Hobby Progress Week 4 2016

That's another week gone by, how fast they pass. I've not made any progress on the Seraphon discussed in the last post, but I haven't been idle. I decided to finish up a couple of small parts of larger projects before cracking on with the new army, and I converted up a 1st Legion Praetor from the Betrayal at Calth set too.

Project one was to get some models ready to use in a small game. My Dark Angels, as discussed were built mainly in the summer of 2013, before "Basegate", meaning they were all standing pretty on 25mm bases. So although I have built all 107 Astartes for The Feared, I technically only had one completed, as I mentioned on Twitter, that is less than 1% of the Company. Well that's changed, now I have 32 completed. These were the models that preciously were finished, so rather than ditching the (I think) quite nice bases I had, I bought 32mm converter rings from Eccentric Miniatures and was very pleased.

 

With some other characters that's 38 32's

The rest of the Marines are unbased so far so they will go straight on 32's to begin with. Soon I'll have a complete Demi-Company as all of those models are painted already. I also took the opportunity to muddy up their legs a little, perhaps oneday I'll add some battle damage too. 

A Dirty Dark Angel

Project two were the two tanks that make up the Space Marine HQ Command Tanks set. The Land Raider Excelsior and the Primaris Rhino. These are lovely, super detailed models that I'm very pleased with. I applied a light coat of kit bashing to them to let them show their Dark Angel roots and will be painting them up as Eighth Company assets. The pose on the Company Master in the Excelsior is perfect and reminds me very much of a popular meme. :)

I'm really pleased with how these are turning out

So onwards and upwards, I'd like to finish building a couple of half started kits and perhaps at least get bases ready for carrying on project one (perhaps that should get a better name), before I start anyday now in ernest on the Seraphon

Nicodemus, Praetor of the Monitors
The First Legion's 88th Company

Age of Sigmar - The Poldraken Rex Constellation

Because I find myself with so much free time on my hands (not at all true), and most of my other projects are wrapping up now (also, surprise surprise, not at all true) I've decided it's time to pull out and dust off some WHFB boxes and turn my Lizardman sprues into a Seraphon army. I know most of the reviews of the new Battletome have been less than stella, but I find the new space faring reptiles of the imagination quite appealing. Mostly, as before, because of the great big dinosaurs, but also the freedom the Slann now have from the Old Ones plans make them a less predictable and more exciting force.

I've spent a few days now thinking about colour schemes and modeling posibilities, reading through all four pages of rules for Age of Sigmar, looking up more rules, such as the Clash Comp., HeelanHAGG and the Norwegian Masters comp to help me structure my army and considering a story and style to my 'Constellation'. One of the great, yet insignificant aspects of the Seraphon (don't Google that at work btw) is the army structure is based upon a comstellation model, each with a Slann at their centre.  With this fact in mind, I went to work. I found an image of a starscape and drew a dragon on top, this was a much better result than my attempt at drawing a dragon myself. 

The Poldraken Constellation

The mighty Poldraken Rex Constellation has plenty of stars, and a good few of them are nice and large to represent all of the big dinosaurs I want to field, now on their beautiful round bases. The initial list I'm going to work on is the models you now find in the Starter set, a Carnosaur, 12 Saurus Warriors and eight Saurus Cavalry. This should give me an opportunity to see if I like the game, army and paint scheme enough to continue. Then, as an example based upon the local NM comp I'd be looking to build something along the lines of the following: 

Plenty of big monsters and some tough space lizards running between the legs, great fun. So as I plan to start work on these next week, if I don't have the sense to push further in one of the earlier projects, I'll be posting some updates here soon. 

Getting to Know the Unforgiven

I've been a Dark Angels player for only a few years. With the launch of 6th ed. I jumped on board with the Dark Vengeance starter set. Tim and I played through the intro games, he hadn't played since 2nd ed. and I'd fallen out during early 5th. We loved the games we had, the feel of the rules, the 'Forge the Narrative' attitude to play and in my case, the  Deathwing Terminators. I got a hold of the 4th ed. Dark Angels codex and made up a 1000 point list, I joined a campaign being held in my local (Oslo) GW and had the first 1000 points painted in about three weeks. The Dark Vengeance set with the Ravenwing and Company Master replaced with Belial and five more Deathwing. This was just before the 6th ed. codex release so I even converted up my own Belial.

