2013 the Summary!

Another year old another year wiser and all that jazz...

So what a great year its been for the Anarchy it still lives and the pledge has been excellent with not just treading water with my purchases actually making some small in roads into the unpainted mass of models that I still have kicking about.

Crank it up!

January

Sucked back into 40K...

Rather than being sensible I decide to do the 5th Company as you do...


February

The Kursk board had it outing at Hammerhead, I also decided to buy an entire Russian army in 20mm, 200 infantry/guns and 27 tanks, as you do.....

A superb job by Coops and went down very well!


March

The 5th Company was coming along nicely....

and picked up a faction for Merc's (system 1)


April

Moving house & Salute in the same month was going to be interesting...

and Dan being his usual sexual god...

May

A Dreadball Torney & faffing about with RTV rubber!

June

The Kursk Board went to Expo with some reinforcements...

and pondered over the amount of plastic crack that I really do have!

humm... 31 systems....


July

I picked up the Cryiss starter set (still not used them!)

And wandered over to the warlord open day which was actually quite good!

August

In a moment of kindness I did a 4x4 bolt action board for the club over in coalville, which the local kids are still using and hasn't been destroyed yet!

Isla enjoyed playing with the trees,

Picked up a second fleet for D-wars and actually managed to get a game in with them!

September

A tough choice christening or Partizan? I managed both!

so from this....

to this within 2 hours...

this was also the month of "systems"

Fanticide, Rohin & Deadmans Hand (systems 2 - 4)

I had another "moment"

why-do-you-blog

I painted up a second D-wars army (and I'm still yet to use them!)

I also started painting up yet another 40K army that I've had for years for a tale of x gamers for the local club which I'll preview next year as I'd forgotten about them until now!

Nick, Phil, Coops, Lee & Myself wandered over to the Derby show and played on the biggest board with the most amount of tanks that I'd ever seen!

and walked away with best in show!

October

My Warzone kickstarter arrived, (system 5)

and wandered up to Leeds with Nick to play some fanticide

November

Myself and Rob went over to Telford for the first warzone convention/open day and bought lots of resin crack and nearly made sweet love to the salesman! 

To help support a local club I signed up for a Kings of War Torney and in the usual Anton fashion wanted a fully painted army

Didn't finish dead last but had a bloody good time so I've already signed up for Battlemasters 2014, and so should you....

Do it!


December

Went mental painting warzone stuff doing most of the Legion stuff within a couple of weeks, The world turned up to the mantic open day to get the deadzone kickstarters including myself & Rob (system 6) and actually managed to resist picking up Judge Dredd!

Another "good idea" was to get a Fae army for fanticide as Northstar miniatures were having a sale so I effectively bought all of it and then painted it!

My Relics stuff turns up and Wild West Exodus (system 7) arrives in time for Christmas and nothings missing!

So apart from the usual painting a million models for all the systems under the world, its been a year of trade shows with the Battlegroup system. Nick's Modern system and Fanticide lots of travelling and rolling dice!
Moving house has forced my hand to keep my "mancave" tidy and helped me from picking up too many systems with a mere 7 systems for 2013 with two of those coming from kickstarter it was quite a "light" year I was really adding to systems that I'd already got.

So onto the "pledge"

December

Bought - 70
Painted - 133
Difference +63

2013

Bought - 763
Painted - 859
Difference + 96

Compared to the previous years,


                    2010            2011           2012     2013
Bought        469              1238           407        763
Painted        513              1245           563        859
Diff             +44               +7              +156      +96

I nearly doubled my bought & painted count but when looking to see what I'd actually bought its all sorts of odds and sods mainly Dark Angels which I really need to finish, 20mm WW2 Russians,some 15mm Grunts stuff and then my kickstarter stuff that came through.

I'm a bit surprised that I managed to actually finish in the black with the weather being so nice for once and with the time off was spent down the park with Isla being a "responsible" parent...

and all the kickstarters that came in towards the end of the year.

So the stat thing, it did become a bit of a burden with setting myself a challenge of keeping the hits above a certain number, not sure why maybe I'm pushing for view but when I think about it it shouldn't matter as this isn't my job!

over 3,000 hits a month, yup I'll take that!



The Future....

Well I've been given the "blessing" that my better half will bugger off out and I'll get my geek on so gonna arrange a night with a couple of guys and get a game in, also give me an excuse to actually do a board and I'm going to be messing about with a jungle board so keep an eye out for that, the materials are all in I've just got to get on with it!

Systems wise All quiet on the martian front and Myth should be arriving early(ish) next year and May(ish) will bring AVP from prodos & War & Empire (15mm ancients) from westwind so thats 4 straight away and what ever will tempt me in between.


The Fallen...

Kenneth "The Don" Evans (Grandad)

Paul "Popey" Millis (Dad)

Huge thanks to all my followers and thank you for your time and may 2014 be an action packed rollercoster ride!

Special mention to my sister & Nadine

Cheers for the support over the last 12 months you've both been an absolute stars!

