AVANTI SAVOIA!! Bolt Action Italians & getting ready for the expo

After getting ribbed by Kris with regards to collecting Italians and bragging about how the LRDG will "rip me a new one" Kris powered his way though his painting as shown below...

I really like the effort that Kris has made on these guys and make a nice change from the usual West Europe collections that you usually see.

So after a monster assembling session last week on I started on the army, I was going to do a unit at a time however it soon became apparent that I could actually crank these guys out at a rediclous rate of knots! After some late night sessions which is when I'm at my most active due to working perment nights I had all the Italians done and ready to go Scorpion hunting!

Normally I don't go all Gucci on the bases, but with these guys I fancied doing something different,

The 2 squads of normal infantry, I'll run these as regular guys at 10 man size with 1 LMG,

The Command team,

The FAO and the weapons teams

The tiny Semovente 75/48 and a cannone da 105/28 from a chap called Bob Emmerson that I stumbled across on the bolt action facebook page, 

With how I've placed the crew I can also use the 100/17 Modello 14 medium gun that is now available though warlord. Even though they are both classes as medium I'll use the 105/28 as heavy until I can source the right model,

So whilst I've been doing these during the evening, I've been entertaining the GC during the daytime hours and putting the finishing touches to the Saga Expo board, 

We managed to get another big game of Saga sorted as well to iron out some of the kinks from last time and it should run quite smooth!

 

 If you are going to the Expo come and find us, roll some dice and make us feel special! not too sure where we'll be but look for the nutters in the Phat Cat T-shirts and you'll be sorted!

http://www.ukgamesexpo.co.uk/ 

Bolt Action the Italians have arrived & the pledge

So after finally sorting out an 1000 point army list and ordering the models from warlord they turned up, took a while but that didn't bother me as I has plenty of bits and bobs to keep me busy.

so the army list consists of,

HQ Regular 2nd Lt and one additional chap
FAO Regular and one additional chap

Infantry Section Regular + 5 men & LMG
Infantry Section Regular + 5 men & LMG
Bersaglieri Section + 4 men & 2 LMG's
Bersaglieri Section + 4 men & 2 LMG's

Machine gun team Regular
Anti-tank rifle Regular
Medium mortar team Regular & Spotter
Medium arty regular & Spotter

Semovente 75/18 Regular

and this is what that lot looks like straight from the postman only onr problem is that the Bersaglieri can with the wrong heads, I'm still awaiting a response from warlord but I'll simply give them a ring at some point. 
 

now the age old debate between myself and Kris has come up with how to paint the Italians, and I wasn't really feeling the desert khaki colour so I'm looking at the grey uniform that they had,

to actually paint these in grey would be really easy and I'm planning on using panzer grey from plastic soldier company so the base colour would be done, pick out the bits and bobs, quick wash, rehighlight and boom job done.

So onto the pledge...

Bought - 88
Painted -79
Differance -9

with the Italians arriving in force midway through the month its forced me to step up the pace and I've managed to get quite a bit done for the Italians, so the dent in the pleadge isn't huge however I'm confident that I'll recover this back in June as I've not really got anything on the gaming radar that is taking my fancy.

2014 Goals

4x4 old west/wild west exodus board - still outstanding i.e. not even started!
4x4 Jungle board - is now 99% finished, just waiting for the radio tower to turn up

Finish off some projects:
Cybertronic for warzone - Done
Enforcers for deadzone - Done
Terrain for deadzone - Done 
Enlightened & Outlaws for WWX - in progress....
Zee dreadball team - still outstanding
Malifaux Gremlins - still outstanding
Plague reaper for 40K escalation - still outstanding
Orks for 40K (not finish but do enough for 2K) - on the table ready to go after the saga expo board!
 Finish off the 5th Company including the drop pods - still outstanding
Orcnar for Relics - still outstanding

New systems & Projects that I've not kickstarted:
Judge Dredd -  Have the rulebook, but no interest at the moment within the gaming club
Muskets & Tomahawks - Have the rulebook, but no interest at the moment within the gaming club
Italians for boltaction - models bought and on the painting table!

The goals have ground to a halt recently, so I'm going to make an effort to work on some of these for the next couple of months, which ones I'm not sure to be honest!

