Future Friday - What's Caught My Eye

I've been looking thoughtfully at a few different game systems of late, so I thought I'd have a little ramble about them. First up is Battletech, where I've already painted up a local militia Wolverine, and am planning to paint a bunch more as Lyran Guards. Once I've got enough painted up, I'll find some folk to get a game with. They don't take up much space and it will be a nice thing to dip into now and again.

The new Games Workshop release of Horus Heresy has been mega tempting. Rather than buy a billion miniatures, I've assembled and undercoated these two characters a friend gifted to me. I'm going to paint those up first, and if I enjoy doing that, I'll paint the various bits and bobs of Heresy suitable stuff I already own before I get anything new.

I've had some realisation about how much stuff I have lying around that I'm not using and I want to really start cutting back on buying stuff up in advance. I'll spend a lot less money if I buy stuff just as I'm wanting to use it, and the overhead of managing a pile of boxes is quite significant!

I did play a game of Warhammer Underworlds a while ago, and quite enjoyed it. I then decided not to get into it because the idea of keeping up with that many card decks really didn't appeal. With the new Rivals format where you can just have a warband and a set deck of cards is much better for being able to dip in and out. I have some warbands commission painted from my Stormcast and other warbands are a nice "dip in" painting project size.

So I'll probably find a couple of pick up games of Underworlds to give it a go, I don't need to buy anything new to make that happen.

Not an Elder Scrolls mini

I've been seeing a couple of YouTube videos of people playing Elder Scrolls: Call to Arms, and it's been tempting me to get into it. I've got the core box without any miniatures, which will be enough to play a test game with my own miniatures. To do that, I'm going to need to finish finally tidying the hobby room, which I should get done by the end of the year.

So, Elder Scrolls can be a nice "reward" game for me. I want to give it a go, and have been trying to move towards "no models without a storage solution" for a while now. So I won't be getting this until I've cleared the hobby room sufficiently that I can make that work - and right now I've still got a bunch of models I already own with nowhere to store, so that will need sorting first!

Not a LotR mini!

Finally, I've been looking really quite thoughtfully at GW's Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game. I'm hearing quite a few positive noises about it being reasonably well balanced and fun. They've also recently released some nice starter boxes, and the new models look really pretty too.

That said, I currently have enough on and I don't really know anyone who plays. So for now, it can stay as something I daydream about and look at wistfully from time to time. It's clearly the game that got a bunch of people into the hobby, so I think a lot of this is "someone else's nostalgia" feelings. I'll be keeping an eye on it for the future, though.

WarhammerFest: New Models

There were a whole bunch of new and exciting models at WarhammerFest this year. I'm currently on a big Age of Sigmar interest kick, so the new models for WarCry interested me in particular. These are some flying beasts of some kind.

One of the new warbands, which have been previewed before, but was good to see in the flesh. I'm really curious how they got that lovely bronze armour effect.

Another warband, this one from the Realm of Beasts. Lots of bone weapons and a critter friend.

New Fury models are coming. The old ones are incredibly old and tired, particularly when you look at how ridiculously dynamic these ones are. Definitely excited by these.

Another warband was announced for Warcry at the event. This is a creepy snake cult, including at least one chaotic aelf. Curious for this new game now!

There's also a Skitarii transport coming for the Adeptus Mechanicus. I love the weird hover vehicle / opened top look to it.

And a very retro / hovercraft look to the back end of it, with fins behind turbines to steer.

You can also build it as some kind of tank thing as well. That front end looks very retro sci fi!

Meanwhile, on the Forgeworld side of things, the Armiger Knights got some resin add ons, which I really like the look of.

My understanding is that they're for Heresy, but will have rules in normal 40K as well. You can see the super heavy drill transport, based on the old Epic Mole, on the shelf below, too.

There's also this giant knight that's getting close to Warhound size. I haven't learned it's name yet.

There were some painted examples of the new knight kits I managed to get a picture of as well. This one is painted as one of the rebel houses from the Heresy.

This Mechanicum knight has a bunch of weird techno weapons that will likely do terrible things.

