Endgame - End Of The Line - No Spoilers

My world is full of disappointment. Many of my long loved IPs have turned on me and left me feeling kind of blue. I'm looking at you Star Wars and Fallout. I guess everything has its time and will eventually fall away and loose it's impact. A few others crap out fairly quickly and some take a decade or more.

I have been following the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Iron Man came out. Although I have not loved every single film they have all been good in their own way. Entropy has been a terrible thing and I was expected it to fail and die eventually.

Last night I went to see Avengers: Endgame. The last Avengers film had set up a high level of expectation for me. I was concerned that the season had peaked too early. Endgame had a lot to live up to and there was obviously going to be a lot to fit in in a short time. Well I say a short time, it was three hours long. With many of the characters dead it was time to see what Disney were going to do. I mean how badly could they screw it up (yes I have seen The Last Jedi and yes that was sarcasm).

So I sat through the trailers wondering how good or bad things were going to be. I had been sat on the fence for a few days before hand.  So there I sat, waiting to find out.

Disappointment was not the word I would have chosen. It was a bit of a roller coaster in fact. The plot was good. the characters were the ones acting like the ones we know and have come to love. Triumph and tragedy is all around. Tony and Steve ae still at loggerheads but they manage to work through it. It almost managed to bring a tear to my eye a few times. It is well worth the money.

The only thing I didn't like was there was no easter egg at the end. I know there is a Spiderman film on the cards (I like the actor and he is the best Spiderman I have seen but it's still Spiderman) but the absence of the easter egg makes me wonder about the future of the franchise. This is more than ten years down the line and the actors may have aged just a little bit but I really love these guys.  I cannot help but think about what comes next and, being a true fan, I worry.

Painting Handle Vs Paint Pot Handle

For a while now I have been using paint pots as a base for my figures whilst painting them. It makes the painting process much easier. It keeps my fingers off the figure I'm working on, especially the head. You can get better angles with the brushes with a figure on top of a paint pot.

For preference I use the older GW paint pots (pictured below). At one point I used to turn them upside down as the lip around the base of the pot fits around a 2p base quite nicely. I did try corks and bits of wood, maybe ten years ago but these didn't really seem to work. Unless you are the kind of painter that pins figures to bases corks do not seem to work so well. Bits of wood did not seem to do much at all.

It's big

Over time I have made up quite a sizable collection of empty of empty GW pots. At any one there are probably forty pots on the workbench. Of course you have to add plenty of Blue Tac and this needs to be replaced every now and again. Blue Tac, being what it is, is not especially tacky and things will fall off if you don't press them down hard enough and even then, they can still fall off.

About a 20mm base

The painting handle has a lot more positive pressure on the base. I could see a figure being knocked out of it but is seems unlikely that it would just fall out. It's a good size to fit in your hand and is a little more comfortable to hold. It has more heft to it with a fairly balanced centre of gravity. This extra weight might not be so good if you have to hold on to it for  a few hours.

And this one is about 50mm

All in all the painting handle is pretty good. I've had a go painting with it and it works well. In the round, the handle beats a paint pot every time but only just by a fraction. In the round, paint pots are free (well kind of) and the painting handle costs £5. To my mind, if you are the kind of painter who focuses on quality not quantity (really not me) or concentrating on a single figure then this is a worthwhile investment. If you are painting an army in a batch of ten figures or more, I am not sure that you would want to be buying ten of these or swapping the figure out every time.

Blood Bowl Elfheim Eagles & Other Stuff

Although the Elfheim Eagles for Blood Bowl have been in the offing for a while there are been some genuine publicity for them today and alongside that there are a few other new releases pending.

In the first supplement for the game, Death Zone all the elf teams got a mention. It seemed odd to me that they haven't come out earlier as they tended to be one of the more popular teams especially if you liked passing plays and dying players. I was expecting the other elf teams at some point but as GW came up with a kitbash way to do Dark Elves and High Elves could easily use this box (well maybe with a bit of conversion) leaving the wood elves to do, so they may not be hitting the website any time soon.

The Full Team

The box set has all the usual stuff. In order to field a reasonable team you are still going to need a couple of boxes. This is probably going to leave you with four of the twelve figures in the second box (two blitzers and two throwers) being pretty much useless but this has been the case with the other boxes as well. There are a couple of deals including one with all the new elf releases and another with just the team and the dice. Neither of these seem to have any cost saving though.
It's the look of the figures that is all important and they do look good. They have the distinctive elf style and grace. I thought the catcher was nicely posed and the thrower and the blitzer look pretty good to.

Not a Nazi salute

As I said earlier there is plenty of other new material and some "new" material which is also on pre-order. There is obviously a set of dice. As all teams now have a set of dice I guess they are just following form and they do seem to make money. There are card sleeves for the special play cards. At £7 for fifty they are no prohibitively expensive and are almost value for money. There are three team decks also due out. Obviously the elf team deck is there as is the deck for humans and orcs and I assume decks for other teams will follow. There is also the Almanac which is everything from Death Zone 1 + 2 plus a few extras. I haven't seen a copy of DZ 2 so this book might make it on to the shopping list.