Spectre miniatures beta rules

Myself and a few other guys have backed the Spectre miniatures kickstarter,

In the last couple of days the beta rules have been released for people to have a crack at, normally I don't bother with beta rules however after having a quick scan of the rules it looked fairly simple, it also had some really interesting looking rules and myself and Kris gave it a go learning together over the course of an evening,

So we managed to get three games in ramping up the rules each game to try new things out, So the first game was a simple meeting engagement between 2 squads of professional infantry armed with assault rifles,

the objective was in the middle of the board and it was a simple snatch and grab,

line of sight was fairly limited but that added to the brutality of the shooting, after a couple of turns both sides were taking effective fire with suppression and guys bleeding out,

Kris managed to get to the BTR however a cheeky hand grenade soon put an end to that and the guys bleeding out were gunned down in cold blood!

The second game, we introduced commanders with some perks, again it was a snatch and grab with Kris being the defender. as we played mainly on a 2x2 its was tight and fast,

for this scenario as the attacker I could come on from any table edge, to did a three pronged attack,

it was going smoothly until the team was stacked by the entrance ready to breach and clear suddenly had two frag grenades land at there feet!

the ones that manged to survive that managed to grab the secret tea recipe out of the APC and it was effectively game over,

So for the third game we really went for it, using the force selector to really try out the rules and see what can be done with the system,

Kris went with an SAS patrol consisting of the following:

Commander,
Assault rifle with UGL
Pistol
Body Armour
Laser  designator
2x frag grenades

Squad leader
Assault rifle
pistol
body armour
2x frag

Operator
assault rifle
body armour
pistol
2x frag

Operator 
LMG

body armour
pistol
2x frag

4 guys for 227 points, me on the other hand went with militia....

Warlord,
Assault rifle
body armour

Big man x4
Assault rifle
body armour



militia x10
assault rifle

militia x2
armed with nothing!

militia x2
Medium Machine Gun

militia x1
RPG

so I was out numbering Kris by quite a bit, and we were laughing out heads off with the difference in the sides,

The mission we played was destroy the BTR to stop the local warlord salvaging it, so it started off with both sides moving on from the edge of the table,

as there were so many milita I couldn't hide them all so decided on a tried and tested tactic, Charge!

Well it worked for the zulu's so it couldn't fail!

so after a few effective shots from the SAS it was time for the militia to start shooting back and I managed to a get a lucky shot and drop one!

as both sides got closer to the objective it wasn't looking good for the Brits as the militia were swarming all over them, until a couple of grenades from the SAS caused huge amounts of damage amounts the tightly packed militia, however one of the operators did pay the price and was caught in his own blast!

with the machine gun on overwatch it got a bead on the SAS commander and cut him down as he dashed for cover, so only one guy remained the militia got blood lust and swarmed into the room, now it seemed a pretty much foregone conclusion until we read the rules for multiple combat, Kris smiled from ear to ear and rolled his dice, all 6 of my guys fell over as the last guy ran outside to take out the warlord and RPG guy,

I decided to shoot into combat, judging by the last turn the warlord & RPG guy were good as dead! and managed to hit and kill the last of the SAS!

So three games in a single night and we'd pretty much got the rules nailed down, overall its a solid set of rules so far and the games are fast and brutal, if you hit your pretty much dead unless you roll a 1, which Kris managed quite a few during the evening!

We do have a few questions that I'll be putting on the kickstarter comments so see if we were playing it right and get an understanding of why some of the rules are written in a certain way,

If you fancy having a look the beta rules are at...

Spectre-Rules-Beta-1.1.pdf

and the actual kickstarter is...

spectre-miniatures

the minimum pledge is £10 personally the sculpts look great and for nearly a packet of B&H you can't complain really!

Now I'm off to do some technical shopping....

