Painted - 6mm Pontic Thureophoroi

 As part of my January painting challenge I have been painting some 6mm Pontic Thureophoroi, which is medium infantry. Most days I have been painting more than the 15 minutes a day I am required to. It was, however, very nice to have some days where I just painted the minimum 15 minutes, and still felt I made some progress.

I paint 8 strips at a time which corresponded to 2 bases. Normally I would do such a batch on an evening.

They are painted with GWs contrast paints apart from some small metal paint on the spear tips and on the shields. Although I look for inspiration various places I just try different colours and hope it looks good. I finished a total of 8 bases which is 4 units in Sword & Spear. Afterwards I actually realized that on the Spanish and Roman medium infantry bases I only had 12 figures on, so I made a small mistake putting 16 figures on these bases, but it doesn't matter that much.

Next on the painting cue is some Pontic skirmishers.

Game - Chaos vs. Humans - Blood Bowl

 The other day my brother and I had another league game of Blood Bowl. I had recently painted my chaos team, so both teams was painted, which is always a nice thing to see.

Both teams were somewhat hurt by casualties and had to use journey(beast)men. Chaos was on the receiving end and immediately began a bloody way towards the end zone. The minotaur managed to blitz the ogre and knock him out.

First half ended with 1-0 lead to chaos. It was a bloody half with 4 casualties in all, and even 2 human players knocked out.

The humans came close to scoring when a brave catcher almost picked up the ball in the end zone, but unfortunately failed.

The beastmen picked up the ball and started moving across the field. The brave human catcher desperately tried to steal the ball but with no success. The rest of the human team was being in check by the chaos players.

The depleted humans team was unable to prevent another goal to the chaos team, who took hime a rather secure 2-0 victory.

Painting - January Painting Challenge

My friend, Steffen, and I have started a painting challenge in January, inspired by a Youtube video by Storm of Steel Wargaming(who I believe was inspired by another video). The challenge is to have painting session of at least 15 minutes every day in January.

For me the purpose of the challenge is not that I expect to paint 15 minutes every day for here on and forth. By rather to acknowledge that in periods where my painting motivation is very low, just doing 15 minutes some days will still mean something. I suspect we all have periods where we don't paint as much as we would like to. And then, rather than get too disillusioned about not painting, simply doing as little as 15 minutes worth of painting once awhile will hopefully help the situation somewhat.

I have no specific painting project I'm going to work on during January. Rather I will just paint what I feel like. So this first week I started of with 2 bases of 6mm Pontic cavalry. At the moment my painting motivation is rather good so I will most likely paint more than 15 minutes a day. But I have had a couple days with only about 20 minutes of painting, and it actually felt rather good, that I didn't feel like I needed to do more.

First day of work. Just painted the horses.

Second day I added a bit more colours.

Third day they were done apart from the base.

Next couple of days I worked another 3 strips.

On the sixth day I was done with both bases.

It has been a good experience, and I really can feel the appreciation of not thinking I need to paint a lot more and for longer time. So it will be interesting to see how much I get painted in January.

Game - Middle-Earth - Elves/Rohan vs Moria

 Last night I played a game of Middle-Earth against Chris and his Moria goblins and their friends. We played 600 pts.

I had 3 warbands, one with Legolas and and 14 warriors from the Halls of Thranduil list, one with a mounted Rohan captain and 12 Riders of Rohan, and one with Gamling and 10 warriors of Rohan. I don't have that many different troop choices for my LotR armies, so that is why it is all common troops in this list.

Chris had 2 warbands, one led by a Balrog and one led by a goblin captain. He also had a cave troll and about 25-30 goblins.

Deployment. Chris put the Balrog in the middle, and the goblin captain with the cave troll on his right flank. I tried to spread out my army as much as possible to outflank the goblins and avoid the Balrog as much as possible.

We played the Clash at Moonlight scenario, which although randomly selected seemed very appropriate. This meant that shooting ranges were only up to 12" which hampered me severely, but shootings attacks also had +1 to wound which was very nice.

I really didn't know what to do against the great Balrog, so I quickly decided to just go for his goblin friends instead. One of the Rohan warriors did, however, get a lucky hit quite early, which actually earned me a victory point.

When my Rohan riders stormed up my right flank, Chris decided to move the Balrog and most of his army towards that threat. This left my elves on the right flank a bit out of the battle, but at least there were a few goblins they could kill on their flank (apart from one lucky little bastard who somehow survived in combat against 2 elves most of the battle).

I had hoped to make a dashing cavalry strike on my right but when the Balrog turned towards the Rohan riders they quickly changed their minds and tried to get away from the monster.

The Balrog did manage to catch and slay a handful of riders, but the rest managed to get away, while the rest of my army killed a bunch of goblins.

The Elves cleared my right flank and much of the center (apart from that little bugger seen in the left corner here).

