Board Games, the other white meat

Part of my lack of production/playing in miniatures lately stems from a new fascination with board games (ok and a fair amount of video games too) lately. There's a site called Tanga.com that has sucked money out of my wallet. My hope is Christmas eve or day I'll get some crazy family members to play a game or two.

Holidays are around the corner

And while I see great deals, I've been trying very much not to buy anything. The one concession was a super deal on the Marvel Heroscape set. When a $40 set is $13 and it has superheroes, I'm in.

Other than that, no painting going on lately. I have most of the holiday week off and my hope is to either play or paint at least one day. I asked for some AT-43 stuff this tear, we'll see if I get it. I never seem to get the miniatures for the holidays but who knows.

It's been almost a month, have I done anything mini related?

Well that depends on your perspective. BobG the dungeon master gave me some figures to paint up for the current D&D campaign we're playing in. I got the D&D players manual and Oriental Adventures to get myself into the D&D realm. I even rolled up a few characters with a little guidance from Grandmaster Jay.

This of course was not good. Now I've ordered the Star Wars RPG for a few reasons. First, it's friggin' star wars! Second, I have approximately 200-300 star wars minis getting very dusty in a bin waiting to be used. And finally while D&D is cool and I'm not abandoning it already, how in the hell could I resist the potential to use the force. So I am eagerly awaiting that book.

In the meantime, I decided to stop buying anything metal for a while until I paint more of what I have and use it some. I have a lot to do, the Hordes starter, the rest of the em-4 samurais, lots of Confrontation that I bought on sale and a unit of Halbediers for War machine that still aren't even fully together.

But I still had a jones for some gaming. So almost a year after it came out. I bought the AT-43 starter set. Because it was pre painted and ready to go out of the box and the figures and rules seemed pretty cool. Because I am a bastard, I got Nat X over to play a game so we could both try it out. Needless to say he's buying the big rulebook and probably some more Therians. He tried to resist before seeing it but I think he enjoyed himself too much to leave it alone. The fact that it's pre painted non collectible has probably sealed the deal. I already had a giant poster size picture frame that I put my star wars maps in and the AT-43 map fit under the plexi glass quite nicely as well. My verdict on the game? Pretty fun. Definitely worth more interest and time in the near future. The Therian strider came broken and I emailed Rackham as they suggested with pictures. Lets see if they really win my business and send me a new strider and take back the slightly broken one. Anyway there are now 4 factions and the UNA and Therians both aren't bad. I'd probably go forward building a bigger UNA army or go communist and devote some time to Red Blok, I like their look a lot. They have a lot more mini striders than the rest. Armor is good!

So Hordes is on hold. I'm trying to get maybe a once a month game night going with some folks but it hasn't happened yet. All of this could take a back seat to Star Wars RPG when it comes in though.

So there I was, all set to paint blue trollbloods

And then I go play old school D&D last Friday night and the DM sets me up as a brand new Samurai and I kicked some major a$$. That's right, it was D&D, I don't want to hear anyone busting on it. Tabletop miniatures probably wouldn't have happened without D&D. So anyway Bob the DM had a few characters to represent the 7 of us that were involved that night but no good Samurai. Afterwards I remembered that I'd bought a 4 pack of the Oriental Blades from em-4 about three to four months ago. So I broke out the one that matched up the best and I gave him a rough initial blocking with the paint.

Because I was on a roll, the next night, I painted up a barbarian type I had from Mega Miniatures for my friend Gangrene who always hosts these things. It turned out alright. His character is half man half orc so I made his skin greenish.

Anyway long story short, the trolls still aren't painted yet but I did get back in the swing of things and get some painting in. I still have Halo3 that will occupy a fair amount of free time and Bioshock waiting behind that to finish but it felt good to sit down for an hour or so a few nights in a row and knock out some figures.

Oh I also bought some Warmachine Menoth figures on ebay for really cheap and the paint jobs on them are FAR better than what I've done, it both depresses and inspires me. So the Trollblood project will continue to be delayed. This weekend doesn't look great for time to paint either.

