Some folks in the club started talking about Necromunda again, and I love that game so I got involved. Once again though, I have the choice between my Orlocks (who have been my first love) and my Cawdor (who I never loved, but who look way better). I sent out a link to my last old models post, to give people an idea of what my Orlocks actually looked like. Someone was disappointed that there were actually no photos of Orlocks in that link, so in order to procrastinate painting some more I thought I’d take some photos! I don’t remember exactly when I painted these. It was after the Dark Elves for sure, but before I worked at GW and learned a lot about thinning paints. 🙂
After I finished painting them, these 4 juves were in every gang list I made. They were cheap, and as long as you didn’t get into close combat they were almost as effective as a ganger. I tended to run them in pairs so they could support each other if they got into combat. I also really love the models!
Gangers have always felt kind of interchangeable to me. Sure, these guys all have different weapons, but in the end you just put them on the table and hope that the weapon you’re holding is good enough to hurt the person standing across from you.
I love this leader model too, although I’m disappointed that the new Community Edition rules don’t allow his meltagun in the initial gang. If I run Orlocks, I’m going to convert something I think. Boltgun/sword is a good combo for a leader. I’m surprised to find the stubber merely primed, since the rest of the gang is actually painted and I ran him in every list I made until I picked up a plasma gun (see further down).
These guys have a variety of stories. The pit slave on the left is likely a model that doesn’t belong to me, I think it’s actually Gavin’s. The dude next from the left is a conversion I made from a tank commander body and some plastic legs and a bolt pistol and flamer and I used him either as a scum or mercenary (I forget which). Gavin had the exact same conversion and I thought it was so cool I made my own. The next model in is a pyromancer, whenever I ran him he didn’t do to much. And lastly the guy on the far right I think ran as a telekinetic because I thought they seemed cool. He’s just an Empire wizard model from that era, I think.
After a large number of games, I got tired of running the same weapons over and over again and bought some Catachans to get some more weapons. I don’t really like them as Orlock replacements, as the Orlock models are a lot less “beefy”. Still, they aren’t bad.
Lastly, and this is also disappointing, two special edition models I grabbed at some point. It’s Scabs from the Kal Jericho comics and a PDF trooper, I think. The disappointing part is that I can’t find Kal!! Likely he was at Gavin’s at some point and now he has my Kal and I have his pit slave. Poor trade. 😛
As for the photography, there’s something missing from these photos. They don’t have the “luminescent” quality that I think they should have. Possibly my lights were poorly angled or not strong enough. I like the last photo, but not the other five.
For the number of people talking about Antares locally, there still isn’t the representation I was expecting at our Sunday gaming club. I arrived late, around 1:30pm (we open at noon) and one guy was sitting with his army set out, and a table set out, waiting for an opponent. I looked around and saw 2 Antares people playing Blood Bowl, and 2 watching another game, one of whom I found out was waiting for his BB game! One issue we have with growing this game is that Blood Bowl is a commitment in our league, so if you fall behind on games you have to prioritize it over other games!
I got asked if I wanted to play BB, but I only brought Antares, so I played 3 games of it! 😀 This post won’t be a battle report, because I kind of hate (reading) them, but read on because it’ll turn into a mini-review of scenario #4 “Tunnels” from the Xilos supplement.
First Game
I played the poor guy sitting with his army out. The trouble is, that he’s a guy that others have been complaining about. Not that he’s a bad guy, but he plays this wicked fast Boromite army that’s in your face turn 2 and it’s quite daunting to have to deal with 2 rock rider units, the rock rider character, 3 units of lavamites and 3 X-launchers. The lavamites are quite good.
We played one of the scenarios I wrote for the scenario competition a while back (still no links, since maybe it’ll be published one day, that’d be nice!). It was the only scenario I didn’t get a chance to play test before I submitted it, mainly because I didn’t have time and I was more confident that it would be good. And oh man, was it ever.
