Blood Bowl – Treeman
To bring a little more variety to my Old World Alliance team and not just have a "human team with dwarves", I promptly acquired a treeman last year.
Hamburg Tactica 2023 Loot
After the event coverage, here's my loot post from Hamburg Tactica 2023.
I got myself some reinforcements for World War 2, adding the Bofors gun by Rubicon for my 8th Army and got the new Sd.Kfz. 250 plastic kit for review purposes. The large Start Collecting! Box for Age of Sigmar covering the new mortal Chaos, was something I got from Fritz the Brushzerker, I've been tempted by that box for a long time and the updated range really speaks to me. Maybe we will see more of them as I got my hands on the army box, including the new Daemon Prince as well.
Hamburg Tactica 2023
After 4 years, we're back at TACTICA in Hamburg! Our last visit was back in 2019.
TACTICA is Germanys largest wargaming convention and usually held in february (this varied in the last years a bit) in the Wilhelmsburg Community Center. I'll talk about how to plan a trip and combine the show with other things in Hamburg in a separate post. The show is open two days, Saturday and Sundays and usually the first is the more crowded one.
TACTICA covers trade stands and participation / demo rounds of various games, in different scales and settings. You'll find historical as well as ficitional setups, with detailed tables and many wargaming clubs work all year to prepare their demos for the show.
January 2023 review
What was January all about? Well, getting my Legio Astraman Titans painted. I did two updates on the Ad Arma series of them, a recap of the gaming weekend as well as a show case of the Legios participating.
Event Schedule for 2023
A brief overview of the events that are on my radar for this year.
List will be updated accordingly and focus around DACH and BeNeLux countries, with minor exceptions for special occasions:
Dino’s annual preview 2023
Aha, so it's 2023, anything special coming up this year? Well, I'm turning 42 and as everyone knows, 42 is the answer to all questions! To all questions? At least to one question I have the answer: do I need more minis? No, not 42...
The Great Moderation is a concept that I have been following for several years now, where I limit my budget to 20,- € per month, with the goal to increase my painting output of existing miniatures and to limit the new purchases in my hobby. As it turned out, 240,- € per year is quite a lot if you already have a bunch of miniatures at home and the pile just grows and grows. For this reason, I plan to cut my budget again - ironically, my strategy has also found approval in the forum of the Tabletopwelt and a group project has emerged from it, so to speak, the not so anonymous round of addicted hobbyists, in which if possible no new purchases should be made. However, everyone receives 150, - € annual budget - for slip ups. This seems feasible to me, since I have everything here, within the projects I pursue
But before I move on to tackle one of the leftover projects, I want to paint the new acquisitions from last year first, because there is also a part remaining. In addition, I will set myself a fairly small annual goal in 2023, since my hobby time continues to melt due to my professional commitments.
Kick Off 2023
We've done the sum up of last year already, so let's take a look ahead and see what 2023 has in it for us:
As a starting point, I looked up the 2022 Kick-Off article, to see what was the status quo, and what changed. Biggest improvement - not just spending hobby time by myself. In addition, as I am working as a sales rep, the re-ignition of actual (meaning offline) events was something that I really was looking for, so the lack of those was not hobby exclusive.
So that we could move from
to here
Shows, Conventions and real-life gaming meetups
I'll update the event schedule on here and prepare a post for 2022. So far booked are these;
- January 13th-15th - Tabletop Scenario, Hackenheim GER (visits 2013 and 2015) BOOKED!
- February 18th-19th - Tactica, Hamburg GER (visit 2019) BOOKED!
- April 22nd - Salute, London UK (visits 2012, 2016 and 2018) LIKELY!
- August 4th-6th - Bring out your Lead BOYL 2023, Newark UK (not yet)
- September TBA - Rhein Main Multiversum 2023 (visits 2018, 2019 and 2022) VERY LIKELY!
- October 14th-15th - ScaleModelChallenge - Eindhoven, NL (visit 2015) LIKELY!
Dino’s annual review 2022
It's that time again, a whole year has gone by and I have quite mixed feelings when I look back. From a hobby point of view, all in all, it actually went quite well. I have not reached my goal for the year, but I was and am close.
At the beginning of the year, I managed to paint the two remaining archers from the Corinthian part of my Mortal Gods army quite quickly. In fact, it went so smoothly that I would have loved to paint another troop right away, and I've assembled another group in the meantime.
Corinthian archers
December 2022 review
The final monthly recap, but unlike last year, it will be mostly about the month of december and less about the whole last year.
In 2021, due to the move of the whole studio, the activity had a bit of drop and there were only 77 new posts - much fewer articles published that year compared to the years before (2018 - 140 new posts, 2019's 176 and 2020 - 195 new posts,), but we managed to raise that back about 80% to 135 articles in 2022! Yes, there were further additions to the review section among those posts, roughly 40 new reviews on the blog - marking the barrier of over 300 reviews on this lovely project of mine. But most importantly, I managed to get more structure into my projects and written down ideas and intentions on projects, along with a bit of building and painting, which will be pushed more into focus.
Chaosbunker is non-commercial hobby blog. I am not doing this for money, hence no (paid) advertisement, as this keeps me independend. This is my hobby and I want it to stay that way, because I want to move further into that area of wargaming, that I enjoy and move further away from those parts that I don't. This still means creating content, because I enjoy that, but more of that kind that is fun to produce (I already did a lot in my favor, to mostly only cover products in reviews, that I am certain are of proper quality).
I enjoyed the participation on events this year a lot, and played far too few games and had far too few get togethers for painting etc. with my gaming buddies. I got invited for an Adeptus Titanicus event in february 2023, and I have to get my maniple up and running. Which means the continuation of Legio Astraman Ad Arma! White is an ungrateful colour to paint over black. I tried with multiple thin coats of white, went over to Grey Seer (which did not really work either), but with Corax White, I managed to get a proper base, even in a thinned down variant. So, that's my task of the next days, along with Deathworld Forest and Gun Metal, to cover the base colours.
Had the 3d printer running again, this time for a christmas present for one of my eldest wargaming buddies, Indiyeeha. We started together back in the day, and he is a oldhammer enthusiast as well and when I found these files of the monopose Ork Boy and Gretchin, I printed them at 200% as something special, to place upon a shelf or just funny collectors piece. Once they were printed, I had some really odd errors on them and couldn't really make any sense out of it. Looked fine in Chitubox and Photon Workshop, but I was recommended to load them up in Lychee and about 50 errors came up. Afterwards I looked into the sliced files and I saw the "bleeding" on those layers as well. But beyond that, I am once again amazed what my entry-levele printer is able to produce. No steps, pretty clean finish, almost like injection moulded.
Dino’s December 2022
As announced in November, I painted the last lineman of the humans for my Old World Alliance team. With that, half of a Blitz Bowl team is already done and I'm considering stepping on the gas again in January and paint the remaining three players so that the next time I'm at the club in Bedburg, I can field a completely painted team.
As you can see, the players look much better with the decals, as it breaks up the large green areas better. While I think the contrast between the light and dark green is sufficient by now, the decals add a certain polish to the overall look.