The First 1000 points

Six-nine months later, my Dark Angel collection had grown, I'd painted most of it and was happily playing fairly often (Norway has ten weeks of paternity leave). Then with the announcement of a re-release of Apocalypse coming I cracked, the only thing that would do me was a complete Company, the Fourth would be complete. As it turned out I only needed to order a few Dark Angel and Assault Squad shoulder pads and buy another Devastator box, a good rummage of my bitz box(s) provided the other 60ish marines I lacked.   It was good times. I decided that with the Dark Angels reputation for stubbornness I'd get them terrain to stand in during Apoc games rather than transports, this had the advantage of cutting down on time I spent moving the mass of single models around. Games Workshop released some amazing terrain pieces at the time, so my Unforgiven manned a Wall of Martyrs centred around an Aquila Strongpoint (that reminds me I should get one of those Fortress of Redemption kits) and one place or another I played a good few Apoc games over the next few months. 

The Fouth Company 'The Feared' with support from the Deathwing and Ravenwing

Then came 2014, I was too busy with my son and home life to make any regular games and I felt a little cheated by the quick release of 7th edition after investing in 6th. I went from playing regular games to having one game of 40k in January over the while of 2014. :(   However, I didn't stop hobbying, just gaming. Most of the painting I did was for Bolt Action, I started a British Commando force. And the Dark Angels still got plenty of hobby time devoted to them, it was just mostly on my iPad. I'd built up the Fourth Company, now it was time to detail them, build up their fluff and turn my models into characters. The following pictures are from what I have now, details have been added over the past two years, and they got a good re-haul with the release of the 7th ed. Dark Angel codex. That involved a new Company Master name, a rank given to the character I had already leading the Dark Angels fleet, a whole extra Tactical squad in the company as I before had used Veterans in the first squad position and the new title of The Feared to the company.

I use OneNote as it allows for easy formatting on my iPad

As story, battles or the models dictate
personalities get developed

By setting my army in the recent past I can have small changes to the fluff as suits me
Like returning Belial to the Third Company and reviving Amadascus

The Destiny Principle of Rocket Cars

I managed to get back into some gaming last year after not having to travel so much for work. These games are all on the PS4, as that is my preferred gaming platform. The console works best for me as having to use a PC during the day it’s nice to sit back and be further from the screen.

Basing this on the most fun I have had two games come out equal top are The Talos Principle and Destiny.

The Talos Principle really hit the spot with the a great story, think Matrix levels of introspection. Its got nice tight handling controls when combined with the first person view point giving a good feeling of interaction, the level of freedom given in the game world means you get enough choice not to feel enclosed and have enough to do but not so much free reign as to feel lost. 

The game world works well with the many puzzles there are to solve, as when played over time you up skill and learn the systems so you get a great feeling of success from beating some of them and a sense that you yourself have improved. The personal feeling of progression with wanting to learn more about the story really are the two key things which push you through to see the end.

I saw the latest version of Destiny on sale on the Playstation store, and after reading the feedback on the latest patch and expansion thought it was time to give it another go. This is after getting the original release on the xbox 360 then getting it again in a bundle with the ps4. The graphics upgrade from the 360 to the ps4 did make this worth it.

Originally after reaching max level then getting bored of the grind for light levels it fell out of interest and I stopped playing before any of the expansions were released. They did not seem to offer good value or much content. 

The current version of Destiny is the original game plus three expansions, with the latest The Taken King being the largest, altogether it is a much larger game then when first released. The amount of content makes it great value now, they have also rerecorded much of the in game voice work and redone the cut scenes, making the story more detailed and easier to follow.

Its said that the Diablo 3 team gave advice to the latest work done on Destiny (Diablo 3 Team) and it really shows. Both Diablo 3 and Destiny are much better games than when they first released.

Basically if you liked the old Halo games or Borderlands 2 or Diablo 3 you should get on well with Destiny.

The last pick from the last year goes to Rocket League. I got this inclusively from Playstation plus, or I don’t think I would of tried it but it really is a little gem. The prequal for this, by the same developer, had such a great name, Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars.

 

It’s just a nice game to play, the clear graphics with the style of little remote control cars suits it well, the matches are not too long and even when on the losing side its not annoying and you can still feel good. Its much less annoying than being on the losing side in Destiny PVP. For a quick blast of fun it really hits the spot.

A Splendid New Year - Splendor Review

Over the New Year Tim introduced us to a new game, Splendor. With threes tiers of cards, half a dozen resources and a few 'Nobles' to offer patronage the game is a simple affair that offers plenty of things to think about and reasons to worry about what your opponents will be getting up to in their turns.      

"Splendor is a game of chip-collecting and card development. Players are merchants of the Renaissance trying to buy gem mines, means of transportation, shops—all in order to acquire the most prestige points. If you're wealthy enough, you might even receive a visit from a noble at some point, which of course will further increase your prestige."                                   - Back of Box

 

Tim picked up Splendor for us to try as an alternative to Dominion, we'd played that a number of times over the past few years and although we'd enjoyed it we always felt like it wasn't quite the game we wanted. I'm sure it was just us but games often boiled down to who picked up that little extra gold in the late mid-game, fun but not quite right. 

