Game night

Thursday evenings are our semi-regular game night at my friend Oko's house.  Oko can fit up to four tables in his basement.  This week I played a game of Dystopian Wars with my pal, Erik, and Oko played a game of 40K with our pal, Wyatt.

Erik and I are still learning our ground forces, so we played a dedicated land/air battle of 800 points.  The missions were rolled straight out of the Field Orders in the book.  I had to destroy half his forces, and Erik had to destroy my Core force (all the land units).  This first photo is half-way through our opening move.

This game is the first time I used my land models on their clear acrylic bases.  I wanted to see if I prefer leaving them clear or basing them.  I could go either way, but I prefer leaving them clear.

My favorite models in my force so far...

The enemy Bombards, War Gyros, and Air Fortress...

A mess of destruction.....

With concentrated fire, I managed to take out the enemy's main battle tank, that walker with the four legs towards the upper left.  My small tanks sent rocket troopers to assault one of the War Gyros and succeeded in overpowering its crew, leaving it a floating derelict.  With those two main units defeated and a lot of the smaller units damaged, my worthy opponent ceded the battle.


At one point in the game next to us, we heard a mighty uproar.  Checking out the excitement, we marveled at Wyatt's win-or-lose roll of the game....

Yup, that's the real deal.  He rolled straight 1's.  That's one chance in 7,776.  Time for Wyatt to play the lottery.  Here's how happy he is to know how he "beat" such odds.....to lose the game in such grand, cosmic fashion.

Ramping back up

I'm wrapping up my computer migration.  I'm still adjusting to using a Mac instead of a PC, so I'm only operating at about 85% efficiency for the moment.  Plus, I need to purchase a new copy of Photoshop Elements or some appropriate substitute.  However, I use Picasa for the majority of my editing, so my blog posts should be OK for the near-term.

I took advantage of the migration to reorganize my hobby area, so I'm excited with the amount of space I cleared for myself and how much easier it's going to be to access everything, especially basing material.  I'll have easier access to pigments and other more exotic supplies, so I look forward to making more use of them.  I may even set up my airbrush in the upstairs work area, as opposed to the basement area, if I learn how to control it well enough.

Another cool thing about the new photos of my workspace is that I've entered the photos in a contest by Benchvent.com.  They'll make a random draw, and the winner gets an Exagon R bench ventilation device, used for sucking away airbrush overspray.

I look forward to immersing myself in modeling and painting again.  One thing that's motivating me is the prospect to play Eden and/or Alkemy for Demo Day #4, which I'm now organizing for 23 February at Dropzone Games in Glen Burnie, MD.  I also want to renew my goal to demo Carnevale.  It will be interesting to see how far I get along in only 3 months!

Dust Warfare Panzer Gorillas

Here's a quick project to break me out of my rut.  I needed to finish something.  I've been consumed by house projects, and I've been spread so thin across painting projects that an hour or two of painting doesn't seem to move me any closer to completion of any given project.

So here are the guys that inspired me to jump whole-hog and blindly into Dust Warfare, hoping that the rules were good enough to justify these fantastic models (they are).

Such fantastic poses and expressions.  Big kudos to the sculptor.  The deep creases in the fur were made for dry-brushing.

I don't show it here, but the leader in front is painted as a silverback.

Terrain for Dystopian Wars

This is a project I've wanted to do for some time, and I finally felt motivated to test the concept.  I wanted to make modular land-masses that would be easy to store and offer multiple configurations.  I wanted the "tiles" to be non-skid on my vinyl sea-mat.  I had the idea to adhere heavy upholstery fabric to drawer liner, using rubber cement.  I had no idea if it would work, though.

Here are my materials.

Rubber cement and thinner.  Drawer liner and fabric.  A draft graph for landmasses, drawn on transparency squares to test different combinations.

Geddy the Schnauzer is unimpressed so far.

I learn that my drawer liner is 18" wide.  My original graph assumed I would work in 2'x2' squares.  Back to the drawing board, literally.

It works!  The rubber cement seems to work.  The fabric absorbs a lot of it, but maybe it absorbs only the thinner, leaving the rubber cement on the surface.  These are my first four tiles.  I have material to make two more, plus small pieces for "caps"and "bookends".

Add some hills, and I'm ready for river harbor or canal entrance scenarios.  I plan to add a bridge going across the river.  I also have plenty of Spartan's resin terrain, so I have all sorts of ideas to make modular, story-driven scenarios.

Geddy is still unimpressed.

The first photo was taken in the morning, and this one was taken in the evening.  Geddy did move between the photos, but he seems to have a natural position.

Ready to store!