Painting for Lazy Cheats Part II: King Ra and his Jaffa

Last week I introduced you to the basic principles and concepts surrounding the creation of my Tomb Kings army, and showed you how I cheated my way to finishing the 75 skeletons required for my 2400 point list.

Of course the foot soldiers of the Tomb Kings are only so much inanimate bone without a Hierophant to maintain the spells holding them together, and what use are these skeletal minions without a King to lead them in to war? With that question in mind, and without further ado, allow me to introduce you to King Ra:

We will fight them on the beaches!- Flames of War

The Second World War has been done to death in modern media, from video games such as the the excellent Company Of Heroes series that has recently got its second installment, TV series like the equally good Band of Brothers and of course the plentiful supply of movies like Saving Private Ryan. Its easy to say that World War 2 still has a significant place in modern culture. Flames of War draws on this wealth of material to create a game that is enormously simple to play but rewards tactical thinking over all else.

Maliwhatnow?

In the time I've known (well, conversed with over the interwebz) Aidan, one thing he's always championed has been Malifaux.  There had been conjecture he had just made it all up (along with his meteoric rise up the UK rankings chasing the crown of the elusive Adam Magicpockets) but lo and behold, it's a real game.

So, with my ongoing descent in to the murky waters of 'the hobby', and the prospect of more very nice looking minis to paint, I investigated further.  The nearest hobby shop to me is Worlds at War in Livingston, and after chatting to the owner on a few occasions he told me they ran a variety of demo days for games, Malifaux among them.

Britannia Rules The Waves! An Introduction to Dystopian Wars

Naval combat wargames that are not historicals or space games are tricky to find; this is perhaps because the nature of naval warfare is not immediately interesting in game terms. Ships are slow, hard to manoeuvre and armed with more weapons than most games can simulate, most of which shoot things from ranges far beyond what tabletops allow. Games Workshop's Battlefleet Gothic, a broadsides-and-cannons game at its heart with a space flavour added, used a kind of non-scale; ship models were huge but simply a flavourful abstraction with only the base of the model actually representing its position. This was a theoretically good compromise but one which made moving models around terrain difficult at times.

Zombicide: The Review

In most “dungeon crawl” type games, in which the players move around and discover a map filled with enemies while seeking objectives, the balancing of progression – of the simplified “levelling up” mechanic derived from role-playing games – is in an awkward position. A fully-fledged roleplaying game has a much longer progression track and a much wider design space for gaining abilities; there is a much larger portfolio of things to improve (base statistics, the character's library of abilities, the efficiency of existing abilities, non-combat skills and feats etc) while a board game generally reduces the entire design to a series of, or indeed single, combat encounter. This smaller design space means that each level has a smaller number of possibilities – and thus the rate of progression is a lot faster. Similarly, a board game is designed to be played to completion in a single session – the levelling mechanics in a role-playing game are for a campaign lasting several sessions. Thus a player may well gain several levels in one game.

Tale of the Unpainter

BLAME WARHAMMER QUEST

Hooting into the Abyss is a tabletop gaming blog, but there’s more wargamers and people painting miniatures here than anyone else. I was offered a place here to talk about tabletop games and the last time I painted a miniature I was in my late teens. It was a Warhammer Quest elf, one of the only Games Workshop miniatures I still have, although I’m not sure where it is any more.

As a child, I was given a copy of HeroQuest, which my brother, father and I used to play constantly. It was my first board game, my first look at a primitive version of the Warhammer universe, and the way we played, my first roleplaying game. My brother was too young to see through my father’s lies when he was told that Joyce was a good barbarian name. Then there was Stumpi Shortarse the dwarf, and Gary the National Elf (from the National Elf service). Even in these early years, I discovered there were expansions for the board game and hunted them out eagerly, a warning sign for my stuffed board game shelves two decades later.

A Tale of VIII Painters - Ray Part 3: Dire Avengers, Assemble

Initially I hadn't planned to include any Dire Avengers, or indeed Aspect Warriors of any sort, in my Eldar army. I like the concept behind them (Eldar picking a job they like, like shooting missile launchers or being a ninja, and getting really good at it) but some of the models are a mite ropey and on the whole they didn't fit my bike-focused plan.