As stated previously, there were a number of good looking participation games at the show. I took some photos, but unfortunately the lighting was abysmal. However so have come out ok, with a bit of tweaking in iPhoto, so here are the first batch.
East Street Games had this great looking zombie game using their Bullets and Brains range...
Prodos Games had this great looking Aliens versus Predator game running and fifty odd lucky Kickstarter backers walked away with the frirst prints of the new game...
Hawk Wargames had this awesome game of Dropzone Commander. Now that is what I call terain!
Continuing my tour of things that caught my eye at the UK Games Expo is Guild Ball. I'd not heard anything about this or last year's Kickstarter that brought it into production. Steamforged Games' Guild Ball is a game of fantasy football, using human teams based around professional guilds, playing a form of medieval mob football.
The game looked pretty cool and the miniatures are just stunning. Sadly for the most part the lighting defeated the powers of my Blackberry, so you will just have to trust me when I say the Fisherman's Guild team is stunning...
Wandering around the halls at the UK Games Expo, I came across a new magazine being launched called Tabletop Gaming. Published by Warners Group, it was apparently planned as a one off looking at "101 games you need to play", it will now be a quarterly release.
At 162 full colour pages it is a weighty journal and good value for a fiver. Unlike regular wargames magazines it covers a wide range of games including board games, card games as well as miniature games. Whilst this might reduce its immediate appeal to most I would recommend trying the first issue, if only to widen your appreciation of the gaming hobby as a whole.
Buying it at the show I was given a sprue of two plastic terminator models from the new Terminator: Genysys game. This was being played at the show and did look but with an RRP of £70, I thought it overly pricey and gave it a pass...
One of the games that caught my eye yesterday at the Games Expo was Dice Sports new Z War One. Described as tactical espionage with zombies, it looked really good, a cross between Spy Or Die Trying and Zombiecide. The Kickstarter starts tomorrow, I took these photos of the game which are a bit ropey due the lighting and my phone, but hopefully give you a rough idea of things...
I went to the UK Games Expo at the NEC today. I wasn't planning to, I was only going to meet someone but when that got bumped back a few hours I found myself wandering around a large hotel rammed full of gamers.
I say gamers, not wargamers as it was, by and large, a totally different audience from what you get at Salute or Colours. There were a few wargames companies in attendance, but by and large it was a show devoted to board and card games, the scope of which was quite daunting.
There were some good miniatures games on show and I will dig through the photos I took on my Blackberry in the poor hotel lighting(!) tomorrow, but I will post these of PSC's TheGreat War boxed game, my Kickstarter copy I picked up at the show...
I don't know where time is going this year, but unfortunately not a lot of it is being spent on hobby activities. I really want to get back on with my ACW project having painted up the first couple of infantry regiments. With this in mind I was surprised to find that em-4 Miniatures had released two sets of plastic ACW infantry at the bargain price of £5.00 for 20 figures!
They don't look too bad and will provide some useful filler figures if nothing else. Gisby has shown how nice they paint up and easy to convert on his website here.
Ok, so the brain has been on overdrive thinking about Mad Max and gaming possibilities. Whilst I like the look of Devil's Run: Route 666 it is 20mm scale, so vehicles like tankers will be a tad big (also the game isn't due for delivery until February next year). The one thing that struck me about Mad Max Fury Road was the scale of evereything. The desert, the fleets of gang vehicles, these weren't battles with one or two vehicles, but potentially dozens a side.
I had a Eureka! moment on the train today when I recalled TimeCast sell sets of 1/300th plastic modern cars, twenty in a pack for just £2.50. This would mean they are easy to convert and you can have a lot of them. They would also be compatible with 1/300th WW2 and Modern vehicles form the likes of GHQ and Heroics & Ros, so lots opportunities for bits and spares.
The TimeCast models are (I guess) architects models for the lovely white building models you see of planned constructions, so I am hoping there might be more vehicles out "there" that I can hunt down. And of course, there are the Irregular 'Mad Ron' vehicles which can also join the fray...
Edit. Or you can buy 1/300th 100 cars for £3.61 with free postage from China on eBay!
Just back from the watching Mad Max Fury Road at the cinema - wow! A shed load of fun and hugely entertaining, well worth watching on the big screen if action movies are your thing.
Of course I now want to make loads of Mad Max vehicles and that Devil's Run: Route 666 Kickstarter is still open. Ummm...
Boggler kindly pointed out that the 1/32nd Australians were going for just £2.49 on the Airfix website, so I popped over and bought a box of them, the Gurkhas and 8th Army, all retailing at the same price.
The plastic they are moulded in is really interesting as it is not the old soft polythene, but is harder, fileable and easy to trim. I thought I would see how easy it was to convert and had a crack at one of the kneeling 8th Army figures to see if he could help fill out the Kohima British unit.
I'm pretty pleased with how he is coming along...
I have also started on one of the Australian figures, replacing his bush hat with a helmet. The Aussies are wearing gaiters instead of ankle puttees so this will require some work, but overall I am pleased with how both are looking at this point.
I've been meaning to find some time to paint up the Mars Attacks Kickstarter and over the weekend Beasts of War posted a live blog of an ingenious Mars Attacks/Bolt Action crossover, that was really inspiring, even if it was a shame it had a lot of unpainted figures n a really nice table...
They also produce a free downloadable PDF for the Martians, so if you fancy bringing some inter-planetary invasion to WW2, this is the way to do it!
After a minor set back last week, Killerfish Games have now released the iOS version of their new game Atlantic Fleet. I loved Pacific Fleet, but this looks much, much better and no doubt will provide many hours of entertainment like its predecessor...
