Too Hot To Paint

I can't wait for it to cool down again. I haven't managed to do any painting since Sunday. When I got home this evening, just after 6pm the temperature in my flat was 29.5C. Four hours later....

Yes, a whole 0.5C drop. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't so humid as well. The sweat is pouring off me even now it's past 11pm.

So, what's been going on? Not a great deal. I did pop down to Modelzone after work yesterday and picked up a few Vallejo paints (some new, some spares). I had a pleasant chat with the girl on the till who paints fantasy figures for pleasure. She thought it was cool that I was a wargamer.

Pimpage Time

Edwin over at "Thoughts of a Depressive Diplomatist" is having a prize draw to celebrate his 200th post.

Congrats to Big Lee! (More Prize Draw Pimpage)

I think it's worth posting my congrats to Lee for reaching 1 million page views over on his blog.

Nothing to do with the fact that doing this will gain me 5 bonus entries in his prize draw.

Nay, nay and thrice nay missus. Nothing to do with that. Definitely nothing to do with that.

Those are some very nice prizes though. Not that I'm interested. Oh no, not at all.

Pimping a Kickstarter Campaign

Well, this just came into my email box:


"We are releasing this crowdfounding campaing in Kickstarter.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/922026722/dark-skies-in-the-land-of-the-empires

Dark Skies is an aerial combat wargame, the miniatures are 1:72 (24mm)aircraft with ww1/ww2 aesthetics with a touch of fantasy, from lightfighters to huge flying carriers. There are 6 factions: The Kingdom ofEngland, the Germanic Empire, The Kingdom of Iberia, the Russian Empire, theGallic Duchy and the Foreign Legion (Mercenaries). Andy Chambers will do afinal edit of the rules and Plastcraf will do the scenery.

It is almost impossible to find the project in KS' website, please we needall the help possible to make the project less unknown.

Regards!"

Whilst this isn't something that particularly appeals to my interests, I'm sure that some of my 426 followers may be interested, so I decided to post it for you.

Pimping a Prize Draw; Whoops! No Camera

First up, Kev's Wargames Cabin is having a prize draw for reaching 30K page views. Incredibly, his blog has only got 70 followers at the moment but it's well worth following so head on over there and sign up.


Whoops! No Camera

Sorry folks - I forgot to pack my camera yesterday so there are no pics of yesterday's refight of Gettysburg: Day 1 at the club yesterday. You'll just have to make do with a very brief report.

Ian and I got to the club at about 2.30 to get everything set up. It took us about an hour to do the terrain. Following a short drinks break, we then spent the best part of an hour sorting through the troops for the starting deployments before we kicked off the game itself at around 4.30pm. Ian took the Rebs, so I ended up with the Union. Having only played Fire & Fury once before, the first couple of turns took a lot longer to play than they really should have done, but after that I was OK.

The starting deployment had Buford's Division supported by Reynolds facing off against Heth's Division. I opted for the old maxim "the best defense is a strong offense". This saw mixed results - I was winning on my left, but losing on my right where it didn't help that I rolled a natural 10 in one shooting phase causing 2 units to hit "low ammunition" status at a crucial time.

At about 6pm we were joined by some other players. Andy joined Ian on the Reb side; Geoff and Stan joined the Union. This was probably just as well as the union XI Corps were just starting to arrive on table and I didn't fancy handling that many troops all at the same time - 4 Divisions was quite enough for me, although there wasn't much left of Buford's cavalry by that time. A little later I transferred control of one of Reynolds' divisions to Geoff. Andy had taken over Hill's corps with Ian assuming command of Ewell's corps as it came on the table in the North.

We carried on playing until 10pm and had reached 2.30pm in battle-time. At this point in the game, the Union had formed a strong defensive line along Seminary Ridge and Oak Ridge, although a couple of Reb brigades had pushed the Union back off Oak Hill, but then had to fall back as fresh troops from Reynold's and Howards corps advanced. On the Northern flank, the union troops were falling back in good order to present a continuous defensive line with the rest of the army.

We called it at this point as a minor win for the Union. Hills' corps had been heavily delayed by my aggressive defense and there was no chance of the Rebs making it anywhere near their Day 1 objectives of Culps Hill and Cemetery Hill before the Union XII Corps would arrive on the table.

