Hey, remember when I last posted, and said I had two things to post about so I'd split it in two? No? Well, that's not really surprising since it was more than a month ago. Whoops.
Since I never got that posted, and since then I've painted some stuff on a third project, and it's now a new year, I'll abandon my original plans and sort of smush everything together as one. This gives me some chance to clear the backlog and start afresh, staying on top of things this time.
The Hobbit Goblins
Right, first things first. In our gaming group, we had a brief flurry of interest in the new version of the Games Workshop Middle Earth Battle Game (I think it's called that, or something like it anyway (if only I was on the internet and could look this up)). |
| Five goblins! |
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| A further five goblins! |
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| Surprise! Five more goblins! |
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| All together now |
In the event, I enjoyed painting these models more than I expected to. They're single pose plastics, which normally I don't like, but it had the advantage of making it much quicker for me to get stuck in to painting. They're reasonably detailed, which I didn't really spot looking at the bare sprues - slapping on some paint showed things up so they were nicer models than I'd thought. It also helped that I'd deliberately worked out a very simple paint scheme for these using Vallejo paints:
Skin - German Camo Beige
Loincloths, straps, weapon handles and pupils - German Camo Black Brown
Hair - Neutral Grey
Bone, eyes, teeth and highlights in hair - Sky Grey
Metal - Gunmetal Grey
I gave the whole thing a brown wash too to pick out detail, and it worked well enough. In fact I was all set to blast through the whole set, but then...
15mm WW2 Terrain
Every year at Christmas we do a big game with the four of us taking part, over the course of a day. This year we opted for the Berlin scenario from the Bolt Action Tank War supplement. We played this at a somewhat insane 9600 points per side, which came about as we played in 15mm and used our Flames of War forces.I'd had some urban terrain at this scale kicking around for something like 15 years (there's a scary thought) so I figured it was now or never and dove into it. This was clearly a stupid thing to do as it was a lot of effort and it'll probably be a very long time for I use any of that stuff again, but it was nice to paint up something I'd been holding on to for ages. Plus, you never know, we might start that 15mm Tank War campaign we've been talking about forever.
In the spirit of getting this post actually published, I'll go without photos of the terrain specifically for now, but I took a few pictures of the game itself. As might be expected, this was carnage - even on an 8 foot table and at 15mm, we had so many tanks that a lot of bunching up took place, and both sides had rocket launchers available as well as lots and lots of guns. Kieron wrote up a proper report on the game so you should read that, but it was an amusing affair which is the main thing. We also won, which is of course excellent.
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| The table, before things kicked off |
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| Pete doing some planning "Hmmm, that seems like a good hill to have lots of my tanks explode on" |
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| The master of disguise maintains his low profile |
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| A shot from early in the game. The lines didn't move much as time went on, but lots of vehicles exploded |
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| The middle ground - pretty much everything in this section was wiped out by the end |
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| The end of the game! A victory for the Germans, but a costly one... |
Wrapping Up the Year
Okay then, the important stuff! I've been diligently tracking numbers of models I've acquired against those I've painted, and for 2018 that's worked out really well. Totalling up the stuff I've painted recently and the 4 boats I got on the covers of Wargames Illustrated, I end up at:Acquired: 34
Painted: 135
That seems pretty conclusive! I think the main reason for success here is just that I've bought such ridiculous mountains of obviously surplus models in previous years. I certainly took on new projects - Middle Earth, Post Apocalypse Top Gear - but generally I could do these with models that I already had so didn't need to buy more.
I'm going to try and keep that up for 2019. There are things I want to do - 7TV Apocalypse should arrive in the next couple of months, and there's a Pulp day for 7TV in the summer - but with the models I have on the way already and the bountiful lead pile in my garage, I ought to be able to address those without gaining too much more new stuff.
One thing I definitely want to do more of in 2019 is posting here. It's a bit of a weird one (I don't think anyone really reads this) but keeping a tally of what I've done and roughly when I did it is interesting and a bit of a motivator - it's nice to have things to write about. I might go back to an earlier version of things, and try for monthly updates - recently I've been hanging on to try to theme posts together, normally with the result that I don't post anything at all.
I'm going to have a think about projects, too. I can think of several that I'd like to do, some much easier than others. I'm going to try to figure out a sensible way of approaching things (and then almost certainly not actually do that) as it would be nice to finally get some things finished off.
Right, that's it. This post was pretty rambling and unfocused, but I've cleared the decks - so roll on 2019, let's get stuff done!
Happy New Year everyone!