Convergence reinforcements

No sooner had I finished the previous batch of Convergence models the next wave of reinforcements landed in my lap,

So your looking at conservator heavy vector, a combat heavy chap with armour 20 as long as he's got both his arms however he does have an anger management problem with hand of vengeance.

next up is the optifex directive, three chaps armed with screw drivers and swiss army knives. So maybe not the most effective combat unit but these guys are great for buffing both units and vectors and can repair vectors as well.
One thing I did notice on the repair text is each model can repair so if your feeling lucky and roll low enough you could get 3D6 damage points back add that with the forge masters skill and that's an additional D3 damage points back.

and finally you have the transverse enumerator, a unit attachment that armed with a screw driver and a blow torch, again this guy can repair vectors and gives some great buffs to units that he joins, not sure if you can join a unit give them some buffs then run off and repair a vector though?

so the latest lot in a group shot, the red with the bronze works really well on the robed infantry and do remind me of the mechanicum from 40K

it was totally unintentional however it suits the back ground of the cyriss really well!

So with these lot done its off to sort out the next batch fairly soon, so I've now hit 38 points of cyriss enough to give me a decent game.

Mantic open day 2014 with roaming reporter El Pollo Diablo

How do!

The Ant-meister asked me to do a quick write up of the Mantic open day this weekend (17th May) and I said I'd be happy to oblige.  I do apologise in advance if the prose isn't up to the usual high standard though!

The main reason I went along was that I wanted to defend my Dreadball Open Day title that I won last year.  Ironically I didn't get any pictures of that as I was too busy playing!  I was joined in this endeavour by two of my Phat Cats compadres; Mr Nicholas Ayres (Lord High Table Builder of our esteemed gaming group) and Mr Adam Cooper (Chief Phat Cats Rabbi Impersonator).  

The venue is the same as it was last year; Mantic HQ is a former health centre in Nottingham.  That said they've improved the building no end.  Last year the tournament felt like we were playing in the Chechyn Dreadball Open with lighting taped to the ceiling and sub zero temperatures.  It is much better now with the added benefit of working toilets and proper lighting!

There was a lot going on with demos of Dreadball and Deadzone, a massive Kings of War game going on (about 15,000 points a side I think), studio seminars, sculpting demos and ask the artists sessions.  There were some guys for Warlord games too showing off Bolt Action.  The chap running the demo was right beside the Dreadball tables and he was using a shell casing as a dice roller.  I don't think it could have been any louder if he'd actually fired the gun the shell came from every time he rolled the dice!

The Dreadball tournament itself was a great experience.  One of the most heartening things for me is that the Dreadball player community is a genuinely nice bunch of people with an almost complete absence of dicks.  And I don't mean people called Richard.  I always hated playing in WHFB and 40K tournaments as they seemed to generate epic twattery.  I've never played Warmahordes but I get the feeling the same is true there also.  Never seen it in Dreadball though which is its own tribute to the game and the players.

We played using the Azure Forest rules which added a whole new dimension to the game with the weather playing havoc with your strategy.  I enjoyed the tactical challenge it provided though.  The first three games went right on schedule for me getting three landslide victories on the bounce.  The last game however against a chap called Mike and his Nameless team proved to be a match too far.  I managed to get into a 5-0 lead but my dice abandoned me in the later rushes as I missed four attempts to score two points and close the match out.  Ultimately his passing game and the gradual loss of my players to his hitty guards meant I couldn't score enough to get back in the game.  Second place overall is not too bad though and there's always next year!  Unfortunately Nick and Adam had varied fortunes and my dream of a Phat Cats 1-2-3 was not to be with both of them finishing in mid-table oblivion ...

I picked up a couple of bargains; Project Pandora and Dwarf King's Hold were on sale for a £10 each (reduced from £34.99!).  They are Mantic's sci-fi and fantasy dungeon skirmish games (think Space Hulk and Heroquest).  I think Mantic are going to release new version of the Dwarf King's Hold though which is more of a Heroquest type game (see photos below for some of the models!)

I'll leave now, kind readers with some of the photos from the cabinets at Mantic HQ.  As a keen Dreadballer I'm quite excited about Dreadball Extreme and the Season Four rules which will bring the Extreme teams onto the standard Dreadball pitch.  Anyway; thanks for reading!

Dan "El Pollo Diablo" P.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Note from Ant - Huge thanks to Dan for taking his time to put some words togeather for the blog and snapping the outstanding pic of the shiney new stuff that will be coming out from Mantic in the next few months.