The Daemon's Claw

I have been working on my bases for my 40K armies. I have been adding snow to the rock bases for the knights and supporting infantry. To make the snow I used a mix of baking soda, PVA glue and water. I then added a coat of white paint to brighten up the colour where the colour from the herbs leached through. I have also been working on laying down the base for the gold colours around the edges of the panels. I am using the Foundry colour Beasty Brown. I can then add two different shades of Vallejo air gold to make the gold mix. I have been making some progress with my colonial African skirmish. The Congo rules look really good. plenty of opportunity for cinematic moments where explorers get mauled by a Lion or bashed by a Gorilla. I watch Kong, Skull Island last night. Very much what I was thinking of for my colonial skirmish. I may also have more of a Cthulhu bent for Congo rather than strictly historical. Again it's a game where you can get into it with a few plastic warrio...

I will be scouring my collection of old figures for models that are suitable for colonial Africa skirmishes. I found an interesting article in Wargames Soldiers and Strategy about adapting Saga for Colonial. The article comes complete with a colonial and native battle boards. You can even use the horse and camel rules for mounting units with the corresponding reduction in defensive stats and the reduction of shooting range to medium representing carbines rather than rifles. I also have a copy of Congo rules made by Studio Tomahawk and the Men who would be Kings (AKA Pith Helmets Rampant). So there are plenty of options for intrepid explorers to face down fierce natives. I have some plastic colonial British from Perry's some Zulu warriors from Warlord and some Mahdists and ACW Zouaves from Perry's the terrain can be a mix of 40K plastic palm trees, plastic aquatic terrain. The Zouaves will make excellent Askaris or Ruga Ruga. The Mahdists will either be themselves or Zan...

I went away for a few days this week. Normally this would mean less hobby time, but always on the lookout for some new inspiration, several of the photos do great inspiration for Rock and Snow terrain. Amazing how you got the dark brown volcanic rocks, red brown vegetation, bright green moss and white snow. This is good reference material for my Knight army. I am also looking at projects for 2018. The club has already kicked off a DBA War of the Roses project. We have 6 people interested. I got some more specialty models from Firestorm Games to go with the Perry's plastic. I think I will do them as Lancastrians from Towton. Blue and white livery. The plan is to fight 4 major battles of 2018 with smaller skirmishes in between. I also am interested in some more skirmish games. Some other people are interested in colonial battles so I got a copy of Congo rules and a box of Perry British. I can use them against some Mahdists I got a while ago to use as a Warhammer...

To scratch a historical itch and create a new wargaming group within the club, Pete and I have decided to get into War of the Roses. We will be doing 28mm DBA armies. This is great because you get to paint a small army made out of a box of Perry's plastic infantry and a cannon. We can then make the larger battles using the DBA big battle rules and generate the appropriate level of paranoia. I think armies will form much like MMP governments, either as necessary evils or an unhappy marriage of the unwilling. So far we have been planning this for a week and have 4 players. Pete will be the vile and treacherous Warwicks. No he is not allowed to paint them green and purple like all his other armies. Apparently a Tailby was found down a coal mine with the Lancastrian army payroll after the battle of Towton. I have no idea if I am related to this person but it makes for a great story. More updates with models shortly.

This weekend was a good hobby weekend. My Codex Adeptus Mechanicus arrived on Friday night. So I ripped that open and started reading it. Adeptus Mechanicus wasn't even an army when I stopped playing 40K so a lot of this was new to me. This also gave me the "official rules" for the Imperial Knights or Questor Mechanicus as they are named in the Codex. I got some new strategems to use on the knights. These would come in handy in the games. I took the knights down to the club and got in a game with them against some mostly bike mounted marines. Blessed with some sanctified blue tac, the knights marched to war. The knights took first turn and pinned the marines down in their deployment zone. By the end of my turn 1 I had killed a tactical squad a bike mounted command squad and most of a squad of bikes. From there my opponent never really got a chance. Bike squads got pincered by the knights and squashed, melted or blasted apart. I had a scary moment when the multimel...

I got in another game of Infinity down at the club over the weekend. I used my Aleph again. I changed the list a bit so I got some practice using some new models while still retaining a core of similar models. If you change your army list all the time you don't learn how to use the models better. This time we just played Annihilation, this is the Infinity version of kill the enemy. The mission is about killing loads of the enemy while staying alive. Oh and completing your classified mission objectives as well. Ryan won the roll and chose table sides and deployment. I chose to go first to try and take off some of Ryan's pieces before they got going. Here are my Forces in their inital positions. The Total Reaction Bot with HMG is in the middle of the table. I ended up with Ryan's Fiday assassin parked just outside my deployment zone in the middle of the table. In this photo the Fiday is just on the other side of the building from my troops and doing a great job of imp...