March Update

I've been working on my Dwarf army and with the completion of the current 5-model batch, I will have 35 models finished, just over a third of the army. I've got a pretty good system going for the models, so they are going faster with each batch. The most time-consuming part of the work is painting the beards, but painting beards is also the best part of the process, so it all balances out. I hope to work my way through some more of them.

I recently got books 9-12 in the Horus Heresy series, so I should be reading through those over the next week or two. I just finished reading the first Ciaphas Cain omnibus, which takes a more light-hearted look at the 40k world. It was pretty good, and I look forward to ordering some more of those books.

After I got back from my R & R leave, I took a little break from exercise, but I've picked that back up. Running isn't quite the chore it's been for the last few years. I finished my run today and realized that I was only wheezing and snorting during the last half-mile or so, rather than being out of breath in the first couple hundred yards. We have a PT test coming up, so we'll see if I continue making gains. When we got here I was barely finishing the 2 miles in the minimum 17 minutes, but I've worked that down to 15:50. It would be nice to get under 15 minutes by the time we go home. I also need to push myself on the other events and my fitness in general. I've been considering the P90X workouts as I've heard good things about them from many sources, but haven't justified ordering the DVDs just yet.

I also bought a car, which has been quite an ordeal. We've been looking for something pretty much since we traded in my truck for a minivan to replace my wife's Subaru wagon before I left. While I was home on leave we looked at a whole pile of cars, and I've been a fixture on the car sales sites and fueleconomy.gov during most of my free moments. We nearly bought two or three cars, but things fell through each time. We finally found something that met our transportation requirements and fell into the right reliability/fuel economy/low mileage brackets. I'll admit that it doesn't look that practical, but it was a decent compromise. That big wing on the back is a bit silly, too, but at least it is a factory option and not something from the aftermarket. My wife is not a fan of garish yellow cars, but she knows that I like flashy colors when it comes to shoes and cars, so she relented in this case. For the most part I hope to ride the commuter van to work and save that gas money for other things, but we wanted something with reasonable fuel economy to drive when the commuter van or my motorcycle (52 mpg) weren't an option. I'm pretty happy with our decision, but we'll see how it works out for us over the next several years.

Our twin boys are growing pretty well. I think they are both rapidly approaching 9 pounds. My mom got to meet them for the first time a couple of days ago, which is pretty neat I guess. My wife had a family friend take some family pictures of her and all our boys, and they turned out pretty nice. I don't have access to any of them here, so you'll just have to take my word that I have a pretty good-looking family, especially when I'm not there to lower the bar.

Phoenix Fire Games, Part 2 and Malifaux

I stopped back into Phoenix Fire Games this evening and had another look around. It appears that their Customer Loyalty program is a bit more robust than the one at Hobbytown. The Hobbytown program here offers a $5 coupon for every $100 you spend, good for use on any purchase over $25 in the next 90 days. Idaho has a 6% sales tax, so the coupon almost covers that. Most of their Warhammer box sets are marked down from list price a fair amount, while blister packs and army books are usually sold at MSRP. Core rules are usually offered at a discount as well. I'm not sure what formula they use, but it works out in general that the Hobbytown prices are pretty competitive with internet prices, except during seasonal sales, bulk purchases,  and/or when the Pound is weak against the US Dollar.

The Phoenix Fire Games Rewards program is based on the $100 model, but for every $100 you spend, you get 10% off on your next purchase. The website encourages you to load up and save, making sure that your 10% discount applies to a large purchase. On the surface it seems like a good system for someone who plans out an army and buys it all at once, with hobby supplies and odds and ends making up the initial $100 of purchases. It's not the 20% off + shipping that certain online retailers offer, but the online retailers can't offer a space to game and a local community of like-minded people. If you planned out your purchases, this program would probably work out a bit better than the Hobbytown program, but for multiple small purchases Hobbytown still offers the best deal locally. But Hobbytown doesn't really focus on gaming and has moved away from having games going on in the store, although the Hobbytown here in my town has a pretty active TCG group that takes over a large portion of the store on tournament days. They don't offer enough table space as the shop is quite small, so most of the games are played on the floors in the aisles, luckily away from the miniatures section of the store.

There were a fair number of people in the gaming area of the Phoenix Fire store today. It looked like they were mostly playing TCGs. I've purchased decks and cards for most of the major TCGs (Magic, World of Warcraft, Vs., Pokemon, probably some others), but the sheer number of cards and frequent releases overwhelms me a bit. I just can't process all of the stuff that's going on in most TCGs. Even when I was playing Heroclix, the sheer number of stats and abilities crushed my brain. The other guys who played seemed able to memorize every stat on every figure, but I never really mastered it. Anyway, there was a decent crowd in the shop and they all appeared to be having a good time. I saw one guy walking around with a Tyranid codex and a box of figures, but I didn't see anyone playing any miniature games. I didn't look too hard, though, and the event calendar says tonight was board game night. There could have been five games of Warhammer going on and I may have missed it.

