N:AW Ash Wastes Game Mat

So something that you need for a Necromunda Ash Wastes (N:AW) game is in fact "ash wastes", that is a playing surface.  Your usual green felt or shattered future city is not really applicable.  N:AW has effectively two game scales, one which is the usual Necromunda scale skirmish, which you play on a 3x3 foot or 4x4 foot board, and "rolling roads" where there is some sort of vehicular chase/heist/etc. which needs a 6x4 foot or two boards that you switch to represent the road passing by. The boxed set came with a rather nice 3x3 foot printed paper mat, which has a day and night side, but it is glossy and already showing a bit of wear at the folds.  So the idea came to make a new game mat to represent this surface, and more to make it from a new technique. [who would be smart enough to use a tried and true technique?]

Googling around for various ash wastes mats, I somehow came across this video from Black Magic Craft.  He has a few more videos that use this same technique to make roads and rivers, which might have been where I found it the first time. 

I really liked how it seemed heavy and dense compared to caulked canvas, and the idea of using rollers and other things to mark the caulk seemed like a good one.  So after some research, I found a similar runner from Lowes (the same product as the video is not sold at Home Depot in the US), bought some caulk, and got to work.  

So to learn how to make one, continue after the jump. 

Necromunda: Ash Wastes (N:AW)

(Picture from Warhammer Community)

For Christmas this year (which since it is August, I note was now a long time ago), the kid got Necromunda: Ash Wastes (N:AW).  Released in 2022, this was officially an expansion to the main Necromunda game, adding vehicles, Ash waste campaign play, and several new gangs, including the Ash Waste Nomads, present in the box.  However, the hard back book in the box was in fact a complete Necromunda rule book, only missing the dominion campaign and specific underhive locations. In addition to the rules, the box came with two complete gangs, two vehicles, and four giant flea riders.  And a jolly lot of lovely terrain.  (as well as dice, templates, and cards)

This box triggered some what of an arms race in the house, as I bought first a Escher gang (new on sprue from a extremely cheap Ebay lot), then various books were bought, then various conversion projects were undertaken to get us to complete starting gangs of 1400 credits (to allow for vehicles), and after painting and a lot of rule reading, and production of a game mat, games have been played.  More to come on this, but it is pretty exciting.  

N:AW Teaser

 

For Christmas the kid got a box of Necromunda Ash Wastes, and this weekend with the house to ourselves we finally got a couple of games in with completed gangs and terrain!  Fun stuff, even if the first game did take nearly four hours as we looked stuff up!   Second was much faster, same 1400 cred battles but half the time. 

More to follow. 

Fleshy Tests

 Hello blog reader(s), it has been a while since the last post.  The kids have been busy with water polo, which means I have been busy driving, and with a couple of home projects and the season of birthdays I have had very little time for hobby (or gaming, I missed a lovely Quar game).

I have been working on a project which is inching closer to completion. 

The figures in question have a lot of bare skin, so I thought I would simplify things by using some newfangled Contrast paint.  Since I have not used this paint before, I thought a test would be in order, and this level of work was something I did have time for.

Gulliman Flesh test #1

I had a ton of old Chaos Marauder arms, so I selected a few that were similar, sprayed them white, and then undercoated them with the following colors: Flat white spray, pink as a highlight, all pink, ivory, Bugmans glow (a ruddy skin tone), and splatter paint with Bugmans. 

Here is the result:

Honestly, it was super fast to do the skin this way, but I did not get the look I was after for this project.  I may run another test (after all I have plenty of spare Marauder arms!), or I may just go back to traditional painting. 

What do you think?  Have you used Contrast, or another one coat paint for skin?

Beta Strike

This weekend past, I had the chance to play Alpha strike again with P, this time to celebrate the completion of his new hobby and gaming shed. 

It is hard to do justice to the space with just a few words, but it is pretty much every gamer's dream, storage, hobby space, art and books, and in the middle a nice sized table, ready for gaming. 

Lovely space, and very large! 

We were supposed to play a four person game, but sickness prevented the other two from coming, so we shifted around the game time to be more convenient, and essentially playtested the scenario.  In this game, the evil Clan mechs would come in from one corner of the board, attacking some sort of forward base held by mercenaries, and then later a couple lances of the real heroes from the Inner Sphere would come in to save the day.  The Objectives for the baddies were to destroy the parked leopard dropship and to get infantry into the bunker.

 

Start of the game, with two lances in reserve

This game was a reminder that while the Clan mechs are absurdly fast and well armed, they have effectively the same durability as the Inner Sphere mechs, so concentrating fire eventually can put them down.  Doing that while they blast away at your much weaker mechs is the real trick! 

Still one lance in reserve

As usual, I forgot to take many pictures once the game really got going, but the Clan mechs dumped off elementals at the edge of the complex and then supported them with pretty heavy fire.  The Inner Sphere eeked out a victory mostly due to time. 

