Just a Quick Blog!

Last night I played the  Mars Attacks board game. I got this game for Christmas but have only just got the time to have a sit down with a good fiend and play through a few scenarios.
The box contents everything you need to play. In the rulebook there are around ten scenarios, the first one is more designed to teach you the rules and they slowly add more challenges as you move through the scenarios.
In the box you get around twelve Martians,  ten US soldiers and the civilian heroes. The models are good quality though sometimes the gun barrels seem to get bent a little in transit. You get a mat to play on with depicts a T-junction and sone plastic ruins which clip together fairly easily (I clicking them together looks more complicated than it is)  you also get some nice street furniture to add to the game.
The rules are really easy to grasp with it being based around D8 Rolls. The turn allows each player to 'activate' up to two models,  then the opposition can do the same. I like this as it makes the games more tactical as your opponent can react a lot quicker to things you do. The event cards you get each turn also add a nice twist to each game. (flaming cows running through the middle of the game board anyone?)
Overall really enjoyed this game :-)I like this trend of new games where everything you need is in the box a lot easier than collecting massive armies of models.
You can buy extra bits for the game so if you want to take it to large tabletop level you can.
Right that's me done for today. Have a great day!!

It's Been a While Hello everybody, sorry it's been a while since my last blog it has been a busy month with family and work etc. Today's post is a slightly shotgun approach to give you a rundown on the bits I've been working on since the last entry. First off of fancied making some sandbag positions s these can be used in any game system I'm playing. (Across the Dead Earth, Dystopian legions etc). I looked at a couple of ways of making them and settled on salt dough as this seemed the easiest to attempt plus my wife and son could get involved meaning a nice bit of family craft time. :-) We used a recipe of 2 cups of flour and one cup of salt and cold water. Mixed together to create a dough, we had to add extra for at some points because the dough was very sticky. Once I'd made the dough I would roll it into a sausage and cut sandbag sized chunks off. Some would need a bit of shaping but then you use each "sandbag " to start constructing a wall or gun position. I'm sure they are not technically correct but I think they look the part when painted and will do the job on a game board.

While scouring eBay for wargames stuff (a regular time waster of mine) I came across a few miniatures I liked the look off. One gang of suit wearing gangers but I missed out on those but I won this group of miniatures for £5!! Which I thought was quite a bargain. I plan on using them as a second gang for Across the Dead Earth. As an added bonus they are already painted!!

Next up is my main gang for Across the Dead Earth.The gang is called the 78th Smethwick Irregulars. I'll do another blog with a bit more fluff about the hang and is members. Please excuse the painting skill level as I'm years out of practice and want great to start with! The models are mostly necromunda gang models with a wood elf thrown in as a forest kin (more on that on the gangs blog post soon)

Last of my rambling now. I've read about foam board being used to make buildings for game boards so on my last trip to hobbycraft I picked up two A1 sheets of foam board for £7. I've found some templates for buildings online but I've also made some of my own up. In the pic below are my works in progress ruins. One I'm hoping looks like a row of three storey terraced houses. I wanted to add a bit of height to a battlefield and be able to have a nice built up area to scrap over. The other one is a smaller two storey ruins. I've kept the templates so hopefully I will have a nice collection of buildings to grace the game board.

Right that's it for now. Hopefully I will do some more blogs soon. This Friday I've got my first game of mars attacks so no doubt I will write about that!

More Terrain! While working on my last piece of terrain (in my last blog) I've been working on a bigger bit of terrain where models can fight indoors as it were. I chose a bunker as my first attempt having come across some quite thick cardboard over Christmas. I measured up and cut the wall sections out and some interior walls to break up the interior. (good opportunity to hide round corners) these were all stuck down to a cardboard base. I didn't want the interior to be spartan so I started thinking of what to put inside but due to resources it would have to be home made or home sourced. I wanted the bunker to look overgrown and partly buried so I added filler around the sides and on the top edges (as the cardboard had holes at the edges). The hope was to sand the filler down so it would be smoother. Unfortunately this failed (mostly down to me being an amateur) I ploughed on anyway as this is one of my early attempts it would never be perfect.

For the interior I settled on a table with some maps on and sone old maps and posters on the walls. The table was made from lollipop socks and matches (very fiddly!!). The maps were doodled by me and aged by squashing used tea bags onto them (cue some strange looks by my wife). I surrounded two of the maps with cardboard and mounted them on the walls of the bunker. A couple of posters were put on some of the other walls then two maps left on the table.

The bunker was undercoated in black then painted grey, the filler green and the base dark green. Sand was added to base then painted over with dark green this was then dry brushed. (learnt from doing the car in my previous post) Railway flock was then added to the filler to make it look like the bunker was dug in and flock added to roof as well.

Things I learnt from this process are. 1) plan more don't go at it haphazard. 2) choose the materials you use well. The cardboard I used was Ok but the holes in the edges just added extra problems. 3) use of flock? I'm not sold on this and have yet to find a use for it where I'm totally happy with end result. I think the problem is you have to match the colour of the flock to the colour of your scenery. The base green was quite different to the flock green. Well that's all for now. Up next is the gang for the game Across the Dead Earth. The models are assembled and awaiting my clumsy hand to paint.

Terrain!! The last few days I have been working on terrain. I'm currently doing two pieces. I'll do a separate entry for the one as it was a bit ambitious for a beginner like myself. I want to keep all my terrain non game specific so I can use it in all the games I play. I decided to make an abandoned car, I been inspired the guys on the Across the Dead Earth facebook group https://m.facebook.com/acrossthedeadearth I'll say more about this tabletop game later when I've got the hang of this blogging malarkey as I want to do them justice as it's an awesome game and they are ultra helpful. I pilfered one of the son's old toy cars and grabbed a CD to base it First thibgs first,the tyres were pulled off(thankfully very easy to do on this car) and several washes of brown acrylic paint mixed with water. The CD was painted with a mix of green acrylic paint and pva glue. Next up was sand added to base and then another layer of pva/green paint.A few more washes on the car and I ended up with pic below.

The next stage was to dry brush the base. I've never done dry brushing before. So after some advice from the Across the Dead Earth group I gave it a go. The results are below

As you can see it did not go well. I was told I had not dried the brush enough. I was all ready to paint over and start again but was advised try a dry brush with yellow first to bring out the definition on the base. So I stepped once more into the breach! The results are below

I hope the photo shows the definition and makes it look more 'ground' like. Then I smashed the windows of the vehicle and attached it to the base. Some flocking around the wheels and here it is!

For a first ever go I'm quite happy with the results. I might add some bushes around the wheels. Thank you all for reading

A New Frontier

Hey out there,
I've been reading a few blogs recently and thought I would give it a go. I've just started getting back into war gaming (after an absence of about 12 years....god I'm old) and some board games. I'm hopefully going to start regular games up a lot more than I have been.
Now I'm quite an amateur at this so please bear with me (as a blogger) and as a painter. I'm hoping you (and me!) will see an improvement as we go.
Myself I'm just a regular 30 something, used to play Games Workshop when I was younger. Now rediscovering the world of war games and the amount of options that are out there. Currently on the go I have
Small Space Wolves force
A Necromunda gang (Goliaths)
A Kingdom of Britannia starter set force
The newest is a gang for a game called Across the Dead Earth which has just started up recently. I'll put more up about that in fourth coming blogs.
Any way thanks for reading!