3rd Annual Weekend o' Gaming

The ManCabin v3.0

It's been three years in row, so I guess we've got something of an event on our hands. A little backstory; I was a non-traditional college student, going in at age thirty, so it was kind of a big deal for me and my family. Upon graduating with my undergrad in Anthropology, as a graduation present, my wife and daughter gave me a cabin for the weekend up in the Smoky Mountains for me and my buddies to geek out in. Very cool. Well a year later, and I subsequently plowed through my Master's in Education and graduated a second time, thus a second cabin! So once again we packed up the XBox360, a bunch o' boardgames, and a metric ton of food and drink and headed again into the mountains.

We had no celebratory reason this year, but we had to do it again! So most of the original crew, plus a few guest appearances made plans and got yet another cabin with the intent of enjoying good food, fine drink, and nothing but gaming. Of course this year we all pitched in, which was nice for me! The big joke this year was doing a schedule and a "sign up matrix", but all jokes aside, there were a bunch of games to be played. I think our headcount at its height was at ten? Understandably, the entire affair blew by rather quickly, so my memory's a tad suspect, I did keep some notes though, heh.


In the previous two years we took some liquor with us, sure, but also a keg (Harp both years I think). For the sake of calories, ahem, we tripled the Scotch and Bourbon allotment, and left the keg behind (though we still had beer mind you). For food we go all out, and this year was no different making sure steaks we're at the top of the list. Sadly though, we didn't do ribs, which I enjoy quite a bit. This year I was able to bring some of my homegrown peppers though to juice up a little homemade salsa, woohoo!


A stack o' games

You'll have to excuse the blurriness of my pics, I was using my phone because I forgot a proper camera! The above pile of games is just the tip of the iceberg too. We also brought along a host of RPG's, my XBox360 with a ton of music games, and even had a Wii thrown in there for good measure. Only two games come to mind that were missing to my lament; Shadows Over Camelot, and Last Night on Earth (with its expansion).



Blood Bowl!

Wiht the pending release of the video game, plus all the teams I've been cranking out lately, we were in the mood for some serious Blood Bowl! We had a lot of gear on hand for some pure mayhem on the pitch and at one point we were sporting three games simultaneously. It was good because we had a few players who had never had a chance to play before, so they got to try their hands at it too. We had an obscene amount of teams on hand to pick from as well, I think we were pushing twenty completed teams out of the box.


Galaxy Trucker

I've only reported on this game once before, but man, if I knew it was this good, we would've been playing it much more all along. I can safely say that if this game wasn't the MVP of the weekend, it's near the tip of a top five list. We had a lot of people rotating in and out of this one, and many were still coming back for more.


Red November

I know I've posted a couple of times about this one. It's a fun game, a blast really, and I was really looking forward to it maxed out with eight player. Well, we did just that, but it wasn't the frenetic, zany fun I thought it might have been, too many players bogged it all down. There's a reason BBG suggests that it's best with four peeps.


Settlers of Catan

Well, if Galaxy Trucker wasn't quite first place, this one was. Oddly enough, there were a good number of people at the cabin who hadn't played this gem either. Like a knucklehead, after our last big game of Cities and Knights, I left all the pieces of one color behind, arrgh! We were only able to play five player games, but play them we did. The Settlers table was on fire, with many different players rotating in and out of this one too.


Carcassonne

You can't have a gaming weekend without everyone's favorite Meeplecentric winner, Carcassonne! This game is pretty amazing, no matter how many times I play it, it stays awesome. It was Spiel des Jahres after all (so was Catan), with an incredibly easy learning curve, easy setup, and amazingly infinite replay value.


Ca$h 'n Gun$

And now for something completely different. Ca$h 'n Gun$ is just plain fun, that's all there is to it. You play gangsters/crooks/mobsters/whatever and your goal is to split up the loot after a heist, of course your number one negotiating tool is the pistolero. You have a deck of cards in front of you ranging from bluff to full auto, and on the count of three, you point your foam pistol at another player. Before the action cards are revealed you can choose to duck down or stay in the 'negotiation'. Whoever is left standing at the end of each round splits the pot evenly. At the end of the game, those who are left alive compare their fat stacks o' cash and the big winner is (obviously) the one with the most dough.


