Delistificating

Apparently the making the big list was a good way to get into the second half of the 2022 productivity planning? I've already checked off a whack of things!

First, a random model or two

One was found in the drawer of shame and the other was in the pile of to-dos. The first is a classic GW Great Eagle that I think I've had kicking around since about the 4th edition of Warhammer which I *might* me able to use in Kings of War Vanguard (I haven't actually checked!) but it was easy enough to get it done and it's a nice model. I think I intended to have a rider on it at some point but no idea what that was going to be!

I also finished up re-doing a Deathwatch Terminator:

This guy used to wield an Assault Cannon but given Dark Angels Terminators can have plasma cannons, I figured I should swap that out, so I have!

Silver Bayonet

 The first thing was finishing the last four Silver Bayonet Models from Perry.

Marin de la Ligne Remi Lievremont and Chasseur Veteran Jean-Paul Clerisseau

Grenadier de la Ligne Maximilien Choquet and my last infantryman Fusilier Gerome Boissonade

There are a couple more in the box but I don't need them to clear all the options that I wanted in this first tranche so they're on the back burner now!

 

And then a couple of monsters - a Living Armour (I've gone Living Statue in this case) and a Changeling. The Changeling is a Nolzurs soft plastic and was a bit warped when I got it from Blogger Pooch. I decided to keep it as it does look very shambling zombie. I've also started working on the ghosts, but I need to get some more plastic putty to tidy up some seams before I can finish those. 

Next Time

Not adding something to the to-do pile, like the 15mm Tiger that arrived during the week, would be a good start. I'm staring at these sticks of Tercios and thinking that maybe it's time to get one of those going. It's also club day so planning on some kind of game of something.... :)

Once more into the backlog!

I've been doing all sorts of random stuff this last week and finally (FINALLY) done some work on some things that have been waiting far far too long for progress.

Khemrians

I bought these direct from GW in the UK more than a decade ago to use as a Necromantic warband in Mordheim and I think I might have played them once or twice. They've been used as a Wizgang in Frostgrave and I have most of the parts for a decent KoW Vanguard list too. I'd just like to hunt down a couple of the classic Ushabti to finish that up. They've had a touch up of the paint over the last week and I finished up the swarms, a couple of new skeletons and a pair of giant spiders.

The spiders are also from the Drawer of Shame. They're the mounts for the current generation of Forest Goblin Spider Riders and we picked up a bunch from some place at some time and shared them out amongst the nerds. These have been waiting for AGES to get done and will serve as proxies for scorpions. Because both are arachnids. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. 

Brotherhood
Oh my goodness. I did it. Finally. I painted some knights!!!

So these are the two regiments of the 'Order of the Brotherhood.' Basically my line cavalry. I can't believe it took me this long to get it done. Ugh. So finishing this army won't take too long now.

I also painted these 'Order of the Forsaken' Pegasus knights too. They're super cool. The resin Pegasi from Fireforge are kind of rage inducing - they're super gappy - but an insane amount of filler largely fixes that problem.

Finally, I painted an 'Avatar of the Green Lady.' I'm not crazy on Mantic's figure and honestly, I'm not super crazy on this Nolzur's model either - the details are really shallow (especially on the face and hands) but it's a good stand in until somewhere along the way I can pick up an old Wood Elf Spellweaver to take it's place.

Deathwatch
And just because I felt like doing them, a couple of Vanguard marines for my Deathwatch. This is part of an evolving plan to redesign the army a little to emphasise the Primaris Kill Teams and use my Veterans as a more rapid strike unit. 

And from the Drawer of Shame
The only Protectorate of Menoth model I own that I hadn't painted.

At some point I acquired a second Reclaimer to run an old High Reclaimer Theme Force. Which, as you can imagine given that this one just got painted, NEVER got used. Whoops.

Next Time
I'm working on a new warband for Dracula's America using my old Malifaux models and am trying to finish up the last two things for my Brotherhood army - a regiment of the 'Order of Redemption' and a 'Beast of Nature.' It's also going to be May, which means more work on the Stupid. Pooch and I are going to hit 100 PL again in May because why not? That'll close out my Khorne, which I'm quite excited about.  

Let Battle Be Joined!

It was a quiet club meeting this week, post-Nationals, so Scotty and I booked in a couple of light skirmish games to while away the day.