One of the games on the shelves that  haven't seen elsewhere in town (I haven't been to All About Games recently) is Malifaux, the miniatures game by Wyrd Miniatures, It's a skirmish-level Steampunk/Fantasy game with an accompanying line of figures. I know it is a diceless game that relies on cards, but I don't know much else about it, aside from seeing the figures and reading about it on a few of the blogs I follow. To me, an uneducated observer, it appears to target the same sort of person who plays Warmachine/Hordes, which I categorize as a mix between a standard miniature wargame and a TCG. I don't think I'll buy into either system, but I can't say I haven't thought about it. I do hope that the shop runs a Warhammer or Warhammer 40k league around the time I get home from Iraq. I will try to support the shop, as it's the closest thing I've got to a local gaming-focused store.

Phoenix Fire Games

Yesterday I stopped by a new gaming store in the area, Phoenix Fire Games. They are located just two or three blocks from our previous home, which would've been nice to have at the time. I don't know how often I would go there now, as there is a Hobbytown located just down the road from my house here in my new city. The new store seems to have a fairly active event schedule, which is something Hobbytown doesn't offer anymore.

The shop looked clean. It's a bit small, with a few gaming tables in the back. Not a lot of GW product, but I think D&D/Magic/WoW TCG/Board Games are their main focus. They do have a Warhammer Escalation League going now, but they are pretty far along in the cycle at the moment at 1750 points. They also run weekly D&D Encounters events, which would be nice to participate in, as getting a group of friends together for playing RPGs requires one to have at least three or four friends with matching blocks of free time. But store-run events don't require you to have friends at all. I guess we'll see what the shop is running when I get back home. An escalation league could be pretty fun.

One god thing they had was a few of the upcoming Orcs & Goblins releases on a shelf for customers to look at. I got to take a look at the Savage Orcs box and the Arachnarok Spider box, as well as flip through the pages of the new army book. The switch to hardcover is an obvious ploy to add ten dollars to the book price without offering anything new in terms of content. There's nothing in there that couldn't be done in the already ridiculously-priced softcover format, which has gone up by ten dollars in the last five years anyway. But I am a shameless fanboy, so I pre-ordered it. Most of the new units have been previewed elsewhere on the web, with the big spider and some sneaky Goblin assassin-types being the main new entries to the list. The only other new thing that really caught my eye was the Mangler Squigs, described as two really angry Squigs chained together and sent spinning into combat, sort of like Night Goblin Fanatics on crack. Hobbytown used to put new models in one of their display cases for people to look at before release, but I haven't seen anything there for a while.

The shop also carries a few boxes from the Lord of the Rings range, which is pretty cool, but also probably a money sink for them. I have really mixed feelings about the Lord of the Rings games from GW. The miniatures are, in my opinion, some of the best-looking figures out there. I like them a lot. I just have so many game systems going right now that it's hard to justify really going after this one, too. At my current rate, the backlog on my shelves will take me approximately 3,500 years to paint, and each box of figures will add another year to that total. Still, it is cool that they carry portions of the line.

February Update

This has been quite a month for me. I spent about three days in transit from Iraq to Idaho for my two weeks of R & R leave. On the 22nd we welcomed a couple new folks into the family. Bruce Banner (left) was born at 7:47 a.m. and Logan X (right) was born a couple of minutes later at 7:49 a.m. As you can see from the picture, they are not identical. The last few days have been a bit of a haze. Our 2-year old is slowly warming up to them, but he's a bit jealous of the time that momma spends with the new brothers. We have to remind him a lot that he needs to be gentle with them, but we haven't had any major disasters.

All of my paints and brushes are back in Iraq with my Dwarf army, so I haven't been working on any hobby stuff (not that the twins give me any time for that). I'm pretty excited for the new Orcs & Goblins releases, specifically the new Savage Orcs and the massive Arachnarok spider. These releases have got me thinking about the state of my armies. I've realized that my Orcs & Goblins are really three separate armies. These fall into the Forest Goblin/Spiders/Savage Orcs section, with the other two armies being the Night Goblins/Squigs and then the traditional Orcs/Goblins/Snotlings army. There is some overlap between the armies, but for me most of the units in the army fall into one of those three molds. I'm not sure what the new army book will look like. I hope it doesn't change too much.

