White Dwarf 394 & Wargames Illustrated 300

It's been a big month with my two wargaming magazines, lets start as usual with White Dwarf.

White Dwarf 394 (actually I now can't see that number anywhere so WD Oct 2012) is the first of a new era, with a complete redesign and an increase in size and price.  There is a lot of good here, it's a big improvement.  I like the new styling, I like that black library, forgeworld and fantasy flight games are given a proper place.  At the end of the mag is a nice section of whats going on in WD, the design studio, black libray and forgeworld, with the sort of design notes that have been missing of late.  Jervis Johnson, Jeremey Vetcock and John Blanche (blanchistu is spectacular this month) get columns and there are quite a few examples of poeples models and conversions.  A battle report of course features and there is a nice article called the rivals which pits two warhammer generals against each other in army design.  It's not all good though the painting section is still very basic with little in the way of techniques, and the biggy is that the new releases section takes up a whooping 50 pages! A full third of the space.  It's definatly better, but not quite yet fixed.

It also comes with a fre Horus Heresy poster which is OK if not spectacular.

Wargames Illustrated celebrates its 300th issuse by producing a huge issuse of just shy of 300 pages!  This months theme is last stands and the mag has many many articles on famous and not famous last stands throughout history.  Flames of war only gets a quick look in where they explore the new plastic starter set (which I am tempted by), but pretty much every era gets at least one article.  I've not had a chance to read it all yet, but it's very impressive eye candy and the articles I have read have been up to the usual standard (including an interesting one trying to sperate the myth of the 300 spartans from reality).