The full Monty

There are also several new boards. Along with the Elf Team release the is a nicely manicured elf pitch on one side and a wintery pitc on the other. This comes with suitable dug-outs. Also out is the Blood On The Snow board with orc and human themed winter boards. Then there is the goblin board which has two fairly mashed up looking pitches. Both of these also come with dug-outs. Forge World have also done a couple of neoprene boards.

All in all they seem to have made it on to the wishlist.

Red Dwarf XII

There are not many series that keep going and going. In truth there was a very long gap in the middle but aside from a few soaps and documentary series, I can't think of any that have been going since 1988. I recall the first season being the biggest distraction from doing my A levels. If I watched it once, I watched it twenty times. So often in fact that, even now, I can still quote it word for word.

Back from the dead twice, at least, the show is going from strength to strength. I keep expecting to to fade but it keeps coming back stronger. The plots still find different twists on what is essentially the same themes. Pretty much the entire universe seems to want this crew to suffer but not nearly as much as the crew members want each other to suffer. Each episode sounds like a afternoon with my mates. The bitching and the infighting is just like the real world even if me and my mates manage to throw in some quotes from Red Dwarf.

Whilst this is the second batch of shows shot in 2016, the tone is similar but different. Different enough to make it look and feel like a new season. Nearly all seasons of the series cultivate a new look and whilst this season doesn't, the vibe still feels fresh. I get the feeling that this season has more than a tip of the hat to the problems we all face in the real world.

Zombie Movie Night

My other half is out last night. This means that I get to watch something other that cut price Marvel TV shows (seriously I have watched Legion, Agent Carter, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and we are working through the second season of Daredevil prior to watch Defenders, two or three episodes almost every night for months and I only liked the first two).

So what am I choosing to watch? Well cut price zombie films (well all but one of them is fairly low budget), obviously.

Starting off with Cooties. This is a fairly standard zombie escape the building horror. The film is set in an elementary school (the American school system is a mystery to me). it's major difference is that if you have gone through puberty you are immune. Despite that, you can still end up as dinner. There is no help coming as the phones are out and school Head takes all phone off everyone. It's a nice twist on the survival horror type of zombie film with some great quirky characters (Rainn Wilson plays an outstanding steroidal PE teacher). I can see me turning this into a scenario for a zombie game.

 I went on to watch What We Become. This is a movie that takes itself a bit more seriously but then it's Danish (I am not saying the Danes have no sense of humour and I have met six of them :) (yes that was a joke)). It starts out with a flu epidemic and everyone in the house (and several others) are sealed in (it looks just like E.T.). It has some nice plot elements and is a very character driven drama. If you were planning a zombie game, this would not be the one to choose.

The ReZort is a bad movie. It has just about every zombie movie cliche going. This does not make it a bad movie in itself (zombie movies are all about the cliches). The movie takes place on an island full of zombies set aside for rich tourists to go on hunting holidays. I don't see this as a great idea for a zombie campaign but I guess you could squeeze a one shot game out of it.

Of all of them, The Girl With All The Gifts has probably been the star of the evening. The characters are all inside some sort of bunker with a load of children wo are trussed up and kept in high security cells with no readily apparent reason. As you start to piece things together things just get weirder. I can't say too much without spoiling the reveal but it has a good plot with a few twists in it to keep you on your toes. This has the potential for a great campaign and could be turned into something to keep players on their toes.

All in all, not a bad evening's entertainment.

Blood Bowl Releases

There are still a number of Blood Bowl Figures on the workbench in various stages of completion. Despite being in the throws of Zomtober, I still keep looking at them.  It's Blood Bowl that is really taking up much of the rest of my Birthday list (soon to rechristened the Christmas List). I have a bit of sitting around time so I was looking up what's new in the world of Blood Bowl.

The answer wasn't much...But there is a bit of promise out there. Whilst there is nothing new on the GW there is some stuff on Forgeworld site.

I did a post about a Minotaur big guy which is now out along with the counters for a chaos team. Then I found that there is a chaos team with all the bits in one box.  Chaos was always one of my fave teams so I guess I will take a punt when I next get the urge. I am not sure that I would buy the tokens at £8 when a whole team is £20 but they look pretty good.

On the downside, the elves are coming. I hate elves. A mate of mine, Martin, loves them and all his characters were either elves or behaved like elves if the game didn't have them in it. This may be why I hate them. Uppity, smug, arrogant and annoying. Yes Martin, I am talking about the elves.

Now I am a completist so I will get round to buying them. This is not a big ask as the figures are really, really nice.

If I can make them look this good, I might actually have to play a game with them. the only time I have used the elves I have is to practice against them. The Christmas list will just have to get bigger.