Video stole the painting star

Cheesy, yes but stoopid NatX kept up the pressure and I finally caved Monday and bought Halo3 on launch day.

I had a Best Buy gift card, I read a bunch of reviews, I love multiplayer co-op games... So I caved and between that and trying to install blinds/curtains/bathroom vent fans in my house this week all of my free time has been sucked away. I need at least a solid hour block to do any worthwhile painting and I just haven't had it. The trollbloods sit there taunting me and I just take it and go back to playing Halo.

NatX even gave me Bioshock for my birthday and I haven't even really put that in to try and finish the game which is probably a 6-8 hour commitment at this point since I'm at least a 1/3rd through already.

Oh and the worst part is I keep checking ebay to see if I can get a deal on a different Hordes warpack so I can get a friend into this thing. So far, no luck.

So week 1 of painting a Trollblood a week isn't happening. Hopefully by week 2 I'll have knocked one out. I'm involved in an all day kickball beer party Saturday so that kills that free day. Sunday I may be hungover. Don't want to paint hungover. That's how Trollbloods become troll blobs.

Oh and if anyone reading this (all 2 of you maybe) has a 360 and hasn't gotten Halo3 or Bioshock yet, do yourself a favor and splurge. Halo3 is great for multiplayer, Bioshock is a great storyline shooter with good twists that I think make it the game of the year.

Trollbloods have arrived

They got here about 6 days after order. Not terrible. I did an unboxing that I may put up later, nothing fancy.

So my new idea is to try to do one of each of them every week so in a maximum of four they'll be done. This should be interesting. I've got the first two soaking in a little dish soap right now to take some of the grime off 'em. I'll try to post pictures with the updates. This all assumes I'll have at least 3-4 hours a week to paint. The clock starts Sunday since I want to at least have a few glued together and primed to begin. All I can say right now is great friggin' sculpting on them. Hopefully they turn out cool. I bought the P3 paint set for them because I felt they were the most difficult faction to paint.

I'll take all the help I can get from the proper paint to get them ready.

Okay off to take them out of their soak.

-Lefty

P.S. Everblight is also a pretty cool looking faction and probably would have been my second choice.

Yay! I got one group painted... oh wait

Just when I thought I had the whole Warmachine Mercenary starter set painted after throwing myself into it for about 90 minutes last night while watching the new high def TV in Man Island, I bring Magnus back to the desk and see that I'm still not done with one of the light warjacks.

DAMMIT!

So close! My Hordes order has in fact shipped. I found my priming spray, I'm trying to dedicate a few hours to them Saturday morning if possible and in an effort to be more proactive I'm hoping to paint maybe a little more tonight or tomorrow night.

In the meantime I'm thinking about selling off some of my star wars minis. I have WAY too many. I spent way too much, I could sell off some rare and very rare ones I have and probably raise plenty of cash to support my metal miniatures interest. Besides I think the quality of the minis from wizkids has really dropped off. The Bounty Hunters set really dropped the ball I thought. I haven't bought any of them since and the Halo Clix aren't looking too good. Which is kind of a shame when Rackham are putting out good plastic pre-paints like AT-43 and Mongoose has done a decent job with Battlefield Evolution. Oh well, I hope to finish off the last Mercenary from the starter and possibly the two Confrontation solos I started last weekend. One is essentially done, the other needs a few highlights.

I also finished off the only Reaper C.A.V. figure I have. It was my first real attempt at drybrushing and I think it turned out pretty good. Maybe a little heavy with the amount of the mini that got drybrushed but you learn. I don't think at this point I'd buy more of them. I'm not inspired by them. But Wyrd Miniatures keeps taunting me by showing sketches and greens of the new factions they are putting out. I REALLY want to get my hands on some of them. I'm trying to wait until they make official factions for the game so I can somewhat justify it.

Pictures of some of my stuff are coming soon. I just have to figure out how to maximize my paltry setup so the pics don't make my already mediocre paint jobs look worse. I'll probably then submit some to cool mini or not.