I borrowed a couple of pictures from the Scatterbrain blog that show the new Savage Orcs and the scale of Arachnarok compared to standard Orcs. You can also see the mount for one of the Forest Goblin Spider Riders sitting under his leg.

If I get a little more free time in my life I want to sort all of my figures from every range into army lists. Skaven sort out into a couple of different lists, I need to figure out the fictional make-up of my Space Marine army so I know how to paint each squad, the Imperial Guard need split out into a few different groupings, and I'm sure the Empire will break out into a standard State Troops list and a fanatical Crusade list. Then there are the other game systems and stand-alone figures. I have most of the Warhammer/Warhammer 40k stuff in my collection inventoried, but I really don't have any clue about how much other stuff I've got from other game systems and companies.

Recent Reading

I finished reading the Bone anthology a couple of days ago. It's a really good adventure story. Although it's got over 1300 pages, it ended much too quickly. But the story ended, and I'm not sure how you could top what the characters had just been through, so I guess it ended in the right place. Most of the complaints from Amazon reviewers focus on the lack of color in the anthology printing, but I think the line art really stands alone very well. The few other negative or neutral reviewers are just cold soulless folk who wouldn't know fun if it bit them on the bum and said, "Hi, I'm Fun!" I'd recommend reading it if you get the chance.

I also read the Sabbat Worlds Anthology, edited by Dan Abnett and featuring short stories and novellas from him and several other Black Library authors. All of the stories take place in the world of Gaunt's Ghosts, although many of them focus on other units and other planets. But all are part of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade that Gaunt's Ghost's made famous. After reading the first two stories I wasn't sure I'd spent my money wisely on the book. They left me feeling a bit flat, I'm not sure if the writing wasn't very good or just because I didn't identify with the characters and situations in them. Luckily, the book picked up for me from that point on, and I enjoyed the rest of it. The first Abnett story was a bit silly, though, as you could tell pretty soon what the surprise ending was. I sincerely hope that he was just trying to give some insight into Gaunt's character and values rather than trick the reader, because it was pretty obvious what was going on. I can't really say more without giving up spoilers, so I'll leave it at that. I'd recommend the book if you are following the Gaunt's Ghosts series, but otherwise you probably won't miss much by giving it a pass. Next on my agenda is Blood Pact, the most recent book in the Gaunt's Ghosts series, and after that I will probably start in on the Horus Heresy books.

I slapped some black wash on the Dwarf Warriors the other day, but that's about it on the miniature wargaming side. I've started running again after a few days off, so that's been fun. I can't say I enjoy running, but I do feel better when I've made it a point to exercise (almost) daily. And I've enjoyed watching my times slowly get better.

Not Everything is Negative

Although I am mildly irritated by Forge World's disregard for my favorite armies and the uninspiring Hell Pit Abomination figure for the Skaven army, things are really not all that bad. I got a shipment of new books to read in the mail today, an anthology of stories from the Gaunt's Ghosts setting and the first four books of the Horus Heresy series. I have nearly completed my reading of the Bone anthology, which has been a great read. I've made it to the last book, so I may be able to go to bed on time today rather than staying up late to read just one more. We'll see if the Horus Heresy books keep me up past my bedtime.

The twins continue to grow and appear healthy. One of the benefits of having multiple kids in the womb is that you get to have more ultrasounds, so I think my wife gets to look at them almost every week. I get to see a few of the pictures, although the babies aren't very cooperative.

I am still ignoring the Dwarves, who should be half-painted by now. I haven't been able to get myself going on this second batch. I partially blame changes in the routine at work, as changes to my routine usually leave me floundering for a while. The day shift guys have been having difficulty sleeping, so they hang around the office at night and bother me socialize. So the first few hours of my shift are devoted to listening to other people's drama and/or receiving unsolicited advice for problems I don't anticipate facing in my life. For my schedule those are the hours that are best suited to working on figures, so instead of working on Dwarves I get to take part in an un-aired reality show drama. I find it frustrating, but I don't suppose there is any benefit in holding a grudge. So I let it go and silently pray that the other guys will be healed of their sleep issues. Perhaps I should give them the advice my Mom gave to us, "How can you get to sleep if you're out here messing around? Maybe if you go get in your bed you'll feel more tired."

I have a lot of ideas for my wargaming armies, but I don't see a lot of actual progress being made for the moment. I need to find a template for Imperial Guard infantry, so I can draw different camo designs on them and come up with something I like for a Mars-type planet. I recall seeing one, maybe it was in the old Imperial Guard army book or an old copy of White Dwarf, but I haven't had any luck finding a digital one that I can use on the computer or print out and color manually. The best way to do it would be to paint different designs on actual figures, but I don't really have the resources for that here.