Human Team Ogre

Now that I am nearing finishing enough players for the Human Blood Bowl Team, I thought it was time I should have a look at this figure now. What I am really doing is avoiding finishing the Orc Troll and dry brushing the Human Blitzers (not to mention the bad back I now have) that are already in the queue.

I hate doing bigger figures and they never really seem to get finished. They seem to take me a dog's age to complete as I seem to lose the will part of the way through. This figure is one of the few Big Guys in the game that I am likely to play so I figured I should get him done.

Anyway back to the Ogre. He is a nice brutish figure and really conveys what I think of as an ogre. The model is reasonably easy to put together. The right arm is a bit fiddly to get in properly but it did get there in the end. I had a few problems seating the number plate on the front as well. However, when it does slide together it makes an awesome looking figure. It was almost good enough to get me to buy some GW ogres for my fantasy RPG games as I don't actually have any.

For now at least, I have chosen not to place the head on at the moment. The plan is to keep it separate until it has been painted so I can add some details. It is currently on the workbench and is in the next batch of figures to get done.

Scythe

Scythe is a boardgame roughly based on the battles for European domination in the Victorian era with giant stompy robots. I think it is currently Rank 8 on Boardgame Geek which is pretty good going for a new game. So I figured it must have something about it. I looked for it for ages but couldn't find it, then it popped up at my local bookshop so it seemed a bit of a no brainer.

It has decent quality components with some pretty nice, is stylised artwork. Some wooden counters and about thirty plastic minis.There is enough there that you know it's going to be an involved game to play. All in all it was probably worth the sixty five pounds I paid for it.

As a game it is all about resource management. It starts of slowly but as soon as you start to build up your empire the game speeds up. There is enough going on to make the game difficult to see who is in the lead which seems to work to keep all the players keen as you seem to have the feeling you are still in with a chance of winning.

It is complex but not complicated. There are many mechanisms vying for your interest and all need some level of attention. If you favour one you may well not do so good but you do get bonuses for  doing this at the end of the game. To win you have to craft a suitable strategy but this is doable but is is all about the clash of strategies.

The mechanics are intriguing enough to make it novel. Having played it I am sure that there are a dozen ways to play and still stand a chance of winning. Each nationality has it's own flavour and special rules. None of these are game breakers and the sense is that you have to play to that nation's strengths in order to come out on top. All in all I think this game has good replayability. From what I have seen I could happily play this game a couple of dozen times and still find it interesting enough to play it a few more times.

Having played it twice it plays well as a five and a three player game although as a five player game it takes a long time and is a lot more dog eat dog. The board gets very busy in the five player game so there is a bit more planning to do. Turns are rapid enough that you stay interested, especially in the three player game. All in all I am glad I got it.

One Hour Wargames

I got a copy of One Hour Wargames by Neil Thomas a little while back. The idea seemed to fascinate me when I heard about them and I went out and searched for a copy of the rules. I have played a few Two Hour Wargames rules and they simply lie, it's much more like four hours to a game but I liked the general idea. I am not doing much wargaming at the moment and would like to do some more. It has to be said that these rules give me that sort of scope to be able to do that without running out of time to walk the dog or feed the kids.

Essentially there are three bits to the book. Each period has a short description about what warfare was like in that era. It's only a few pages of details but it acts as a raison d'etre for the rules. This is followed by a few pages of rules. Most rules are common to all periods but there is some variation depending on the era. Repeat this for all the periods it covers. After this are many generic scenarios which allow you to run the game. Simple.

The basic idea put forward by the author is that games companies want to sell you lots of stuff and that really, most gamers at least, do not have the space for the table let alone all the figures and terrain. That seems fair and it has to be said that I have a lot of sympathy for this idea. Instead of having massive armies most battles take place with about six stands on a three foot square table. Sometimes there are a few less stands and rarer still with a few more. If you are doing it with smaller scale figures you could probably get them painted up in a weekend at most.

Sadly though I think wargamers are missing a trick as this set of rules does not fit the niche. There are two schools of wargaming as far as I can see. The easiest way to discuss them reduces the ideas down to two basic, reasonably controversial groups, style over substance and substance over style. I know this is a little of track but it will become obvious where I am going in a minute.

Style over substance sounds a lot harsher than it is. Here it's the look of the terrain and the figures that make an extremely visually appealing game is at the core of what these gamers do. Hand made terrain and pro-painted figures are the order of the day. these are the people who will not allow unpainted figures on the board. The rules can be important and in fairness people will usually pick a nice set of rules to. These are not people who like to do things that are not by the (rule) book.The emotional payoff comes from people telling you how beautiful a game it was.

