Monday 31 December 2012

2012 The summary!

Well where has it gone!

Its been a superb year gaming/painting wise and I didn't hit Stef's "expectation" of 2012 models after last years stella performance but I still managed more than I expected as I hadn't planned on any new projects, but that kinda went out the window!

Play me really loud... If you dare....

Jungle

Metal!

Ragga


So the year in a summary....

Jan:

Mordhiem Gang & Necromunda (never did get round to playing with them)



Feb:

Went mental on 20mm WW2 stuff for KGN (system 1) for it to be dropped in May by GW!



March:

British for FOW (not played with them!) A load of warpath (system 2) stuff painted up and played one game.



April:

The dreaded month of Salute, picked up a fair bit and painted a load of modern Russians



May:

Continued with the 20mm WW2 and tried weathering powders for the first time



June:

More 20mm WW2 and picked up and painted a Relic's gang (system 3),



July:

must have been something in the water as I cranked out a load of 20mm modern Russian stuff and 40K chaos that I've had sitting around for about 3ish years!



August:

Went into "finish stuff" mode, Did my combined army, Kum bikers and the Disc riders and started working on my Gruntz force (system 4)



September:

40K 6th came out and I ended up painting up an entire city in 20mm! Oh and picked up Boltaction (system 5)



October:

Got the airbrush out for Drop Zone Commander (system 6) and painted an entire army in about 3ish weeks!! Also ticked a "must do" from my bucket list and helped/contributed with a demo/display table at a gaming show, and boy oh boy it was a table and a half!



November:

Thought about starting grey knights for 40K but then saw the light! Picked up Dystopian Legions (system 7) & X-Wing (system 8)



December:

The postman's arms nearly dropped off with all the Gruntz bits that I ordered from all over the place and somehow managed to get them mostly painted and still do my Chrimbo shopping, oh Dreadball turned up as well! (system 9) and also did most of my D-Legions stuff.



So other stuff inbetween the painting has been testing Nick's Modern system which is coming along in leaps and bounds now and deciding to buy a house (which I've already claimed the garage) The side business that I started at the beginning of the year is chugging along nicely and managed to get quite a few suppliers for paints &  brushes and once I get into my new place more room means more stuff! as well as a shiney website so watch this space!

So lets look at the pledge....

Bought - 407
Painted - 563
Difference  +156!

so comparing that to the last two years,

                    2010            2011           2012
Bought        469              1238           407
Painted        513              1245           563
Diff             +44               +7              +156

Quite a comparison compared to last year no Napoleonic/Celt armies certainly helped! The thing thats surpised me the most is the differance, I wanted to reduce the amount of unpainted stuff I've got lying about and that certainlly is a big chunk out of the huge amount of stuff I've got kicking about.

I'm not normally fussed about my "stats"


I'm happy that the line has stayed about the same, I've moved quite far from the GW & warmachine systems that I played quite a bit and gone for the more "traditional" systems/scales but with a nice twist every so often.


The Future.... 

I don't think I'll see hoverboards or giant robojox mech's in 2013 but I'm looking forward to expanding my 20mm WW2 collection with a load of Russians for BGK as the Phat Cats Demo team has secured Hammerhead in Feb and working on Expo and a few others so that should be a good laugh!

Helping Nick continue testing his Modern system and try not to get sucked into a huge of amount of systems! theres a few that have caught my eye I just need to show some restraint!

Stream lining the blog starting with the labels is something that I need to do and have a jigg about with the side bar on the right.


And finally thanks to all of you lot for reading my random whaffle and looking at my stuff, so have a great new year get completely mashed and play lots of random games!!


The smiling assassin!

Thursday 27 December 2012

Dystopian Legions, The Prussains Assemble!

Well I managed to get a couple of days off "Dad" duty and decided to crack on with the Legions stuff that I picked up last month,


So the basic starter set with an additional squad and medic blister/box all done,






The main colour scheme for my force,





The two commanders with the previous painted unit





and the two big battlesuit things,

I've also go the 2nd wave stuff and just weathering up the tankettes and trying to get some motivation to paint 4 models!

So with this lot as well as my Gruntz stuff I smashed the 500 mark the likely hood of getting anything else painted is slim, so onto the pledge...

Bought - 73
Painted - 83
Difference +10!

what a end to the year.

Monday 24 December 2012

Merry Crimbo!

To all my readers, thanks for the 100,000 page views! and hope you have an awesome Christmas with you family & friends,

Hope you all get what you want in your stocking this year......



Saturday 22 December 2012

Gruntz its onto the final push!

Well if your reading this the world hasn't ended! and another batch of the 15mm sexiness is sorted!

starting with some gunbot's from CMG.






nice and easy to paint, I'll be either using these as weapon specialists for the normal grunts units or a 3 droid special weapon unit. Not too sure on that one yet.





Some hover gun drones 2 with cannons 2 with missiles, I replaced the usual plastic flight stand with a bit of wire on a 20mm MDF base and looks spot on!





And finally the hired muscle, I wanted some thing a little different in my army and ordered these guys, I'm happy with how they've come out the red off sets the sea of green nicely!

Monday 17 December 2012

More Gruntz stuff done!