I think everyone would agree that the unit of the game had to be Meredith's Iron Brigade who had driven off two of Heth's brigades early on, then repulsed 3 successive assaults (the last one when they were down to 4 bases [spent] and disordered against a fresh 9 base brigade!) before being retired from the front line having achieved their aim of holding up the Reb advance while the defensive position was formed on Seminary Ridge.

A Bit More Pimping

James Brewerton of Exiles Wargames Painter is celebrating the 3rd birthday of his blog with a fantastic giveaway. So, if you want some freebies you'd better head over and start following if you aren't already. All you've got to do is comment on the post and there are bonus points for pimpage and poetry (he's asked for wargaming related limericks, but I submitted a haiku instead).

I may or may not post later this evening - I've arranged with a couple of people at the club to play our first games of X-Wing, so it should be fun. If only it was 26 days earlier so we could quip "May the fourth be with you!". I guess we'll just have to settle for such benedictions as "Stay on target", "I find your lack of faith disturbing" and "Let the Wookie win!".

I've remembered my camera, so there should be pics.

Edit To Add: Don't forget Mike Whitaker's giveaways over at Trouble At T'Mill

And another Edit To Add: I've just realised this was my 400th post!!

Pimping Time

Well, I've got two bits of pimping to do.

First up:

Click the pic to go to the blog

A few fellow nutters bloggers have decided to lay on a super game at Triples next year to raise money for two charities - Help For Heroes and Men Matter. The game in question will be the Battle of La Belle Famille from the French Indian War played using the Muskets and Tomahawks rules. At the moment it is in the planning stages, but they have already secured support from AW Miniatures and Warbases. The blog has links for donating to the charities, there will be a collection on the day and all the figures used will be raffled or auctioned off at the end to raise extra money.

They are looking for people to help out with painting all the figures (painting only - they will be doing the basing), so if you'd like to help by contributing some time, pop over and let them know.


Second up:

Mike Whitaker over at Trouble at T'Mill is celebrating being the survivor of 100 thousand hits by having a big giveaway over the next few days.

"It's freebie time folks!"

100K Prize Draw - The Day 1 Winner

What a truly popular prize this one was - 240 entries (including bonuses for poetry and pimpage) from 67 individuals!

Just to remind you what the prize was

Anyway, the spreadsheet column of names was sorted into alphabetical order, copied to random.org and the words "Hocus Pocus" said (or whatever the site does to randomise them) and a winner was found:

Congratulations Ferb!!! Please email me (use the Kontactr link underneath the Posties Rejects logo) with your address, and I'll get them sent out to you.



What else has been going on?


Monday Night FoG:AM Game

Gordon is taking a Later Polish army to a tournament this weekend and wanted a practice game beforehand. As the only blood my Swiss pikemen had seen was mine on the end of their pikes, I volunteered and duly turned up with a 650 point army that should have been a good match against a cavalry-heavy army.

Unfortunately, Gordon discovered on arrival that he'd accidentally picked up the wrong bag. Instead of rules, dice, measuring sticks, terrain and 650 points of Poles he had 850 points of Classical Indians. Rather than cancelling we agreed to play on and Gordon worked out a 650 point list he could use. He won the initiative and selected b****y "Tropical" as the terrain type! Just what an army of Swiss pikemen want to be fighting in. Here's a pic of the table:

Green blobs = Forest; Black = Gully; Brown/Orange = Brush. Table is 3' x 5' - you can just about make out the chalk boundary

Absolutely brilliant. Terrain that slows my heavy foot down and severely disorders it but barely affects the Indians' medium foot.

I'll do an AAR later, but the abridged version is that I scraped a narrow 12 to 8 win (I'd lost 3 BGs broken and my camp; Gordon had lost 5 BGs). Most of my fighting had been done where my BGs lost dice due to severely disordering terrain where their pikes didn't count for combat factors, so it was quite a surprise.


The Mystery of the Blue Moon

I'd been waiting almost a month for my Blue Moon pirates order from Old Glory UK to arrive. Yesterday I had a package in the post which contained 4 of the packs from my order, but no packing slip or note to say where the rest were. I was planning to contact them this evening to ask about the rest of the order.

The 4 packs I received

This morning I got an email from them to let me know that Royal Mail had returned a package because I hadn't collected it. As I never got a "you weren't in" card, I didn't know it was waiting to be collected. After mutual disparaging of the Royal Mail, they are sending the package out again (to my work address this time) so I will hopefully get it on Friday or early next week.