Substance over style is at the other end. Terrain can be quite basic and maybe even symbolic (roads made of of brown paper envelopes as an examples) although it might be purchased it is at the cheaper end of the market or very basically made. Figures are usually painted by the players and will sometimes not be painted at all. These are the people who think they might want to try out a period so buy some airfix or similar kits and just plonk the figures on the battlefield. Rules and more importantly the feel of the game (is it historical?) are what is important. These are the people that like to tinker with the rules and maybe even write the rules themselves. The emotional payoff come from people telling them that they had a good game.

One Hour Wargames is a good solid set of rules and I have enjoyed playing the game. They are great for solo play with limited time and space. It's simple mechanics are easy to pick up and can be played with just about all periods. The trouble is that they do not meet the needs of the style of substance or the substance over style players.

It does not offer the style over substances players the pretty game and it does not offer the substance over style gamer an interesting set of rules. Whilst the rules are basic they cover most eventualities. The system covers a vast range of periods and gives a few subtle ideas for each period. Neil Thomas has tried to keep things simple as he sees it but this means that there are only four troop types per period when in many periods there are clearly more than that. Keeping a common rules framework has the advantage or disadvantage of making the mechanics a little overly simple.

So why do a review of something I don't seem to like? Well the truth is that I do like them. With the absence of a lot of mechanics, you can concentrate on a strategy. They make an excellent solo game as a result. Each side starts out with a simple objective and you can just get at it. Each period is just begging to be tinkered with. Pretty much every gamer I have spoken to who has played them does not like them but wants to have a play about with them to make them better. This is true of most of the really successful wargames rules over the years. People want a game with just a bit more, a ninety minute wargame perhaps? If you have a play about with them, add some more mechanics, some extra troop categories and more units on the table it would become a pleasure of a game.

Star Wars Rebellion

The day has been a little slow for my liking and I haven't got much to say about the day so I thought I'd talk about playing Star Wars Rebellion. I last played this a few weeks ago now and I have played it once before that. Both times I have ended up playing the Imperials. Obviously, I need to wear black and start breathing heavily more, you know, just to get into character.

My initial impression was that this was Star Wars Risk. This wasn't fair and as I began to play the game I started to get a better idea of the game. Although it's got a Death Star in the game, it plays more like the plan to find the rebellion during the Empire Strikes Back rather than A New Hope. The Empire are sending out drones and playing cunning rouses to find their opposition. You are also looking to capture rebel heroes and if you can get Luke, you can even convert him to the Dark Side.

There is some production management involved. Although it plays a role, really the name of the game is get-em. Cards and territory determine how much kit you get and more developed planets get you the resources quicker. Really the need to concentrate on this aspect is secondary. Resources are going to happen as neither side can really stop the other from acquiring resources. From mid game on you main problem seems to be not that you haven't got resources but that you are running out of tokens. Speaking of tokens, the game comes with plenty of them. The quality is also pretty good.None of them are in any particular scale although the infantry could probably just about work as 15mm miniatures. Nothing else seems to fit together.

Blood Bowl Rumours

It seems that I might have been wrong about the goblin team. They might be the next one out on the shelves after the dwarves. This is probably going to coincide with the next Death Zone season book some time around Spring/April. It would follow that all the goblin specials would follow. there is a lot of them if I recall. There is some suggestion that there will be new secret weapons goblins as well

Speaking of the dwarves (and presumably the other stuff that has been seen recently as well) they will probably be out around the end of the month or the beginning of next month. There seem to be some dwarven  star players too.

There is talk of an extra skaven booster pack. If I could I would have picked up two skaven packs yesterday so this might save me some money. There are possibly some skaven star players too.

There was also talk of a skaven/dwarf pitch. Judging by how quickly that one ended up on eBay for £100+, I had better get in there early for that.

I would also guess that the elves are coming. They are in the Death Zone Season One book as are their star players. This is a shame as elves suck :( Others are saying that some of them might even be next year. Some of the figures might be in resin MIGHT be in resin later down the line

Finally the next Death Zone is likely to have the underworld and chaos pact teams and more special play cards have been kind of confirmed.

Blood Bowl - Do I Like It?

Yes. Yes I do. And no.

The game looks very nice when you pick it up. The components are a step up in quality from previous editions. Nothing other than actual cards and the pitch is  Everything seems bigger or better. The range ruler, throw in template and scatter template are made of plastic and not acetate sheet. This makes them a little more user friendly. Shame that the range ruler does not seem to fit in the box nicely. Counters are now plastic rather than card and each team gets it's own set. The minis are bigger as are the bases. This means that the old pitches seem a little too small. I am not sure if this means that older minis will need re-basing for tournaments. I like the idea that the each sprue comes with some game balls. One of the problems always used to be losing the few balls that you got with the game. There are player cards in addition to the special player cards. Getting back into it, the standard player cards are a fantastic aid. The player cards are so  good that it great if these were produced for all times. It is essentially keeping the same old rules. This is really good. I haven't found anything that looks like an effective change.

