Book Review: In Her Majesty's name

This is a book review for a set of steampunk skirmish rules. We've not yet played the ruleset, a new review will be posted as soon as we do.

The ruleset caught my eye in the Wargames Illustrated. Greet mini's and great setting. We are playing Chaos in Carpathia but that is more Victorian horror. This is more the steampunk variation in my opinion. The book is accompanied by a blog with latest findings, errata, additional material and reference cards.

The book is good: Nice size book, softcover, good pics and not a ruleset with 500 pages. Read the book within the hour and flipped through the warbands. I love the setting and quick paced skirmish rules (as they read, how they play has to be experienced yet!).
I am enthusiastic on forming a warband and the fact that you can come up with your own themed warband is great. A solid ruleset for creating warband members including the formula's to calculate the points for your warband members is ace. Playing these kind of games leads to coming up with ideas of your own. It is then difficult to create such a thing. You need a lot of playing hours with existing warbands to get a feeling for points value. When eventually you come up with your own it needs loads of play testing and tweaking (and discussing with fellow gamers) until you have a balanced set (if you didn't quit in the process).
This set of rules bodes well for creating your own warbands in the steampunk setting. Love to get to grips with the game!

Some random ogre's appear!

A short while ago we decided to start a new campaign in Mordheim. I decided to go with Ogre's this time. This post is the first update on the progress of creating the models for my warband.

I really had some fun creating these guys! Not included is the Halfling btw.

Mind you, this is also my very first attempt with milliput ever!

All I made tonight.

A random base with tiles.

The full group thus far, front view.

Full group thus far, rear view.

Mountian Guard and Boss, I guess.

Again, but front view this time.

painting Mournfang

As mentioned in the previous battle report my mournfang are finished painting. It took me a while but they are done. I tend to like to start up multiple paint projects with models I like, ending up with 4 projects progressing very slowly. Plan to paint is good thing here and I put away 3 other projects in a shoebox (literaly so you can't see them near the paintstation) and focussed on the mournfang. This proved good tactics since they were done in 2 weeks (just painting half hours here and there).

The base of the mournfang was done by airbrush. Great stuff to paint the hide and add cool highlights. Finished of with a wash and a final highlight with the airbrush. This was done in say 2 hours. I also undercoated the riders and the saddles separately. In total 6 parts to paint separately (2 riders, 2 saddles and 2 mournfang). The mournfang itself finished quickly after the airbrush session. The saddles as well since only leather painting needed to be done. I did the tusks and bones on the saddles with a colorflow from brown to red to yellow to white. They are more magical creatures and this gives them that look I had in mind.

With the mournfang ready I started work on the bases as well. I wanted these simple and snowy to focus attention to the model. Simple layers of snow were added with watered down pva glue. I also added clumps of snow and put drops of watered down pva glow on them so it could soak through. It gave nice patches of thick and thin snow. With some added rocks covered in snow, for now it's done.

Meanwhile the ogre riders were started. Mainly your basic ogre although I wanted to give a nice print to the pants. It became a cloud pattern that works well. The troop is now called the cloudriders and the entire ogre force named: skytitans of null. Always nice to see this naming following from the models and paintschemes themselves, works more organically that way.

A lot of work went into weathering the armour and waponry. The first order to make it less 'clean' and further more to give more color to the model that has a lot of reds and browns. Green-blue oxidation on brass is great here.

Fianlly assembly of each model with the 3 parts finished and then all comes together. A quick layer of matt varnash and the models are done. Good to see how focussing the work leads to quick and good results here. Next up is the stonehorn but maybe I'll do 1 leadbelcher in between to do something different then furry brown beasts.

The watchtower

A game of my Ogres vs the Nurgle warriors of chaos. For the first time my army list contained the mournfang cavalry! Yesterday I actually finished painting them but they were good to go on Friday. The rest of my army was a set of 7 Ogres, 5 ironfists a bruiser (BSB) and a butcher (lvl2). I added a scraplauncher, 3 maneaters with pistols (and swiftstride and poison attacks) and 3 leadbelchers for some shootyness and 2 sabretusks to harass where needed.
What was I up against: a hellcanon (of course), some low level spawn, a block of warriors of chaos (not to mess with), a chariot, a wizard, a hero with palanquin and it was topped off with some 3 dragon ogres.

The scenario I rolled was the watchtower and Chaos was assigned to guard it. Of course the warriors were put in the tower (maybe the single most difficult unit to defeat without any charge bonuses). The game for me started of with my first mistake: not charging the tower directly with the strongest unit I had. For some reason I sought out the my chaos opponents first to ensure a safe battle for the watch tower. This is somewhat odd since I had more troops than the chaos ones. An immediate charge and fight for the tower would have been a better plan. Start the conquest of the tower as soon as possible is a lesson learnt here.

My Chaos opponent did will by putting his warriors inside the tower. They are a tough nut to crack. I charged with my ironfists eventually but even with my big block of attacks it was not enough. The one time I won combat, the warriors stayed inside the tower and I had to start all over again. Subsequent attacks proved some losses on my side as well and in the end I couldn’t swing it before the game was ended.