Climactic action with the Elementals swarming in

Once again fun to get mechs out on the table, and P is always great to play against.  We had a good chat after about the 101 other games he has, now that they are all unpacked from storage and can be seen... so hopefully we will be back in the shed soon for more games! 

Holidaze 2025

Well hello again. 

Happy New year and Merry Christmas to you my dear reader(s)! 
Hopefully everyone is well, and you got what you wanted from Santa.
As for myself, my family was very generous, and I got a few gaming related items.

Nothing touched yet

The generic black box on the bottom is an Eldar Fire prism, which guarantees that GW will release a new one with the new codex.  I also got a new Kroot kill team, some bones figures, and the sprue is a Stargrave Crew II sprue that Santa put in my stocking. 

Over the holiday we did manage to play a single game of Splendor, a single game of Forbidden Jungle, and got in a good session of the kid D&D game with all the cousins, but little gaming or gaming related work has happened in the last few months.  Between work and driving to school or water polo I seem to have little time or energy.  I am nearly ready to reveal a fall project which should lead to more games, so watch this space. 

Also somewhat exciting is that the kid got the huge Necromunda Ash Wastes box and some additional stuff to go with it, so we have been talking Necromunda and campaigns quite a bit.  

Actual plans for this year look depressingly like plans for last year: Finish the Eldar army (complicated by a new codex and miniatures in March or so), paint something I got as a gift, and work on WWII Normandy. 

What about you, what are you planning on doing this year?

GeG Swap meet

The FLGs had the fall swap meet this Sunday, and despite shopping there for something like 24 years this was the first time I actually attended.

All of the very sizable game space was full of tables with people selling things, some new, some used, and a few vendors selling wares as well (mostly 3d printed stuff).  The very first table was a guy selling effectively a whole game store of stuff, mostly new in box, some partly built or painted, as well as six plus boxes of citadel paints which were new/used. 

Loads of people getting out of Horus Heresy, which is a shame.  Not much in the way of historicals, and far less Flames of War than you would expect as well. Lots of old board games, including a two pack of the original boxed CityTech and AeroTech for Battletech (unpunched, so $$$$).

So what did we get? Well... sort of a lot. 

The kid got:
Plastic chaplain, banner bit, five partial assault intercessors, and six partial blade guard, $20.  Same guy was selling a stack of Horus Heresy marines, as well as a nicely painted fleet for Victory at Sea (with the thick bases).

I got the OOP ruins new in box ($20), some opened contrast paints ($1 each), a brand new shade ($3), and a Harlequin star weaver with a hull that had been used for an airbrush test ($25).  The same seller had a few other terrain sets, and what seemed like a dozen Eldar Avatars new in box, but I passed on getting more. 

The real find though was the shoe box above.  Complete partly painted Imperial Knight for $30.  The kid is pretty excited about that one, even if it is partly painted and is the original model with fewer options.  The seller also had a large stack of never read Games Workshop publications, so we picked up an issue of the short lived "visions" magazine as well. 

So we got out comparatively cheaply, and it really makes you wonder what was available at the beginning of the sale, and what the deals were like as the sale was coming to an end and people were wanting to go home...

We were there an hour and a half, and the kid and I could have spent another hour there picking through bins of miniatures, but we had to hurry along before going to pick up kid #2 from water polo practice.  I am sure that we will plan to go again next year. 

Baby's first kickstarter

A few weeks ago now I got delivery of my very first Kickstarter reward.  I had pledged the minimum pledge of $10 for Bones 6, and after dithering a long time how to use that credit, I decided on getting a proper dragon.

I selected "Chaarondar the Cruel", the sturdy looking guy below. 

That's Chaarondar the Cruel, with two As

I eventually got a heavy box in the mail, which contained the following:

Since that does not look like much, here is a scale shot of the base. 

Hard plastic base, with an Eldar crew person on a 30mm base

So you can see that the dragon will be massive!  I did a quick assembly test, and everything seems to slot together nicely, although I would need five hands to hold it all for a picture to prove it.  I may need a bit of putty for the wing to body joints, but that is to be expected for a huge guy like this. 

Anyway, so far, I am pretty pleased with the whole thing.  Now it gets put away into a box for a while...

Alpha strike

This past weekend I was invited to P's house to play a game of Alpha strike.  Alpha strike is a quicker variant of Battletech, which instead of hexes has more of a traditional miniatures game feel.  Models have free movement in inches, and line of sight is closer to "real" from the model's point of view.  The basic game play is much like battletech where you determine a target number and then want to meet or exceed it to hit, and you are often fishing for criticals.  It also reduces the complexity of a battle 'mech from a full sheet of information down to a card, where a single mech has just a few stats.

Here is a Griffin (model GRF-1N) as a point of comparison.  The Alpha Strike card has five lines of information, and then a little critical hit chart.  Movement is a fixed 10 inches and is marked "j" to indicate that it can be jumping. Shooting is reduced to a Short/Medium/Long range output of 1/2/2. (and all range bands are the same for all mechs)

Simple

By comparison, the Battletech record sheet for that same unit has three modes of movement, and each of two weapons has heat/damage/Minimum/short/medium/long range stat.  (and most mechs have a lot more weapons than this Griffin)  Damage is not  limited to five little bubbles, but has a whole mech body to bubble in before you start getting to the good stuff on the inside. 

