Ready for Kick Off

I laid out some targets for the year in my last post, and I can now report some progress on the first of them. The Squig-fuelled Stabbers, my goblin Blood Bowl team, are now ready for the start of the club's 2013 Blood Bowl season.

The team photo - take a good look while they're all still standing...

I went for goblins this year because I've used human and chaos teams for as long as I've been playing Blood Bowl (which, now I think about it, is about 20 years now!) and it was high time for a change. With goblins expectations will be low, but I'm hoping to overcome as many opponents as possible with a high silliness factor...

Apparently, both of these count as "cheating" for some reason!

I did consider a starting team of just normal goblins and eight re-rolls, but that limits some of the silly things I can do with secret weapons and trolls. Kieron was kind enough to donate a fanatic, a looney and two trolls, so all of those have made it into the starting team, along with ten normal goblins.

The trolls as they came from Kieron...

The trolls can fling goblins downfield (or at opposing players, heh heh heh), and are the most expensive players available to the team, so I've gone for two to start with since they'd be hard to save up for later. These were already painted when I got them from Kieron, but I wanted to give them blue skin to make them stand out even more from the little guys so they got repainted. I might normally strip them first, but these are pretty old models without much detail and were also varnished, so I decided it would be easier to just paint over the top. Never overestimate the power of laziness.

...and now with my new paint job

The colour scheme is based on that of the Sheffield Sabres, one of the real-life American football teams my brother coaches, although it ocurred to me the other day that it's also the same colour scheme as used by the Gotham Rogues in the Dark Knight Rises. Incidentally, how come there don't seem to be any fans of the Rapid City Monuments in the stadium in that film? Everyone in the crowd is in black and yellow. Anyway.

The original pogoer paint job

So that I have models available to replace the inevitable casualties, I've painted a couple of spare goblins as well as a pogoer and bombardier. I've painted the pogoer before - it belonged to my brother many years ago and I painted it for him then. I think I've managed to improve on it this time round!

The modern paint scheme on the pogoer, next to the bombardier

I realised when I came to paint this team that it's well over a decade since I last painted greenskins - I used to just slap a coat of goblin green on them, cover it (and, more often than not, any nearby soft furnishings) with orc flesh wash and hope for the best. That seems a bit half-hearted now though, so for these models I used the same colours as for my US Armor for Flames of War, but with more of the lighter highlights. It seems to have worked out, if I do say so myself.

Finally then, some numbers. I wanted to paint 22 models for this team - a full 16 goblins, 4 secret weapons and 2 trolls. I still have 4 standard goblins left, and the eagle eyed amongst you may have spotted that the number is missing from the base of the pogoer. So, although I probably won't use all 16 goblins I would like to have one painted and numbered for every position, and while I've got some momentum going I'm going to carry on and get the last few models done. At the moment I've got 17.5 out of 22 done - there'll be some rejoicing when I get that up to the full 22!

This year's losers!

2013's Hobby Resolutions

I said at the end of my last post that I'd set some new targets for 2013. The more astute amongst you will have noticed that almost two weeks have elapsed since then, but I'm claiming that this is actually a good thing, as I've been focused like a laser on getting my goblin Blood Bowl team ready for the start of the club's 2013 Blood Bowl season on the 3rd of February.

Just for you though, I've found some time to get back to blogging, so I thought I'd share with you my plans for the year.


I've decided to make these more measurable than the list for 2012 was - while it's nice to have some aspirational goals in the list, having clear objectives that I can count progress towards is going to be helpful in getting me motivated. It'll also give a handy way of providing a score card in my blog as I achieve things!

This means that I really have only one resolution for 2013: "I will stick to the list". Hopefully people will read this and complain if I wander off the list, to provide even more "motivation". Or "intimidation", as some people call it.

Without further ado, let's have a look at the list of goals then...

1) Get the Squig-fuelled Stabbers ready for the 3rd of February
Pretty simple one, this. The Squig-fuelled Stabbers are my goblin Blood Bowl team, based very loosely on one of my brother's real-life American football teams, the Sheffield Sabres.

This is a pretty good approximation of the team colours, actually

I normally get frustrated during Blood Bowl leagues that my ability to purchase new players is limited by the models I have available, so I've countered that this time by converting enough models to cover every possible combination of players on a gobbo team (not counting the star players, which I never really like using much anyway). That gives me 16 Goblins, 2 trolls, and 4 secret weapons.

2) Play a four player game of Flashbang at the club
Right, I still want to drive forward with Flashbang, a set of rules for small modern actions that I wrote myself. I have an idea for a multiplayer scenarion for this that I'd like to run at the club, so job one will be to work out what I need to get painted for that.

