Hobby Tip - Infinity Scenery Packs

My brother and I wanted to get some more sci-fi terrain, so we saw these Infinity Scenery Packs. They are a very good price, and come with some decent amount of terrain. Not enough to cover a 4'x6', but good enough for small skirmishes.

They are pretty easy to assemble, but once we got it done we noticed something. They are made out of printed cardstock, and are very light weight. The issue is they easily get bumped around the table, and even if someone were to open a window in the house, your terrain not weighed down with lots of minis would get moved about.

So we came up with a couple of ideas to weight them down.

The building layers were easy. We got some cheap paint stirring sticks from the hardware store. Cut them down to fit the insides, and hotglued them to all 4 inside walls. It sufficiently weighed them down without getting too heavy. I would recommend hotglue over woodglue, because water based glues may soak into the cardstock and cause rippling and warping. Hotglue seemed to do the trick just fine.

The small crates were a different issue. I wanted them to be able to stand up on end, as well as lay flat. So I came up with the idea of weighing them down with wood cubes. I bought a piece of 1.5"x1.5" lumber. A long wood strip. Then we cut off pieces 1.5" long. This created a nice cube, which fit perfectly into the crates.

Now, now matter which side you lay the crate on, it gets some stability. Especially if you decide to put them up on end, the block rests at the bottom and makes it bottom heavy. No need for gluing.

We like this kit because it looks great, is cheap, and sufficient for quick terrain. We will be experimenting with the other scenery packs and try to get enough for some good tables, and see how we can weigh them down as well.

Gamer A.D.D - Rogue Stars

I am a fan of the Song of Blades and Heroes game system. I've done a few posts on it before. It's a great little fantasy skirmish game that can be easily taught, picked up, and provides a dynamic gaming experience. When I head the creator, Andrea Sfiligoi, built a scifi ruleset that was published by Osprey Wargames (who also published Frostgrave), I knew I wanted to check it out. Also I learned the art within was illustrated by Johan Egerkrans who also runs one of my favorite blogs that I follow. So with some of my Christmas money I ordered a copy and read through it.

The game is advanced. It has a lot of rules and a lot of conditions. Your characters can have 3 different types of condition tokens on them at any one time, including pin tokens, stress tokens, and wound tokens. These tokens represent penalties for different types of rolls and bonuses for your opponent depending on the rolls. The amount of special rules available to making characters isn't as much of an issue as I am used to it with SoBaH, but the sheer amount of tables needed for referencing is pretty high. Attacking and damage alone has you go through about 5 different tables in a sequence. It's a little daunting, but you can quickly remember common roll modifiers and table look-ups to speed-up play. But a cheat sheet would sure help as I was flipping through the book quite a bit on our initial playthrough.

We were excited to play this game using my Zone Mortalis tiles, and it worked quite well on them.

However there were some aspects about it I really enjoyed. It borrowed a few key things from SoBaH which I thought were best about that system. It's still a bring-whatever-minis-and-stat-them-up type games. So I could use whatever scifi figures I wanted, and make their profiles to match the miniature. This is especially friendly to conversions as a lot of options in the book will cover most creative ideas I can think of for miniatures. The other aspect it took is the activations and initiative. Where you rolled on each figure to activate your minis, and your opponent got to react to them based on bad rolls and even attempt to steal initiative away from you, switching to your opponent's turn. The game experience can be active for both players, and that is very cool.

Some people are calling this a scifi Frostgrave, which I don't think it is at all. The model count per side is only about 4-6 models, and really can't go much higher with how activations and initiative is handled. It doesn't even feel like Necromunda. To me it feels closer to each player is bringing a team of  RPG Player Characters that face off against each other. Perhaps another good comparison is to GW's old Inquisitor game.

We didn't get through a single game as my brother, Jarom, and I played. We were both learning to play and things went really slow. We could tell though that it did start to speed up near the end as we learned about the common target number rolls and table conditions. But this game does take a lot of practice, so it's not as friendly to new players as SoBaH is, especially those new to wargaming. We do want to give it another chance. There may be a lot of rules to go through for actions, but it provides a lot of detail to them, like damage locations and weapon ranges.

