Well
we are now into February already and it’s time to check in on the past month to
fill in the gaps not covered by the past few posts.
The Painting and purchased
tally 2018:
Well the year’s painting tally
has yet to get off the mark but I did do a reasonable amount of work during
January. My efforts focused on two areas, Bush Wars and Soccer players.
After recently playing another
fun game of Striker (See previous post) I decided that I want to play more of
this excellent game and would like a bit more variety in the teams I can play.
So I headed off to Eureka
miniatures and picked up two more teams (14 players per side with substitutes). While I was there I also picked
some nice farm animals for general tabletop scatter.
This brought my month’s
purchases to 37.
I decided that I would paint up
one team as West Ham United and the other team as Tottenham Hotspurs. I’m not so much of a
perfectionist to paint away strips for teams so I make sure that the teams I
paint can play in their normal colors and will not clash with my other teams.
As soon as I got these home,
they were cleaned up,based ,and undercoated (in white) in quick fashion and I
started painting them. Unfortunately they weren’t finished before the end of
the month so they will go into February's totals.
The other project was Bush Wars
vehicles. I assembled two trucks and a couple of helicopters and undercoated
them in white. In assembling the helicopters and vehicles I had to check myself
when it came to the interiors. As they are supposed to be wargame models not
scale models (and the models don’t come with crew figures) I decided that I
don’t need to paint the interiors and can just paint the windows blue and that
will be okay.
However I cannot rule out one
day painting the interiors so I glued the glass in with PVA glue (easily
removable) and before spraying with white undercoat spray I gave all canopies/windows a
thin coat of Vallejo primer medium. This medium is a type of rubber polymer so
I should be able to carefully peel it away to expose the clear glass if I ever want to convert back to a scale model.
Some brass tubing and "Knead-It" polymer putty for a helicopter mount.
I have three Resin APCs for
Bush Wars but they aren’t the best quality so I decided to go on eBay and I
purchased three BTR-60PB to replace them. The resin APC will be sold off. These
new models should arrive next month.
Once the APC are assembled and
undercoated I can finally break out the air brush and do all the camouflage
paint jobs in one go. Then it will be a relatively quick job of painting the
details and weathering the models.
I will also have to print off
some homemade decals of the UmBongo flag to stick on the models.
A old Hound for troop transport and every African despot must have a Hind gunship!
The UmBongo vehicle park...
So in short plenty of activity
but nothing quite finished. Painting tally: 0
In an interesting crossover
project there is talk that I should paint up an UmBongo national soccer team to
play arch rivals Umgawaland. I could imagine a fierce match between these two
African minnows interrupted by a pitch invasion by a T-62!!
On the gaming side I managed
games of ECW, Striker, and Dragon Rampant (to be covered in a later post). On
the board game front we played Labyrinth (with the new goblin expansion) and
also a game of Star Wars rebellion.
Star Wars rebellion looks like
a fun game but I will give it another play through before writing a review. It
did certainly tick the boxes if you’re a fan of the original trilogy.
The evil face of the Empire!!
I was happy to see the release
of the new boardgame The Dark Crystal by Riverhorse games. I picked up a copy
at a local comic book store and we played our first game.
The game has a similar look and
feel to the Labyrinth game and does share some similar mechanics. We did have a
bit of an issue with the Garthim rules but this was fixed a couple of days
later with a quick Errata by Riverhorse. It’s a bit annoying this error wasn’t
picked up in proof reading but oh well.
I will play another game before
reviewing this one. I am certainly looking forward to painting the models!
And finally we come to the
dreaded topic of kickstarters.
This month I backed two
kickstarters, the first was Fourth Quarter football. A miniatures board game
based on American Gridiron and the second was U-Boot a cooperative board game
where the players are controlling a WW2 German U-Boot with an interactive App
to control the enemy.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/phalanxgames/uboot-the-board-game
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2013971464/fourth-quarter-football-gridiron-miniature-game?ref=nav_search&result=project&term=fourth%20quarter%20footbal
These both look like fantastic
games but in the end buyers remorse kicked in and...I cancelled my pledge. My reasons were as follows:
U-Boot: a fantastic game but I
know the reality will be I would play this maybe once a year. I couldn’t really
justify the cost at the moment.
Fourth Quarter football: Again
I would not play this very often and as there were no Kickstarter exclusives I
don’t really need to buy this now. I can buy it later on in retail (although it
will cost a bit more).
So in the end my willpower held
and I did..sort of.. resist the curse of the “new shiny”
And that’s it. A reasonable
hobby month with some sensible purchases. Hopefully February will see me
finishing some of these outstanding projects.
Bye for now!