P.S. painting eyes still sucks!

Pressure to paint

I just got back from a relatively nice weekend at the beach. Aside from a four hour trip home that should have been an hour shorter and the thousands of meatheads on their motorcycles, it was a nice weekend.

I brought my paints with me as well as two of those confrontation minis I recently got and a CAV mech I want a redo with, a mega minis knight I've had for a while and finally the remaining unfinished mercenary box set from warmachine (really just finishing Magnus, the warcaster). Believe it or not, I primed and mostly painted the two confrontation dudes and I think I finished probably 2/3rds of the work on both of them. I also actually tried some ink washing I'd seen on a tutorial at Brush or Die .

I even did some dry brushing. Things look pretty good. Before I left I emptied a minis container I use to cart them around and now that I'm looking at it. I actually did a pretty good job on the two Cygnar warcasters I have, Darius and Caine. I still suck at eyes but they may be entries to colminiornot if I can photograph them semi well.

Hordes warpack should be delivered soon. That's part of the reason I wanted to paint this past weekend. Get me back in the groove.

Hordes... oh how I loathe you

So to make fixing up my house go in a timely manner, I devised a point system of how much each task was worth. Crawl in the attic feeding wire and connecting ceiling fans... 3 points. Clean up and connect all of the electronics in man Island now that I have the new glorious 47 inch TV, just one point. This whole thing was also done so I'd pace myself on buying things I lust after, certain things I wanted had a point value.

Anyway, I've been hard at work almost every night this week, with my father no less and I love the man, I really do and I appreciate everything he's done not just with the new house but in general but we have differing styles. He ponders for a long while, ponders some more and I just want to get sh$t done. So working in close quarters has probably been somewhat of a study in patience on both our parts.

Back to the story, I've been busting hump, racked up a bunch of points. I was all set to get another Warmachine starter when I just happened to linger on the Hordes section of the Privateer Press site. I liked the looks of two factions, read a very in depth review from TGN . I liked that for the most part the only difference between the two games was the warcasters weren't as powerful and the action in hordes is more aggressive. So I spent my "points" and bought the Trollblood warpack which I'll throw a picture in from the PP website below. I went to Superhero gameland, which right now is kicking CCG Armory's butt by a few $$ in price and ordered the warpack AND because I want to try and paint the traditional colors plus I'm curious about the new paint line. I bought the corresponding Formula P3 paint. The warpack was less than $32 and the paint another $12-$13. Once again let me state that I would love to support my local store but they want as much as it cost me for just the warpack as the warpack, paint and shipping cost me at Superhero Gameland. If you really want to sell, discount the starters a little so we don't feel like we're getting ripped off getting into a new game.

We'll see how Hordes goes. I now have to convince one friend to buy a starter pack of Hordes (Sarge?? Nat X, JayJian??) so we can play. Otherwise I'll have to break these out on JayJian's WM army. I think my already overflowing workbench just got a new group which is now being pushed straight to the top. Fall and Winter are coming and that's when I actually play with my miniatures.

Here's a picture of the Trollblood warpack. Incidentally this did win Miniatures game of the year at Gencon.

New Mini lines coming out that look promising

Because I can't get enough superheroes and I think it would be cool to get a true metal miniatures game based on them I'm pretty excited about the Pulp City game coming out. The ape with the chain gun hooked me. That looked too cool.

The other newish miniatures line out there that I think shows some promise is the AE-WWII game by Darkson Designs. I know WWII stuff is very overplayed in both miniatures and video games but this just looks kind of cool. I love the alternate history angle and the weird genetic mutations. Below are two figures from the Darkson Designs site.

Wyrd Miniatures

Say theoretically somebody got some birthday money. And theoretically that somebody had what some have termed a problem with his miniatures hobby. That somebody may be looking at Wyrd miniatures as his new crush.

I know I'm no great painter by any stretch but look how friggin' cool these guys are. These are my current top 4 favorites from Wyrd. Eventually Wyrd is going to release a game around their wonderful miniatures and take the ones already created and add some cool new ones to form new factions. So while these guys aren't part of a game right now. They will be. Apparently the game may not be dice based either.