This is a flashbang, you see. Until it detonates. Then you can't see anything.

3) Paint a unit of my 28mm Napoleonics
These are starting to get embarrassing! I have a big stack of Napoleonic British Highlanders that I want to paint but have never worked up the energy for. I'm going to aim to get a single unit done first, so I'll decide which one and how many models that is as a first step.

Mine are unlikely to look quite like this.

4) Paint all my terrain!
I've built up a modest collection of terrain, but most of it is still unpainted (some of it not even assembled) so it's not of any use at all right now. This is the year where that changes! First job is going to be to figure out what I've got and what would be most useful to paint.

Couldn't think of a picture that suggested "unpainted terrain", so here's a photo of some giraffes.

 5) Paint enough Germans to give me two effective Flames of War forces
Or two forces that can sensibly fight each other, in fact. I've always favoured the US for Flames of War, but this means that when I do use my Germans for a game, the lack of painted support options pretty much condemns them to a loss every time. I want to turn that around so I'll work out what I need to paint to give me some options for different German forces.

At the moment, my version of this table would be a bit one-sided.

6) Sort out a force using the Nuts! book for Flames of War
I got Nuts! for Christmas, and I really want to do Easy Company (truth be told I've always thought of my US Airborne as Easy Company anyway). So, I'll work out a force from the new book, and paint up the bits that I don't have ready yet.

Nothing to do with this, of course.

I think that gives me a fair bit to go on. I'm not sure how feasible it is to get it all done in a year yet, as my painting time is much reduced now that I'm a dad and I'm supposed to be all responsible and stuff. Watch this space though, part one of following the list is to work out how many models each of these goals would take, and start keeping a tally. Public accountability, that's the way (to make sure everyone can see that I've failed...)!

Review of 2012

No posts since November, eh? Whoops. I didn't mean to let that happen, but Christmas turned out to be hard work! Hopefully, normal service can now resume.

So let's kick off with the post I wanted to write in December, but obviously didn't. At the start of last year I wrote some hobby resolutions, so I should see how well I managed to keep them before I set some more for this year.

I'll take them one by one and see what happened...

1) I will get Flashbang to "Triples Standard"
Well, that certainly didn't happen. I did do some terrain painting for Flashbang, but then got a bit sidetracked and moved onto other things. I'd still like to do this, but as an intermediate step I have some plans for a multiplayer Flashbang scenario I'd like to get ready for a club night.


2) I will only buy models and books when I need them (or when faced with an offer I can't refuse!)
I think I did fairly well here. Admittedly I came away from Vapnartak and Triples with a few goodies, but I think all of those either fell in the categories of "things I needed" or "offers I couldn't refuse". I went a bit wrong by buying some "not-predators" which I intended to turn into a faction for Flashbang but never actually did anything with.
To be fair though, what with the house move and baby and everything, I didn't really get much chance to make any truly foolish purchases. I'm going to try to stay sensible this year, but we'll see what happens as I start to get a bit more freedom back.

3) I won't be afraid to spend money on wargaming
Difficult one, this. I can't really say whether I was afraid to spend money on my hobby or not, because I didn't have any to spare this year! I don't think I stopped myself buying anything because of the cost, but I did shy away from quite a few things because I didn't expect to have time to get them ready to use, which is a shame. Unfortunately, time is one thing I'm not expecting to have much of in 2013, so this situation isn't likely to get much better this year.

4) I will get my Napoleonics started!
That happened even less than the Flashbang thing. I did play a game of General du Brigade at the club over Christmas though, which has given me a bit of inspiration to finally get on with this. I think I'm going to have to tackle them in small stages, but more on that later.

5) I will prepare at least two armies for each of the games I play
I still like this idea, and I didn't do terribly at it - I now have a second painted force for Saga in the form of my Normans. I really do want to use these to try to lure in some muggles into trying some wargames, so we'll see if I that works in due course.

6) I will build up a collection of terrain
This is at least underway - I've certainly bought more terrain over the last year, but a lot of it isn't ready for the table yet. I do now have space to play (smaller) games at home though, so there's more incentive to get this done, and I'd like to be able to take terrain to the club as well. The only terrain I did any work on last year was for Flashbang, so it would be good to spread my wings a bit.

7) I will keep blogging and setting targets
This one I carried on with as much as possible, but I have to admit that I stopped setting myself targets in the blog as the "Tale of Gamers" project died down. Having the targets was a nice incentive, so I'm going to go back to that, although I might approach it in a slightly different way - I'm going to have a think about that.

