Trouble in the Underhive

Suzy and the Slayers faced the off against the Red Groin Rags from House Orlock. Despite deployement rivaling any Imperial bureaucrat and even the House leaders sending the gang a new Juve Anthea, the rags quickly found better firing positions than the slayers and proceeded to pepper them with waves of pinning weapons fire and all too many explosions. Ripper Jack De Felici managed to drop Kasumi after entagling her with his chains. The favour was soon returned though when Helga flattened Smokes Del Giorno with her heavy stubber. Anja spent most of the encounter locked in long range duel with Autogun Edwin, receiving much more than she gave in return, fortunately staying on her feet despite several bullet wounds. Unfortunately for the slayers Iron Hand Di Bernardi blasted Rosa and Irina off their heels with his blasting charge. When this was followed by underhive fauna (lured in the by the Groin Rags' unwashed loincloths) beating Eri senseless, Suzy made the wise and prudent choice to advance to better defensive positions and the gang legged it, leaving the worthless wasteland to the Orlocks. Luckily enough, only Irina was forced into bedrest with everyone else making a full recovery.

"Pinned" was the word of the day.

 Yesterday I had a Necromunda game at my FLGS - there's a store campaign going on for the control of the Myhr Manz sector of Underhive (Tietäjät tietää - an ancient finnish proverb). I was facing off against Red Groin Rags from House Orlock. The orlock player won the roll off and got the better table edge and caused me great problems with his grenade launcher, but I held my own until my girls started getting pinned left and right and dropping like flies and after getting three gangers and one champion out of action (luckily none of them were permanently maimed or died) and one ganger severely wounded I decided to cut my losses and bottled. Fair's fair and I lost - my gang was weaker (not by much though, to be fair) and made some errors I could have avoided (deployed Helga and her Heavy Stubber in the wrong spot for example, which lead to many turns of wasted shooting), but I do think out terrain was working against me a bit. There was a Killteam game going on at the same time as our match and they had arrived earlier and taken most of the suitable terrain, which left our board somewhat lacking in height and with wide open areas which meant it was difficult for me to close the distance and favoured the opposing gangs well entrentched shooters. Fun was had though, which is the main thing, and luckily none of the ladies dies. Now I just need to paint a new Juve before the next match!

Wooden Boxes

Another quick update, this time on another awesome second hand model. I just got it varnished (just to be sure), so I thought I'd share it with you guys. I present to you, a Khorne Berzerkers / World Eaters rhino:

Notice anything yet?

"Nice greenstuffing there, but what makes this so special?", you may ask. Well, first of it's completely scratch built. Secondly, it's made out of wood. I bought this from the same guy I got the Rogue Trader Dreadnought that made an appearance in the earlier post (also bunch of variant armour marines, but I haven't painted those yet). It was made by a friend of his back in the day who had quit the hobby and given all his stuff to the guy I bought it from. I don't play chaos or have chaos army (anymore - I had a second hand Chaos Space Marine army but I didn't have time for them and they didn't really tickle my fancy so I sold most of them to a friend). I have a couple of units, but that's it. Anyway, this was too cool to pass up in my opinion.

See? Wood.

Now, I fall firmly on the "if it's there you're supposed to paint it" camp when it comes to stuff like bottoms of tanks, so the bare plywood does elicit bit of a cringe from me, but in this instance I'm not going to do anything but the already completed varnish for the model. I don't want to tamper with such a cool old scratch build.

Future on the Pacific

It's been a bit quiet on the hobby front for the last couple of weeks for me. The big EastFront game is always fun, but it tends to suck the juices out of you real good. The next weeks are really busy as well, so it might be that I won't have time for much in the near future either, altough I hope that doesn't turn out to be the case. I have evening shift the whole next week so no time to play, but hopefully I'll be able to get a game of necromunda in the week after that. Or maybe Pacific Victory, which arrived yesterday.

Pacific Victory, 2nd edition

All the blocks, put in the stickers yesterday.