I believe the kids would call this an "absolute unit"? That's all my pictures of new stuff from WarhammerFest, but I've still got photos of other stuff I saw while I was there still to come...

WarhammerFest: Contrast Paints

If you hadn't heard already, Games Workshop is bringing out a new range of paints, called "Contrast Paints". The basic concept of them is that they are higher pigment not quite washes that can paint a model in a single coat over a white undercoat. Games Workshop is keen to push these, and has even created a new paint website to explain it all.

These paints are obviously super useful for anyone who's starting out, or who wants to get an army done in a hurry to a basic standard. But they're not restricted to that. This is an example Stormcast (I think from Warhammer Underworlds) that has been painted in contrast paint, with a simple edge highlight over the top. While clearly done by a skilled painter, we shouldn't be writing these off as just for the newer folk.

This Nurgle Plague Marine, however, is just contrast paints and nothing else. That's pretty exciting for me as it's clearly done to quite a good standard, and should really speed up painting.

Meanwhile, here's a Chainrasp who had a zenithal undercoat before the contrast paints were applied. There's going to be a lot of cool and interesting techniques to discover with these, as they're a new tool for the arsenal.

There were some paint stations where you could try out the new paints yourself with a figure they supplied. I picked possibly one of my favourite Stormcast models of all time. There are two new undercoats. Both off white (for better coverage) one bone and one grey - Wraithbone and Grey Seer, respectively.

I tried out the yellow on the helmet first. Bluntly, it's great and sneaky wizardry that I resent not having had access to earlier.

I wasn't as much of a fan of this dark blue, but look at how thick you need to put it on to get it to work right. It dries thin without obscuring details, though. They did indicate that it will not be as robust as their existing range so it'll be worth giving it a coat of varnish or two - and they're also updating their varnish range, conveniently...

So, here's where I ran out of time. I tried some wet blending and playing around, relatively unsuccessfully. You likely want to treat them like watercolours, and paint light to dark colours as you go. There's a base coat that matches the undercoat if you screw something up, but we didn't have any available to play around with on the day.

I painted the shield in the new "Snakebite Leather" - a throwback name some people will remember. It's not exactly the same but I co-incidentally utterly love what it does.

I keep looking at that cloak thinking that it will just pop with a little bit of dry-brushing and maybe a little highlight. But for a first pass, gaming standard piece, it's good.

Here you can see where a couple of attempts at blending have gone wrong, or where over-paint has happened. It's remarkably easy to do, so you'll want to be super precise with these new paints, or you'll have to do a lot more work correcting them. These are definitely a case of "more haste, less speed".

All in all, I'm super excited for these new paints. I think they're going to massively help with me getting more models painted, and I want to spend a bunch of time learning what they can and can't do. I'm super stoked to get the painting desk operational again!

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.

Trying out The Other Side

Last month I pottered down to Dark Sphere because our local Henchman was running demos of Wyrd Games' new . . . game, The Other Side. I'm a huge fan of Malifaux (and eagerly await their new edition) and wanted to see how the new game would fare.

We're playing with about half a full force of miniatures - you usually run with two commanders and about twice as many models, but to keep things manageable, the Henchman was running demos with just the one.

The Other Side is based in the same setting as Malifaux, covering events back on earth in the ongoing narrative of the joined games. In short, horrible magical beasties have broken through and the opening four factions consist of the two biggest nations - The King's Empire and Abyssinia, and two different types of horrible monster - The Cult of the Burning Man and the Gibbering Hordes.

I picked Abyssinia because if I do pick up The Other Side, I'm most likely to go for them as a faction, if only because I think it's time game manufacturers started putting a better spread of representation into their games and I should put my money where my mouth is.

As it was an intro game, we were keeping things pretty simple - we both had one commander, a few units, and weren't using some of the more advanced rules. I still got a bunch of tactics tokens, though, as they're pretty core to the game.

The first thing I did with some of my tactics tokens was to spend two of them...

... because unlike Malifaux, where you get a hand of cards to "cheat" in and replace cards you've flipped from the top of the deck, you have to pay for them in The Other Side.

