Sloan's Rangers (Gun Mages)

Here's a little more painting for you, this time of a Warmachine bent. I'm pretty happy with how these all turned out, but the pictures are actually nicer than the models in real life. Which is nice

Back in Black 13th

Love these models and the normal gun mages. Great concept well executed. Oddly small, but we'll get on to that in a minute...

Relic entertainment

I had a game of 6^th Edition 40K last night down at the Wakefield Warriors club. It was a marine on marine affair, but very much livened up by playing a mission that’s new to sixth. We were playing relic, with the short table edge deployment type, which was nice and new. Both my opponent and I were getting a bit more confident with the rule set now, and although we forgot to roll for night fighting in the first turn and got thoroughly confused about vehicle and transport moving, the rules galloped along at a fair old lick. I’m pretty sure that unless you play two armies with mixed saves in every single unit (Space Wolves I’m looking at you) then they play a little faster than the 5^th edition rule set. In the end I think that I lost the mission (5 points to 1) due to not combat squadding my tactical squads and feeding the little combat squads to his Deathstar unit. This thing was a destructive force of nature, featuring 5 lightning claw terminators, a chaplain and Pedro Kantor, from Land Raider Crusader. That’s +1A, Re-roll hits and Wounds at AP3 on the turn that they charged. The Lightning Claws guys delivered 16 Wounds on to my tactical squad. Ouch. What I should have done (and normally do) is split the squads, leave the heavy weapons at the back and feed the terminators half a squad at a time, to keep them away from the relic. 

The other mistake I made was that I deployed my Sternguard in drop pod badly, to take out one of my opponent’s scoring units. Not sure what I should have done, but I definitely didn’t do it right. Perhaps I should have dropped them further to one flank, so that they dragged more of my opponent’s units out of position.

Relic was fun and the secondary objectives work nicely, and the deployment style was fine too. It gives a narrow front and deep deployment zone, although you can’t get too far away from the enemy, especially now that all vehicles can go 18” in a turn if they want to. That gap is very easily closed in just two turns for assault armies.

Warlock of Firetop Mountain

Not that one

I had a cunning plan the other day. Holdenstein Jr. is terrible at reading, and really terrible at reading aloud to me. It's not that he's actually bad at reading, he's quite good, he just hates it. Then while trundling around blogs followed by blogs that I follow I came across an interesting genre. The Fighting Fantasy playthrough blog. Honestly I don't know who came up with the idea first, but it is both simultaneously genius and the saddest thing I have ever seen.

That gave me an idea: I have a box full of game books upstairs and a son who won't read to me, so I embarked on playing Warlock of Firetop Mountain with Holdenstein Jr. The rules were simple. No cheating (except in the annoying Maze of Zagor- and only then to ignore irritating repositions), re-roll on skill of 7 or 8, Holdenstein Jr. gets to roll the dice for us in combat, and every couple of entries we swap reading duties. I'll also make the map. Thus the project is both entertaining and informative. I make him add up his attack strength too- that's maths covered as well as English.

And a bit more painting

The release of 6th Ed. 40k has been positive in  that it's persuaded me to paint. Here are some pics!

Brother-Sergeant Chronus

 So first up we have Chronus, who was a bit fiddly, but ultimately quite a nice job, after removing all his Ultramarines insignia.

Aegis Defence Line

 Next, another 40K painting job, the Aegis defence lines, which can be used as a fortification in the new edition. Don't know if I will, but of course they can go in normal terrain.

Gobber Bodger

And finally a Gobber Bodger. I love this model dearly. Would love to know who sculpted him, but PP don't seem to want you to know who sculpts their models. Nice though. It was painted using the new GW ork triad of paints, which are very nice indeed.

Next up, Kara Slone from Warmachine and some Vanguard Vets for 40K