Bear sign!

You can't have a trip to the Smokies without a bear sighting! This was taken off the back deck, but we saw this fellow early on walking about ten yards in front of our front door. Judging from the little log book left in the cabin, the last few families staying in the same place had also seen bears, multiple ones at times. Pretty cool...


That's a Wrap!

What a blast! I get in a lot of gaming, sure, but once a year I really look forward to this, I'm sure we'll continue the tradition next year. A lot of our gaming buddies who have moved on show up for it too, coming from many states away. What would I change for next year? I don't know, maybe less gaming and more hanging out, haha! I will say this, don't try to use Splenda as a substitute for sugar when making Sangria!

Like I said, I kept a tally of the games being played just for posterity. We played a ton of Rock Band, Rock Band 2, Guitar Hero World Tour, Wii Golf and the like, but I'm not counting those below. Here's the breakdown of what all went down:

Carcassonne: four plays
Munchkin: one play
Robo Rally: one play
Blood Bowl: three plays
Galaxy Trucker: six plays
Settlers of Catan: six plays
Red November: one play
Ca$h 'n Gun$: four plays

But wait, there's (no) more!

The late, great Mays machine

There have been a couple of news worthy celebrity deaths within the last week or so, and frankly I've not been "moved" by a single one...except in the passing of America's favorite pitch man. I don't mean to sound cold, but late fallen pop kings and old, feathered hair actresses just don't rate high on my "oh man, that's a bummer" meter.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Billy was the American insomniac's best friend. Always there late at night or early in the morning. Always happy to see you. Giving you that old thumbs-up sign of Mays approval. Always selling something terrifically wonderful, so much so that even folks with graduate degrees found themselves grabbing their credit card and reaching for the phone to beat that phony "Next 10 minutes" deadline.

In fact, he didn't put insomniacs to sleep. How could anyone sleep around Billy's obviously genuine enthusiasm and energy? He just kept us company while we worked through the long night or waited for dawn to arrive.

He was no doubt sound asleep himself somewhere else. But through the magic of video, Billy was right there in our living rooms showing us a mop that could not only clean all pet hairs off the floor but probably off the dog too.

Here's the deal: Billy was real. He would only sell products that passed his test, that worked and that he himself used at home. He even handed out samples to guests.

You don't see that much elsewhere in American society today, especially in politicians. For instance, if Billy was, say, president and trying to sell us all on a massive national public education reform program costing billions of dollars, you just know he'd have his kids in those very same public schools, not off safely in some fancy private place.

So today, June 29th, is Billy Mays Memorial day. Wear something blue! Rest in peace Billy!


A candid, and fun-loving Mays in action

Traitor Guard Planning: Troops

Since I've gone to the shiny, new Imperial Guard codex for my Traitor Guard planning, I've got a mind to really take tons of troopers. Of course, painting hordes of troops is *not* my specialty, but I guess I need to start somewhere.

I'm going to start simply with my two compulsory troops choices, which in Imperial Guard terms means a lot more figs than one would think. Two names really caught my eye in the Eye of Terror codex; the Sentrek Freemen and Discilian Apostates.

I'm sitting on two boxes of Imperial Guard troopers already, one is the twenty strong Catachan troops (yes, with the mondo muscle arms), and the other is a twenty strong box of Cadians. Each of these boxes will form the core of both my troop choices.

Regarding the Catachans, with their bare chests and Guerrilla look, they just scream to become Sentrek Freemen. I thought of just using them as is, but I'm thinking of adding a rather roguish head swap to them and with Pig Iron producing a lot of head packs, I may go there. Unfortunately it looks like the Warstore is out right now, but the Kolony Rebel Heads would work well with the Catachan flak vests and jungle look.

The Cadian figures are much more regimented and militant looking than their Catachan cousins, and for them I'll be going with the Discilian Apostates. The fluff on these guys says they were once part of guarding a religious higher-up who was taken down by the Inquisition. Using West Wind Productions' hooded Arthurian heads from their historically range I hope I'll be able to peg down that 'Cardinal' look.


