Air of Authority

Had some more mixed airbrush results recently. I was working from home on Friday so I had some time after logging off and chose to get as much of my Combined Army as possible undercoated with the blue colour I've chosen to start from.

No matter how thick I had the paint mix, it seemed to not be sticking, and pooling on the miniatures... This of course was after I filled the reservoir with a whole heap of blue, only to realise that it was the wrong blue... I persevered, thinking maybe another coat would do the trick once the first was dry but it didn't seem to help at all.

Later that night I tried to salvage some of the models with a mix of the blue base coat and Lahmian medium to attempt to make the finish a bit more matte.
In the cold light of morning the next day, the salvaged models looked fine. Great news. So did all the others though, so they never needed salvaging in the first place.
There are a number of things I think that went wrong here -
Poor light while airbrushing
Wrong temperature - I had the window open to vent the airbrush booth, maybe too cold
No glasses - They don't fit on my face with the respirator mask

I was completely downtrodden when I packed everything up on Friday night, but seeing the basecoat dried on those models I managed to undercoat makes me feel like I will do this again at some point to get everything undercoated, and some blending on larger models too perhaps, and OSL

We played our weekly Malifaux game on Sunday, and I think Titania finally clicked for me. Supporting Barbaros and Nekima is easy! They both had Fears Given Form which i felt a little bad a bout. At one point poor Cojo had to test for Titania's friendly scheme marker rule, and two lots of fears. He didn't make it...
We played Mark of authority, which was a lot of fun as well. Good game all around, including a couple of new scenery pieces :)

I'm currently planning out 300 points of Morats for a game after work on Wednesday so watch this space!

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Sunday Showdown - First of Many

We christened our gaming room this Sunday when our friends came over to play Malifaux :)

I faced off against Kirai while my friend and my wife played Mcmourning into Marcus respectively. The strategy was Extraction and I took Dig Their Graves and Quick Murder.
My list was:
Titania
-6cache
-Aether connection
-An audience with the queen
-Behold my Glory
Barbaros
-Malifaux Provides
Nekima
-Fears Given Form
Thorn
Tooth
Primordial magic
Mysterious effigy

Barbaros and Nekima were definitely MVP in this one, challenge Aura sitting in the middle of the board can ruin a lot of plans. I didn't manage to combo it with Titania's Behold upgrade, but having it next to Fears Given Form was a good stack. Nekima did cause more points of damage to friendly models than I care to admit if I'm honest :p especially Titania herself.
I scored full for quick murdering Izamu, full for dig and dropped a point in turn 5 when I moved Titania to stop scoring from Claim Jump. The final score was 9-7, I struggled vs accusation as I don't really know how to prevent it happening to be honest. I still feel i'm under utilising Titania herself, but feel like I'm getting the hang of it, and feel like this crew was very well suited to the strategy and was succesful to boot.

Lots of fun and a great way to start with the new gaming space :)
My (Mcmourning) friend was also very interested in my Infinity models in a strange turn of events and was asking about game play and mentioned Nomads, so who knows what will happen there. I'm going to plan out some scenery/gamemat purchases so that my work friends can come over to play eventually, as well as it being usable for both Necromunda and 40k at a push :) I also want a few more pieces of Malifaux scenery as well to fill out both boards.

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Seasons Gamings

We started a tradition last year to meet up with friends and play Malifaux around Xmas. We were at Element Games on Sunday to do just that :)

I faced both a new opponent (master) - Ironsides and a new opponent playing Pandora.

I took a fixed Justice list to both games, mainly to check out her new upgrades and the Death Marshall recruiter, and also because I was honestly expecting to face a lot more rezzers but I lucked out and drew the two opponents that weren't playing Rezzers :p

I did teach my Ironsides opponent to fear the Lady, and downed her in two attacks through the non charge bonus on her great blade plus the bonus flips from the Swordmaster upgrade. The red joker on the second damage flip sealed the deal but was over kill at that point :p

Pandora was hell. I have some really un-fond memories of playing my friends Pandora crew when it was his first master, misery, web weaver, sorrows. All that fun stuff combined with some daft placing on my first couple of activations made this a real chore to be honest. I won't say much more other than that I need to learn to block LoS and not have models too far forward when they don't need to be. Play the long game lofty :)

I also got my required models primed on Saturday, and kept working on the Raicho, including a bit of a treat working on his base.

