed to kill all the aliens at the crash site. Here a sectoid captured the wounded X-Com sniper, probably taking him away for probing...

After my game hosting, I played in a DBA tournament. This year, it was rather sparse since some of the regular DBA players were away at the time. We also used the new 3.0 version of the rules, which took some getting used to.

Later in the day, I played in Terry's "All Quiet on the Martian Front" game, which I play-tested on the previous EWG night. This time around, the Martians (including me) were more aggressive, and tripod casualties were high. In the above picture, you can see one of Terry's flashing fire/smoke markers on a destroyed tripod.

It was another great gaming convention, and I can't wait to try the updated X-Com game at Fallcon this year.

Back to X-Com

For this year's Mayday gaming convention, I'm running my Strange Aeons: X-Com game again, this time with slightly different scenarios to make it easier on the human player.

I've painted up some extra miniatures for both the human and alien sides, to make the original scenarios better-balanced.

First up are some Elhiem Figures "armoured fed troopers", used as medium-armoured X-Com operatives. These are incredibly good miniatures that fit well with plastic 1/72 miniatures. Hopefully they are part of a trend popularizing 1/72 scale science fiction.

This is one of the armoured troopers compared to a Caesar ultra modern miniature.  You can see that they fit together perfectly in terms of height and proportions.

Here's the whole gang I painted up.  They can be used as a squad with rifles, a heavy weapon, and a leader with some sort of carbine.

A close-up of the heavy weapons trooper and his loader.

Another comparison shot with a Caesar miniature and the Elhiem carbine trooper.

I'm thinking of using these medium-armoured X-Com troops against the original snakemen, and give them better armour and weapons ratings than the poor initial tech-level humans.

To get a bunch of easier opponents for the humans at early tech levels, I painted up some sectoids. These are Rebel Minis alien grays, and even though they are designed for 15 mm, they can fill in as child-sized aliens for 1/72.  The only modification I did was to add some wrist-mounted plasma pistols since the originals were unarmed.

Here's a comparison shot showing the height of the grays. They look fine as small aliens versus human miniatures.

I'll see if the humans do better this time. The sectoids, just like in the computer game, are significantly weaker than humans and only have plasma pistols. Hopefully this will give the early level humans a fighting chance.

Tuesday Gaming Night

Ever since I bought a smart phone, I started taking pictures of my regular Tuesday night gaming club events.  This is the first time I'm actually posting any pictures from one though.

I went to the April 21st gaming night hoping to have a practice run of my X-Com game for Mayday.  However, it looked like everyone was occupied with a game already, so I just joined an "All Quiet on the Martian Front" game, also being prepped for Mayday.

The game has an excellent sci-fi premise of the Martians from H. G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" coming back for another round during the time of WWI.  The humans have various type of primitive tanks, along with giant "land ironclads", and the Martians have their classic tripods in a variety of flavours.

The scenario we played centered around an American land ironclad getting attacked by a large group of Martians, along with other human reinforcements thrown into the mix.  The land ironclad is a huge resin model that dominated the table.  Unfortunately it didn't hit much due to bad dice rolls.

In this picture a group of rough riders - overly brave motorized chaps - tried to immobilize a Martian tripod with grappling hooks.  They succeeded too!

Here, massed tanks attack tripods on the Martian flank.

The game was extremely colourful, and I can't wait to play it again at Mayday.

There were a few other games running, including Kevin and Elliott playing the new Star Wars Armada game.  It looked really good.  I think Dave was running a DBA game, and there was a CCA game being played too.

Overall, it was a pretty good night.

Bio-Titans

Continuing on with my epic scale Tyranid kit-bashes, I created some bio-titans, again from 40k bits.

These will represent barbed hierodules, the ones with barbed strangler launchers.  They are small bio-titans and are made from 40k termagant bits.

A couple of close-up shots showing the details of their guns.

These are scythed hierodules, with two large scything talons and optimized for close-combat.  They're made from 40k hormagaunt and termagant bits.

 

More close-ups showing details.

These are a couple of trygons, made from gargoyle bodies, ripper heads, and gaunt scything talons.  The talons look a little too "busy" to me, so maybe I'll change them around a bit for later versions...

I also put together something larger - an attempt at an hierophant, the largest of the bio-titans.  This is made from a warrior body and various large creature bits.  I like most of it, but it still sort of leaves me cold.  Maybe I can try a different design.

This is the same creature from the side.

Now I just have to start doing some painting.