Pottering about doing a little hobby

I've spent the week pottering about doing some bits and pieces of hobby. A couple of my Infinity figures have picked up some dings. Mostly, it's the loss of the brass etch fire arc markers, particularly when they were the first ones I ever put on.

I also took the opportunity to assemble all those zombies I ordered from Anvil. I made sure everything got thoroughly washed and laid out to dry. I've even bought myself a new bowl to do this in so I don't get (rightfully) told off for using baking bowls for cleaning resin.

The Anvil stuff goes together super easily. Most of the joins don't need any pinning at all, but there's a few points where I get a bit nervy and decide to do a little re-inforcement.

I was also using Anvil's Hypercity base toppers. They're pretty darned awesome, but do sometimes leave a little of the base showing, so I used my favouritest thing in the world - the Vallejo red basing paste - to add a little texture there.

It seemed like no time at all before all five women zombies were assembled ready for undercoating.

I took advantage of the clear weather to get other undercoating done as well - a bunch of Infinity figures also got a quick Corax White undercoat spray as well.

You'll notice one zombie is missing here - sadly I managed to break one before undercoating, and ended up having to pin several components together to fix my ham fistedness. The glue on her is still drying, but she should be ready for undercoating by tomorrow - though I'm betting the weather is going to be terrible for weeks now...

Product Review: Anvil Industry Female Zombies

Having had excellent fun the other week painting zombies for Anvil Industry, I decided to pre-order the female zombies I'd been grumpy about not being ready for the speed painting night.

This is a mini-review of sorts, so as a disclaimer - I paid for these miniatures with my own money, but I am friends with the lovely people who run Anvil Industry, as well as a fan.

My original plan was to paint these on Sunday, but a reschedule meant that my plans for my day off on Friday got moved to the Sunday, and they hadn't arrived on the Friday for me to paint... (This paragraph specially for everyone who says that they miss my painting excuses!)

The detail on the new sculpts is excellent, and well up to Anvil's usual standard. There's a mix of military and civilian women zombies to give some variation. As you can see from the photo, bodies, arms and heads are separate so if you want an all female zombie horde, you should be able to get a reasonable amount of variation before you start seeing duplicates.

Because I pre-ordered, they also threw in a free Rock Zombie. He's pretty darned cool, and definitely a character of sorts.

Part 2 of this mini review will follow once I've assembled and painted them! So, erm, don't hold your breath? We don't need any more zombies...

War of the Worlds V at "ibuywargames"

So, on Saturday I headed down to Woking with a whole bunch of the Infinity players from HATE to do some of this ITS tournament stuff. Unfortunately, a booking mix up meant that the tournament had to relocate from the local Conservative Club to the ibuywargames store, but everyone was very accomodating and it went off without any further hitches.

I was running Corregidor for the first time ever. In the end, I only ever used one of the two lists, which basically consisted of a full Senor Massacre Jaguar link, my always loved Lunokhod, a smattering of specialists and a Haris link of Wildcats with a Spitfire.

First up was Transmission Matrix against generic Nomads. My plan had always been to run a simple Alguacile Hacker to do some cheap annoying AROs against Hackers until she died, while my opponent was running Zoe and Pi-Well and two Interventors. After one careless move of Pi-Well in range of a repeater wasted a co-ordinated order as the plan was urgently changed to "reset", my Hacker was squished like a bug.

The smoke or eclipse options of the Jaguar link was excellent, and meant I could selectively decide whether I was going to keep the board open for my Intruder, or shut it down for my opponent's. My Intruder had an excellent moment himself when a Vertigo Zond landed on the ground near the roof he was hiding on, and he destroyed it with a speculative fire grenade. I could just imagine, as the model was prone, the veteran troop sighing, casually lobbing a grenade over the wall, and nodding at a job well done at the sound of a breaking remote...

