Hobby Update: Space Marines, Warhammer Quest and Badgers!

‘We’ve got a spare blog spot on Wednesday’, Kez informed me (being my organiser, social media manager and general fixer-upper).

‘Great, we’ll do another Year of Hobby update, with lots of photos.’

All good so far. I then wondered which number update this was and checked on the blog… And apparently 2015 was my year of hobby. My last update for 2016 was back in January, when I shared my hobby goals for the year.

In my defence I have had a lot of books released this year…

Let’s see how I’ve done, shall we? (I don’t expect to emerge from this with shiny hobby credentials, let’s be honest.)

Anyaral – World of Twilight

I’ve been plugging away on my Kickstarter bundle from 2014, and I added some new purchases back in April when I went to the Salute show. There are still more models to be done, but I’ve made some good progress, as you can see below.

And I even managed to squeeze in a game with them when I was at FantasyCon, with the help of fellow author Guy Haley.

So, a solid start actually.

Betrayal at Calth

I said I was going to take a break from Anyaral to tackle the boxed game I bought in December last year. It took a while, but I am pleased to report that there has been movement on that front too. Everything has been undercoated – I’ll be painting the forces for use in the game, so the Word Bearers and Ultramarines legions. Red versus Blue is good to go. Just in time for the new Burning of Prospero to take over as the Horus Heresy game of choice. I can resist that temptation pretty easily at the moment though (and it has reminded me again that I have a complete copy of Space Hulk in the garage that I can paint).

Painted or Not?

I have a simple rule – I don’t play wargames with unpainted miniatures. I like all sorts of games, be they video, role playing, board or card games, and for me the biggest appeal of the miniatures game is, obviously enough, the aesthetic. Painted armies over modelled terrain, that’s what toy soldiers is about.

On the other hand, a playing piece for a board game is just that. It’s a wriggle, I know, to make a distinction between a finely crafted Citadel miniature on a tabletop and a finely crafted Citadel miniature on a board, but it does mean I get to play more games without feeling I have offended the Hobby Gods.

The Ultramarines are going one better than that, and I have painted the Tactical Squad (or Legion Tactical squad if we want to be picky). I’ll be doing the decals for the whole force in one go, and the basing for the whole game needs to be consistent so that will have to wait until both the Ultramarines and Word Bearers are ready.

So, two for two at this stage (if I squint and tilt my head).

With that in mind I have almost finished assembling my Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower set. I had a demo of the game during a store signing in Derby and really enjoyed it, so I’m looking forward to getting the last of the denizens assembled read to play.

Burrows and Badgers

These have been sitting on the ‘to paint’ pile for quite some time but I have started putting paint on them at long last. As they are all individual miniatures I’m doing them in very small batches of a few models at a time, to allow me to focus on the colours for each miniature.

Not sure four half-painted models really count, but they are started. Two-and-a-half out of three?

Vehicles and Filbots and Voodooworx

My models from the Road/Kill Kickstarter still languish in their boxes, for shame, but I can claim another partial win for getting a lick of paint on one of my Filbots. Along with some models for Open Combat I’ve been practising my highlighting and blending on this one, as primarily my painting of the last couple of years has been far more predicated on ink washes and drybrushing. However I have a number of very nice new arrivals and pending arrivals (including Human Interface: Nakamura Tower, Bombshell Miniatures’ Kritterkins, Rumbleslam, Mythos and Parallax: Warbands*) that definitely need a more refined approached to painting, as well as the Warhammer Quest miniatures.

I’ve been trying out something else for my Voodooworx Hul’Gren model, using mostly ink washes to get the colours. If it looks okay when I’ve finished I’ll try the same on the other models – and if you want to read more I have a number of short stories set in the world of Tir-Dagrau available from Fogberry Press.

*Kickstarter

I don’t think I need to go into any more detail regarding how well I’m doing on my vow to back fewer Kickstarters… In fact, Kickstarter have really rammed home my failure by making me a ‘superbacker’. Oh well, I can live with that.

Other Games

While the regular gaming hasn’t quite happened every other week as I envisaged, we have managed to get together semi-regularly for games of Cthulhu Wars, Scythe and Gorechosen (yes, another GW boxed game with models to paint. Did I not mention that one earlier?).

Kez and I also continue to sneak in the odd morning or day (when babysitters allow) at The Dice Cup games café, and we’ve been introduced to a few new games by the team there. These include Evolution, Imhotep and Hey, That’s My Fish! among others. Our hope for the future is to get in a whole game of Sid Meier’s Civilisation that we bought a copy of, but haven’t succeeded in starting that yet.

ROBIN

My next hobby goal, as I mentioned in my last newsletter, is to run a demonstration or participation game at the ROBIN wargames event in Nottingham next February. As of the time of writing I have pinned my efforts to a mech fighting game. Probably 6mm scale, but not attached to any particular miniatures range.

All I need now are models, a table, some terrain, cards and special dice, and to create the rules… What could go wrong?

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