Copplestone 10mm Dwarfs

Copplestone has some new 10mm Fantasy, which is certainly surprising, as there have not been any releases for 10mm for some time.  Three new packs at £5.75 a pack, which works out to about $9.70 with today's exchange rate.

Two handed axes

Spears are pretty unique

I like that some swords are mixed in

The information for these figures says they are 9mm, which looking at comparison pictures of the Copplestone 11mm humans probably means to the eyes.  At that size they are going to be larger than the plastic Bo5A figures (~7.5mm to the eyes), but in line with the sizes of Eureka 10mm dwarfs, and the metal dwarf archers from the very short lived Bo5A blister line. (Occasionally on ebay for ~$30 a blister)

Regardless of their size, they are lovely, I think I will have to get some. Pity there are no archers though...

Birthday 2014

This weekend we celebrated my birthday, and I got some loot that you may find interesting.

First is the TIE Defender for the X-wing Miniatures game.  The Defender was always my favorite in the old TIE fighter computer game, and it should be pretty powerful in the table top game too.

Second is Justice League: Axis of Villains, which is a strategy game about defending the Justice League tower from an onslaught of villains. 

Third is the King's Quest collection, which collects together the King's Quest games 1-7.  I have heard that there are some problems with playing these games on newer computers, but I loved them as a kid, so I will jump through some hoops in order to play them.

Finally, we have The Landmark edition of the Campaigns of Alexander by Arrian, which I am very excited to read... sometime.  However, there should be plenty of gaming ideas in that book, which I look forward to. 

Scratch Built Dropship

Sadly, not mine, but one I saw on Iron Mitten.

I really love the idea of taking "junk" and making something practical out of it, and since I have one of these same bottles at home, I was staring at it for a while in the shower this morning, thinking about how to make it into something useful for Inq28 or other WH40k/Generic Scifi sort of games.

Unfortunately I always start to get carried away, and I was thinking about blue foam shapes for the nose and tail, a chimera turret, vector engines, windows using disposable contact packets, and adding a layered styrene skin to have panels and exposed wiring... at a certain point I need to stop thinking and just make something.

(also see this post from the Marienburg Gazette)

6/28/14

A few days late for this, but 100 years ago Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were shot to death in Sarajevo by Princip, a member of the Black Hand. This was of course the immediate cause of the Great War, which started a month later on 7/28/1914.  While that war may seem remote to some, it is obviously hugely important to making the contemporary world, with global effects rippling out from a few pistol shots in a far away city.

As it happened I visited the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna a couple of years ago, where they have a whole room full of artifacts from the shooting, including the car, Archduke Franz's coat, and the pistols of the Black Hand agents captured following the attack.