Well I'm on a roll!!

I've managed to crank out the cool looking stuff and made some great headway with the last batch, the T-72 looking tank and the Doe gunship I'll leave till last as a "treat"

So 3 APC's that I picked up from Ground Zero Games, and at £7.50 a pop there not too bad, all metal so they've that "old school" feel to them, you know the one when you pick up your 2000 point marine army you nearly dislocated your shoulder!






I've gone for a "in the field" look and remembered what Dave from Portal gaming told me about sponging metal paint to make it look chipped scorpius and I'm quite happy with the over all look, might do some more washes but holding fire on that at the mo,





The Decals are from Doms decals www.domsdecals.com and the various sizes that he does on one sheet are spot on for loads of different scales,









so the two light Mechs from khurasan miniatures mounted on 40mm MDF bases from warbases, and all I need to do is get hold of some Russian looking numbers from Coops get them varnished to hide the shine of the transfers and there ready to go stomping!

And the last unit done is the suits from critical mass games,



again some numbers and these are sorted!

All I need to do is get the unit stat cards sorted and sort out a game.....

Wednesday 12 December 2012

Gruntz infantry Completed!

Well this lot didn't take half as long as I expected thanks to my secret weapon!



So what did I manage to do once I'd peeled Isla away from my painting desk....

So the space marine looking power armoured infantry,





The Mortar teams





And all the infantry, so just the big guns to work on now and that will be my Ruskies ready for my game of gruntz in the new year, I've started messing about with some unit cards for the above guys as well,







I've not got a great deal of a clue if these are right I'm gonna check out the book when it turns up to see if I need to do any jigging!

Sunday 9 December 2012

Gruntz, Reinforcements inbound via Khurasan...

So as the year is starting to turn into a Santa induced frenzy that a Slannesh Deamon price would be proud of I've managed to get my hands on the "last" bits of my gruntz army....

I've been tempted to order from Khurasan for a while but was never too sure the classic shall I Shan't I situation, So I decided to take the plunge and then the East coast of America got a whupping from a hurricane so I had to wait for the website to come back up and now my bits have arrived boy I'm not disappointed!!

So the "normal" infantry that I'm going to using, these are evil mid-tech models and I'm really liking the look of these the actual quality of the casting and the detail on the models are really rice and there was hardly any flash with these.













As Guntz is a skirmish game that should do me for every game I hope!

I  decided to also order some heavy armoured infantry





Now on the actual website the picture is ok, but in the flesh these remind me of space marines!

No sci-fi skirmish game wouldn't be complete with out some alien merc's


Far bigger than I expected more 20/25 rather than 15mm but I'm thinking of painting these like the guys from the fifth element



As I'm a sucker for guns and stuff it would have been rude of me not to grab a couple of light mechs





I also have had my eye on a T-70 inspired model, but I'm unsure what version to make....

 




But the whole point that I noticed Khurasan miniatures was because of the up and coming Doe Gunship a while back...


Only down side is that its missing some bits but the nice chap has already sent these out so I'll be showing off more of this model when the new bits arrive, 

So plenty to crack on with and I determined to finish in the black this month with the "pledge" so expect a few updates this month to the blog!


Saturday 1 December 2012

We are Legion... well Dystopian ones.. & 15mm Critical mass goodies!

I'm not talking about the highly effective Anonymous legion from 4Chan...

We are Legion

this is about the shiney new models from Spartan Games, there 28(ish)mm skirmish system in the dystopian universe, When these were first previewed on the net a while back I like them from the start and when I got the chance I got my hands on some and decided to do splash some paint on these.

I was in two minds how to paint them though as I didn't want to go down the route as WW2 Germans as they didn't fit the colour scheme, so after some digging about I found a pretty awesome site with loads of pictures of various Prussian uniforms and picked a couple from there.

www.kaisersbunker.com

 As I bought the starter set and an additional section I decided to paint them in different uniforms rather than the standard everything looks the same, So I decided with the dark green of the light infantry for the "extra section" and the dark blue for the rest of the army,








The models themselves were fairly simple to paint with good detail and the quality of the casting being very good, once I've done this lot...






Then I'll be basing them with my usual mix and rolling some dice at Coopers Yanks!

So I put an order into Critical Mass games for a unit of robot type things and they arrived really fast!!

I threw these together at work when I was on my "fag break" I tried to cut some round bases but will replace these with warbase's precut mdf shortly. 


The casting on these are really nice and I ordered the 3 man? section for a very reasonable £11 and they gave me enough weapons/arms to mix and match how ever I wanted which I though was cracking.

As I was looking at them I had a bit of an idea and though if you painted them like necrons/cylons you could use these in 40K as necons or anything else with the right amount off "fluff"

so a size comparison


They are going to look great as dreadnought type machines for gruntz, and look really nice compared to the grey knight, something I might do but not for a while!




So the pledge for November was a bit of a disaster!

I only painted the 8 transports for grunts and that was it! so finished on a not so shocking -15!

but year so far is looking like....

Bought - 334
Painted - 480
Difference - +146

so I'm happy to let this month slide, and I'm confident that I'll break the 500 mark with models painted.

So until next time!