I haven't had the chance to read the rules yet, but they're pretty short at a bit over ten pages, so that shouldn't be a problem. The game is pretty colourful with the addition of Chinese blocks to the second edition and the Kickstarter version having separate colour blocks for UK and ANZAC (brown). I'm missing one blue extra block, but I might not do anything about that since it's not necessary for the game and it'd be pretty ridicilous to send one (1) wooden block all over the world. Or maybe I'll ask Columbia Games to put it in my next order (let's face it, there's bound to be one). Anyhow, can't wait to get gaming!

Catastrophic losses suffered by the Russian Red Army in the east

Besides miniature gaming, I also play boardgames of various genres. When it comes to non-miniature wargaming I'm part of a group that meets once a year for a weekend long game of EastFront II or sometimes EuroFront (block wargames from  Columbia Games), and also play other games every now and then (There's copies - singles and multiples of - of atleast EastFront, Westfront, EuroFront, Julius Caesar, Rommel in the Desert, Here I Stand, Sekigahara, Pacific Victory and Twilight Struggle, and if I remember correctly Bobby Lee and Hammer of the Scots in the group. Personally I have EastFront and Julius Caesar and am waiting for my copy from the recent Pacific Victory 2nd edition kickstarter). I've been part of the group for about four years, but the rest of the group has been at it for much longer, the core members for over a decade. "What makes this event special?", you may ask. Well those of you who have played EastFront know (and those who have played wargames in general can reasonably guess) that it is a two player game. Except it's not when we play it. In our games there is usually two teams (Germany and Soviets) of 4-5 players each, and 1-3 judges. Each team has the HQ (Supreme commander and Chief of staff assisting him) and 2-3 frontline commanders (usually 3), each commanding one of three separate fronts (Northern, Central and Southern). Each front and both HQs are located in separate rooms to make sure no information bleeds from one front to another unintentionally. Judges take care of the game running smoothly.

Front locations this year. Pohjoinen is north, keskinen is centre and eteläinen is south. Dacha is soviet hq and bunker is german hq. Upstairs blueprint is incorrect on the room placement (it was done from memory before the game).

Once every month (every other game turn), before production is assigned there is 15 minutes long negotiation period held at the team HQs. These negotiations are the only times when every player in a team are in the same room and can communicate freely. Other times communications are done by messages between fronts or between HQ and a front, but these messages have a chance to get lost or being intercepted by the enemy. Here is a link to 8-player version of the multiplayer rules, put together by a couple of the guys in our group and shared by a third one.

This year the scenario we played was Winter '43 (starting in December '43) (likely to be taken out of rotation for a while as it's been played several times in the last few years). I was playing the Chief of Staff on the Soviet side. Our plan was to push through north and south of the marshes between Kiev and Minsk. At first this worked resonably well even though we lost our southern Panzer army which meant putting all of our proverbial eggs (armoured eggs travelling on tracks, that is) in one basket so to speak. This again worked fairly well (we were mostly ahead of the Soviets' historical advance) until March '44 when disaster struck. The German team managed a brialliant coup (aided in no small part by the weather going completely their way, but brilliant nonetheless) and succeeded in a counter attack that saw about third of our army (includingin three Headquarter units - that is, whopping half of them - and practically all of our attack units) first encircled and then destroyed.

Rough outline of the situation before the Disaster of March

Line stabilised in early summer

It took us the rest of the spring and start of summer to stabilise our lines and start building new attack forces, but we ran out of time and the game ended in a decisive victory for the axis. The rules describes this as a victory of the magnitude to almost certainly guarantee victory in the war (Altough, realistically I'm not sure even such a coup would've been enough to save the Third Reich at that point. It would've likely meant that less of central and eastern european countries would've fallen under soviet occupation after the war though.).

Northern front at game end

Central front at game end

Southern front at game end

We may have lost the war, but I can confidently state that the soviet side had better provisions

Red and black leopard spots

I have recently acquired an Eldar army. Not just any Eldar though! They're an old force packed with conversions, and frankly mind blowing old school paintjobs. This army would be one of those where I intend to keep the paintjobs. Infact, I bought them specifically because of those paintjobs. The schemes change a bit, the two major parts are a funky black and red leopard scheme with lots of blending to whites and yellows, and the other is a vibrant orange scheme. Some units and single minis have different schemes, but the majority are in one of those schemes.

