Infinity Tournament: Red Star Blues - The Anniversary

 

Back in March, HATE hosted another "Red Star Blues" tournament. The first mission was Resilience Operations, and I was drawn against Heshore who was running Tohaa.

I discarded a card that required me to hold the centre of the field as I felt like two capture territory cards had too much of a risk of being very swingy. I also needed to target HVTs and kill points of my opponent's force.

The early attack from the Tohaa game from Jaan Staar, a special character Impersonator. Heshore was proxying a lot of the Tohaa with Combined Army models as the Tohaa have been out of production for a while now. The proxies were well thought out and pretty obvious as to what was what.

Jaan went on a bit of a rampage, going after my Lieutenant, but fortunately hitting the decoy, not the real one. I eventually managed to take him down before he did too much damage.

It was a very cagey, back and forth game, and we ended up ending the game not knowing who'd pulled off the win! Once we compared objectives and added up points, it turned out it was a 5-5 tie, which felt very fair in the circumstances.

The second game was the old mission Hunting Party, and I was up against Jimrod, running Star Co. Hunting Party is a mission from a previous tournament season that's about immobilising and isolating specialists and Lieutenants.

There was a big core Riot Grrl link team running around pushing buttons and being a terrifying threat...

Unfortunately for Jimrod, I'd taken the Heckler with E/Marat - a large E/M template weapon. I ran him up to them and managed to drop a big template over most of them, but some key models had managed to set up around the corner so weren't caught in the blast...

I spent my third turn running Pi-Well up to drop an E/Marat template over the first Lieutenant who had been knocked unconscious in a previous round. This isolated them and meant I'd "hunted down" more Lieutenants.

Fiddler managed to fight through to get a shot on my Lieutenant, but on the last dice roll of the game, she wasn't immobilised. This meant I won the game 6-5, but if I hadn't won that roll, I'd have lost instead. Another close fought, cagey game that was great fun.

For my final game, it was Supplies against Alicat. It was a punchy looking Tunguska list with a Szalamandra, and I was pretty glad to have won the Lieutenant roll and chosen to go first...

I ran my Heckler up, and had it deploy a Fast Panda, covering both Mary Problems and the Szalamandra. I had Jazz Trinity Mary Problems and take her out, before taking a swing at the Szalamandra...

And I managed to possess the Szalamandra, and in turn, had it walk backwards and shoot up the Interventor who, it turned out, was the Lieutenant.

This was a pretty rough turn for Alicat, but things got much worst! She had two of her back up attack pieces try and take out my Reaktion Zond, and due to a terrifing run of critical hits on my part, both went down...

At this point, you'd think the game was done . . . but no.

On Alicat's second turn, she ran her Vertigo Zond up, and managed to find quite a few creative angles across the table . . . and basically took out every major attack piece I had with area effect missiles catching them in the blast of someone else.

With me having very little left on my third turn, I couldn't get much done, and Alicat was able to get up to capture some boxes and pull a 5-0 win out of the bag, despite an absolutely catastrophicfirst turn!

Overall, I finished 10th out of 18 players - which you'd kind of expect with a win, a loss and a draw. I once more managed to keep my record of comfortable mid-table mediocrity!

Westfalia Pride Knights

 

My quest to get bits and pieces I have lying around painted continues with this excellent set of Westfalia Pride Knights. They were a Kickstarter a while ago, but sadly don't seem to be available any more. These figures were based on costumes from a project by Archer Inventive.

I've had them painted up in the colours from the original photoshoot. The painting was done by the excellent Brushchewer Inc. These deserved an above tabletop level, and she's absolutely knocked it out of the park.

These will be excellent fighters and Paladins in D&D and Pathfinder. The rainbow paladin in particular will suit the Pathfinder goddess Shelyn. The good range of interesting weapons also means there's plenty of opportunity for interesting variations to a group of antagonist profiles.

There was a villain miniature also provided, I think also from the original photoshoot as a baddie. It's a definite spooky villain type who should be interesting to try and stat up for a fight.

There was also a tiny viking child miniature, which is a fun little additional sculpt to have for a group of playing kids in a village or something.

