First game of WWX, and some thoughts thereon

So, I finally got the chance to play a couple of small, $500 games of Wild West Exodus last night.  We had a couple of things we were concerned about, most notably true LOS.  Yes, WWX uses true LOS, which is a departure from many other games, which treat miniatures as occupying a cylindrical space the diameter of their base and extending a certain distance upwards.  WWX does not do that; it harks back to the "If you can see it, you can shoot it" rule.

Overall, it worked fairly well, but neither of us were being jerks about it.  In a tournament, however, I suspect that things would be very different.  And that brings me to my biggest criticism of WWX - it is not, and probably never will be, a game suited to tournament play.

That's not entirely a bad thing.  WWX "suffers" (so to speak) from the same club-level mentality that is the case for WFB and 40k.  Those games work just fine when you are playing with your friends, and you play in the same group from week to week.  But, when you move away from your local circle, and go to a convention, you can very quickly find that, because the rules (and sometimes tournament guidelines) are so "loose," there is a lot of room for interpretation.

By contrast, Warmachine has a very tight ruleset.  There is not much wiggle room, and you are pretty much assured that, whether you play in Chicago, Pittsburgh or Seattle, you are going to be playing under the same conditions and rules for terrain.

It's not a bad thing that WWX is not really a tourney game.  (Yes, they are having one at AdeptiCon.  I am playing in it, but I am expecting a lot of "Well, we can always dice to see who is right about [X]," or possibly a few full-bore, alchohol-fueled arguments.)  It's a fun game to sit down with some friends, have a few drinks, and shoot a lot of varmints full of lead.  It's fun, and I am enjoying it, but as a tournament game, it is going to be lacking.

Oh, and for the record - I lose both games.  The first one badly (very badly), the second I managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with my usual stellar dice rolls.

It's a feeling of accomplishment

And not a little horror.  I'm still not done with cataloging everything, but I made more progress today.  The kids had a half day of school, so I lost some serious painting and counting time.  Here are the counts, as of a few minutes ago:

Cryx -111
Cygnar -39
Khador -36
Protectorate -18
Retribution -94
Convergence - 89
Mercenaries -57
Circle -28
Legion -22
Skorne -54
Trollbloods -74
Minions  -92

So, we're up to 714.  I think I only have a couple hundred still to go.  I'm a little unsure at this point - I'm marking and setting the tallied ones aside, so it's not that, it's simply that I have several half-filled cases, whose contents are currently a mystery.  I'll see about clearing some of that up tomorrow.

In the meantime, I'm hoping to get in a few games of WWX tomorrow.  Need to start playing so that I can get a good handle on the rules between now and AdeptiCon.

Almost halfway?

So, I lost all the stuff I had been logging yesterday.  I made a plea for a new collection tracker on the PP forums, and lo, my plea was answered.  It's been a long day, and I've had a couple of drinks to unwind from several hours of counting little metal men, so I'll keep this brief.

To date, I have cataloged something like 412 miniatures, broken down (roughly) as follows:

Cryx - 42
Cygnar - 27
Khador - 29
Protectorate -10
Retribution - 10
Convergence - 86
Mercenaries - 25
Circle - 23
Legion - 18
Skorne - 12
Trollbloods - 55
Minions  - 75

Per the calculator, I currently have 56.74% of the casters (though it includes, among other things, all of the ones from the KS - which I will be getting). I have 23.51% of all the available models - but it will be considerably higher, obviously.  And, it says that 17.45% of what I have is painted - but it counts a unit of 10 as being 1 model in this case, so that number is whacked.

I'll bet that I plug in another 200 models or more tomorrow.  This is kind of interesting - I knew I had most of the casters - looks like the current count is 80, but it is still shy by at least half a dozen.

A wasted afternoon

So, I'm now looking for a new collection tracker, other than forwrdkommander. I've used it, it's not bad, except for this:

I logged out of FK on the desktop upstairs. I take the laptop to the basement, log in to forwardkommander, and begin to track everything. I mean, everything - I started with a blank slate, and began to rebuild the omnibus list.

I had some 200 or so models logged, and so I logged out on the laptop. When upstairs, started making dinner, and logged in on the desktop. And half of the models are no longer logged. So, basically, I can redo about half of what I had logged over the course of the afternoon. Except, I need to sort them out, and see which models are still logged, and which are not.* (E.g. - the last thing I logged, my units of gatormen, are still there. My convergence, which I had logged previously, is now gone.)

I have a thousand or so WM models, spread across every faction. I'm trying to build an omnibus list so I can (1) ensure that I have every warcaster/warlock for Who's the Boss events, and (2) not buy solos or other models that I have, but have forgotten about.

So, tl;dr - collection tracker wonkiness lost an hour or more's worth of work today.  Yay for wasted time, right?

Life had other plans

So I did not post anything the last couple of days.  A quick update is in order, then:

The FLGs that changed owners?  Yeah, it's going to be a nice place to play.  I did an unofficial demo day there today (advertised, but not enough people for it to be "official"), and I plan to be back there again next weekend.  I may stop by during the week, since they have used miniatures for sale. . . .and while I resisted some of the siren song, I nonetheless picked up Kromac the Ravenous and Intercessor Kreoss.  That makes me happy - and brings me a little closer to the goal of having all the casters.