Detailed

In any case the main allure of Alpha Strike vs. Battletech is that in the same amount of time you can play games which are more than four times larger, more easily incorporate combined arms, and since they are not hex based, you can use more common terrain, so it looks a lot more "real" than Battletech can.  

In preparation for the game, I read the quick start rules, put together a small army from some existing figures, and gave some more details to some partly painted figures which were going to be a couple of mercenary lances.  I went mech only, and had this Marik Militia unit supported by two mixed lances of mercenaries. 

The real heroes of the day (mercenary scum not shown)

P has a LOT of battletech stuff from the kickstarters, so he had a more combined arms force, with power armored infantry, LRM carriers, tanks, and then a number of heavy mechs.  His were not painted, so we joked that they were the "Grey Death" (an in universe unit).  In the pictures that follow, his forces are predominantly on the left, and mine are on the right.  In the mission we selected, the attacker (me) had to scan each of the buildings to find six that were targets, and then escape with the information. 

Turn 1

Grey Death to the left, Marik to the right screened by the ridge, Mercenaries top right in the forest.  I ended up deploying the heavies on the bottom and top of the map, with mediums and lights in the middle, with the idea that they would zip in and scan the buildings. 

Turn 2

During the first turn, the forces engaged in long range speculative fire (mostly indirect), and the attackers were pressing in a bit.  Little fast mechs zoomed around the board and missed each other. Some damage was dealt, and the helicopter was shot down. 

Turn 3

By the start of the third turn, the Grey Death tanks and heavy units shuffled around to get more cover, the lighter units and infantry skirmished with the mercenaries, and the Marik heavies advanced to get into medium range for more damage. (potentially, you have to hit stuff for that to work)

Turn 4

At the start of turn 4, we tried some close combat... light mechs do more damage shooting than they do stomping on infantry (2 instead of 1, since close combat is based on size), and stomping on a tank seems to do a lot less than you would imagine.  None of the Grey Death heavies got killed, but a couple of them were pretty close, where as the Marik heavies had the damage spread out more evenly. 

We ended up playing through four complete turns, which took around an hour each.  Further play would be somewhat faster, as we did spend a lot of time looking things up.  The basic rules themselves were very easy to grasp, but there were some unusual interactions and a few areas that were not very clear.  The game would also have been a lot faster if we did not roll like crap for most of the game!  "Looks like I need to roll an 8 here, <rolls a 7>".  Mechs only go boom IF you hit them...

P was an excellent host, and after we finished the game we discussed playing again... maybe a game with Stew, if he can get away from the family for an afternoon.  I do after all have two companies of painted mechs, and a lot of random figures that could become mercenaries... 

Quick 40k Game #2

 Last month I played 10th edition 40k for the first time. 

The kid and I returned to battle this weekend with effectively the same forces, and tried to incorporate more of the various layers of special rules. 

The Kid had a Space Marine Vanguard force (light scouty sorts) and I had an Eldar force.  This time I remembered to take a picture of the mission cards, so I can report to you that we had a Sweeping Engagement set up, a primary mission of Take and Hold, and a mission rule of Supply Lines.  That means that we deployed diagonally, with five somewhat offset objectives, and the supply lines mission rule meant that we generated an extra CP if we held onto our home objective. 

This time I actually remembered most of my special abilities, but I still spent a lot of time shuffling through printouts comparing various rules.

Initial set up

In this initial setup picture you can see that the Eldar are on the bottom, mostly centered on the left.  I remembered to set up the guardians on the objective.  Swooping hawks are off board ready to... swoop.  Rangers infiltrated into the forest on the top left.  The large group of marines near the center was shrouded by the librarian, so I could not shoot them.

Wraith blades vs. scout dreadnaught

The dread is a real beast, since it has three heavy weapons, two heavy stubbers, a rocket pod, power fist, and as a vehicle can tank shock... it killed off the wraith blades before finally getting killed by the wraith guard. 

Reivers and a lieutenant drop in to assassinate the Farseer

The Reivers popped in to assassinate my Farseer (the warlock had just been sniped), which they did very successfully.  Then they kill d a few guardians, who then turned left and blasted them off the board.  The lieutenant unfortunately lived.  I feel less bad about my unpainted farseer base when the reiver in the back left has no head... 

Final positioning

Two wraith guard left alive, five guardians, and four swooping hawks left at the start of turn four.  Swooping hawks now toss a TON of dice, so they managed to blast the lieutenant away before getting killed.  Somehow I ended up with seven figures left on the board, but a major win on points?  40k is weird. 

Playing games with painted miniatures is fun, the 40k universe is fun, but I am not convinced that 10th edition is fun, since there is a lot of "game-y" interaction between piles of special rules that hurt my head.  Never-the-less, we are going to play some more soon(-ish, now that school has started up again).