Still Going

The blog has been quiet for about 6 months now, mainly due to work and life pressures.

It was getting hard to find the time to do everything that needed doing, let alone the nicer, hobby related things. I decided that I would spend what limited free time I had painting and playing with toy soldiers, rather than writing about them.

Things have eased up slightly, so there may be a small return to the blog, or I may spend more time painting. We shall see.

Not really much has changed in the 6 months absent from the blog, with gaming continuing on a Monday night at my regular club, Falkirk District Wargames Club.

I have decided to abandon 9th Age completely, as I don't think it is really what I am looking for in a game.  I wasn't sure before but the publication of V2 of the ruleset was the deciding factor, as the game now feels more like work than recreation. The Dark Elf book is  a real mess, with all sorts of stupid names and pointless rules appearing so I have just given up in disgust.

I have continued to play Kings of War though, and despite being terrible at it I have enjoyed the games I have been playing. I am still using Twilight Kin, despite there being no proper list and it getting no attention in the upcoming Clash of Kings rules update. To that end I am now converting my Warhammer Orcs to also use in the game. This should involve a minimum of painting as I only need to include a few thing to make the army viable under he new rules system. 

I bought a large 15mm scale Egyptian army for use with Field of Glory in December 2016. Unfortunately Field of glory has pretty gone the way of the Do-Do, as v2 of the game went out ot print and the Caliver Books published v3, which no one picked up due to the prohibitive cost of buying a new rulebook and army lists for a couple of rules tweaks.  

Our club has since moved on to L'art de la Guerre, which is a French derivative of DBA, recently translated into English.  Unfortunately by the time I got wind of this the game was sold out pretty much everywhere and there appeared to be no plans for a reprint. I was very lucky and thanks to sharp eyes of a club member I was able to get a copy from a gaming store located in Dorset. I still have to paint the miniatures, but thankfully the new system requires far fewer so I anticipate being able to get them on the table sooner rather than later.

My 2018 gaming opened up with a game of Lord of the Rings against Dave Knight, and we opted to carry out the assault on the Deeping Wall from The Two Towers., with Dave rolling a die and ending up as the defenders, leaving me to take the roll of the Uruk-Hai.  The game went badly, probably more due to my ineptitude than anything else, but I think it is a hard scenario for the Uruk's to win.  I must admit to being "slightly" pessimistic during the game and this is the main thing I need to work on this year.

Dunlendings try to scale the wall (and fail!) while the Pike wait for the breach to be created (get on with it!)

Still no progress, and pity the poor Dunlending that climbs a ladder only to be confronted by an irritated looking Aragorn!

As usual for 2018 I don't really have any plans.  I expect to play some games and paint some stuff. It is a hobby I do for fun and relaxation so I try not to make it stressful by giving myself artificial targets.

There are very few purchases planned this year. I was looking at the impending Batman boardgame kickstarter, from Monolith, that same people that made the excellent Conan game, but a 200 quid service bill on my bike and an impending family holiday to Florida may have scuppered that idea.

I have been slowly buying Genestealer Cult models of Warhammer 40,000 and now have a fairly significant collection, to the point where I just need to pick up the more specialist parts of the list.  There is no codex for them in 8th edition yet so I am in no hurry to get this done and probably won't put brush to model until the later part of the year.  

While Genestealer Cult has got me back into 40k again (sort off) I still think the system is a bit lacking. To that end I have been slowly trying to work out how to convert my favourite system, Chain of Command to use 40k models and setting.  40k is a very different beast to WW2, with some weird and wonderful stuff going on but I am making slow progress and hope to have some sort of working prototype soon. That pretty much sums up what's been gong on, and this might be the last post for a while, or it might not.  I shall wing it and see how it goes.

Twilight Kin in action (another loss!)

The Fellowship flee from Moria, pursued by Wargs.