Saturday, July 2, 2011

Hmmm

This morning I discovered why Blue Table Painting makes all their big scenery pieces out of just foam and not foam and hardboard. Hardboard in large sheets likes to bend a bit too much causing a lot of stress on any filler compound you use.

I am debating scrapping the WarMachione table and salvaging what I can from the foam. I might go ahead and finish it up, but cut back on the detailing and crack filling I had planned on doing. Decisions, decisions.

Friday, July 1, 2011

Warpath

I just got the beta rules for Warpath, a game being put out by Mantic Games. The game is 40K-ish in a lot of respects. I am not sure how successful the game will be, as I see some holes in the system already.

What I do like is that the game has a number of modifiers for shooting. Cover seems to reduce the chances of being hit, instead of preventing damage. The other thing that I love is the heavy weapons guys can shoot at different targets!

I will have to print out the rules and read them to get a good grasp of how fun the game will be. Might do a test game next week sometime if I can scrounge up the models.

I am doing a happy dance, the majority of my order has shipped! I should have D&D miniatures and WarMachine armies by next Wednesday. Should be a good week!

War Machine Table

Its been too long. I am enjoying my month long vacation, and by vacation I mean making scenery! My family is out of town which means I can do crazy scenery projects and not get the third degree about how I am making a mess or taking up too much room with my garbage.

I decided to use the time to make a niffy war machine table. I wanted something that could play up to four people and still be interesting to play all the normal two player missions. What I came up with was a nice rocky mesa piece that will be lots of fun once I build some bridges to connect parts of it. I will also need to make some removable pieces to fully enhance the game play. Overall the table should be fun to finish and paint.

This project is bigger than anything I have done, and I have made it out of scraps left over from other projects. As my first foray into such project types, I have learned a few things.

The first is while using scraps is cost effective, it is far better to plan on using who sheets of foam. I should have just purchased a sheet of 2" foam and carved the rocky cliffs from that instead of layers of the smaller stuff. There would be less gluing hassle and overall there project would have flowed better.

The second thing I learned is foam will dull a blade really quickly. I was not aware how quickly until I worked on this project. I will have to buy a few new blades this week.

Thankfully, I have finished cutting everything I need to cut on the board itself. The next step is to put down some putty to make the transition from foam to table top and then to glue down a bunch of stand before I start painting it with my mighty airbrush! In theory, I could finish this up by Tuesday if I actually work ojn it over the weekend.

I did order my starting War Machine forces. I am going to play some Cygnar painted up like the Confederacy, minus the battle flag. I love the Cygnar blue, but I already have a blue army in Ultra Marines. Besides if Martin gets into the game, I know I will be painting his stuff up in traditional blue and I want my stuff to stand out as different.. Hopefully I will get them sometimes next week.

Other than that, I saw Green Lantern this week. I would like that two hours of my life back please. Its a decent movie if you do not think about how utterly absurd the story and characters are. I am not referring to the super hero genre or camp-ness. I am referring to the huge gaping plot holes and nonsensical character development. I actually had hope that it would be good. DC can stop making movies now as they seem to be terrible, with the exception of Batman.