100th Post and a Prize

Well the time has arrived! It's my 100th post.

I "borrowed" this from  http://onelostroad.blogspot.com/2011/07/1lr-100-pageviews.html 

And as with such milestones I suppose I should have some sort of give away. Being a hoarder and a cheapskate, I'm having a little trouble coming up with ideas for a good prize. My painting skills have deteriorated past the point of being able to offer them up. But I can do some things with GIMP so I thought I'd start there. So my prize is the lucky winner will have their choice of Flags/ Heraldry or Ripples added to such; a map of their campaign setting; or design of some kind of game aid (ie cards).

If you can't decide if you would even find value in that I shall direct you the relevant posts.

Flag Ripples: here and here.

Maps: here (unfinished) and here. But I feel that this is my crowning achievement.

Game Aids: here and a picture of them.

So if you care to "win" just become a follower and leave a comment indicating so. In one week (Aug 7th, 2012) I'll randomly select a winner from the entrants and then work out with you what you'll have me do.

Thanks for reading.

From my Library

After buying a few more THW titles in a recent sale I was thinking about how to jump start my knowledge of eras I am not as familiar with. While at the local Costco I happened upon this book.

While it is just basic it puts a lot of things in context. With my recent purchases of Muskets & Mohawks, and Long Rifle (Both set around the time of the French and Indian/ Seven Years War) I now have the basis for some campaigns not only in The Americas and Europe but perhaps also some 18th Century colonial actions. This book also got me to dust off a couple of impulse buys from last year.

So could be a great resource for using the new RRtK Historical Army lists that just came out.

Now I'd love to give you more detail on the DK book, but it has gone missing already. My son is in the habit recently of picking things up and moving them about the house. I'm glad he's interested, I just wish he could tell me where he left the damn thing.

In other news, while I was successful in finding flow aid and a lot of good artist acrylics, but I managed to leave my pot of Dwarf Flesh just open enough to turn it into a solid block of paint. So now I have to figure out how to mix and thin my own paint. Joy.

Talomir and other things updated

Hi all,

As I approach 100 posts I got a little funny about post hoarding again. So I'm giving you a few things all lumped together.

I put together a short video AAR of the most recent Talomir Tales battle here. You'll need to pause it to read the text but it was a good first try just to see how it might work.

I played the game on my new foam battle boards.

Artsy eh?

I went a bit crazy with the sponges and paint. I then did a wash of brown with a little black mixed in to tone down the effect.

The final result.

I got carried away and forgot to photograph the intermediate steps. After the wash I highlighted the grit with gray and then a mix of sand and gray by dry brushing. I then liberally applied Scenic Cement with a spray bottle and a 1:1 mix of turf and grass colored flock. I think it is a little too fine and uniform, next time I will add different textures of flock and try my hand with some static grass. I then sealed it with another liberal spraying of scenic cement on top.

And here it is set up for the battle.

I have since purchased some felt squares to make a better delineation of terrain features such as woods.

Off to continue some cleaning and then swim lessons and Karate for the kids.

General Update

Hi All,

  Just a quick update since I have several irons in the fire. I've been doing a lot of shopping for hobby related stuff. Bought way too much stuff at Wargamevault during their sale. Mostly paper terrain but also rules and ships for Roman Seas. I mostly wanted the ships but the rules sounded interesting.

  I base coated and started painting the Vikings. Those sounds you heard were my cries of anguish. Thus far I feel that the spray primer experiment may be over. It doesn't seem to save that much time and, as with most things, I fear I am to heavy handed with the spray.

  Also I began the color blocking and realized that I must face the fact that I am a total beginner again. The paint glopped on and looks atrocious. But on ward and upward as they say. I need to figure out how to thin my paints, can't find Liquitex Flow Aid locally yet, or if I can do it with a model train "wet water" recipe. I did a little by just wetting the brush periodically. It may also be time to just dump the old paint. Any tips are greatly appreciated.

  I also broke down and bought a magnifiying lamp. I'll post pictures when I get it set up. I also need to clean my work area. Right now it's in a state I'm referring to as opulent squalor.

  Printed off the extra counters I needed to play the next to battles for Talomir Tales, the other players are waiting on me (no pressure). And so of course that meant I should also spend a lot of time yesterday starting a new battle board.

  I have huge sheets of styrene but I thought this solution might be quickest. Four 1' x 3' x 1" sheets which I have now painted and textured. I will spend today getting a tad artsy and hopefully flocked and playable by this evening or late afternoon.

They now have a top coat of brown over the grit.

