Some Weekend Gaming

I managed a bit of gaming over the weekend, and even got my wife to sit down and play for a bit. I tried her out on Anima Tactics. It's a simple enough system, although we disregarded the characters' special abilities in the interest of simplicity. Of course doing so reduces one's options in the game but it was still fun. My group is Azure Alliance while my wife was using Black Sun nasties.

We set up a graveyard-themed battlefield. Many of her characters were undead so that was pretty fitting. This was also the debut of the Japanese hut I'd made a few months ago.

For the most part, our warbands duked it out in the middle of the field. There was some trickeration involved with trying to get the other person to burn all their action tokens to prevent dodges later in the turn.

Ender wanted to see what was going on. He approved.

 Ender's look-alike was the first to go.

He was soon followed by the scantily-clad lass who was the focus of much attention in the earlier photo (three pics back).

Deadmoon and Jerry (the gal with the cloak and the brown and orange fellow) weapon-high-five after bringing down the raven-laden goth.

The bird-brain in his new home.

The cemetery was rapidly filling up with fresh corpses. I guess some of those corpses weren't really so fresh after all.

The final critter in her group falls - a flying Frankenstein's monster that Jerome had actually been fighting for much of the game. He'd broken away from it earlier to help Deadmoon in her fight but the pair were reunited to end the game.

I really want to try AT again playing the right way, with special abilities, etc. I think after the play through, Wifey won't have any trouble with it.

Saturday evening I didn't feel like setting up the gaming table so Zig and I played X-Wing. He doesn't play very often, not that I do, but I do play a lot more than him. We did 120 points and He took the Rebels. I was happy to use the evil Empire - I normally play with the Rebels and wanted the change of pace.

Our initial setups. I took two high-end TIE Interceptors, the shuttle (for comedy purposes) and Vader.

Part way through. I hammered the Y-Wing from the get-go. I'm not a fan of Ion Turrets.

As things wore on, the shuttle and Carnor Jax's red Interceptor were blasted to bits as was the B-Wing.

A few turns later, Wedge Antilles killed off the second Interceptor while Vader took out the Red Shirt X-Wing. Which left us with this:

Lord Vader and Wedge in a fly-by. We flew around for maybe ten turns. I hit him a few times, he shot me once. Neither one of us could get a definitive advantage so we declared it a draw. It was a damn good game with a great ending.

The Beginning (of 2015)

I managed to wrap up a few models during the week and got in a game of X-Wing with Junior on New Year's Day. First up are some light bombers from the Dystopian Wars French Air box set Zig gave me for Christmas.

The air components for my French will be predominantly white, as opposed to the blue I used on the ships. If I ever to French land forces they'll be mostly red.

Next up is a little critter I picked up just to paint. It's an Anima Tactics Hellhound.

I have a good selection of AT stuff but I've only ever played it once. The models are gorgeous and I do like painting them. Maybe one day I'll put it on the tabletop again.

Finally is Stampy 3. The largest model I've painted in a while. It's a Dystopian Wars mobile airfield for my Empire of the Blazing Sun forces. I don't care much for painting large models with lots of detail so I'm not going to lie, I didn't try my hardest on this beast.

I think I tend to get burned out working on one model for so long that I just get sick of it. Regardless, it's good enough for my tabletop and should be a hoot to play with.

I took some pics of the X-Wing game. We played the scenario that comes with the VT-49 set which features the VT-49 and two chump TIE fighters versus four Rebels totaling 100 points. The Rebels only get two of their ships (Imperial choice) for the first three turns.

He chose my Y-Wing and E-Wing to start against. Here we have a massive traffic problem in the center. The VT-49 has a turret and he worked on my Y-Wing until it went away.

This unfortunate TIE fighter was hovering next to the map edge at the end of turn 3. I placed my reinforcements right on his tail. You don't get many opportunities like that.

Spot the difference between the two pictures above.

And then my A-Wing goes away. (The rubble marker in front of the X-Wing).