100k Prize Draw - Day 3

Prize Draw Day 1

Prize Draw Day 2


The response so far has been amazing. For the Day 1 draw there are 191 entries when bonuses for pimpage and poetry are taken into account.


So, onto Day 3 and I have another fabulous prize for someone.

Yes, some more Warlord Games plastics, this time from their Pike & Shotte range.




OK, the rulesy-stuff:

1. You must be a public follower of this blog
2. Each draw will be open for 7 days and then the winner will be chosen at random from all entries
3. Every comment on the post will count as 1 entry in the draw (eg 5 comments = 5 entries)
4. Linking to the draw on your own blog will earn you an extra 5 entries for the prize in question
5. You can transfer your prize to someone else if you wish

Back from Campaign; Korean Camp

Hi all, I'm back from Campaign now and what a weekend it was. I've downloaded the pics from my camera and will try to write up some AARs tomorrow (I deliberately booked the day off work). I am feeling rather tired, as you can imagine.

So, my results:

Game 1 vs Bob's Southern Song Chinese - 11:9 win*
Game 2 vs Pete's Liao - 15-5 loss (might have been 14-6, the 15-5 was a guesstimate before doing the actual calculation)
Game 3 vs Keith's Koryo Koreans - 25-0 utter defeat in a Korean Civil War
Game 4 vs Paul's Xi Xia - 24-1 not-quite-as-utter defeat
Game 5 vs Mark's Xi Xia - 12-8 win to me in a Central London Wargames Club Civil War**

* my clubmates were amazed that I'd beaten Bob as he is a very, very good player and my win resulted in me receiving a standing toast when we went for a curry on the Saturday night! There are some tales of Bob's truly atrocious dice rolling to be told in my AAR.

** this round was particularly important as my team were fighting against our clubmates and the team result would determine who ended up in last place. My team were 1 point behind going in and the results were as follows:
Simon vs Richard - 24:1 loss
Me vs Mark - 12:8 win
Andy vs Jerry - 25:0 win

Last year my results were: 24-1 loss; 24-1 loss; 21-4 loss; 24-1 loss; 12-8 loss, so this year was a massive improvement I'm sure you'll agree.


I did meet up with a couple of people from the blogosphere while I was there:
Mike from Trouble At T'Mill who was there running a fun-looking participation game involving hot air balloons suspended from the frame of a small garden marquee.
Simon from Iron Mitten and his lovely better half (Kath? I'm terrible with names) who were there in C17th costume with Prince Rupert's Blew Regiment of the Sealed Knot. Poor Simon must have been boiling in his uniform and armour.
Doug (sorry - not sure if you have a blog) who was there with a 54mm Stalingrad demo game which looked fantastic.


Here are a couple of pics I took of the good (?) pirate ship "Madaxeman's Revenge" (I don't know if he's actually given it a name, but it seems appropriate) and of brilliant cohesion markers:

Teh ship is the 8-gun Barque from Blue Moon/Old Glory. He got the tokens off Ebay but I expect you can find them in the kiddies section of poundshops.


Korean Camp

Finally, the Secret Project which was the supply camp for my Koreans can be revealed.

Seb's 2nd Blogday Prize Draws

My club-mate Seb over at Back To the Minis is celebrating his blog's second birthday with a series of Prize Draws.

Today's draw is for a NAC starter fleet from GZG, which I'd really, really like to win. As I commented "Oooh! Oooh! Shinies! Spaceships! Oooh, oooh, shiny spaceships!!!!"

So, pop on over if you fancy winning this prize and take a look back at the previous 2 prizes (the winners will be declared 1 week after each draw is posted).

Birthy Happdays!; I'm A Winner!; Bloggers' Meetup at Salute

Birthy happday to me! Woohoo, 21 (again? Ed.) today! I've had a quiet celebration on my own with a  Chinese takeaway and a tub of Haagen Daas ice cream. I suppose a prize draw is in order, especially as I've also reached 350 followers.

And it's "Birthy happday to Ray" as well - His Most Universally High Imperious Kingliness is 45 today. What a great blogger and painter to share a birthday with.