I was trying to write a game that scored more like Malifaux, with VPs accruing at the end of every turn. This allows you to “lock in” points so you can forget about those points and focus on how to get other ones. It has a interesting “flowy” feeling to it, since you don’t have to be focused on the entire board at once. “This one, then this one, then this one” sort of feeling, if that makes any sense at all!
Until you get flanked by lavamites. Rapid sprinting at you, and rolling 1s for their Ag tests so they move 25″. I played a denied flank, leaving a Strike Squad dangling to bait him and trying to push more force up a single side, while he spread out evenly. It was on the verge of working, except that because his entire army is so fast and so strong there’s no flank to deny, it’s just a flank taken. He ran forward, grabbed the points and just kept running. The only thing that saved me from getting completely destroyed was on turn 3 about half his (Co 9) army failed a Command Check, then failed again to remove their Down orders!
I lost this one 6-4, but am super happy with the scenario!
Second Game, Xilos #4
My dudes, cramped in a tunnel. The scenario description recommends 750, and I heartily agree!
I’ve had it as a goal of mine to play through every scenario in the Xilos book. I usually buy books like these and then read and forget them – “scenarios are hard”, “lets just line them up and smash each other”. After my stint in Malifaux, I’ve learned that scenarios are the best to play a wargame. The Xilos book has been a source of some very excellent ideas, but I’m afraid to say, some less good implementations.
My opponent “broke through” first, so got to place a unit ahead…and then cramped the rest of his army. The caverns he’s standing on are the ones placed before the game starts.
The first scenario was so asymmetrical I think I would have been annoyed if it hadn’t been explained in the scenario summary that this was the case. Xilos #4 is one sided, and I don’t think it was intended to be so. It feels like the writer had a really good idea…and then wrote something different down. It’s a game where you place tunnel sections on the board, tunneling out your map as you go. Very cool idea and I was really excited to try it out, but the rules have this terrible conflux:
You must always place your first tunnel section at a right angle to the table edge.
You must always place subsequent tunnel sections heading directly towards the table center line (used in one part of the rules) or “your target”. (a phrase used in another part of the the rules without explanation of what my target might be?).
When you combine these two, if you both don’t place your first tunnel section directly in line with the initial canerns, you will very likely, never meet. (when you place a tunnel, roll a D10, if you roll a 10 you can place a cavern that can be placed to adjust your tunnel course slightly). If you do place your tunnel section directly inline with your opponent, I think you end up with a very uninteresting game with a long tunnel where only 1 unit from each side can shoot at anything.
This game my opponent placed in line with the existing tunnels and I placed off-center to see what would happen. It wasn’t until turn 6 (out of 8) that I rolled a 10 and managed to place a connecting piece that the game got any sort of interesting. He almost won without interacting with me at all, but we got to turn 8 and he won 3-2.
We finally met. If he’d sprinted at this point, across into the far cavern, he’d have auto-won.
The state of the game at this point. We ended up “just moving” most of our armies, without drawing dice because everything at the back couldn’t do anything but keep up. Saved a lot of time!
I moved into the battleground cavern to block his movement and shot up his guys a lot.
Don’t cross the streams!
The end. I couldn’t run into the left-most cavern in this photo to contest it and tie the game up. He won 3-2.
Third Game, Xilos #4
We re-racked and tried again with a small rules variation – you can place a tunnel section at any right angle – so you can choose to change course as you wish.
This was much more interesting. We both placed our initial sections off-center from the middle, but only slightly so that a single tunnel section could be used to break into the main cavern whenever we wanted. I pushed to 2/3s of the way up, and he pushed to half way and that was the winning move for me. I managed to bottleneck him in his single line and he didn’t have time to break in again while I sprinted to the far end of the cavern to win automatically 4-0.
I broke in at two points, allowing me to Ambush with the left-most squad and keep his army pinned in his tunnel. I sprinted a squad across the biggest cavern to hold 4 at once and auto-win.
Not a Fourth Game
We thought about other variations that could work to make this more interesting. I initially wanted to be able to use Orders dice to place another tunnel section during your turn, but since the game was so cramped and movement-heavy already, I worried that spending any dice not moving would bog the game down.
