Day 1 (and a half): KOF in the house

As the actual Xmas days don’t count as vacation by any stretch of the imagination with all the madness and chaos and driving around, so today is the first day of my official holiday.  I was up until 1AM getting in a game of Starcraft the board game–only my third or fourth play so I was up inside the rulebook most of the time– while the game has all these FF patented fiddly bits, the combat system is excellent.  Four hours later I’m still up with the kids who were right on schedule screaming and crying at 5:30AM.  After I get some sleep, I’m going to drum up some nerdery interest and try to get some painting in between rounds of KOF 13– that’s right– finally SNK’s masterpiece of punchery fell into my craven little hands from Santa Claus– while KOF 12 was all stripped down, 13 has all the extras you want on top of it’s already excellent fighting engine.  I started playing straight away online and cheered after seeing King’s clothes rip off (I was using King and I lost of course) like earlier (MUCH earlier) KOFs.  Now, I don’t want to be a sexist pig here, especially with KOF that has it’s share of cute little man-boys for the girl-otaku to pine over, but fighting games are all about the cheesecake at times.   As silly as the clothes ripping off is, what’s indicative by little touches like this means SNK was confident enough in the engine an the rest of the game to throw in these extras.   Well enough about KOF– except that you should get it.  Fair warning:  if you care about your Xbox rep, do not play online right away as the Japs will rate you a 1 if they play you and don’t feel you’re good enough.

I also got the second Legends of the Old West supplement (Blood on the Plains) from MAAT who will now have to suffer some old west miniatures gaming for his trouble tracking that fucker down.

 

Xmas vacation!!!

Have a Kathy Ireland Christmas

As of last night I am officially on Xmas vacation. This means GAMING. I got in a game of Agricola and Dreamblade last night with my buddy JP who has the pleasure of having worked quite a large chunk of the last few years on that little game we call Skyrim.  I pumped him for information which he was happy to give since the game was OUT– a far cry from last year when we couldn’t get him to say anything about this new ES game.

It looks like we’re going to get in on the most vicious of all games during the off week: Republic of Rome and try out the new fangled (not that it hasn’t been out for awhile) Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition.  What’s more, a big game of Cosmic Encounter is in the works as well.  I promise to post something stupid every day about what ever sort of nerd crap we are all doing.  I know I will be trying to plow through my beastmen army, but I started getting an interest again in EPIC 40K and pulled out all that old stuff to give it a painting improvement before hopefully getting in a game. If anyone wants to read a run down of the sad epic (pun intended) of this failed game: read here.   It wasn’t because it was not a great design, it was because no one would give it a chance that played the old version.

As for useless and redundant blog posts, I also want to give a run down of 2011’s games that were great and those that were disappointments. We have had the greatest deluge of AAA class titles in human history this Fall, and there just won’t be a year like this for probably another decade.. but I digress. Vacation. Nerdery. Drinking. Yes!

GenX revision: Snow White

I’ve had to read the snow white golden book probably 50 times in the last few months.  Here’s the GenX revision:

It’s ironic to see all the movies around fairy tales get gruesome and scary while any book (re)written for kids will be 100% politically correct and won’t even have threats of torture or death or being eaten– even though almost EVERY children’s story from the ancient times (and not so ancient) is all about the threat of kids being eaten as that’s the point of the lesson! “Childe–don’t act this way or you will be EATEN.”   What else would they bother to remember or consider using their 3 second attention spans to ponder?

Fortress America???!?!??

Fantasy Flight is going berserk with new game announcements this fall– and this is an absolute shocker, first because it’s so obscure and second because it’s not the best old game out there by far:

I played this once in 10th grade and I have to say, aside from the ridiculous 80’s setting, that was plenty for me.  There’s apocryphal and there’s “apocryphal”…  However, it’s good to see the MB big box (Game Master Series) games getting some love.  Shogun/Samurai Swords came out again as IKUSA and both Axis and Allies and Conquest of the Empire are still in print.  With this game FF can really do no wrong with the development of the game– they’re not going to have a legion of fans complaining about how it deviated from the original with Fortress America as it wasn’t all that great.  You can really see FF’s Petersen reliving his childhood via these old rehashed games though, and since I’m just a few years younger, I can get behind it!

More more more COSMIC ENCOUNTER!

Animal: doesn't like not getting invited

FF just released a smidgen of details for the up coming Cosmic Alliance expansion.

Races for sure in:  Gorgon, Schizoid, Animal (new), Cyborg (I think new too).  I’m going to dig out my Mayfair version tonight to review the aliens I think will be in this new expansion. I’m hoping for SILENCER above all as that is a doozy of a power.   While it has pieces for another player, what’s best about this expansion is what it does not have in it:  LUCRE.  Lucre is essentially Cosmic Encounters version of money/trade goods and it made playing with ‘everything’ in the Mayfair expansion a tower of suck.  By this time with the FF version we have tech, we have hazards– so the designers were probably reaching for new stuff to put in (obviously they have tons of aliens to choose from) and lucre was undoubtedly on the list of considerations.  Here’s to the designers for not putting that in the game!