We started with Scotty's first, and my second, game of Kings of War Vanguard. I brought out my Elves and Scotty brought the Kingdoms of Men. We just played the basic scenario from the quickstart rules - a meeting engagement.

It's all on!

The game mostly started simply as we advanced towards each other, although I pulled some shenanigans to plink off a couple of early shots at Scotty. These resulted in him returning fire with his arquebusiers and shooting my Gladestaker off the board. 

Human Spearmen advance to protect their general

 The Human Spearmen advanced and bunched up around the Leader of Men. The Elven Mage, sensing an opportunity burned all of my power points to boost a lightning bolt into the bunch. Two of the Spearmen were killed and the Leader of Men wounded.

 We maneuvered our forces around a bit for the next couple of turns, plinking off shots and spells before we all finally got stuck in.

The Knight Charges the Prince and is charged by Tallspears in response

 The Knight, who had rapidly redeployed, charged the Prince and took him down to 1 wound remaning.  He was unhorsed by the Tallspears and while the Foot Knights continued to batter the Prince, he was healed by the Elven mage and fought on to victory over the Foot Knights.

Scotty got some revenge for the lightning bolt at this point with a boosted fireball into my bunched up Tallspears, wounding a couple and damanging the Prince. Again.

WIZZARD! 

In an effort to stop these shenanigans, the respective generals charged the opposing Wizards and promptly dispatched both of them. Scotty had his Leader and an Arquebusier left on the table and I had my Prince and two Tallspears when the game ended.

It was a fun game - the power mechanics gave us some entertaining options (even though we mostly used them for extra dice) and it was a pretty even match in terms of capability.

Warmachine! 
So this one didn't start all that well. Scotty pulled MacBain and Pirates out of his bag and I pulled out Feora1 and all her setting infantry on fire nonsense. The game definitely turned out to be much more evenly matched than we thought it would be.

Turn one went as Warmachine first turns tend to. We both ran up the board, Scotty rapidly repositioning his Pirates to fight my Warjacks, not my Flameguard.

Protectorate Turn 2 - shenanigans! 

 Turn 2 saw the Daughters arrive from ambush on the table edge and Feora getting into position to feat on the Pirates. The Daughters sacked First Mate Hawk (because she scares me!) and Feora feated on the front rank of Pirates.

The Flameguard attempted to sack the Freebooter. Badly. Scotty's turn didn't start well, as none of the fire went out and he passed one tough roll on his burning pirates. However, he promptly used his munted but Failsafed Freebooter to trample over my Flameguard and attempt to batter Pyrrus. Pyrrus proved his worth as he rolled insane damage with his spear and shield and battered the Freebooter out of existence...

... leaving him open to being charged by everyone's favourite electro-sword wielding Italian, Savio Montero Acosta who gave him quite a lot of what-for. I sent Feora out from her hiding place to get Savio, which she royally did, but it left Scotty a lane to send in the Vanguard to take revenge!

Squeaky Bum Time

Both of us had been steadily accumulating points and so on my left, the Vanquisher was actively trying to remove the three pirates that were occupying his zone. Man, I miss the +2 to hit off Choirs. Although, I didn't have a choir at this point as they'd been well pirated. 

The Vanguard went into Feora and smacked her repeatedly. I'd forgotten that she was a beefcake and just took it. In her turn she powered up the Hand of Judgement to end MacBain! Which he promptly didn't. So Grogspar ran in to give MacBain Gang Fighter and he had a jolly good crack at wrecking Feora's favourite warjack. He put a LOT of dents in it, but not enough to put him out of action.

Its over! 

Feora tried to pull some shenanigans, and fired a boosted flamethrower shot around and across the Hand of Judgement and tried to end MacBain by styling on him. Disappointingly (?) she flubbed the boosted damage roll. So, to avoid MacBain trying on some dodging nonsense, the Hand of Judgement decided to club him with a P+S 20 flaming club.

35 point Warmachine armies are great fun. There's not a lot of room for jank, nor is there a lot of room for mucking around. We had some boss solos and some useful units and a couple of warjacks. Hopefully we'll get some more games in. Warmachine is a cool universe with some great models and

And more! 

We also played a game of Keyforge, by MTG designer Richard Garfield. It was a lot of fun. Scotty's evil combination of Brobnar, Shadows and Dis beat out my intellectual combo of Logos, Mars and Shadows. It was Scotty's first and my third games of Keyforge and it's a lot of fun. We both enjoyed the challenge - me to remember back three months to when I first learned and Scotty to learn with my fairly sketchy teaching! We'll definitely play it more as a late in the day club game.