My opponent suggested that you could put D3 pins on a unit to place another section. This was an interesting idea that I hadn’t considered, your troops getting tired from digging so much! In my Antares scenario designs I haven’t thought about pins as a “resource”, and I’m super happy that he made me think about them that way!
What I wanted was to be able to build more interesting tunnels – with the current rules it looks like the optimal placement is two off-center lines that could break in at any point, giving you flexibility but also protection. But that you had to break in at the 2/3s mark no matter what, in order to prevent your opponent from stealing the game like I did. If you place additional sections during your turn, you could push hard in one direction and still be able to defend if you needed to.
I think this was the last time I had a painting slump that felt like this. I haven’t done any painting or modelling since my last post, which is disappointing to both of us. (Or, at least just me). I have in mind, the following hobby projects queue’d up:
Skaven Blood Bowl team has 5/16 models fully finished. Another 9/16 are about 70% done. Another 2/16 are just primed white.
2 C3 Medium Drones that are just primed, a light drone with subverter matrix that got to a single layer of paint before being shoved in the case.
Don’t get me started on the plans I had to go through each part of that box piece by piece. I haven’t had time to game.
Most of a Freeborn force that I picked up for a steal.
Use that photo setup I’m very pleased with. 🙂
Play every scenario in the Antares Xilos expansion.
I think those all of are the hobby “commitments” I’ve given myself, that I haven’t done anything with. It is nice to see the list.
Here’s what I did tonight:
You need pin markers for Antares. I’ve been using just a bunch of tokens to mark pins, but as part of that Freeborn force I got some of the Warlord games pin markers and I wanted to use them. On their own, they are exceedingly difficult to read and the Antares Facebook group has a lot of people doing something similar to this so you can actually read the numbers.
Wash of Abaddon Black. I don’t think this worked out well.
Wash of Drakenhof Nightshade. I like this colour more than most blacks, because it’s deeeeep.
Quasi-careful highlights of white over the numbers.
Went back in with the Drakenhof to touch up the edges where I’d messed up.
Purity Seal for safety?
I’m a little worried I should have primed something or something, but priming something you aren’t painting all of is a pain.
Now onto the excuses? Yeah, I don’t feel like going to bed yet. These are all the things that are filling my brain, instead of painting:
My wife is pregnant!!! woooot! We have a lot of things that need doing around the house…including keeping her fed and watered, which isn’t always easy. She’s suffering a lot from pregnancy sickness. 🙁
I’ve had some sort of intestinal issue for about 4 months now. Constant light cramps and gas, and often feeling like I gotta go, even when I don’t. Sucks a lot, particularly since the solution is 30 days of a very stringent diet (plus antibiotics) that I’ve somehow failed to follow perfectly.
Trying to plan a diving trip.
Trying to plan to teach some friends toddler to ski.
Planning meals for the above intestinal issue. Can’t just walk out the door and eat, this thing needs careful management.
Two circus shows – one in March and one in June.
A secret hobby project that I’m going to talk about but not tell you any details for a few months.
Before I got a career job, programming was a big hobby of mine. I’ve written tons of little programs that have barely had any use, just because I thought it would be neat to have a program that did that thing. Over the last few years, because of globalization and Google Play the world has been able to benefit more from this hobby. I’ve written 4 apps for Android that help with various gaming related tasks. My new project, which is literally sucking up and devouring every moment of time I have that isn’t scheduled otherwise, is a new web app that I hope might be of use to some of you when I’m done. There’s also a possibility that I might try to monetize parts of it (although the basic functionality will be free), like a DLC for your web app.
It’s time for sleeping, thanks for reading and I hope the photo of pins markers will keep you satisfied until I return. Tomorrow at least I’ll be playing some Antares and maybe I’ll have some photos of that. I’m on Xilos #4 and it looks really good!
