Progress Report Q1 2019

This year has been pretty good for painting, almost all of it for Saga.

I finished off my Late Roman Warband. This was supposed to be combined with some of my Early Romans to make a more balanced force but I discovered I couldn't easily re-base them so I have this all hearthguard cavalry force which is not really a winning strategy in Saga. Still it should be fun to play and I think the Cataphracts will work well for my usual playstyle of concentrating too much on one good unit.

Once I finished off the Romans I made some good progress on my Franks. I got base colours on them all and ordered some decals. Because I still didn't have enough to do a force with Roland (he needs 4 points of foot at the beginning and then 4 points of mounted after he dies), I have bought a 4 point starter box of Goths who will masquerade as Franks when required.

When the Age of Magic was announced I put the Franks on hold to work on the Revenants. They are still a work in progress. Half are just primed and the others have block flesh colours. If I can get through them this month and then paint the Undead Legions next month I will be in good shape for the Age of Magic event at Cangames

While working on the other stuff, I finished off the two Viking Champions I got from ordering from Gripping Beast as well as Boadicea and Cartamanda.

Finally, once I had my airbrush working again I decided to actually paint something for the Stalingrad Campaign and built a Lend-Lease Churchill force. They are only primed so far but should paint up quickly once I get the right colour.

Plans for the coming months focus on Cruel Seas terrain for Cangames and the undead for Saga: Age of Magic. After that it will be some more Saga terrain and the Franks/Goths. I might turn the airbrush on some Team Yankee Warsaw Pact forces if the mood strikes.

SAGA Battle Royale: Spanish vs Crusaders vs Eastern Princes

Last weekend Mike, Stan and I got together to play some SAGA. (We had planned to play the weekend before but we decided to postpone because of the snow). Mike has already posted his battle report.

My Spanish force consisted of the warlord, 2 units of 4 hearthguard, 2 units of 8 mounted warriors, 1 unit of  8 foot warriors and 1 unit of 12 crossbow levy. I hadn't really thought about painting a Spanish force but the Spanish mounted warriors and crossbow levy can be in a Moorish force and I had the hearthguard that Ed had painted up long ago when we were going to do a Warhammer Ancients Battle El Cid campaign (a big part of my Saga Moors come from that project). It turned out that I had a big block painting the mounted warriors though. I started painting them just when the new SAGA came out last year and just finished them for this game (and they were sitting on my painting table for most of that time.

As we were starting to set up we realized that the terrain table for the multi-player games (which are played on a  4x6 table rather than usual 3x4) had more terrain types than the basic terrain table and so, naturally, Mike and Stan were demanding lakes and crevasses which I had not made in my terrain making frenzy over Christmas 

After we selected terrain that was actually available we set up. We didn't put a great deal of thought into the setup of either the terrain or our forces and we ended up with me on one side between some wood, Stan in the centre around the rocky hill and Mike in the corner.

The turn sequence of the Battle Royale scenario is quite clever. Each player starts with 6 tokens and when you take your turn you give up one token and then you pass the turn to the player with most tokens (and you can choose if there is more than one with the same number)

In the first few turns we did some manuevering. I got some good use of the Iberia ability which allows the Spanish Jinites (mounted warriors) to react to an enemy movement or shooting to move or shoot (and it is a basic ability so you can put multiple dice on it.

Mike moved a force on my left which did some damage to my but it was isolated enough that I could gang up on it and wipe it out with no further loss to myself

There were no clear sides in the fighting in the centre with everyone attacking everyone else. I probably got involved a bit more closely than I should and took some losses (but so did everyone else)

On the second last turn I used the Jinites! ability which allows a unit of Jinites (no surprise there) to activate as many times as you want (it still suffers fatigue for each activation) and reduces the armour of all its shooting targets by one -- you can only shoot each target once in the turn though. I did quite a bit of damage to both Mike and Stan with this but I didn't get far enough away at the end so Mike managed to catch and kill the exhausted unit. It was quite a fun exchange of Saga abilities and fatigue discarding since Mike had an ability which added the attack dice of another unit (in this case, his Warlord) and I had an ability that removed all his attack dice (Treachery) and it would be better for me if he played his first (it worked out the other way in this case).

