Dreadball: Robot Team, MVP's and Coaches

With season 3 of Dreadball due to drop through the mailbox any day now I decided it was about time I got a move on and did some more work on some of the season 2 teams.  What we have here is the robot team which I'm looking forward to playing.  The team starts the game as 6 jacks, but can transform into strikers and guards as the game goes on, it's an interesting sounding mechanic.  I've painted the team in a basic bronze scheme that was quick and easy to do and I think gives a nice almost 'steampunky' feel.

Below we have two of the MVP's from season 2, on the left is 'Gabe' who is from penny arcade and the robot 'Firewall'.

 

 

And finally 4 coaches.  This is a great pack with 4 really characterful models, 'Orcy' is my favourite.  Unfortunately the coat of varnish that I apply to all my Dreadball minis to help them survive the rigours of play has spoilt the paint job's slightly.

 

Airfix 1:76 WW2 German Reconnaissance Set

 

I was off work sick last week and wanted a quick little project to keep myself busy, I came back from the model shop with this WW2 1:76 scale German Reconnaissance set from Airfix.  The set contains 3 infantry figures, two of which are unfortunately the same and two vehicles.  The vehicles are a Kubelwagen car and the highlight of the set which is a SD.KFZ.222 armoured car.  It's a good little set and I enjoyed assembling and painting it.

 

40K - Space Marine Land Raider & Techmarine

A couple of new additions to my space marine army today, a Land Raider and an attendant techmarine.  My copy of the new Codex: Space Marines arrived yesterday as well, obviously I've not managed to read it all yet, but it looks really good, possibly the best codex yet produced, in terms of the production values, art, background and what seems to be an interesting, yet still balanced, army list.  It wasn't cheap, but I'm really impressed.  Hopefully I'll post some more detailed thoughts in a couple of days.

 

I'm A Winner!

There's been quite a few competitions going on recently around the blogosphere, and after having entered a lot of them I've finally won one.  I'm now the proud owner of 'The British airship at war, 1914-1918'.  I've only had a quick flick through so far but it looks really interesting.

I've been interested in airships as long as I can remember, which is probably due to having lived in the shadow of the old Royal Airships Works, near Cardington, Bedford, for most of my life.  These two 'sheds' are absolutely huge and dominate the countryside for miles around.  The famous R101 airship was built there.

Anyway thanks to Edwin at Thoughts of a Depressive Diplomatist and a recommendation that you check put his blog too.

The hangars at Cardington as seen from my village

From the Painting Table 8

I'm resurrecting this old format of mine to show off a couple of completely unrelated projects that I've just finished.

To start with we have this squad of 6 Eldar dire avengers.  Painted in a similar manner to the last unit of these I painted, but with the red and white crest pattern reversed so I can tell the members of the two squads apart.

We also have this 1:288 scale model of the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, made by somebody called Ace Corporation who I've never heard of.  This purchase was of course inspired by my recent trip to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford.  It's not a big kit, but it does what it's supposed to do just fine.  It has the option of wheels, but I've mounted it on a GW flying base.  One think that struck me about this kit was that it came with 29 separate, often very small and fiddly, transfers to apply!

40K: Alpha Legion Chaos Space Marine Khorne Berserkers

Some more additions to my alpha Legion force today, the bulk of which is this 15 strong squad of Khorne Berserkers shown below.  This is an amalgamation of two lots I bought off ebay a while back (both lots also included other bits as well), the problem with this is they're not necessarily assembled as I would have chosen.  The question of course is why do I have Alpha Legion Berserkers in the first place? Essentially because I want to, and I don't think it's beyond reason that over the millennia some of an isolated alpha legion warband wouldn't fall to worshipping one god or another in particular.

 

I've also made and painted these three alpha legionnaires below to bring my second marine squad upto 10 men.  These are made up from a variety of bits, the legs come from Khorne Berserkers that were in too bad a state to add to the squad above, the torsos and most of the arms are from loyalist space marines and the head and weapons are spares from the chaos space marine squad box.  I think it all worked out fine in the end though.

 

 

And finally a pic of my Chaos army as it stands now.  I have 5 more terminators and a small squad of plague marines too paint and then I need a centrepiece which I think will be a deamon engine of some sort, but do I go for a Heldrake, a forge fiend or a defiler?