The Press mold for the base is still quite tricky, and the picture doesn't really show it turning out better than I expected. I'm still not really a fan and for the first time in a long while I'm tempted to buy some bases for miniatures, as I don't think I can continue this method but want to maintain the hex pattern bases. I added a small fan, and two resin plugs from Zinge industries, connected by guitar string, and lowered a section of the base as I have seen this done on some bases available to buy and really like the extra dimension of the base.

I originally planned to grab some infinity stuff at Element games, and save the postage, but I couldn't quite bring myself to add to the pile of unpainted miniatures in the end which I guess I should be pleased about :p

Looking forward to getting started painting again over the festive break, so watch this space :)

Thanks for stopping by

Lofty

The Living Infinite - Carbon Dated

I've set a date with the guy at work for our first lunchtime intro/refresher game. This means that I need to get some specific models ready by then, which helps me focus rather than doing random bits of random miniatures when I sit at my desk :)

January 4th

I'm pretty much going to be taking the starter set for the first couple of games, with hacker/TAG added later as these each have specific rules to learn in addition to the standard stuff required to play the game.
All that is left to do currently to get them playable is to pin the weapons onto the Vanguard models. Hopefully though, I can get some paint on them before starting to play. I've been thinking alot about a colour scheme, and I think it will look good, close to the stock scheme seen in this picture:

I want to go with the grey and dark blue, but without the red accents. I like the stripe detailing and I'll use Orange for that. As for the glowing orbs on the armour (energy source? no idea really) I'm looking forward to some Airbrush OSL. To be honest, if I can get the grey/blue done with the airbrush, the rest of it should come along poretty quickly :)

I broke apart the Raicho the other night and started scraping out all the olkd superglue from joins and removing mold lines. I will be re-pinning and airbrushing in separate parts, so hopefully the airbrush is easy ebnough to use under the skylight in the new attic study, with the booth hose venting out of there :p

I managed to salvage the old wooden boards from our old makeshift gaming surface, and it'll certainly work as a game table until I have the money/time/motivation to sort something nicer/more permanent.

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

The Living Infinite - Aggressive Expansion

A picture is worth a thousand words

After a lot of chatting about Infinity with the guy at work who plays, and talking about some intro games in the new year, I decided to post on the forums about what I have already and what a 'shopping list' would look like to make a usable force.
After a quick look on ebay, I found this little lot which has some of the stuff that was on my own list to buy, and some of the stuff that was on the recommended list. £120 retail for £50 so I consider that quite a find!
I'll be cleaning it all up and re-pinning & basing over Xmas :)

In other news, the great table fiasco continues, after getting out the Malifaux mats to test the new tables finally and realising that the two 3ftx3ft mats on the 6ft (as advertised on the product page) over hang at each side....
Checking the listing on Amazon again, and the '6foot table' is actually 180cm... I'm going to return it, and at a loss for any other options at this point that wont cost the earth, I'm going to re-try the old board table a friend's dad knocked together for me a few years a go, with trestles underneath it. The boards were a little warped before I moved them down the cellar out of the way though so I need to undo that damage plus the damage from the damp cellar for a fortnight...

I'll keep updating as the saga continues. I suspect the table will be fine once it's been wiped down and maybe varnished or otherwise treated. I just need to work out how to attache it to the trestle legs a bit more permanently than resting on top of them, or replace them with proper legs somehow.

Apologies for the slow updates recently. There's a lot going on to make it difficult to find time. New year should improve things hopefully, maybe before then with any luck

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Tabled

After a fair amount of furniture shuffling, a couple of new storage units, and putting my back out last week, the end is in site.

All the things on the shelves need sorting through and reorganising but the general idea is sound, scenery will live under the table, minis/rulebooks on the shelves. We will also be moving our boardgames from the living room up here too :)

Nearly at the stage where making/painting toy soldiers again is a thing!