Overall then, hardly an unqualified success - I think there's about four out of seven that I at least did something towards. I think I was being a bit overambitious when I set these, but maybe that's a good thing. In any case, hopefully I can do better for 2013 - starting with some better resolutions, which will be posted here as soon as I decide what they are. Stay tuned!

Kasserine: Passed

Remember when this blog used to be about painting? Well, me too, and it's high time it went back there, however briefly. As I still have plenty of "new dad" duties, I don't get to spend as much time at the paint station as I used to, but dogged persistence has eventually paid off, and I've managed to get my Flames of War US Armored Rifle Platoon ready for the table.

The platoon arrayed in all its many-weaponed glory

This really is a pretty spectacular platoon option for the yanks in Mid War. 255 points gets you 5 half tracks, 5 stands of riflemen, a commander, a mortar, 2 machine guns, 4 bazookas and the choice of an anti-tank gun or another bazooka.

Throw enough men at the enemy and eventually they will go away!

With 14 teams on the table when dismounted, the platoon is big enough to spread out and cover a wide area of the table, or can obviously jump in the half tracks and quickly redeploy - with its own AA machine guns to protect it from marauding aircraft or infantry as it goes.

The M3 37mm anti-tank gun

With a full loadout of bazookas, the armored rifles are a fearsome prospect for enemy tanks - they can scramble all over them, fire shots into side armour, and then assault with the means to destroy tanks, or they can sit back in their foxholes, fairly safe from enemy firepower, and repel assaults from tanks as they come in.

The M3 gun has a high rate of fire and decent range, but isn't that powerful against armour, so for me it's a toss up whether to include it or swap for a bazooka at the start of the game. It would depend on whether I was planning to assault with the platoon I would think, in that case an extra bazooka would be very handy.

If the enemy gives up on the tanks and tries sending in infantry, there are two machine guns to start with, with the option to dismount the guns from the half tracks and swap the rifles for another five machine guns. 

In case any infantry get ideas, this platoon has its own machine guns

I found these fairly simple to paint, and they would have been pretty quick if I'd had a few hours to spend on them in one go. All I did really was follow the guide on the Flames of War site for the base colours, and use an ink wash. To my eyes, flames of war infantry models are a bit small to do anything else with, so I save the more in depth techniques for the armour. I quite like how the bases have come out though (flat brown followed by drybrushing english uniform and then usa tan earth), so at some point I'll go back to my Airborne and make their bases match these.

I do still need to paint the dismounted machine guns - at the moment I don't have that option as they are still in the blister pack, so I've dealt with that by cunningly arranging to fight against German armour!

And with that, I've segued nicely into a quick battle report from this weekend's game at the club.

Kieron of Cheaphammer fame is running the campaign and is also my teammate on the US side. As I went into Sunday's game against Andy, Kieron had just lost a game against Andy the week before, and so I had the opportunity to be Patton to Kieron's Fredendall...

I was using the US Armored Company I've been putting together, and Andy had his panzers. We rolled Cauldron for scenario, and since we both had tank companies rolled to see who would attack. With Andy attacking, I was left with defence. Since "at least half" of my platoons had to be in delayed reserve, I had to pick two from the 5 I had available. I chose the armored rifles, which I deployed without the half tracks, and the security section from the tank destroyer platoon, which I placed in immediate ambush.

Andy deployed some panzer IV's, but my attention was immediately drawn to the Tiger on his left flank. I knew it would be in his army somewhere, since it had given Kieron so much trouble the previous week, and so I placed the ambushing security section as close to the Tiger as I could, knowing that the scenario gave me the first time and a chance to take out the Tiger before it mauled my other tanks. This was especially important as nothing else in my army had much chance of hurting the Tiger at long range.

The "entirely suprising" trap was sprung in my first turn, and the M10's appeared and drove around the flank of the Tiger - I decided to sacrifice rate of fire for a greater chance of hurting the big cat with shots that hit. The M10's let rip, and... managed to bail the Tiger. Oh dear.

I wasn't too worried given the low rate of fire of a Tiger. Surely my M10's would be reasonably safe, until Andy brought on his reserve Panzer III's immediately next to them. His first round of shooting destroyed one of the M10's and bailed two others, leaving me with a single operational tank destroyer. I had more luck in my second turn and was able to destroy the Tiger (without which I think I might have started to get into some trouble) before the Panzers destroyed the entire tank destroyer platoon in return.

