No game night this week with Al having to earn some pennies to keep the bank manager at bay. But we have decided that October is going to be Dystopian Wars month with games planned for the rest of the month so I need to get a look at the new Fleet Action rules before next week to work out what I need. Not that it really matter because my Russians are going to rule the wave, he says with mock bravado.
On the hobby front I’ve been working on something of an eclectic mix with a bit of Malifaux, some Relics and some wall building / flag laying. So I’ll start off with the flag laying. When I picked up the Troubleshooters I had the idea of doing something a bit different with the basing by making a full on display base. The idea behind it is to make a Victorian style street scene with all the crew on it but with the ability to lift them off on game bases so they can actually be used in bases. I’ve seen a lot of these in the past but what I wanted to do was to have no gaps around the base. I wanted it to look like a single diorama whilst retaining the option to use them in game. My idea is to build everything up on inserts that can be lifted out and magnetised to a standard gaming base. Rather than trying to do all of this with textured plasticard I picked up some moulds from ‘Diorama Debris’ so that I can make wall sections, for the backdrop and different sized cobbles for the pavement and road. I’ll do a full review of the moulds in a spate article but at the moment I’ve made a simple brick pillar and a test base insert. Partly to see if the concept is sound and partly to test out some colour schemes. This is my first attempt but I think it proves that the idea is valid and that for me at least the colours will work, with a bit of tweaking. Now that I think I’m on the right track I’m going to try do a project blog taking you through the ups and downs of trying to pull this together.
The bricks and cobbles have taken up a lot of my time this week so I’ve not managed to get a great deal done on my Malifaux crew. But I have used some Foundry paints that I picked up at Derby to do the skin on Toni and I like how it’s turned out. I’m going to do a separate article on the paints themselves, which should be out on the Thursday (13th October) but I have to say that I found them very useful.
On the Relics front all I’ve done so fare is to get a couple of the little blighters built up and primed. Being small metal miniatures they were a little bit fiddly to put together but well worth the effort. The last few things I’ve worked on have all been plastic so it was a bit of shock going back to working with metal minis again. Overall I know how I want these guys & girls to look but I’m not sure how to actually go about this yet. The plan is that they will have dark clothing and very pale skin but rather than going with straight black I want it to have either a green or purple tint to it, which may take a bit of trial and error.
Now I’ve got a proper waffle of an update on something that happened nearly a year ago now. Back in Weekly Waffle #42 I was talking about an order that UK Mail never delivered and the saga I’d had trying to sort this out. Before it was resolved some real life issues pushed it to one side and in the end I just wrote it off as a bad experience and got on with things. Then last week I had an e-mail for the review site asking me to review my experience from this order. So I obliged and wrote up what I thought was very fair review which essentially said I’d had excellent service from the company in question but that despite all of the it still never received my order because of how inept UK Mail were. Anyway about an hour after this I got a call from the company who were genuinely horrified that I still hadn’t received my order, despite the fact they had already sent out a replacement. They had rightly assumed that because I didn’t get back in touch to say I still hadn’t received the order that the replacement had arrived. The upshot of the call was that no longer use UK Mail for delivering models and that they are more than happy to give me an immediate refund. As it turns out I still haven’t got the models I was after and they are in stock so they agreed to send them out again, this time via Royal Mail. Hay presto a couple of days later they arrived so whilst it’s taken a while we got there in the end. Up until now I haven’t mentioned the mane of the company because this was really an issue with UK Mail. But I think whilst we are quick to criticise bad service I would like to complement the really good service I have received here from Goblin Gaming
And that’s if for this week. Have a good weekend and I hope to see you all again next week.
