Table Top Hero: October 2017

I've been busy this week trying to finish off as couple of projects.
Firstly I have now painted everything in the Stygia expansion of the Conan Miniatures game. I've got the quality of the sculpts whilst not ground breaking are very serviceable and not bad considering they are made of a softer plastic than say the gripping beast or warlord plastic figures. The scorpions were a bit fiddly to do as they had to be removed from the base to allow the base to be textured and painted and then re-fixed, just a bit time consuming. If you look at the giant scorpion you can see my first attempt on the claws of fading black on the tips into red and then into the body, a bit ham fisted but I wasn't to sad as this was my first attempt.

Evil Thoth Amon, the bad guy

The Hero from the Sytgian set, I always find shades of blue difficult to do.

Smaller scorpions, there are 10 of these bad boys in the set

Oh good grief, how shit am I at keeping this blog up to date?
There has been a lot going on at the moment, not least my poor old dad being poorly and requiring a hospital stay, which has been stressful, time consuming to the point that my gaming has had to take a back seat for a day or two.
In between I have still managed to get plenty of painting projects in and a couple of more local war gaming shows in. I was impressed by the growth and improvements in the Peterborough war game show in September and at the opposite end of the scale was sad at how the change of venue for the Derby (not in Derby) war game show had spoiled what was once one of my favourite shows.

New purchase wise I have snagged a copy of the reprint of the board game Glass Road, and whilst only having played a learn the rules games and a solo play I can see there is potential there for a great game. The game is recognisable as a game by the designer Uwe Rosenberg at a country mile away, with elements that feel a little like Caverna and that idea of trying to solve the puzzle of building an engine to earn points. I suspect with the card playing aspect it will have some great interaction with 3 players and up.

To aid in my figure and model painting I also recently invested a small fortune in and air brush and compressor set supplied by the very helpful people at Barwell Bodyworks. I was a little frightened of it at first, but slowly with practice am becoming more efficient. Its been great for under coating models and have noticed it gives a more even and finer coat which doesn't mask or smother details on the figures and for painting larger areas of bases and buildings it has been a great help. I'm now moving on to more detailed work like pre shading, keep an eye out for forthcoming results. Also if you buy an air brush don't forget to buy plenty of the cleaning agent, you'll get through more than you think.

The last few months have been more than difficult as I suddenly lost one of my oldest gaming buddies who suffered a heart attack whilst on holiday. It was a sudden shock for all family and friends and I was amazed at the strength of his son, my god son during the whole thing, he proved himself to be an outstanding young man. I was tasked with sorting through all the gaming related things, some which were sold to raise funds for the family. It was a difficult job and very emotional and brought back some happy memories of time we had spent together painting figures, role playing and generally being a bit geeky before it was fashionable. There was one item which my god son wanted me to have, it was a certificate awarded to my friend by myself for the untimely death of his character during a Call of Cthulhu roleplaying campaign I ran back in the early 1990's, this item is framed and will serve as a happy reminder of what good friends and what good times we can have playing games.

All the best