2017- What does it hold for me? (Pooch)

So, 2016.

Glad you are no longer with us.

On to 2017!

So what does it have in store? Well, I want to keep the good(ish) habit I began last year which was to actually finish things, a short list of what I did last year includes...

• A 15mm Napoleonic British army

• Four Bolt Action armies

• Four 6mm Team Yankee armies

• A Norman army for Impetus

• Two Infinity forces

• A fair few Flames of War Germans for two tournaments I played

Which wasn't all that I planned to do, but it was actually a good amount finished!

In keeping with that trend then, what do I want to get done in 2017?

1) Impetus
It's no secret I like Impetus, but am rubbish at completing armies- which is why the Normans are such as surprise! Clearly forgetting my inabilities, I have decided to paint another Impetus army this year. As for which one, McBeth has been working on Romans for the last little while, which very neatly leads me to.... Carthaginians!

This is actually most of the army, just missing some Cavalry and Elephants!

2) Napoleonics in 15mm
So for super secret project #8, I painted up a British Waterloo army. I have the makings of a French army in a box upstairs, in fact, some of them are even painted! But might end up doing Prussians. Or Dutch-Belgians. Or Brunswickers. Or Polish....

Whatever the army is, there will be another one!


3) Team Yankee
I like the idea of 1980s Cold War gone hot, and I do like Team Yankee- Battlefront have made a great product there I think. So, it should surprise no one then that when one the club members said "hey, I am keen on 15mm Team Yankee" that I jumped straight onto that bandwagon!

My plan is a US Tank force, which I will paint up as M1A1 tanks for Desert Storm. Just willing Battlefront to release M3 Bradleys now, so I can have Armoured Cavalry!

The vauge plan is to play around 75 points, so I am starting with the Bannons Boys boxed set and then progressively building from there.

Bannon's Boys boxed set. Because M1A1.

4) Bolt Action

Well, Bolt Action. I painted no less than four armies for this last year, and still wasn't happy with the job that I did on them. So, I made the decision to cut down to one army at Valleycon, selling my US and most of my germans- but the halftracks, Tiger and Puma didn't sell.

And so, those became the starting point for my new army! With the money raised, I bought a whole lot of the lovely new Winter Germans. Plan is to whitewash all of the vehicles, have all of the infantry in greatcoats etc and make the OPFOR for McZ's Americans. An idea I have stolen from Shep is to have Battlekiwi cut some bases from his cobblestone roads, thus making the basing step so easy for me!

I have done a couple of test figures, and I am really happy with the result!

Warlord winter german, Battlekiwi base and GW snow product

5) Flames of War 

I played two Flames of War competitions last year, and really did enjoy them. Add to that the upcoming release of V4, I can only expect I will want to play more!

I made a good dent into the repaint/rebuild of a very old Flames of War German army made up of the spare parts I had lying around the house, and scrounged from other Regimenters. I will try to keep the progress going to get the last of it done! 

6) Miscellaneous

And, hell. If you are on our blog you have figured out we love random projects. All those little games like In Her Majesty's name or Dead Mans Hand, or even those bigger games like Warlord's Gates of Antares. I should really build more model kits. And more Infinity. Or 28mm French Napoleonics for Chosen Men. Or maybe Zulus for The Men Who Would be Kings. Or Afghans...

So how random? Repainting X-Wings to be Blue Squadron random!

Obligatory "pew pew"

So there you have it. I wouldn't call it a plan, more of a "disorganised list". Which is probably about all you can hope for with us!

Pooch

2017: what does it hold for me? (McBeth)

Plans are afoot!

Now that Gamesmas and ValleyCon 2017 are over I can look at gathering my thoughts regarding the coming year (seeing its now February y'know). Plans, both well thought and diabolical, race through my head, but as usual with new year's resolutions of restricting the intake of bad things such as chocolate and booze, I thought I'd hold back on getting too exited about new projects and try and limit myself. At the moment, I only have two projects that require figures to paint and I find myself turning more and more to the idea of terrain making. One complication for this year for me will be that Mrs McBeth (no wait, that sounds like I'm talking about my mum!), err Lady McBeth (oh yes. MUCH better :| ) and I have plans to renovate the house (not into Cawdor Castle though. that was vetoed very early on!) which that will mean the games room will need to be first packed, then moved, then cleaned and we will likely be living at the mother-in-law's for a couple of weeks or months.

