The WordPress app was being a pain yesterday, so here’s a snapshot of my workbench from last night.
Just knocking out a couple of Nomad models while I wait for a box of buildings to show up (tomorrow!): a Bandit, Carlotta Kowalsky, and two Midnight Sun Analysts.
Unsure how I feel about how Carlotta’s skintone is coming out. I keep trying to 1) do more non-Caucasian fleshtones and 2) do better with them.
I’m super far behind on posting photos of my painted minis (past the quick workbench photos I’ve been posting). Time to fix that. Since I’ve been painting Infinity Nomads, I’ll be posting Infinity Nomads.
(This is not all of my Nomads: just the Nomads I’ve painted since the last time I posted something from the lightbox.)
I got out to my first Infinity Tournament this past weekend. The event was organized via the local NoVA Infinity Gaming FB Group The event was run at a school, which was pretty cool: the space was perfect for a couple dozen people, and they had pigs in a pen just outside.
I went in expecting to get my teeth kicked in and, in fact, did get my teeth kicked in, so mission accomplished. The important thing is, though, is that everyone I played with was super supportive and helpful and I can absolutely walk back how events played out in each game to mistakes I’d made (and in one place, a few key dice rolls that had a greater impact than any mistakes). Really, that’s all I could ask for.
It was a great time and, as I’d said, everyone was super supportive and helpful, and I’m looking forward to seeing these folks at future events.
I ran Corregidor, with the following lists: List A, List B
Round 1 was against a Vanilla Nomad list; Justin ran kind of a camo spam list. I feel like I held my own here OK… even though I didn’t actually accomplish any of the objectives. Bran do Castro really did some damage.
Round 2 was against Vanilla Ariadna. Len had a ton of light infantry. Duroc popped in and, even though I was ready for Van Zandt to show up and make life difficult, he just kept making rolls and I kept failing ’em. The dang werewolf ended up killing about a third to a half of my army alone.
After that, I ran the Iguana around with something resembling impunity. It wasn’t effective, but it felt good.
Round 3 was against… J? I’ve forgotten his name, unfortunately. He was running Tohaa. I got to more mobile than usual time time around, but paid for it: overextended with the wrong units, was too cautious with the wrong units. Even dumped a bunch of orders into accomplishing a Classified Objective… that I didn’t have!
In the end, I was 0, 1, and 3 Objective Points across the three games… but they were all good games and I had a great time. Definitely pumped for more Infinity and definitely pumped for the table I ordered a couple of weeks ago from Shark Mounted Lasers to show up.
Bones 3 showed up in the mail a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve idly knocked out a few items from it. There’s something liberating and relaxing about simply picking up a model to paint and blowing through it.
I started with the terrain pieces:
The Mystic Circle’s a great piece. The Mythos expansion came with a few terrain pieces, including an altar that fits the stones perfectly.
There are a few other pieces, too, from Mythos & Stoneskull:
The Graveyard expansion included a mausoleum that’s pretty rad:
I’m very happy with how the roof of the mausoleum came out:
Finally, I painted up a couple of models I thought were especially rad.
They’re serviceable paintjobs, but that’s really what Bones minis want.
All in all, the perfect painting palette cleanser.
Back in the saddle this weekend: knocked out the two Morans, now I’m trying to wrap up these Morlocks today so I can just move on to the next thing.
Trying to get the painting ball rolling again: I think I might have started too large a batch.
2017 was turning out to be a juggernaut year: I’m almost at more done in 2017 than in the entirety 2011, 2012, or 2013.
And then Persona 5 came out. I painted some more Warsen.al bases earlier this month, but otherwise have accomplished nothing hobbywise. I’m probably ~60% through the damn game. Maybe I’ll be able to start painting again in May?
Aetius & Arthur’s out. I flipped through it.
I can’t say I read it, because I left the battleboards in the game room, and: why in Sigmar’s name do they not include the actual battleboards in the actual book? Yes, they’re shrinkwrapped on there, but it means I cannot reference a force’s rules with the book (nor can I reference an army’s rules with their board: I need both). This has always been and remains fucking incomprehensible to me, and it means that my eyes passed over words, but without the accompanying boards, those words didn’t have a lot of meaning.
I like/liked Saga quite a bit. It’s at the upper limit of what I want to paint models for, plays fast and interestingly, and has the gold standard for army construction rules, I think. Initially, the battle boards’ rules were clean and clear: Vikings are about getting in and axing people, Normans are effective with their cavalry & shooting, etc.
As the supplements have continued to come out, though, it’s harder and harder for me to understand what the actual fuck is going on with it. In most games, it’s easy to look at an army and understand how they play: these guys are glass hammers, those guys are slow and tough, etc. I can’t get my head around how the different armies play. Why would I pick, say, Crusaders, over Milites Christi? I’m sure that if I played a bunch of games with both, I’d understand the difference but at that point it’s too late: I want to know what I want to build and paint.
A&A escalates this by getting pretty specific about steps in which things happen, too: where earlier, you’d see things like “Gain 3 attack dice” (comprehensible), they run more along the lines of “Gain 3 dice in Step 2 of the melee” (uh… I better look some stuff up). Maybe that’s an insignificant difference (in which case, why make it?).
(A related issue that isn’t really their fault: when Saga first came out, you could pretty much just grab some Dark Age Warriors and go: a Dark Age Saxon is close enough to a Dark Age Viking to not matter, so build a bunch of models and you can run a bunch of battle boards. Now, jeez, this is not the case. So many factions are so fundamentally different, you’re not going to be very successful with that.)
I do like the persistence of the tables: what options a faction can take and a summary of what how they work is fantastic.
Only about half the book are new factions: there’s a lot in there about adapting previous battleboards to be more era-appropriate. I think this is inspired.
They add a few new types of units: I dig the War Dogs, and I like how Romans can take little war machines and that Picts actually get Chariots.
The book is printed GW-level quality (which makes the so-so art and so-so miniatures within kind of stand out), but this is nothing new.
It makes me want to play Saga again (yay!) but further discourages me from being up to actually doing so (boo).
Had planned to work on some pieces for Historicon, but got sidetracked working on bases. I blame the overlapping color scheme (if I’m going to work on this, I might as well do these at the same time) and that I’m kinda pooped from doing yard work.
The past month has been unusually productive for me: I blew through two batches of Nomads for Infinity (17 models total) as well as a huge chunk of my unpainted Goritsi (only 21 models left).
Spent a bit more than I’d planned on figures, so it’s nice to know that despite that: the painting pile has shrunk and not grown.
Next, I think I’m going to work on some pieces for Historicon: it’ll be the last year I go, so I’d like to have a good showing. Then: it’ll be more Nomads, Goritsi, or Flames of War depending on what I’m actually rolling dice around.
UPDATE:
Just looked at my charts:
Yeah, I’m getting stuff done this year.