Viking Bruiser

The last Club day of the year has come and gone, and as usual it was another glorious day. We only had four tables going yesterday, a Lord of the Rings Game, Field of Glory, Field of Glory Napoleonic's and full on 28mm Napoleonic’s game using some old rules “War Games 1685-1845”, which looked fantastic.

I didn’t catch up with how the battle went or who won, but it looked like a pretty epic battle.

 

Also another great looking game of Lord of the Rings played out in the morning . A lot of the scenery the guys have at the club is just awesome.

 

 

I rolled out my Vikings in a couple FOG games, first in a long time, so the rules were pretty rusty. I got really crushed in the first game up against Mike’s Korean’s. The dice were not kind to me and I started badly with placement and ended up having my flank destroyed.

The second game was a lot closer as I battled with Kevin’s Syrians. In fact it was the closest game I’ve ever had. I managed to kill 3 of Kevin's generals and he killed one of mine all in the space of two turns. We made a few mistakes with the rules along the way, being rusty and also trying to use the new 2.0 rules as well, but I think it evened out over all. The Syrians gave my Vikings a beating at the beginning with the Heavy Chariots, so it wasn’t until well past the half way point in the game that my heavy foot troops got stuck into the Syrian troops. It basically came down to a race between my Freemen finishing off the Syrian foot troops or the Syrian Cavalry catching my mob of thralls and running them down. The Syrian troops boke first giving the Vikings the win by the skin on there teeth.

Trifecta

  Chocolate, Gaming and a new bottle of scotch. Life is good.

The only way to relax after 10 days straight of work and more to go.

Good the Bad and the FUBAR

The good is the fact that I found a backup of my blog and I can repost all my old post, it will take a bit, but I should be able to recover most of my old stuff. It’s more for my own records than anything else. So at least something is going right for me today

The bad is I’m stuck working this weekend so I wont get in any gaming, just killing time while thing install.

The FUBAR is the Exchange mail server I’m working on that's killing my weekend and gaming time. I’m seriously considering the baseball bat approach, I’m certain it will make me feel better, not so sure email would work after that though.

Oh the joy’s of computers…..

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.

Board Game Bash

Gotta love summer, gaming in the garage finally becomes a lot more fun in the warmth. I'm sure my brain works far better in summer than winter. (We will probably be bitching about the heat in another month or so)

So today we played mostly board games, with Capital Offensive fist up. In which I got seriously FRAG'ed so quickly it was almost embarrassing ... But then again thats typical of my skill at computer games.. LOL, so nothing to unusual or upsetting about that.

 

After that we played another four player game of Spartacus. I really enjoyed it, being my second game I understood a lot more of what was going on and how to play. I ended up drawing the same house as I had last time which also helped my cause. We started at 7 influence, which is basically a shorter game time. It ended up that Mark and myself had to slug it out in the arena to see who would win as we both got to the 12 influence level in the same turn. The really funny thing was that neither of us had any gladiators left, so we had some slave on slave action. Which basically came down to the roll of dice, which I lost. Defiantly looking forward to some more games of this. The sneaky back stabbing nature of the game is great fun.

Spartacus

Then Mark and I broke out Summoner War's for a couple of games. I got mashed in the first battle between my Shadow Elves and the Mountain Vargath. In the second game I defeated Mark's Benders with the Deep Dwarfs in a massive beating. In both games the order of the draw pile really made/broke one side or the other. Every time I play Summoner Wars the more I enjoy it. So simple a game that can be crazy complex if you want it to be.

To wrap up the day we played a 100 point X-Wing game, 2 players a side. 4 Rebel ships up against 5 Imperial ships. This time my dice rolling was much more even, and Phil's rolling was also pretty good. The Rebels came out on top with some lucky shots and a bit of manoeuvring luck. This game is another one that I foresee being played regularly for some time, as its easy to setup, fast and fun.

(I'm still trying to use my ipad to post to my blog and still pulling my hair out with getting a good photo layout, giving up using the Blogsy app. It just doesn't cut it. Also tried out using Flickr, which is ok, but I don't like the fact that when you click an image to enlarge it, it opens another page, so back to using google for image storage.)

 

The Score Board

Well I’ve managed to miss keeping records on a few game days, but my score board I’ve been keeping this year is pretty close. I started the year out with wanting to play at least one game of everything I have. So far, I’m miles of that goal. One thing that has surprised me is the emergence of board games in our group, which I think is a really nice change. Give’s some of us a chance to catch up on those piles of unpainted models.

The end of year figures will be most interesting, the biggest surprise this year so far (by light years) is the return of 40K to our tables. I would have lost money on that bet. Not that I’m complaining, I got my Trygon onto the table, even if it was for a very short amount of time before he got pasted. .. Roll on Christmas holidays.

Capital Offensive

Ok, so I'm over my brain fart, and now back to what I was going to doing last night.

With a bit of a board game theme to Sundays game day. We started off with a new game that Phil turned up with called Capital Offensive. It's like an old style video game with the object to Frag (kill)as many of your opponents as possible. With your characters respawning once they die in the next turn. It's a really fun game, light and fast. Apparently it's based on a comic book.

Then Mark and I busted out a game of X-Wing at 100 points. I played the rebels with 3 X-Wings and one Y-Wing and Mark had a mix of 5 Tie fighters. It started badly for me and continued that way, with the dice gods laughing at me (So just another normal day). I couldn't hit an asteroid if I flew into it. I did get the prise of killing Darth Vader though.

I can't believe how much fun this game is, I love the manoeuvre mechanic with the dials, already ordered a few more ships and can't wait to see the new ones coming out.

Then to round off the day we played Spartacus. With five of us there, I teamed up Garth since he had played it once before, for a 4 way game. It's a rather well done back stabbing game, I'd need to play it a few more times to really be able to comment on it fully. But after once through the game, I'd easly say it would be money well spent. And if you have some gladiator miniatures about they can really make the game look the part (and of course Mark's gladiators looked the part)

Side note for the geeks:

I've done this whole post from my new ipad, using an app called Blogsy. Setting it up and using it was a breeze. Typing up the text and fonts etc is easy, but when it comes to dealing with pictures.. OMFG .. What an arse. I've found another app called Photogene to edit the pictures and shrink them down which works really well and has some good options on exporting images ready to use for the bog. But trying to do any type of layout in Blogsy is an episode in hair pulling frustration. Off to go look for an app that can actually do a page layout without inspiring suicidal compulsions.

 

Death of Blog

Well it’s a simple thing, to kill your blog. In an effort to clean up all my accounts for MSN, blogger, Facebook etc, after having one of my accounts hacked into. I got a little ambitious and culled out all sorts of old accounts and email address from over the years as I went through and reset passwords. The one small thing I didn’t realise, or see in the fine print….(a.k.a. massive brain fart of the year). Was that when you delete you Google account, any images that were uploaded with that account get deleted, even if they are uploaded to your blog, which you specially DONT delete and transfer to the account you want to use.

Oh yeah, and then there is the backup function of Blogger.com … (Insert Tui’s Beer Advertisement) Yeah Right!.. That only backs up an xml file, and no actual images.

So I was left with a blog minus all the images… (insert obscene language, the type you can get arrested for in most countries, that's if your still alive after being beaten by your wife for using those words.. you know the ones,). Hovering over the Delete everything button It was time to call “Scotch o’clock”

Now after several scotch's to claim one’s self, I realised I could just delete the old broken posts and keep going, … what can I say to such a close call to complete and utter death of my blog..

Smurf it!