On the boardgames front: January is OxCon month and all of my boardgaming too place there.

I gave Civ a try only to remember that I’d played it once before when I was half way through the game. (It is quite fun, but I’m still not sure that it is a good game as it feels too much like a game of “Who will blink first”).

I got in a rare game of Seafarers which I proceeded to win by a large margin after discovering a 6 gold and a 5 gold next to each other on the same turn.

I also managed to play half a dozen games of Dead Rising which I’m growing increasingly fond of. The expansions have arrived now so I’m going to have to try it with some other races and custom warbands.

I entered the Settlers tournament and managed to come third (after new rules were invented to tie break the tied tie break for second place). I’ve now managed to come consistently near the top for a few years, so I’m feeling quite pleased with myself.

Finally an honourable mention to Cities, an interesting tile laying game. Sadly it completely lacks interaction. A collection of tiles are selected in a random order, but each turn each player gets an identical tile and places it in their own play area.

Next up, RPGs: A GMing heavy month for me, I’ve been running Fantasy Craft with a Mythic Roman setting on Tuesdays. I’ve been very happy with my players as they’ve taken the plot in directions I hadn’t imagined and kept me on my toes. I think I’m getting better at improvisation. I’ll try to get a proper write up done after the final session next week.

The monthly Traveler game continues. We broke into a disturbingly insecure military base to sabotage the Giant Ancient Anti-Hyperspace Weapon Of Doom.

Finally I ran the adventure from the new D&D Red Box. It went down reasonably well, although one player was unimpressed with the dungeon crawl slog making things somewhat boring for his character (the party tank).

On to wargaming: No plays this month, but great success with my New Year Resolution, which I have so far failed to break.

If I have a quiet evening in, then I will do some painting.

Some nights I manage 10 minutes, some I manage 2 hours (and quite I lot I’m out and thus not subject to the resolution). It has meant that I’ve got through a couple of dozen skeletons, mostly finished a dozen elves, and have another dozen skeletons almost ready for the QuickShade stage. Decent photos coming soon!

I’ve also half assembled the Magnus the Traitor starter set for Warmachine after two people asked me to start playing the game enough times.

One of my acquisitions was a copy of Dwarf King’s Hold. This is a fun little game with fairly simple mechanics, but a fair amount of tactics. I’ve played through the first scenario twice now, once as each side. The undead won both times, but it was a close thing on the second game. I’m looking forward to giving scenario 2 a shot.

The figures are great, but suffer from Mantic’s usual problem of not having enough bases (none in this box). The box set comes with a £5 gift token which I’m going to splurge on getting some more (since I have various Mantic freebies that came without bases).

The other worry I have about the figures is that you really need to glue them, which might limit the set as a mainstream board game (which is a pity, because I think it would suit a certain segment of that market).

I’ve painted up the skeletons by applying some Army Painter Skeleton Bone primer, slapping on some Warlock Purple for the cloth, painting a few bits in black and then dry-brushing a dark metallic paint on the weapons and shields. Then it is off to Strong Tone Quickshade before painting the bases dark grey with a coating of Ash Grey flock then adding a little static grass before applying a matt varnish.

I’m quite happy with the way they have come out, and it has encouraged me to dig out the box of undead that I still need to paint from last year. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a few more days to work on them before the end of Easter.

On a related note, Irregular Webcomic has something similar about Siamese cats which I found fascinating.

Now to find some more cat miniatures to paint!

Since I was being reasonably successful, something had to give. It started when Tunbridge Wells Wargames Society threw their annual convention — Cavalier — ten minutes walk from my flat and I picked up a box from the rather nice Battlefield in a Box range.

Fast forward a couple of months and I’m now the proud owner of a pretty reasonable set of scenery. Things will be rather less bare the next time my table sees use as a battlefield.

A few months ago I mentioned that I had started pulling together some figures for a game of Fantasy Craft (and excellent system that has just had its first batch of errata). As usual, other projects got in the way, but I have finally got a significant number fully painted — more then I originally planned, but I’ll come to that in a minute. Today I applied a coat of matt varnish and can call the first batch “finished”, so I’ve taken some pictures and will relate the story of how they came to be.

The original plan was to paint a few figures to represent House Deneith mercenaries in my ongoing, but infrequent, Eberron campaign. (I also plan to paint some Orcs, and should probably up the priority of that little project as we are getting close to the session when they come out to play with the merry band of heroes).

When I want to get miniatures, I usually make Foundry my first port of call. They are a little on the expensive side, but produce some very nice figures — and the frequency of their 20% off deals helps a lot! The trouble with getting nice figures is that it leads the fanatical Warhammer players that you call “friend” to make comments such as “They would make a great core to a really characterful Empire army!”. To which there is only one response — “Yes, yes they would.”

So it seemed I was doomed to getting back into Warhammer, and I stuck my head in the Empire army book and tried to figure out what I wanted from an army. The answer was simple, cannons and other things that go “Bang!”. The fluff suggested a Nuln army and, while the text shouted “Black! Black to hide the soot marks!”, the pictures showed a number of units which had gone for a red and black colour scheme.

I took another look at the House Deneith pictures in the Eberron source books. Black and red was a common theme. It seemed the world wasn’t going to give me an excuse to avoid it.

I dabbled with various figures and eventually got to the point where I was painting my first cannon (I have another two still waiting in their blister packs). How was I going to apply my colour scheme here? I looked up and saw, framed and hanging on my wall, the answer in a holiday photo I had taken a couple of years previously.

Too many coincidences?

Meanwhile, Warhammer 8 has been released and given me another reason to keep painting. At the current rate, I should shortly have enough fully painted models to be a reasonably sized army and will be able to take them to the tabletop with some degree of pride.

Happily I managed to escape having bought nothing more then the three things I went in to buy (two pots of paint and some plastic glue). The afternoon was spent working on some House Deneith figures for my Fantasy Craft game. I have a long way to go, but it should make for an entertaining next session.

Copies are selling on eBay for quite insane prices, so I’m probably not going to be able to relive that particular part of my childhood through that channel.

Happily, Games Workshop have produced some rules that are supposed to recreate the feel of the original game. So, despite my intentions to aid the Green Tide in conquering the galaxy, I might just have to invest in a couple of squads of Terminators and some of those nasty Genestealers in order to build myself a pseudo-Space Hulk set.

Hopefully, it will prove to be a good system for quick games that don’t require much in the way of set up, and keep the measuring down to a minimum. I have quite a few friends who like board games, and this might turn out to be something that will appeal to them.