Nevi: Welcome to the very second Bits & Pieces hobby round-up. At the moment, the site is in a weird space where our time to work on it is severely limited due to other life commitments. However, that doesn’t mean that our hobbying has stopped. Hopefully, normal service will resume soon, but in the meantime check out all the things we’ve been building and painting in the world of miniatures tabletop games.
Warhammer 40,000
Nevi: I unofficially decided that June was going to be terrain month. For ages, I’ve had a box of mostly unpainted terrain that I’ve used for games and it finally felt like the next big project was to get it all painted. And while I didn’t finish it all, I got through a surprising amount. Not all of it was specifically 40k themed, with a lot of the terrain coming from the Age of Sigmar: Mortal Realms magazine, but I did have a few sci-fi bits knocking about. Now that they are done, it’ll be nice to play with fully painted terrain.
Nevi: Other than terrain, I didn’t work on anything Warhammer 40,000 related except to start putting together Commander Brightsword and his two Warscraper Drones. They are both kitbashed and the commander himself uses an old small scale Burning Gundam as the base, but after some feedback on what I did with Farsight, I’ve made him more obviously T’au. In July, I’m hoping to get him finished and painted. However, outside of T’au, I want to finally start on the Grey Knights or World Eaters, I haven’t decided which yet as either might be involved in an upcoming Crusade campaign – which is quite exciting!
George: Edging ever closer to a fully painted playable army list, this month I’ve finished a Cybernetica Datasmith and am making progress on two big robots for him to babysit.
The Datasmith looked like a really daunting model at first but after priming black and giving him a zenithal spray of leadbelcher he started to come together pretty quickly as I blocked in colours. Was aiming for speed and simplicity here, blocking in clean bright colours and them falling back on washes to add texture and detail to the model. Particularly happy with how oil washes made his lab coat look suitably grimy aiming for a blachitsu look.
Was aiming to be equally quick with the robots but as they’re primarily black, washes aren’t really all that useful here. Instead I’m learning sponging and chipping using wear and tear in place of highlights.
Age of Sigmar
Nevi: Age of Sigmar has fallen to the side. Despite my excitement for the third edition, after watching some battle reports and reading the core rules it remains the ruleset I’m least excited to play (at least from GamesWorkshop). That being said, I have painted a lot of AoS terrain this month including a few repaints. I never knew how satisfying it was to prime some terrain white, paint a few of the details and then just wash the whole thing in Agrax Earthshade. Considering how quickly I smashed these out, I’m really happy with the results and can’t wait to get them all on the table.
Nevi: The next set of Age of Sigmar terrain that I worked on (and am still finishing off a few pieces for) is the spooky terrain or Sigmarite Mausoleum. I used a pretty simple technique of prime black and dry brush with steadily lighter greys before hitting some of the edges with Corax White and painting up the other details. They were another load of terrain pieces that were fun and quick to paint up and that I can’t wait to get on the table. Admittedly, they likely won’t appear in an Age of Sigmar game (no idea when I’ll play one), but they work fine in 40k and while some bits of crazy Sigmar nonsense, some it is low fantasy enough for Middle Earth games.
Middle Earth SBG
Nevi: Out of the three rulesets that GamesWorkshop produce (that I play or collect), Middle Earth SBG is my favourite. I think it’s partly my love for the films, books and other tertiary media (The Third Age on PS2 is a stone-cold classic), but I also think it sells the scale and strategy at play within the War of the Ring. It also doesn’t have about a million different rules, spells, stratagems, warlord traits, upgrades, weapons and goodness know what else that the other Warhammer games have. And while I enjoy all that nonsense, it’s nice to play a simple game that is complex through its choices rather than its rules (not that either of the other two don’t allow for complex choices, but Middle Earth SBG is inherently a more straightforward game). And this is even more true for the Battle Companies campaign structure. I had my first game of Crusade in June and it was nowhere near as fun as my second game of Battle Companies. Crusade feels like a more complicated, yet watered-down version of Battle Companies with a lot of custom bits for factions (who have a codex) and small rules that I kept forgetting. I think I’ll do a more in-depth look at the two and then a comparison in a future article, but my TLDR is that Crusade feels like it’s trying to maintain balance (and yet uses Power Levels for some unknown reason) whereas Battle Companies is all about narrative, and I don’t care about balance when playing a narrative campaign. Anyway, here are some snaps of my Osgiliath boys being eaten by spiders and wargs.
Other
Nevi: I don’t really have an other this month. Except to say that I’m eying up a lot of the Marvel Crisis Protocol stuff and trying to decide what team I want to build. After a look at the prices, I will never own every model. Instead, I think I’ll put together one hero and one villain’s team built with the core set as a starting point and be happy with that. Although that is probably somewhat in the future as I have a large backlog of Middle Earth and Warhammer 40,000 stuff to get through first.
George: I got to play an in-person game of X Wing the Miniatures Game. I’d forgotten just how clumsy my stupid meat hands can be after a year of nothing but the beautiful precision of playing on Tabletop Simulator. To celebrate returning to the tabletop I painted up an ETA-2 Actis to match Anakin’s yellow livery from the Battle of Coruscant.
Thanks for reading. If you missed it, check out last month’s hobby round-up for more miniature painting goodness. Alternatively, check out some video games with Nevi’s review of Yoku’s Island Express.
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