You've just gotta have Plague Zombies...

Another tidbit that caught my eye from the Eye of Terror codex was Plague Zombies. Basically these were Mutant troop choices that had specific mutations. Obviously I'm not going to be able to pull off true Plague Zombies with the new IG Codex, but where will I find cheap, meat shield troopers? Oh right, Conscripts. I had originally planned to hybridize Guard components and WHFB Zombies to make these, but I don't know if I want to invest the cash for enough Guard parts to make them 50/50 figures. I may however buy some bots here and there to disperse throughout the unit to give them the appearance of Guard Zombies, plus, I should have plenty of Guard heads leftover from all the above swapping. Each of my two troop choices will have these 'conscripts' attached to them.

Mass Effect 2 in early 2010

Put Bioware's seemingly epic sequel on your long range HUD

A Pair o' Cyber Trolls

Darkspawn's Brilliant Trolls

Although this was posted just this week over on the Brother's Brick site, I thought it deserved a second look here. Aaron Andrews has put up some great looking MOC's in the past, but these two really take the cake. It's a simple idea, executed brilliantly with loads of details and lots of fun 'greebles' to boot. I love the mini-fig arms as fingers.

Retribution Myrmidon Models

The Hydra

These previews have been popping up all over the Privateer Press front page lately. I haven't checked the forums, I don't ave to, I know these are getting mixed reviews from polar opposite ends of the spectrum. Some will feel these sci-fi mecha have no place in the gritty world of the steampunked Iron Kingdoms, others will absolutely be in love with the sci-fi edge and otherworldliness these have. I am leaning towards the latter.

It appears switching to plastic is a great moce as it allows for huge models that have amazingly smooth lines and architecture. The one flaw to the above heavy Myrmidon is the head. That lower 'rivet' looks too much like it could be an eye if painted right, coupled with the unfortunate seam right below it, it looks to me like a duckbill. With that high crest, you could EASILY paint it up as a Parasaurolophus, seriously, check it out!


The Manticore


The Phoenix


The Chimera


The Gorgon


The Griffon

Lego Artwork by Freeny

"Micro Schematic"

Jason Freeny over at Moist Productions is an artist, illustrator, and 'crazy person' (his words, not mine). It's not often, but thankfully not rare either, that someone of talent incorporates a little Lego into their work now and again, and that's why I took notice here. The above "Micro Schematic" came out a while back, and I fell in love with it given my Lego background. I actually reached for the check card immediately to order a shirt with this design on it, and I usually don't pay more than twenty bucks for a t-shirt, unless I'm at a Rush concert! Ironically I don't wear the shirt out that often because I don't want to get a lot of wear and tear. Even stranger is that looking through the online store now I don't see the Micro Schematic shirt anywhere, so I don't know if there were some copyright issues?


"What You're Made Of"

Check out his galleries, he doesn't stop with mini-figs, there's some great anatomies of balloon animals, sock monkeys, gummy bears, and the like. There's more than just a couple of Lego pieces of course, lots more, but that's what caught my eye to begin with. Looking through those galleries (I can't hot link them, so just refer to his home link above) you'll find some great graphite illustrations, a lot of computer works, and even some sculptures. The above piece has obvious resonance with me as well, just because of all the time I've spent clipping parts off of sprues and assembling them, it's nice to see the red brick, the heart of the model on there too, I think we all have a little Lego in us after all.

Imperial Tower

Imperial Tower

My terrain building momentum has died off considerably, but I'm still happy with what I've been able to crank out near the end of last year and up 'til now. We were playing in a 40k campaign where you got additional points awarded for completed pieces, hence everything I cranked out lately. Well the campaign (in that form and function) has ceased, but I still had an unpainted building I had started, so I figured I'd paint it up.

I wanted something that was both tall, and had a small footprint on the tabletop at the same time. It's base, cut from MDF board is a six inch square, and the tower itself (four levels at 25mm scale) is about a half inch over a foot tall. The neat thing about this tower is that it was made entirely out of spare parts, pieces, and scraps that were all left over from a variety of the great building kits GW came out with a while back.