Next Time
The first part of May's special project....

To celebrate 200 posts, backpacks!

Despite a slow as 2017/18, this is the 200th post we've put up here. I'm as suprised as anyone that any of us managed to keep an interest here (we are magpies after all!) for any length of time, least of all me.

Painting?
Yes! Painting. I'm pretty sure I said I should paint some Cobras that I need for an upcoming TY event (where we will play part 2 of a campaign and the brave NATO troops will fight off the WARPAC hordes!) and I have been looking for a camo scheme for ages. I found an amazing one used by the Jordanian army that they've used on Cobras and Blackhawks and it is SO COOL. This got me thinking about Khalids and...let's just stop this train of thought right now.

So Cobras:

WUB WUB WUB!

Tank and I have the same problem, that we'd both prefer our Cobras to have MARINES slapped on the side, so I've not done the transfers yet. Overall, they'll fit nicely into the randomly camo-ed MASSTER army. I am pleased.

I did hate assembling these. I do wonder about sprue design at BF sometimes. But they're done and I would consider another two at some point if I ever feel like burning 14 points in a TY army for another two very mobile ITOWs.

Vanguard!
Tank and I had a test game of Mantic's Kings of War Vanguard, using the free rules and lists Mantic have published online. That, coupled with the fact that Tank already has a bunch of Mantic Orges (note spelling), seemed like as good a reason as any to give it a blat.

The game went well - we tried some things to see how they worked out and had to talk through a bunch of stuff to understand how things worked. We got wound up in a combat where my Prince punched the Orge Sergeant and failed to kill him. Was punched in return and lived through it. Got punched AGAIN and still didn't die and then got up and put the Orge Sergeant in the dirt. He was promptly sacked by a Goblin Biggit and another Orge. It felt wrong to begin with but as we worked through the stats and the rules, it made sense in the end. By the end of the game, I had a wizard left who wasn't fleeing and Tank had two fleeing Orge grunts, a shaman (oh man that's a cool model too) and a Goblin Biggit.

I built all my wizgangs for Frostgrave from old Fantasy miniatures because they look cool. Part of the reason I wanted to play Vanguard is that I wanted that to matter again. Tank's Orges were a blunt instrument with many melee dice (although low skill) and lots of wounds. My Elves were squishy AF and had fewer melee dice but with much better skill.

I liked the power dice mechanic and each list having it's own things to do with it's power dice also adds to the variation. I think there's some interesting depth in using your power dice for extra dice on fights or saves as well as using it to fatigue models for extra activations. There'd definitely an art to that methinks.

The lists having cheap grunts and better (and slightly more survivable) warriors is a nice distinction (with each having benefits) and a nice selection of support models for each of the lists. I was able to just upgrade one of my spearman to a cavalryman by adding 'horse.' Also, being a lover of terrible dad jokes meant that I enjoyed the fact that an Orc warrior is called an Ax. A stronger Orc warrior with more weapons is a Morax. Because of course it is. Teehee.

Anything I didn't like? Not really. I've never been a super fan of exploding dice but, at least in our test game, they definitely seemed less awful than either of us expected. They turned 2 successes into 3 more often than not. Some of the terrain rules and how 'height' works (particularly as it applied to cavalry) were a little less clear than I would have liked but once we'd worked through them, they were fine.

Overall? Tank has already brought the rulebook and I won't be far behind him TBH. Pel and McBeth also tried out proper KoW as well and they really enjoyed it. Props to Mantic for putting out a free rulebook that was broad enough to test the game out and decide whether it warranted further investment!

Good News! 
The best news of the week was that Pooch noticed that I could get some backpacks for my Cadians locally. I bought many. Probably too many. I think the phrase is...oh dear, how sad, never mind? One of those things that has always vexed me about all the Imperial Guard (do not talk to me about Astra Militarum. That's just Latin for 'Star Army' and is lame.) models GW has ever made is that Guardsmen don't really have enough kit. I always feel like they're more like modern soldiers, carrying all their stuff with them, so they should have backpacks.

Carrying ALL THE THINGS

Next Week
Some Guardsmen. I've started painting them already (and I've done a test model already - you saw him in our Wrath and Glory run through) and loving how they're coming out. Oh, and I have a couple of HMMWVs I need to paint too.