This is Killjoy. Love the cleaver

This is Nicodem the Undertaker. The vulture is just bad ass

This is Seamus the Mad Hatter. Don't F with the Irish!

And last but certainly not least. This is Viktoria the witch hunter.

Confrontation figures arrived

A big thanks to Brookhurst Hobbies for sending me that batch of Confrontation figures from their recent sale. Unfortunately I guess because they ran out, the starter set was not included so now I'll have to look for that. I think I'm missing one other figure that they ran out of stock on but I'm ok with that. I've got more than plenty to keep me busy.

I think my early favorite might be the Bogeyman character.

That or the Executioner. the pose is kind of cool like he's about to unleash a big can of whoopass

Either way I know have a LOT more minis to add to the workbench. Unfortunately I'll be away this upcoming long weekend so they'll have to wait.

New WM Mercenhary Nautical pics

I admittedly got this from Tabletop Gaming News who got it from somebody else. But some guy named Tony took some sweet pictures of the new mercenary nautical themed warjack at the PAX show last weekend. My friend JayJian was there, he said the new stuff looks phenomenal.

This is just not good news.

Here's the newest unknown heavy


I like it a lot. Pretty clean colors too. Hmm painting this group could be relatively easy.

Here's a few more of these naval Mercs from the WM site itself.

This one isn't bad either though I'm not sure what the other arm is supposed to be, a mechanical tentacle maybe?

The Sea Dogs look relatively cool but there are a few solos for this set that just look so much more interesting.

This is lord Joln, a bit of a Napoleon ripoff but he looks pretty mean.

Ok what can I say, I'm a sucker for monkeys, especially the cymbal banging kind that creep you out.

And finally, the human type character I like best from this set, Doc Killingsworth. I don't know why but this strikes me as a cross between pirate and a bushmen type. He's got the giant hatchet in one hand and XXX strength moonshine in teh other.

Oh how I would love to attemptto foul up the paint job on this guy. If I ever got any of them, this might have to be the first. He just looks way too cool. Plus, for those on a budget (like myself) he's only $6.37 at Superhero Gameland.

CoolMiniOrNot.com

So the latest website obsession has been this CoolMiniOrNot.com site for me. It motivates me to paint some more, give some finishing touches to what I already have painted and photograph them for submission to the site. I honestly think my BEST paint job so far might get me a rating of 5 on the site. My worst, hopefully in the 3's. They seem pretty tough.

I asked for one of those clamp lights with a magnifier for my birthday to help me attempt at being a half decent painter. I still hate painting the faces. I'm just lousy at it. But once I get a few that are submission ready. I'll include the photo here when I submit.

I've also noticed with the unboxing post earlier that I'm going to need to do something about the light in the den or go outside to photograph. With digital cameras, the darn things saturate the mini with too much light on automatic settings and seem to have trouble focusing in macro mode. I did a little googling and got some ideas. The weirdest one I'll have to try is putting a tiny bit of dish soap in the paint to evenly thing it out without making it a wash effect.

We'll see what happens.

I cleaned up the den... now I'm in trouble

So I spent the better part of Sunday cleaning up the den down in Man Island. While this was great for progress in getting rid of the boxes that had yet to be unpacked, I found out that I have a few things to paint. In fact, I have MANY things to paint.

Here's the list and it isn't pretty:

Warmachine Mercenary Starter Box. I'd say I'm 20-30% through. I have the bigger warjack painted but I've had to re-glue arms to both light warjacks plus I used yellow on the heavy and I'm not sure if I like it. I may have to try and strip him and repaint but I'm not sure how easy that process is.

Warmachine Mercenary Steelhead Halberdiers. Wow, my least favorite of the projects left unfinished. These little guys are an absolute bitch to glue together. I'm not even close to painting them yet since assembly isn't finished and well I haven't found my primer yet. When these are done, I'll be pretty happy because I can use them with any faction just about.