The victory points were based on Survival points and Stan had quite a bit more left than Mike or I so he was declared the winner.

My warlord survived the game (which is unusual for me) and I really enjoyed the Spanish board. If I were going to play again I would take 2 units of Hearthguard again but go for 4 units of Jinetes. Since I had such a struggle painting them this time, I probably won't be rushing into actually doing that any time soon.

The Battle Royale scenario worked really well and I will certainly play it again (and who knows, maybe I will have made lakes and crevasses by then)

Plans for 2019

I didn't do a planning post last year and managed to avoid going terribly off course so maybe I am courting disaster by doing one this year but since one of my goals is to use the blog to keep focused I will go ahead anyway.

My basic goals for the year are to play more and buy less. I would also like to paint more but I have realized I need to be in the right state of mind to do that so I am not going to push that but I will make sure I have my painting setup ready to go when the mood strikes!

These are the games that will be in my mind (and hopefully on the table this year)

SAGA

This was my most played game last year and with the appearance of  the Book of Battles looks likely to be my most played this year. I have created the terrain needed for the Book of Battles (as discussed here ) so my next goal is to paint some baggage and livestock that is required for some of the scenarios

I should finish my Spanish Warriors

But I seem to have a bit of a block with them so I might skip ahead and paint the foot troops for the Franks which I think will give me enough of a force to actually play with them (though not enough to use Roland which is my long term Frankish goal).

Next up will be the Black Hoods mercenary unit and beyond that it gits a bit hazy but I want to get some more units painted for my Islamic forces

The Age of Magic will be coming out this year and I will hopefully finally paint the Revenants and I am tempted to paint some Mantic Games Naiad to use alongside some Vikings

The Walking Dead: All out War
Now that the Motel is finished, my terrain goals for this are to finish the Diner and the office building (I also have a swimming pool and playground to go with the Motel that should get done this year)

In terms of painting, I want to get through the figure from the Made to Suffer expansion and once I get those done (at least the survivors, I feel that I have more zombies than I would need now) I will get the Fear the Hunters expansion -- I have some interest in the Campaign rules, but realistically I know that I won't play enough to actually use them.

I have two side projects that I would like to at least do something with this year -The first is to do Cops vs Narcos using the Walking Dead rules

And the second is to use the town terrain to run Gaslands with 28mmish cars -- The Sunday Drivers expansion for the old Steve Jackson Games Car Wars was always a favourite.

Cruel Seas
I have high hopes for this game but I am holding off buying more until we have played at least one game. If it does play well I am seriously considering running a larger game at CanGames with either an attack on the Monitor HMS Abercrombie at D-DAY or and attack on some Liberty Ships in the English Channel

Team Yankee

I should get the airbrush out and finish of my Soviets but I am not sure if that will happen. I do hope to play some more games of this -- it has always been a fun game in spite of itself.

I am tempted by the Czech Dana Self-propelled artillery but there is too much unpainted to add more to the pile.

Flames of War

The OMG club is running a Stalingrad campaign this year and I will play in that but I have no desire to paint anything (I do have some Soviet SMG troops that are primed that I feel I should paint but I don't think they will actually get done)

Hail Caesar

At the moment I have no strong desire to run this at Cangames and my painting passion is more geared towards SAGA so I think there will not be much movement on this front this year

Boardgames

I am looking forward to another year of Boardgames with the Thursday night group 

SAGA Battle Report Moors (Umayyads) versus Normans

At the recent OMG club day I played a game of SAGA with my Moors in the form of the Umayyad list from the Old Friends, New Enemies list in the Age of Vikings book. I was playing against John Cowen's Normans.

I should probably start with an apology as when I looked up the spelling of Umayyad in the rulebook, I realized that I was not allowed to take the Crossbow unit as all levy needs to be equipped with bow (I had my doubts when I put my list together since they are Spanish mercenaries and don't really make sense for the time of the Umayyads but I wanted to do an all foot force so pushed ahead anyway)

As I was packing up to go to the club Canada Post dropped of a package with my new Mats by Mars 3X4 mat that I had bought especially for SAGA. Naturally, I brought that along with me. I am quite pleased with it, the price was good and it seems durable and it rolls up again neatly and it is lightweight. My only real complaint is that it is a bit glossy -- though not as much in person as it seems in the photos.

