Halflings and Weird Lil Guys

 

The Halfling team is finally assembled. Since this photo was taken, I've undercoated both them and the tokens and balls that come with them, but I failed to take a photo and I can't face venturing to the conservatory to take another one. 

Next up are the two Treemen who make the team actually viable to play with. I'll probably look to get something else painted first, just so I've had a bit of a break from Halflings being the main thing on my hobby table!

I got this Krakon Games Shieldkin at "Nottingham Gaming Fayre" last year. Not quite "done over Christmas", but I'm definitely feeling a bit more on the horse.

Also undercoated and ready for paint: Bad Squiddo Guinea Pig Witches. Sculpted by Kinsfolk Miniatures, I'm very excited to get some paint on these.

Finally, I've undercoated this dragon by Mammoth Miniatures. As a bit of an experiment, I gave her a blast of Midwinter Blue as a zenithal over a black undercoat to create some interesting vibes for when I start adding paint with a brush. There's no intent for her to end up blue, but it was sitting there in my box of spray cans and I wondered what would happen.

Next up on the assembly table is a big chunk of metal miniatures I've picked up at various things I've been to - the Gaming Fayre, Lead & Steel, and Salute. As my dearly beloved is allergic to nickel, I'm going to try and get a batch of these assembled and undercoated on a weekend she's away. Pictured are a couple of a "Big Mr Tong" Sample pack from Lead and Steel.

I'm also side eyeing these two critters from Dungeons and Lasers because I got them in the Kickstarter and they don't pack well into my storage boxes, which makes them very tempting as a little side project while I have the plastic glue out for the Treemen.

A little bit of hobbying

 

I've started making a little time for the miniature hobby again, and am back on sorting out the Halfling Blood Bowl team. They're the big project at the moment and I am very ready for them to be assembled! I suspect I may set them aside for a little bit once they're ready to paint as I'll want to look at something else!

I'm now up to eight Halflings done, with four left to go. There's also the Treemen and other bits and bobs, but once the core team is assembled it'll really feel like things are moving along.

I got this plinth by Fenris Games undercoated. I went black first, and it ended up really quite tacky - I suspect the weather wasn't quite undercoating weather. Once things dried out a bit, I gave it a spray of Mechanicus Grey and that seems to have gotten it back to normal. So this is now ready to paint.

While I was undercoating, I also undercoated a 3D printed dragon skull plant pot that my wife picked up at a craft fair. That's now done and in a box ready for her to paint.

Finally, I based up a few bits ready for undercoating. Miniatures here from Mammoth Miniatures, Krakon Games and Bad Squiddo. I used Krautcover for these ones as that's what I could find lying around. It's quite powdery so I want to put a light coating of glue over the top and let that dry before I undercoat them.

Plans for 2026

 

And so, 2026 dawns with a dread inevitability. It is an unusual one for me, as it's dawning in a new city for the first time in a couple of decades. The move to Nottingham has hit my hobbying this year, as it takes time to put your life in boxes and and then take it all out again.

There's still plenty of settling in to the new place still to be done, so I'm expecting hobbying to continue to be slow for at least the first part of the year. I'll also be dipping into Flesh and Blood, LARPing, and selling excess possessions on eBay, all of which can be quite time consuming.

So, I'm planning on being quite restrained with my 2026 hobby goals. I want to check in around about the end of March to see how things are going. The main thing I want to get sorted is this Halfling Blood Bowl team project. I want to get some games in at Warhammer World now I'm in Nottingham, and this seems like a nice small and achievable project to make that happen.

Once I've gotten the paints out, I also want to really hit my Combined Army and Shasvastii pretty hard. I'm thinking of trying getting a batch of ten models together and putting some time into just getting some regularly used pieces done. For example, for Vanilla Combined, the Charontid, the Anathematic, Bit and KISS, two Daturazi and four Hungries will mean that a huge number of common list builds will become all or mostly painted.

This might prove to be too big an ask in terms of the size of the batch, but I want to give it a go before deciding if I go for smaller batches first or not. Ideally I want to have painted some of my Nomads by the end of the year, but right now I have a set scheme for my Combined Army and have a whole bunch assembled, undercoated and ready to go, so getting a bunch finished will be good for my soul.