The figures, for me at least, are just a bit too spiky. They have gone the way of all recently released GW fantasy miniatures IMHO. The snap fit figures are a blessing and a curse. They give the figures great animation. The snap fix is far from perfect and this has lead to be biggest gripe. See the Golden Orc Award post if you want to know how I really feel about it. It is the kind of thing that seems to come with CAD designed figures. there is no chance that they will be compatible with older figures. That is a shame but to be expected.

The game does not come with stats for all the teams. There are more teams in the Season One book and I suspect that there will be at least another two books to cover all the teams. In fact there seem to be a lot of teams missing at the moment. There aren't so many special play cards. Again, I suspect there will be more later on. There was only the one extra team, the Skaven at the time of release. I have all these teams and they are fairly standard teams. It looks like the dwarves are about to be released and usually GW release products every month. I am guessing that they are spreading the popular teams among the books. Probably a marketing ploy and again, this is to be expected.

Overall: Blood Bowl is a great game. It hasn't been tinkered with so much that it makes it a different game. It means that it is going to get a new lease of life, which is a really good thing. It's different enough that people are probably going to buy the stuff. This gives the game some legs. Assuming that GW stick with it, and all the teams get released I would be a happy man. I would have like figures that were less spiky and compatible with the old ones but this was a bit of a punt. On the whole I am quite happy.

Dead Rising 4 Or Christmas And Zombies

The year is about to come to an end. Zombies, what is better than a game about zombies? A zombie game set at Christmas. Talk about senseless violence. I love the franchise nearly as much as Fallout. I think it was when I got to kill a horde of zombies with a park bench in the first game that I was sold on it. Hordes of the things that never seem to stop coming. You can pick up  practically anything and use it to club things to death. In the first game I had a kill count of over 100,000 zombies. After four days with the game I am just touching 30,000 and now, a few days later I am almost at the 100,000 mark.

Guns seem to be playing a bigger role in the game. In the first game you could count yourself lucky to get a pistol. With this game (which is set in the future) guns, even energy weapons, are much more common. This makes the zombies much easier to kill. I am a lot less likely to die.

Creating combo weapons was the focus of Games two and in three and now four, combo vehicles are the big thing. Taking a segway and a golf cart, a classic car and a ski-mobile and a go cart and an electric wheelchair for example. All good fun. A quick step to mas slaughter.

I got a copy of Dead Rising just before Christmas. I finished it three days later. It was a rocky ride but I only died about a dozen times and bear in mind this was achieved in a few days whilst I have been busy buying Christmas trees and all the usual seasonal stuff. Story line is therefore a little light but who cares when there are zombies to kill right? There just isn't enough game there to keep me happy. That said I have started it again, finished it and started it again, just to find all the trophies.

There is even a Christmas sticking stuffer. All the zombies become Santa's elf helper zombies and a few other bits. Nice but I have turned it off already.

For various reasons. the Character of Frank West, the main protagonist of the game is a character I associate with more than any other. I should probably get myself a camera.

The game is set in a place called Willamette. Oddly the same place where a lot of the action takes place in the book The Postman. It has a massive shopping mall which is odd for a settlement which is home to three hundred people.

Red Dwarf XI

There isn't much TV that I can quote almost word for word. The first six seasons of Red Dwarf are part of that limited range of shows for me. Thinking about it, Hitchhikers and Hyperdrive are two of the others so sci-fi comedy features quite highly. Red Dwarf took up a huge part of my life in my late teens and early twenties. It's odd that four characters that have a number of personal issues have managed to attract such a huge following over the years. I guess it is because there is a little of the characters in all of us. Or is it just me?

So it is back for another season. Next year it will be thirty years old and it's still going. You never know what to expect when shows have been going on for so long. Having watched the first episode of season XI I have to say it's still on form. If anything it has gotten slightly better than recent seasons. The production values seems to have gotten better, particularly the sets and the special effects. Where things are really noticeable is the scripts. After thirty years, it is expected that scripts should start to falter and plot lines seem to be consistently absent. No such problems are here. The script still seems fresh and there are a few lines, among the usual tropes, that make you laugh out loud.

The early seasons did of give me an education in many things that were really important, but gave me a bigger insight into the human condition. After all, it was Red Dwarf that taught me that hell really is being stuck in a room for eternity with your mates, not Sartre. I am proud to be one of the "boys from the dwarf" even after all this time.

Miniature Painting Guides On YouTube

I have been looking for inspiration a lot lately. Or was that I have been lacking inspiration lately. Normally I look at a lot of forums to see if I have lost my direction there. All the pretty pictures. Recently I got a new TV. The thing is huge. I am going to have to build a new TV stand to cope with it. It has a voice activated search facility. This has revolutionised my life. I used to occasionally use YouTube on the TV but typing all the info in took an age and was about as user friendly as a 1980s word processor. Voice activated YouTube is way much more fun. For the most part it is great but sometimes it goes wrong. Try explain why suggestions for lingerie keep coming up when you were in fact searching for 4K.