While this should have been the centrepoint of the battle, I put my focus first on the dragon ogres and the chariot for I thought they would mess with my plans. Of course my chaos opponent manoeuvred in such a way charges in turn 3 were only succesfull. I had to charge the spawns in the end with my mournfang (completely wiping them out, mournfang are gooodd!!) before I could get to grips with more interesting units. The maneaters got to grips with dragon ogres (which should have been my mournfang with their impact hits) and got stuck the rest of the game. Luckily the hellcanon played no major part in the game as well as the magic users. I would have gotten stuck in sooner with some charges but it was not to be.

The watchtower scenario with Warriors of chaos inside was too tough a nut to crack with the mistakes I made. Fun game, good mournfangs, better luck next time!

Like I had nothing left to paint ....

Sometimes you don't see a single miniature for over a month, and then all of a sudden they start to appear out of nowhere. I had that same experience today.

This morning I bought a standard ogre box to create the maneater mordheim warband. Some greenstuff required but that will be all fine. I already assembled parts of them today, removing a little of the points where the ogre's where attached on the sprue. Also they all have their slippers on and are ready for combat.

So what happened when I emailed Arjan to check if the Open Fire box was already in? Indeed, "it's on my desk a.t.m.".

That's even MORE to paint :D . I made a deal with arjan where I could have the rulebook and the US troops (though they are mostly Brits in the box), along with some counters and dice, where Arjan would have the rest. We split the cost and all was well.

I am a bit dissapointed with the build quality of the tanks though. The entire left side, top and bottom are great, but the right side is completely out of shape, for all the tanks (did not assemble the FireFly yet). Have to do a lot of shaving there. Also a lot of greenstuff required, but ah well.

All in all.... painting and assembly time!

plan to paint everything

it has been a while is a sentence I have been busying a lot the last couple of posts here. Luckily my fellow gamers are entering posts here and there. With me using my social media mostly in the form of twitter (and facebook coupled to it), this blog is lagging behind. I had plans to post numerous battle reports (there have been enough actually), and multiple posts on the progress off a lot of painting projects. Actually I finished a lot of ogres that already went to battle as well. They all did not appear on this blog.
At this point I was painting a set of parallel projects and got into the mood that nothing finishes. A good point to reflect. Is painting Ogres becoming dull? Ia painting not a challenge any more? Is playing becoming more interesting than painting? Might be some truth in all of those but probably it is lack of focus. With that in mind I am now making a plan in what order to paint all this stuff cramming my paint station. With planning came a thought to put all this reflecting into a blog post. All restored!

What has been entering the realm of painting then you might ask. Actually not so much. I got a bit greedy to play mournfang so bought a set of those. Also when coming across a stonehorn I wanted that as well. I have a nice airbrush set so painting the big beasts shouldn't take that much time right? As a matter of fact this is true, only the details take up a lot of time. With the big beasts come big bases, so they need time as well, since the big mini's need to make an appearance on the battlefield of course.

Aside from the ogres I seem to be collecting all kinds of scenery on my painting table. I have stuff already painted, but with the airbrush comes the possibility of painting it nicer! :) Get everything up to the same standard. All in all an unduly task.

THe painting table is thusly collecting a lot of half painted stuff and nothing gets finshed since I start with everything at once. Or maybe in the end everything is finished at once (but this might be a while!). Therefore I cleared the desk, put to the task only the mournfangs for now and take it one at the time. Actually taking 2 mournfangs is slow going, but a lot faster than painting a stonehorn, a wood elf hero, an imperial marksman, 4 ogres, 90 gnoblars and a set of trees at the same time :)

Hopefully my painted models output will rise with this and you will find more posts on the blog about them. Now how many tanks for flames of war should I order and start painting.... :)

"To enter a world of poetry and violence"

(Warning: This is a book review... The book in question is a novel, not a rulebook, nor a history book, it's even literature....)


Some time ago I read a small review in my favorite Dutch newspaper of a recently translated book by Roberto Bolaño. Having read and thoroughly enjoyed '2666', I was even more pleasantly surprised when I found out that a theme in the book was wargaming. In a word: A must read!

In the book the main character plays (rather fanaticly) the game "Rise and decline of the Third Reich", a classic Avalon Hill game. Apparantly mister Bolaño was a gamer himself and the way playing the game is depicted shows this; the game and the thoughts of the gamer are "true to nature" and feel realistic, even for a gamer like me :-)
Googling around I found this article on the book and other books referring to wargaming, so there's another shortlist of books in need or reading..)


Once more mister Bolaño managed to entertain, confuse and hook me and lead me into a bizarre and disturbing world, not unlike ours. The best way to describe it I found in this review: "To read Roberto Bolaño is to enter a world of poetry and violence.."


And last but not least, a service for (nearly all of) our readers, a link to the book in the local library...