Republican Romans for Impetvs

I had already started this project last year with several purchases of A&A Miniatures excellent Gaulish/Celtic figures. The initial idea was to do Carthaginians, but then just before Christmas I saw Mighty Ape had a sale on Victrix's Republican Romans in chain mail (Lorica Hamata for you nerds out there) so I snapped them up as a pressie to myself. The opening did not last until Christmas day and I had already opened them and finished painting two bases of Velites by Christmas morning!

The list consists of two legions supported by various locals. The celts are kind of trying to be Celtiburians or Spanishy-celty dudes to try and make sense that I also have Numidian cavalry in the force too.

I also picked up some Warlord Games slingers and the great little Pullo and Vorenus figures to act as my commanders. These are unfortunately still 'in transit'. Mr Bowman is trying to hunt down where the package has got to :(

I've been using the LBM shield transfers for both the Celts and the Romans and they are lovely, but bloody fiddly! It took a few to get the hang of it. My main problem was matching the colour of the red Roman shields to cover all the white showing through.

Late War Germans for Bolt Action

I had been looking for an OPFOR for my 51st HD army and when Regimenteer Bob "Mad as a cut Snake" Pearce was selling off a box of the Warlord Grenadiers, I threw cash at him and grabbed the box. The plan was to wait until the Romans were complete before I purchase any more figures for the army, but because I won the Flames of War competition at ValleyCon 2017, I had a few $$ worth of vouchers to spend at Mighty Ape! I also picked up Poochie's StuG IIIG from the bring and buy table :)

The plan is for a small, mobile force with lots of firepower - very German. Plenty of Stg44s and panzerfausts and MG42s in one section. No HMGs or mortars, but maybe some Sturmpionere and flame throwers!

Odds and Sods

- basing vampires for IHMN

I've had these for a while now and McZermof kindly pointed out during our Gamesmas game of IHMN that I should really finish them.

- painting arc cannon for IHMN

Again, McZermof pointed out that I've had this figure for my British rifle company for IHMN for quite some time undercoated and on the painting shelf.

- Austrians 15mm

I think my first posts on the blog was me painting the Austrians for Napoleon at War. Some recent motivation has come up to have these finished so with only two battalions to go I should get these done this year. (Seeing I painted a French army in the last 4 months of 2016 for another project...)

- 25mm AWI

After last year's fantastic Black Powder game of AWI, I have a whole heap of sprues of Continental infantry in my basement. I reckon there are about 4-5 regiments there so the aim will be to break up some of the other projects and paint a regiment every so often.

Terrain

As always, there is a heap of terrain projects that I'd like to do but I find myself limited by time and ability.

- Cornfields
These would be great to have for any game but in particular the AWI games that I'm not playing :) There is a great product from JTT's that has O Scale ripe corn stalks, but at $30 per 28 stalks they are expensive. I think I could find cheaper versions, maybe via eBay or AliExpress...

- Buildings for Frostgrave
I made these last year and want to expand the ruins to have some arches and walls to break LOS

Well, thats about it. Of course, as this blog is about a motley collection of magpies, these plans will change and be augmented by whatever new shiny comes along!

Maybe...

ValleyCon - after the dust has settled

The Hutt Club hosted its annual wargames convention - ValleyCon this weekend past at Expressions Event centre in Upper Hutt and what a weekend it was. We had our largest ValleyCon attendance yet - 123(ish) gamers from around the country. As usual we had great support from our sponsors, visit them - they're awesome (you'll have to pop into the Beachfront Pharmacy in Paraparaumu to visit the Hobby Corner):

KREATIVE SCENERY

People traveled from as far afield as Auckland and Balclutha to play toy soldiers for a couple of days. We expanded the range of games on offer again this year and will probably keep it to this list next year as we did a good job of filling the hall comfortably with enough room left for some of the games to expand:

• Warhammer 40K (14 players)
• Age of Sigmar (22!!!)
• Flames of War (14)
• Warmachine/Hordes (16)
• Lord of the Rings (10)
• DBMM (18)
• Infinity (7)
• Bolt Action (14)
• Malifaux (8)

Club members, and some of the visitors, rallied around on Friday evening to get the tables set and terrain ready for the early kick off on Saturday morning.

