Frostgrave: The Living Museum

The Gaming Heir and I settled down for a game of Frostgrave over the weekend. His elder brother was off wooing a girl or some-such, so I fear he may be lost to the hobby for the foreseeable future so it was time to see how just a two player game went.
We would be playing the Living Museum scenario, which involves six statues next to the treasure tokens in the centre of the board, who come to life when the treasure is moved and try to cut down the nearest adventurers. In the absence of any suitable statue models we use the Arab Warband models I'd created for the eldest boy.

After some initial fumbling with the rules we were soon up and running. The Gaming Heir has a marvelous memory and so  kept reminding me of rules I'd forgotten or got wrong, which was handy.

 Valerie d'Horlage the Chronomancer leads her men into the ruins

 The Elementalists hove into view

 Titus the Elementalist's apprentice with his Templar chum

 The fiery Elementalist lurks by the tower

 A statue comes to life and stabs at the crossbowman

 Another statue takes on the man-at-arms

 More of the Chronomancer warband are drawn into fights as the Elementalist looks on

 The thief sneaks off with a treasure

 Wandering zombies arrive to make life tricky for the |Templar

 An Elementalist thug hacks down the archer

 Chronomancer warband tries to retreat, harried by statues

Wuff the dog gets a face full of Elementalist arrow

 A thug tries to get away, covered by the crossbowman

 Finally the statues turn on the Elementalist and his men

The Templar wades in as zombies converge on the warbands

We had great fun playing what turned out to be a very brutal and bloody game. Despite an early kill of one of the lad's thugs by my crossbowman, as soon as the statues came to life they all converged on my men and began to whittle my forces down. The Gaming Heir used his thief and Leap to nick one treasure then pinched some others while the statues picked on my men. Neither of my spellcasters were having good days and eventually killed themselves when miscasting spells. Finally as my last thug tried to make it off the board he was cruelly shot down just yards from safety.

A big and easy win for the Gaming Heir, who captured four treasures to my none (we play to a random turn length and you get whatever treasure you are carrying or have taken off the board when the game ends). I got a measly 30 XP, not even enough to level up, whilst the lad managed to rocket up to level 5. Pretty much my entire warband had been taken out during the game, but fortunately only the archer actually died in the post game round up, though both Wuff the dog and the Infantryman will miss the next game...

I really enjoyed playing this and I'm now thinking about actually finishing off the rest of my warband

Black Templars Captain

Another model painted for the Gaming Heir's Black templar army.
This is a Games Day 2008 model.
Ridiculous hammer action going on, which makes photography a bit tricky

 

 The face has a touch of the Keifer Sutherland's about it I reckon.

Biel Tan Eldar

Son and Heir has joined the wargames club at school. As is to be expected it's a largely 40k dominated affair and after a short period of borrowing my Orks he eventually upgraded to an Eldar army, largely thanks to the generosity of Stephen, who happened to have a load of half painted ones he had no use for.
After an initial burst of enthusiasm he soon dropped any desire to paint them but carried on taking them in for regular punch-ups with his mate's Tau.
The club is an active one and they duly entered the Games Workshop Schools League, which is IMO a Good Thing that GW does to encourage younger gamers. For this he needed a painted army. Apparently the half-painted unbased stuff he had was "fine Dad" but I had other plans. However at the same time he managed to get cast in a role in the school play and weekends and evening painting time all but vanished. So I picked up brush and helped finish off some of the models.
And here they are:

A squad of guardians. Son and Heir painted most of these last year, so they just needed basing.

Fire dragons - again mostly painted by the lad last year

Banshees. He did the basecoats. I supplied the touching up

Rangers. These were mostly my work

Farseer. I did him

He also needed some objective counters, so I created these using some little oval gem things from a craft shop.

I was aiming for an "abandoned Spirit Stone" look - Just the thing Biel Tan Eldar would be searching for
They look a little like Skittles in that shot, and the more on the base the less convincing they look, but I'm pretty happy with how the single one turned out.

Funnily enough Eldar were the first Rogue trader models I ever bought many, many moons ago. And that Farseer model is one I've always loved. Simple, but elegant - Jes Goodwin at his finest I think.

There's also an Avatar, but he's suffering from droopy sword syndrome at the moment (we've all been there) so he'll await some straightening before he gets photographed. And there's a Wave Serpent that I forgot about - a picture for another day too.

In the end he won one game and lost two and his school were runners up in the heat. He had a great time and came home full of it.

Oh, and he won best painted army - a certificate he handed over to me.

Artizan NWF British

I've been eyeing these splendid models since they came out.
And as I appear to be turning into some kind of Dan Mersey Fanboy (a Mersophile?) and he has a new set of colonial rules out later this year called The Men Who Would be Kings it was only a matter of time before I cracked and bought a pack or two. Well three, actually, as twelve appears to be the requisite number for a unit in TMWWBK (pronounced TimWubbuk - which sound like the name of a burly Canadian lumberjack).
Nice Mr Nick Northstar only had two kneeling and one standing when I popped in and despite offering to cast some more standing ones "While You Wait" I decided to just take these and I'd be forced to return for more at a later date. Oh the hardship.

Painting was simplicity itself - a spray with Halfords Matt Khaki, pick out some details in whites, flesh, brown and black, then a wash of medium brown and pretty much done. They practically paint themselves. the remaining eight are already in an advanced state of paintingness and will be along shortly.

As a result I'll probably be back to see Nick far sooner than I expected...

Asteroids for Star Wars X-Wing

I like X-wing, it's very jolly and easy to play (if a little repetitive after a while).
However the two dimensional "debris" tokens have always irked me.
So I made some asteroids or meteors or whatever from some of the yellow insulation baord the builders had left in my garden.

 The full set

 Three of the big 'uns

 Three small 'uns and my new Imperial Ace for scale

Imperial Ace with a couple of the larger ones

Easy to make by just cutting the foam into squarish shapes and then pulling/cutting chunks out. They were then hot-glued to cocktail sticks which were in turn attached to some Mini Bits round bases I had lying around. I then coated the rocks with a mix of paint, plaster, PVA and some fine sand to seal them, before spraying black (you need to seal first of the spray melts the foam) and drybrushing.with some greys.

Very pleased with them and they've already seen action in a couple of games.

Black Templars Emperor's Champion

I painted this up for the smallest boy.
He's something of a junior power gamer and thinks the Emperor's Champion is made entirely of awesome and win.

Its the Limited Edition 25th Birthday miniature.
I think I have a couple more somewhere in the stash.
Pretty pleased with it.

Crusader and Artizan American Infantry

Some US infantry roll off the production line:

 Crusader riflemen

 Artizan BAR teams

All eight together

Painted and dipped to match the models I painted many moons ago.

These were added to try and get me a functioning force for Chain of Command so that I can take on Oberstleutnant Ballzimmer. The Bolt Action list I put together originally was some BARs and a few crew short. I guess BARs are "sub-optimal" in Bolt Action as I picked these two Artizan ones up cheap from Colonel Bills. Unhistorical force organisation in BA equals cheap soldiers for me.
The Crusader riflemen I picked up from nice Mr Nick Northstar.

Now just need the moons to come into alignment so that General B and I can give CoC a whirl.