The Balrog got ready to charge the center of my army, but it was too late. I had killed almost all the goblins and so the Moria army was forced to retreat.

A fun game were I fought hard to avoid or limit the Balrog's killing ability. I had quite a lot of shooting in my army, so I think it was lucky that we played a scenario that limited it. Legolas did very little in the game other than kill a few goblins. The heroes of the game were those unfortunate Rohan riders and warriors that had to give their lives to ensure the rest of the army could go goblin hunting 😀

Always fun to play against Chris, and I am sure he's fine tuning his army and tactics for our next game.

My 2020 in Wargaming

 

Well, that was a strange year. I actually started the year being off work and ill due to stress. It happened because I had a very poor team leader, and fortunately that meant I was able to get a reasonable resignation settlement, so I could resign immediately but still get paid for 5 more months.

When I got sick with stress in december, my doctor told me to focus on the things that made me happy. In December I decided to focus on my family in time of Christmas. After New Year I started thinking about my hobby. Because of the problems I had had at work I hadn’t been playing or working with miniatures for over a year. I had actually somewhat given up on it. But now times had changed and I felt drawn to the hobby again.

Virtual game of Black Powder ACW

I reached out to old playing friends and began to slowly bring it all back to life again. First step was buying Blood Bowl and beginning to play a weekly game against my brother.

And so it begins...

During the spring I met some new local players that meant I started looking at playing Warhammer 40.000, which I had not played for over 20 years. I have always loved the 40K universe, and had been regularly playing Epic Armageddon, but I had stayed clear of Warhammer 40.000 because I did not like the style of the game, and because I did not like to paint 28mm models. Then I discovered GWs new line of contrast paints, and after having painted a Blood Bowl team I realised that this was great for my simple painting “style”.

I still didn’t like the style of Warhammer 40.000 because I think it looks stupid and unrealistic with too many models on the board, so I went for smaller and more skirmish like games. This, naturally, also had the advantage of not needing to paint too many figures.

Starting small!?!

Around summer the new local players I had met mentioned that they also played GWs Middle-Earth. I had tried this shortly when it was called Lord of the Rings SBG and had amassed a large collection of mostly plastic models when I tried getting into War of the Ring. So I was quickly ready to jump into that game and bought the rules and army books. So that was the game I played mostly during the summer months.

Imrahil facing off against Saruman

By autumn things changed a bit. Firstly Covid-19 did slow things down a bit, and by October I had also started in a new job which also diverted some of my time and attention. Nevertheless, I still felt good about the hobby. My oldest gaming friend, Steffen, and I was talking about playing Chain of Command again, so I was preparing to paint more miniatures to those armies. Unfortunately, Steffen doesn’t live so close to me, so we don’t get to play as often as we would like, but when we do, we often get a full day’s worth of playing. And when we don’t play we often talk about projects, games, miniatures, history and all other hobby related things, which is actually very dangerous as we are very prone to starting new projects. This year we have had 3 playing days, where we have played SAGA, War of the Ring, Chain of Command (including starting a campaign) and What a Tanker.

Not painted, but a fun War of the Ring game nonetheless

So all in all it has been a good year in gaming. I have played a fair number of games, although I always dream of more. I have played a variety of different game systems, although again I always dream of more. I have probably painted more than I ever have before in one year. My collection of miniatures and books have grown, but I have also managed to sell off things I didn’t need.

Command & Colors: Napoleonics in solo mode

I’m looking forward to 2021 where hopefully Covid-19 will no longer impact our lives and open up for more gaming. I have plenty of projects, both ongoing and new, I'm eager to get into. I will not make any plans for projects I need to finish. Instead I will allow myself to work on what I find interesting, even if that means I jump from project to project. I will of course endeavour to try and finish projects but we’ll see how it all goes.

Epic Armageddon: Eldar vs. Orcs

My 2020 painting year

 

As I have mentioned several times on the blog, painting is not my strong side. For several years, particularly when I mostly played Warhammer Fantasy Battle, my group and I would often play with unpainted miniatures. However, the last few years I have tried to focus more on painting since it just is more satisfying playing with painted miniatures and on nice terrain.

My style of painting has always been very simple, and it is even more evident when I paint the smaller scales of 6mm, 10mm and 15mm. Basically I just spray a dominant base colour, do a few details, then a wash and finally tufts and flock on the bases. It works perfect for me, just don’t look too close.

Human Blood Bowl team

With the coming of GWs contrast paints I suddenly even found it easier to paint 28mm. It is still as simplistic as with the smaller scales, and you should not look too close, but very fine tabletop standard for my part. And most important of all it actually makes me paint.