Yeah, I'm still short on that, but I plan on getting a little closer this year.  I think, even with the release of Vengeance, that I can get most of them by the end of the year.  I closed it up a bit last year, but lost focus sometime mid-year, when my attention turned to Convergence.  That has settled down a little, so I can spare some attention to other, non-roboty goals.

I have been assembling my WWX guys.  I love their plastics.  Very, very nice.  I want PP to make plastics this nice, actually.  My Union goons (er, hired hands) Wave 1 are done, and I am working on my Lawmen goons, just so I can play a couple of different things.  I should get them primed in the next couple of days, and I really need to start painting them ASAP.

I haven't actually started working on the DZC figs.  I should be doing that too.  And pouring plaster - I have three major Hirst Arts projects that are about 75% poured, and really, a day or two of casting would let me get to the point where I could finish putting them together.

I've also been cleaning the basement.  I have a train layout that I really need to get cracking on.  Working on it will help with my modelling skills, as well as my carpentry.  And get a lot of crap out of the way in the basement, since it's all stuff that came off the former layout, and needs a good home.

I'm back.

Nothing tonight, but just got back from a trip to WDW, aka the Mouse House, aka The Most Expensive Place on Earth.  No gaming was involved, but an awful lot of running was.  I should be back to posting pointless pontifications pursuant to our hobby tomorrow.

Rater than reinvent the wheel

I'll just link to a Rivet Wars unboxing.  I have mine, but I don't have time to unbox it and ogle my new shiny plastics for a couple of days.  Anyway, read this, and enjoy:

http://nogspaintingcave.blogspot.com/2014/01/when-it-rains-it-pours.html

Being snowed in. . . . .

really puts a crimp in your plans.  I left the FLGS on Saturday, and the snow was coming down fast and heavy.  By Sunday afternoon, schools around the state were being cancelled for Monday and today.  So, instead of having some decent hobby time to myself, and catching up on assembling all of my lovely WWX models, I got extra time with the kiddos, and almost as much extra time with the snowblower.

It was bad enough that, near as I can tell, there was no local mail yesterday.  This was bad, because I was expecting a package.  Fortunately, the plows finally came through, and the mail followed today, and I know have a box with my core set of Rivet Wars.  It looks very nice - I will try to blog an unboxing of it later tonight.

A change of scene

Nothing much to say today.  I started putting together my WWX guys, and working a little on some of the new Convergence stuff I had sitting around.  Played a couple of games at a FLGS that just changed owners, and the new owner sounds like he really wants our community to take off.

It's a good start to the year, gaming-wise.

Tracking is a blessing and a curse

I'm certainly old enough to remember the bad old days, when you would order something, like x-ray specs from the back of a comic, and send off the requisite $3.99 and wait 6-8 weeks for delivery.  At first, you would check every day for the package in the mail, and it would fail to arrive.  (I mean, you sent off for it on Monday, and it's Thursday already - where is it?  Wile E Coyote can get Acme stuff in all of 2 seconds, surely the USPS can do that, right?  Anyway . . .)

Eventually, you would stop checking all the time, and one day, you would come home from school, and there would be a little cardboard box on the table, with a "present" - some random piece of crap that you had ordered and forgotten about.  Yay!

Now, we have tracking.  I know where my Rivet Wars game is currently located (Ohio).  I know when it got there (Dec 31st).  Thanks to mapquest, I know that it is only a couple of hours from my house.  I don't know why it is not here yet.  And that's oddly frustrating sometimes. 

I tracked my WWX stuff via UPS.  I watched it go to within 40 miles of where I was staying, and sit there in a UPS facility for almost a week before it moved on.  That frustration galled me a bit - I knew where it was, and it just sat there, unmoving, basically waiting to be moved overnight, so that it did not get delivered early.

Anyway  - I am putting off working on things I have in hand, obsessing about stuff en route.  It will get here when it gets here, right?

WWX is finally here

I'd say more about it, but it arrived fairly late in the day, the kids are still off of school, and it was date night.  I've gone through it - figs look decent, I was missing a few things, and I am going back to drinking bourbon and watching Tonto - I mean, the Lone Ranger.

2014 post

Okay, so I don't really do the resolutions thing per se.  I do have some goals for 2014, which I may as well lay out here:

1. Post more often.  I really slacked off last year, and I do not like that.  I would love to post at least four times per week, but I am going to try and get in the habit of posting something, even if it is only a couple sentences, every day for as long as I can.   The over/under on that one is Monday, by the way.
2. Paint more.  I did not paint nearly enough in 2013.  I would like to paint 100 miniatures in 2014.  I'll have plenty of incentive, because
3. Play more games in 2014, and play them more competitively.  I plan on growing the local community, and playing more games.  When I am not demoing, I need to play to win - though I will still abide by the Wheaton rule.
4. Play different games.  In 2013, I played a few games of X-wing, a few games of Ogre, and a fair amount of Warmachine and Hordes.  In 2014, I want to play all of those games, plus Bolt Action, Malifaux, Wild West Exodus, Dropzone Commander, Rivet Wars, and Relic Knights.  Possibly some other stuff.
5. Rebuild my gaming table.  I build my first gaming table over a decade ago, and it has been moved cross-country once, and around the house a few times.  It needs to go, and a better one built.  I need to build the benchwork for my sons model railroad first though.

I may have more.  I will edit this post if I think of any.