Paintlog + A Couple Games

My actual painting progress has been slow as I've been doing a lot of filing and cleaning of the minis and there's been some problems with the priming (The paint was coming on all fuzzy and gritty) so I had to strip and reprime a few guys.

It's been a little frustrating but I have gotten a few things done and I was able to play my first very very very basic game of 3rd edition fantasy battle!

I'll start off with the painting.

Here's an old chaos dwarf I had who was sitting on my painting table already primed from years and years ago and I felt inspired to paint him, so at around 2 in the morning I started to work and here's what I ended up with.

 I think he's pretty nice. Definitely can be improved on but perfectly suitable for tabletop use. I rather like how the red/blue color scheme turned out. I've always wanted to do do a chaos warband in that kind of scheme. Maybe this is a good start?

 This next guy is part of my Chaos Dwarf Blood Bowl team for the upcoming league (starts in a week!) A work in progress. I just finished base coating tonight.

He is of course, a 1st edition goblin. I'm rather short on blood bowl hobgoblins so this is Hobb the Gob. He'll be pretending to be a hobgoblin for the duration of the league. (Also two 1st edition orcs have snuck onto the team in disguise.)

I was kind of using him as a test model for the rest of the team as well since I didn't know how the black and blue scheme would turn out. I think it's rather nice. Not sure I'm a fan of the gold gauntlet he's wearing but maybe a good armor wash over top will make it a bit more suitable. If nothing else I guess I can just say he has a golden arm. (As in he's really good at throwing/catching?)

Now for my first Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd edition game. It was very simple, very basic and very small. My friend came over and brought a unit of 10 skaven to do battle with a unit of 10 dwarfs. Several turns were spent crossing the table to eachother and then the fight started.

My dwarfs attempted to charge the skaven upon seeing them come through the woods but their light armour and shields slowed them down a little too much. They barely failed the charge.

The skaven were clanrats and my dwarfs were warriors with spears. The clan rats had a magical banner which gave +2 to combat resolutions instead of +1. The rats then charged my unformed unit of dwarfs and didn't have much trouble forcing them to rout.

After routing and rallying several times and losing half of the unit mostly to free hacks (and losing the standard as well.) my dwarfs were pushed back until they were at the edge of the table.

There was not much that could be done against the oncoming skaven so they were forced to retreat the battlefield in shameful defeat. (but at least they looked nice doing it!) They'll be back though and in greater numbers!

Overall it was pretty fun. My friend had never even looked at the 3rd edition rules before I'm pretty sure so I had to look a lot of things up and try to remember rules I'd read 2 weeks before and there were some things we were unsure of (like are free hacks only on units in base contact or is it for all of the front line of the pursuing unit?) I feel like the magical banner really pushed things in the skaven's favor, but my failed charge also made things start off pretty badly.

Just from this one small one on one fight I kind of like the combat better than the current fantasy edition. There seems to be a lot more to it. The maneuvering system is really confusing but it apparently is the most complex of all the editions in that regard. I hope I can start to understand things better so our next game can be bigger and more interesting.

I also set up a makeshift sort of 40k/space hulk/space marine assault type thing on another table in my room using a bunch of my old video game collection.

I bought a couple of these starter box things about a year ago for 5$ each. They come with 5 space marines, 8 genestealers, some paints, a brush, a little red die and very simple rules to play with and some mission scenarios for you to try.

Image taken from SantaCruzWarhammer

The scenarios and simple rules inspired me to set up this table and try to make an interesting game from it.

There's two sides, a Space Marine (or in this case Squat) team and a group of 8 genestealers spread out around the table in groups of twos. Each model is moved individually, so no keeping unit coherency or shooting at a single target with all the guys or anything like that. You can split guys up, keep them together, shoot at different things, whatever. It also uses the very simple combat rules on the back of the box's manual.

The squat's objective is to get a valuable relic from the armory which is north of the loading bay (the place with the land raider). The armory door, however, is locked, so they must first get to the security console to open it. (the room directly on the other side of the wall where they start.)

From the security console they can control a turret in the loading bay (the unpainted metal ork) which can fire two bolter shots per turn at a target. Inside the land raider is an energy shield which gives the squats a +1 armor save.

The genestealer's objective is simply to kill all the squats.

There is also a mad ork roaming the halls who is controlled by each player during their turn. Though it might've been better to make him a bit more unpredictable.

In the end I think things need to be rearranged a bit and perhaps it was too hard for the squats. In these halls of death all five squats were killed, and so was the ork, and there were 3 genestealers left alive. I'd like to tweak things a bit as even though the squats didn't get very far, it was a lot of fun.