Then at 8am the hordes descended! I'm not going to give a blow by blow of the event but each TO has provided a small writeup and some pics below:

Demo games

Gates of Antares

A really nice looking table put on by Scott Bowman from The Hobby Corner

Wings of War

some WW1 biplane action

Infinity 

This was the first time that someone has attempted to run a multi-day Infinity event and I was more than a little nervous about it, particularly as 5 of the 7 players travelled down from Auckland! Thankfully they were all great sports about it and saw it as an opportunity to show Infinity as a great tourney game with loads of great table eye candy and try to draw in a few more players. The eye candy factor definitely worked with loads of interest coming from other competitors and Joe Public walking through. 

The Infinity scenarios are split into three groups:

• Direct action - scenarios more focused on causing casualties or otherwise dominating the tablespace
• Special operations - you'll need lots of specialist troops to interact with mission objectives
• Combined Ops - scenarios with a mix of the two play styles

To keep things interesting over the two days, I used Direct action scenarios for the first day and Special ops for the second and allowed players to swap lists to suit the scenario types.

Auckland has a very active Infinity scene, most players getting in a couple of games a week so they were all going to be stiff competition. All of the players were great sports and everyone ended the weekend having thoroughly enjoyed themselves and promising to get back next year (well, I took it as promises anyway.

the results at the top of the table were very close:

Player	TP	OP	VP
Jed Stanton	12	31	1055
Jason Farley	12	31	839
Luke Brimblecombe	10	31	1097
Matt van Dam	9	22	886
Isaac Nannestad	8	23	981
Chris Parkin	5	7	631
Dave Fraser	2	6	379

   

and some pics of the games:

Age of Sigmar

Age of Sigmar made its debut at ValleyCon this year and managed to attract the biggest field at the event with 22 players! We have a strong traveling group with 4 from Auckland and 2 from Hamilton. The tournament was 2,000 point games with 5 rounds played over 2 days. The games drew a number of spectators with questions and comments. While Age of Sigmar has been out 18 months the tournament system is only 6 months old. There was a great mix of armies with 8 Order, 6 Chaos, 5 Death and 3 Destruction. 

The tournament ran smoothly with no drama and only positive feedback. It was won by Matthew Britton (The Champ) with his Destruction list. This is Matthew's first tournament win after 2 previous strong finishes. Congratulations Matthew this was well deserved! Best Army (Paint) went to Matt Watkinson, who recently arrived from the UK. Best Sports went to new on the scene Joel Taylor who corrected his opponent interpretation of how a scenario worked which meant Joel lost the game then and there, great sportsmanship!      

Age of Sigmar is still in its infancy and the next 12 months looks to be a very exciting time with a number of events taking place in Hamilton, Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. This will be capped off with Masters in Wellington at the end of the year. For more information on the Age Of Sigmar scene in New Zealand, check out http://warhammernz.com/ contact/ It has a number of useful links and upcoming tournaments. 

Warmachine / Hordes

So a motley crew of 16 competitors rolled out to play an Iron Gauntlet Version of the Warmachine Steamroller rules at Valleycon 2017.

Some beautiful armies competed across 6 rounds to find a champion worthy of the title. Each player had three lists of 50 points and the last round would be made up to 75 points from the lists they had used in the previous rounds. Some players only used two lists and restricted themselves in the last dash for glory.

Our final standings saw 

1st Place  - Mike Thorn (Cryx)

2nd Place - Rob Van Der Wal (Khador)

3rd Place - Scott Wyngarden (Mercenaries)

Best Painted - Rohan Prince (Mercenaries)

Assassin - Scott Patterson (Trolls)

Butcher - Scott Wyngarden (Mercenaries)

Best Sport - Rohan Prince

Wooden Spoon - James Braid (Minions - Pigs)

Bolt Action

14 players went to war at ValleyCon, playing Bolt Action, the WWII wargame. There were seven Axis armies (4 German, 3 Japanese) against 7 Allied armies (2 American, 2 Soviet, 3 British).

