Evil plan

  So my evil plan has hatched and grown legs, with the second game also being a success with my wife. Yes, I went a bit overboard this week and ended up buying another game, the card game Dominion. 

We broke it out this afternoon and have complete two games. Both of which I lost by miles. And yes I was trying to win both of them. It's a really nice card mechanic and the two games we played were both extremely different from each other. With the card selection for each game of the two games being very different. At about 30 mins a game, it's going to be a nice time filler. 

So now I've got my wife playing card games and tile laying games all within two weeks. The evil plan is working nicely. Now I just need to get some more game sessions under her belt and wait until Chirstmas before bringing in a board game our two.

We are Gamers, Resistance is futile 

The ABC’s of Death

Random YouTube surfing strikes again.

Disturbing …. but I bet you watch it to the end.

Pile of metal

  My Samuari army turned up today, talk about a pile of metal, 16 bags of 15mm guys... Just one or two models to paint. They are going to make up my first Field of Glory Renaissance army. Only problem is I promised myself that I wouldn't start on them until I complete my Egyptians. (So I have to seriously start painting) these guys are going to be my summer holiday painting project. 

Carcassonne Crazy

The first step of my evil plan has been accomplished. Two days after getting the base game, we have completed 10 games. We now also have an expansion to the base game. We found the Trader and Builders expansion in a toy store when looking for Christmas presents and it just happened to end up in the shopping basket.

 

 

 

 

 

The wife is so hooked she’s even got the scoring app on her mobile phone.

We have only been playing two players, so it will be very interesting to see what the game plays like with more players. The base game is pretty straight forward. The expansion really adds some depth to the game and I enjoyed it a lot more. So I foresee several of the other expansions turning up at home very soon or at least at Christmas.

So now I’m planning stage two of my evil plan which is to introduce my wife to something a little more complicated in the gaming stakes. With Ticket to Ride now on the Christmas list, after some suggestions (Thanks DFlynSqrl) and a really well presented YouTube video I found online. It was an easy sell being that she's a Viking and there is a Nordic version.

 

I’m currently thinking of something like “Small Worlds” as the next step. Not to sure about it or not, and if its a too bigger step. So some more internet searching for the next few days.

Board Games

  I picked up a copy of the board game Carcassone yesterday, after a bit of research into what games make good intro's for new players. Im attempting to get my wife into playings a few games, in the hope ill be able to get her playing some of the larger more complated games which I enjoy. At $50 it wasn't expensive for a board game and pretty straight forward to learn, having never played it myself. 

Three games later, I get a complete ass whipping by my wife. After which she's onto the  Internet looking at the expansions already. So safety say that's the first step in the right direction.

Speculo Killer

I ended up getting some more painting time in today, with a little bit more work done on my FOG Egyptians. But I felt like trying out my new brush on something a little larger than 15mm figs. I bought a Winsor and Newton Gallera brush to try out when I was in the art store the other day.  So I started working on my Speculo Killer. So far I'm more impressed with the brush than my colour scheme, but its only my fist base coat so I never know what I'll change until I do it. The brush is really nice, holds water and paint well, the best thing so far is the smooth flex of the brush. Which suits my painting style incredibly well, so I'm going to endeavour to try and look after this brush. I'm usually really bad at taking care of my brushes.

On another note, my mission to use my iPad for blogging ( and other real work things) is taking a turn for the better, having got my apps sorted for editing photos. And spent a bit of time learning how to use them helped a lot. Now I'm just getting use to my latest app purchase for actually composing my posts. (Blog Docs) so far it's working we'll enough for means I try out all sorts of settings and options.

Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds

I went along to the show tonight with my wife. Talk about awesome, they had some really nice laser and dry ice effects going, and the projection on the dome screen above you made for a superb experience. The singers were pretty good as well, although the acoustics were thrown off a bit on some of the higher notes they were hitting. But that was minor to say the least and of course the sound tracks are pretty cool. Well worth seeing.

 

Club Day - November 2012

The monthly club meet was yesterday, and I completely forgot about the game of Fire and Fury I said I'd go in on, with the crazy late night work I've had this week it slipped my mind. So I turned up with a boot load of games that stayed in the car. (Not that's a problem, as any gaming is good gaming with the guys at the club)

So my first game of Fire and Fury (F&F). Coming from a Field of Glory (FOG) background, F&F is much faster, the movement is just huge compared to FOG. Moving distances of 12 and 16 inches etc in a turn. It has lots of tables like FOG for working out shooting and melee etc, with plus's and minus's that add up, so wasn't to hard to pickup the basics. The mechanics a quite different, but if you have played FOG nothing to difficult. My impression from my first game was the D10 system adds a larger element of chance compared to FOG. Not in a bad way I don't think, so from my first game it seemed like a fun system.

Not being a historical minded gamer, Ill just say it was simply the the Russian versus the British. (I'm sure someone will correct me) I was on the British side and we got rolled over after some seriously bad rolling at all the wrong places. Never the less, it was lots of fun, and playing with fully painted minis is always great fun. 

After lunch I played the Rebels against Phil at a game of X-Wing. (Such a fun game) I had some steady rolling this time for a change and a bit of luck. One of my pilots flying through no less that four asteroids and surviving ... Yes surviving with only 1 hit. In the end it came down to Wedge and a Y-Wing against Darth Vader. Wedge came out on top.

Then to round of the day we got in a couple more games of Capital Offensive, introducing it to the guys at the club. Its a really light fast game and is best played with a cheerful bunch of people in a light hearted manor, it definitely wouldn't work well with a serious gamer attitude... It has space aliens, a four armed dude and a Koala, just to mention a few of the characters. 

Gipo's

So with no gaming this weekend, I tried to get back into painting after what seems like months of not lifting a bush. In fact it's only been a couple of weeks.

With the Battle Cry tournament registration opening for early next year I thought I'd get my Field of Glory Egyptians out and see if I can get them to a usable point. Im still undecided on what to use and if it will be FOG or maybe X-Wing (if that ever happens).

Either way, I'm pretty sure ill be going along for what most certainly will be another bashing. The Gipo's are pretty soft as an army, and I've not played them enough to get the real hang of them yet. If it get a few more games in with them I'm hoping ill be strong enough to win one game if I use them. Nothing like aiming high :-)

So after painting up the base coat on the bases, they already look 100% better as an overall army. I've now got some heavy foot troops to clean and base which will give the army a few teeth instead of just throwing sticks at the enemies.

I'm still struggling with blogging from the iPad. I guess I'm a little pedantic in the way I want things to look. There are just so many weird things that Apple and iPad don't do. I mean what's with no bloody image names, you edit a photo, shrink it down ready to use for your blog then piss about guessing which one is the edited version. ... Rant rant rant.. The iPad has so much potential but it just seems to be neutered in the weirdest of places.

I have managed to find a great little app for editing the photo's and resizing them down nicely. It's called Photogene, I started with the basic version and that works well, but you don't get much control over the size of the images when exporting. I just upgraded it to the pro version and that works a treat, with a nice slider bar on the compression ratio of exported JPG's. And its got some nice quick simple edit functions to crops and adjust levels and colours etc. It's perfect for what I wanted to be able to do for blog photos. Now if only I can find a good app to blog with.