So, I left the room for a few minutes and when I returned this game was sitting on the table. But I decided to call the bluff and agreed to play the game. Now to be fair have has decided to try and select games that we have not played before, or at very least that we have not played for quite some time. I think this is the first edition and includes 3 expansions.
Well, after nine years I have finally reached 100,000+ visitors.
I first need to thank all my friends in Russia, Ukraine and Singapore without whom it would have taken many more years to have had that many visitors. In the early years Russia and Ukraine were major 'supporters' of the site but have in recent years dropped off. They now sit at 5% and 1% respectively. Now Singapore is the number one all time visitor to the site at about 24% of the total hits. By comparison, Canada is 17%, the US 19% and the United Kingdom is at 4% (so roughly 40%). Rounding out the top seven is Hong Kong at 10%
It would be nice to think that all these visitors to the site are actually gamers and not just robots, but it seems unlikely that they are.
On the other hand maybe 40-50% are truly gamers interested in some of the stuff that I have posted. So 50K hits by actual humans is not so bad a thing.
Thank you
Well, the monsters beat us, first time this year. We went up against 4 of them, well 5 as the Monster and his Bride were 'one' of them. Dracula, The Mummy and The Creature from the Black Lagoon rounded out the group. We dealt with Drac quick enough, and the Monster and the Bride became more human, but the last two defied our efforts to defeat them. The Mummy was especially tough this time around.
A blast from the past, we pulled out a copy of A&A Europe the other night, pretty much on a dare. We had already played two games of Sentinels of the Multiverse and were casting about for another game to play when we settled on this one. Now, we have played a lot of games of the original version over the years, but not recently. We somehow went with this game thinking it might not be quite so long and as we were starting to play at around 10pm short is what we needed.
Well it did move fast enough and strangely it was fun to play. It has different challenges than the original game and different features such as the Eastern oil fields and convoy spaces. Both of these were fine additions and shook up the regular flow of the game rather nicely. The Germans made one error at the start of the game that wound up having ramifications later on and made it very difficult to win the game. In the end we called it a night at around 1AM without a clear winner, but withe the understanding that is was going to be nigh impossible for the Germans to win.
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| Yellow zombie figures |
When you attack a territory that has zombies in it, the defender will roll 1 'zombie die' per zombie in that space. Again there is a 1 in 6 chance that the attacker or defender will be bitten(killed). The dice in the game have replaced the 6 with a skull. Should you roll a skull in normal combat a zombie has been killed.
So the game is still being played and I have yet to decide if it is any good, but it does look to be much faster play than any other version that I have played. We shall see...
So found some stuff from various vendors at Cangames. Apparently I am going to be working on a centaur themed Fantastic Battles army. I found these at Crossed Swords. Seventeen centaurs and 1 big monster/Minotaur/centaur thing. While I did not go looking for them, they were a fair price and I figure I do something with them. Apparently they are Bob Murch sculpts from the early 2000s. I already had some very old chaos centaurs painted a few years back. Combined this will be a force of 27 centaurs, roughly 12-13 companies and a couple of leaders. The big guy will be built as a dragon. The winded figure in the picture will be used for another project.
Zeppelin Attack! is another fun, very quick play game. A deck building game focused on fleets of zeppelins dueling it out. While I lost both games it was still entertaining!
So, another Hotlead has come and gone and I have survived another mad crush at the bring and buy! So far I have had a great deal of success at the event, this year was no exception, except that I did not find as many great items as I have in the past.
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| The haul! |
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| The Fluyt |
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| The Dhow |
So, I have actually played this game a few times, but I have not played it for at least a decade or more. In my early days of gaming, gaming in 20mm was the natural starting point, it was cheap and readily available. We started with Napoleonic and WWII games with any rules that we could find. At that time it meant Airfix rules, Introduction to Battle gaming and Discovering Wargames. The point of this is to say that while my collection of Napoleonic forces were excised from my collection, I have continued to collect 20mm WWII stuff since the 1970's.
Now some might think that I would have a fully realized and painted collection, but not so. I have, for the most part, been a casual gamer. Work and life has often got in the way of the hobby (but did not stop me from buying stuff) So right now that semi annual (or bi annual) urge to do some WWII gaming is returning. But even just looking at my collection is demoralizing, so much stuff to work on.
So more ideas, not all of them are mine.
While I have moved away from Warhammer I still have fond memories of some of the quirky rules and effects. So for your consideration here are some quirky ideas mixed in with some ideas that seem somewhat reasonable.
For the most part they are untested, but we did try the artillery rules, they worked fine. Some like the oblique marching just seem reasonable as do the marching rules (I think maybe Nic talked about that)
Anyways here they are:
So, two 2 company units of light Dwarf infantry are done. They were actually fun to paint but kept getting shunted aside for other tasks which is why it took so long to complete. In the end I just wanted them off the painting table so flocked them up today.
Again these are going to be fast moving skirmishers.with decent shooting skills. It should make them fairly flexible.
So, back in the old days when we played Warhammer 3rd ed, there were two tomes that could be used to create a Chaos army. It was silly fun as you rolled on chart after chart to create your army often rolling something that had no functionality. The best result I remember was the general of the army who was a lycanthrope who walked on four legs when human but would turn into a bipedal mammoth. He had so many other mutations that should he gain one more he would instantly turn into a chaos spawn and cease to be the leader, he was the most expensive figure in the army.
Anyways, it amused me to start work on a simple Fantastic Battles chart to allow a chaos player to create their own strange units. So here it is:
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| Sprinting at you, some quick strike Dwarf archers! |
So, I finally got around to building and basing some of the Oathmark light dwarves that I bought many months ago. Up first are these 12 guys who will be an auxiliary unit for my Roman Dwarves. I envision fielding them as two units of two companies, but I might also need to spread them out into four one company units.
I think they look the part and are bright enough that they should not go unnoticed on the battlefield. With only three figures a base they do look irregular, almost skirmish troops. Many of the poses are running or at very least they are in action poses. The bows were an add on that I had not planned for but the box included a mix of weapons and bows made sense.
They stat out as:
Irregular Doughty Shooting Skirmish Fast
Just the way they look!
Here, despite the lack of demand to see them, are my cards for Fantastic Battles. They are in no order and are a mix of spells and relics.
Disclaimer: I found these images through online searches and was unable to determine if they were copyrighted, hopefully not. At any rate I, perhaps foolishly, thought I would share these, no copyright infringement is intended & if I offend let me know and I shall remove them.
I have found them somewhat useful as all required information is included on the cards. I tried to make the cards visually interesting and the images matching the spell.If you are using character cards you could clip these to those cards to indicate who has what.
For the spells you would want to record what level any given spell was selected at. I use plastic card sleeves for these cards, so dropping a damage marker into the sleeve is a quick way to record the spell level.
Anyways, for what it is worth here they are!