Broadly, I'm trying to get in a game of Infinity a month. I do want to try and build a community in Nottingham, and there are a few folk who are interested. I'm booked in for a game later this month, and I'll try and keep that up.

My side hobby project is that I very much want to work through this year is getting a bunch of bits done from smaller hobby companies, especially for RPGs. Eventually I want to run an in person campaign with miniatures and so on, so building up a good variety of basics will really help build a good foundation for that.

All in all, this year isn't so much about setting goals "for the year", it's about getting started again, seeing how I'm going, and adjusting to match. Everything is far more of a new start than normal. I am much happier in Nottingham, but it is a different pace of life to London, and its an excellent opportunity for a bit of a reset. Making sure I don't fall back into old over-commitment habits is really important.

Christmas and New Year Hobby

I have been pottering on with assembling the Halfling Blood Bowl team. I'd hoped to be a little further along than this, but an assortment of non hobby activities took up a bunch of time. Still, excellent human interaction and resting occurred. 

 

Games Workshop sent me their annual £10 voucher, and I used it towards buying some online only Halfling Star Players. I've also put some money from my eBay sales into picking up the new rulebook and a couple of Treemen (alongside a mat for Infinity), which should show up next month.

The space between Christmas and the New Year also had a meeting of what is intended to be a new gaming club: The War Dollies Collective. The hope is that this will turn into regular club nights, but at the moment these aren't finalised.

There were a wide range of activities on offer. There was a large kit-bashing area for folks to build whatever they fancied. There were also participation games - both some kind of car combat game and a small scale Napoleonic historical game.

I took advantage of the day to arrange a game of Infinity with one of the people I gave a demo to at Dice Cup earlier this year. We had an excellent 300 point game, with me taking White Company and my opponent Next Wave, playing a Direct Action mission.

The arrival of over 300 miniatures from Wildspire Miniatures has also taken up a chunk of time. These models were originally designed by Blacklist Miniatures, who then ended up being incapable of delivering. Wildspire purchased the moulds and produced these models, offering original backers a significant discount to acquire the miniatures. There's still a Horror set that Blacklist failed to deliver that Wildspire has purchased and not produced yet.

So, it has still been a very busy couple of weeks from a hobby perspective. The coming month has some LARP, some card games and some work travel which won't produce interesting things for the blog. Still, I have a few stories to tell about my Infinity game and the Wildspire minis that I'll tell in a short while.

The first Halfling

 

With the Dungeons and Lasers dungeon tiles put away, the next thing on the hobby desk is a Halfling Blood Bowl Team. With the new edition out and plenty of folk playing GW games in Nottingham, it seems like a nice little project. I don't have the new rulebook yet, nor any Treemen, but I want to get these assembled before getting anything else.

I've gotten my first Halfling assembled. I also cleaned the mould lines on the coins, turn markers and balls that come with the team. There's a couple more Halflings I've started on too. It's been a while since I assembled any GW miniatures. The last one I tried to do was one of the Inquisitor characters, and they were incredibly fiddly and awkward. This halfling was a joy - three parts, relatively limited mould lines, and brimming with character once done.

The trick now is going to be setting up a regular schedule to put some time into assembling models. The aim for the next year is to try and be steady with progress. I have a lot of ambitious ideas, and I need to put time into the hobby to try and achieve them.

Planning some actual miniature hobby

 

With the realisation that I'd been too busy to use up my holiday allowance this year, I have the week off. The eBay clear out continues. The unpacking continues. I've got two games of Infinity booked, so we may see a battle report of some kind if I remember to take enough pictures...

But I also really wanted to start getting into getting some miniature assembly done. First up on my to do list is a Halfling Blood Bowl team. With the new edition out, I'm sure there will be some folk interested in getting some games in.

More experienced players of Blood Bowl may be asking where on earth the Treemen are in this picture. Well, I haven't bought any yet! The new rulebook and the team's Treemen will be the reward for getting the rest of the team assembled and ready for paint. I'm not daft enough to try and play Blood Bowl with a Halfling team without any Treemen...

I also could really do with getting my Dungeons and Lasers set off sprue and into a storage box. They're pre-painted, so it's not really an "assembly" job, but it's something that will take time.

As a potential bonus, I found this box of assorted Frostgrave sprues. I may be joining a Pathfinder campaign in the new year, so knocking up an assortment of generic baddies could be a fun little side project.