 

Deadzone cover & Plague

After playing a few games of deadzone I went digging into my "extensive" collection of bits and dug out some sci-fi terrain that I was going to do "something" with and splashed some paint on these for deadzone,

I've been a busy boy!

nice and simple technique I've used on these, base colours then sponged a browny black straight over, followed by some metal for a quick weathered look,

I made up one of these palletts a while back so decided to crank out the rest,

again nice and quick, base colours, wash in the groves, apply some transfers and sponge weathered,

Drybrush necron compound, soft army painter wash, pick out some areas with the orange and sponge weather, 

And thats it a shag load of cover sorted out for a multiude of systems,but it didn't stop there I decided to splash some paint on the Plague as I've been enjoying using them on the table,

nice and simple, nothing too special but good enough that when you look at the models close up they don't look like a train wreck!

I picked up some gamesworkshop technical paint Blood for the Blood god (nice and catchy!) and had a play with the stage 1, 2's and dogs and they came out excellent!

I'm going to get some more of the new techincal paints and play about with them and see what other bits I can make look pretty!

First Look: Wild west exodus

This has to be the fastest first look!

I got my box on Friday, spent most of my spare time building the contents and then by chance sorted out a game with Rob at Hinckley,

we kept it fairly small at $500 as that's all I had with the enlightened, and a basic kill misson, interesting set up rules as the posse with the most models sets up first and goes second which I thought was a nice touch, In the usual Anton fashion I decided on the stubble tactic of charge with a huge amount of guys running up the high street.

With Rob's force on the table when we started reading some of the ability's of the models his two snipers suddenly went to the top of my "kill" list! added to the fact that I found out my constructs if they loose their life points due to shooting they explode, the charge down the high street was bout to turn entertaining!

With some well placed sniping from Rob blew my 7 man assault unit to bits and a lone guy was left!

Not a lot left! added to the fact the Billy the kid was carving his way through constructs it wasn't looking good!

This prompted my entire force to go stage left out of line of sight, and pick off models one by one. Edison with his sonic wave blaster became very popular as he flushed out a chap in cover and pushed him into line of sight of construct 13 who then opened up with his Gatling gun and evaporated in a mist of red blood!

my last 3 long range constructs went on a daring flanking manoeuvre...

only to get spotted by Frank James, the first construct lost his head and blew the other two to pieces! so much for the "master plan" however thanks to the Doc I slotted the sniper and Rob decided to leg it to live another day!



Gameplay - The gameplay is surprising simple, each model has a number of activations that you can do, in a similar vein to infinity & warzone, however you only activate 1 model at a time unless your go for a group activation or a gang activation which is good for getting masses of models moving at the same time.

The D10 system is quite nice from the usual D6 and more systems are starting to move away from the traditional D6 which is about time as I've all my old school RPG dice still kicking about!

the shooting is really easy to get your head around and not that many modifiers to remember, we never made it into combat but initial looking at the rules it should be along the same lines, the only thing to really focus on is area of influence another name for reach for people from the warmachine system.

the clever bit is the damage roll where you roll a D10 add your armour and take away the power of the weapon the difference is the amount of wounds that you take, nice touch as a 10 always dodges the damage as it hits your bible/whiskey flask/little black book etc!

You generate influence every turn that you can use to reroll dice though the turn, you have to put the influence down before you roll the dice so if you don't need it then you lose it, with the enlightened I was getting 8 per turn compared to Rob's 4. As you lose the models that generate the influence you lose these from your pool and if I'm reading the rules right straight away.

Weapons have special rules as you;'d expect armour piercing ammo and the like, single handed weapons are done well as you get to shoot both for one action point, some pistols have a rate of fire more than one example being Jesse James whose pistols are ROF 2, meaning you get 4 shots per action!

Lastability -

With Wild West Exodus being a fresh system the scope is completely open ended, the amount of models that will get released in January are vast with loads of variety, Another quirky thing about WWX is that they have a comic that has a mission in based on the story, so if you wanted to play out the comic you could, the only thing that its lacking is a campaign system but as most of your bosses, underbosses and sidekicks are quite tasty it could unbalance the game quite a bit.

Models -

When you really start working on the models you notice the crisp detail and the amazing detail on these, great for the showcase painter could be ballache for people like myself who just want to field painted models!

The multi-part plastics are completely mental who ever designed these models either has OCD or decided to actually take the piss with the components, you legs on the enlightened are a mere 6 pieces a far cry from the usual one maybe two pieces that most manufacturers go with so if your planning a game give your self a couple of days before to build your stuff rather that the night before!

posability of the models is zero, they are all designed to fit together in a certain way, so unless your handy with a knife and green stuff converting these are very difficult for the novice and for the veteran well can you be arsed, personally these have to be some of the best models I've worked on with regards to detail and quality the end level product on WWX is very high.

Initially when you look at the prices you do have a high possibility of spitting team all over your monitor/keyboard, example would be...

23 of your hard earn sterling for these fine heroes of the imperium...

with no guns I might add.....

$46 of your hard earned sterling for these fine heroes of the wild west....

roughly converted you would be looking at about 28 quid plus postage for the union guys, The Forgeworld would be with guns £34 so rocking in at £6.80 a marine, or if you wanted a fairer comparison then the new tactical squad of 10 models is £25 for 10.

If outlaw miniatures do source a supplier for the UK/Europe then this should give the game so stability as well as the usual online discounts that you see for some suppliers.

overall the game plays well and does have alot of cool factor with the weird west/steam punk type feel to it the only thing that I'm not 100% is the bases of the models it increases the size by about 5mm  and going with the terrain that you can get from 4ground and Sarissa precision they are a tad big, Micro art studios have done some buildings for the system but with only a couple available at the moment so I'm on the fence with regards to the bases...