Batman Miniature Game

   This is another of those odd posts where I talk about models that have been painted for ages (a good 2-3 years in this case) but for some reason missed my blog first time round.
   The Batman Miniatures game is a game that I knew I was going to buy into the moment I saw the models, then the more I saw Michael Awdry mucking about with the game the more carried away I got. I suspect the models missed my blog as I was trying to do a full gang post for each side and it just slipped by when they were finally finished. From being finished, each model went into a foam case and that's where they lived while I tried to get some scenery finished.

   I had been reading the various Batman series' since the New 52 started coming out - it felt like a good jumping on point - focussing on Batman, Nightwing and Batgirl, so I knew what figures to pick up. The coolest Batman figure I could find, a Robin (Damien) and Nightwing as a replacement Batman, then some cops to get some extra bodies. Albert was free when I bought the rulebook.

   Then I needed a bad guy and Bane felt like a good opponent. When painting him and building his crew I wanted a colour scheme to unite them and allow me to reuse them into other crews if I expanded my collection, so I kept the scheme as one of two things; prison orange or black and urban camo.

   In the last week or so I have been trying to cull my collection and while talking about this game to one of my mates, it dawned on me that I had spent all the time and money on getting two crews together and yet I had never actually played it. So the two of us set about trying to fix that. 

   As it was our first game we kept the crew numbers small (3 a piece) and reputation low - named character and two generics to add bodies, then proceeded to blunder our way through the rules. The sides were: Nightwing and two cops (one had a taser) vs Bane and two prisoners (one had double handguns). While we definitely got rules wrong, especially in the first game, we picked up more of the nuances as we went on to the point I think we were pretty close to how the game is supposed to run.

   As this game was on the cull list (not having been played and being an easy list of models to shift) playing a game was designed to be the play or sell designator and I, have to say, I think the Batman Miniature Game has saved itself. While it won't see the table as often as some of my other games and I doubt I will be investing in many (if any) more figures for it, the game was really good fun and that was with minimal crews.

Thanks for reading

Gaming mats

     It's been another couple of weeks with very little hobby to put to my name, a mix of extra hours at work and spending time trying to bond a newly adopted rabbit to our current pair, but that doesn't mean I haven't got anything done.

     A couple of months back I backed a gaming mat kickstarter from a company called Ceri Designs. The guy behind it wanted to make great quality, versatile, but most importantly, affordable, cloth mats and as I have been on the verge of buying some mats for a while, I took the plunge, backing it for 2 of the 3x3 mats. First things first, this is the first kickstarter that I have backed that has delivered on time, that definitely deserves a mention, secondly, much as he has taken a bit of slack for the designs being fairly modular (you'll see that on my second mat) it's not something that I am overly worried about, the actual printing quality is really good and if his claims are anything to go by these things are wash proof and game proof, I'm not sure you can go too far wrong. These are definitely some of the better quality mats I have ever seen, so I am looking forward to seeing them in bigger sizes next.

     The first mat I picked was a modern urban one, I have a slowly growing collection of urban buildings that I am building and painting/spraying as and when I get enough time, my lead mountain now includes a secondary mdf peak. The mat itself is a simple crossroads, which is the basic layout I generally prefer, you can make sure both sides have a fair game, but can block off roads to get rid of lanes of fire if you want.

       The second mat I got was the basic flagstones mat that every gaming mat company has to have on their books. I picked the most basic one in the range, simply because I felt I could get more use out of a basic one used well than shoehorn a more specific mat into other uses. I can definitely see this being used for small games of VBCW, Frostgrave, Open Combat and maybe even Lion's/Dragon's Rampant.

Thanks for reading

*Edited* - The website is now live; http://www.ceridesign.xyz/

A confession of weakness

      This is going to be a quick post to show what I have been up to recently and be a bit of a taster of a project I hoping to finish over the next month or so. 

       This building is the first bit of scenery for (and I particularly blame Sir Awdry for this) the Batman Miniatures Game, that I have got to a sensible point. I have a few more details to add to it, but I want to add them once I have a few under my belt so I can spread them out a bit better.

      The building is a small block from the Sarissa Precision city block range, with a couple of extra floors to give the board a bit of height. The gargoyles are from the Knight Miniatures range just to make it look a bit more 'Gotham-y'.

    Lastly is the Frank Miller Batman that I painted a year or so ago. Weirdly, he isn't in either crew(?) that I have planned to play with my mate, but I thought he looked a bit more natural outside this building than in the terrible photo I gave him last time.

Batman

      I'm still going to save the vbcw unit for later, but I thought Batman deserved his own post. This model was a proper spur of the moment buy, I doubt I will ever play the game, it was just a really nice figure I couldn't say no to.

       The model is from Knight Models and, to be honest, the whole range is really pretty. I must have spent a good 20 minutes standing by the rack trying to work out which one was going to be heading home with me. The only disappointing thing was that I thought I was buying the Batman in the picture below, as this is the cover from the blister pack . . . On the other hand there is a Robin in the range as well, so who knows if he will turn up at some point.