Masters of the Universe - Battleground, a review.

Master of the Universe.

As per my last post, I picked up this starter set on an impulse at Colours wargame show. I had seen it online when released and the reasonable price per kilo (Seriously you get a lot of heavy plastic in there) plus the freebie added He-man and Battlecat mini, was enough to convince me.

The box contains a cardboard hexed board, a lot of plastic scenery and ten minis, five each of heroes of Eternia and villains. Even if the rules were rubbish, the plastic components were definitely worthwhile. The terrain pieces are generic enough to be used for other games and the minis are great quality too.

The set is produced by Archon Studio who also make the Dungeons and Lazers range of plastics including their great range of dragons, one of which I own:

Like the dragon, the plastic pieces fit together so perfectly, there has been a lot of thought put in how these kits are made. I would say though, that to produce the dynamic poses they have, each model is comprised of around seven to ten pieces, meaning there is a lot of craft knife work to be done on their contact points to the sprue. (Not a project for a first timer.) It took me a couple of evenings to glue them all together, but they look great.

I have yet to play the game, but a quick read through of the rules seemed to make sense. Each player has a deck of cards that they use to 'bid' for priority then use the same cards to assign mana and action points to their models. Mana is used to cast spells or re-roll dice, action points for moving, shooting etc. The cost of an action increasing if attempted multiple times in the same go. Resolving attacks is pretty simple, roll a number of dice equal to the relevant stat, succeeding on a 4+ and then the defending player cancels out successful rolls with their own test.

There are lots of exceptions to the rules on character cards and item buffs to keep the game interesting. For example, the sword of power can use mana to increase its attack. Characters can also spend a turn focusing to improve their odds the following turn.

A well set out and clear rulebook, an additional book of different missions and some high quality plastic parts make this a great starter set. There are two 'Wave one' add ons available now with a third 'Wave two' coming in October with extra characters and cards. Fingers crossed eventually we might even get She-Ra and Swift Wind! 

Review of the day, Colours 2022

This weekend I went to Colours 2022 at the Newbury Racecourse, hosted by Newbury and Reading Wargames Society. Regular readers will know I love this show and due to reasons we all know about, last year the show didn't go ahead. This year was a welcome return for the show.

The whole day flew by at such a pace, I had such a great day I was too busy to even take any photos! I started the day with a peruse of the always wonderful Bring and Buy then Brother in Law and myself had a demo game of Achroma, a new card game. Similar in vein to Magic the Gathering or Pokemon, there were some interesting ideas like the use of a mobile app to keep track of your life and as you are linked to your Opponents apps, you can steal their life directly from their phone too. 

There was of course the obligatory meet up with Illustrious Opponent and other friends, then for the afternoon my youngest boy joined me thanks to the Father in Law bringing him down. Keen to get some gaming in, my boy was a little disappointed with the less than normal number of games at the show, but we did get to sit down with the chaps from Liverpool Wargames. We had an excellent game of Saga using balanced Samurai forces and I have to say myself and the other chap I was partnered with took an absolute trouncing from the Enthusiastic Opponent. My son has the best luck with dice and a keen tactical mind. We were very grateful for the chaps coming down from Liverpool with such an excellent game. I've not played Saga before and I have to say, I would again.

For the rest of the show we got some great shopping in, even Pokemon cards, although Space Marines were thin on the ground around the show, so EO didn't get to add that wanted Dreadnought to his Ultramarines force. He did however choose some scenery of his own.

The scouts are his own too.

I had a lovely chat to the owner of Tangent miniatures who kindly gave EO a freebie miniature that has a distinct Buckeroo Banzai feel to it. As we watched Ready Player One this week, I am instructed to paint the model up as Parzival for him. (Watch the film, it will make sense.)

The shopping haul wasn't massive, but there was one heavy item.

I have to say, the set is so heavy my plastic bag split before I got home and snipping the sprues for the scenery was a workout in itself. We are looking forward to getting a game in. Today has been all about X Wing though, mainly because there wasn't any painting involved, we cracked on straight away learning the rules when we got home.

All in a fun day, can't wait till next year.

Old West Fighters.

