Chaos Army Standard Bearer

My first painted figure of the year! This is my chaos army standard bearer, an Avatars of War chaos lord with GW plastic banner from the knights set (I think). The base is slightly more elaborate than I would usually bother as it's entered into the Warhammer Forum winter painting challenge. It looks as though it might topple over as I had to position the figure to one side to allow him to sit on the corner of a unit, but it's perfectly sturdy.

I am not sure when I will get to game with the figure. WHFB is low on the list of games to be played these days, with Saga and recently Dux Bellorum being the game of choice. No doubt, Sedition Wars will be added to that list in the near future. I did hope that the new chaos army book would fire me up, but the images have achieved exactly the opposite effect. I quite like the dragon ogres, the rest are not to my taste and/or badly sculpted. Still, there's plenty more fish in the sea, so no doubt I will add to the army eventually.

Sedition Wars mini comparison

My copy of Sedition Wars Battle for Alabaster arrived in the post yesterday. This is the game developed by Studio McVey that I supported on kickstarter last year. I am trying hard to not get distracted from my other projects, but I could not resist lining up some figures for a comparison shot. It's a big picture so that you can see all the detail, a little grainy because of the darkness of a northern hemsiphere winter, but clear enough. Click on the photo for the bigger version.

The game comes complete with dozens of minis, with a good number of extra ones thrown in for kickstarter supporters. I bought the game for two reasons. Firstly, as a complete game that hopefully will be fast, easy to learn and interesting to play. Secondly, and more importantly for me, was the opportunity to pick up some quality sci-fi minis at a reasonable cost. I have a few ideas for what I will do with the minis in the future, but that's still under research.

Looking at the photo, you can see that the scale is similar in height to the Dark Vengeance cultist and chaos marauder. The Gondor soldier is a fair bit shorter. The plastic of the Sedition Wars figures is different to the Dark Vengeance items, a plastic-resin mix maybe? It is quite hard, slightly harder to clean mold lines, but holds lots of detail (check the big photo for this). As I said, I don't want to get too distracted from current projects, but will try to get a few samples painted in the near future and post the results.

First Game of Dux Bellorum

I went round to gaming buddy Matt's over the weekend, for our first attempt at playing Dux Bellorum. We had both read the rules, the figures were supplied by Matt from his dark ages collection which have seen much use over the past few months as various Saga factions. These round based minis were simply popped into some Lord of the Rings multi-bases, instantly converting a skirmish army into the rectangular bases required by DuxB.

For those unaware of the game, DuxB is a dark ages wargame designed for use with a range of figures, no scale is assumed, since all measurements are made in base widths (BW). Since our figures were on bases about 110mm wide, we decided it was near as damn it four inches, much easier for older imperial brains like ours. Movement 8 inches, shooting range 16 inches, that kind of thing, very easy to visualise, even if pre-measuring is allowed.

The game was suprisingly quick. There were a couple of areas which required a re-read, but after a couple of rounds we settled down with our interpretation and rattled through the game. There's only half a dozen unit types to remember, with a small stat line, so it clicked into place fairly easily. In fact, we finished so quickly that we swapped armies and played again. I find myself more and more liking simple rulesets, it's quite important when switching from game to game on a monthly basis.

Apart from this speed, first impressions were mostly favourable. The battles seemed to make sense, movement was logical, and there was enough decisions to be made to keep it interesting. We just lined up and fought to the death, but next time we will most likely follow the scenarios (our experiences with Saga was that each faction seemed to vary in performance depending on the nature of the scenario).

I do have a minor niggle that the factions all seem very similar and troop choices are not particularly varied, though that makes sense for dark ages warfare and is probably my fantasy wargames brain taking over. It's early days as yet, too soon to make meaningful judgement, more games have to be played. Watch this space.

Nurgle Plague Marines for sale

One finely painted squad of seven plague marines, plus a rhino, available on ebay. Funds are needed for new hobby ventures and I have to accept that I will never play a chaos marines army. It's a shame because I really liked the way these turned out. I painted them using a number of new techniques, including chipping using hairspray. The rhino was also chipped and weathered using MIG pigments. More pictures below. Please pass on this post to anybody you think might be interested. Thanks!

More Hobbit Dwarfs for Sale

Eight dwarfs for sale on ebay this week. Well, to be precise, it's a hobbit and seven dwarfs. All the proceeds from the sale will go into the Vapnartak fund. What's Vapnartak? It's a miniatures trade show run by the York Wargames Society in early February. It will be the first show I have attended for a good few years, I am looking forward to seeing the latest goodies in the flesh. Now that my interests have evolved into several areas, I suspect I will be tempted by many, many shiney new toys, hence the raising of funds.

Zombies resurface

When I photographed the ghouls recently, I decided to snap the zombies too. These are not new work, I painted them over a year ago, but I have recently discovered that a black background helps to show the minis more true to life. I also touched up the statues and added a few leaves to the base.

I have another regiment of this size waiting to be painted. However, having just painted the regiment of ghouls, I'm not sure I can face another large horde at the moment, so I will be painting up a couple of single models for the army in the next month.

The Hobbit Dwarfs for sale part 1

I bought the Hobbit boxset to use the goblins as ghouls, which has worked out very nicely, but I didn't want the rest of the contents to lie in the box forgotten forever. So here are the first batch of dwarfs, available on ebay. They are lovely models, very detailed for plastics, quite small scale (as you would expect for the vertically challenged bearded folk). I don't usually advertise in my blog, but I want the cash from the sales to buy more hobby goodness, so here we are. Shameless plug time!

If you are interested, here's my ebay sales page. Tell all your friends! More beardy brushwork to come in the next few days.

Ghouls

I finished painting the ghouls (hobbit goblins). They are multi-based on 2mm mdf in various sizes, meaning I can field this unit as 5x4, 6x4, 7x4, or 6x5. I will probably add a few generic fillers to the army at some point, to give me more flexibility, though I'm not sure how to do this yet as I am not a huge fan of them.

Some more pictures below to celebrate the start of a new year! I would like to think I can keep at the army for at least two more months, so hopefully more deadites on the way. I will at least re-photograph the current army at some point and post it here.