Twelve months, 20,- Euros – Part 1
There is hardly a hobbyist who doesn't have a certain stock of leftover minis at home. In my case, this used to be for a growing bitzbox, but since then, a whole series of unfinished projects have also come along. Since my "Pile of Shame" is already quite large, I thought of a strategy at the beginning of the year to reduce it and at the same time prevent it from growing again. The idea was simple:
Every month I have a budget of 20,- € for my hobby.
With this limit I' d like to achieve that I dedicate myself to my old projects, and at best increase them instead of starting any new ones. Long story short - fight the unpainted minis! In my annual review I already mentioned that the first thing I want to do is to finish my Mortal Gods Hades army. For this I need two squads of zombies that I've already startedn and one base with skeletons.
Star Wars – A long time ago on a gaming table far, far away
I wrote a couple of times about how well Mandalorian was produced and how much I enjoyed it. It picked up the satisfaction I had with Rogue One, and brushed away the lower excitement I had with the final trilogy. The skirmish battles, the rag-tag crew of individuals, with bounty hunters, scum and rebels, all set in the western and eastern inspired space opera. So I looked into Star Wars on the tabletop.
So far I only had Imperial Assault and X-Wing on my plate, and for that the IP works quite well. A dungeon crawler with two clear sides, good and bad, have your heroes fight squads of Imperial goons and hired guns. And for X-Wing, picking up the Wings of War engine and used it for the sci-fi setting and breaks with one of the major disadvantages of the Star Wars IP for a tabletop wargame, the limited amount of factions.
Warlords on the March – Warmasters sighted
Last weekend, Games Workshop did another online preview, covering a few teasers and sneak peaks into the novelties of the upcoming year. I am pretty sure that if you were on social media the last few days, you got bombed with repeated, repeated and repeated again posts of from that stream.
When I ordered the Wargames Illustrated with the ACW sprue from Drachental, I took a look on their webshop and sales, and noted a Warlord Titan in there. So I ordered that one with the magazine. And wouldn't that be a great task, to assemble my third Warlord Titan while watching the stream?
American Civil War on an epic scale
I am preparing a bit of American Civil War for Q2 / 2021. I don't stray often from 28mm, but there is such a broad variety of scales in wargaming (just to give you some examples from 6mm Epic sci-fi, to 10-12mm Warmaster fantasy, 15mm ACW, 28mm Napoleonics and 40mm Perry Border Reavers) that I needed to take a closer look, when something is released in plastic.
Necromunda – Underhive Stock
I started with the hobby in the mid to late 90s in Germany, so a lot of that late Oldhammer to early Middlehammer coined my image of the hobby. Miniatures sculped by the Perry twins, Jes Goodwin and Gary Morley, artwork by Mark Gibbons and Wayne England. So it is no big surprise, that 2nd Edition 40k, Blood Bowl and of course Necromunda really appeal to me.
What is Necromunda about? It is a 28mm skirmish between the street gangs of the bigger Houses on the planet Necromunda, fighting over supply contracts, mines and facilities. And all that in the underground of a megacity (so very 2000 AD) in the Warhammer 40.000 universe. With the character / gang development it even included a narrative part, to tell the story of your own gang, with all the ups and downs that belong to it. And that narrative part is simply the cherry on top of that old school goodness.
Frostgrave Ghost Archipelago – Tribals
After covering the Crewmen, the next Frostgrave Ghost Archipelago kit are the tribals we're going to cover. Besides the very obvious temperatures and climate as a difference, in Ghost Archipelago the crew follows a heritor instead of a wizard, and these tribals can be used either as allies or enemies of those treasure seekers.
The tribals are a generic plastic kit, catching the idea of tribes, native to the jungles of the Lost Isles and isolated from the known world. They are heavily influenced by different cultures from our world, like the Polynesian Samoans or Maori, with some North American and African influences as well.
Tutorial – Painting Bronze
In the German-speaking Facebook group for the Footsore products I was recently asked how I paint bronze. The answer is quite simple and is as so often: it depends. Depending on what you paint, there are different ways to paint bronze. In the following I will show you how I paint bronze parts on undead.
First of all, I didn't use a common metallic paint here, but mixed one. Why all this, when there are ready-made metallic paints? Well, metallic paints have a few annoying properties - they tend to pull skin quickly, or are too thick or too runny. They don't always cover well and are hard to control.
Necromunda – Bulkheads
While sorting through the miniatures and getting a feel for the volume, I realised that my actual problem aren't the miniatures (they are mostly 28mm, so that's not that tall, and I don't do mass combat armies) but the terrain. And after going through the boxes and opening up the 4th box (of a few more) with Necromunda Bulkheads in it, it dawned on me that I might went a bit overboard on them.
So my stock went above 200 of these, that's more than I need.
Blood Bowl – A new stadium for a new season
You may have seen the game reports on here by Dino, with his Maulers playing different teams, like the Skycastle Titans or Altdorf Avengers, and with the topic of battle reports, I want to be prepared as well to host some Blood Bowl matches.
Therefore I got myself the basic game materials from Blood Bowl season two, covering the new pitch, templates and dice.
Kick Off 2021
I gave the indication in the holiday wishes, that I'll do another Kick-Off this year.
A few (or a lot?) of the things that were planned for 2020 had to be put on hold and are still the goals for 2021 - which was primarely having a good time. But let's talk about this in the usual format, answering a few questions.
What was the biggest challenge of 2020?
Well, yeah, the plans for the last year had a full schedule of events along with weekend trips to a couple of cities, picking up on culture and some museums. That obviously didn't happen, turning the vision of 2020 from this:
To this: