The problems of being an altaholic.

So, my FLGS is going to start some different fall slow-grow leagues in the middle of next month.  Right now, there are plans for leagues in Malifaux, Warmahordes, Firestorm Armada, 40k and Infinity.  I plan on playing in 4 of them.

Fortunately, I already have the needed minis for everything.  I can play either Terrans or Directorate for FSA, anything I want for WM, Combined or Ariadna for Infinity, and more than a couple crews for Malifaux.

But I would like to have everything actually painted by the end of the league, which is the hard part.  I think I need to spend some time in the next few days assembling things, and maybe really learning how to play Infinity.  And brushing up my Malifaux rules.

There and back again

So, I missed close to 2 weeks because I was at the Shrine of the Mouse, aka Walt Disney World.  Always a good plan to escape the heat and humidity of a midwestern August by heading to a swamp in Florida.  I love it, but I could do without the 90+ degree heat and heat indexes of 110. 

But, despite a SNAFU on the part of the USPS, I came back to some minis - some Directorate ships for Firestorm Armada, and the Revenant models for SAGA.  With summer winding down and the kids heading back to school soon, I am hoping to really get some painting time in soon. 

But first, I have to catch up on the lawn and the laundry.

FSA tourney report

I got to play in an FSA tourney yesterday.  I went in expecting to lose, but that's okay, because I had only played a couple of games of 2nd ed FSA.  I just wanted to get some games in, which is the same expectation that I have for any games at GenCon. My list was dictated mainly by what models I had, and what I was most comfortable with. (Eg, I have a carrier, but haven't tried it yet, so I did not take it.)

I fielded:

Tyrant battleship, with +1" Mv, +2 PD, -1" turn limit
3 Hermes crsuiders, all with +1 shield
3 Artemis destroyers
4 Missionary frigates
4 Armsmen frigates

I faced Ba'Kash and two different Sorylian fleets. The Ba'kash player just rolled over me - his frigates outflanked me, and my torps just could not get to his carrier. (I played poorly, which is part of it, but I was trying to use my cruisers, battleship and destroyers to crack his heavy cruiser, and not having any luck.) I did bad, bad things to the first Sorylian; a combination of lucky dice rolls, and most of his force was either ambush or in reserve, so everything got to shoot at his battleship. I did not kill the BB when I had the chance, and it cost me a couple ships in the end. I also should have spent a battle log point to ensure that my reserves got onto the board on the final turn, instead of letting him have the free points. (Lesson learned).

The second Sorylian player tabled me, and I barely did enough to him to avoid hitting -10 on the battle log. I played passably well, and he said that my fleet wasn't bad - it just needs some tweaks (which I know). My lesson on that game was just how powerful nukes can be.

So, my quick lesson thoughts are:
Buying MARs for extra PD and shields were worth it. That extra shield or PD (or both) kept my ships alive much longer, often being the difference between a crit and just a point, or even taking no damage at all.

Next time, take nukes. They will force the other players to either spread out their fleet, or risk the extra damage. Plus, Terran nukes are cheap.

Remember that you can reroll beam weapons in range band 1. The Tyrant shot at something, and I had a bunch of 1s, commented on it, scooped, and went on. A couple minutes later, with my next squadron, I realized that I could have rerolled those. I might not have done any better, but I sure as hell would not have done any worse.

Terran destroyers are evil. Full stop + hidden killer + maneuverable is bad enough, but if I make the fore weapons into nukes, all I need is a clear firing lane.

The cruisers were kind of meh. I'll try them again, and spend the extra points for nuclear torpedoes.

Missionary frigates did not do much, and were barely useful in hunting down enemy ships with Difficult Target. I need to try shunting them in or bringing them on the flanks as reserve. Armsmen frigates were almost always more useful, and I used their torps to take out Difficult targets with a decent rate of success.

The weekend was a bust

Well, a bust in the sense that I got no games in.  At all.  On the other hand, I spent hours at the FLGS on Saturday, talking about Planetfall and FSA (which is good, because I am hoping to play in an FSA event next Sunday), and helping four players through some games of Warmachine.  These weren't demo games; the players all had 15 point armies, but they were still new to the game, and I was glad to answer questions and offer advice when needed.