My couple weeks of leave is coming up soon and I'm looking forward to spending some time at home with my family. Our two-year old is extremely energetic and talkative, so I will probably spend the entire time being jumped on and talked to. It should be a lot of fun. And it will be nice to finally meet the twins. I doubt I'll get much wargaming stuff done while I'm home, but maybe I'll be able to steal a few moments for myself to do a small project like paint a character model or a superhero. The weather at home is still a bit cold and wet, so plans for motorcycle riding will likely have to wait until late Summer. I may sneak out once, though, with my heated jacket and gloves. The best thing will be getting to spend some time with my wife. I enjoy her company quite a bit. We'll both be going crazy with the new babies and the toddler, but hopefully we can sneak in a few minutes to go on a date and get our lives synced back up. Sometimes it's a difficult adjustment because the deployed soldier and the family at home both get into routines, and coming home is a bit of a shock to both sides. But I'm looking forward to seeing them and living in something that's not a shipping container for a couple weeks.

The Curse of Chaos

This is going to be bit of a rant, I suppose. Probably a two-parter, although the parts are related. My first complaint deals with the Hell Pit Abomination figure that Games Workshop released for the Skaven army. The model is just too busy. People seem to be fielding plenty of them because of the juicy statline, but for me it just doesn't fit in with my vision of a Skaven super-beast. If they were going to give the Skaven a big Moulder-created figure, why couldn't it have been someting like a massive Rat Ogre or Rat Mammoth (like the Lizardmen Stegadon, only furry)? At least something with a face. From the tail to the center of the torso, the critter looks okay. After that, it devolves into a complicated mass of heads and limbs that just don't work. There's so much going on that no real theme can come out of it. I don't particularly like the army book description, and I really don't like the model. Maybe the stat line is all right, but I've never paid much attention to stat lines before. The battle report in January's White Dwarf featured two of the creatures, and I couldn't help rooting against them. I just don't see the draw, which brings me to my next problem.

Forge World recently sent out a newsletter proclaiming the first wave of releases for their Warhammer Forge line, models that focus on the world and armies of Warhammer Fantasy. Rather than covering a variety of popular Fantasy armies, all of the releases are Nurgle-themed. Someone at Forge World must be a huge Chaos fan with a Nurgle fetish, because they release far too many models that regurgitate the same tired theme. I hope they eventually release something exciting for the other armies, but it seems a bit narrow-minded to only cater to one segment of your fan base with the inaugural wave of releases. I'd like to see a Dwarven war machine, some Skaven contraption, or perhaps a Forge World interpretation of an Imperial Steam Tank. I'm sure they could do wonders with the Orcs and Goblins, too, as their Ork range for 40k is pretty decent. Granted, I can't afford half of their stuff and mostly only window shop, but there are a few models from the 40k line that I am going to get as time and budget permit. I would like to suppor the Fantasy side of the house as well, but only when they decide to support all of the hobbyists who don't want to run Nurgle-themed Chaos armies.

Shogun

Today before work I played the board game Shogun with a couple of guys from my unit. One of the guys is really into board games and has been hustling pretty hard to find players. Three of the five scheduled people showed up this evening, which is the minimum necessary to play. It's a pretty interesting game, with players fighting for control of territory while balancing a limited budget that must be split between raising armies and constructing buildings. Owning a territory will score some points, but buildings are where the game is really won. The game lasts two turns, with four rounds per turn that represent the seasons of the year. At the end of winter, the number of buildings in each region are added up, and the owners of the most buildings in each region gain points.

I came in second place, with the guy who owns the game winning. I don't think I really caught the scope of the game until partway through the second turn, and by then it was too late to catch up on construction or conquest of territories with important buildings. I think there is a tentative plan to play again soon, and I should be able to give it a better run next time.

I did have a couple of good moves during the final turn, using the combat mechanic to my advantage. All of the armies are in the form of small colored wooden cubes. During an attack, the armies are gathered together and thrown into a battle tower, which is like a dice tower except that some of the armies thrown into the tower might stick on the shelves and stay inside. The ones that fall all the way out are used to resolve the combat, and the ones that stay in the tower have the opportunity to influence future combats. I knew approximately what my opponents might do during the attack phases. I arranged some useless combats in the early part of the fighting to pre-load the tower with armies of my color, so that in the combats that really mattered I would have an advantage. It worked well this time and in two decisive battles I had more armies come out than I'd put in, providing the margin of victory for those combats. It's not a fool-proof method, but if you know there's an important combat coming up you can increase your chances by trying to get some more of your unused armies stuck in the tower.