These Wraithlords were mostly in pieces and needed some small paint fixes, but the work was fairly minor.

These are examples of the second scheme. The one in the middle was WIP (though mostly done) which I finished, the other two were in that condition when I got them.

The guy I bought them from was selling them on behalf of someone else who had bought them in an estate sale. The seller said he suspected it was an army passed from father to son or older brother to younger brother based on the paintjobs, but didn't know more about their origin. My plan is to restore them to the best of my ability and then run them as Ynnari along with some Dark Eldar and Harlequins (mostly newer stuff) I've also gotten. The ultimate aim is to actually expand the army after that, altough if I'm being honest the prospect is pretty daunting. It's definately worth it though. Same goes for fixing the army.

Some of the minis before any restoration.

Minis and bits.

More minis. Note the Exodite Knight conversions.

This will be an awesome project, and I'm very pleased about aquiring these.

Turn Signals On A Land Raider

This is just a quick post for anyone who might've missed the recent return of a 40k classic (or, gasp, did not know of it back in the day). Nothing to do with my own hobby stuff. Think of it as a public service announcement. I'm of course talking about TSOALR. That's right,  after nearly a decade it started again last month and is back (and I'm loving that GW legal is represented by a Lizardman)!

For those of you unfamiliar with this modern masterpiece, it's a humorous 40K webcomic from the 00's following the misfortunes of the crew of and the land raider Super Jackhammer Carrier Tank (Jack to friends) Kren, Frep and Harkon, of "The Emperor's Pointy Sticks" chapter. By far the best GW related development of this year in my opinion. Here is a link to the new strips hosted on the Warhammer Community site, and here is a link to the classic ones hosted by the author on the original site.

Poke 'Em Inna Eye!

Canned Failure

Everything doesn't always have to be perfect (I hope). The subject today is failure (Ooh, dramatic!). I’m sure everyone has at some point encountered failures in their hobbies or other things that bring them joy. I certainly have. With miniatures, the options are usually limited to starting over, accepting a result you’re not all too happy with (and taking it as a learning experience) or just leaving the project (I’m fairly certain there isn’t many a wargamer or miniature painter around without some projects “in progress” for n years at any given time). The mini I’m using as an example falls into the latter two categories.

When I started 40k again a couple of years ago the game was nearing the end of it’s 7^th edition (I missed about half of the 5^th edition and the whole 6^th, in addition to the start of the 7^th). I started again with Space Marines and chose Iron Hands chapter tactics (a moment of silence for the loss all Iron Hands players suffered when the edition changed) because they were cool, and allowed for a heavily mechanized force. With this in mind, I decided to convert a biker Techmarine for the army. It took a lot of effort and multitude of bits (besides the plastic space marine bike and biker used as main part of the mini, it includes 2^nd edition techmarine backpack and parts from the 3^rd or 4^th edition Iron Warriors upgrade kit, Rogue Trader Rhino, 4^th edition space marine captain and Forgeworld Titan Techpriest). The end result, in my opinion, looked great. I consider it the best conversion I’ve done so far (that’s pretty much the reason I decided to write this actually, since the paintjob is anything but). Alas, the ruinous powers were a foot when it came time to paint it. I don’t know what went wrong, but the primer came out all goopy and splattered, looking horrible and obscuring detail (this being one of only two such incidents I’ve had up to date – rotten luck that had to happen to this particular mini). I tried to fix the issue, but couldn’t find a way to strip the mini without having to start over and likely get some replacement bits (besides plastic, there’s also resin, metal and green stuff in the mini), so in my frustration I abandoned the project. Flash forward to last week (two years or so). I decided I’d try once more. Unfortunately the problem persisted, so I decided to cut my losses and get it on the table. End result is less than ideal (it looks horrible), but atleast it’s useable in games now (as long as you don't look at it too closely, that is). Maybe I'll make another version some time in the future and marvel at the evolution between them.

Right side

Left side