Firestorm Armada, deploy the fleet!

A month or so ago Dan from the Leicester Phat Cats organised a game of firestorm armada adeptly named the Battle of Anton's length (cue the homophobic jokes) and people jumped on to the play list like nits onto freshly washed hair!

I fancied a change to the Dindrenzi and I had the hawker fleetbox kicking around after buying it back in January! So after some musing about the colour scheme and so I broke out the airbush and had some fun.

I undercoated the models with halfords grey, then used an off white as an initial coat,

I then gave a watered down soft wash to pick up the detail of the panels and the like,

I then applied another rehighlight to the panels,

it was then simply a case of doing the metal and applying a wash, then the jade colour for the detail colour,

and in traditional Anton fashion the rest of the fleet was finished in time for the game,

As we were setting up for the game I took a snap of Dan's beautiful painted fleets,

The hawker fleet leading the way...

an orgy of geeks getting it on

and funnily enough the dindrenzi leading the way!

the gunline all nice and pretty,

flank speed and intercept....

the rest of the "heroic" fleet

Overall the game was a draw and as I moved at flank speed towards the gun line I sustained heavy losses but it was a good way of sussing out how the fleet worked, I'm now looking forward to my next game of firestorm, who knows when that'll be though!

with regards to the pledge it's currently on hold as with my old rig going down and the new one failing within 24 hours I'm still hunting a new one down but more than likely will get it after crisis in Antwerp, I'm really looking forward to that show and I'll be taking plenty of pictures and looking forward to seeing new European plastic crack dealers!

all quiet on the martian front, demo game pics

A month or so ago I organised a demo night to play the new shiny all quiet on the martian front,

after some intense painting I managed to get quite a bit of the humans painted, and Lee got his tripods painted up to a basic level and these are the pics from the night,

so the inital set up,loads of humans verses a few tripods, I was wondering how they would both fair,

the human blip markers advance towards the tripods

and the tripods return the advance shooting as the move and every thing they hit turns unto a puff of dust! the weapons are very powerful!

in a heroic/mental move the rough riders go ploughing into the closest tripod and entangle the legs then leg it into some cover!

with an immobilised target the Mk2's open up on the target and when the dust clears its still standing!

with the return fire from the martians, holes are starting to appear in the human gun line.

and in a moment of madness, a pair of scout tripods break through the human gun line and promptly get assaulted by infantry and some point blank shooting which in turn takes them both down!!

the black dust launcher continues to blast the infantry!

however the rolling from the human side is outstanding and tripods are falling like leaves in the autumn,

with the sense of victory in the air the humans push forward and put the pressure on the tripods, and manage to drop another one winning the game on victory conditions,

over all the game plays very well and I'm looking forward to when I can give the humans another run out, in the meantime I'll be painting rough riders all five units of them.

Maybe the second wave will turn up at some point who knows? however you can actually buy them online which is a kick in the spuds as the communication from alien dungeon has been pretty poor and not had any updates since the end of August.

anyway enough of the moaning, the victorious human force all all their glory!

and Lee's tripods, looking great so far, and I might pick up a couple just to paint up and use for grunts!

WWX table, get on the love train!

So as part of my 2014 goal I wanted to get a 4x4 wild west board do for WWX/deadmans hand,

A while back I picked up a couple of train sets from pound stretcher around Christmas time last year and in the usual wargaming hording fashion they have been sitting on a shelf looking at me ever since, until recently!

I decided to base up the tracks rather than simply painting them up mainly for the stability of pieces as between myself and the GC we've broken a few bits whilst playing with the trains,

so I simply measured up some cork board and with some sand and paint the finished result looks great even by my standards!

I decided to add two tones of static grass for a variation,  

 and looks cracking on the table, bit of a dark picture but that's what you get for playing in Kris's S&M man cave!

 So all I have to finish off is the train and I've had the station from sarrissa turn up so that'll be done in a couple of weeks along with some other buildings for the town, I'll be adding bits and bobs to the table over a few months. One of the ranges that I'll be investing in will be 4ground and these look good scale wise next to the wwx models as well as the deadman's hand models.