Urban Mammoth Urban War starter box. You've seen the unboxing... and that's about as far as I've gotten. Everything is primed but I still have to glue the backpacks to the troops which I might do after I paint.

eM-4 Oriental Blades set. Only 4 little men and no gluing and they look really cool but ask me if I've even primed them yet. Not at all. The cool factor on these guys may propel them up the priority list even though I can't use them in any established game I own. I might go warhammer historical with these guys though.

Plus the *few* items I may have ordered last week during that ridiculous confrontation scale.

The good news about the cleanup is that I was able to move this mammoth bookshelf into the den that holds literally everything I have in relation to the miniatures. I've actually got it organized and it motivates me to paint more. Well that and a website I'll talk about in a minute.

If I had to rank the priority of what I have right now it would be

1. WM Mercenary starter box
2. Urban Mammoth starter box
3. the wicked Samurai dudes
4. WM soul sucking Steelhead Halberdiers

Let's see what progress I can make on these things in the next month. I'm not claiming I'll paint everything up. I'd just like to clear something off the list so I can start playing with it this fall.

Non miniatures note

So Natty Boh let me borrow Bioshock last night for the 360. The game is not only visually stunning but fantastic to play. You can achieve objectives different ways and the zombie-like characters you face just come out from everywhere. Any game where you can alter you DNA through injections to give you god like powers is cool with me (I wonder if they got their inspiration from Barry Bonds?).

I was planning on doing some painting early Saturday morning while the wife slept but I think I might have to scrap those plans and see how far I can get.

Damn you Natty Boh!

Big Sale on Rackham Confrontation

Brookhurst Hobbies is having a huge sale on their Rackham Confrontation stuff. I do enjoy a good deal. 75% off many figures. I wasn't a huge fan of the series before but upon looking through the various factions (and there are many) and seeing that you only need three or four minis to play... well let's just say this has potential. I do know Rackham is going to reproduce these figures in pre painted plastic but I heavily doubt they'll be as detailed or as cheap as the sale going on now. Thanks to TGN for putting the word out.

Game Table idea #2

So while looking around on line, I noticed these new Zuzzy Terra Mats. I'm seriously debating plunking the money down on this to easily complete one side of the game table. The question is which one should I get?

They have the Sulfur Fields or the Scourged Forest.

Both look like winners. Since it would be used for Warmachine mostly... I'm leaning slightly to the Scourged forest. These mats look pretty cool. I guess you can become Bob Ross and drybrush to your little hearts content.

Hmm for my 4 x 4 surface, $39 might not be terrible.

Game table

At some point in the near future, I actually plan on completing my game table. I have a bunch of home made buildings for it, just not the table itself. I've got the 2' x 2' boards cut, I had a first attempt at it with 6 inch felt strips but that ended badly. Now I'm thinking about getting a couple of yards of fabric. One side I'll do green and the other I'll do gray or black and draw some streets in.

Right now the closest I get to a game table is a frame I picked up at target that holds all of my star wars and heroclix maps. I think either Natty Boh or GT Jason gave me the idea for that one and it was brilliant. The frame was on sale for about $12 and totally worth every penny.

Also if anyone who is actually reading this is interested. I'm debating getting either some Reaper C.A.V. minis or SuperFigs minis for a little change of pace this fall. Both only seem to require a few minis to play. The other option is whenever Wyrd releases their dice-less game to get started with that. They have fantastic minis.

Unboxed #1 Urban War

So here it is, the first unboxing. Please bear with my crappy camera technique as I try to master proper lighting and just about everything else that goes along with it.

This is the unboxing of the Urban War starter box. Yes, I realize it's not the newest game put out by Urban Mammoth but a complete starter set for slightly over $20 is too damn good to pass up.

First comes first. Here's the box as it comes.

Kind of cool. I like the idea of sci-fi skirmish games. Let's see what we have when we open the box.

Ok two sets of figures some equipment on sprues, bases and as a nice touch, I believe it comes with some customizable building type structures.