I mentioned last time that I had a lot of projects suddenly, and this is one of them. I’m super excited to be able to review this box set for you, particularly since it’s the first time my blog has generated income. Yes, this time I get to add the caveat: this product was provided for free for review! 😀
This article will be very “quick and dirty”, since there’s a good bet that if you play Antares you’ve seen the entire contents of this box already. I have a series of follow-up articles planned that will require some time to get out. Here’s my plan
Give the C3 sprues to a friend. He’s planning a Freeborn Command Squad conversion that I can’t wait to see. I’ll take photos, and get him to write something about what he did, or interview him and post it here.
Split up the Algoryn sprues. I had planned on winning the scenario contest (takes a lot of hubris to “plan to win” a contest :D). I was going to give the sprues from that to Myles, since he was instrumental in playtesting my scenarios. Since I didn’t win that, I’m going to give him a sprue from here. I’ve got another friend who plays Algoryn who I’ll give a sprue to. Then I’ll assemble and paint a sprue of my own.
This box contains a series of starter/demo game scenarios that I’m going to play and review.
I also want to talk about the 2D terrain and fold-out board, as well as the rulebook and starter book.
Enough about the future, let’s get to this box!
Review
It’s awesome.
Starting out with the least important detail – it’s very well packaged. It’s a fairly small box that one might expect to only contain a single Space Marine Rhino, but instead contains an entire game in a box. You can’t buy many board games this big, let alone an entire miniatures game.
The top layer holds the mini rulebook, the starter book and a little Warlord advertising thing. Underneath those are a quick reference sheet, which also has two cut-out rules on the sides (not shown). This box has been designed for the beginner Antares player, and the reference sheet is well designed for that purpose. If you are an expert, I suggest using the one hosted at Vardos Delhren instead as it is more complete.
Dice! I think the D10s are the same as the Xilos starter box, as I don’t know if there’s a good reason to have the black dice in this bag! It was in Xilos for the Ghar Distort dice. At the same time, the C3 (and maybe Algoryn, I don’t know) often need different coloured dice in a single squad to differentiate between the Plasma Carbines and the Plasma Lance shots. The orders dice are the C3 colours and the Algoryn colours. The blue on red is exceedingly difficult to read, but since these are just markers for the most part it’s not a huge deal.
Sprues! We’ve seen the results of the C3 sprue countless times. It’s still a great sprue, containing 5 Strike Squad members and 1 C3D1 drone, which gives you a great combination of “what you need” and “what you want”. The Strike Squads are the C3s bread and butter, whereas once you get a few more units in your army the D1 drone is a nice optional choice to make among many other great units. 2 spotter drones round out this sprue, which is great since they are in every C3 squad I put together. (even still my bits box has ~10 spotter drones un-built). There are 2 of these sprues in the box, which is a great starter number. A C3 player will likely want 1 more before branching out, as I tend to have 3 Strike Squads as a basic component of any army I’ve made that didn’t contain Drop Squads (as they take up a lot of points and also fulfill your Tactical requirement).
The Algoryn sprue is a little more difficult for me to talk about confidently, since I don’t know what these weapons are. But here’s a few guesses about what’s on this sprue:
Definitely there are 5 models. 🙂 5 legs of roughly 3 different poses – two “stepping” poses, two “bracing to shoot” poses and one “already stepped” pose. The torsos are all identical. There are 7 heads, 5 with full helmets, one half helmet and one open faced.
The guns are where it gets complicated, but I’ll do my best:
5 mag guns. I think the mag gun is the one that’s on the bottom left of the sprue in this photo.
2 micro-x launchers. I think the micro-x launcher is on the bottom, the right-most gun, just before the torsos.
2 mag repeaters. I think the mag repeater is on the bottom, just up from the bottom-left-most mag gun.
1 mag pistol. This one is the obviously pistol-like one. 🙂
1 spotter drone. I’m super stoked that the Algoryn get a very different looking spotter drone! The C3 one is nice, but while the Freeborn sharing it makes sense fluff-wise, it bugs me as a miniature painter.
Other people have done a far more comprehensive job of outlining exactly what army options are on this sprue than this, so I suggest reading Listing to Ports write-up if you’re an Algoryn player and want real knowledge!