Your models are a varied number of large bases of miniatures, and broadly, everything has one hit, so as your fireteams take casualties, you remove models from the larger base. There's a cool little reinforcement mechanic where you can put models back into a fireteam.

There are different play styles for different factions. The Abyssinians are the ones with the most advanced technology, and have reliable, pretty elite troops. They're not shabby up close, either.

The Cult of the Burning Man have a weird mechanic with portals which means that they zip about the board teleporting all the time.

So, my overall verdict on The Other Side? Cautiously interested. I haven't seen anything to make me dive excitedly in and buy all the things. It's a solid, well put together game with a slowly growing community. If you're interested in getting into it, delays on the original Kickstarter means that there are a few people looking to offload relatively large purchases on the cheap.

I had a similar problem when I first started getting into Malifaux - there wasn't a single faction that jumped out to me and said "You love me now". But then again, I'm not sure if that's a wider problem I have across a lot of games.

If you like the look of this, I can confirm that it plays pretty well. You'll need to find people locally to you who are interested as well, because this isn't something that would work well with solo play. It's quite hard for me to reach a conclusion because it's, well, OK, I guess?

On the Impact of a New Infinity Classified Deck

Corvus Belli, who make Infinity, run an Elo rated tournament season from September to August each year. We've just hit Season 10, and with the new Season has come an updated Classified Deck. These are secondary missions you secretly select for many of the game's missions, scoring you assorted points. It was introduced with the 3rd edition of the game, and with the lessons they've learned since the start of the new season, it's undergone a pretty significant overhaul.

The first obvious change is that it's now two decks of twenty cards, with twenty different missions. Before, it was one deck of forty with four sets of ten missions. You can read a summary of the misssions in the Season 10 ITS pack, available from the downloads page of the Infinity website, but it doesn't contain enough information to fully use the deck.

The second deck, in red, is a new "extreme" deck where the missions are harder to complete. This is simply a different option, but it will change the decision making process about whether your chase the points for the classifieds or the main mission.

When going through the new ITS missions, we saw a couple of comments like those above - which relate to symbols on the card.

There is some level of theming to these - the one that looks like a medic's cross are usually doctor's missions, for example. I've not worked out all of the themes, though, so I've not yet worked out if there's a particular reason for the extra rules. I suspect it's intended to be a flavour thing over a competitive thing - encouraging the taking of cards that suit the theme of the mission.

I was never hugely sure about "Intelcom" - which were used for a variety of things including cancelling a model's effect on scoring or scoring some points towards control zones. The former hasn't really changed, but the latter sort of has.

With the reduction to 20 cards from 40, the numbers on the cards, used as a points substitute, have a much smaller effect. A card in the mid 30s or even the 40 could hugely sway a game as you had to be really strongly winning to have a chance of holding off a card. Now, a maximum swing of 20 points rather than 40 leaves it still potentially strong, but not quite as overpowering based on a lucky card.

Finally, the number of classified missions have risen from 10 to 20. While some still rely on specialists, others require on troop types, troop classifications, certain equipment or even close combat kills. This means that if you want to be comfortable achieving any classified you draw, you will need to think a lot more about list composition and, in theory, take a more balanced list.

All in all, I'm in favour of the new Classified Deck. Some people don't like the randomness when both players get missions that are of varying difficulty for them to achieve, but it's not a huge number of points, and Securing the HVT on the field remains a viable option for builds that are bad at Classified Missions. The greater variety also means that you can build towards those cards that don't require specialists if that's not your army's strength, and still have a chance of getting missions that suit your build.

I'm not sure of the viability of or buy to of the "Extreme" classifieds. Outside of the Highly Classified mission, where all points scored go from the deck, most missions only have one or two points coming from the deck. I suppose it actually favours those who aren't in favour of Classifieds, as by making them all significantly harder, you're reducing the chance of people spending the time completing them, meaning more emphasis is given to the main parts of the mission.

At the time of writing, I've only played one game using the new Classified missions, so can't really advise on completing them - but I hope my first thoughts on how they may impact the game are of interest to people.