Sadly, my opponent had muddled up "explosive" ammunition and blast templates, so his Tsyklon with Feuerbach was a teensy bit better than it actually is, but it seemed like an honest mistake. I never managed to catch up with him after lunch to let him know once I realised. In my game, however, it managed not to change anything due to my Jaguar link's tendency to not roll under an 18 for armour saves. In the end, Senor Massacre held the centre objective in close combat with a rival Jaguar to squeak me a 5-4 win despite almost everyone of my models being dead.

After a delicious lunch at the Korean Restaurant next door we headed back to play Hunting Party. This is a new mission where you're trying to immobilise specialists and enemy Lieutenants, and your more elite troops all get issued with Adhesive Launchers. I was up against one of the other HATE residents, who was running Yu Jing.

I decided to start the exercise by dropping a Hellcat with Adhesive Launcher right behind his Lieutenant. Sadly, I couldn't thread the needle sufficiently to be completely undetected, and some warnings meant enough models turned around that I'd only have one shot at gluing the Lieutenant. The Hellcat missed and was reduced to a fine red smear by a lot of angry guns.

My Alguacile made it to one of the antennas, but couldn't activate it for any points. Meanwhile, my Lunokhod reduced a hacker to a smouldering pile of ash.

Senor Massacre and friends made it up the field, but when the time came for the final run at the Lieutenant, he couldn't quite land his E/M grenade and was instead glued in place. A mistake in the placement of my Lieutenant meant a Tiger Soldier was able to drop down and glue her in the back. This left me with a thorough 8-0 kicking.

Battle three was Comms Centre against Yu Jing. Nine antennae to flip to your side, with the aim of getting more than your opponent -while taking out your opponents specialists and designated target, preferably with your "data tracker". My Wildcat Haris did a lot of work here as the Spitfire "data tracker" gunned down the designated target and anyone else foolish enough to stick their heads out for a good while.

My Hellcat managed to stuff his landing this time and was shot to pieces after landing in the open near way too many people...

The careless placing of a couple of specialists meant my opponent was in the lead with specialists, and I was in real trouble...

An Oniwaban materialising in my backfield and murdering my engineer did not help the situation - but I was able to set him on fire before he could kill my designated target (who you can see in the corner here).

With all my specialists dead, I resorted to brute violence and killed enough of his models to put him into retreat, preventing him from pressing any more of those pesky console buttons to take the lead, leaving us tied at 5-5.

In the end, I ended up 13th out of 20. I won some Nomad transfers I've been wanting to pick up for a while, and also some more Antenocitis Workshop brass etch, because you can never have enough...

I'd definitely recommend the ibuywargames tournaments to anyone who plays Infinity. They're good fun, and more welcoming than you might expect. While people are competitive, its in a friendly way, and not in a way that would leave you with a feel bad experience. Hopefully I'll see some of my readers at the Totally Crit Open X2 this coming weekend...

Zombie Night at Anvil

Last Thursday night, I went down to Anvil Industry for Zombie Night. It was the night before Friday the 13th, and Anvil were planning on releasing their new zombie regiments the following day. Sadly, the female zombies, were still in the mould at the time I arrived, so I didn't get to paint those.

Between us, we were aiming to get fifty zombies painted in an evening, and play a game with them. In the end, we "only" managed to get 46 done, but we were close!

With it having been so long since I was last painting, it took me a little while to get back into the swing of things. I also made a few mistakes, like leaving a spot of white on this one's arm!

Still, it was nice to play around with different painting techniques and colours, if in a rather hurried way. For the first four, I base coated, then did a light bone drybrush over the entire model for highlights, before adding ink washes for detailing.

Of the first four, I'm especially proud of the effect I managed on the visor on this one, although the coat and goggles on the first one I showed are also pretty darned excellent.

For my second batch of three, I tried something different again - doing a light Nuln Oil wash over the entire model before brushing on the colours. I quite liked this technique and I'd like to experiment with it a bit more in the future.

This zombie was all fashionable with his white shoes and yellow jacket before he got bitten.