Going deeper into the box, there’s a sprue of templates and a sprue of blast markers which is really nice. Then we get down to the bottom. There’s a large fold-out piece of paper that has an awesome poster on one side which is a larger version of the Strike on Kar’a Nine box art, and on the other side is a fold-out table mat. Lastly, there is a single piece of 2D terrain.
I’m looking forward to trying these out. I love the fold-out mat, since it means you could set up anywhere immediately. I also wonder if I love 2D terrain. I’m consistently annoyed by needing to go to the back room to get 3D terrain, carry it out, gently unpack it trying not to break anything, and then reverse the process at the end of the game, all the while knowing that you can’t help but break and chip it by constantly moving it around. I’ve never seen a good terrain carrying solution, and so it ends up rubbing against itself constantly. 2D terrain, if I’m ok with the 2Dness of it, could mean never needing to worry about breaking it again. I’m going to play all of the starter scenarios with this terrain, and may Sharpie the edges of the terrain first as several others have done.
Lastly, here’s a photo of the entire contents of the box and my cup of tea. I’m not British, but I still can’t get through the day without a cup of tea.
Price
One last thing is a comparison of the cost of this box compared to the contents. This is in CAD, with costs generated by asking XE.com to convert from the UK store. In Vancouver, Canada this is how we tend to buy Antares because the US prices on the US store tend to cost us about 15% more.
2 C3 sprues $33CAD
3 AI sprues. The Warlord store sells them from $33CAD for 2, so 1.5 is $49.50CAD. Note that we’re only 2 line items into the breakdown, and we’re already well past what the Strike at Kar’a Nine box actually costs. >.>
Templates $9.90CAD
Blast Markers $9.90CAD
D10s $9.90CAD (and you only get 1 colour, not 3)
Order dice $16.50for 10, and you get 5 in the box so $8.25CAD
Rulebook $49.50CAD. This isn’t strictly a fair comparison, as it seems that the hard cover rulebook has rules in it that aren’t in the mini rulebook. This is a disappointment, but with the help of Battlescribe, likely not a big one. Also, personally, I own the PDF rules so I can always go there.
Which adds up to…$169.95CAD. Which is ridiculous since the box only costs $58CAD. $112 savings is unreal.
Summary
If you are looking to get into Gates of Antares, this box is still a good deal even if you don’t want to play the C3 or Algoryn as the other contents cost $87.50CAD for $58CAD and you could sell the sprues to friends.
The difficulty is that the rulebook isn’t complete, which I think we’ll get into later. The internet says it’s missing special ammo and special unit rules, which makes it less useful. I haven’t looked though, so do your own research on this if it’s important (or wait for when I get to review the paper contents in more detail :))
If you are planning to play C3 or Algoryn, this box is an insane deal. Buy it now!
Scenario writing is a good exercise. It’s very similar game design, but the parameters are really limited. You still have to build something that is readable, understandable, makes sense, and is fun for everyone. But you are limited by (some of) the actions already available in the game and by the theme or genre of the game. For example, I love the hell out of how Malifaux does scenarios, but I can’t just drop a Malifaux scenario into Antares, because (just for starters) in Malifaux units get 2 actions per turn and in Antares they get 1 action per turn. Antares already has the idea that orders dice denote an “action”. If we were playing in 40k, there are no “actions” at all — units in 40k are either standing near something or they aren’t, killing something or they aren’t. The language of the game doesn’t support anything more interesting than this.
I instantly had an idea for one scenario, and ideas for 3 more were conjured up days later. I wrote 3 of them out, and the 4th one was left on the drafting room floor, as it had too many moving parts for me to have time to finish. I haven’t included the files here, since I don’t know what Warlord is going to do with them, but I’ll try to put them up if they don’t end up using them in any official capacity.
The scenarios were:
What Does God Need With a Starship? A 2-player game where both players have a lot of mobility, but limited reach and so need to choose positioning carefully. I like games that have a lot of mobility, so that tactical positioning is really important, but because the game is still about “shooting that guy over there”, you can’t just be able to show up without constraints. I split the table up into 3 sections that couldn’t interact with each other, then placed objectives players need to shoot on each of them, and a “God” in the last one who was invulnerable until his shields were taken out, and who was shooting at players the entire game.