Here is my painting statistics for 2020:

28mm: 164

Infantry: 134

Cavalry: 13

Large Inf.: 10

Monsters/Walkers: 6

Vehicles: 1

Undead Blood Bowl team: 14 minis (2 Mummies, 2 Wights, 2 Ghouls, 4 Zombies, 4 Skeletons)

Humans Blood Bowl team: 13 minis (2 Throwers, 2 Catchers, 2 Blitzers, 6 Linemen, 1 Ogre)

Chaos Blood Bowl team: 13 minis (1 Minotaur, 4 Chaos Blockers, 8 Beastmen)

Eldar 40K: 5 Wraithguards, 1 War Walker, 1 Wraithlord, 2 Farseers, 5 Dark Reapers (inkl. Exarch), 2 Warlocks, 5 Dire Avengers (inkl. Exarch), 10 Guardians + heavy weapon

Tyranid 40K:  16 Genestealers, 12 Termagants, 1 Broodlord, 12 Hormagaunts 10 Gargoyles, 1 Trygon, 2 Carnifex, 1 Hive Tyrant

Chaos 40K: 2 Obliterators, 1 Greater Possessed, 1 Champion

Adeptus Mechanicus 40K: 5 Skitarii Vanguards, 5 Skitarii Rangers, Tech-Priest Dominus, Onager Dunecrawler

SAGA Normans: 13 Cavalry, 8 Crossbowmen

15mm: 76

Infantry: 59

Vehicles/Tanks: 13

Guns: 4

WW2 late war Germans: 17 LMG crew, 19 riflemen, 2 sniper crew, 4 Panzerschreck crew, 8 leaders, 9 Engineers, 3 Sd Kfz 221, 3 Sd Kfz 222, 3 Pak 38, 1 Pak 40, 1 7.5cm IG.18 infantry gun, 4 Schwimmwagens, 3 Panzer IV H

6mm Sci-fi: 32

Infantry stands: 4

Vehicles: 23

War Engines: 5

Imperial Guard Epic: 3 Stormblades, 2 Stormhammers, 6 Basilisks, 3 Medusas, 3 Salamanders, 3 Salamander Command vehicles

Eldar: 5 Falcons, 3 Night Spinners, 2 Dire Avengers, 2 Howling Banshees

6mm Historical: 13 bases

Infantry baser: 9

Cavalry baser: 4

Pontic: 9 bases Pikemen (144 figs), 2 bases Cataphracts (18 figs), 2 bases Horse Archers (9 figs)

 

Other: 8

Objectives: 8 Tyranid infestation nodes/objectives

 

It is certainly one of the most productive painting years of my gaming life, if not the most. Now even as impressive as that is (for me) there is one important disclaimer. Most of the miniatures I painted this year are purchased this year. So my unpainted pile (of shame) has not fallen at all, since I have also purchased several miniatures that have not reached the painting station yet. Still, it is definitely on the right path. It should also be noted that I have bought several already painted figures from various Facebook groups so my painted collection is also growing in that way.

Tau Epic Armageddon army for a games day in July

I will start off 2021 with a sort of painting challenge together with my regular gaming friend, Steffen. Inspired by a video about painting 15 minutes a day from the Youtube channel Storm of Steel Wargaming, we have set a goal of trying to paint at least 15 minutes every day in January. Both Steffen and I have large unpainted collections so we are always trying to find ways to motivate us to paint. We are both very excited to see how much we will paint in January.

Painted - Chaos Blood Bowl team

 The very last thing I have painted in 2020 is a Chaos Blood Bowl team. I was eager to get them done to finish of a rather good painting year (probably the best thing to be said about 2020).

I have used my standard simple painting style with a mix of GW contrast paints and Copper metallic for the armour. I probably should have done more with bases, but I got a bit lazy. The most important thing, however, is that they are painted and ready for a game.

8 Beastmen

4 Chaos Blockers

The Minotaur

Group photos

Black Friday (part one)

For the first time ever I had some extra funds to use for my hobby as we approached the time of Black Friday. So with the coming Brexit in mind I decided to splash out and make several purchases. So I scoured the webshops to look for interesting offers. 

I decided for a few guidelines to help me focus my purchasing, since I'm generally easily tempted to get into a lot of different things. First of all I needed to be wary of not getting too many new miniatures, since I still have a lot I need to paint. This meant I focused mostly on terrain, books and pre-painted stuff if possible. Secondly I should not start new projects but concentrate on existing ones. And thirdly, due to brexit, I should only look at English webshops. Now, as it were, I did fail on all 3 points, but more on that in part two.

Because of covid-19 and christmas season the items arrived very piecemeal and there is still some stuff I haven't gotten yet. Also some things I have ordered with others, so those items are also missing. But here's a photo of all I have gotten so far.

As can be seen it is quite a diverse collection. The mdf buildings are for my 15mm WW2, so primarily aimed Chain of Command. The desert pillars from Battlefield in Box I got because they were rather cheap. The SAGA box is for a late roman warband, so my Normans have someone to fight against. The LotR LCG boxes I collect whenever I see some good offers and availability. I collect books as much as miniatures so I always purchase those whenever possible. These purchases should demonstrate that I reach wide in my hobby 😀