I also worked on a couple of 4' x 4' boards for a friend, and got a little painting done, and had time to start reading through the Planetfall rules.  I also think that I have all of my 40k Marines rounded up, so they can go off to Bartertown.  Need to raise some cash for GenCon, and pay for a couple of Kickstarters that I am interested in.  And get some more SAGA models.

So much for a resolution

Been way too busy lately - a wedding, the 4th of July, and family in town have kept me away from any sort of hobby time.  Finally, things are mostly settling down, and tomorrow, I am expecting my starter box of Planetfall to show up on my doorstep.  I have also been building terrain, and, in fact, rather than post anything else here, I am going to go and actually work on my various hobbies.  I have an FSA event I can enter in a bit more than a week, and I think I might want to have some things painted for it.

A wedding and two new games

I was gone last weekend - we went out of state to attend a wedding.  Fortunately, it was in the town where I went to college, which meant that I could see friends and nearby family, and revist the old stomping grounds.  Most of the game stores (hell, all of them, I think) that I used to hanfg out at are all gone.  But new ones have arisen in their place, and I wound up with two new games - Boss Monster and a Pandemic expansion.  Both will be getting played soon.

Anyway, continuing on my thoughts about Kanban boards and being overwhelmed, I need to take a pic of the current board and decide what to do.  I did get some stuff built the last couple of days, and I should be able to prime later today.  I think that, for the most part, this week I shall concentrate on getting some paint onto some Malifaux figs.  Next week, I think I will concentrate on FSA (and hopefully Planetfall).  The week after that, Warmachine.  And then I think it is on to GenCon (or near enough), so I will also be spending time the next few weeks getting ready to put things up for auction.

With that in mind, for today, I have two or three Ten Thunders models to assemble, and about a dozen of them to prime.  I plan on doing that today, plus basing some of the Kings of War models, and putting some base colors on some Malifaux figs, though I don't know whether it will be more Ten Thunders or the Latigo posse.  Or Gremlins. 

Now - as a sidebar - I said that I would be concentrating on Malifaux.  That's largely true, but I should have my Rhulic colossal coming in the mail tomorrow, so when it shows up, I might start putting that together.  Because I want to field it. 

Progress report

I'm not painting nearly as much as I would like  Part of that is life getting in the way, part of that is because I decided to help out the FLGS.  Today, they are having a 40k tourney.  It's apparently going to be kind of a big deal - they are hoping to have people coming from several hours away (though the foot of snow expected over the course of the day will probably lessen attendance some).  Anyway, the FLGS does not have nearly enough terrain for this.  They have the table space, they have table toppers (to get them to 4' x 6'), but the tables would have been pretty spare.

So, the store reached out to the local gaming club, which, ideally, would have said something like "You betcha!  We're not really using it that day, and we'd love to see lots of 40k games being played in the area, even if they aren't at our preferred store.  What time and format is the tourney, anyway, because we would love to play!"

That didn't happen.

So, I looked at what I had in the basement earlier this week, sent a quick message to the store telling them that I could probably scrounge up some terrain for them to use, and got to work.  This is the result:



(For scale purposes - the green area rug is 5' x 8')

The final tally is more impressive.  I managed another seven or eight linear feet of walls, maybe more.  I had a large box of hills that aren't pictured here.  There are pieces on the right that got cut out of the photo.

Now, I have been painting.  I got a couple of things finished - and I'll post pics in the next day or so.  But, I have also been working toward the next big thing for my FLGS.  They're doing a miniature gaming demo day.  So, we plan on running demos of Warmachine and Hordes, another local is going to run Malifaux demos, and we'll have space set up to demo and play Firestorm Armada, Relic Knights, and Robotech Tactics.  We'll also demo PP games like Zombies Keep Out and High Command.

So I have also been building Robotech figs.  And some Malifaux. And painting FSA stuff, in addition to WM models.  And, this afternoon, while the snow falls, I am going to be spending some quality time in the basement, assembling veritech fighters and battlepods, while watching a bad movie or two, and periodically going out to fight a losing battle against the white stuff falling from the sky.