Meanwhile, back in my deployment area, the sheer number of teams in the armored rifle platoon and the short distance between the objectives I had to defend (thanks to the smaller deployment area in the Cauldron) meant I was able to use the single platoon to hold both objectives with dug in infantry, bristling with bazookas and an anti-tank gun. Since Andy needed to take the objectives he threw his tanks at them, but wasn't able to winkle them out - in the whole game they only lost a single rifle team, in an assault.

Andy got a platoon of reserves in each of his first two turns so soon had his whole army converging on my dug in infantry. Oddly, this actually helped me out as it meant that when my own reserves finally arrived they came behind Andy's tanks and he was forced to choose between engaging them and continuing his attack.

Also, having my reserves off-table for so long meant that my air support could keep hunting stray tanks while Andy had to call off his aircraft as they were too close to his attacking forces, and he had no luck at all in shooting down my planes.

All of this combined to allow me to destroy quite a lot of panzers (many of them in defensive fire as they assaulted the armored rifle platoon), including Andy's commander, and eventually forced the company to break. A 5-2 win to the Americans, giving me bragging rights the next time I see Kieron I think!

Wargames - A Guide For Gift Buyers

When Christmas or my birthday roll around, Mrs Matt complains that she'd like to be able to get me surprise wargames presents, but doesn't know enough about the hobby to know what to get. I wrote this guide to try to make it easier, so I've posted it here in case anyone else would like to increase their odds of getting something really useful for Christmas...

What's all this then?

Well, as often happens at this time of year, we're approaching Christmas. I know I write a list of things I want every year, but if anyone wants to buy me a surprise present related to my hobby, they tend to struggle because it's a bit complicated. So this is an attempt to explain what I do with all my spare time and money in layman's terms, so hopefully you might feel a bit more confident about buying me stuff.

Hang on, that just sounds like a veiled way of saying "please buy me more stuff".

I was hoping you wouldn't notice that.

Fine. Go on then, what are wargames all about?

I'll assume that you don't know anything about it at all. So, in simple terms, the hobby is about fighting battles with model soldiers on a tabletop. We use tape measures for things like how far things can move and shoot, and the effects of what we're doing are decided by rolling dice. We tend to have model scenery on the table as well to give us something to fight over.
To make games "fair", we normally use a points system to decide which models we can use - so I might have to choose between 30 men on their own, or 10 men and a tank, for example. That way both players can use different armies but both have a decent chance of winning. We don't just use all the models we have every time.

That sounds fairly straightforward. Why do you need so many models then?

Well, there are a few reasons I like to have more and more things!
First of all, the more models I have, the bigger the games I can play. If 10 men and a tank cost 100 points, then if I have 20 men and 2 tanks, I can play a 200 point game (so long as my opponent has 200 points' worth of models too).
Second, I like to fight battles from a wide range of different time periods - one week I might be playing a World War 2 game, the next a game set in 1066. I need different models for each period.
Third, if I have models for more than one side I can use either in my games, so I have models for the Americans and Germans in WW2, for example.

Alright. So if I wanted to buy you some models, what do I need to know?

Well first of all, don't worry too much. Whatever models I ended up with I'd be able to find a use for them, even if they become the start of a new army!
However, if you want to buy something to fit in with what I already have, you really need to know two things - the period and the scale.
The period is the easy bit - that's the point in history (or the future for science fiction!) that the models are meant for.
Scale is the size of the models. Wargames model scales are listed in mm - it's supposed to be the distance between the feet and the eyes of a man standing upright in that scale. Typical scales are 15mm or 28mm, and I use different scales for different games.
There's a list of periods I play and the scales I play them in at the end of this guide.

Ok, I think that makes sense. I've seen you with lots of books as well though. What are they for?

Remember earlier I said that I need different models for different periods? Well, the same thing is true for the rules used to play the games. Warfare in 1066 was very different from WW2, so we use different rules for different periods as well.
For example, for WW2 I play a game called Flames of War, but for Vikings I play a game called Saga. Each has its own book.
On top of that, there are books for each game which list the points values for different armies, and give scenarios to play, and things like that.

What do I need to know about buying you books then?

Well that's a bit harder. New rulebooks are always welcome but they tend to be pricey - a lot of them are big hardbacks at around £30. The supplement books are cheaper, but I need to have the main rulebook for that game as well. Really you need to know whether the book you're buying is a complete set of rules or not - they normally mention in the blurb whether a copy of something else is needed to use them.

Ok, so models or books. Is there anything else that you'd like?