When I started painting, I had a guide in the back of an old Games
Workshop Catalogue. It hadn't realised that it was that old, I have been painting longer than I thought. This was good to start with but I git all I was going to get out with it by the time I had finished my first batch of figures, Where to go then? Well nowhere really. There were a few articles about painting in magazines, maybe about one a year and they usually covered the same old ground. There were a few books but these were not cheap.

These days, you can learn a lot of stuff very, very quickly. That is the power of YouTube.

Dr Faust's Painting Clinic. The Doc is one of my personal faves. It is a difficult between the Doc, ASS and Tabletop Minions for my real faves. The guy has been around a long time and has a lot of skill. He has got some good ideas for airbrush work. Mainly fantasy stuff but some good sci-fi stuff for GW as well. Doc Faust has some skills and is all about the painting. It's

Tabletop Minions. If I had to pick a site I like the most I am not sure I could do it. Tabletop Minions would be pretty close to the top of the list. he has given me some great ideas. He is easy to listen to and has some insights into the wider hobby. There is stuff here that is useful for speeding up the painting process and other stuff for putting in more detail. He is more about fantasy, with a little bit of sci and even some modern ish stuff there as well. He also has a lot on interesting polemics about the hobby.

Wargames Soldier's and Strategy. I am loathed to put up this page because it is much more of a comercial site that the others. It is included for one reason, it's good work. There is a range range of figures from all sort of periods and manufacturers but pretty much all in 28mm. The tutorials are good and have a lot of tips in them. This is a great place to go if someone has a particular project that coincides with what is here.

Engineer Jeff. Another nice site, A lot of his stuff concentrates a lot on Reaper Bones which he seems to back heavily. As it is all about the Bones, there is some good advice about painting them. Although not the best painter of the bunch (which is no criticism) but he has some solid painting advice which is worth listening to. A great site for fantasy ideas, especially reaper.

Miniwargamer Jay. Perhaps my most recent, good find on YouTube. He has a huge amount of very specific tutorials about how to paint different colours, skin tones and furs. There are a lot of videos. He has helped me painting yellows, which for a long time has been a colour I have chosen to avoid. The guy has some good skills which are easy to digest,

I don't think any of these guys are winners of any major painting awards. This was kind of a choice. They are all pretty good practical painters who do work solidly above my standard. To put it another way, these are the guys just about anyone can aspire to. They have skills to pass on and some have nice ideas about the hobby that are worth a listen. If you watch what they do and put it into practice, you might get as good as they are.

28mm Zombie Minis List

I started out with a few old fantasy tribe zombies and some old Citadel plastic skeletons in my first zombie game. For the most part these are on the small side. This was largely stuff I have had for years and some of which were the first figures I ever purchased. I had also picked up some Alternative Armies zombies along the way. This made a quick if challenging game. I decided quickly that I wanted more zombies. Lots more zombies.

I look at the zombie miniatures I own and worry that what I end up with will be something like the undead version Village People although I do need to find a motorcycle cop to make that happen. These are what I call feature zombies.

At the time I started buying zombies, there weren't too many zombies to choose from. A few manufacturers had a few small ranges. This quickly changed. You can look and minis manufacturers without finding something that works for a zombie game. Anyway, I thought I'd do a list of the zombies I have used and plan to use in the near future. Over time, I will add some more in. I know that there are plenty of zombie lists out there already. This one may be a little more subjective (in my mind that's a good thing) than some.

Copplestone – Sadly there are only ten of them. These are some of the best zombies available in 28mm. They seem to stand out in all the pictures of games that people post. Characterful without standing out too much. Copplestone are just on the heroic side of 28mm but their human zombies are not all that out of proportion with some of the smaller stuff. They have a lot of civilians that would make a nice addition to any range. They are reasonably priced and well worth the money.

Cold War Miniatures – Cold War has a nice sized range of zombies with about sixty five plus some survivors. Unlike Copplestone, they fit well with anything in the traditional 28mm scale. They have a nice mix of all the human type zombies you could want. Whilst American themed zombies are not all that hard to come by, old War have some British themed zombies too. They have a few kid and crawler zombies and even one that is on fire. I do like my feature zombies and this really dates back to the original dawn of the dead. This range has some nice ones such as Elvis, Hari Krishna (like the one from Dawn), a British Guardsman in bearskin and a whole range of others. They seem to be available through eBay at the moment. All in all a nice range. The odd figure in the range requires a little construction but nothing major. I am not sure if they still do metal bases but if they do, they are very good.

Eureka – Eureka have two nice sets of zombies and a lot of modern military types. The first pack of ten different eviscerated zombies. They look pretty good and fit in with the cold war stuff very nicely in terms of size if not style. They have a style all of their own. This makes them great as special types of zombies. I have seen these painted up very nicely as Glowing Ones from Fallout and their tattered look makes them look good for eviscerated zombie types. They also do a pack of zombies getting out of barrels that are similar in style to the first pack. I have seen these used as great terrain markers but don;t actually own any myself. What they d have in addition to this are some nice modern and cold war military figures. The have some Americans and Russians in NBC gear. The Americans really make me think of the early Romero films. Not a huge range but well worth putting an order in.