My brother and I have had our own scifi setting homebrewing in our heads for quite some time. We had already adapted it to a simple RPG that I outlined on my other blog (which I don't do much with anymore). We were looking for a miniatures game that could do it justice, and this might be it. Our initial thoughts were for Deadzone, but that game is not as adaptable as this.

After a couple read-throughs, I made some useful reference cards for recording your characters. These are meant to be 3"x5" so they can fit into large card sleeves.

And here are a few examples of the cards in use. This is my 200xp team. The Oathbound. In our setting is a massive heavy world rich with minerals, and generations of Fairin (the common human-like race of the galaxy) have been working on the world of Urachbach. They formed the Urachbach Mining Guild. A people of hard work ethics and very dwarven policies when it comes to grudges and righting wrongs. One of the things they have are the Oathbound. When a group has wronged or shorted the Urachbach mining guild, the Oathbound are set out to track them down and get reparations, under threat of death. They can only seek this justice in neutral space, so a lot of it has to do with timing and investigation.

Obviously this is my little Deadzone Forge Fathers collection, which I am looking forward to painting soon. I like this game because it encourages you to give each model its own style and personality, while keeping with a theme for your force as a whole. There is no 'generic footsoldier', they are all named characters. Undoubtedly you will be seeing more about this game sometime in the future.

Gamer A.D.D. - Song of Blades and Heroes (SoBaH)

I have just recently happened upon the Song of Blades and Heroes family of games by Ganesha Games. I gotta say I am getting hooked. I love the idea of skirmish gaming, and lately I have been interested in fantasy. This has started to take the place of Frostgrave for my interest in fantasy skirmish (Note: Age of Sigmar I do not consider a fantasy skirmish, so that still holds the mass battles spot for me).

From what I am reading, the core game system is simpler and more flexible than Frostgrave. You build the profiles for your models from scratch, and it uses an equation for configuring their points values. This is a really good feeling because I love the idea of making profiles to match the miniatures, rather than making/finding miniatures to match the profiles.

The system is really simple and could be a great intro to teach people about miniature wargaming, because all the elements are there for it, without going too complex. One of my Youtubers did a video on it that I like. Also another blogger I follow used this game to teach his young daughter her first miniatures game in a post. A lesson I plan to emulate with mine. Right now my daughter is only 4, and so we are still trying to teach her the fundamentals of Uno and Candyland.

So for fun I went around and started making profiles for a bunch of minis. This is what Reaper was made for. Cheap minis with a huge variety, allowing you to build whatever warband you want.

I have 3 books of this, I will go through each one with a description.

This is the basic rulebook for SoBaH, and the rules in their simplest form. With this you could easily build a warband of just about any type and theme, and all the images above use the rules from this alone.

For those wanting more granularity in the game, and this provides just that. Mainly an additional reaction mechanic to make the games a little more interesting, along with actual weapon and magic rules. The other edition has an abstraction of weapons and magic to keep it simple. This is pretty massive in what it brings and can be kind of overwhelming. The unfortunate thing is when reading through this book, the simplicity of the game loses some of its charm, but the good thing is there are a lot more options for building profiles.

This is a standalone post apocalyptic scifi game using the SoBaH system. I actually got to play a demo game with my brother using this, and it was a lot of fun. It's very interesting to experience the core game system and see how it works. He played his Orks, using them as mutant humans, and I played my Inquisition, using them as pureblood humans. Again, the beautiful thing about these games is you build the profiles to match the minis you have, not the other way around. It really makes those conversions you do worth while.

I will go over some conversions I did on some Reaper minis for my Dwarf warband in a later post.

The Holy Grail of Terrain Building!

I have found the best spray paint for terrain builders. It's affordable (About $5 a can), it does a nice even coat, and best of all:

IT DOES NOT MELT FOAM!