Why, yes there is! I mentioned earlier that we have model scenery on the table when we play. Well, that needs to match the scale and period of the game as well (you might fight over a viking longhouse in 1066, but in WW2 that wouldn't make sense) and it's always useful to have more scenery.
It's also called "terrain", if you're doing a Google search. The same periods and scales that I use models for are what I can use terrain for.
I also need to transport my models to games. In the past I've used whatever boxes I could lay my hands on, but it's much nicer to use custom made carry cases that are lined with foam to protect the models. Any of these are useful - I have so many models of different sizes and shapes that you really couldn't go wrong getting me a case of some sort.
Finally of course there's painting supplies - paint sets and brushes are always useful. There are more and more things like basing kits and modelling accessories that you can buy now as well, I'd be happy to get that kind of stuff as I can experiment with it when I'm painting.

There's lots of information here, and I'm confused! What if I buy the wrong thing?

You can't buy the wrong thing, not really. I'll have a more immediate use for something that matches up to a game I already play, but wargamers joke about the "butterfly syndrome" - as soon as we see new models or rules or even a film related to a period we don't already play games in, we want to give it a go, normally abandoning a current project for a while as we play with the new thing. If you bought me something completely unrelated to anything I play at the moment, I'd still end up finding a use for it and it would probably cause me to find a new game to play. So don't worry, I'm just happy as long as there are toy soldiers to muck about with!

Then I gave a list of games, periods, factions etc that I play, and some websites that you could buy stuff from. We'll see how well this all works out... 

Why win when you could have a chainsaw?

Work-life balance, to use the kind of neologism that makes certain sectors of society extremely angry, is very important. If you spend all of your time at work dealing with pitiful budgets, unrealistic expectations, arbitrary deadlines and a constant need to be seen to be working as much as actually getting the work done, it's important to be able to relax and do something different in your free time.

In that spirit, here's a blog post about my latest hobby project, so that I can show you all that I've been working on a project that I don't have much money for, unreasonably believe I can make brilliant, and will really need to finish by the end of the year.

January is Blood Bowl season at Wargamers FC, and I wanted to use a new team after years of only humans or chaos to pick from. Since I did fairly well with chaos (supposedly a harder team to use) last time, I decided to make things even harder for myself and go with goblins for the next season. Since I've been saying I was going to do this since the end of the last season, Kieron was kind enough to give me two trolls, so I just needed to get the other positions.

I've built the team from a goblin regiment box, which was easy enough to do. Since one problem that I kept having with my other teams was an inability to buy extra players due to a lack of models, I've made every model that could possibly be a part of the team (so 16 basic goblins, 4 secret weapons, and 2 trolls).

They'll just need painting before January now...

Apologies for the terrible photos below by the way - they were all taken very quickly on my phone. I'll sort out using the proper camera soon. Probably.

A couple of trolls, useful for flinging goblins at the opposition (or occasionally at the end zone if it looks like there might be a chance to score).

A couple of goblins landing badly from being flung!

The "secret" weapons. The pogoer and looney with chainsaw are "proper" blood bowl models, the fanatic is a WFB fanatic and the bombardier is a plastic gobbo with a hand swap and bomb added.

The rest! I have 16 of these, so there should be plenty of spares to cope with the inevitable injuries...

Two years of this nonsense!

I've just noticed that my very first post on this blog was two years ago today!

Just think of what I could have achieved if I'd put the time I've spent writing this gibberish to some sort of worthwhile use.

Still, I think I've come up with some reasonable painting during that time. Some of my favourites have been...

My Republican Romans - I really must play some Impetus again, I like that army! I especially enjoyed putting together the Roman baggage train for them, and I'd like to do some more diorama-style pieces in future.

The Saxons that I painted for Triples 2011 were also fun, and I was happy with how the colour scheme for the bases helped during games of Saga, so I followed on the same scheme for my Normans (although I still need to paint a mount for Alan).

I painted a set of SWAT and criminals for Flashbang, my own set of close-quarters rules which I really do intend to finish and do something with. I also put together some really nice Sarissa buildings for this, which see a lot of action in VBCW as well.

Speaking of VBCW I built a couple of wacky vehicles for that.

In fact the conversions, even though I don't do that many of them, are probably my favourite projects - for example the Steam Powered War Altar which may very well only have seen the table once but is still among my favourite things I've done.

The nice thing about maintaining this blog is that it encourages me to try to make something worthwhile out of what I paint, and to get things finished so I can blog about them. I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that I normally spend the days after posting rocking back and forth, hitting refresh over and over while drinking alone constantly checking for comments, as it's other people's feedback on the things I post that makes me want to get more up. So thanks everyone that's said things on here, especially the two or three that were complimentary!

See you in another two years...