Hasslefree – These are a great company to deal with and they do some cracking miniatures. There range of zombies is quite small (about a dozen) but they do some nice miniatures. They are the place to get a zombie surfer. One of the most ubiquitous zombie miniatures on the is Ray (not Shaun). A zombie with a cricket bat. They do a nice zombie mutant/small tank. Again the great thing about Hasslefree is not their zombies but their zombie hunters. This is one of the best ranges out there. All are good characters. Again, these all fit in well with the traditional 28mm stuff out there. Their single figures are not cheap but are very nice. They do have a set of five zombies which is reasonably priced.

Studio – These started to come out about the time I was finishing my big push on zombies. If they had been available at the time this would be a lot smaller post as I think most of what I would have binged on would have been Studio. Sadly I only have a few of them. They have everything I could ever want apart from zombie dogs. Lots of female zombies which other ranges lack like kids and crawlers. They have a nice range for hospital scenarios and some of them look like the cast of Scrubs. They also have a lot if characterful stuff. There are zombies that seem very like the zombies from Left 4 Dead. They have a Santa, bride and groom, soldiers, police, clowns, superman and even Harry Potter.

Tengu – I like these minis a lot. They are a touch smaller than the regular 28mm zombies but are not so small in terms of body size that they look out of place with others. They just look slightly shorter.
If you look back I have posted some of their Grey zombies in the past and some of their regular zombies here. It is not the biggest range in either scope or size but it tends towards the small but perfectly formed. One of the best things about this range is the fact that they have female zombies, which many ranges omit. They also have a couple of mutant type zombies that really make me think of Resident Evil.

Wargames Factory – In general I am not a big fan of plastic kits, they take too much time to put together and tend to be fairly fragile. More importantly, they seldom seem to fit with anything else. I actually own two boxes of Wargames Factory Modern Male zombies and they do assemble into something that fits in very well most of my other stuff. Because they are plastic you can in theory get a huge range of poses but there are quite a few that don't work to well. That said there are thousands that do. They can also be turned into corpses and crawlers with a knife, some green stuff and about five minutes.If you are looking to build a new zombie hoarde or bulk out what you have already, these are the zombies to go for. Although I don't own them they do have a pack of female zombies which is unusual. They also do two plastic box sets of survivors, one male and one female. This makes a wide enough range that you could populate your entire game with these minis.

Black Cat Bases – Their range of zombies is not huge and it does not really stand of from the crowd. I have used some of them as glowing ones. I think they are all badly beaten up and largely naked. The poses are not my favourite but they are not bad and cheap for metal figures. I have painted some of the as glowing ones but I am not sure they look as good in this role as the one from Eureka. They have a range of modern ghouls which are really fantastic. Again, not a huge range but these are really nice modern figures. They look like crazed teenager in hoodies and with pointed ears. There is one I don't own where the creature is coming out of a sewer which looks nicely threatening. They look a little like hunters in Left 4 Dead. They fit well with all normal 28mm figures.

RFAM – This company do have a a nice modern range with a number of zombies. I think I am right is saying that these are the grandaddy of modern zombies. All are nicely detailed sculpts. I've been a fan of their for a long time and a huge fan since they picked up the old Citadel 15mm Traveller minis which have featured on this blog several times. I got a boxed set of zombies a few years ago but I only have a few of these painted. There are some nice zombie minis and some quite a range of civilians and zombie hunter types. On the down side, the bases are very chunky on some of the models. I have added matches to one wooden base to even it out. If, like me you add a standard sized base to each figure, this is going to make them look a little tall. This is about the worst thing I can say about the minis. Some of them look very human and have little damage, which is a benefit and a curse depending on which way you look at them.

Westwind Productions – These are nicely generic so could probably be used in fantasy and pulp games as well and quite cheap as well. They are quite chunky though and definitely on the heroic side of 28mm. If your game features big chunky zombies, these will do nicely. The range features some nice zombie hunters and red necks which work well as survivors. This range would not be first on my list but there is something of the completest in me.

Foundry – Not a huge range and they are cowboys. Cowboys may sound like a strange idea but for a game set in the American South, they do okay and as ever, everyone needs a feature zombie. I painted one up for Zomtober last year.  They may be an impulse purchase but they fit is as slightly (but not unworkably) bigger than standard 28mm.