In space, no one can hear you scream. . . .

when your dice crap out on you.  Three of us got to play a small game of Firestorm Armada last night.  We kept things small, used frigates and cruisers, and basically spent the evening pushing ships around the table, making "pew, pew, pew, kaboom!" noises.  (Well, I did that, mainly, but anyway.)

It was a learning game, and we learned a few things.  Like how nasty Dindrenzi railguns can be when three of them point directly at one of your ships, and suddenly your ship is gone.  And how Terrans really like to stay far away until they can arrange a broadside, and even then, they don't want to be too close.  And how badly Jake can roll - for once, the bad dice were not confined to me (hell, I had some great rolls!), and Jake sent several concentrated beam attacks at one of my ships to do absolutely nothing.

So, I need to decide if I am going to bolster my Terrans or add more Relthoza.  Because Dindrenzi are spoken for, as well as RSN.  In the meantime, I need to finish more asteroids, and maybe build a few planets.

Later today is Warmachine, but as EO, I may not get to play.  And tomorrow is a SR tourney, where I definitely won't get to play.  I plan on taking some models along, and getting some assembly done.  Might work on putting together some of the Relic Knights stuff this weekend as well.

AdeptiCon, part II

Next up, Blood, Sweat & Tiers.  I wish I had taken better notes, because for the life of me, I can't recall what I lost to in the first round.  But lose I did, and I wound up heading into the second round, and looking across the table at an eGaspy list. 

I don't recall the entire list, but I recall bane knights and thralls, the cankerworm, withershadow, and a boneripper.  I tried to run my Mortenebra list, but neither she nor Terminus would have been a good match for it.  I died via assassination, and, IIRC, it was to a seether made by the withershadow from one of my jacks.

Third round, I would up playing Wargamer Girl.  She was running an eSorscha list, with winterguard death star, a mortar, widowmakers, and couple of jacks.  I spent too long trying to tear apart the winterguard, and she wore me down and killed poor Terminus.  It was a good game, and I think I would have done a lot better if my Blackbane's had gone right through the winterguard and gone after ole Kovnik Joe.  Oh well, you live, you get curbstomped, and you learn.

The last round, my poor opponent was obviously tipsy.  And he was running pStryker, and a Stormwall.  He moved forward, spent some time trying to take down the objectives for the control points, and left pStryker exposed, and within 9" of Terminus, and 8" of Deathjack.  I won that game, which at least ended the evening on a happy note.

On Saturday, I played a couple of games in the Iron Arena, enough to get my the points to earn a Magnus art print, and then spent some time playing demos of Firestorm Armada and Wreck Age.  I got owned on both.  Wreck Age looks like a fairly decent game - it's a story-driven skirmish game, sort of a post-Apocalyptic setting for Necromunda.  The figs aren't bad, and any faction that has explosive-laden pigs and a remote detonator can't be all bad, right?  One of my friends picked up a copy of Wreck Age, so I'll be picking up a faction for it at some point.

As an added bonus - I managed to score a free Firestorm Armada fleet - the Aquans might not be my first choice, but free is a hard price to beat.  I also stopped by and talked with Romeo, the guy in charge of Wild West Exodus, and hopefully made contact with some people in the Grand Rapids area who might be picking it up.

I also spent some serious time looking at the terrain from Burn In Designs.  It's really nice stuff , and they have a good deal for a western town.

I probably should have stopped gaming at this point, but I wound up getting sucked into a 50-pt pick-up game of Warmachine. I made some mistakes, played badly, and wound up losing.  The aggravating part was that I tried to concede - I did not see the fury tokens on Grim Angus, went in for the assassination, and realized that I could not kill him, since he had plenty of transfer targets.  I wanted to concede the game, and he really wanted to play it out.  I was hungry, and frankly, kind of tired of losing, and did not see the point of suffering through making the attacks and failing to kill Grim, and then getting killed by the EBDT that was right next to him.  Meh.  Went out to dinner afterward, and that made things better.

Sunday, I had to do some demos, and that pretty much took up the entire day.  Drove back, and I'll discuss that in another post down the road.