Now, where are my clippers?

Warhammer World New Year's Open Day - All The Gossip

Without further ado, I'm going straight into the assorted pictures and nonsense I managed to pick up at the Open Day. There's no real revelations here - there's prettier pictures over at the Warhammer Community site - this is more about what I saw and what I thought about it.

Lets start off with Blood Bowl. The new stuff here was some additional Goblin Secret Weapons, including one with wings, one with a pogo stick, and an 'Ooligan with a bunch of noise making gizmos. These are the sort of thing I expect my darling wife may pick up at some point...

There's also an alternative troll sculpt if that's your thing. This one seems to be wielding someone's leg, which is pretty cool. Some extra variety is really nice to see.

Helmut Wulf and Karla von Kill had already been announced (and can in fact be ordered from Forge World now) but it was great to see them in the flesh. Karla is a bad-ass female character whose background is simply that she's a great Blood Bowl player. That she's sensibly dressed is a relief. Meanwhile, Helmut Wulf is a lunatic with a chainsaw. What could possibly go wrong?

On to Necromunda. If this figure looks familiar, that's because it was formerly available for the now discontinued Forge World Renegades range. The discontinuation inconveniently made it a little harder to get a Rogue Wyrd for your campaign, so he's getting a repackage and rerelease into Necromunda. Which is kind of sweet.

The Am-bot is a robot designed to look like an Ambull that any gang can hire. It looks like either there's more than one way to build the kit or more than one version going to be available. I love these to death, they're great.

Wait a second. A Blackstone Fortress expansion . . . called "The Dreaded Ambull". Surely not?

Apparently so! The Ambull is back in 40K as a monster in Blackstone Fortress. I cannot foresee a circumstance where I won't be buying this. It's amazing!

They also had an early copy of "Urban Conquest", a new campaign system for 40K. I really like this, it looks well thought through and rather clever.

You make a "map" of the city by dealing cards into a five by five grid in a wallet. It's designed for four players, with different starting map layout options. Each "campaign" turn can be after any number of games, including none if you've missed a round! You rank the players depending on how they did, then they do stuff like capture territory, select strategies for the next round of games, and accumulate their victory points.

This would be a lot of book keeping if there weren't reusable stickers supplied with the back so you can just fold the map up and get it out next time, with all the player positions and stratagems all neatly laid out. The designer also said it should work quite well for Kill Team. I'm not sure if it's designed for it or if it would need a little modding.

The pack is designed to handle the usual campaign woes of people missing weeks, or getting a drubbing and ending up near the bottom - it's intended to be quite forgiving of that and give people who are significantly behind ways to catch up. It's not just a case of winning the most games - if you outmanoeuvre the other players on the campaign board, you might win the campaign without having won as many games as them.
 

There were a bundle of other releases - this was a Mechanicus who'll be in a Kill Team expansion box. I'm assuming there will be 40K rules for them as well. There was also a ton of Genestealer Cult stuff, an announcement of a Ghoul vs Skaven box, and various other things I didn't have time to find and photograph.

The goblins, or "Gloomspite" were also out in force. Jes Bickham has been making an all troll / Troggoth army. I'm resisting things one for now - I had a few good talks about what I'm looking to get out of Age of Sigmar and I'm getting slightly more concrete thoughts about what I want to collect. I'm going to keep those to myself for now.

I'm pleased to say that a weekend away seeing amazing hobby stuff, and hanging out with awesome people has really ignited my hobby keen. I can't wait to get underway with various projects, and then tell you about them on here.

Daydreaming about future plans

While still not able to really do much hobby during the move, I thought I'd ponder some of the things I'm looking forward to getting into once we're settled in to the new flat.

Adeptus Titanicus

My darling wife is super excited about this, as she's always been a titan fan. We need to have a chat about who is going Loyalist and who is playing the Traitors, but otherwise I'm just looking forward to some nice meticulous modelling and painting. The game play demos I've seen also appeal, with resource management per titan, tracking sheets, and lots of lovely crunchy stuff.

Age of Sigmar

I've been meaning to get into Age of Sigmar forever. I think it probably merits it's own dedicated post at some point, as I probably need to rationalise the projects I've got and focus on something in particular. Right now, I've got Chaos, Order and Goblins, and that's probably too much. Working out what to drop is proving a challenge, though.