Happy gaming all. I hope to have some battle reports soon.

Viking figures, some progress

It's not much, but I've started making some progress on my Viking figures. Right now I'm trying to paint up the Mirholme Army in the Talomir campaign. There is a little more pressure as Ed (owner of Two Hour Wargames) has joined and will be fighting one of the other battles. He blogged about it here.

Anyhow, a few minor setbacks and challenges. I had to brush prime as my unused Citadel primer is somehow blocked and won't spray. My attempt to use poster tack to put figs on a popsicle stick failed miserably. I don't want to glue them on as I'm afraid I'll snap them off at the ankles. I found and then lost some double sided tape that I will try next, when I find it again.

The basing is coming along nicely, a mix of sand and Railroad Scenics ballast. But I learned that I need to apply a second coat of PVA on top unless I want the material all over my paint brush.

The non functional spray can.

What do you mean it's no longer under warranty?

 Yes that says 1999 on there, never sprayed it once.

You may recall Hemming and crew.

 Coated in diluted PVA then left to dry. Followed by more PVA on the base and covered in sand/ ballast. Then painted on the Black and relized I should have sealed the sand with more PVA.

A mix of Zvezda and Imex.

This group is PVA'd. I used light spackle and then played around with putting sand on in patches. Then sealed it with more PVA. When taking this picture I noticed the axeman  on the right has some terrible mold lines. I suppose I'll have to clean him up.

(This will also be my first test of scheduled posts)

Memoir Third Age 3019

My son was bugging me to play a game and I had just read Bob Cordery's post about his rainy day game here, and I thought why not give it a try.

I have never played Memoir 44 and am only vaguely familiar with it, Command and Colors, and Battle Lore which are all adaptions of the theme. Or at least that is how I understand it. I do have a copy of the game Lords & Levies, which I thought I first saw on Rudi Geudens site the Universal General but had to look on the internet archive for the files here. Here is the BGG page.

Anyhow I took Bob's rules and tried to figure out the dice from his AAR. After studying hi pictures I figured that I would "label" my d6 thus: 1-2: infantry, 3: grenade, 4: tank, 5: star, 6: flag.

Next I was going to use the games LotR Risk and Conquest of the Empire for board and pieces. I used the LotR board because I like fantasy. I then used the following pieces: Infantry as Infantry, Mounted as Tank and Monster as Artillery. I thought about using the Catapults from CotE but decided against it, I did use the galleys from CotE.

Ships cost 3 but only had 1 combat die. They could be defeated by two 5(star) results. I also chose to use the leader pieces from LotR and gave them for free with 1 combat die and defeated on three 5(star) results. I also decided that the named fortresses gave an added die on defense.

Next I determined that I would play the combined Mordor/ Harad side and my son elected to play Gondor. My daughter said she would play Rohan, but never even came to the table. I decided to do initial force points by the printed reinforcement bonus for holding a kingdom and the additional bonus for number of territories held. I did the three players as individuals, this decision made it harder for me the evil player. So we came out with Mordor 9pts, Gondor 10pts and Rohan 7 pts. I think I will do it differently next time an use the kingdom bonus and 1pt per province held. Then it would be more like Mordor 16pts, Gondor 17pts and Rohan 9pts (I'm not positive as I didn't write it down.)

I did not remember to take pictures until near the end. It got to be a terrible slog and it seemed that it was only a matter of time till Mordor lost. The good side had a lot of advantages, two reinforcement rolls to my one, two movement rolls to my one, so it was just a matter of time. Perhaps give them a d8 for movement and maybe just keep the reinforcement level based on provinces held.

I started getting a little loose with the division size.

Showing the killed units with dice next to them.

Decided that Gondor should retreat to South Ithilien rather than over stack.

I called it there because my son had lost interest and the kids kept on interrupting me and I couldn't keep it straight what I was doing. Fun but needs a few more tweaks. I'll try again another time.

Paper Chase

Just doing a little card modelling, using Dirt Cheap Terran by Microtactix. Inspired by the Colonel to get started, and in need of a gaming surface I thought I'd start with this kit I bought over a year ago.

On the recommendation of the Dux I downloaded the latest podcast of Meeples & Miniatures and listened while I cut and glued. So far so good. (Actually I listened to #90, 89 and 91 show up on the blog, go figure.)

I'll try to get some pictures of progress up tomorrow.

*** Update 7/15/12 ***

Here are a couple of pictures of what I've done so far. Sorry to disappoint Joe, but it's not an actual terrain piece but really a tile. I'm trying my hand at these to improve my papercraft technique on something that is not as vital.