What’s sad is we have only played four times this year…

Big Eddy Russian Imperial Stout action

Leinies hasn’t been on my list of beers to go out and get for awhile.  The Red is good, the nutbrown is solid, but the Sunset wheat is far too sweet and I am not a fan of the honey/berry wiesse’s at all.  We drink a few cases of their regular lager in cans while camping each summer and I have no complaints about that one for a sessionable  beer, but Tuesday I had what is easily the best brew they have brewed to date (at least that you could drink and buy) and that’s their ‘Big Eddy’ line Russian Imperial Stout.  I guess it’s going to be only around for a limited time, so grab it where you can.   It’s an extremely well put together stout, with some real earthy richness at first blush that gets fruity and a little sour at the end.  I was at a place where it was free and I drank a LOT of it, I had no desire to switch to anything else, and usually I’ll hit the ports/stouts and then switch to a weisse for the rest of the night.  Great stuff.

Bestigor test model

Oh yeah– bad weather and back to painting is in full swing (albeit Skyrim and Saints Row 3).  I did a paint test model for my bestigor unit and here it is.  Mostly this post is to list out all the colors so I don’t forget what I used.  I’m going to do 3 metal treatments and probably another skin treatment to mix up the look of the unit.  I want especially to do the bestigor’s snouts black like the cover of the book, but didn’t do it on the test model.  Note, I got ripped off by a guy on ebay selling bestigor bits and so his body is actually from the new Gor kit.  Except for a couple places on the upper body, it looks totally fine– though the normal bestigor have armored (and sweet lovin’) thighs.

in Progress

Horns: deneb stone washed with delvan mud and highlighted with deneb stone and skull white.  This is from WD and worked out really well.

Skin: same as always: Dark Flesh, Vermin brown, Vermin brown + bronzed flesh (a discontinued color at this point)

Metal:  Tin bitz, drybrush boltgun metal generously, drybrush silver a bit and wash with Vallejo Smoke with a lot of water – this gave a great weathering

Fur: not happy with it on this guy but here it is: beastial brown washed with delvan mud, highlighted with Snakebite leather and then snakebite + a bit of bronzed flesh.

Axe handle: scorched brown washed with black ink + delvan mud, highlighted a tiny bit with bleached bone

Leather: black as a base color, highlighted with snakebite leather and edge highlighted with deneb stone with a final wash of delvan mud. This is another WD recipe– on paper that should look like shit but it works out awesome on some parts.

Base:  absolute key to every miniature looking good. If you’re going to be anal about something, the base is it.  Bestial brown over black (important as black forms the lowest highlight, drybrushed heavily with snakebite leather, then again pretty heavy with bleached bone with a wee bit of static grass glued on here or there. Make sure to do the flat sides of the base in at least 2 coats of bestial brown to get a good finish.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with it– it’s not awesomely great, and while the Bestigor are the best heavy infantry in Warhammer 8th edition, he’s still just a rank and file.   What you can’t see here is that his left arm is poorly attached to the axe hand and looks atrocious if you look up close on that side. However in a unit ranked up, this will be totally invisible.

completed angry beast with his buddies in the back waiting for their turn

Warhammer milestone (millstone?) 50 Gor!

Well the weather has turned to pure shite and so instead of going outside and getting fresh air and exercise, it’s the season for sitting in a dank basement doing stuff, and I have no more excuses for not working on the hairy beasts (well except for kids, work and Skyrim).   Last night I completed my first unit for Warhammer Fantasy Battle ever by actually painting up my first unit base–and it was a big one– 50 gor with a hero, champion and standard bearer on 25mm bases.   As you can see, I have a couple extra musicians in there so I have to paint up a few more rank and file to replace them, but it doesn’t change the fact that I can slap this giant unit of beastmen on the table complete with a painted and flocked unit base.

very very angry and rapinesque are they

The base itself is from Gale Force 9 that I picked up this summer at Gencon.  While solid in construction, it is slightly warped (nothing you can notice without looking really close, and I chalk that up to this being probably the biggest unit base they have, though Skaven players run slave units of 80-100 so this is not all that big of a unit).  Hopefully having this weight of lead on it will flatten it out a bit because as you can see, this unit spans the history of GW’s beastmen with some of the mid 80’s models interspersed with the 5th edition “these guys look too small to have 2 wounds” to the excellent 6th edition kit.  In the front rank is an old Minotaur from the 80’s.  You can see how small he was compared to the new kit.

As much of a triumph as this is, it’s still just the beginning. Behind these lads is a unit of 30 bestigor (the big boys!) and I’ve got a spawn, a giant, 65 ungor, another Razorgor and a chariot to paint up in addition to building a herdstone to rape the Magic phase.  As slow as I paint, it’s going to take years to get it all done…but at least I have this in the can!

from the top (and yes I see the flagrant mold line--ugh)