Blowing dust off the blog

 

Oh, it's, um, been a while since I posted here, isn't it?

So, it turns out I rather over-committed myself in February. As a result, I ended up either not doing very much blog-worthy, or simply not having the time to write it up.

I went to the "World Premiere" of a new set for the card game Flesh and Blood that I've been getting more into. It was excellent fun but I think I played more than 40 games of cards over the course of a long weekend. I definitely needed some time to recover after that.

I've played a couple of games of Infinity - one in person and one on TTS. I have another TTS game in the coming week for my club's current campaign. Meanwhile, assembling and painting models has taken a back seat while I do other things. I'll get back to it, but we're not quite there yet.

All in all, I'm not unhappy with how February and the first part of March went, but I wouldn't want to get that busy too often! I definitely needed a break after all the fun things.

Flesh and Blood Pre-release, and thoughts on pacing

 

On Friday evening I headed down to The Dice Cup for the Flesh and Blood "Super Slam" pre-release. The new set has a bit of a death match / wrestling theme, and two of the four heroes are the class I play - Guardian.

I had a bunch of fun, winning two out of my three games, and got a bunch of cards I'll be able to use later. However, it turned out that sorting these cards out, so I can return the cards I don't need to the store "commons" box next week, took up a good chunk of my hobby time this weekend.

I got as far as "getting the box of stuff for eBay" out in order to take photographs and get started, but once I'd finished sorting household tasks, it was late Sunday and I stood a real risk of wrecking my work week trying to get it done.

While circumstances conspired to cause there to be a few more household tasks than usual, I should have been able to foresee the time that sorting cards would take up, and maybe not have decided that Sunday would be a great time to cook a roast rather than a stir fry.

So it's an important reminder that while you might at first thing that things beyond your control are impacting your hobby time, there's still plenty of stuff that you do control, and choices you make that get in the way of you having more time for your hobby.

Nottingham Update

 

Nottingham is still going pretty well. It turns out its the sort of place where people stick wargaming stickers to the local bus stop.

I'm still deep in the unpacking mines as my main "hobby" and I'm playing the card game "Flesh and Blood" as my fun thing to do. I definitely recommend The Dice Cup for folk passing through Nottingham.

I will be getting back to the wargaming stuff as soon as I get a bit more free time, but there's not been much going on that's really bloggable.

Two events in a weekend

So, many of the people who follow this blog will be aware of Salute, the UK's biggest wargaming trade show. It was last Saturday, and as usual I went along. But it wasn't the only nerd hobby event going on at the Excel Centre! The Flesh and Blood London Pro Tour was running from Thursday to Sunday in the hall next to Salute. And I went to that as well.

I am very tired.

One of the great things about Salute is meeting a lot of friends from the wargaming hobby. I wasn't buying much, but I saw a bunch of folk, had a nose at various stalls, and saw some pretty cool gaming boards.

The Flesh and Blood Pro Tour had a lot of advertising around the Excel. I'm not sure how many Salute attendees went to get a demo game to see what it was about... I played games there on Friday and Sunday, as well as after Salute on the Saturday, too. I may ramble more about this later, but for now, I'm going to go and have a nap...

AoS, Flesh and Blood and some Commission Paints arrive...

 

It's been a busy week again! I managed to get in my first ever game of Age of Sigmar, pitching my Stormcast against a friend's Seraphon.

I also managed to pop down to Spellbound Games who'd had to reschedule a pre-release for Flesh and Blood. It was an event where you get given eight booster packs to make a playable deck, and I had a bunch of fun. The new set are wizards and "runeblades" (fighters wielding magic), with themes of Earth and Lightning. It was an incredible amount of fun, and I got in four games (and lost them all).

I've also had two commission batches back from Tesseract Miniature Studios. This will be just in time to get in a last few games with my White Company before the new edition drops. We're still waiting to hear what changes are happening to factions, so I'm hoping this isn't their last hurrah...

Breaks and holidays

 

I've not been posting on the blog much. I've played a few games, been playing Flesh and Blood, doing some tidying of the flat and LARPing. The blog is a hobby, too, and while I generally keep to a good regular update schedule, I don't want it to be a job. Sometimes a break is better than letting something stop being fun.

As of today, I've got two weeks of holiday from work, and I'm having a staycation. There is some tidying around the flat I do want to get done, but I want to have some rest, and get some painting done. High on the "to do" list is reducing the number of trays of miniatures that are out to "work on next". I'm not working on most of them next, so they need to go away to where they live.

There's a few half finished miniatures on the painting table that I should finish up. A Battletech Lance, a D&D adventurer and a handful of Halflings shouldn't take long.

Corvus Belli have just announced N5 - the next edition of Infinity - and it's going to be in October. I'm not going to have time to get my Nomads painted for then, but I reckon over the course of this holiday I should be able to blitz my Vanilla Combined Army and get my Nomad test paints done so I know what the Nomad paint scheme is going to be...

First up, though, are these Wizkids Kobolds I threw away the box for ages ago, and are still on their sprue. The Bretonnian Men at Arms are also getting a firm side eye as something in need of assembling, but they're a bit further down the list. Lets see how we go...