Superhero Gaming

The next batch of Dwarves is coming along slowly. I am trying to push through and actually keep this project moving. There's not very much that's complicated about them, but I am a slow painter. One of the guys asked me how long it takes to paint each one, and I estimate my time at 1.5-2 hours per figure. So I'm figuring it will take a little over 200 hours for the army, once you figure in the time it will take to base them and brush on a coat or two of varnish, as well as waffling around and painting character models. I may even hit 300 hours on the 2000-point Dwarf project.

I didn't work on the figures tonight, as I had to watch some football. I'm glad the Packers beat the Bears, and it looks like the Steelers are going to beat the Jets. That would make for a good Super Bowl matchup. I sure hope the Steelers lose to the Packers, though. Roethlisberger has an uncanny ability to move around in the pocket, but his decisions off the field make me root against him. Of course, you can't throw a football in an NFL stadium without hitting a player with some legal and/or personality issues. But the Steelers should have some bad karma coming to them after they stole that Super Bowl from the Seahawks a few years ago.

I've been getting a little tired of using the same GW paint colors for everything, especially skin tones. I've been looking at other paint lines, like Foundry's paint system, but switching paint systems is not the cheapest thing to do. I will probably just pick and choose a few different colors from other lines to supplement GW colors that I want to switch up. I know there are a lot of people who use cheap craft paints that come in big bottles for $0.99, and I use some of them for bases and terrain, but they just go on a little too thick and grainy for me to use them for my figures. Even watered down they don't go on the way I'd like. There's no doubt that hobby paints are expensive, but so are most hobby items.

A couple of blogs that have caught my eye recently are those showcasing superhero figures. I love comics and the brightly colored heroes and villains who populate their worlds. We're even naming all of our kids after various comic book heroes, which is something I hope they'll appreciate as they get older. We haven't done anything too crazy with their first names, though, as it's important to me that they'll be able to suppress the comic book connection if they want to later in their academic or professional lives. But enough about my kids, here are a couple of blogs I've spotted recently that heavily feature superhero figures. There are a lot of neat figures out there for superhero gaming, quite a few from Reaper's Chronoscope line, a bunch from Superfigs, some Heroclix that can be rebased, and probably a hundred more I don't know about just yet. I've only painted one super so far, but I have big visions for teams and individuals that could inhabit a four-color world. I just need a rules system and a pile of lead.

I also wanted to bring some attention to this Death Mountain terrain piece over at the Ricalopia blog. There are a few work-in-progress posts prior to the post I linked, so you can see the process that went into it. It's a combination of GW kits and foam that come together to make something really neat and unique.

Reptiles, Reading, and Too Much Bacon

I thought I had something to write about, but whatever idea I had has flown the coop and I am unable to bring it back. I finished my book on the illegal reptile trade, which was an interesting look at how far some people will take an obsession. I had no idea how much double-crossing and dirty dealing there was in the world of animal trade. Even some of the most famous zoos in the world were allegedly in on many of these deals, although they tried to distance themselves from it once the big stings by federal agents got them some unwanted press coverage. The feds apparently had enough evidence to go after the zoos, but thought better of it, preferring instead to take down the sleazy guys who actually arranged and carried out the smuggling.

I would still like to keep a reptile or three, probably just Owen, our Russian Tortoise, and a small snake or two. I'm not too interested in the rare and illegal critters offered by the folks I've just finished reading about.  I've promised my wife that I won't try to bring home a snake until I am there to care for it and have a place set up to put it. The males in my family have a history of bringing home animals that don't necessarily have proper housing set up yet, and sometimes it gets interesting.

I haven't read much from my Bone anthology yet. I may try to get stuck in today after my shift, but I also may decide to paint some Dwarves. I haven't decided yet. It would be nice if this place had a library that was any good, because I keep running out of books and I really don't have space for all these books, either. An e-reader of some kind would sure be handy, but good luck finding a place to download books from. Many new PC games are unplayable here as well, as the anti-piracy features render them unplayable without a handy internet connection. I've just about given up entirely on video games. The return on time invested just seems to be getting lower and lower for me personally, and jumping through all the hoops just to verify that my software is a legal copy makes me more grouchy than I already am. I haven't quite sworn them off entirely, but I'm pretty darn close.

Now I'm off to get some breakfast. The portions at the chow hall are ridiculous. If you ask for bacon, you will get a minimum of 8 slices, maybe up to 12. If you get eggs, there will be at least 2 cups of eggs. If you want hashbrowns, you'll get a huge pile of them. It's crazy. I will probably have a heart attack caused entirely by bacon overdoses. I hope that's covered by my insurance policy.