#miniature wargames

[oldschoolfrp]

"Oh, no! Not more Landsknechts. The ultimate 'Have pike, will travel' troops. From a Renaissance game recently staged by the editor." (Duncan Macfarlane's 25mm armies, photo by Martin Fuller, in Miniature Wargames No 4, 1983)

[daves-miniature-adventures]

I finished this Orbital Station yesterday for my Battlefleet Gothic collection.

Really enjoyed working on it, the miniature was fairly simple so I added some small details to it such as the extra antenna arrays and the central communications spire.

For the colour scheme, I wanted it to stand apart from the ships of my Imperial fleet, so I chose to paint the main hull in a space/naval grey.

This was inspired by a classic BFG showcase in an old Citadel Catalogue, depicting an amazing scratch built version of Port Maw by Chad Mierzwa (as seen in the last picture).

The grey colour for the hull is a little homage to that awesome piece, and I had fun picking out the details in metallics, as well as the running lights/observation domes and hangar bay entrances to match those on my Imperial Fleet.

Some of the fleet can be seen in the last few pictures, docking with and manoeuvring around the orbital station.

Overall I’m really pleased with the finished result, and it will make a great little thematic addition to my BFG collection.

Happy Hobbying!

Dave

[metalhead-brainrot]

Color Study: Red

Both of these minis were a study in painting a (relatively) monocolor red scheme, done ~2 years apart.

Clovis, from the Zombicide: Black Plague game. CMON miniatures. Mostly Blood Angels Red contrast paint glazed over a manual black/white undercoat.

One of my wife's unpainted Eschers, from G*mes W*rkshop's Necromunda; I decided to finish the set for use in Firefight and Deadzone.

This was the first of several so the implementation isn't perfect, but she's one of my favorites nonetheless. For one, the off-pink steel is very useful in certain schemes (Pro Acryl Coal Black -> Neutral Grey -> Pink -> Pink + White).

Secondly, in the words of Al Pacino: she's got a great ass. GW puts way too many details on their models, so on these Eschers I shaved off excess doodads and made up the difference with a little Greenstuff. I was reading some Catwoman graphic novels around this time and wanted practice painting latex (similar but subtly different from glossy leather). Plus it seems like the model companies only make space for skinny women. A far future sans curvy gals would be grim and dark indeed.

Feel free to ask me any details about my painting process, I'm happy to share. I'd also be happy to field any discussion about the games mentioned in this post: Zombicide: Black Plague; Mantic's Firefight and Deadzone.

[skunts-own-truth]

what's quar

This Quar’s War is a fresh little miniature war game, currently played at the skirmish scale like 40k’s Necromunda or Kill Team, where you’re playing as these cute little anteater fellas called the Quar:

It’s played on in a small space, usually 2x2 or 3x3, with a nice clutter of terrain scattered around to give the little guys a good amount of cover. The core box for Quar, Clash of Rhyfles, comes with two factions:

The Crusaders and the Coftyrans as shown in the picture above. These are more factions slowly being released for the game, but the main concept is the Crusaders (left hand side of the image,) and their allies are trying to flush out nobility and royalty from their world, while the Coftyrans (right hand side of the image) and their allies are safeguarding the old royalist way of life and defending their farmsteads from the invading Crusaders.

The game is played using an action deck, on your turn, your opponent draws a card from the deck and keeps it hidden from you. The card will indicate how many activations you will have in your turn, ranging from 3-5. You know you will always have at least 3, so once you hit your third activation for your turn you ask your opponent “do I have a 4th?” If you do, you get to make one more action… and if you’re lucky, you may even have a 5th! This gives a lot of the action a sense of danger, dread, and a bit of that gambling rush. Once all of your activations are used up, you draw a card for your opponent, keeping it hidden, and they begin their turn.

A round lasts until the deck is drawn out, and usually goes very fast. You reshuffle the deck and start round 2, and keep going until you finish round 3 or 4, depending on the size of your armies. Games usually last around 20-50 minutes in my experience.