Hack the Shard. A 3-4 player game of lying while racing to the center. Players must choose how best to use their limited actions to earn victory points, vs killing their opponent to reduce their available options. I’ve always been inspired by the lying and bluffing of the Battlestar Galactica board game, and this game comes a little bit from there. 1 player is secretly holding the “Superior IMTel” and has different victory conditions from his or her opponents. Players are incentivized to run to the center because of the VP-holding marker there, but also have to use their actions to discover who has the Superior IMTel. You can lie about who has it, if you’re a decent liar, to put people off the track of where the real VPs are held.
The Antarean Trail. Race for 8 markers, each of which earn you points once per game. You can quickly grab a few points, but you’ll have to work harder to get them all. We didn’t get a chance to play test this one, but it’s the simplest of the bunch, so I’m more confident it’ll work as-is. >.> I like that in this one players get VPs as the game progresses, so you can keep a running total, and also don’t have to worry about your VPs. Once you have 2VPs, you’ll always have at least 2 so you can change your focus to the next goal. It’s kind a “checking off the list” game – “Ok, I got the medicine and the food but need the equipment still…”. I also really love the Oregon Trail reference. 😛
Here are some photos of our play test last night! Everyone really enjoyed the game, to the point that we’re still talking about the rules and how to best manipulate them today on WhatsApp!
We played Hack the Shard with 4 people. I choose a force of only 5 dice at 750 points to reduce the chances my opponents would be able to h4x0r my shard. At the same time, this reduced the number of dice I could use to h4x0r other shards. A trade-off that ultimately paid off. 😛 Drop Command with Medi Drone, Drop Squad, 2 Strike Squads and a Light Support with Batter Drone.
Clayton’s Freeborn are really cool. He had this 300+ point Command Squad that was blowing 18 SV0 shots per turn around the table. Downside is, in a game with a lot of trees SV0 isn’t good enough to make your opponent fail a lot!
Racing for the center to try to take the intelligence marker. I moved up my C3D1 drone to provide batter shield before I moved my troops up.
Next turn I moved it up again, pinned and/or killed the Boromites to my right so I only had to worry about the Algoryn to the front. Unfortunately, this strategy ultimately failed as the Algoryn had too many units still on the table and were very much able to kill my shit, then race in with his bikes and take it away!
Another photo of Clayton’s Freeborn Command Squad. This thing is a beauty!
This was a great game, that only needed a few numbers tweaks to make it better. I got what I wanted from it – at one point I believed every person had the Superior IMTel other than the person who actually had it. Well played.
We play tested What Does God Need With a Starship? last week, which went extremely well. It’s really nice to be able to have down to earth conversations about what is and isn’t working in a game!
I asked GW if I could do a review of the new box about a month back. They were kind enough to write back saying they’d send my request along, but unfortunately I never heard anything about it afterwards. So as much as I’d like to have a little disclaimer here about how this was “paid advertising”, it isn’t. Maybe next time!!
This is going to be a long one.
I want to start with how pleasantly surprised I was at my local non-GW games store getting so many of these boxes. I’d heard that small stores were only going to be able to get 1 Skaven box per 5 core boxes they had ordered, which is ridiculous in a game that has such a big existing community. So, good start.
I have no idea how much it cost, but I picked up the Death Zone book, this box and the warpstone dice for about $100 CAD which wasn’t unreasonable.
Whats in the box?
It’s a cool looking box.
There are two of these sprues inside it. I love how full this sprue is!
There’s a Skaven theme decal transfer sheet! I paid extra money for such a thing when I made my Dreadball rats, and I’m totally going to use the shit out of this one!
The models were easy enough to clip out of their sprues, with only a few awkward angles. Every piece is pretty easy to figure out where it’s supposed to go. I lined them all up on the instructions to make sure each rat was right, but I think it would be very hard to mess this up as each model has very specific tongue-and-groove fittings.
