Batman: my first time

Following on from my last post, I've had my first demo game. I played the lovely James Crook at Darksphere.

It was a 200 rep (rep=points) game. It had Batgirl in it and she is super awesome:

      

I ran

Batman (Dark Knight Returns)

Batgirl

Female Cop.

James ran

Scarecrow

Deadshot

2 Henchmen (one of whom was a medic)

Prep time with Batman

Well, as some of you know I'm in hobby hell at the moment. Most of my stuff is packed into boxes, I'm in a tiny rental for much longer than expected, my wife still hates gaming and I'm not living in London. 

On the upside, I have decided to play a smaller game whilst I'm in moving hell. The game is Batman. Why Batman? Well it is a lovely skirmish game so appeals to the Malifaux side of me, and it has a small model count. It also has worryingly complicated rules and I'm not sure how many people play it, but I've decided to take the plunge.

Batman has always been a favourite hero of mine. I love Man of Steel and Batman v Superman but even more than that, I adored Batman Begins and the Dark Knight Returns. Such iconic performances. 

That's why I'm pitching into the game.....well that and the fact that I love the Arrow TV and especially Malcolm Merlow and the League of Shadows.

State of the Project Queue!

Hey guys! I had a few (OK one) request on Twitter to see more of the projects I'm working on currently. So as I'm never one to dissapoint my literally tens of fans, I thought I'd do a quick round up of what what projects I have going on and in what state they're in.

1. Ponies - Status:  Mostly Completed.

The "Mane" Six

If you follow my Twitter at all (@Elessarion30) you've probably seen pictures of these! They are from 2 Kickstarters run by a very small but awesome company called Slap Miniatures. The first one was called Pewter Ponies and was a very simple set of sculpts, mostly generic ponies although if you're a fan of a certain magical cartoon about friendship, you MIGHT think a few of them look familiar. The second Kickstarter was named The Evil Ponies, because if you've got good ponies then you have to have villains too! This campaign was certainly more ambitious with the sculpts and included the 4 ponies of the Apocalypse (yes Death has got a small Death of Rats on his back, it's awesome), a necromancer and skeleton ponies and 3 witch ponies. There was also Dr Pones (Best. Pun. Ever) and his faithful assistant Rocquefort. There's also a D&D type group from the first campaign, including a bard, thief, paladin, wizard, enchantress and a barbarian.

Pony adventurers

Ponies. Why'd it have to be ponies?

Ponies of the Apocalypse!

These were a really fun painting project as they gave me a chance to go wild with some bright paint schemes and also a chance to practice my fairly terrible freehand to try and paint on cutie marks for some of the ponies. They're mostly finished, I just need to add grass and flowers to some of the bases.

 2. Small Female Warband - Status: In Progress

Another ongoing project that I've thrown myself into this year is to do a warband for various skirmish games (Frostgrave, Open Combat etc) made up entirely of the smaller races. Yeah sure, elves may LOOK all willowy and graceful but honestly, they go through WAY too much conditioner. And lying around languidly on tree branches gets boring after a while. Plus splinters. So. Many. Splinters. So I decided that my warband should be something of a self portrait band and be made up of female dwarves, gnomes and halflings.

This project all got started when I came across another cool Kickstarter campaign by the fabulous team of Oathsworn Miniatures called Heroines in Sensible Shoes - which was to raise funding for a smallish range of sculpts, all female adventurers but without the "chainmail bikini" look which has become a bit of a trope in fantasy. All these female miniatures were clad in sensible adventuring gear and no high heels allowed!

I eventually pledged for the female halfling rogue from the first Kickstarter and from the second campaign I went for the gnome wizard, dwarf queen and a forest gnome ranger from the first campaign that I'd missed the first time around. To flesh out the band I've bought some amazing miniatures from other places like Reaper (care of the fab Bad Squiddo Games), Hasslefree Miniatures and Otherworld Miniatures. While I've only painted one of the miniatures so far, the band is looking in great shape and I can't wait to get more done.

3. Malifaux Resurrectionists - Status: In Progress

Don't panic, I've not gone over to the filthy green side of Malifaux. One of my fellow Abnormalifaux bloggers (Bad Luck & Blood) is in the process of moving house and so has had his hobby time cut for the forseeable future so I offered to step in and paint some miniatures for him. There's a nice mixture of Resurrectionists as well as parts of his plastic Leveticus crew so it's a chance for me not only to do a favour for a hobby pal but gives me a chance to paint some new miniatures I wouldn't otherwise get the chance to put a paintbrush to.

In our little group of bloggers we have a running joke that his favourite colour is pink so I've been trying to incorporate that into some of the miniatures. While it doesn't work for every mini, I've tried to find places where it seems to fit.

There's a whole bunch more small projects I've got on the go - an ongoing stream of Batman miniatures for my friend Lori, some Sisters of the Thorn and an Artemis stand-in for Of Gods and Mortals, Greeks, monsters and knights for 7th Voyage and that's not to mention so many of the random minis I bought just for painting!

2 Boudis from Hasslefree Miniatures

My First Adventure With Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower

Mechanical Dove

So I stopped playing Warhammer and Warhammer 40K over three years ago now.