Front and right hand side

I primed it was the usual generic flat black spray paint and waited for it to dry. Then I tried something new, I "drybrushed" it with a spray paint can of antique gold. Basically I dusted it in areas with the gold to the same effect as if I had drybrushed it.

When I paint up large projects like this, I mostly use craft paints. You get a lot in a bottle, and you don't mind using a bunch of it squirted out on a paper plate to get grips with painting it all. I mentioned drybrushing earlier, well, when you're doing large pieces, buildings and such, it's your best friend to get the most area covered the fastest.


Left hand side and rear

Once the spray paint dried, I drybrushed it with a dark blue (midnight) followed up with another layer of an only slightly lighter blue (night sky). I then went in with a layer of craft paint also in an antique gold and laid in heavy on the smokestacks, front doors, vent pipes, chains, and the like. I used a GW Tin Bitz on some of the skull motifs, and the swords of the figures in the windows. I painted the remaining skulls with a GW Bleached Bone, followed up with a direct wash of GW Devlan Mud.

The rest of the skulls (did I mention how many there were?) were done in GW Chainmail with a direct spot of Badab Black on each. I used the Chainmail quite sparingly on other little detailed areas of the panels. That was it for the building, I kept it simple.

For the rubble, I used generic cat little, hardened with a watered down white glue option. I laid in a heavy drybrush of craft paint gray, followed up by a lighter drybrush of craft paint dove gray, then a final highlight of GW Fortress Gray.

The Gropers of Gorgorth

The Gropers of Gorgorth

The light of the Chaos Dwarves is fading every day in the halls of Games Workshop. They are no longer grandfathered in as a preexisting WHFB army, and there's only one model in the entire range that can still be said to sport the little evil guys, and even then their hats are gone! I love these guys even more because of this, they get to exist in their own little GW time warp bubble and stomp about the pitch on equal terms!


Chaos Dwarves are always known for their funny hats

Again, credit for these amusing conversions goes to Oz, who did a great job here. Remember their old hats? Those were pewter too, that took a lot of hacksawing just to remove! The new ones are hats from the Lego cowboy range, nice!


Ocho Hobgoblinos


Star players: 1st edition Geargrinder, Bull Centaur, and a Blunderbusser


More of them dang numbers

District 9

Terminator Toys for Tabletop Gaming

It's kind of funny that they're doing a direct toy tie-in to the new Terminator movie. It's been done before, but it just seems that the genre itself really isn't child friendly. Or at least, it shouldn't be child friendly. Nonetheless, Playmates is doing the new lineup and there are definite gems to be found here, not as toys, but for tabletop gaming.

The above Hunter Killer costs about twenty bucks and is eight inches long. You can pretty much ignore the T-700 it comes with (or cut him up for terrain), but the ship is just great. For it's size you almost proxy it as a Valkyrie, or keeping it in the 25mm range it could easily be a gunship, VTOL, or some type of fighter craft along those lines.

Now if you depart from the 25mm range the possibilities open up even more. If you're duking it out in 15mm (which I should do more often given my large Star Grunt II army) this ship could easily be a dropship that could feasibly hold a platoon worth of troops; maybe three squads of men plus their command squad. As I write this I'm daydreaming of painting three of these up in a desert scheme and using them in said SGII army.



Another view of the HK in the box


The T-1

This last piece is a good one too, the T-1, it costs between twelve and fourteen bucks. It comes packaged like an action figure, and judging from the size will be about 5"-6" inches tall. Absolutely perfect for 25mm troops. I missed out on picking up the ED-209 from Robocop a while back, but this actually looks cooler. One or two of these could give a full squad of troops a real headache. It almost looks like you wouldn't need to paint it up either, it's good to go as is. Given its size, I think you wouldn't need more than two.

Xbox Blood Bowl Star Players

TitC recently reported on four new upcoming star players

Xbox Blood Bowl is coming, and it looks like a lot of the original flavor will be kept as they have announced four more very familiar star players! Big guys like Ripper Bolgrot the Troll and the Rat Ogre Headsplitter will be included, as will Dwarf Slayer Grim Ironjaw, and Lizardman Saurus Silibili. Refer to the original article for larger pics to click on and the full lowdown on these latest additions over on the Troll in the Corner.