And finally, a freebie that came with them, a mysterious wandering paladin with a tiefling child. Which definitely isn't based on any popular science fiction properties in any way whatsoever. This one is less likely to have much use in RPGs as it would absolutely be a Bit.

Very Modest Salute Purchases

So, last weekend was Salute, and I tried to keep my shopping reasonably modest. We're trying to have a clear out, so it seems like a bad idea to buy loads of stuff without any intent on getting to paint it soon. Lets see how well I did at managing to keep it restrained... A couple of bigger items didn't fit in this photo, so lets cover them first.

First up is the Dungeons & Lasers Dwarven Mine . . . but in this case, it's pre-painted. I've not had time to dig into it just yet, but it looks incredibly promising and I'm stoked to dig into it further.

I picked up some area terrain from Playmats.eu pretty much moments before the show closed. These were pretty cheap and should add to my area terrain for both RPGs and for Infinity.

Between two of these, there's plenty of area covered by two packets. That'd be plenty for a typical 4 x 4 game table alongside other more traditional terrain.

The company Debris of War had a good range of resin terrain, but I picked up a couple of sheets of transfers. I'm pondering adding some graffiti to my Nomad Remotes when I get them painted, and these would be great for that.

On the Infinity front I grabbed the new event exclusive Varangian Guard (plus a second for a friend, which is now winging its way to him). I also hadn't picked up the Helen of Troy limited model when she came out, and I thought another Infinity civilian wouldn't be the end of the world, so I got her two. The Varangian will be heading off to my commission painter for a White Company paint job, but Helen is one for me to paint.

Annie was kind enough to bring some of the Community Miniatures I'd backed down to the show so they didn't need posting. The Community Miniatures project is a Bad Squiddo side project to make historical figures who wouldn't otherwise get made. They get voted on going up for pre-order, then when enough people have pledged a fiver to them being made, they get sculpted and made.

Here's the other Bad Squiddo model - the show miniature! There's a sculpted scull and crossbones on the flag, and it should be a fun paint.

Anvil Industry also produced a 3D sculpted show model, which you could either download, or pay them for a print of. I decided to pick one up at the show as we don't have a 3D printer.

I got some orcs from Forgemaster Miniatures, too. This is another small company 3D printing miniatures, and these orcs looked like a useful set of models for Pathfinder, D&D and so on.

The company Warbases has a new range of minis, called Bifrost Miniatures. I've got a Gnoll wizard planned in Pathfinder, and while Gorrit here is marketed as an artificer, my character comes from the Mana Wastes, so can look a little technological. I'm hoping to get him painted up in time for the UK Game Expo when I'm hoping to get some games of Pathfinder in.

Some nice gentlemen were handing out free sprues of Wargames Atlantic "British Expeditionary Force". I'm thinking of assembling them as a Last War warband. Probably a good opportunity for an unusual paint scheme for otherwise historical miniatures.

A couple more 3D printed miniatures, this time from "Modular Worlds". I got a Leshy, which I'm a big fan of from Pathfinder, and a skink familiar holding a scroll in its tale which is perfect to add some flavour to a friendly NPC wizard.

Only Games was doing a promotional offer where they gave you a model if you signed up to their mailing list. This model is intended for One Page Rules, which I have enjoyed playing the sci-fi versions of.

And finally, the Gaming Vault was giving out little packets of freebies. They're a gaming shop that has a sideline in 3D printing bases.

The freebie packet included a sci fi base and some sweets. Not sure what I'll use the base for, but free is free!

I don't want to let this lot build up, so I'm planning to work through getting these assembled and painted pretty quickly so they all end up done and painted sooner rather than later. I'm not sure how quickly that will be, but I'll give it a shot.

A short Salute post

 

I went to Salute 51 at the Excel Centre on Saturday. It was a pirate themed event, and my friend Annie at Bad Squiddo Games had made the show miniature! I'm super impressed with how far Annie's come with her company, though apparently not impressed enough to take an in focus shot of the show miniature she had made...