I got my first box of Chaos Space Marines when I was finishing primary school and have some really fond memories of playing Warhammer and 40K while growing up.  I never played competitively, but played regularly with a group of my best friends; three- or four-player games, using VHS boxes for terrain, you name it.

Well, lots of things change over time and as you grow up.  Warhammer and 40K, in particular, became game systems I started to dislike; the amount of painting required was sickening, notwithstanding the cost of the miniatures and the baffling changes to the rules over the last few years.  The 40K battles my friends and I waged on the few times a year we used to meet up, after moving to different parts of the country, became less enjoyable.

I think, ultimately, the process of playing these games was far too different from the times we played together back in school.  We’d moved on, or Games Workshop had; either way, we had to find other game systems.  For our hobbying time and friendships, moving onto Malifaux, Dropzone Commander, Guild Ball and Bushido, amongst others, did wonders.

Stay with me...

Daffcon

I've been planning on writing a short blurb on Daffcon since I attended but have been very busy lately, so I apologize for the delay. For those who do not know, Daffcon was a convention at Firestorm in Cardiff that was focused around small games (defined as game companies from Wyrd and smaller basically). It is the brain child of Mike Marshall and follows his philosophy apparent to those of us who are avid listeners to Fools Daily. This was the first year for the convention but Daffcon II has already been confirmed for Aug 2017.

I had an absolute nightmare of a Thursday and the train ended up being delayed for almost 2 hours due to a train failure ahead of us so we were stuck sitting on it in a station for ages. Didn't end up getting to our Air B&B location until after midnight.. So not a great start. Was worried about getting up early the next day, but ended up being alright. And we were only about a 15 min walk from Firestorm, so that was great. Warning: There are going to be a lot of photos in this article. I took a lot during the weekend, and it was three days of solid gaming.

Day One:
Started the day off with breakfast at the really nice cafe near the gaming venue, too bad it wasn't open on weekends, as I would've liked to go back. I had two events for this day, OGAM (which I had never played) and Frostgrave (I had played one game). I was also hoping to play some demos if there was time, but this was my busiest day of the weekend so Saturday seemed more likely for demoes.

OGAM:

This picture was taken near the end of the game when our gods faced off for the first (but not last) time.

There were only three of us signed up for the event, so Spooner begrudgingly stepped up to play as well as run the event. Other than him, none of us had played the game before. After seeing eachother at many malifaux events over the last couple years and almost ending up facing each other in the UK Masters Final (sadly blu tack took both of us down) I finally got to face Connor Barker in a game to prove once and for all who spells the name correctly! Sadly I forgot the Cerberus model I was using as my Lion God back at the hotel. Luckily Connor had his The Sow proxy. So now I was all in on worshipping the pig god. I believe Connor was using Pan as his Greek God. Had an absolutely awesome game, was absolutely hilarious as my heroes got cut down immediately but the pig god stormed back to singlehandedly win the game! All hail the pig god!  Connor was great fun to play against and OGAM was as fun (or more) as I had hoped.

His god and a unit of fanatics that did a lot of praying

Guildball Battle Report: Fishermen vs Alchemists

Insidiously Mad

So this is a first for the blog, but after much discussion we have decided to include game systems other than Malifaux on the blog. The blog will still be heavily malifaux focussed, but since all of us are playing all sorts of different games at the moment, it seemed like the right decision to do some writeups on these. As a group I think the most common game we've been playing (outside malifaux) has been Guildball. Man do I love Guildball. Has so much that I love about Malifaux in the game but is also a lot less complicated and it is much easier to play 2 games in one evening.

Not the best photo... and not the exact team I used. But thought I needed at least one photo of my team..

On Monday I had two great games of Guildball last night vs Mechanical Dove.

Game 1 was my first time using Corsair vs his first time with Smoke.
I took Corsair, Salt, Siren, Angel, Sakana, Gutter
Brad took Smoke, Flask, Vitriol, Mist, Calculus, Mercury

Turn 1 started with vitriol kicking off and me grabbing the ball with sakana and passing it to Salt. Brad decided to go aggressive and charged Salt with vitriol, getting some momentum and stealing the ball (but not having enough inf to shoot). Corsair then started beating down Vitriol (and taking the ball back). Passed the ball around a bit but thanks to all the burning I was unable to get a first turn goal so I passed it back to Corsair since close control could help keep it safe. Meanwhile team Smoke was just throwing conditions around everywhere. At the end of the turn my 4 of my 6 players were burning and poisoned and salt died to conditions :(. But I was way up on momentum and won initiative.

Turn 2: Corsair activated and took out vitriol and decided to keep a hold of the ball. Mist then charged in and took the tackle but I pushed him out of combat with the counter attack. He didn't have the momentum to score so he kicked the ball back towards his own team. Smoke came up aggressively to throw some templates around. Sakana/Angel repositioned to give assists and Gutter charged into Smoke and got off a scything blow on Smoke/Mist. Don't touch the hair came out to keep Smoke safe but I still got a few more momentous damage on Mist (thanks to all the assists). Siren tried to tie up Mercury/Calculus to stop him from scoring but Tac 3 and a tackle on 3 meant mercury just walked away with the ball and scored to put Brad up 6-2.