It got weird. GW is doing things that make sense. Like communicating with their customers and selling things that people have claimed they want to buy for years.
I’m torn about the release of Shadow War. On the one hand, more excitement about a Necromunda-based ruleset is good. On the other hand, GW has yet to prove to me that they haven’t forgotten how to write an army list that could be considered close to balanced with its peers.
My local group has decided, under the tyrannical rule of Mr. Nick, to play Shadow War: 30k rather than Shadow War: Armageddon when it’s released. I’ve been told that Orks don’t exist in 30k, which is why I don’t play 30k. But Nick took pity on me and let Orks into the club. Then, in a totally unrelated conversation I linked a photo of a gangsta with his arms crossed, and then this sprang into my brain:
Uhh…or something similar to it that I would be incapable of puttying. But this is the most amount of putty I’ve put onto a model in a long while, and I’m not displeased with it. I sculpted an entire ork arm once upon a time, so I figured I could do it again. Putty is an 8 headed hydra, always snipping at your left while you focus on the right. I prefer the regular sort of ork conversions, where you kitbash something until it looks awesome.
The left shoulder in particular pissed me right off. Nothing I did could make it look good, until I finally got it good enough and then I fucked it up again. I considered tossing a pauldron over it, but that would be cowardice, both for me and for my waaaaghlife thug who just needs his guns and his shades to protect him.
If Shadow War turns out to be a terrible game, at least I got one more ork boy out of the exercise. 🙂
I’ve mostly finished building the game now. Giving the rulebook another solid read to make sure I’m not missing anything, but I am:
A marker for where the storm currently is.
Tokens for the spice. I’ve ordered 100 purple cubes from Starlit Citadel (a local games store) so this will be solved quickly.
Some way to mark Fedaykin and Sardaukar, apparently those troops have stars on their tokens in the actual game, but I’m playing with cubes. I have different shaped cubes, but only 4-5 per colour so I have to figure out if that’s enough.
Seconds later I look down at the rulebook and see that there are 3 Fedaykin and 5 Sardaukar, of which the colours I have are perfect.
I cut and sleeved about 200 cards. Carefully cut out 6 player aid shields. Less carefully cut out 2 combat wheels.
After I glued the edges of the map last time, I Purity Sealed the top and then painted into the crevasses with colours similar to the colours that were missing. Because the map is 9 sheets of printed paper, there are 4 lines across the map where my job of lining the pages up were not perfect. Purity Seal again, to keep the paint down. Then some white glue painted carefully on in places where the paper was pulling up. I didn’t want to white glue a lot, because it can shrink the paper if you’re not careful.
And a photo of the whole set! I hope to find a good box around the house to put it in.
I’ve started organizing a time and place to gather the various actors who have a vested interest in the status of Arrakis, and hopefully the next photos will be of me and 5 other friends playing this game!
Suddenly I have a lot of projects going at once! This one is an obsession though and seems to have gotten top billing above all others. I was looking up colour schemes for my new Freeborn models and wanted to see what various artists had done with Dune over the years (most common: desert orange/brown with blue). In that Google image search I found a Dune CCG and a little thing at the back of my mind tweaked and suddenly needed it. Mercifully, I resisted (CCGs are not good at this phase of my life!) and as I continued my image search I found this post on Board Game Geek of a gentleman who had put together a print-and-play copy of an ancient Avalon Hill board game Dune.
My Build
I hope no one from work reads this, because I started by printing a lot of cards at work. >.> It took a bit to get the cards printing right, as the front and back needed to line up perfectly to actually make cards from it. The map was a bit of a pain, as I don’t have a 23.5″ printer at work, so I found an plugin for my favourite paint.net program that would separate it out into 8.5″x11″ sheets and print those.
A short trip to Staples had me bringing home $100 of supplies. About $20 of this is card stock, as it doesn’t come in any smaller units than 250 pages (I’ll use it all…eventually…), and after starting the project I think I’ll get to return about $30 of stuff that I won’t use. This sounds like a lot (it is), but it’s mitigated by the fact that this game costs up to $200 on E-Bay because it’s pretty old and pretty rare.
Once home, the cutting began. I started by cutting up a lot of transparent report covers. I knew from experience from my own board game design (I’ve never put it up anywhere) that the transparent sleeves wouldn’t stand up to shuffling. You usually need to put a card in the sleeve with the paper, and for this project I wanted the card backs to show through because they are so cool looking (and also, they help sort the decks out). So I chopped up a lot of plastic, without even having card sleeves on hand.
The next day I bought some card sleeves. They are Ultra-Pro non-matte transparent sleeves, and I’m annoyed that they have a little hologram on one corner of them. As one print-and-player said, they are designed to not get in the way of Magic cards (their primary purpose these days), but not other applications. I’ve put the hologram on the back so it’s annoying, but not in the way.
I cut and sleeved 99 cards before I ran out of sleeves. This game has 209 cards so far, so I’ll need to pick up another few sets. I’ve done this a lot before, so no problems here.
The map, however, was stressing me out and I thought about it all night and started thinking again when I woke up. It’s 23.5″ square. Staples sells foam boards in units of 9×12, 11×14 and 20×30. Some quick math will tell you that there is no combination of those that covers the entire board and doesn’t use 9 pieces. I didn’t want a 9 piece map since it would be very likely to shift around during play. Last night, I set it all out and starred at the problem for a while. I told my wife about the problem, and thought up a solution that used on 6 pieces. She stood up, and suggested I cut the edges off the map to make it 22″ square. I didn’t like this solution, as I really liked the black edging on the map, but after some thought I realized that the black edging was less important than having only 4 pieces to the map.
