Thanks to Mangoat for posting this one, classic GenCon if I ever saw it.

I bet this happens every year

I’m a little impressed, I actually completed playing Borderlands last night. I think that’s only about the second game that I’ve actually finished (the other being Half-Life 2). I did it on Normal difficulty and only had to Google a couple of times for hints. Usually I get stuck on a game either because I’m not a good enough shooter or I can’t figure out where to find something. I put down Bioshock a few months ago because I couldn’t get where I needed to go on a particular map (even with hints) but I’m going to give it another shot because I really enjoyed that game.

My Knights Exemplar Errants are going to be very strong on the battlefield but getting them there is going to be challenging. They are a pain in the butt due to the large part count on each model. I built a minimum unit of six about two years ago and didn’t buy the other four until now because I hated assembling them (not to mention painting all the detailed armor plates).

Now that the unit attachment is out (which makes them really strong) I decided to get the unit buffed out to full strength. Below is one pose with the sword & shield in hand plus crossbow on the back. The second shot is even more parts, crossbow in hands with sword & shield on the back.

Errant with Sword

Errant with Crossbow

That last Seamus shot was very small after cropping from the camera so here’s one of him after assembly as well as Madame Sybelle. Yes, she’s an overweight undead madame from a cathouse. Shooting raw pewter is sketchy, the high reflectivity can wash out the details sometimes.

Seamus and Sybelle

Here are various Knights Exemplars Errant in my ghetto spray booth. The officer from tbe UA is on the far left and you should be able to pick out the standard bearer. The other four are the grunts from the two blisters that I just got to bring my unit up to full strength. Now I just need to grab the Errant Seneschal solo.

I finally got going on my Malifaux figures today. I started with Seamus since he looked relatively easy: one hand w/toolbag to glue to his wrist. Turns out I had to pin it since there was so little contact area.

Well my first model purchase (since I got the book a couple of weeks ago).

I had my LGS order me the Red Chapel Gang and the Miners & Steamfitters Union boxed sets. I wanted to be able to demo the game but stupidly ordered only the Resurrectionists deck (so I should have that next week). For you non-gamers Malifaux is a really neat miniatures game that combines victorian horror, steampunk and wild west themes all in one game. The startup cost seems to be a bit less than Warmachine or Hordes, a box is about $30 and you can add extra models for less than $10 each. Best of all (from an assembly and painting time perspective) there are no full-sized units, the closest is a few things that come with maybe three models. (Of course one big exception is the arachnid swarms in my Arcanists set, there are six individual spider models but they are tiny.)

For anyone interested the publisher’s site is http://wyrd-games.net/ and if you Google “Malifaux review” there are several good ones out there so I won’t bother reviewing the whole game. Future posts will include my thoughts on specific topics but no general overview. I will probably do one of those goofy box-opening videos just for fun, too.

The surprising thing was the small size of the boxes (since I’m used to the size of a Warmachine battle box). The second picture shows one set next to the box for my Gravus solo.

Wow, I didn’t know dice overload until I saw Game Master Dice Store, Game Dice, RPG Dice and Board Game Dice. They have got some really nice dice sets in metal and as long as you are buying a lot the flat $7 shipping charge isn’t bad. I am thinking of these bad boys for my Hunter game.

I’m not sure whether to be horrified at the complex mechanics or excited at so many dice. Apparently the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game has seven completely different kinds of dice. You have a different colored dice pool for different functions, there are some eight-sided, some ten-sided and some six-sided. None of them use pips, the each have a combination of custom symbols and blank faces.

One of the new features of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay are the custom dice used during task resolution. The core set includes 36 custom dice. With these dice, the characters can perform a wide variety of actions while accounting for changing tactics, situations, and effects. Rather than numbers, these dice feature special symbols.

Of Dice and Men – A look at the custom dice and core mechanics of WFRP

Yes, I’ve finally branched out. I have been playing a Protectorate of Menoth army (Warmachine) for over a year and decided that for my second faction I would go with the Legion of Everblight (Hordes). I found a second-hand army on eBay at a good discount off retail, even better is that the beasts are all at least basecoated and the Harriers and Seraph are basically done. The rest of the models are either basecoated or at least primed. Below are pics of the new army. My biggest challenge will be getting the remaining paint on the Carnivean to match the quality of the existing paint as well as the flying beasties. I really hope that whatever my next beast is that I can live up to this quality.

The Seraph has a great verdigis green paint scheme, I really like him. Amazingly he arrived via US Mail completely intact.

The Carnivean is mostly done, it looks like the brown chitinous armor is still just a basecoat though.

Wow Little Wheel has got to be the most stylish Flash game I’ve ever seen. Great story and the setting/atmosphere was awesome. Too bad it’s a one-shot game, once you finish it there’s not really a reason to play again. Hopefully the authors (OneClickDog.com) in Slovakia will put out another installment.

Play Little Wheel, a free online game on Kongregate.

I ran across LOLcaptions over at Kongregate today. For some reason I really enjoy stupid image macros, don’t ask me why. In this game you join a room with other players and create captions for random photos on flikr, then everybody votes on their favorite.

I got really bad about posting my Warmachine work in progress (WIP) photos over the last nine months or so. I would take the pictures but then never crop them to post. Here’s a few from September 2008 showing my work table and the pieces I was working on at the time.

Painting Workspace 2008-09-16

I recently ran across some really neat miniature bases at Iron Halo. They sell both full bases as well as inserts to put inside the standard bases you already have.  I think that I’m going to get some for my warjacks, warcasters and solos; even though they are inexpensive I think it would be too much to do units of eight to ten troopers for me right now. Iron Halo Custom Bases

They actually come unpainted but the examples below are some of the styles I like, hopefully I can paint them up to look almost as good as these.

30mm Southern Sands base inserts

Wyldewood 40mm round bases

The Fens 40mm round bases

This is another indirect result of my cruising for Warmachine images, I linked to a page at Brookhurst Hobbies and ended up discovering Harbinger magazine which is all about miniatures. It looks like there’s some good stuff in here about all kinds of minis, painting tips etc. The link above is actually to their download page since there are quite a few issues that can be downloaded as PDF files.