Here's the Titan Owner's Club "Titan Walk", playing Adeptus Titanicus in 40K scale. I couldn't get an angle to actually get the whole board in! I didn't put the effort into getting a ton of photos this year, preferring to wander, look at what was about, and pick up a few bits and pieces without going wild.

This was a project to model the Italian town of Gradara in the Renaissance. This is a historical project that was sponsored by the EU and the town in question! They were also cross promoting a renaissance skirmish wargame called "Force of Virtue". It's also absolutely huge, and the photo doesn't do it justice.

That's all I've got on Salute this year. It was good fun but I was hard pressed to think of what to write about it beyond what I've said already about previous years. It remains something I'll attend any year it doesn't clash with Empire LRP.

Books in, models out, and some news about the future

 

After my first game of 40K 10th edition went well, I noticed that the club was kicking off a new campaign based on the Pariah Nexus Crusade book. I decided it was worth signing up, and while I was grabbing the Pariah Nexus book, I decided to order the Tyrannic War Crusade book as well. I've had a little scan read of the Pariah Nexus book so far, and while there's a little bit of admin, it looks like Goonhammer have built a good app to handle all that stuff 

Much of this weekend was spent packing up my O-12, which I'd listed on eBay. With 50 lots sold, it's a good chunk of stuff out of the flat, but it was very time consuming to get it all gone!

The internet has been getting very excitable about the discontinuation of a significant number of Age of Sigmar models, including a good chunk of the Stormcast Sacrosanct Chamber, which is a good portion of my Stormcast. I've not played AoS yet, and given 4th edition is coming, I'm now planning on holding off until then. Having had some time to think about it, I'm pretty relaxed about the whole situation. Age of Sigmar isn't my main game, and I don't really know enough about what's staying and going to really know how it will affect me until the new edition releases, so I may as well wait until then.

Trying Warhammer 40,000 10th Edition - Deathwatch vs Thousand Sons

 

A few weeks back I took my Deathwatch down to the club to try 10th edition Warhammer 40,000. I'd found 9th edition a bit fiddly and hard to keep track of, and was quite hopeful for 10th. I certainly found list building a significant chunk easier!

My opponent was running Thousand Sons, and had been playing a few games of the new edition. We picked a pretty standard mission and deployed, with me taking the first turn.

I advanced my bikes, claiming an objective, but my fire into the Thousand Sons was pretty ineffective.

A squad of Thousand Sons with flamers and Ahriman headed into the midfield. They used some kind of magical ritual to remove the armour saves of my assault intercessors, who basically exploded.

Some Thousand Sons teleported into my backfield to score a secondary objective.

On my turn, I charged a Dreadnought and Bladeguard into the Thousand Sons.

But the counter attack started to whittle them down...

Kill Team Cassius then rolled into the Thousand Sons squad who'd charged my Spectrus Kill team...

At the start of the Thousand Sons turn 2, Magnus turned up. I was definitely in a lot of bother.

That's . . . that's a lot of casualties.

My Phobos Librarian charged into the Tzeentch sorcerer to try and finish him off...

Buti it was basically all over - my Captain got run over by a Rhino (the ignominy!), while the surviving Hellblaster tried to facedown a (proxied) Mutalith Vortex Beast on his own...

Magnus smushed another Killteam on his own - the sole survivor got charged.

My dice were not helping, though. Here's a typical round of armour saves...

After some ineffective flailing at each other for a few combats, the Phobos Librarian eventually fell to the Sorcerer, despite having had a relatively good chance of killing the sorcerer outright...

And it was then basically down to the mopping up. At the point of turn 3 that I was tabled, I was down 22-57 victory points...

That said - I had a lot more fun than with 9th edition. The Goonhammer game tracker is excellent and makes it easy to keep track of what you're meant to be doing, picking which special abilities your army has means that you only have a few things to keep track of, and all the units having some cool special ability on their card was fun.

I'm going to put the Deathwatch away for a little, though. They currently lack good anti armour options with the models I have, and I don't want to invest money in them until their Codex comes out. So, it's time, I think, to pull out my rather dusty Astra Militarum...