Stuff I wouldn't recommend
I do like the Zombie Plague game and miniatures. I ordered the full set and all the survivors from the states several years ago. The miniatures made by Fortress look very good too and they are impressive in the flesh as it were. Sadly they are huge compared to everything else and are closer to 32mm than 28mm. Some of the GW stuff looks very nice but next to none heroic 28mm it is a little chunky not to mention the fact that it's a kit. The stuff from the Zombies!!! game is really small for 28mm and wouldn't be all that out of place in a 20mm game although their zombie dogs might be worth a look.

Through The Ages

I played Through the Ages for the first time last weekend. I am a big fan of the Sid Meier's Civilisation game and Through the Ages runs in a pretty similar way to that game. There are some games that are a bit more like the computer game is some respects but this plays out the experience of civilization development better than the others. I am not going to do a full fledged review of the game but I will make a couple of observations.

Firstly, this is not a game where you can afford to fall behind in any area  of the game other than in culture (the benchmark for winning at the end). If you do, you will either fail to produce enough resources (food and ore) or fail to develop a big enough army (which was my failing). It is a game where you don't really get eliminated but you might become someones punchbag and source of free resources in which case you can retire with good grace.

It takes a good hour per player to finish plus a substantial learning experience at the beginning to get up to speed. There are a lot of variables to keep in mid and a consequently large number of dishes to keep spinning. You will have to pay attention when you for the duration of the game as taking your eye off the ball will let the opposition take a swipe.

Not sure I am going to buy it bit it is a game worth playing and a lot of fun.

X-Com: Enemy Unknown

Well Sa-t-an-ta (I have fogroteen how to spell, I think), wasn't bad to me this year. I got a copy of X-Com Enemy Unknown from my other half who has now lost the use of the remote control (when asked, all I have been able to say is that it is hidden in my secret mountain top lair or behind the sofa). For those of you who have gone back more than a few posts you will probably have picked up on the fact that I like a bit of X-Com. I like it so much that the blog even has a label for X-Com.

It has had a few detractors. Maybe it has lost some of it's re-playability. It doesn't seem to have as long a legs as the original. This could be me being a bit of an old fart. The game is one of my sacred cows and it hasn't done a bad job of it. I read a complaint online that it did not have many environments. It has way more than the original and any of the sequels and having played it through twice I haven't encountered that many duplicate scenarios.

The environments are really gorgeous. All game environments should look this good. I could see me trying to use some of the ideas in my tabletop games. Pity there is no really good zoom function but you can see the terrain disintegrate around you when you and the enemy miss. Having vehicles explode around you is a nice touch which can cause you to move when you really want to stay in cover.

The bad guys are interesting. I was kind of hoping for the old bad guys jazzed up a lot. They have been significantly re-imagined. This is not a bad thing but not always a good thing. Mostly I liked the aliens but the floaters are not what they once were and all have lost their cartoon/anime touches.  They variety of types has also dropped. So there are floaters and hevay floaters but not pilots, navigators, medics, soldiers, commanders etc.I like what was there and wanted the bad guys to but updated and enhanced versions of what they were. They look much more hi tech and the greys do look really evil. There are a few new aliens. They have plenty of twists to catch the unwary off guard.

On balance, better in some respects, not as good in others. I enjoyed playing it. I'll play it again on a harder level which I am sure will give it a much different vibe. I am glad I didn't pay full price for it though. I'd give it an 8 out of 10 which is a shame as I would have loved to have given this a ten. It's worth buying but I doubt that I will be raving about it in a year let alone twenty years.

On the table top front, I can see that there are some good ideas. I look at the environments and think I could use what I have seen here to make a better game. There is a really nice idea for a train/tube station. The aliens have a few nice ideas which might turn into something on the tabletop. If there was anyone interested in making some figures for the old game or the new game, they would have a nice big order.

I am sorry that I haven't been able to do much table top stuff. I have done some but I am currently suffering from a chest infection which is crippling me. Sitting up is proving to be a problem. As soon as I do I start coughing. I was joking about having 72 hour TB that was going around. That was a week ago so not as funny anymore. My next dose of antibiotics are due soon. Still the blog looks like it is doing okay without me. I even had my first visitor from Bolivia today.

Walking Dead Season 3

Well it's out in the states and I am hoping to get a chance to watch it tomorrow but as I am in Spain I am not holding out too much help. It has got my zombie gaming mojo going.

I have just finished reading Rise of the governor and I am going through the comics again.  I have been doing a zombie RPG during the week and I am now really in the mood for it.

Red Dwarf The Verdict

I have waited for a few years for this. The level of anticipation in the Jackson Household was high. For the first few minutes I thought it was just going to be a replay of old episode on new sets. Which to be honest

would not have that bad. The old archetypes were there. After about five minutes of settling in, the first episode got better. It was novel enough and the same enough to keep the old Dwarfers happy.

The last mini series had some nice ideas but some how lacked that essential zest. RD X did not. It#'s funny. It's got it' head around the old and made them new again. The cast are starting to show their age (something to do with drugs or doing too many shows about the industrial revolution).

If my other half is reading this, the Blueray will be out just in time for Christmas.