The spot where the blue has bled into the yellow is incredibly annoying, but I was working really quickly and often not waiting for paints to dry...

And here's the final zombie of the seven I painted in the evening. I then handed them over to someone else to mass paint the bases and get them on to the game.

The zombie hordes assemble...

One of the other painters had managed to get ten military zombies done in the same time I'd done seven!

We then added the horde to one of Anvil's lovely demo boards, where they were also showing off their police car that they'd wired to have flashing lights.

As the game started, heroes rallied around the police car to try and hold off the zombie horde before they could escape.

And here we leave our brave zombies, watching as the murderous "survivors" flee in the distance, slaughtering any innocent undead they come across...

HATE Infinity League: Bakunin vs. Merovingian Rapid Response Force

So, as expected, I played this game at the end of May and I have not a clue about the details of what happened, and I barely took any photos either. My notes say that we were playing "Seize the Antennas". I was playing Jb's rightly feared Merovingian Rapid Response Force.

This photo was probably taken as the first time I've actually landed a smoke grenade and not got my Morlocks slaughtered before they did anything at all.

The closest I got to the centre objective. My brave Zero light skirmisher has little chance of taking out the swarm of assorted French who are covering the centre objective.

My Reverend Healer made a second push for the centre console, but it was not to be.

I was doing badly enough that I took a photo of an unconscious French trooper.

Jb pushed up to try and get my antenna, but the Mk12 Sin Eater did his job and the last photo on my phone is this same photo with absolutely everyone removed. I think the Moderator may have done something heroic, but the end result was everyone dead before the French could seize the last antenna.

Final score - Jb wins 7-4, but I feel really good about this as usually he completely takes me apart. It not being 10-1 makes me feel much better (both scored a classified objective for a point, then he had two antenna at 3 points each to my one).

The Quest for the Hobby Desk

So, as I mentioned last week, my hobby desk has been a bit of a state for a while, so I took the opportunity at the weekend to clear a path to get to it.

I will admit, a significant motivating factor in getting the the path clear to reach the table is that I have some Infinity miniature repairs to do. Nothing drastic, but an Interventor needs their fire arc marker reattaching, and my Prowler is only attached to his base by one foot. If I use the coffee table for gluing, I'm going to be a dead duck, so hobby table it is!

I'm planning on making "War of the Worlds V" at I Buy Wargames next weekend, and then Totally Crit Open X2 hosted by Totally Crit the weekend after. Of course, nothing is going to be painted, but at least I'll be making a showing and playing more games!

Am I legit now?

Does this mean I'm legit now? I have a publication in the British Library and everything!

(Screen shot taken by me after the Oldhammer Facebook group discovered someone else's blog is archived there alongside the original Realm of Chaos books.)

Where the hell have you been?

Well, I haven't posted since late July, which is a bit unusual for me. Painting has kind of fallen by the wayside - I haven't really painted since July when I posted my work in progress of the models I was playing around with, and the last model I finished was Teddy back in May.

So, this is part of the problem. The dining table where I do my painting is still a bit of a state - although I at least got it to the point where my beloved wife could have her half back for a her knitting machine.

Of course, I needed to pile all this up to clear that space, so I can't really get to my hobby space at all. There's probably too many projects that will never be started, let alone finished, so perhaps I should have a bit of a clear out...

What's been good hobby wise is that I've been managing to keep regular games up. Unfortunately, the battle reports take a lot of time to process and write up well, so I've had ten Infinity games since I last blogged - seven HATE League games, and three at a tournament down at Wayland Games.

I may summarise a few, as it's been quite a while since some of them and I may not be able to accurately remember them!

The Wayland tournament on the first day of the Infinity Season 9 has led to a small bit of comedy - for a brief, brief moment I was ranked 24th at Infinity in the UK, as you have to play a game that season to rank in ITS.

That's all I've got for now. Hopefully I'll be back soon enough with some interesting hobby content...