Warhammer 40,000

So, I love the look of the new edition. I haven't played it once. Part of the problem is, I think, playing Guard is proving to be a challenge in terms of storage space and getting stuff to a game. Originally, I'd planned to get over this by moving to a mixed Imperium force with tons of bits and pieces from all over. Unfortunately, the easiest way to get a balanced pick up game when you don't play very often is to use the matched play rules, but they've updated those rules to remove the ability to use the "Imperium" keyword to pick an army due to an assortment of abuses in tournaments. I'm left not really sure what it is I want to be doing in 40K...

Kill Team

While Warhammer 40,000 requires this big bucket of effort to get the army out, find time to play, and all that stuff, Kill Team is looking like an excellent low effort alternative. Less space to store, fewer models to paint. I hear it's pretty balanced too. Definitely one for quick games with my wife after work.

Necromunda

Basically, everything I just said about Kill Team above. Small units, I can use the same terrain for both, and you can get a game done in a reasonable time frame. It's mostly just a case of working out what gang I want to run and picking it up... I used to run Cawdor back in the day, but both Orlock and Van Saar look tempting today.

Shadespire

Again, a nice looking game with pretty miniatures, small cost of entry and minimal storage requirements. What's not to like? Once I'm moved, I'm keen to get a demo game in to work out how quickly to get it, but its definitely something I'm excited about.

Blood Bowl

The only real question is what team to get. I ran a Blood Bowl League in my school when the last edition was released. It's stood the test of time and I adore it. I still have my old Skaven metal team, but they may end up getting sold on - the new Chaos cheerleaders are tempting me towards a more fighty game than a running and passing one.

Warhammer Quest

I have Silver Tower, and the Hammerhal version also looks like it's Even More My Jam than Silver Tower is. Plenty of gorgeous models to paint up, though it's quite a few to paint in one go before you can start play, so likely to be something I do after getting one of the games with a smaller barrier to entry done first.

Aristeia!

Like Shadespire, but in the Infinity universe. I've been offered a demo game down at HATE, which I hope to fit in at some point. The base game comes with 8 models, and you need a team of 4. These are the sort of painting numbers I can feasibly achieve. Very tempting!

Malifaux

The announcement of Malifaux 3E has both excited me and persuaded me to pause on my Infinity stuff for now. The game had been suffering from bloat, and play had been dropping off a bit, too. I'm not painting anything up until the new edition drops, so I can decide whether to stick with my current faction or switch to another one. Collodi, my main master, has dropped from tournament play, which is where I get most of my games. While I realise most UK tournaments will include the "Dead Man's Hand" rules to allow the lost Masters to be played, this edition change would be the best opportunity to switch factions.

As more information about 3E comes out, I'll pull together a few thoughts about which way I'm pulled to play, and what I'm considering.

Paint job by Aodhan

Infinity

In the language of the modern youth (I believe), Infinity is bae. It's my gaming love right now, and I'm really enjoying it. ITS Season 10 is around the corner in September, and my Druze Bayram Security will be taking the field for it. Expect more photos soon of Aodhan's brilliant paint jobs.

Decisions, Decisions

I'm not pinning myself down or committing to anything until the move is done. At that point, I'll pick up some small hobby projects and start working from there. If the blog is a bit quiet, the move will be eating into my hobby time, but I hope to try and keep semi regular posts up in the meantime.

A little bit of weekend painting

I got a little painting done this weekend. I wanted to see if Army Painter spray undercoat worked on Reaper Bones material, to which the answer is "it seems to be OK". The terrain isn't for much in particular - will probably see service as a piece of scatter terrain for Infinity.

I went with a bright colour scheme on the terminal because I'm trying to get out of the habit of painting everything in dull colours. It's a useful practice exercise for when I want to use it in anger.

A late Christmas present finally wound its way to me. I had a good sit down read and got reminded why I love Blood Bowl so much. I should really consider digging out my Skaven team...

I also got the Daemonhunter undercoated. He can now potter off into the "waiting for 40K to catch my interest again" pile.

This was a common problem with some old sculpts - he has quite a strong forward lean, and that can look a bit odd if you're not careful with assembly.