Please excuse the lack of painting.....

......but a dragon ate my paint brushes.

It's a pretty flimsy schoolboy excuse isn't it? Since the day it was launched, I have spent most (my wife would say "all") of my spare time playing Skyrim. My wood elf character is wandering around the jaw-dropping scenery of the game, helping those in distress, clearing dungeons of miscreants and vanquishing the odd dragon. But it's not all hack and slash. Last night I wandered the shores of an icey lake, the moon rose above snow-peaked mountains, and the northern lights glowed green and purple. I just stood there slowly rotating, drinking it in. Awesome. It's early days yet and I can foresee another hundred hours play at least, but I reckon this is the best game I have ever played on the xbox.

At the other end of the scale, my interest in Warhammer has hit rock bottom. After nearly twenty years of playing the game I am really disheartened by many things. I think my attitude is best encapsulated in this little tale. The Undead are possibly my favourite army in the game, certainly in my top three along with Chaos and Elves. So you would think that the recent rumours of a new Vampire Counts book would have me jumping up and down with excited anticipation. Sadly, it has the opposite effect. I am almost dreading the new book. The recent trend of wow-cool-massive-monsters and the disneyfication of the sculpts is a real turn off for me. Even if I like the new sculpts, the pricing issue is forcing me to seek alternatives, so I don't really see anything to look forward to. On top of this, I am coming to dislike 8th edition the more games I play. The mass casualties from every phase of the game can be viewed as fun and exciting after some of the more "static" games under 7th edition. Or it could be viewed by a cynic as a ploy to force gamers to buy more boxes and blisters just to keep up and compete.

So I am having a break from painting Warhammer and turning my attention to other aspects of the painting and gaming hobby. It's amazing how much there is out there, companies seem to spring up on a monthly basis, or maybe they have been around for a while but I have missed them while wearing my Warhammer blinkers. I must get a list up on the blog at some stage. When I get some spare time.

PS. Having said all this about my interest level in Warhammer being lower then ever, I did think that the dragon logo would make a lovely banner for my Vampire army!

Dreadfleet (part one)

When Dreadfleet was announced I was quite surprised that my wife seemed interested. She's not really a wargamer and having tried to introduce her several times to various games, I was on the brink of giving up. When it arrived I put together a few bits and had a couple of trial games with her. It's reasonably easy to pick up the rules, very important when you play only infrequently. With a couple of house rules to cut down on the randomness of the fate deck, it could become a family fun game, joining  the likes of Talisman, Cluedo and Risk as a Christmas staple.


My task is to get the components painted up. I want to get them done in a reasonable time frame, so I thought I would make a start on a cross section of ships. It's possible to get a decent finish in a shortish time scale, but the sail ships are definitely the harder subjects with all those details, even if they are etched on. My favourite so far is the skaven ship (even if I do hate them in Warhammer)!