Rise of the Lycans

Underworld 3: Rise of the Lycans

To show how little I know about this franchise, I thought this was the sequel! To be honest, I never saw the first or the second Underworld movies, it's just not my cup of tea, and as hot as Beckinsale is, I didn't want to watch the movies just because she was running around in a tight black outfit shooting bad guys, good guys? I don't even know what those movies are about. I know she's a vampire, or half-vampire, or something.

I don't know objective this review can be because I thought Beckinsale was in this one! Apparently this movie takes place in the middle ages with the, ahem, rise of the Lycans, of whihc there is a hybrid type born with both smarts and ferocity. The dirty vampires enslave these new hybrid smart werewolves but that plan backfires. A new female hero, original Tomb Raider and action priestess of Doomsday plays the vampire big sister to Beckinsale, and also falls in love with the head Lycan, who becomes the leader of the Lycan resistance, rebelling against the dirty vampire overlords, with her help.


Dude is not happy

This move makes the uppity head vampire really mad, who goes crazy and gets all his armor clad vampire buddies to go after the werewolves, who have escaped, but left behind a bunch of their feral friends...and the leader's love interest.

Of course they go back, because these were wolves are pretty open minded, and they don't leave their friends and loved ones behind. A big battle ensues with agile, sword-wielding vampires fighting savage, claw and fang flashing werewolves. It actually does not go well for the vampires, who are all but wiped out. Just a few, literally, escape the massacre in their underground escape hatch via boat and the werewolves take over the huge castle and presumably the lands that were previously just stalked by them is now fully under their control. Unfortunately the head vampire father felt it necessary to punish his traitorous daughter with the ultimate recourse, death by sunlight.


"A good plan, but where will we find a wheel of cheese that large this time of day?"

If I were the head Lycan hybrid guy, I'd have transformed into my wolf form more often, especially in fighting the head vampire at the end, but he chose to wear leather armor and use twin short swords. In the grand scheme of things, I guess not having seen the first movies, seeing this prequel was the smart thing to do.

If you like the Underworld movies, chances are you've already seen too. If you can't get the same star power to last for the trilogy, the next best thing is to pull the 'big sister' card like they did here, which seemed to work out all right. The vampires were not in that ambiguous gray area for the film, they were decidedly the bad guys throughout with the werewolves being the good guys. I'm not a big vampire (or werewolf) fan but I may have to track down the other two movies just to see how the story unfolds. It's not an awful film, and fills an action / fantasy / horror niche which doesn't see the light of day too often.

The Neverwinter Wights

The Neverwinter Wights

Continuing on the roll I've been on with showcasing my Blood Bowl teams I've got the much maligned Undead team. By "showcasing" I really mean dusting off and getting them out of their respective boxes for some fresh air.

I've seen some Undead teams do all right, remember "back in the day", haha, there was only one flavor of Undead, we didn't have Vampire Counts and Tomb Kings and the like. Slow and clumsy is how I remember them, with a few that also hit hard. I've used them in a couple of one-off games, but they weren't my play style, and you'll never win a game with them based on touchdowns. That's all right though, they've got tons of character.


Some Skellies

There are a lot of great third party companies out there making Blood Bowl figs, but one idea I've never seen done was to use Privateer Press' Risen models for skeletal linemen. They've got a great look to them, especially the Cygnar Trencher.


A pair o' Wights and a pair o' Mummies


Two stock Ghouls and a converted WHFB one


Star players: a Vampire and a 2nd edition Ned Stein


Zombies!

The Orc zombie is obviously a conversion I did with a plastic one and a couple of skeletal limbs. In the one big league I played in, our buddy Marc had a rather successful team much to everyone's chagrin. To further add insult to injury his team color was pink and named the Deadrock Goyles, as in "you just got beat by a bunch of goyles", but it was all in good fun, and I digress. Anyway, when his star player, a Blitzer (thanks for the pic Brian!) named High Heel Provac finally died, I couldn't help but 'resurrect' him as one of my zombies. Of course on my team roster I still kept the same name too!