Where a lot of the fun for the game comes from is the fact that you don’t know how any action will go. The tests are simple: 3d6 vs. a skill score, usually of 12, with a series of negative modifiers. When shooting at a Ready unit, the target can pick to Dive for Cover or Return Fire, giving negatives to the shooter, but also adding an element of surprise. You can absolutely see your little guy dive for cover and get gobsmacked as he landed badly, or you could see your shooter get shot along with his target if the target was lucky enough to score a hit of their own. When actually hit, a model goes down. Once down, you have no idea if it’s dead or not. You need to move a model into base contact and spend a whole activation checking to see if they’re alive! If you are lucky, they’ll get right back up and start fighting again. If not, well, you got a dead Quar on your hands.

It’s that chaos of not knowing what your opponent will do, not knowing how many activations you have in your turn, not knowing how many of your guys are actually dead and out, all that, that really just makes the game so much fun. I’ve only played a handful of times now, but I can say firmly that a single round of Quar has given me more tension and thrill out of war gaming than most Warhammer games in my 15 years of dipping into all sorts of tabletop games. Blood Bowl and Mordheim are the two I would say match its intensity, and Blood Bowl is far easier to get folks into, but there is such a charm to Quar.

Everyone I’ve brought over to my place to teach how to play it has fallen in love with the game, not just because the rules are fun and exciting, but because the Quar themselves are just so fun to look at! They’re silly little guys, and as you have them fight over a war torn farmstead, you feel so much for your silly little guys, watching them get blown up by a grenade, only to stand back up proud to continue the fight later. It’s fantastic.

[umbrum77]

I used to like 40k as a game. (See profile pic)

But I'm begging 40k players, play other games.

Particularly historical rules.

You are in a abusive relationship with games workshop and you need to get out

No models should not cost $5 per infantryman

No they are not "better models worth the cost"

No a new edition should not fundamentally change how the game is played. It should just fix errors, and smoothen things out.

The card system is terribly done compared to other companies that have been doing it for years longer.

No, armies should not be horribly unbalanced at release.

Yes it is the job of the company to play test there rules before release.

When major tournaments have to make fundamental changes to a rule set to make it work, it's a bad rule set. They wrote bad rules and did a bad job.

Alot of articles covering 10th edition feel like they are written by hostages in games workshops basement.

Please play other no GW games. You deserve better.

[diocletianscabbagefarm]

I’ve been looking for some good outdoors scenery for D&D for literal years, like it’s easy to find scenery to build indoor maps like caverns and dungeons, but some reasonably-looking hillocks with shrubbery or trees? Forget about it.

So I finally went ahead and began building one myself. I bought a couple small planks of MDF at an art supply store a short walk away from my house, I think they’re supposed to be paint palettes, but they work just as well as a base. A quick bit of sawing to round the corners and done. Then I got a bunch of cork coasters, this shit rocks so much. Just tear or chop it into interesting rock formations and layer them on top of each other, and glue them. Added some stones and twigs to make it more interesting.

After that I liberally doused it in pva glue and dipped the whole thing in modeling sand. Let it dry, spray the whole thing brown, and then I added some old pine trees I had lying around from literally like 15+ years ago. I bought them at a hobby store that deals in model trains and such, which has a decent assortment of materials for scenery. Store’s still in business so I’ll pop in soon enough for some more

And then it’s just a matter of painting that drab brown into something more lively

And after that I glued on a lot of grass tufts to further liven it up

[mongrel-miniatures]

Some better photos of the models for my Death Guard Kill Team:

I'm really happy with how they turned out. I still have to finish painting some of the bases, then clear coat, then gloss varnish the goopy parts.

[knightoflodis]

I am a little torn which of these 3 kinds of rifles I want for my pieces. I have been leaning for the last set (which are called phase carbines), but now I am starting to wonder if I want the bolter looking rifles. I originally was looking at the middle guns, but I keep changing my mind