 

IWM Duxford

Over the bank holiday weekend I took a long overdue trip to the Imperial War Museum at RAF Duxford, despite it only being 40mins away from where I live it's been over 15 years since my last visit.  Obviously I had some recollection of my last visit, but it was hazy at best, quite a bit seems to have changed as well.  The site is an old RAF station and is a collection of hangers, purpose made museums and old military buildings, focusing mainly on military aviation, but also featuring some civil aviation, naval and a large collection of land warfare exhibits.  You can just about get round it all in a day (we did), but I heartily recommend that if you're visiting you arrive at opening time!

There are three main museums Airspace, The American Air Museum and the land warfare hall.  Airspace is the central gallery of the site really, it is a large hanger filled with (mostly British) planes.  Highlights include a Lancaster bomber, a Sunderland flying boat, an Avro Vulcan and a Concord (that you can go on and have a look around) plus lots more.  The hall also includes an introduction to flight and aircraft, which is mainly aimed at kids, but still had some fun buttons to press.  And finally it also includes the museum of parachute regiment.

Oddly perhaps for a visit to an aviation museum my favourite part was the land warfare hall that is at the far end of the site.  It has a mixture of tanks, trucks and guns from WWI up to fairly modern stuff (although WW2 takes the lions share) all laid out in mock battle zones.  It's very good and there is a lot of stuff in there including the vans used by Montgomery himself as his HQ.  We also have another regimental museum here this time for the Anglian regiment.  Just out the back of the land hall is a tank arena, luckily we got there just as they started driving a bunch of tanks and other tracked vehicles around through the mud.  This was totally unexpected and was a great bonus to the day out.

The American air museum is the last of the big exhibit spaces, a showcase of American military aircraft from early bi-planes up to modern planes.  The building is built around a B52 Stratofortress, which whilst being an awesome plane, is not the highlight of this gallery, which is undoubtedly the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.  The blackbird shouldn't really need any introduction, but just in case it does, it's an old US spy plane that still holds the record for fastest and highest flight by a manned aircraft!  On top of it's fantastic spec is the simple fact that I think it's the best looking plane I've ever seen.  Apart from the Blackbird and the Stratofortress my other two favourites were both hanging from the ceiling, the A-10 Thunderbolt tank hunter, and the U2 spy plane. 

 

There are a number of additional galleries as well housed in old aircraft hangers.  The first one we went into housed a bunch of privately owned classic flying aircraft, both military and civil and some that weren't in a very good state at all, but are in the process of being renovated.  The next one was called 'battle of Britain' and as well as looking at the battle of Britain also looked at British air defences in general.  The most interesting of these hangers though was the 'air and sea' hall.  As well as more aircraft this also had a midget submarine,  an old lifeboat and torpedo boats from both WWI and WWII.

 

 

The site itself really adds to the day with the period buildings, and also lots of exhibits scattered around the place, including a large anti-ship gun that used to defend Gibraltar and a replica V1 rocket launcher.  Also (and I don't know if this happens every day) there were lots of planes taking off and flying about all day, including several bi-planes, a spitfire and a catalina.  A adult entry cost £17.50 which was definitely worth it.

The Hobbit: Dwarf Grimhammers

It's been a few months since my last trip to middle-earth, I've now returned and painted a box of dwarf grimhammers from the Hobbit range.  These are really fantastic looking models and I'm very pleased with them.

A couple of weeks ago I actually played the Hobbit game for the first time, playing through a couple of the scenarios in boxed set.  It's quite fun really and I'd like to play it a bit more and use the rest of my middle-earth figures, however to take the next step you really need to buy the £50 rulebook (for the army lists and points values), and that's a bit steep for me.

Axis & Allies: The Battle Of The Bulge

For the first time really this summer last weekend saw quite a bit of gaming activity, as well as playing a fair bit of Jurassic wars (see two posts back) we also finally got around to playing the Hobbit game from games workshop and my friend brought round a new board game for us to try, Axis and Allies: the Battle of the Bulge.  I've played the original Axis & allies game many times, but this is the first time I've tried many of the 'off-shoot' games that have been released using the same brand.  This one of course sets out to simulate the battle of the bulge at the end of 1944 in Belgium.  It's very different from the original Axis and Allies game.  The objective of the game is for the Germans to capture more territory than they did in the historical campaign and for the allies to stop them.