 

The main trick in Splendor is that you only get one action per turn, this means plenty of stress as whilst you feel you have so little effect on the board each round your opponents seem to have completely changed the state of affairs by the time it comes back round to you. Your choice of action each turn revolves around choosing to take resources (coloured chips representing gems and gold) or spend them on assets (cards representing trade routes, shops or mines, etc.). Each card provides one resource you can use each turn too, allowing you to pay for more and more expensive assets.

Eventually a player will win by having the most prestige at the end of the round where at least one player reaches 15 prestige. Prestige is collected from assets, the cards have values from 0-5 on, or patronage of nobles (a reward for having varied asset types in quantity). This building up of a buying engine makes for a slow and steady start followed by a scarily fast rush towards the finish as all players reach a point where the cheapest and even some of the better cards become free purchases and the board is in a state of constant flux. 

 

The simple design and clear colours make Splendor feel very in touch with its theme; something that we consider a big bonus to our games. It's of no surprise to me to see how many awards and nominations it received in the year of its launch (2014) and for only £25 or so it's great value in the money to hours ratio. Whilst there isn't a lot of content inside of the (way too big) box it all feels very nice quality and shouldn't get too easily destroyed. 

 

I'd be happy to recommend Splendor to anyone who thinks they may be interested, and if you're really on the fence there is also an app version that is apparently very good and accurate for only a couple of quid (£1.99). We were certainly very happy with our New Years Eve entertainment. 

Jay Played: 2015 in Review

2015 was a good gaming year for me, we tried out plenty of new games, many with a Star Wars theme, played a good bit of some classics like Pandemic, Dominion and Dice Masters and finally tried out 7th ed. of Warhammer 40k.

I record all my games played on Board Game Geek which is a great feature. I not only know what and when I've played games but also note down who wins and who played etc, really fun to look back at, I have stats going back to 2012. This doesn't include time spent painting and building models or sat in front of the computer gaming. So beyond what I have here I've also been working on my Dark Angels and Mentor Legion Space Marines and played a lot of Shadowrun games from Harebrained Schemes and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, an amazing group computer game.

Here is the list of 2015's games

Clearly up in the #1 spot is D&D, my group played all the way through the beta test for DnD Next and then at the end of 2014 we started playing the Horde of the Dragon Queen adventure module. It's been great fun, we've at this point only one character remaining from the original party after some killer DM weeks in a row and have a feeling of dread as we move in to the next module of the campaign. The last few sessions of the year have been a break from the Forgotten Realms with a classic Ravenloft adventure updated to 5th ed.



The five games of Muskets & Tomahawks were all in one evening. We were playing small 200pt games (about 20 men per side), of French vs. British in the Peninsular Wars  the games were fast, bloody, fun and amazingly narrative. I'm really looking forward to finishing the two starter forces I started last year and playing more of this great game.

My biggest regrets of the year have been only getting in the one game of Bolt Action (we gave the Tank Battle rules a try) and three games of 40k. I came to the 7th. Ed. party late but am quite impressed now I've tried it. Finding the time to play miniature games is hard, but I hope to manage a little more of it in '16. 

Not a game we'll bother with again

When it come to Star Wars gaming the Fantasy Flight Games rpg has been the best of a great bunch. I've GM'd the three times I've played and really enjoyed the way the rules allow for anything to happen and really embrace the "Yes, and/No, but" attitude to roleplaying I like. On top of the great rules we have beautiful rule books and an amazing community (The Order 66 podcast and twitter are great places for support) that make it such a fun game. 

Heroic Dark Angels & wip Mentors

I hope you've all played loads of great games last year and have a ton of fun memories from doing so, please share, comment with what you've played most, what you wished you'd played more or what your best game of the year has been. Hope to hear from you, good luck over the next 365 days.

Welcome

Hi to anyone who reads this, and a hearty welcome to you, we hope you enjoy this blog. Here's a brief introduction to us, we're going to aim for a regular if not overly frequent posting schedule here so try and hang around a few weeks and let's see what we can do with 2016. 

Okay, I'm Jay (@DrakePoldragon on Twitter), a British ex-pat in Norway and father to two small kids. I'm a gamer, nerd and big Star Wars fan. You may find me reading rpg rules, painting models for wargames or playing the occasional video game, likely from Nintendo or Bioware. My DnD group now play 5th weekly, I'm the awkward player who chimes in over Skype. Other than that my main hobby love is Warhammer 40k, I've a large and ever growing Dark Angels army as my focus, although I'm slowly getting more into historical and skirmish games.

Hi, I'm Tim a gamer who enjoys video games and board games as well as all things sci-fi and fantasy related. Mainly a console player but used to be a WoW player on the PC, currently getting stuck into the updated Destiny while checking out the latest indie offerings.

 

Jedi Master Jay

Jedi Master Tim