So for this week’s waffle I’m going to venture into the divisive topic that is Age of Sigmar. Now just to start things off I have never played fantasy so when Games Workshop effectively finished off that world and changed things about it had no impact on me. In fact I found it quite interesting to just sit back and listen to some of the passionate debates that were taking place. The after one game night I noticed that Al had some Age of Sigmar models on his work desk, a bit of quizzing ensued and he just liked the models so picked some up to paint. And I have to agree with him that there are some really nice models in the range that I’ve been tempted with as a painting project.
Anyway last Friday I was chatting to a few friends and they were saying that they had really got hooked on Age of Sigmar. But what was important here is that they were all fantasy players and none of them were initially happy with the changes. Granted they didn’t through their toys out of the pram but they weren’t a happy bunch. Now like Al they had picked up some of the new models to use in their existing armies. Then after the initial upset wore off they gave the new format a go, because the rules were free, and found that they actually enjoyed it. So they effectively now have two games to play with the same miniatures because they can still use the old rule if they want too.
For me it seems like all the furore that kicked off when Games Workshop made the changes seems to have settled down, and with no figures to back this up, it seems like it was a good move on their part. Mainly because the ‘barriers to entry’ seem to have been lowered so you don’t need to invest a great deal of time and money to give it a go. If you then throw in something like The Silver Tower that brings even more nice models to the table along with a different way play the game it seems like people are settling down and accepting the changes.
A quick update on the Lightbox issue is that I’ve been able to track down what is causing the issue so from now on it should work on all new images that I add. The only little issue is that I will need to manually update each image where the Lightbox isn’t working. So this will take me a bit of time but I will work my way back through the posts that have the issue and fix things. On the image front I’ve also added some more images to both the 40K and Wild West Exodus galleries.
Game night this week saw us carrying on with our RECON game with some mixed results. The more we play it the more frustrated we seem to get. I think the problem is that because we are used to playing MERCS we expect a similar sort of play from RECON but that just isn’t the case. The rules also seem to be open to interpretation. What seems to happen is that we will play through a mission and one side or the other seems to be totally out classed. But when you read back through the rules with that experience you interpret them in a different way. This seems to happen every time something new comes up. An example was I our last game we had to ‘breach and clear’ every ‘named’ room on the board. This was ten rooms, but even though there was only one enemy in the room we had to do 19 ‘blood’ (wounds) to kill him. As a team we get one attack each and he gets an attack for against each of us. So even though we were winning the engagements we were taking woods. This coupled with guards shooting at us meant our super doper corporate MERCS were dead long before they near to completing their mission. It may be that it’s just one of those games that you need plug away at for a while before it clicks but as things go it’s touch and go if will get the chance.
On the hobby front I’ve finished off Ben Hamilton for my Confederates. He is an Underboss and one of my favourite looking models. He was a big part in my decision to pick the Confederates when I back the Kickstarter. I’ve no idea how he will actually play but who cares when the mini looks this nice.
I’ve also made a start on my Blackhoof scout and again I’ve use the Concept Art book as my starting point. This shows the ‘metal horse’ as a dark metallic blue which how I have started things. The problem I have at the moment is that I should have done more of the highlighting before I added the wash I used to darken the blue. So I’m a bit unsure about how to achieve the highlighting now. It’s not an insurmountable issue and Al has given a couple of ideas so I’ll just have to give it a go and see how it comes out. For the rider I think that because he is a scout I will just go with the same colour scheme as that used on my other scouts which should offer a nice contrast to the horse.
And that’s it for this week. I’m going to carry on working on the Blackhoof Scout and see how it turns out. Other than that I haven’t got anything else planned for next week at the moment so I think it will be a case of looking through my stash of untouched models to see what perks my interest. So until next week have a good week and I’ll catch you all later.
