Full Circle...

 hi all,

As the title suggests, this blog and myself have come full circle. For a long, long time I've resisted the allure of mass battle wargames, considering myself more of a skirmish type player. The advantages are the low model count which often mean a cheaper buy in, with a lot of the games publishing the rules to the games online - for free! something GW did with the earlier AoS stuff but have since gone back to their corporate ways of charging through the a**e for everything. I mean why have one rulebook when you can have three and army books and compendiums and FAQs.

But....

My very first draw into this hobby was Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd ed. This blog was started due to me being drawn back into Warhammer (8th I think? what was Island of Blood?). Last week, I was at the Thanet Wargaming Club (TWC)  minding my own business, playing a game of Malifaux, which I was totally intending to blog about. When the table next to mine started laying out a game of The Old World! I could have resisted, until one of the players began deploying High Elves...

They were magnificent, the ranks of spearmen, the deadly archers, eagle claw bolt throwers. I was smitten, I imagined charging my own high elves into the filthy beastmen, cleansing the board of their chaos taint and preserving the sanctity of Ulthuan. HOOK. LINE. SINKER.

So it was fitting that I dust off my Silver Host, prime the remaining figures, and start painting. Thankfully there are less than 20 miniatures left and it shouldn't be long before I get the whole lot on the table. Except, the paint I used for the colour scheme have dried up... Now I've got to wait for replacements to finish them, but at least I can get the bulk of the colours completed in the mean time.

No pictures for today then, but I will link the first few blog posts below so you can see some of the minis that will make up the army. Now I need to download the rules and army books to read up on the mighty elves.

early posts

hope you enjoy

dGG

Carnevale - the full board

hi all, my apologies for the gap in the blogging and the whole skimming over xmas etc. Unfortunately winter pressures in the NHS is no small thing and the sheer amount of norovirus and flu has meant i've been super busy in the real world. Worse one of my last patients before xmas decided to give me an early present - norovirus! The subsequent fays afterward are best not discussed...

Sooooooo, anyway. I prepared this post before xmas and never published it, so here it is. I will post up soon about some of the goodies that have since made their way into da Grotto.

As promised here are the rest of the buildings I made specifically for Carnevale, but I think will be pretty useful for anything else, like Malifaux or Mordheim.

The first building I made was fully interactive and included an interior that I scratch built. Shout out to my buddy Dan who 3D printed all the windows and doors for all of the buildings.

However, when I read the free online rules I realised that the characters don't go inside buildings during the game, as the citizens of Venice lock up at night very tightly indeed...

looking at these pictures though, i felt the board looked very flat. Oh I don't mean the buildings, but the tiles themselves were a wee bit 2 dimensional. So I set about creating some terraces for the buildings to sit on to give the tiles more of a 3D feel.

Most games don't encourage the use of as many buildings and blocking terrain, but Carnevale is a small skirmish game and encourages Parkour type movements. In fact the game rewards players who perform the most daring of move sequences including leaping from building to building and running along roof tops - hence the packed streets and waterways of Venice.

hope you enjoy

dGG