The Burrows of Warren Percy - part 1

 Hi y’all

This week’s offerings are a bunch of buildings that I made over the spring/summer of this year for the “Warren Percy Affair” - a two player campaign for Burrows & Badgers, by Michael Lovejoy. This awesome skirmish game pits two warbands of anthropomorphic animals against each other in a series of connected scenarios from a training session to a full on barroom brawl…

There is a lovely mdf terrain set by Sarissa Precision, specifically designed for the campaign and it’s really cool and looks beautiful and you can see them here as I'm happy to support the Lovejoys by providing links to their website. However, that support stated, I felt like I could make my own versions for a lot less money and still do them justice. So I split the buildings into two different types - the traditional medieval type building and the more uniquely “burrow” like dwellings that give the game such a distinct feel. 

The first batch of buildings that I made were the burrows. I didn’t make a “how to” video for these like I used to do back when I was blogging regularly but I did get a few progress snaps.

This is how all my projects start - a bloody mess!

a combination of blue XPS and coffee stirrers

a wet wipe provides a bit more strength than toilet tissue for the canvas covering

he bottom building has a platform for bird characters to land on

a heavy mix of PVA and water to seal the foam and protect it from the aerosol
of the priming spray

then some zenithal sprays

Brother Mortimer's Den - a cleric and chief brewer

Prickly Jane's Cottage - the hedgehog hedge-witch

Rumbolt's Place

Salvor's Burrow

The Altar

The Undergrass

With the rounded doors and rustic architecture, these citizens of Northymbria are denizens of the more rural parts of the mythical county - wooden plank roofs and single story buildings as well as the "Rabbit Hole" type building - the Undergrass,  that reminds me of Bugs Bunny cartoons. I had a lot of fun building these characterful houses and think they represent the “official” buildings well, use the link that i provided at the beginning of the post to find out.

That’s it for this week, I’ll show the more traditional style buildings in the next post

Hope you enjoy 

dGG

Tabletop Scotland 2024

hi y'all,

What is this? 2 posts in 2 days? Well this is just a quick bonus post, haha I said I would add a few of these now and again...

Last weekend I flew up to Edinburgh for Tabletop Scotland 2024, the biggest gaming convention north of the border and rapidly becoming the biggest outside of Expo. I haven't been to TTS since before Covid, when the convention was held in Perth. That convention was my first and was brilliant fun with me showcasing my own board game design - Blood, Sweat and Horses! A chariot racing game you can find out about here. The whole weekend was filled with gaming, broken only by an unfortunate trip to A&E after I fell and bust my ankle, made worse by me having to drive 11 hours to get back to the southeast coast of England at the end of the con.

Fast forward to last weekend, TTS has outgrown its previous home and was being held for the first time at the Highland Centre, conveniently located within walking distance of the airport. So, I thought why not? I really wanted to go back but could not resist flying - £39 return ticket, 5 hours of travelling instead of 11 and delivered right to the door, what could go wrong... oops!

Getting up at 02:00hrs on the friday morning wasn't too bad I suppose, except it was a peasouper foggy kind of morning - bugger! No worries, we slowed it down and got to the airport 45 mins later than planned, but we were safe. Onto the plane - no problem, held on the tarmac for 30 mins longer than planned - no problem. Arrived in Edinburgh only 30 mins behind schedule, not too bad and we're all safe and sound... or are we? where is J? they haven't got off the plane - 20 mins later and they are wheelchaired of the plane and we are on our way to A&E - two trips to Scotland, two trips to A&E! thankfully the Scottish NHS is more than up to task and our group member was triaged, assessed and treated within 3 hours - a time that shames almost every hospital I've ever been to south of the border and i'm a paramedic so i've seen quite a few! However, drama over we still managed to get to TTS, missing only the first hour which would have been held up by the queue to get in - which was impressive and just shows how big the con has grown in the last few years!!

home from home...

The convention was amazing fun and I was too busy to get a load of different pictures but there was a massive area for retailers, game demonstrators, free space, game library and bring and buy.  I spent so much money that missus Gobbo will be wearing a frown for some time. I also played so many games from wargames like Fallout and Bolt Action, to RPGs (a brilliant Wild West RPG which is going through Kickstarter atm), to board games such as Zen Monkeys, Rising Sun, Hues and Cues, and may others. But by far was my favourite - Worms the board game by Mantic games! based on the video games from back in the day, Worms is a faithful recreation of the old classic and the nostalgia hit alone was worth the box price, let alone the excellent game play that had me laughing throughout the whole game and recreating the sound effects from the vid game.

our amazing accommodation

playing Worms in the airport following the delay 

my set of painted worms

i loved painting these guys and completed the whole lot in just two days. I could go on and on about the convention but as this is just a bonus post, I'm gonna leave it there and just thank the awesome David Wright and his excellent team for hosting a brilliant convention.

hope you enjoy

dGG

So what games are we playing now?

 hi y'all

So, the last post showed you what I'm playing on, but what games am I actually playing? Four and half years ago it was mainly Blood Bowl, some ATZ and Bushido. 

I'm still playing Blood Bowl and have been trying to get to some local tournaments over the last couple of years as the league play is hindered by lack of interest at my local club and my shifts. I have been adding various teams to my collection in addition to the Humans, Skaven, dark elves, pro-elves and halflings. Slann, Goblins, Amazons, Wood Elves, High Elves, Lizardmen, Norse, Chaos Dwarfs and Vampires have all been built and painted and will be shown off over the coming months but as a taster here is one of my favourite team sculpts - Chorfs!! the team will need tweaking now the official GW minis have been launched, due to the new positionals. The minis I got from Comminex and I can't tell you the designer (although I think they are a very old Greebo sculpt).

I still haven't found nicer sculpts than these for BB and although Chaos Dwarfs don't play to my style, being more Bash than Dash, I still had to have them.

Another game that I've been playing a lot of is Burrows and Badgers, the game of anthropomorphic animals by Michael Lovejoy. It's a fantastic skirmish battle game, with delightful miniatures and although the warbands have a low model count, I have gone a bit nuts and bought loads of them! I can't help it, the miniatures are amazing and the game is a lot of fun, with a relatively simple ruleset. 

Lady D'Eath - fox assassin

Madame Tilly - cat crackshot

Dandy Fox Highwayman

Fox bandit

Fox Mage

It has also inspired me to build loads of new terrain. All built from scratch, with a few printed scatter pieces that finish the look off nicely. I'll go into more of the buildings and how I did them in later posts as there are quite a few more and some interesting pieces as well.

As this post is getting fairly long already, I'll kind of skim over the other systems/games with just a couple of pics and a bit of blurb, just to whet your appetite and know that I'll be doing more in depth posts at a later date.

 I've also just started playing Star Wars Legion, which is a game with a larger model count than I normally go for, but it's Star Wars innit so I've just got to play. 

Count Dooku

and his Magna Guard

I've also finally got to play a decent Cowboys/Wild West game - Dead Man's Hand. A brilliantly simple skirmish game, which again has led me start building some nice old West buildings

There also have been a smattering of other games like Bolt Action and the like but they are few and far between. As for my beloved Bushido, all games have dried up due to a complete lack of interest from anyone else in the club and Damon having drifted off, so my huge collection sits on shelves gathering dust until I can coerce someone into a demo game and spark their interest.

As for ATZ that is definitely coming as I'm currently writing up a batrep....

hope you enjoy 

dGG