3 Day week at work = not much to do.

Things that have happened on the gaming front.  Finished painting up my 3 warhawks and 2 eagles, just getting the bases sorted out so that I can pop the models on and off the magnets for making transport a little easier.  All riders are magnetised and all fliers are mounted on paper clip metal which attach to the bases via magnets so they can be removed, all in all it makes them a lot simpler to transport and they break far less frequently.

Also worked on the characters a little and found my missing musician so will be able to field the proper command group for my Scarlocks WE archers RoR unit.  Once the army is fully painted I'll be going back and improving the command as they're currently far substandard to the rest of the unit due to painting constraints... Oops!

Wed games night is due to go on it's summer hiatus but due to overbooked sporting events it'll continue for another week, will most likely be running Tempest Ragnarok restrictions and trying to work out how on earth I should set up my characters, magic continues to stymie me.  I'd ideally like a few magic missiles but the WEs lack easy access to those.  Considering dropping all mages and adding in a fighty character as my list currently lacks much in the way of hitting power that can kill characters.

In further news I might have just bought a Skaven army... Not sure I'd planned that! Saw a couple of deals going on t'internet that looked pretty good and decided I'd stick in some offers and picked up something like 250+ skaven plus a few of the toys.  Add that to the 40 IoB skaven I dipped just to see how they'd come out I'm now pretty sorted for an army! 

Will need to revisit my schedule of what I'm going to work on as I've agreed to join in a painting/gaming event down the club to paint up a 40k army.  I've an old box of eldar stuff kicking about in my cellar that I'd got dirt cheap and intended to paint up but never got round to, so this will hopefully get me started.  I'm not a massive fan of 40k, played about 5 games of the current edition and generally found it a bit meh.  I think it's largely because the whole tanks generally trump infantry thing and my lack of desire to work on tanks.  But Eldar are sweet models and it should give me a chance to get my airbrush going again so no bad thing.

Easter weekend

Well with a 4 day weekend here in the UK you'd have thought I'd have been hard at it but I was away over the weekend visiting family so barely touched a figure.

With the WE coming out for tempest I had a look at what I needed to paint in order to get everything ready.  Because of this I painted up 2 eagles (one finished, one half done), the riders for my warhawks and basecoated up a couple of characters as the ones I was using were a bit shoddy. 

Also a few more Eldar finished up for Epic

Tempest Rising Practice

So back on the tournament preperation bandwagon.  Tempest Ragnarok is the third in a highly popular line of very heavily restricted tournaments.  It aims to balance out a lot of the armies and remove a lot of the tricks from the game to help reward good generalship.  Obviouly the reality is that not all armies are equal even under the restrictions but it makes for a very fun tournament.

So my practice game was against the much abused Tomb Kings, the big losers to 8th Edition.  Only my opponent has been playing them solidly since it came out and hasn't had the best of results but certainly knows the army well and it makes for fun games.  The big impact of Tempest comp this time round is mages aren't adding their wizard levels to casting attempts, for normal armies it's not too bad, but against TK it makes a massive difference.  Their incants go off regardless and even on the 1 dice incants a high roll leaves you needing to throw a couple of dice at it, combine that with the wizarding hat and you've got a horrible phase to face!

I'm not going to go into a full report here but had a very fun, if a little bit frustrating game which ended up in a tie.  Basically we killed off all the cheap stuff in each others armies and the characters and expensive units all survived.  I had some dice nightmares in the middle of the game which probably cost me the win, lots of fluffed attacks followed by lots of failed painc and rally rolls.  My opponent played it well and kept the pressure on me from the start of the game and I was slack in advancing some of my units which cost me on one flank but generally I felt I dealt well with his bigger threats forcing them to stand off me.

Also tried beast magic for the first time and to be honest it achieved pretty much nothing, but the magic rules as they are I think that will tend to be the case.  If I had the option I'd probably go with a damage oriented lore as they tend to be cheaper to cast and with multiple spells you'll get something through.  As it was I really struggled to get any spells off which had much of an impact.  Time will tell and more practice is needed.

More painting on the Epic stuff has taken place and also finished of the Judge for my Malifaux crew.  Now putting some work onto my WEs just to get all the units I'm going to use for tempest done up to an acceptable standard and then build some movement trays for the current unit sizes.

Week 2

Not a lot of progress this week, a bit of prep work for Tempest III down the club on Wed saw my WE face off against Trevs lizards.  Due to the unusual comp restriction of not adding your magic level to spells I decided to ditch the level 4 and mess about with treesinging, turns out that didn't work out well, partly because of the random deployment scenario and his haivng the life awakening of the woods meant I generally stayed out of the trees so it was all a wasted opportunity.

The game was a bit one sided, basically I couldnt' deal with his saurus heroes and they tied up a couple of my units until his army could smash home.  I still made a bunch of mistakes with my treeman and left my treekin a little bit exposed but the random deployment forced my hand on that one.

So totally reconsidering how I'll run the list again. Ho hum.

Painting I picked up an Epic Eldar army for ~50% of retail from a guy selling out of it at the club so have been having a play about with that.  Not a clue what makes up a good force so been doing some reading and coming up with a paint scheme.  Over the weekend I painted up:
8 Stands of Guardians
4 Wave serpents
2 stands of Dark Reapers
2 stands of Warp Spiders
1 Nightwing
1 Phoenix Bomber
1 Vampire

So that's 550 pts worth of legal units and some other stuff just to see how it looks.  Not bad start, in addition I've basecoated up another guarding formation and a falcon troupe (400 more pts).

Still reading up and trying to find some resources for what goes in a list but by the looks of it what I'm working on isn't wasted.

I'm somewhat disappointed I never started tracking what all I've painted so far this year as it's been fairly productive and think I've found the balance between sinking time into painting and spending time with the girlfriend so I won't get abuse, but lets see if that lasts! So might find one of those tally sheets and work back through my photobucket to see how I'm doing.

The beginning

Ok so first up lets see how things look. 

The purpose of this blog is to centralise all my painted figures into one repository.  As such it's possibly easier for me to track what I've been upto by dumping it all on one page, here!

Anyone dropping in you'll see I'm mostly a Warhammer Fantasy player but Malifaux has captured me recently, the figs are just so cool.  In addition I've got a Space Marine army for 40k which I play once in a blue moon and I'm looking back at Epic again as it seems to have got a solid foothold in my local Club.

On which note I'm based in Edinburgh and can be found down the [elg] club most Wednesdays.