Making a case for the Dragon

With all the chaos and mayhem that has been a part of daily life for almost 2 years, heading over to the Wandering Dragon Shoppe has been an imposibility.

I have only seen the Shoppe once since the move to the new store, and that was at night when it was relatively  crowded.  That meant I didn't get to see some of the incredible things that Kevin and Laura have done with it!  Fantastic.  Just look at this room!!!

It is truly a Palace of Gaming.  This is still the same room!

I don't think these were around the last time I was there.  In fact, there are so many sizes and types of cases, I don't think I was able to spot them all! It was like an Easter egg hunt.  More and more of them everywhere.

There were small cases, inserts, craft boxes, and some of these very large cases, which would work for gaming stuff, painting stuff, and anything else imaginable.

The wall of X-Wing and the Star Trek version...

The hobby section continues to expand as well.  Paints, minis, tools, supplies... the list goes on and on.

Down this hall you will find room after room for RPG's, tournaments, private games... it's like a castle that you need to map out like a D&D game.

Just one more area, this near the register.

We were also able to take advantage of the Menu Book that is also part of the Dragon Shoppe experience.  This time, pizza was chosen, delivered right to the room!  Wow...

I guess I should mention that a few games were played.  This was a common sight as I played the Germans in the first round.  It's hard to believe that I was able to keep the score as close as I did in that first game.  The margin was 6-4... almost 6-5.  That  meant a good game as the Americans could still yield an overall victory.

Sure enough, my tank brigades made mad dashes around the flanks of the dug in Germans, which enabled the double envelopment tactic.  I managed a 6-3 victory, for an overall 10-9 win!

Setting up for that first game.  Many thanks to Rich for hauling me out there, and to Kevin and Laura for being such wonderful hosts!!

Wandering back to the Dragon

As most of you already know, there has been a certain project that has kept me imprisoned in the basement for 20 hours a day for many months.  Also, Cathy has her new job, about 3 months in.

This combination of factors has kept us away from one of our favorite places, and that is the Wandering Dragon Shoppe.

The original store was an amazing place, which you can see form my previous posts.  Late this summer, they moved down the street to a larger place to accommodate all the other folks who loved that place just as much.

If it is possible to upgrade this much on amazing, then only Kevin and Laura can pull that off!  Even from the outside, the place is marvelous.  Here is Kevin, hard at work as usual when not running around seeing what people might need.

All of the new space is put to great use.  There were so many new games I had never seen before... and there was room after room of them!

This is one of those rooms.  What's nice is that you feel like you can really take your time to check everything out and never be in someone's way.  Since they are in various rooms, you also feel like you can talk things out without bothering anyone else.

There were more gaming rooms than I could take pictures of!  And they are even more inviting.  You feel like you are playing at someone's house.

Ah, did someone mention miniatures?  And paint, and brushes, and files, and tons of hobby stuff?  Yes indeed!

More rooms for gaming!  Note that binder on top of the vending machine... that comes into play later.  Yes, there are a number of vending machine options.

And then the Main Gallery... still with the TV to keep up to speed on ESPN... and it is still very cool!

There are now multiple shelving units of games to test out now!

And when you don't want to interrupt your game for food, you just check out that binder to find a place to order that food, and have them deliver it.  We enjoyed some pizza with Memoire '44

And one of our last go 'rounds.  A neat system, which appeals to me more than ASL, since there is much more fun visual impact here.  It still had a similar feel, but faster paced.

Many thanks to Rich for hauling me out there, and congratulations to Kevin and Laura for all their amazing work here!!!

A hot time at the Wandering Dragon Shoppe

It was quite the beehive of activity again at the Wandering Dragon.  Lots of stuff going on... the big D & D group, demo games by Chad, Malifaux, Magic and more.

In the midst of this maelstrom, I was painting more lava bases.  Here are a few pics from the evening, such as this early stage photo...

As you can see, I was also finishing off some more spiders!  The darker colors have been added to the lava areas...

And then some darker glazes and washes on the rocky parts.

I was time to test some lava OSL on the Legion of Everblight starter set that I got from Adepticon.  It's been a while since I did the major OSL, and that video is going to filmed soon... so time to practice!

I wanted to try out as many different surfaces as possible, so that is why I have been doing the spiders and the starter set.

Towards the ends of the evening, I put a few darker glazes on what I was working on...

The Big Guy has a way to go yet, but he has a good start!

I was able to get a whole batch of new weathering powders at the Dragon Shoppe, and I will be using those to do some effects on the Legion minis!  Stay tuned!

Using the terrain pieces!

The principle behind terrain pieces is that they should be used early and often. :-)  Here are some images I shot of the terrain pieces (which you may recognize) being used at the Wandering Dragon for some Warmachine!

It was really neat to see all the terrain out on many different boards.  This is the Grand Championship board, which Kevin made a bunch of 3 x 3 boards which fill up the rest of the room.  Quite the beehive of activity!

There were games of Warmachine being played all evening long, which was very cool to see on this board.  I am pretty sure that it is where Rich and I will be returning to test out my new Arachnids of Evil list for Bilbo's Bash.  I remember all the 'training' games we played on this thing.  There are lots of battle reports on those in the LOTR section.

Well, I have to get back to priming now.  About 4 dozen minis... so here I go!

A touch of rust...

A dab here, a streak there, here some rust, there some rust, a little bit of staining.  All that helps to make the 'quickie' terrain look a little more normal.

There was nothing fancy here.  I just mixed some reddish brown together with orange and other browns.  As always, time was counting down, so it had to be done very rapidly!

The one nice thing about mixing in those metallics with the craft paints was the textural difference between the rust colors and the metals.  That's great in a lower light environment.

When I get some more time, I want to paint in cracks on the ground sections, and try to put some insignias and numbers on the tanks...

Here's the storage tank glued in place...

I was hoping that I had left enough open space on these pieces so that minis could get up on them and fight!

We shall see, as players use them on the Tuesday Warmachine nights at the Wondering Dragon!

Now for some shots of the terrain by the end of the day/evening...

This terrain is meant to be used, so feel free to use it for your games of Warmahordes!!

Heavy Metal at the Wandering Dragon...

Painting up this terrain would see some very rare use of metallic paints by me.  Since I was starting to run a little low on my black craft paint, I thought adding metallic paints could help extend the life of the painting session.

I was still painting the black brown mix on everything, with more brown on the rock outcroppings.  At the same time, I was using some of the ivory color mixed in to create more of a stone hue for the bases of the steampunk terrain.  I will be doing more on those later when there's time.

Once that was completed, I started to mix the metallic and craft paints together to paint the storage tanks, pipes and smokestacks.

I added some of the brown craft paint, and even some gold and copper metallics into the mixture as I worked lighter.

Another furnace ready for metallic paints...

Moving along, I added lighter and lighter mixes...

It was certainly odd working with the metallic paints.  By combining them with the non metallic paints, however, it was less of a shock to the system :-)

Each terrain piece was worked to the lightest set of colors one by one...

I tried to leave my darker, sooty areas as intact as possible to save time.

In the next episode, we will see all the rust and additional soot that was added.  Stay tuned!