John got to pick the terrain and put down the 4 forests that I had out on the table -- A bit of disappointment since I had made all the different terrain pieces (and it turns out, not actually allowed under the rules since they permit 3 woods one of which can be large -- I can't imagine this really having any affect on the game)

We got the pincer setup where we each setup half our force in one of our corners and can set up right at the halfway line on the table. It was also a night game which meant if any unit started a turn more than S from a friendly unit it would gain a fatigue

I got the first turn and even though I was restricted to 3 dice I made good use of the Perserverance ability to shoot both my bow and crossbow at the Norman Knights killing a few figures and to charge my foot Hearthguard into the Norman crossbow killing all but one of them.

On the Norman turn the knights charged my crossbow unit but only managed to kill 7 of the Levy (enough that they lose their SAGA dice but leaving enough to still be a bit of a threat) and managed to kill another knight. A Norman foot warrior charged my Hearthguard and were driven back but we both took some losses.

The following turn I used the Discord ability to add some fatigue to the Knights and the Norman Warlord. The Bow then shot them using the Wholehearted ability (which gives me 2 extra attack dice for each fatigue) and got lucky and wiped them out (adding another fatigue to the warlord). The remaining crossbow fired at the Warlord and due to all his fatigue he was killed as well.

 Another attack on my Hearthguard by Norman warriors was set back running but I was down to just one figure in the unit now. Continued use of Discord had most of the remaining Normans exhausted or close to it and the Hearthguard wiped out a warrior unit (dieing himself in the process).

There were a few more fights but by this point it was obviously going to be a Moorish victory.

I had some good luck and John wasn't as familiar with the Norman board as I was with the Moorish one. I do think that with the Perserverance ability it makes sense to make the Moors mostly foot or mostly mounted rather than the more even split I have used in the past. I will have to try a mostly mounted force next time.

Finished Motel, Walking Dead and Saga

The intermittent part of the title of my blog seems to have loomed large again. Red Dead Redemption is probably mostly to blame.

I have finished the Motel to a point where I am happy with it. I would like to do some weathering on it but I think I am afraid that I will make it look awful. We did play a Walking Dead game with it earlier in the month and I think it looks good enough.

The Walking Dead game was quite a lot of fun, we did a game with 3 players and me as the GM. I gave each of the other players a special objective and there were a few special enemies as well as the regular zombies. I used the special objective supplies card to provide clues towards the location of the objectives but I would like to use scenario specific event cards to move the scenario forward (and that would require me to actually do some work to print out the cards so it is less likely to actually happen)

Mike has posted a battle report of the Zombie game on his blog here


The Book of Battles for Saga arrived this month. I was already quite keen on Saga but now I am even more so. My hobby goal for Christmas is to make some "officially" sized terrain for the game since it does feature in the randomly generated skirmish scenario.

Mike and I have split the started set for Cruel Seas so that will also be fighting for play time in the New Year. Luckily Ed was quite keen on the models and painted them up when he was visiting 

Saga Terrain Frenzy

For the early part of the new year I had a plan to slowly build up a collection of terrain to match the Universal Terrain Table from the new SAGA book of battles.

As it turned out both Meredith and I were feeling rather sick so we decided to postpone our trip to Kitchener to visit some friends so I decided to get a start on the project. I had some Woodland Scenic trees and decided I would go with foamcore bases. I had always been a bit reluctant to use foamcore because it is not the most durable but I realized that foamcore was good enough and was within my ability / available tools to actually do something with it.

I cut foamcore into the appropriate square for all the non-hill pieces (they would be made from styrofoam) and started carving the foamcore for the forests.

The bases for the trees were glued down (I had thought of using magnets but again decided that the theme for this terrain build was just to get it done, I would just glue them -- There is enough space to put figures around the trees without too much trouble and if it does prove to be a pain in play I can build another set of woods sometime in the next decade!)