Also on each sprue are a little Blood Bowl marker and 4 ball tokens. I don’t know what the one with the hand is supposed to be, but there are two awesome looking warpstone themed balls that fit into the little hole on the bases, and one free-standing ball.
Lastly on the back of the assembly instructions is a short army list. I’m a little disappointed here, as while it contains all of the rules for each model in the box, it doesn’t have rules for the rat ogre. One more table row would have made this a complete army list for the Skaven, but someone decided not to include it. Maybe they didn’t have space, since there are 3 translations here, but I think a complete roster would have better, and maybe would have helped entice new players to seek out and buy a model for it!
I’m a little sad that the box doesn’t have more of a complete team, needing just 1 more linerat, 2 gutter runners and an ogre to finish it off. The ogre I definitely wouldn’t expect to be in here. I also think that 12 models is a good place to be, and if you had to pick 12 out of the 16 possible, these are a good 12. But buying a second box and not needing 9/12 of the models is annoying. When/if they put out an individual box of Gutter Runners and a Rat Ogre, it will be amazing. But that last line rat is going to bug me for a while.
Assembly
Assembly was a breeze. I’m miserable at mold lines, but near as I can tell these are barely visible at all. The sprue venting holes are placed in easy places to clean off (shoulder plates mostly) and in one case is completely covered by a piece that is placed over it.
I really like the new inclusion of a hole on the base for the ball to fit in, and I also really really like that they went to 32mm bases. 25mm is too small for Blood Bowl.
The models are really damn good looking, but aren’t at “bloody amazing”. The poses are great, and really dynamic. When I first saw the photos I was stunned, but the more I look at them, the more I feel that the details are just a little soft. I’m also very concerned about these tails. I’ve heard of some folks cutting them off and magnetizing them and I may do that myself shortly. There is no chance that the throwers tails will survive transport.
I glued them together with plastic glue, but I don’t think they needed gluing if you didn’t want to. The tongues were all push tight enough they would stay together without it. But with that, I wish they were green plastic or something. 😛
Here are some close ups! Nice thing about having duplicate of each model is I can take one photo and show multiple sides. 🙂
Death Zone
I don’t have any photos of the Death Zone book. It’s nice, but doesn’t have enough difference from LRB6 to make it super worthwhile. I mean, there are a few differences you’ll need to know about, but that’s not my thing to talk about, I let others do so. It’s a nice book, buy it if you want more Blood Bowl in GWs future.
Dice
The dice are crazy. Translucent green, with a sweet font for the numbers, the BB symbol is on the 6, all the dice you need to play the game and it comes in a cool little box.
A friend recommended I check the dice for bubbles, since he’d known other GW produced dice to have issues. I did under my desk lamp – no bubbles I could see.
Also, unlike some other GW dice (the Khorne ones), these ones feel and roll like actual dice, rather than like plastic toys.
They were a total impulse buy, and cost $16 for something I did not at all need.
Summary
The box is awesome, and I’m looking forward to individual releases for more. The models are great. The book is good, but you could probably get away without it. The dice are sweet, and kind of expensive.
This one I’ve been keeping under my hat for a while because I didn’t want to ruin the surprise for Clark. I designed a special board for the Foodhammer Blood Bowl event this weekend!
It started by Clark asking if I could modify an existing board, or make a new one, to make it CHOP!/Foodhammer themed. I said maybe and looked at the board he wanted to modify. The image was about 1000×1000 pixels, which when printed at 300dpi would be about 10 inches squared, which is much too small. So you print it at…I dunno, 100 dpi and it becomes 30 inches squared but would look pixellated and likely awful. And I told him I didn’t think I could design a board, just getting the squares right would be next to impossible!
Then something ticked over in my brain — I could write a computer program to generate the squares! I spent an evening and got it writing out a PNG that was a cross of two 26×14 boards overlapping each other. Then I told Clark I’d think about it. 😛
Days later I had built a prototype. I don’t remember the exact steps, but there was a lot of layering in Paint.net. I had an all snow background on the bottom, then the logo and dugouts on top, then words over that and then the squares overlaying it all.