Using paper connectors

Using paper clips

reverse side showing paper clips

So not the greatest but it'll get the job done. The paper clips hold together better but make the edges bow up. After doing most of these I realized that you need to really bend the flaps pretty far under if you want them to lie flat. That's why most of my edges bow out.

After I finish this set I may sex them up with a pattern printed onto the tiles. I'm also considering World works or something like that for artwork. It also looks like a robo cutter might be a worthwhile investment if your going to do a lot of these.

The Colonel's Cardstock list

Hi All,

  Just a quick re-blog of the phenomenal list of Paper craft resources and reviews that Col. Shofer is putting together here.

  Once again a case of sychronicity (once again a word that blogger sees as mis-spelled and is not in dictionary.com) as I have been looking over paper craft table top solutions.

Enjoy.

Battle Mat idea

Okay so I have been thinking that part of my inertia to gaming is not having a proper gaming surface. Long gone is my full 8' x 4' sheet of plywood gaming table (I think it was last seeing duty as a feed stand for goats) and my wife would probably balk at such a monstrosity in the house.

I asked Prufrock about his hex mat on Here's no great matter and he devoted an entire post tutorial on how he made his from carpet and spray paint here. He concluded by saying that it would probably have been easier to just buy a felt one from Hotz mats. The Hotz mats look very nice and can be printed with hex or square grids. I did admit to him that I do like building things myself, in theory. I also thought about buying a Zuzzy mat.

So we now have this to think about Prufrock's carpet mat ~$100, Hotz mat ~$40, Zuzzy mat~$40. Those prices include shipping. The Zuzzy I would still have to paint myself. I can get spray paint at the local DIY for about $3.50 per can. So if I'm using roughly 6 cans thats another $21 for paint.

While I was at the local DIY Store (Home Depot) I cam across some rubberized and carpeted interlocking mats similar to these.

The ones at the store are only 17.75" per tile but one box supposedly covers 37" x 54" and comes in either charcoal or nutmeg (brownish) for ~$35 for one box. Hmm. So if I made this one it might be $56 to make. Ah decision,s decisions. I think home made has one advantage. I don't have to wait for it to get here, I just have to wait for it to dry.

Feel free to give me a nudge either way.

Where some men have gone before.

And no it is not a setup for "your mother" jokes.

I read this over at the Axis of Naughtiness here. And it looks totally awesome. If I only had some super geek friends to play with. Many of us of a certain age **cough 40+ cough** probably fantasized about being on the bridge of the Enterprise, I know I did.

This would be cool to play, but I find that I need a pause button as real time strategy generally sends me into rage that can be harmful to electronic devices and drywall. I've gotten fairly proficient at repairing drywall, computers, not as much.

I can also see a skype or VOIP session ending up like the infamous DOTS game.

This guy uses normal gamespeak (ie he curses a lot!)

And this remix:

At 16sec sounds like me. Okay the 2nd one is funnier but more explicit.

And welcome to Simon (sorry to welcome you after all the cursing) who is a very talented sculptor. He has several blogs but the most recently active is My Wargaming Corner.

Alternate Flag Ripple Tutorial

If you have tried the other method and had trouble, here's a slightly quicker and easier method.

We'll start with our base flag.

Ray's Boissleau Flag

And an image of some white material that's been ruffled up.

Ray sent me this as well.

Talomir Tales Battle Analysis

Back on June 26th and 27th my brother and I played out a battle from Ruarigh's Talomir campaign. You can read the narrative AAR here.

This was a battle between Seniira, listed as comparable to a Roman client state, and Treyine, listed as comparable to 100 years war English. The starting Armies were:

Seniira (attacker)
2 Veteran Inf.
3 Infantry
4 Aux. Inf.
1 Foot Skirmish
1 Merc. Knights Cav
1 L2 Mage

Treyine (Defender)
1 Foot Knight
6 Archers
1 Merc. Arquebusiers
1 Cav. Skirmish
1 Hero
1 L2 Mage
The Spear of St. Lindorf (+1 to all reaction tests)

Since my brother is not a wargamer per se I figured that he should defend. We played on one of those plastic picnic tables you can get from Costco and set the playing area to 4ft by 30". We then used dice to help us grid out the battle area into 9 roughly equal sections. He rolled for overall rough terrain, but when we rolled for specifics it was only impassable in section 4, a gully in section 8, and a river running from 1 through 7.

You can see the dice to make the grid.