Here's their blurb about the game features:
- No In Apps/Advertising. No Pay-to-Progress. One Price = Full Game
- Stunning full 3D graphics and environments, including underwater
- A unique blend of deep strategic planning combined with quick tactical decisions
- Play as the Royal Navy and her allies or Kriegsmarine (German navy)
- Up to 10 versus 10 ships in combat
- 3 Game Modes:
1) Single Battle Editor with 30 Historical Missions for standalone combat
2) Campaign of 50 missions per faction
3) Full Dynamic Campaign from 1939 to 1945
- Individually saved games for each campaign and faction
- Multiplayer Hotseat for Single Battles
- Sink ships with realistic buoyancy physics, not with hit-point bars!
- Target specific ship subsystems to sink or cripple the enemy
- Destructible ships, subsystems and visual damage to ships
- 60 historical ship classes representing over 630 ships and 350 submarines
- 13 playable aircraft
- Submarine warfare, wolf packs and convoys
- Carrier operations and land-based air strikes
- Too many more to list here, visit killerfishgames.com
Another of Osprey's forthcoming wargames rules titles has piqued my interest - Black Ops. Accoding to the blurb "Black Ops is a skirmish wargame of tactical espionage combat for two or more players. It recreates on the tabletop the tension and excitement of modern action-thrillers such as the Bond and Bourne films, The Unit or Burn Notice TV shows, and the Splinter Cell and Modern Warfare series of video games. The fast-play rules use regular 6-sided dice and a card-driven activation system to keep all players in the thick of the action, while the mission generator provides a wide range of options for scenarios, from stealthy extraction or surveillance missions to more overt raids or assassinations. Stealth, combat and technical expertise all have a role to play, and players may select from a number of different character types - spies, mercenaries, criminals, hackers, special forces and many more - to recruit the best possible team for the job. Players may also choose to join a faction - powerful organizations, intelligence agencies, criminal syndicates, militaries or rebel groups, each with a stake in international affairs. By doing so, their team may receive certain benefits, but may also find itself limited at a crucial time. With the variety offered by the characters, factions and scenarios, no two games of Black Ops should ever be the same! Although the standard Black Ops setting is an ultra-modern world just a hair removed from our own, the rules are versatile and adaptable enough to suit OSS operations behind Nazi lines, Cold War-era infiltration missions in Moscow or Berlin, or sabotage runs against a rival corporation's interests in a cyberpunk dystopia, and the rulebook will include a guide to running games in such settings."
The flexibility mentioned in the last paragraph sounds really interesting.
A rather large box turned up from Airfix today, a bit of overkill for the contents and the bin is now full of those foam packaging quavers. Interesting to find the old bendy soft plastic has changed and now can be cut, scraped and filed quite easily - I have now started the standing and kneeling versions of Kohima rifleman three...
On a different note I came across a great little Kickstarter from Ramshackle Gamesto fund five multi-pose 28mm scale robots. I really like the look of these models and they should be fun to paint. It has less than two days to run so don't hesitate if you like the look of them...
I watched the first part of the Danish drama 1864, about the Second Schleswig War last night. This episode was set just after the First Schleswig War but it boded well for the series and the juxtaposition with a present day storyline referencing the Danish contribution in Afghanistan was interesting. Watching part two on iPlayer tonight.
Had great "fun" today adding foil slings to the Kohima riflemen (and my fingers, don't you love super glue?) and thanks to Boggler spent over thirty quid in the Airfix store where the 1/32nd Australian, Gurkha and 8th Army figures are heavily discounted - £2.49 down from £7.99 :-)
In that purchase I also picked up the venerable old 1/72nd Pontoon Bridge (also reduced) which I want to use in Panzerfäuste, the size being perfect for the French inspired Gnomes...
Been a busy day today so I thought I'd show off some of the Orc concept art from Hysterical Games for Panzerfäuste. There was some 'controversy' on Beasts of War over the picking an "evil" race to represent the "British", some people over think things sometimes and need to get out more...
Here is soldier no. 2 in standing and kneeling positions. As Boggler pointed out the re-issued Multipose boxes only have six figures, and of that only one is kneeling and one is prone, so this requires a bit of surgery to get a second kneeling and prone figure out of the box.
Luckily, I picked up some twelve figure sets released a way back by Airfix off eBay, so I should have enough figures for the half-section, I may also look at the legs in the Afrika Korps sets as I have quite a few of them and should have enough spare.
The keeling figure here is posed just pushing himself up, I think it looks ok. Now I need to add rifle straps, other equipment and work on the prone figures.
It's a little while since I dug out the Airfix Multipose 8th Army and British Infantry sets to mix and match and make some British Infantry to use in a Kohima Normandy Firefight variant, however today I sat down with the heads, torsos and legs I stuck together to make some more progress.
I've done a fair bit of research on what the British infantry in Burma looked like and these photos shows quite nicely the look I want to try and recreate.
Normandy Firefight recommends standing, kneeling and prone figures for each character, which is an interesting challenge. Today, I made some progress on Tommy number one, completing a chunk f the work, including scratchbuilding ammo bandoliers on the standing and kneeling versions of the first character.
These are work in progress photos but show the standing figure...
Things are progressing nicely on the redevelopment of Panzerfäuste, although much of the work is still underwraps. One of the "secret" developments was the commissioning of a range of resin buildings from the extremely talented Tony Harwood.
I managed to get hold of on of the pre-producting casts and liked it so much I painted it up overnight on Wednesday. Having initially wanted to keep it as a surprise for later on, we liked it so much we weakened and posted pictures of it on the Hysterical Games Facebook page! If you didn't see it there, here are the photos with some old Panzerfäuste miniatures to show the scale.