It started to go wrong on turn one as the Germans fail to push back the whole Allied line 

The board and pieces all look good, they don't scrimp on playing pieces either and we never go close to running out of any of the troop types.  I took the allies and my friend took the Germans.  The Germans start the game getting to attack on turn one without any response from the allies, this push didn't go as well as my opponent hoped, with one group in particular holding out unexpectedly, which critically slowed the Germans down.

By mid-game it looks like the Germans are about to breakthrough

 

 

Reinforcements are fixed and each turn both sides get a set group.  The Germans seem to start off getting the upper hand, but by the mid-game the allied reinforcements and planes (which you get from turn 5-8) swing it back in the other direction.  The other major consideration is supply (fuel, ammo, etc.)  which you also have to manage, the allies get the lions share of this too, but it can be captured.  This is designed well I think, it's not complicated, but does add another tactical layer to the game. 

Mike makes his next move

 

 

I won a convincing victory in the end, with the Germans only having around half the territory they needed to win at the end of turn 8.   I liked the game and in particular it's played at an interesting scale, but I also have a few concerns, I'd never played before, but had no real difficulty in halting the German advance against someone with experience.  Admittedly this is only after a single game, but the allies seem to have a distinct advantage.  My second concern is replayability, I want to have another go, being the Germans next time of course, but then I don't have a desire to play the game for quite a while after that.  The proscribed reinforcements hamper this as inevitably games are going to play in a similar way.

In the end the German attempted breakthrough is insufficient and easily knocked back.

40K Eldar Wraithlord & Space Marine Land Speeder Storm

I've been having a busy summer and have got almost no painting done over the last couple of months, but finally I've managed to finish a couple of bits off, first of which is this Eldar Wraithlord.  I'm pretty pleased overall with this guy, although I still haven't quite managed to get yellow right.

Also this scout transporting land speeder storm. It's supposed to have four scouts in the back as well being transported, which I will get to at some point (maybe) but this has been on my painting table for a year or so and I just wanted to get it useable as quick as possible, for a 50pt model it's taken a lot of work.

Review - Jurassic Wars

Today I'm having a look at yet another impulse purchase; a cheap travel card game called Jurassic Wars. The game features dinosaur cards which fight each other until one player has no cards left.  It feels like you're playing a more advanced version of Top Trumps.

The game comes in a small, but sturdy box, which is labelled as a 'dice arena', but it's just a box really.  The box contains a rules booklet, 7 dice and 33 cards.  The rules booklet is in black and white and is 8 pages long.  The rules are clearly and concisely written and we had no issues with understanding how it was to work.  You get 7 6-sided dice, 4 green (for the herbivores) and 3 red (for the carnivores), the green ones have 2 faces with stars and the red ones 3 faces with stars.  It's a nice little touch that they did special dice, ordinary D6's would have worked just as well, but simplifies the process a bit and makes the game more accessible.  Then finally what you're really paying for is the cards, they're standard playing card sized and seem to be of reasonable quality.  One thing I'm really impressed with is the artwork on the cards each dinosaur has been brilliantly rendered , if I'd have had these as a kid I've have spent hours just looking at the pictures.

Gameplay is a series of one on one dinosaur combats, which sees players rolling the number and type of dice shown on the dino's card and the player with the most stars wins that round and either reduces the opponents dice or kills him if there are no dice left to remove.  Play keeps going until only one player has no dinosaurs left.  Tactics revolve around which order to play your cards and when to play your limited supply of combat cards (that have various affects on the dice).

I think it works best as a two-player game really, and if you have the full 5 players there's going to be a bit to much waiting for your turn.  There's only so much depth in the basic game, but there's already a bunch of extra rules on the website which add that extra depth to the game and includes a couple of new ways to play too.

In my introduction I labelled this as a travel game, but that's not really fair, whilst it is suitable as a travel game due to its small size, we've been having lots of fun with this at home on the dinning room table.

In conclusion this is a great little game, inexpensive, good mechanics, suitable for players of different levels and with a great theme as well.  Highly recommended!

Hunters, Explorers and Adventurers - Part 2

Somewhat later than anticipated we have my second bunch of explorers that I plan to take dinosaur hunting.

Starting with these 4 from North Star games.  These are the first models I've got from Northstar, pretty good on the whole, nice detail and character, but there was a lot of flash.

and then these which are from foundry like the last lot.

You'll notice a Renaissance captain looking slightly out of place on the right, foundry have started giving away a free model with orders (a fantastic policy) and this was Julys free model, jolly nice he is too.