I had some unexpected news today. Carl over at Hitting On A Double 1 had a prize draw to celebrate two things - reaching 50 followers (he deserves more - pop over and start following!) and the first anniversary of his blog. Winners were picked at random from his followers. Well, I was one of them and two Mordheim figures will be on their way to me shortly.


Salute 2013 Bloggers' Meetup

Click pic for link

After last year's success, Ray and Fran are hosting a repeat this year. All gaming bloggers attending Salute on 20 April are invited to join them at 1pm in the location shown by the red dot.

They may even bring a big red dot with them to make it even easier to find. In case the big red dot is confusing to you, this is in the seating area next to the bring & buy stall.

I'll be there and (assuming I actually finish them in time) will be revealing my Secret Projects.

Koreans Day 02

Loki's Prize Draw 

Andrew Saunders, my fellow Brush Ronin, is celebrating the 2nd birthday of his "Loki's Great Hall" blog with a fantastic prize draw. We all like free stuff, and all you need to do is be a public follower of the blog and leave a comment on that post.

Koreans Day 02

Well, my lost voice has returned but I'm still croaky. Unfortunately it got replaced by a fever today that has been slowly subsiding. I'm still about 1C over normal body temperature. So, off work again.

I did manage to get some painting done. Surprisingly I got more done than I'd expected. I've been working on the light horse today and they're very close to being finished - I just need to do the ink wash and touch up the white, then coat with Klear. I should point out that I did do the horse flesh colours last night.

So, some piccies:

From everything I've read about the medieval Koreans, although the infantry uniforms were rather bland, that was not the case with the cavalry. So, I've gone with a pretty colourful uniform for these guys.

I'm still umming and ahhhing over the army list for Campaign. Do I take an IC for the extra +1 on cohesion tests from shooting or do I use the extra points he would cost to buy more troops (or better ones)? Do I take my medium foot as 6s or 8s? Do I take 6 BGs of lancers to maximise my pre-battle initiative or take less lancers and risk not getting to choose the terrain type? Lots of decisions to make and they will determine  what I need to paint up.

Calling All the Heroes - Paint The City Pink

Time for a bit of pimping in a very good cause.

Hendybadger over at Tales of a Tabletop Skirmisher blog is involved in running a comp to raise money for Breast Cancer awareness - read more about it here: http://pressganger.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/paint-city-pink-breast-cancer-awareness.html


There are lots of great prizes up for grabs - all you need to do is paint up a Pulp City character (or other superhero/villain) in a pink theme and send it in.

The trouble is that there are currently more prizes than known entrants, so he's asked for people to get the word out via blogs, forums, Facebook etc.


On The Painting Front

Not much progress. I have almost finished the horses (just the tack to do); the dragoons have had flesh, jackets and muskets painted; the farrier has had flesh, shirt and apron painted; his assistant has had flesh and breeches painted; the artillery supplies have had metal dry-brushed and the base colour for the wood done. The very Camp Marshall has had his face painted and is sporting a lovely pink jacket over orange breeches, with a yellow belt and deep red sash.

The main reason I haven't done much painting is that work has been incredibly hectic the past few days and I didn't feel like painting when I got home yesterday. I have done a little bit this evening, but not as much as I'd have liked as I needed to rethink my Swiss list ahead of my game against Ian tomorrow night. I won't be able to get any more painting done until Sunday as tomorrow night will see me getting my bags packed for the Derby Worlds - most of the folks from our club who are going are heading up on Friday after a quick repast of tapas in Camden.

Incoming Prize!; WIP Stuff

A little while back, Marzio over at Fog's Soldiers had a prize draw for having reached 10,000 page views. I was one of the 3 winners, and my prize arrived in the post today :)

Now, you really should head over to his blog and start following - unbelievably he only has 30 - yes, 30 - followers right now and his blog really does deserve many more than that. Go on - you know it makes sense.

Anyway, onto the prize. On opening the incredibly well wrapped package, the first thing to fall out was this lovely note from Luisa and Marzio:

Then it was down to tearing a load of plastic wrapping off to reveal a baggie with this lovely figure in it:

I think I'll have to get some decent display boxes for this and my "Honorary Reject" figure soon, so that I can put them out on display somewhere.

And a huge thanks to Marzio and Luisa for my prize.


WIP Stuff

Last night - prepped the third unit of Reiters
Tonight - prepping the second unit of dragoons
Tomorrow - prepping the second group of artillery