New year New project

This year, the project is Alaitoc Eldar, aka classic banana heads.

My kid is busy working away at the Vanguard Space Marines that Santa brought for Christmas, and given that we have the 8th edition Index set, and the 9th edition rules, games of 40k are in the offing!  I could finish up some Imperial Guard, or paint a bunch of Tau, or paint old Space Marines, but I thought it would be more fun for us to work on something new together (never mind that I have 1/10th of the free time).  So Eldar. 

I have been collecting these figures with the idea to making an Eldar force for... 15 years?  Probably more. A quick perusal of Index Xenos 1, and a small list is drawn up. 

Seen above we have a Dire Avengers squad (10 figures), five Fire Dragons (including an Exarch that I got "new" out of a blister just for this project), a Warlock for a command figure, Guardian heavy weapon (either star cannon or bright lance options), five swooping hawks, and then ten metal guardians to start things off on the right foot. Off camera are five rangers enjoying a bath in simple green, and five metal Wraith guard. 41 figures in all, which is about what I usually paint in a good year...  

I uh... have a lot more.  A LOT more, but this seems like a good place to start, and it is roughly the number of power points that the kid has. 

More to come, as my wife was away for a day and I had time after the kids were abed to assemble the Guardians and the Dire Avengers! 

Ugh, Spam

I was going to have a more substantial post today, but dealing with a ton of new spam comments drained my blogging energy for now.

I, er my kid, did get a fun item in the mail yesterday:

That is the Warhammer 40k 9th edition rulebook from the Indomitus boxed set and the pamphlet of background/units from the box as well. With the second print round of the boxed set, eBay is flooded with these, which makes them actually affordable.  With the index books I got after Christmas, we should be good to go for quick 40k games.  More on that to come. 

Warhammer 40,000: Indices

 My wife decided that we should buy ourselves something we wanted, but did not get for Christmas (I wonder what prompted that policy...).

I had been looking for the 8th Edition Index Xenos 1, with the idea that I could build up an Eldar army from the various collections of parts, old figures, and whatnot that I have stashed away, and then play games with my kid's Space Marines.  (he routinely now tells me how he is going to beat me using this unit or that unit, so it might be nice if I could actually win a few times too!)  

For those of you not up on 40k rules, when Games Workshop switched from 7th to 8th edition back in 2017, they reset all the codex army books, and released these index books to cover all possible units instead.  Each one covers several armies, and provides a datasheet for each unit/character etc. These were great, but poorly balanced (staff churned all of these out in a short timespan) and almost immediately obsoleted by releasing individual codex army books again... in 9th edition that cycle of codex creep continues.

I looked on ebay, and managed to locate someone selling ALL of the index books as a lot, and further the guy took my (very) low price offer and even better he was local and I did not have to pay shipping... pretty sweet deal, and worth a trip to a random starbucks to pick up. 

All five index books, and then he threw in the Chapter Approved 2019 as well

Quite the haul of obsolete gaming material, and the books are in good shape too.  Now we just need a rulebook newer than the 3rd edition one I got 20+ years ago now...

Warhammer Underworlds: Beastgrave

 So my wonderful sister often buys hobby items for me for Christmas or my birthday, and I then usually gratefully put the desired item into a box and never get around to painting it.

This year however, my sister gave me something in concert with the kid, which is to say Warhammer Underworlds: Beastgrave (which in our house at least is pronounced "BEASTGRAVE!!!" in a gravely announcer voice).  For the uninitiated, Beastgrave is "season three" of Games Workshop's Warhammer Underworld game, where players build warbands and card decks, and then fight it out on a board for glory points.  6-8 Warbands are released every season, and older cards are eventually cycled out of "standard".  So far so standard.  

However, with Beastgrave being a GW game, it comes with some amazing pushfit miniatures, and shockingly they are not that expensive, with a whole warband and deck of cards coming in about the same as a single plastic character. 

Beastgrave, full of heavyweight cardstock

These are pushfit

Anyway, the kid convinced me that we needed to paint the figures and play a game before he went back to school, and we shockingly managed to make that happen, building, priming, and painting nine figures in less than 10 days! 

I was assigned the beast-men known as Gashrak's Ravangers

Gashrak's Ravangers painted by me (my photography was particularly poor)

Draknar the Gor

Murghoth Half-horn

Koresh "the sneak"

The kid painted the beast-elves. (Skaeth's Wild Hunt)

Skaeth's Wild Hunt (photography even worse, so attempted to correct a bit in Google)

Conveniently, we got the kid a set of Games Workshop paints for Christmas, which meant we had about 1/4 of the required paints to hand.  We cued up the painting videos from Games Workshop, and aside from having to mix 3/4 of the paints or use substitutes, it all went rather smoothly.  Painting following a guide was surprisingly enjoyable, and I have been eyeing a couple of the other warbands in consequence.  If the game is as fun as promised, more warbands may be making their way to our house soon. 

Happy Christmas/New Year

So, you may have noticed that 2020 was a wee bit different than previous years, and I for one, am glad to see the back of it.

In any case, I hope you had an enjoyable Holiday season.  I was working for most of it, but I did get the specific holidays off, which this year at least added up to a couple of long weekends. 

I made out pretty well in terms of gifts this year too:

Not pictured are a few more Reaper figures (including the paint your own Krampus kit), and a couple of other things that will get their own posts later.

My oldest got a large box of Space Marines from Santa, so he was pretty excited about that, and got most of them assembled already. 

As for 2021, all signs look as if at least the first half of the year will be the same as 2020, which is to say, no face to face time, busy at work, and very little gaming.