And a turn later my X-Wing is up in flames. The damaged E-Wing and heavily damaged VT-49 duke it out for a few turns but in the end my E-Wing got the better of the lumbering Imperial scow. It's 0 agility compared to the 3 agility of the E-Wing was the difference maker. He had a tough time hitting my ship while shooting the Decimator was a walk in the park. Either way, it was a fun scenario and an enjoyable game.

The Hut

I finished my Asian-inspired thatched roof hut. It was made more "just to do it" more than any other reason. It's sized-up for Anima Tactics (28ish mm). Between this and those graveyard trappings, we should at least have a somewhat decorated battlefield to play on the next time we break that out.

I'm very happy with the end result, even though I didn't set the roof on perfectly for these pictures.

Some Scenery...

I worked on a few scenery pieces Sunday. Two of the pieces are Dollar Tree Halloween decoration re-paints:

They are scaled rather nicely for 28mm. Not bad at all for a buck apiece. The originals can be seen here: http://onemoregamingproject.blogspot.com/2014/08/halloween-scenery-at-dollar-tree-stores.html on Chris Palmer's excellent blog.

I've also done some more work on the thatched roof for the hut I started on some time back.

Yup, I made the thatched roof! It's a terry-cloth rag cut into strips. Now it's just in need of a paint job. It's 28mm scale if you're interested. I've got that 20mm Airfix house on the workbench - it's better than halfway done so I may post pics of it later this week.

James and I are going to play Shipwreck on Sunday afternoon - he's put together a Vietnam-era scenario. Should be cool - Shipwreck always is.

Valentine's Day Update

Holy macaroni! I actually finished some of those Anima Tactics minis. Four of the six are "in the can" so to speak. Have some pictures... keep in mind I suck at eyes and my miserable photography skillz.

The undead hound was inspired  my own dog, Flash

I'm supposed to get in a game of either Shipwreck or MegaBlitz on Sunday with James. It it ends up being MegaBlitz, it'll be a first foray into that for both of us. He's put together some "Case Yellow" forces over the last few months that have yet to see the tabletop. I ordered some Soviet and US Navy ships today for Shipwreck. I haven't done any in a while and really do enjoy them. Be well!

Balancing Act!

As model builders, we've all been there. Assembling some cockamamie-action-pose heroic model that looks awesome on the packaging and manufacturer's website. Then, with three fingers super-glued together, you are contemplating either:
1) Pitching the damn thing across the room
or
2) Using the bits as base decorations for other models

The other thing going through your mind, or perhaps out of your mouth is "why is superglue so damn good at bonding fingers instantly but utterly refuses to stick this %&!#@ wing to the shoulder of the pegasus?"

After a few score of these situations, you begin looking for new solutions.

I treated myself to some more Anima Tactics minis, this time Black Sun baddies. One of the models is a winged undead thing which eventually should look like this:

It comes in four pieces. A base, a tail, a torso / legs and a chest / head / wings. Here, look at the next picture

The red lines indicate where the bits are joined. I started from the bottom and went up which left me sticking the chest / head / wings to the rest of it this morning. All I have to say is hooray for Duplo and Gorilla Glue+Loctite.

Those are arcade game tokens under it on the base to add weight to the bottom of the model. I think I'm going to let it sit like this for at least another hour or two.

The rest of the gang was much simpler to assemble

Onward to spackling the bases!

"Recently" Painted

Some of this isn't terribly recent, I've just been bad about taking pictures and posting them.

First up are some more Anima Tactics figures:

These minis tend to show a lot more "skin" than I normally paint. 

Next is some of the contents of the new Dystopian Wars EoBS box set. The new War Gyro and mini squid robots. I haven't finished the cruisers yet.

Here's the new one next to the "old" one I finished up a few months ago.

And now the fun stuff... for me anyway. Some MSH 6mm that took C-in-C 6 weeks to ship. Actually most of the infantry is Heroics and Ros and has been finished for a while, I've been waiting on the support weapons and trucks to base and finish them. Two battalions of USMC infantry! I've purposefully left the bases rather sparse so I can add magnetized Amtracks later if desired, or leave them as foot infantry for heliborne insertion.

The BC and AT platoons have magnetized HMMVWs as seen above. Each battalion also includes three platoons (one per company) armed with Stingers. These battalions should be tough as nails in MSH.