I seem to be painting Bad Squiddo again.  This time some Old West Fighters. These are reasonably new sculpts from their range, a great addition to my ever growing Old West Town. I must photograph the set up one day for this blog, it is the largest set of scenery I have.

 

 

Painting these was the ideal opportunity to try out my newest tool at my painting station, a new brush, painting grip, craft knife? No, reading glasses. I have always been blessed with decent vision and never needed glasses before. However, I have been increasingly struggling with details. I have been taking photos of my models to then notice things I am missing and although I could concentrate on them to see details, it became harder as I got tired. I did consider one of these fancy sets of magnifying goggles you see at wargame shows. A cheap pair of reading glasses however has proven to be just the job. I do perch them on the end of my nose much to the amusement of my youngest son who declared I look like a librarian.

Talking of my youngest son, he has become a keen hobbyist already. For his birthday he asked for some Space Marine kits and we built and painted them together. He is a lot more interested in the gaming side of the hobby at the moment though and was keen to deploy his ever increasing army on a tabletop. Having long given up on current 40K rules I fished out the pdf of the playtest version of the new Xenos Rampant rules. (Based on Lion/Dragon Rampant rules, the book comes out in November.)

The Distinguished (Brother in Law) and Illustrious Opponents were both invited (or summoned?) over for a gaming session. My son (the Junior Opponent?) had a lovely time happily winning multiple games and quickly picked up the rules, in fact by the end of the day he would be correcting me on them. 

The Distinguished Opponents Dark Angel Space Marines bravely take on the Junior Opponents Ultramarines tank, bristling with guns.

My Chaos cultist army squeezing into the deployment zone.

The Distinguished Opponents old school style Beaky Marines.


Apologies for not including photos from the Illustrious Opponent, too much fun was being had to remember to record much of the event. I can safely say though, once the proper rulebook comes out, I think it will definitely become a household favourite.

Finally I thought I would add a photo of another quick project I did lately. Way back in the last millennium I had combined the arms from some plastic Genestealers with the bodies of metal Hormogaunts from Games Workshop. I was never completely happy with them as the heads had a clearly distinguishable face. So much more recently I have added some green stuff and blended in to make them look more recognisable and given the paintwork another touch up. I am quite happy with the finished result: 

Droids, droids and more droids

Just a short post to share these wonderful little droids/robots/sentient dustbins that came in a set from Bad Squiddo games.

A set of seven, they are 28mm scale but all a little shorter than a standard person as would be expected of robots of this type. The first two were asking to painted in the familiar colours of their obvious inspirations.

These next two wouldn't be out of place on a Robot Wars style arena.

I would like to point out that walking robots never fair well though, so "Razer" on the left here I think has the advantage.

These two have a great tin toy feel, so could even find themselves in a Pulp era game.

Finally this little tank was almost forgotten about, it was lost at the back of my painting tray and I nearly forgot to include them. 

I'm amassing quite a collection of robots in this scale so I might have to come up with some skirmish rules for them all. (Who said wargaming had to include people?) They are also going to be useful for Rogue Stars, Stargrave or even possibly Xenos Rampant when it finally arrives. 

Oldhammer is the besthammer

How have you been? It's been an age right? Well, after the Analogue Hobby painting challenge I took a mini break from the hobby and didn't get the paints out much at all. There was a lot of great TV to watch for starters plus sometimes life just gets busy.

Anyway, these days owning an LED lamp rather than a furnace level heat producing daylight bulb means painting is not stopped by the heat of summer. So, I got the brushes out and painted this week. I also did some undercoating and building with the youngest offspring of his choices from GW. They are some bizarre new Space Marine kits that I have no idea what they are. A very funky looking bunker and a hover(?) tank. (Did they get jealous of the Eldar?) I must admit these new kits fit together very nicely even if they have a horrendous number of parts. 

I, however am stubbornly sticking to what I know and have been adding to one of my good old fashioned square based warhammer armies. I explained here how I accidently painted a night goblin army and recently I have been wondering what I can add to it. It really needed a proper character to lead the army and so I trawled ebay until a

I found a reasonably priced set of Skarsnik and Gobbla. What better character to lead the army? I also prefer this version to the newer silly looking one. 