Then came the process of making it cooler. I showed the draft to Clark and he had a great number of suggestions on how to make it better. I cursed, and went to work again. 😛
Here’s a look at the final board:
And the final copy from the printers came this weekend!
Here’s a few things that came out of this:
I learned how to make realistic blood splatter. There is a blood splatter font, and you can use masking and such to make it look pretty gruesome.
This is the only part I “borrowed” from the internet – the dugouts are made from these dungeon tiles. They were almost the right size, and I wanted dungeon dugouts but didn’t want to draw them myself so I resized them. We’ll see if they look good. >.>
I learned how to make an almost realistic snowy background over dirt. You can see the end result above, but before I did that, I made a small prototype to see if I could make it look good:
It’s two different dirt textures with careful erasing, and a large variety of white textures with careful feathering and erasing.
Here are two links, but be warned they are massive images. In order to get a 35 inch square game board to print at 300dpi, you need to have 10748×10748 pixels, which ends up being 252mb.
The Paint.net file (365mb). This version has all of the layers separated so you could potentially edit and make your own board from it! Let me know if you do so, I would love to see if anyone else makes their own from it!
This was an exciting experience as it’s the largest thing I’ve ever graphic-designed, and I’m not really a graphic designer but I’m really enjoying drawing all of these gaming aids! I’ll get to play on it this weekend at Foodbowl!
I posted the images of these cards, but they just came in the mail after having them printed off for my community. These are looking awesome, and I’m excited to have the reminder to use these cool army options in game!
The two numbers in the bottom right are — [Cost] and then [How Many]. For Superior Shard, above, you can only have 1 per army total. For something like Block! you can have up to your Auxiliary count, so it says “AUX” in that sweet sci-fi font.
Building things makes me happy, which is one of the top reasons I’m still in this hobby so many years down the line.
Professionally I’m a software developer, which also allows me to build things. Then, when I have spare time, I get to loop back and build software for my model hobby.
CheatedFates radio asked me today on Twitter if I was going to update my web crew builder and model reference. (side note: Twitter is not the best place to grab me, but it works) So I spent a half hour and updated, greatly assisted by having a PDF copy of the book. Previously I’d write hand-write notes from the book on the bus (I do a lot of stuff on the bus/Skytrain), then translate those (occasionally poorly done) notes to computer form on my lunch break at work. The PDF let me skip that horrible middle step.
Here’s a link: http://geeksong.com/Malifaux/
And for any software developers who use this tool and who might feel inclined to make it cooler, I accept pull requests on GitHub: https://github.com/rythos42/MalifauxModels-Web
I have totally been busy painting and stuff. I just haven’t been posting about it, at all. I’ve been working on my Blood Bowl display board, and it’s coming along pretty nicely although I think my reds and greens are pretty brutal looking. You’ll see later, I’m sure.
This post is about some cool cards I made.
About a week ago, Warlord games via the community Facebook group announced they had printed a bunch of action cards for a local UK tournament and that they would be selling extras on the website at 9am. UK time. That’s like 2am PST. I’d claim to be annoyed, but this is public. (…the game has fans outside of the UK, right?). Rather than trying to wake myself at 2am to buy something silly online, I made my own.
There are other action cards and play-aids available that others have made, but none of them made me want to go out and get them printed at a professional shop. The cards are useful, because you tend to forget items like this in your army, those that don’t have a physical presence. So, like Blood Bowl, you make cards and make them visible! I like my accessories, and I like them pretty looking.
I made 17 card decks, containing 3 Block!, 3 Extra Shot, 1 Superior Shard, 3 Well Prepared, 3 Get Up!, 3 Pull Yourself Together and 1 Marksman. The front is a free border, and the back is an image of the Horsehead Nebula (found on Google Image Search, Labelled for Reuse). They should be suitable for printing, as they are 3.5″ by 2.5″ with a 0.24″ bleed (for PrinterStudio, usually it would be 0.25″ bleed) at 300 DPI.
Here’s what the cards look like (but don’t use this image to print from!)