I used latex housepaint (the blue is from a D-DAY beach piece I did quite a while ago) to bind some sand to the base to add some texture

The peices were primed and painted with some brown and green to have some background colour. I was happy / surprised with the progress I was making so I made two marsh pieces as well which were brought up to the same stage.

Next some flock / static grass was added to bases -- the very green flock was added around the ponds in the marsh before I poured in the resin water.

The water has been poured into the marsh and the trees put on the forest bases -- I have also started the field pieces, I made furrows in drywall patching compound which seemed to work well.

Some highlighting on the fields and the marshes are flocked  (and the two last pieces of foamcore waiting to be carved)

 The flock is added to the fields and finished on the marshes.

The last 4 pieces (hill, rocky hill, rocky ground and ruins) have been assembled and sand added. Hopefully I will get them primed before the end of the Christmas holiday. Even if I don't get further, I have made much more progress than I expected and our next SAGA will have a lot more terrain choice.

Sarrisa Motel Part 2 and a Little bit of Saga

Carrying on from the earlier parts of the hotel construction (the construction and painting ), this week I received the replacement parts for the acrylic stair pieces I broke. (I also got a swimming pool and playground set that I will use for some ground decoration around the motel).

Here are the pieces with the spray paint finished and a first coat on the exterior doors and all the concrete painted with one coat.

I think the next steps are to paint the window and door frames as well as the vents on the side and add some rust weathering to those and then was with a grime wash and see how it looks at that point. I painted a dark blue on the roof to break up the black and I will do a grey dry brush and might put some flock on the roof to show the level of dis-repair

I don't really have a sense of what I want to do with the office -- I will do the doors and window frames in steel with some rust and maybe that will be enough?

The stairs in MDF went together much better than with the acrylic sides.

It turned out that the acrylic railings had the same problem as the stairs -- they were too thick and wouldn't fit in the slots. Fortunately the mdf frame that Sarisa sent had the railings in MDF and they fit fine



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Also this weekend Mike and I played a game of Saga. He has posted a more detailed battle report but I thought I would give my thoughts here and also some thoughts on where I am going with Saga (which with the Walking Dead is the game I am  most active with at the moment).

While on holiday in Cape Breton this summer I painted up some plastic Vikings that I have had for a while and then decided that this should be a Norse Gael army so I ordered a unit of Hearthguard and one of Warriors armed with Dane Axes. I also got a Warlord with a Dane Axe and Gripping Beast were good enough to add in a figure of Brodir of Man, Who Steel Cannot Bite, Sorcerer and King-Slayer.

A month or so ago Mike and I played a game where I played with a regular warlord and Mike posted a battle report. I felt the Pagan Rus had some abilities that did have a strong impact on the Norse Gael board but I really enjoyed the army. I think it may have been the first time I played with an army with no mounted units!

I decided to play then again this time with Brodir of Man. I had to proxy a bit since he is only allowed to take units of Black Crew (hearthguard with 2-handed axes) and I don't have 5 units of Dane Axe armed vikings!  The game went well (even though I lost!), i might have been a bit too aggressive and Brodir was bitten by steel and was not a particularly good sorcerer and didn't kill any kings. I am now tempted to get and paint up some Black Crew but I think I will hold back on that until I get some other stuff painted.

In the near term, I want to finish painting my Spanish and Franks. The spanish only need 2 units of warriors to be finished (and they are about half done) along with the Warlord. The Franks need a bit more -- my goal is to field Roland so I need 4 points of foot and 4 points of mounted and I think I have one of each painted (Roland is painted though, as is a mounted Warlord)

Mike wants to do some Roman Saga -- I am still not sure about using my Early Imperial Romans but I will give it a go at some point.

State of the Game and Zombie progress

Well the blog might itself might have seen a bit zombie-like for most of this year. I have been quite busy and I do have some posts to finish on Cangames and my trip to Louisburg and some other odd games but I thought I would just post on what I am working on right now.