More updates soon :)
Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Back in action

We managed to get a game night on Thursday :D

I played Hoffman because my friend hadn't even seen my completed models, so it was a good excuse/reason :) It was pretty difficult playing with Hoffman who I'm not very familiar with, after a while of not playing, against Kirai who I'm also not familiar with, 8-10 though so it could have been a lot worse!

Once we have a working 'study' again I want to try and get the rest of my guild collection table ready and get some games going with Perdita & Rollins Black ASAP. As well as a lot more games in general.

Hopefully going to have the room move done this weekend, so no hobby updates incoming for a few days, unless its a pic of the new layout (minus gaming table so probably not!), but will be picking up table soon and get some pictures up :)

Hoping that the Ethernet cables we have currently are long enough to reach their new destination, but Screwfix is close enough to get new stuff at any rate :)

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Changing Rooms

Both the Bloodbowl kind and the fact that we are changing our room use in our house. It's good word play, I promise.

Anyway, 'Unnamed Orc Bloodbowl team' (catchy right? Go sports) is now complete, with 4 Blitzers, 4 Black Orcs, 2 Throwers and 6 Linemen before the spare orc parts ran out. There's maybe the option of one more lineman if some already built unpainted spares get sacrificed.

All that's left is picking a paint scheme, and adding magnets and sand to the bases. All in all very pleased at how they look. They aren't ground breaking conversions but they were fun to make and it's great to work on a project that has an end point.

Some of the newer Bloodbowl miniatures are nice enough to be tempting if the league goes on enough to start a second team, but for now these will do great.

The other exciting topic is our 'new gaming room'. After getting some measurements we (my very organised other half) mocked up room/furniture sizes to help plan better and the verdict is that necessary furniture items (stupid big bed/wardrobe) will fit into other rooms, allowing the biggest room in the loft to be re purposed.

Current mock up resembles the below. Plus bookcases/shelving added:

The conundrum now, other than planning the other rooms/buying shelving etc, is how to deal with the gaming table. The current set up is two 6foot by 2foot boards which bolt together down the middle to make a 6*4. This was made a while back by a friend of mine's dad for the attic of our old house, to sit on trestle legs. Due to space restrictions in our current house, this usually sits on the kitchen table to provide a play area, but the boards are no longer flat after being propped against a wall in between uses.

There are a few solutions so far:

Buy legs and attach them to these boards

Start from scratch and buy new wood/trestle legs/permanent legs

????

Some options to consider, but until we have the space free upstairs, we wont know whether or not the boards will straighten themselves out once there is room to lie them flat for a while.

Exciting times though :)

Thanks for stopping by

Lofty

Grass Roots

Another long gap between posts, for which I apologise.

Wedding/Best man duties are completely out of the way now after an absolutely phenomenal weekend.

During some downtime both over the wedding weekend/whilst the groom and I were at a loose end when the bridesmaids were sorting themselves out we managed to get a few half games of Bloodbowl played as a time filler. There are enough of us that are nostalgic about this that it looks like we will be playing a league of some sort. It's also a great game to play with very little setup, in a fixed time frame.

I've decided i'm going to run an orc team which I've made a start on. I wanted to make the max number of all available player options. I was still pretty tired after we arrived home on Monday, but was determined to make use of the spare time and nearly finished the Black Orcs/Blitzers for the team.

They aren't groundbreaking conversions by any means, but it was a lot of fun actually creating something again after so long with so little time.

Before we went away for the weekend, I was also talking a lot with the chap at work who plays infinity, and we are going to be playing a demo game or two on some spare tables at work on an unused floor. I got told that there's no chance that any of my regular gaming friends are interested in it, but I'm happy for a game every now and then, and collecting the models to be honest :)

Work/planning still ongoing for moving rooms around but hopefully we can start working towards this in earnest a the weekend now that our time is our own again. The only thing we have on for a while is the house being remortgaged but that's not really so intensive as the solicitors are dealing with it all.

Good to be back, and hopefully more regular updates on the way :)

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty