Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Something Epic?

I recently bought some old Forge World Epic scale Tau aircraft from a wargames forum I visit.  This is a game I played years ago, and I've always loved 6mm/Epic scale miniatures.  The Forge World resin models were also works of art, possessing extreme amounts of detail.  Far from just for nostalgia's sake, maybe this will get me into the game again...


The deal contained two Orca dropships (top) and two Tigershark bombers (bottom).  They came already painted with a desert camouflage scheme, and it looks quite nice, so I probably won't repaint them.  Unfortunately, some of the always-delicate resin aerials snapped off the models a long time ago.  I'll have to see if I want to repair them.  Included for scale is a Forge World Epic scale Tau Devilfish APC I had lying around.


The unpainted resin model is a Firestorm Armada Manta-class ship I already had.  I'm thinking that it looks big enough and close enough in style to the Tau models to use as a proxy Manta-class destroyer for Epic.  The Forge World Tau Manta is so hard to find these days, and it commands such a high price, that there's really no choice other than to use a proxy.  By coincidence, the name even matches!

Maybe this is the start of a Tau army for Epic...

Monday, October 6, 2014

FallCon 2014

This last weekend I went to the FallCon convention in Calgary for the third time, and it was great as usual.  Unfortunately this year it seemed there were fewer miniatures games than last year compared to board games, but there was still a lot of gaming to be done.

Friday night, I joined the "Roadkill" DBA event run by Paul from Seattle.  This was a tournament where you were encouraged to bring one of the worst-performing DBA armies.  I used my ancient Spanish army to proxy the Ilyrian army, one of the obscure book I armies with a strange set of units.  It has a mostly Aux army with a LH general and a high aggression, a bad combination.  I had a good time, but the army didn't do well.  I think I lost a couple of games and won one, but since my camera ran out of power, I didn't have many photos.



Saturday morning, I ran the same Strange Aeons: X-Com game that I ran at Mayday.  There was only one guy playing it, but I think he ended up liking the game and setting.  The humans died pretty badly again in the game, which led me to rethink some of the rules to make things a bit more even in earlier tech level games.





Saturday afternoon, I played in another DBA tournament run by Mark S., this time using only the same armies against each other.  This was mainly for fun, without much score-keeping, so I just took a bunch of pictures.




On Sunday I attended the annual Alberta DBA Open with my Komnenan dynasty army, which I've always considered a fairly versatile one, and I took on three opponents.  I lost against Mark S's Medieval French and won against Marco's Libyans and Dennis' Italian condotierres.




I ended up tying Mark W for second place in the tournament, which is a pretty good showing.

This turned out to be another great weekend, and it's now a gaming tradition for me to go to FallCon.  I'm definitely looking forward to the next one.

Saturday, July 26, 2014

2014 Fall Auction Items

The local gaming club here (Edmonton Wargames Group) is holding an eBay auction in the fall to raise money for its operating costs, and I'm donating some of my unused Warhammer 40k miniatures.  I painted these years ago to get them quickly into gaming, but I think the paint still holds up fairly well.

The batch consists of two Tyranid hive tyrants with magnetized arm hard-points, two tyrant guards, and a carnifex with permanently glued guns.

 Here is the whole gang together, a total of 3 large models and 2 medium ones.

 The two tyrant guards.  These are the older all metal models.

The two tyrants, again both previous edition metals.  Both have four magnetic hard points each.  I have two big guns (venom cannon and barbed strangler) for one of them, and a pair of wings and two twin-linked devourers for the other.

This is the tyrant with wings and devourers.


This is the tyrant with the two big guns.


The carnifex is also from the previous edition, but is still all-plastic.  It has a venom cannon and a barbed strangler permanently glued on.

All of these are painted and based, ready to play.  I'll be wrapping these up in bubble wrap and putting them in boxes for the auction.  The tyrants will be shipped with the magnetized weapons detached for safety.  The club member who is running the auction, Dave, will be putting up the auction link when it starts in September.


Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Mayday Again!

This past Saturday I went to our local gaming mini-convention, Mayday, again.  This time the event had rather fewer people than past years due to some other gaming tournaments happening at the same time.  However, there was still plenty of fun to be had.

I ran a skirmish game using the Strange Aeons ruleset, but playing out scenarios based the X-Com computer game.  (Both old and new).  The Strange Aeons base game is a great Lovecraftian adventure ruleset, but my adaptation followed the X-Com plotline, with near-future soldiers fighting invading aliens.

I had two 2 X 3 ft. boards set up, one a rural UFO crash site, the other an urban roadside scene.  In both cases the human and alien players were simply trying to wipe each other out.

The miniatures I used for snakemen (old X-Com game) were from Critical Mass Games.  These are supposed to be 15mm aliens, but they fit quite well with my 1/72 scale ultra-modern special forces soldiers.

On the first level, the human player had a lot of trouble advancing against the snakemen's withering plasma fire.  He did poorly in all his cover save rolls, and ended up losing all his men to major injuries.

On the urban map, he tried to take advantage of cover by moving from car to car, and sending some of his men, including a sniper, to the top of the convenience store to get a good field of fire.  But again, the alien plasma weapons proved to be too deadly for the rifle-armed humans.

Despite the one-sidedness of the game, both players had a lot of fun, and I think the rules generally work quite well.  Maybe I need to increase the cover save amount to give the initial tech level humans a chance.  I'm thinking of running a campaign for Tuesday nights, since that's where the SA ruleset really shines, at allowing the player to keep a squad of humans through multiple missions gaining experience and abilities.

There were quite a few other games and displays running at the same time.  Here, Dave was running his Carpi campaign with late Western Romans using the Hail Caesar ruleset.  It looked very nice.

There were some display tables on the side of the room, including this very nice X-Wing setup.

After my morning game, I participated in a DBA tournament.  There were only four participants, and we played three games each.  The theme of the tournament was elephants, and each player had to use an army with at least one.  I borrowed Dennis' Seleukid army, and faced off Dave's Sassanid Persians in the first game.  I lost 4-2, and lost my general in the process.

In the second game, fighting against Dennis' Numidians, I did better, winning 4-2.  My scythed chariot was the star player, mowing down one of his light horse and his general.

In the third game, I played Mark from Calgary and his Carthaginians.  This map had a lot of terrain, and we both maneuvered quite a bit.  The picture shows my pike block trudging around in bad terrain for much of the game.  The game ended in my favour with some bad rolls on his part.  Overall though, Mark won the tournament with the highest score.

In the evening I played in a Star Wars fleet battles game using old clix miniatures.  I didn't know a lot about the ruleset, but it played very smoothly and quickly with a large number of ships.  It seemed to be very well suited for the sort of large scale cinematic action a Star Wars game demanded.

All in all, I had a lot of fun again this year, and I hope I can come up with some more interesting ideas for running a game next time.