I have been very busy with work this year and my painting has been a bit start and stop but I have made some progress on painting my Franks for Saga -- I was slightly disheartened by reading the strategy discussion on the Muskets and Tomahawks forum which suggests the Franks are among the weakest factions but I still like the idea of them (and especially the special rules around Roland).

I have had 2 games in with them (and anyone who knows my Saga playing habits, 2 games with any one faction is almost a record) and I think I am getting a sense for how they work. (Not taking any Levy until the Saga dice are maxed out seems to be a key to the strategy so painting the Levy first was probably not the smartest thing to do)

Frostgrave is also high on my gaming schedule and I have started quite a few figures for it but never seem to get any finished.

I had bought the starter bundle for Warlord games Project Z in the spring and in attempt to get it actually painted and ready, I have committed to running a game in November. Although I was working for a large part of this weekend, Ed came up on Saturday afternoon and I managed to glue together all the figures from the basic box plus the Special Ops and Ed was very excited to see the Z-Mart terrain from Sarrisa Precision so he did quite a good job in getting that together and painted.

There are somethings that I had planned to paint but haven't -- My US forces for Team Yankee are still mostly sitting in their shrink wrapped boxes. I was going to buy an infantry force for my Italians for the upcoming campaign at the club and I decided I didn't really want to paint that much 15mm infantry so I didn't even buy them -- I do have some tanks that I didn't get painted last time that I will paint up and I have been sort of looking at ebay to see if there is a painted Fucilere force since I would like to have one even if I don't want to paint one.

Hopefully the blog will get updated much more often with some progress on these projects (and the backlog games as well)

2016 Plans for the New Year

With being sick and being very busy with my new job I haven't had a lot of time yet this month for the blog or for gaming (though hopefully there will be gaming on Sunday) In an effort to kick-start some progress I will set down my plans and goals for this year.

Team Yankee

This is going to dominate my painting time (and hopefully, at least to some extent, my gaming time) for the first part of the year. I put together 2 starter boxes of Soviets when I got back from Halifax and a handful of Americans and have been planning to start painting them since then. With any luck that will get started this weeekend -- the Soviets should go quickly since they are one colour (I plan to try a bit of "colour modulation" with the airbrush to give them some depth) and then I will follow up with the US. I plan to get enough of both forces so I can do both a mechanized and a tank force. The real test here will be to actually get the infantry done.

SAGA / Dragon Rampant
Here I want to get the rest of the Islamic forces from the SAGA starter boxes painted up. After we play a few games of Dragon Rampant I will get a better idea of how many I HAVE to paint but to be honest, I enjoy painting these. Once they get done I do have some plastic cavalry to paint up but they are not currently in the "official queue". I also want to play more games with the 3 SAGA factions and get good at at least one of them!

I am also going to paint up a force for Nick's Trojan War campaign but it will likely be the smallest force possible i.e. all hearthguard.  I think I will go with Foundry Greeks for this but I haven't decided yet.

Frostgrave
I want to have two relatively coherent warbands for this and paint up most of the stuff I got from the Nickstarter. I foresee this being a useful break from the Team Yankee painting.

Bolt Action
I would like to paint my Canadians but my only real goal is to finish the basing of the Germans and to play a game with them.

Hail Caesar
It didn't look like there would be any Romans in my immediate future but Ed want's to try out his siege rules that he developed for the French and Indian war in a (much) earlier period so we are dusting off our plans to do some Dacian war battles. I am planning to paint up 4-5 Roman siege engines for this and maybe a unit or 2 with some Aventine figures (since I have to get the set that has Trajan and Decadulus' head)

Terrain
Weirdly, the terrain I most want to do is for my Ortona campaign for 28mm WWII for which I don't have any inspiration to paint the figures! I want to do a river bank type terrain, a piece with the gully and a cityscape.

I have some ideas for Frostgrave and Team Yankee terrain and I should probably get more 28mm terrain suitable for SAGA.