You can see the overhang here.
I woke up this morning and started cutting.
I glued the map down first, then flipped it over and used an sharp knife to cut through the paper where the foam board edges were.
Then I used a steel ruler and that same knife to cut away the excess foam board so that the map pieces were exactly the right size.
At Staples I’d picked up some mini-duct tape and I used that to tape down the outside edges to return back to that nice black edging. Lastly, I painted Elmers glue on the inside edges for two purposes — to hold down the paper a bit better, and to allow me to use a spray on the maps. You may know that the propellant in most sprays melts foam, but you can prevent this by using a bit of white glue over it. My next plan is to spray it with a matte coat, then paint in some places where the inside map edges don’t touch properly, then spray it again to seal it all up.
This is a big project…and hopefully I’ll be able to find 5 other Dune fanatics that want to play a very old game of strategy and deception with me. 😀
The Files
Here is Scott Everts Dune Redesign. It’s a lot to take in at first, but it’s very well presented after you wrap your head around the various game components. There are also a lot of components I got to skip because I didn’t want to make either of the two expansions for it – The Duel seemed silly and unnecessary, and the Spice Harvest seemed just unnecessary.
I won’t link to anything linked to in that link above, but I’ll link to any other resources I found as I did this.
You need:
The rules. There are various incarnations of these. Avalon Hill has an original copy. Descartes put out a French version, which was then translated. Use these if you want the pure original versions. Then two of the BGG community members cleaned it up and made it look nicer. Starbase Jeff made his own version, which is just a small clean-up of the originals, with his comments on balance and house-rules added at the end. I think I like Starbase Jeff’s version the best, as it’s concise and also I like his thoughts on the Advanced version of the rules (unnecessary) and balance.
Scott’s Base Game files. These are literally all of the files needed to play the game, and include a lot of cards and the map.
You don’t need anything else. But there are a few other things that I printed anyway because they were included for a more modern sensibility about board games:
Storm Movement Deck. The original had people reaching into bags and pulling tokens out, which is weird.
Betrayal Deck. This is a mini-expansion ported over from FFG’s Rex, which is a duplicate of this game but themed for their sci-fi universe instead of Dune. I really love asymmetric shared victories, so I’ll be including this when I play.
Leader Cards. The original game has you putting tokens into the center of the table to randomly generate a traitor, but I didn’t want tokens so I’m using these.
Scott’s Dune DropBox. Lots of other stuff in here you could include if you wanted!
The Skaven Blood Bowl box only comes with 2 Gutter Runners, but 4 are pretty much required to play. I commissioned Patrick to sculpt me a couple Gutter Runners from a Clan Rat base, inspired by these models. I wish I’d taken a photo before I primed them!
I also bought an Island of Blood Rat Ogre from a friend and tossed him on some cork. Cork is the best way to make a model fit on a base smaller than it’s footprint. 😛
I’ve got a few tabs open and have had them open for weeks while I was trying to find inspiration for the Troubleshooters box.
Unfortunately, those models are back in the case and I don’t plan on playing Malifaux anytime soon and I have a bunch of other painting priorities so I’m going to put the links here. 🙂
I kind of just wanted to use the stock photo of Ironsides as my inspiration. It’s simple, and nice looking and would look good against the other plans I had.
I liked where this guy was going with the Captain, but felt it wasn’t finished. I thought the brownish orange would look good with a bit more shading and contrasting.
Lastly, the Ox. Mages. I wanted them to be super bright colours so I started painting their cloaks in pink and started painting their magic effects in…well, I don’t remember, but I wanted bright colours.
Who knows if these models will ever be finished, but this is here as some good things to look at!
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.
These guys are among the best looking models in the range! Specifically, the Drop Command, but at this point they models are mixed together so I don’t tell which I love the most.
Easy to assemble, with small mold lines not obscuring detail. I did the bases in the same way as the Targeter Probes, because I literally did them at the same time. 😛
I have no idea what this unit does in the game, something about improving Acc when they in base contact with an enemy unit. But they are 20 points and add an additional orders dice for you, which is good tempo gains.
They are kind of terrible looking.
I’m not a huge fan of the miniatures for this game. In general, I think they are “good enough” (except for the T7, drool) (which I finished, but appear not to have not taken a photo of). These are one of the few units that I think aren’t good enough.
This was a quick and simple conversion to make them look better, and also to bring them back in line with the aesthetic of the rest of the drones.
I flipped them backwards so they laid flat and drilled a hole in their center. I primed just the models, without the bases, and then used green stuff to fit the flying stands into the new holes I’d drilled.
Because I’m also a little tired of the Warlord bases being a little gangly, I used some sculpting putty to build up the area around the bottom of the flying stands so the base sits smooth. Then just a little Vallejo Lava paste, and now I have a unit of probes that looks pretty good! (my opinion only)
I plan to use these models in a game next week, so I wanted to get some paint on them quickly so I wasn’t using unpainted models.
Bases are also pretty easy in this crew, so I thought I’d do the base coat and then finish off the bases. Then I found 3 more Arcanist models in my case that hadn’t had bases done, including a very old Silent One I based and primed a while back and my Sparks conversion and Mechanized Porkchop model.
I’m doing pink capes on my Oxfordian Mages. You can’t stop me.