I couldn't believe it either. Rustoleum Flat Primer is what I have been searching for. I stumbled on the discovery when I was testing spray on primers for my Zone Mortalis tiles. They have foam parts, and I worried about the spray paint eating into them, and weakening my whole project. So I ran a few tests. I got a couple brands of craft acrylics and painted a coat on some pieces of foam, and used a spray paint I already had, Krylon brand, and this is what I got:

It ate right through the acrylic coat and into the foam. I figured I would need to do a couple more coats of the craft acrylics and test again, but I was running low on spray paint anyway. So I got into home depot and found the Rustoleum, thought I'd give it a try. Then I did the same test again, and got this:

This one looked much better. Then I noticed that it wasn't eating through the places where I didn't get the acrylic undercoat. So I got 2 pieces of foam (one pink and one blue) without paint on them and tried the spray:

I could not believe it. This is the stuff I have wanted all along. This makes my job so much easier. I was worried that I would need to paint in all the nooks and crannies of the tiles to get the foam, potentially covering up some of the details of the plaster bits with the thick acrylics. Now I don't need to. I took that can and sprayed about 5 tiles before it ran out.

They look so much better even just primed. Naturally I bought 5 more cans of this stuff then next time I found myself in Home Depot.

Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. My review.

I will start this review by saying that I have played Warhammer Fantasy Battles, 8th edition. So some backstory incoming. I didn't play it much, but I have. I started a small Dwarf army several years ago because I am a big fan of Dwarfs and their fluff in Warhammer. However quickly realizing the sizeable force I would need for a game and lack of fantasy players in my area, my Dwarf army never grew beyond a side project. Which I thought was a shame because I really liked my Engineer's Guild themed conversions.

Fast forward to several years later and my 40k gaming partner and I started expressing an interest in giving WHFB 8e a go. He bought and built up a Warriors of Chaos force and I expanded on my Dwarfs. We then played maybe 2 games of 8th edition. We found it... ok. I think we were able to pick it up because we were both experienced 40k players, but it was different enough. However we soon went back to 40k and put our collections away.

Fast forward to last week, and Age of Sigmar rumors were starting to leak and filter in en masse. At first many were thinking it was just going to be 9th edition. Which didn't get me excited. I would be giving it a shot just so my Dwarfs could see the game board again, but nothing excited me. Then the rumors started piling in on what this new game, Age of Sigmar, actually is.

This is something that genuinely excited me. I always wanted to get into a skirmish scale game for Warhammer fantasy, and this seemed to be it. The fact that the core rules fit in 4 pages attributed to the possibility of a fast paced skirmish fantasy game like I hoped it would be. The warscrolls were inspiring, joke rules aside (which I see as the final farewell to the old armies they were meant to be, and the designers' own sense of humor).

Right off the bat, I could see other's reviews and playtests of it. The glaring issue was coming up with balanced forces for both sides. So in our first game, I thought of an idea for balancing forces.

• 50 wounds to each side.
• Up to 50% of your wounds may be allocated to warscrolls with the Hero keyword.
• A minimum of 25% of the wounds must be allocated to Core units as labeled in their last army book.
• A maximum of 50% of the wounds may be allocated to Special units as labeled in their last army book.
• A maximum of 25% of the wounds may be allocated to Rare units as labeled in their last army book.

I wanted to start with limiting wounds because I felt it was a better solution than limiting models. And going with 8th edition style army list composition prevents spamming and taking nothing but powerful units. Others are developing systems for calculating points costs and I may try that at a later date.

I know it wasn't required to rebase my stuff, but I'm really liking round bases. My Dwarfs look great on them.

So my gaming buddy and I built our lists and give the game a go. We wanted to keep the rules as-is for our first game, and decide if we wanted to houserule anything wonky later.

The game went great! I really enjoyed how easy it was to pick up and get used to. Combat goes by much faster with standardized to-hit and to-wound rolling. Some say that has become boring, but when you memorize your warscrolls it goes by so quick you don't even notice. And when you get heroes involved in things, they add some more complexity to it. Even the rules that seemed like they would be weird or distracting didn't come into play at all. I felt our forces were pretty evenly matched. He had a lower model count so he got a Sudden Death objective, which almost cost me the game, but when we got into combat with some of our units we realized the advantage of having a higher model count still, so I think the sudden death objective helped to even thigns out. I just got lucky in surviving it and the battle turned in my favor.

I really look forward to playing more games in the future.  My brother Jarom got the Orcs and Goblins Warscoll Compendium so I hope to catch a game with him on a later date.

On a final note, Dwarfs are just as good at dispelling magic as ever. As soon as my Runelord got in range of his Chaos Sorcerer, he couldn't even get a spell in edgewise.