I think that should keep me busy for the rest of the year and I am going to make a real effort not to get anything that is not on this list

2015: The Year in Review

Looking back over my blog posts for this year it was a pretty good year for playing games but it wasn't all that great for painting (but it wasn't really terrible for that either). I will divide the year up by game rather than time and take a look at what was (and wasn't accomplished)

Descent 2nd Edition:
After having this game for over a year (and buying more expansions than I would care to admit) I started playing this in the summer (we are about halfway through the Heir of Blood campaign now). When I bought this my plan was to paint all the plastic figures and that way I would get something out if it even if I didn't play that much. I did manage to get a reasonable chunk of the base set done when I first got it and I thought that once I started playing it, I would be frantically painting but the reality is that nothing got done (but the game is a lot of fun!)

Flames of War:
We played 2 campaigns at the club in 2015: Firestorm Lorraine and a Fate of the Nation Escalation campaign. Both were a lot of fun and I did a fair bit of painting for both.

For the Fate of a Nation, I painted a bunch of T-55s, SU-100s, PT-76 and and IS-3s for the Egyptians and some Ishermans and AMX-13s for the Israelis. On the downside I bought some M48s and Sho'ts as well as infantry for both sides that didn't get painted (though some of the infantry is primed!)

For Firestorm Lorraine, I had posted my painting goals here and I think I did a pretty good job of getting through that stuff. The PZ IV/70s, the PZ IVs and the Panthers all saw action during the campaign and I think the halftracks got assembled. I also didn't buy anything new during the campaign which is a victory of sorts.

I might as well mention my Vietnam stuff here as well-- there was almost no progress. I based some and primed some infantry but nothing that really gets me close to a game. Again I resisted buying anything new (especially the Riverine stuff  which I am still tempted by)

Hail Caesar:
The beginning of the year was good for Hail Caesar as I painted a bunch of Roman Legion as well as archers and slingers for the game I ran at Cangames in 2015.  The Romans are still my favourite army to paint. I had plans to paint up zombies, skeletons and Beastmen for a Hail Caesar Fantasy game based on the Teutoburg Forest to run at Cangames this year (I had a weeks vacation in September where I was going to paint up a large chunk of it and ended up playing Destiny on the PS4). I would still like to do this  but it is on the back burner.

Frostgrave:
This got played a few times and up to the end of the year, I managed to keep to my plan to play this with the figures I already had. Then this happened. I didn't plan to paint these this year so I don't consider that a negative (yet!).

Bolt Action :
This has been my painting millstone around my neck. I have a lot of good ideas for games based on the Canadians fighting in and around Ortona at the end of 1943. I have discussed terrain with Ed and he has even made me an Italian Farmhouse to try and get me inspired. The idea of running and playing the games is very appealing and even making the terrain should be fun but I just can't get myself to paint the figures.

The number of pieces for each figure in the Warlord Games army box was daunting to start with so I put off putting them together. Then once I had them together I really didn't want to paint them. I wanted to get them painted so I kept them on the painting table and put off starting other projects just so I wouldn't be distracted (the result of which was that nothing got painted for several months). With some prodding from Ed the Germans are mostly painted (but they all need their bases worked up and the halftracks need some weathering and decals.

For the Canadians, I have put together a mortar, a vickers MG and an AT gun and maybe 5 other guys. I am not thrilled with this but I pushed them aside to paint SAGA stuff and hopefully when I come back to them I will be more inspired.

SAGA:
The year did not begin well for SAGA. I had bought a Frankish Starter army and the Gripping Beast plastic medieval guys to paint over the Christmas holidays and I ended up being sick so they are still in their boxes.

When the Saracen set came out for Crescent and Cross as I was pretty good and got that painted up quickly and played a few games with Mike but then the Bolt Action block got in the way. I have managed to catch up and have played with both a Mutatawwi'a warband and and Moorish one but there is still a lot unpainted (my ultimate goal is to have a genericish Arab/Islamic army for Hail Caesar).

I did also pick up the SAGA revenant army in the thought it could also be used in my Hail Caesar Fantasy game and I have done nothing with it.

Other:
I played some Fistful of Kung Fu this year and finished painting the figures I had for that (well, to be honest, Ed painted most of them). I based and primed a Transylvanian army for By Fire and Sword. And I bought a lot of stuff for Team Yankee at the end of the year but that is definitely a 2016 project.