Four missions were played over the two days. Best Sport went to John Fletcher, who fielded a very cool US army and suffered appalling dice. Best Army went to Russell Briant - this was a tough choice, as there were some really well painted armies (all the armies were well painted, and Bolt Action is very easy to field a fully painted army without too much hassle), but Russell's Japanese army was not only well painted but had a lot of really cool conversions. Third place went to Reg Newell, who fielded a vanilla regular British army - it is a sign of how the rules are pretty robust when an ordinary army can be pretty tough and competitive. Second place went to Haydyn Hitchcock, who fielded a very cool US army mounted in halftracks. And the winner was Heath Hitchcock, who had a very nasty Japanese army, with two big squads of bamboo spear armed conscripts, two squads of elite Japanese marines, a bunch of "human bullet" suicide anti-tank troops, an ex-British armoured car, and a heavy howitzer mounted on a light tank.

I played with a German Luftwaffe Division - a formation of middle-aged men, reluctantly thrown into battle. They were all classed as Inexperienced (i.e. rubbish!), but were stiffened by the presence of a mighty Tiger tank! To my amazement, the presence of the Tiger tank seemed to mesmerise many of my opponents, which meant that my poor quality Luftwaffe infantry were able to survive most games. This is a good example of how in Bolt Action there is a lot of variation in your armies if you want it.

Warhammer 40,000

We had 14 participants who played 5 rounds of Warhammer 40,000 7th

Edition. Each round was a mixture of eternal war and maelstrom of war missions from the main rulebook. We had armies from various factions including Blood Angels, Eldar, Ultramarines, Necrons, Black Templars, Space Wolves, Tau, Genestealer Cult & Tyranids, Harlequins, and Grey Knights. Seems like the ‘bad guys’ were outnumbered pretty heavily – or are there any such thing as ‘good guys’ in the 40k universe? Competition was fiercely fought across the weekend with only a single point splitting the first and second places on overall points in the end. The armies on display were a joy to look at and everyone seemed to enjoy the weekend.

Here are some pics of the battles below.

Flames of War

Flames of War has been a stalwart for many years at Valleycon. 14 players made 1000 point Early War armies, representing Russians, Germans, British, Kiwis, French and Italian armies.

With seven games over the weekend and with an hour and a half for play, all of the players had their work cut out for them! And to their credit, every one of them did their absolute best at following the first rule of sportsmanship (don’t be a dick). And of course, every tournament organiser loves it when you only have to look in the rulebook all of four times to help people out...

Points were based on how many wins each player had, and then used the Battlefront victory points for a countback. On to the results. As you can see, it was a closely run thing, with every player losing at least two games!

McBeth managed to sneak away with the win in the end, squeaking past Tank and Bede who were snapping at his heels! The trophy for first place commemorates our great friend, and Regiment Stalwart Nick Garden. You can read more about his story here (http://regimentnz.blogspot.co.nz/2015/09/a-massive-loss-to-regiment.html). Suffice to say, it is always a special point of remembrance to have the trophy presented.

Wins VPs 1st McBeth 5 32 2nd Tom 5 31 3rd Bede 4 32 4th Ken 4 29 5th Steve 4 25 6th Damo 4 23 7th Richard 4 20 8th David 3 25 9th Kim 2 21 10th= Andrew 2 20 10th= Julian 2 20 12th Simon 2 18 13th Alex 1 16 14th Jamie 1 15

Best Painted army went to Richard’s lovely 11^th Hussars (better pics here: http://rdsteer.blogspot.co.nz/2017/01/completed-army-for-valleycon-2017.html) , and Best Sport went to Andrew, because anyone who can run horses at tanks with a smile on their face game after game deserves a damn medal!

Thanks to all who provided terrain, especially Kreative Scenery who not only supplied two gorgeous tables, but also prizes for 1^st 2^nd and 3^rd! Check out the different things to buy at their website (kreativescenery.co.nz). And another big thanks to our other sponsor, Mighty Ape for their generous prizes.

Lord of the Rings

DBMM

28mm DBMM comp at Valley-Con 2017.

John Van Den Hoeven ( Umpire/Player) ran a vary successful 400/450AP comp. 18 entries was 2 more than previous year. The odserver interest was  high & I think that we may have at least one returning gamer and one new gamer interested in playing DBMM in 28mm.

Going into the last round we had 5 gamers in a position to take out the comp. Made it all the more interesting .

Top 3 finish were;

1. Allen Yaxley ( Buyid of Baghdad)

2. Graeme Starkey ( Selucid)

3. Peter Noble ( Summerian)

Very high standard of presentation from all those attending. great looking figures & terrain. John's terrain from Mighty ape looked great.

Alastair & Gary had beautiful Greek armies.