I'm super happy with how they came out. I painted Gobbla first, the entire time lamenting the fact that any squigs I previously owned were sold in a clearout of old models that I sometimes regret. I really want some more old school squigs now, they are so fun to paint. Skarsnik was a bit trickier as he has a lot of details, some of which I genuinely couldn't see unless I took a photo and zoomed to check what I had painted! I tried something new for the green skin, GW Plaguebearer flesh contrast over Coat D'arms goblin green. (I know, right? Finally success with contrast paints!) It's taken about thirty years, but I think I've finally found a way of painting greenskins I am gonna stick with. (Cue GW discontinuing the contrast paints range...)

So, what should I add to the army next? 

Let me know in the comments.

Zulu wars Perry Plastics

Its been a while since my last post here. I haven't been idle though. Regulars will know I have been taking part in the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge and posting there instead. Post Christmas I managed at least one post a week, so not too shabby if I may say so myself. So, apologies to anyone that saw these models in that blog  but I thought they warranted another posting here with some different accompanying words.

As I have previously said many a time, I love historical gaming, but I am slower at painting for it due to the self imposed stress of historical accuracy in uniforms. (Yes, so much has already been said about "Do your own thing" This is just my own issue, let's move on.)

So, I greatly enjoyed sticking together these Perry Miniatures plastics, then they sat on my painting tray for a long time. A very long time. Inspired by the Father in Laws love of the Victorian era in toy soldiers, I picked up a copy of Ospreys, The Men who would be Kings rulebook. They are skirmish rules and using their half size unit rules, you have enough for two forces if you buy two boxes of Perry Plastics, one for Brits, one for Zulus. (You are actually just a couple short, but the free Warlord sprues from Wargames Illustrated I have got recently covered the shortfalls.)

After these were all finished I decided to add a Gatling Gun to the Brits.

The gun carriage colour was inspired by checking out these guys here.

I also remembered I have a couple of the Wargames Illustrated limited edition figures that fit in nicely.

I'm probably going to paint up another box of Zulus if I can bully myself around to getting to it.

The British box comes with casualty markers. The rules I have don't specifically require any on-table markers but I decided to future proof myself by using green stuff to make some dice holders with them in case something crops up in the future that they are useful for.

All the models were finished with Coat D'arms Super Shader which gives them some nice shading, as well as an old school gloss finish that I kinda like for this project.

The paints used were (For those interested):

British.

Citadel paints:

Zandra dust, Corax White, Cadian Fleshtone, Eshin Grey, Dawnstone, Ironbreaker, Abaddon Black, Retributor Armour.

Coat D'arms:

Pale Sand, Horse Tone Dun, Beige Brown, Blood Red, Supershader Light Brown.

Zulus.

Coat D'arms:

Beige Brown, Dark Flesh, Pale Sand.

Citadel:

Zandra Dust, Corax White, Abaddon Black, Agrax Earthshade.

For the bases:

Tamiya Grass Effect Khaki, Gamers Grass Dry Steppe tufts.

The gun carriage is Citadel Russ Grey.

Now, anyone know if I can get an mdf Rorke's Drift kit in 28mm that folds down for easy storage?

Middle Earth painting at Christmas

 So, I have been painting like a (Golden) demon already post Christmas with the Analogue Painting Challenge. under the alias PeterB. For those of you who have not popped over there to find my posts among all the vastly superior work on offer, (There are on average about 10 posts a day from people showing some great painted miniatures over there every single day.) I can give you a brief update on some work I have done so far.

Firstly I have finished the Balrog I picked up at Salute. It actually took a bit more work than I originally thought it would when I bought it. I had to restore two claws at the front of the wings and the point of the rear of one wing entirely with green stuff where they had been snipped off for some reason. 

I then also had to build up the surface below his left foot as his leg was so twisted, that it was clear above the ground.

Next up, a couple of members of the Fellowship, painted as close as I could to their movie counterparts.

Finally, a couple of Bad Squiddo models. the Wolf I picked up to use for Silver Bayonet, the Knight was a model I liked the look of that was part of the recent Kickstarter. I'm not sure I'm happy with the sword and the shield, time will tell if I repaint them.