Lazy week...

 Real life has been going on this last week after a bunch of painting and flagging progress last week and I haven't been in much of a mood, nor blessed with a lot of hobby time. 

First off. I painted another Tyranid for a bit more palette cleanse and he found his way into another potplant:

I've got a few more random 28mm figures floating around on the to-do pile which is slightly reducing the pile of shame on my desk to a point where I *might* be able to see the to-do pile, as it were. On that note, I also did a couple of super easy models to start on my Inquisition Kill Team: 

 

Yep, this is what happens when I have about four hours of hobby time in a week! I do the easy stuff! :)

Finally, we have our gaming club annual competition in a couple of months and I figured that I should probably make some minefields for the army. Handily I've been sitting on a collection of old CDs for making Flames of War minefields. I've got a whole extra set to do for my European-based armies, but these will do nicely for the Italians I'll be running. 

I've started on the second 15mm Spanish Tercio, but not made so much that I could justify claiming it for blog content. I did take all the Mycenaeans out of their box and check everything had arrived. It has and I'm even more excited about getting to work on them! 

Next Time

Good question. Something pointful and complete I'm sure. 

More Tyranids?

 More KoW

I had a full scale 2300 point game of KoW with Blogger Tank yesterday at the club and it has become abundantly clear to me that as my clubmates have adapted to fighting the glass cannon that is my Ghosties, I have not adapted quickly enough. 

 I'm not going to get into a full blow by blow but suffice to say Tank offered me some turn two charges (sensibly on his part as the alternative simply wasn't going to happen) and I flubbed almost all of it. My well placed double-charge in the centre failed to break the Royal Guards and the countercharge hit me much harder than I expected.

My left stuck in some tough combats (I could really have used my Horror buff solo there instead of in the centre where it was) and centre held for a couple of turns thanks to Tank double-1-ing a couple of key Nerve tests. All the while I was attacking Tank's left flank:

This was meant to be how I won this game but with a little good luck and a lot of good measurement, Tank had placed his units such that I didn't have quite as many good landing spots for my flyers as I wanted. It ended well for me:

But the total collapse of my centre and left (since I didn't find a way to end either of those combats in my favour!) lead us to call the game on Turn 5 with Tank still rocking his character Warwagon and giant armoured Dorf where I had effectively run out of models to steal the objective markers with! 

It was a great game and as Tank's Dwarf-skill has comfortably overtaken my own, I'm off back to the drawing board to adapt to the lessons I've learned. I've got a couple more tricks up my sleeve yet!

Spanish

I have done the Landsknecht Kiel (yeesh) and I kind of like how it's come out as a dense pike block. It weirdly feels more dense than the Tercios (which it definitely is) but this does have the advantage of not being able to mistake one for the other!

I'm not super happy with the whole army, to be honest, but I have also reached a point of realising that fixing it would require repainting huge swathes of stuff and so I've decided that rather than do that, I'll focus on getting it finished consistently (even if I'm not super happy) and stick more flags on it to make the whole thing pop.  With that in mind, more flags:

Yeah, I added a couple more to the knights and did the first Tercio: 

So just two Tercio's to go now. 

What about the Tyranids?

Many moons ago, while I was living overseas, my wife bought me a couple of models as a painting project since I wasn't gaming a lot. I've been carrying these around for...too many years and decided to paint them: 

Doing an original 2e Tyranid Gargoyle just as a palette cleanser was a lot of fun. I've done about half of another one who will also find a home inside a potplant somewhere in our house. 

Next Time

I'm getting to work on finishing the last two Tercios for my Renaissance Spanish as the Mycenaeans have arrived and that, well, that I'm really enthusiastic about.

Pooch's January update-2024 is underway!

And with that, 2024 is officially underway. Continuing on from 2023, blogs will be on or around the end of the month, so this one is on time... ish.

January was a very Tyranid heavy month (read only Tyranid!), probably the first of a few of the next few months!

1. Paint something bought before 2024

The growth of my hive fleet continues! I took the opportunity of a holiday break to crank through a good batch of Tyranids, enough to get an army ready to start playing games!

11 Neurogaunts

Close up of the neurogaunts

5 Hormagaunts

ANother 5 Hormagaunts, rounding it out to a full 10

Three Tyranid Warriors with ranged weapons

Five Ripper Swarms

\

Screamer-Killer

Close up of the armour plates on the back of the Screamer-Killer

Neuro-tyrant

Back of the Neurotyrant

2. Paint something bought in 2024

But wait, there are more bugs!

But wait there are more Termagants!

Perks of 3d printing is I could add some heavy weapons to the Termagants, this time with some Shardlaunchers

And..... some spore mines. Not exactly glamorous.....

So, that's 1175 points of Tyranids painted so far!

Tough to get them in a single photo!

3. Play a game of 40k each month

I got in a good number of 40k games this month, against a variety of opponents.

Psycophage chomped on some Death Guard.....

The Imperial Guard were a lovely snack too....

Snacked on some Imperial Fists as well

The Screamer-Killer ate a tank too!

4. Play a game of not-40k each month

I didn't manage it in the way I wanted to, but I did play some games of X-Wing with the kids, so I'll count it as this goal, but I didn't have the smarts to take a photo of the game in progress!

I'd best do better on this goal next month....

Pooch

FLAGS!

It's progress on lots of things on my Renaissance Spanish this week. With my Mycenaeans winging their way here at speed, I seem to have found the motivation to get this stuff done.

Generals

 I decided that I'd start with the flags on the generals because they were nice and easy. I had a 28mm flag sheet (thanks to the legendary Kevin Dallimore) printed out in 80% and 66%. The 66% ones are the ones I'll be using routinely, but I decided I'd stick the 80% ones on the generals so they're a touch bigger.

Knights

I've finished the knights after several weeks of having the horses painted but the riders unfinished. They're not the most complex of models so I decided to make it harder. 

Next time I come up with an idea like trying to paint candy stripes on a 15mm lance, someone please stop me. I've been working on these all week and my goodness, candy striping lances is HARD. I'm at least able to cover my more egregious failures with flags....

Camp

Since I was putting flags on things, I figured I'd do this one too. The camp has a pikeman on it just so I could wang a flag on it and he got one of the 80% sized flags too since I had the room. It also proved to me that the normal infantry definitely needed the slightly smaller scale ones or they'd almsot never fit!

Landsknechts

Progress here too. Most of the base coats are on which is more work than I've done on this army in months. They're probably another week away from done and then the last two Tercios come out of the box for me to get to work on. But no photos because right now there's nothing nice to look at! 

Next Time

Club day! Games day! Also Landsknechts.