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Thursday, July 31, 2014

Malifaux: Entering the Guild

"I was lucky in the order, but I've always been lucky when it comes to killin' folks."

Since discovering the wonders of Vassal for playing miniature games online, I have really gotten excited about Malifaux again.  And with Gencon coming up in less than two weeks, where Wyrd traditionally unveils a host of new models and some limited edition ones, it seems like a great time to be involved!  This spurred me to continue to assemble and expand my primary faction: the Guild.  While not as flashy and esoteric as many of the other factions in the Malifaux range, the Guild are grounded a little more in reality, with a heavy Western theme: long coats, cowboy hats, bandanas, and single-action revolvers.  With one part Clint Eastwood, another part McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and a lunatic touch of Kouta Hirano's Hellsing, Malifaux’s Guild have a very distinctive style themselves.  Nowhere is this more evident than in their Marshals, which are what drew me to the Guild in the first place.

Monday, July 28, 2014

Playing Miniature Games Long Distance: Vassal



Miniature-based wargaming is graced with a huge amount of variety, from setting to scope, science fiction to low fantasy, skirmish to total warfare.  But whereas the genre affords players a plethora of different themes to explore, one aspect of the hobby always remains the same. And that is the investment of time that it takes to play a miniature-based wargame. From assembling, painting, reading background material, learning rules, and ultimately meeting up with some friends to push models around on a tabletop, the hobby takes a lot of time.  And if you are anything like me, as you get older, time is more and more at a premium.  No longer in school/college, you are starting a career, a family, or both, and even if you do have some free time a few evenings a week, your gaming friends likely are not just down the hall or across the street.  Because this is a hobby that I love, I still make time to assemble and convert models, read background lore, explore the vast and dedicated miniature gaming blogosphere, and try my best to keep up-to-date on the rule sets of multiple games.  Of these, being knowledgeable about the rules, has probably become the tallest order.  And this is simply because I do not often get the chance to actually play the games.  Although I really enjoy reading and learning new rule systems, just reading them is not the same thing as playing them.  Playing a single game every five months, when I get together with my like-minded friends, is hardly a good way to learn and retain the nuances and complexities of many of these games, let alone experiment with army lists.  This got me to thinking about how it would be wonderful if there was a way that I could play some of these games digitally, such that when I actually got together with my friends, the games we played would be as good as possible, filled with strategy and character, rather than paging through rulebooks and reusing army lists from years ago. This led me to Vassal: the open-source boardgame engine.

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Basing the Imperial Knight: Dragon Forge

The mailed fist of the Imperium of man!

When I was writing about Forge World’s Cerastus Knight-Lancer a few months back, I mused over basing options for Imperial Knights and ultimately decided that I wanted to use the newly released Dragon Forge resin bases.  To my good fortune, when ordering the bases, I discovered that they had just released a few more variants, increasing their selection to an impressive 13 different styles, including a Tech-deck variant (my favorite of their base themes)!  I recently received the base in the mail and thought that I would show you the process that I went through basing my Knight titan, complete with some repositioning of its feet to fit more flushly on the base .

Friday, July 4, 2014

Karl Kopinski: Zombicide Special Guest Box Impressions

Karl Kopinski steps into Zombicide!

Although this blog was created primarily to document our ongoing modeling projects for miniature-based gaming, we also wanted to use it to talk about and showcase artists.  Towards this end, I have never missed an opportunity to extol the skill of Karl Kopinski.  Although he has since returned to freelance work, Kopinski created a name for himself during the 7 years he spent working in the Games Workshop art department.  With an incredible eye for detail, tempered with both proportion and perspective,  his work infused a vitality and realism into Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 that has not been surpassed or equaled since his departure.  So you can imagine my excitement when I discovered that Guillotine Games, creators of the wildly successful zombie board game Zombicide, commissioned Kopinski to design two survivors (and their zombie counterparts!) for use in the game!