This is where the apologies begin. The first unboxing with pictures is going to be a little rough. These are the VASA figures and what look to be attachable communications devices. Pretty cool. Sort of like futuristic infantry but with gas masks. I guess the future is as polluted as they say it's going to be.

Here's a picture of one of the soldiers. Looks pretty detailed. At what comes out to about $1.65, this is an outstanding figure. It's hard to make out the weird gas mask they wear in this pic.

So here's the Syntha set. As the name suggests these are cyborg types I believe. Looks like they might have one slightly larger figure.

Here's a Syntha solo. Um, nice breast....plate. Yeah I may need to be alone for a minute. Ok take me to your leader Syntha chick. And I just gave the overall detail nod to the Syntha. Yes, I am THAT easy.

Here are the buildings still in their sprues. This deal is getting better and better. I could definitely use these for more than just this game. Some nice sci-fi terrain pieces that are reconfigurable are always welcome.

Now to the boring parts. Two dice and the bases for the figs. Just an aside, I haven't gotten advanced enough with these things yet to do anything fancy like glue minuscule dirt to my bases in any of the stuff I own. If it gets primered white then yes, I meant to do that for effect. Otherwise let's glue them, paint them and get them in play I say.

Finally we have the magazine/manual. It is interesting to note there's an offer for a free triad figure on the inside. I wonder if it's still valid. Anyway I gave it a glance, nice animations, the rules seem relatively easy to comprehend.

Well, thanks for putting up with my first unboxing. Hopefully this one moves quickly through the workbench and then onto same dedicated game testing. I'll let you see the progress as it happens. Lucky you!

Why on line stores rule and B&M need to figure out a way to compete

First let me say that I'm not completely against buying stuff from my local hobby shop. The people that run the place always seem nice and mostly helpful. But dear lord does it seem like a price gouge walking into the place. Here's an example. I started collecting a Khador army for Warmachine. So I went to the local spot to see what a Berserker heavy warjack would cost (btw Khador is the best because of all of the heavies in their army).

So I walked into the place, talked to the owners for a few minutes and took a look. They wanted $27 for the Berserker. This is where the fun started. The suggested retail price on the manufacturer's own website (Privateer Press) is $24.99. So right there they're charging an extra $2. I did not buy there. Instead, I went home and went on line. In 30 seconds of googling I was able to find the same thing for $15.83 at CCG Armory. Even with shipping, I'm still about $7 ahead of the game. So is the loss of instant gratification by buying in store worth the $7.

You're damn right it was.

But back to the point, I still buy my paint and the occasional mini from the local place. But they're just priced to high on the minis themselves most of the time. I know they have more overhead than the on line places but hopefully a good shop combats some of this by having dedicated game nights where they have sealed box games or just leagues where you pay a small fee to play, and the top few get door prizes every week. I know the local store guys are typically getting a break already from the distributor so I'd at least like them to be priced at what the manufacturer believes is fair.

Until I start feeling a little less gouged when I walk into a shop, I'm sticking with on line stores. Typically I'm ordering multiple items so the shipping cost is spread out. Plus, I am cheap.

First unboxing and review

I just moved recently but I do plan to do an unboxing and review of the Urban War starter box sometime soon. I'm not talking about going all the way to full painting. That's more for the work bench but I've had this thing sitting in a moving box for a few months now and I can finally go ahead and unwrap and make some progress on it. Updates will come. Look hopefully under the Unboxed tab when it's up on the right side.

Big Bang

Welcome to Metal Mini Madness!
This is obviously my first post on the blog. So, what can you find here you ask? Well, essentially I'm going to unbox, review, rant and essentially comment on the products of the tabletop universe.

Mostly this will consist of the sci-fi genre of metal miniatures but that can and will change seeing as I have plenty of plastic CMG stuff as well and I see some new stuff I like out there.

Besides putting up with my rants I hope to link to whatever great deals I find out there so that some of this is useful to someone other than me and not just one giant ego stroke (assuming I have more than one visitor who's not related to me look at the site).

So welcome to Metal Mini Madness where I hope to have enough of a periodic update that people find value in this blog.

-Lefty