Wherein a rambly post happens because I'm not blogging the housework...

 

Please find this picture of an awkward adolescent waterfowl learning to forage, which is as good a representation of me trying to tidy my flat as I can find. I've not got any painting or assembly done while I've been either tidying, LARPing, or feeling under the weather. But, plenty has been going on, so here's a bit of an update as to what's been going on...

I have managed to get a bunch of sorting done of my Flesh and Blood cards. A kind member of the UK community sends out a whole pile of common cards for the cost of postage to new players, and I've supplemented this by buying a few singles of rarer cards that are particularly useful for the hero I'm playing. Once the last of them arrive, I'll likely pop down to Dark Sphere for an "Armory Night".

The new competitive "season" for 40K has come out. I picked up the cards and markers for it as I really enjoyed the game of the current edition I had so far. I've got another Crusade game coming up soon, too. I need to line up my Astra Militarum clear out, followed by painting up some models for the new edition.

My copy of Tome of Tombs by James Holloway arrived! James is an old friend from LARP who also creates one of my favourite podcasts. This is a system-neutral zine for creating tombs and so on for fantasy RPGs. If you're regularly running fantasy RPGs, this is definitely worth a look.

Bangarang in the Gutterlands is a little skirmish game by Bill Making Stuff. It turned up recently and I haven't had a chance to nose through it. It's definitely got a home made vibe to it, which seems to be a more and more common aesthetic people are going for at the moment.

Also arriving this week was the Marauder Giant "Made to Order" from Games Workshop. I remember seeing this miniature in my old White Dwarfs, and when I saw that it was being re-released for a limited window, I absolutely had to get one. I doesn't go with my current Bretonnian Old World force, but I'm going to hang onto him until a suitable project shows up.

On an impulse, I ordered the White Dwarf anniversary figure at the same time as the Marauder Giant. I didn't have a particular reason I can remember.

What really impressed me about it was the assembly. It's a monopose model, which is fine on a character you won't want multiples of, but the way it fits together is really quite simple, with pretty large pieces and nothing super fiddly. This sort of kit is pretty accessible to a less experienced modeller, but is still going to look amazing at the end of it.

And finally, the Vampire Queen by Ana Polanšćak and Meridian Miniatures. It's a big monster model with optional wings and tail and two head options. Ana is the creative mind behind Gardens of Hecate. This is definitely an excellent final monster for some kind of folk horror campaign - I'm still having a think about how I might eventually paint it.

Beyond that, I've had a game of Malifaux that I need to write up, and next weekend I'll be grabbing a game of 40K for the campaign that I need to prep for. The points have been updated and I have a few more points I can spend so I need to work out what I'm going to get...

UK Games Expo - Flesh and Blood

 

A friend of mine is really into the CCG "Flesh and Blood", and the UK Games Expo was the only place a particular promo card was going to be available... If you played in certain tournaments. So I agreed to sign up to play a tournament for a game I'd never played, and thought it'd be interesting to document the process.

The tournament was on the Sunday, so on the Friday I headed to the stand for Flesh and Blood and asked for a demo. That went well, but the free deck you get for having a demo wasn't tournament legal, so I picked up a pre-constructed deck for a character called Victor.

The premise of Flesh and Blood is that you're playing a hero with weapons and armour, fighting other heroes with weapons and armour. You select your hero first and equip them, then the deck you build represents the attacks and defences you have, whether that's fighting or magic.

There's two major tournament formats. The first is called "Constructed", and its broadly expected you'll build your decks yourself, with only one pre-constructed deck available at the moment. The second is called "Blitz", where your hero has to be a "young" version of themselves, but they sell a significant number of pre-constructed decks that you can use out of the box to play.

In this case, it was a "Blitz" tournament, which I'd picked as it meant I could use a pre-constructed deck.

My first game was against a hero called Vynnset, a "Runeblade" who uses a mix of magic and fighting. Victor is a Guardian, whose basic premise is taking a lot of damage and then hitting like a truck. Unfortunately, "out of the box", he doesn't really have much defence against magic, so I was very quickly smushed. But I felt like I was getting the hang of things!

I was handed a few extra promotional cards for playing. This is apparently quite a common thing. The players were all really welcoming and friendly. It reminded me quite a bit of how the Infinity scene is - competitive, but friendly and welcoming with it.

My next three games were against Blaze (a wizard), Nuu (an assassin) and Emperor (another wizard). Remember how I mentioned that the out of the box Victor deck doesn't have any defence against magic? Blaze even exploded Victor for all 20 of his health during my turn as some kind of instant interrupt... That said, I'd gotten Blaze down to 3 health so I could see how you could win with a slightly more prepared deck.

All in all, I really enjoyed this game! I could see that the different hero classes create plenty of different play styles. I did dive in the deep end with my first non-demo games being at a huge event where rare promo cards were being given out, so there was always going to be a disparity in the space. When I get a little more time I'll probably pop down to my local store and give some of their gaming nights a go.

If you like card games, I'd definitely give this a go. It probably requires a bit of investment of time and money to really get something out of it, but you could also absolutely buy a few "Blitz decks" and play at home with friends with the pre-constructed decks out of the box and nothing else.