Gaming Day - Review and Gallery

Our Gaming Day on April 14th has been a full success. We expected about 25 people to attend, but our expectations have been surpassed: Over 30 wargamers and board game geeks gathered in Pleiskirchen to play, chat, eat and drink. We even had ourselves a small vending table with lots of Infinity material and other games (I got myself a Blood Bowl Team Manager!). I spent the whole morning playing a great game of Descent and got an introduction game to Infinity in the afternoon. Apart from that, there was a 40k table, a Warhammer Fantasy table, one big and several smaller Flames of War tables, three Infinity tables and some others for aerial and naval combat as well as for historical battles.

My personal conclusions for the Day:

• I can hardly wait for the 2nd edition of Descent to be published, then bought and painted by me.
• I need to play more and worry les about big armies (smaller or simply squad sized games like Infinity or Mortheim somehow suit me better).
• You cannot have such a thing as enough scenery in a game of Infinity.
• Dystopian Wars has got some badass miniatures! (Iron Sky anyone?)
• As has Aeronautica Imperialis - my Eldar Skyhost is heading in my direction via Royal Mail right now. 
• Blood Bowl Team Manager is tons of fun.
• We need to repeat this Gaming Day soon. Maybe even this year.

Here are the impressions of our Gaming Day (more and utterly blurry photos in my Dropbox gallery):

Panorama view of our Gaming Day (via a mediocre panorama app)

How to paint Skaven - efficiently!

I am back from our Gaming Day (much fun, big success - expect photos soon) and back from my trip to Ingolstadt. On the menu today: Painting Skaven without going nuts.

I've painted quite a number of Skaven and still consider myself sane. You may now ask: How did I do that? The answer lies in spray painting the model with brown instead of black or white and to paint a lot of models at once. Also, you might consider ordering some seasons of your favorite TV show from Amazon (I always recommend The Big Bang Theory) before you start - because it's still not magic and will take a while ;-)

Spray painting your Skaven brown will reduce the paint time dramatically

Alas, I can only provide you with a written guide. But I plan to do a step by step guide in the future (since you can never have enough rats on the table), so you can see how easily this can be done:

1. Build your Skaven
2. Use sand and glue or textured paint, e.g. those from the Vallejo range to cover the base
3. Spray Paint your Skaven with brown paint. I suggest Army Painter's Leather Brown
4. Paint everything on the model with its base colour (e.g. metal parts with Chainmail, cloth with Scab Red, skin with Elf Flesh etc.)
5. Wash the whole model (e.g. skin with Ogryn Flesh wash, red and brown parts and the base with Devlan Mud wash, everything else with Badab Black wash)
6. Let the miniature dry and drybrush every part from the model with a brighter colour than you used in step 4 (e.g. red parts with Blood Red, metal parts with Mithril Silver etc.)
7. Finish the details on each miniature
8. Decorate the base if you want to

The reason this way is great is because brown is a perfect basic colour for almost every other colour, especially for red, skin tones, and brown obviously. So you'll need much fewer layers of paint until the miniature is done. I hope this helps. Do you know other ways to stay sane while painting hundreds of Skaven?

Saturday is Gaming Day

I am really looking forward to the Gaming Day in Pleiskirchen tomorrow. Our Local Gaming Club Die Grüne Horde (The Green Horde) is going to host this event, which isn't going to be any form of tournament. Instead, we want to host a broad selection of games where people can look into those games they don't play themselves and explain those they play to others. Right now, there is going to be Warhammer 40.000, Warhammer Fantasy, Flames of War, Infinity, Aeronautica Imperialis, Descent, Warhammer Invasion, Chaos in the Old World, Dystopian Wars, my friend and his father's custom historical board game and several others I certainly forgot.

Knowing myself, I am going to take a lot of photos which you all get to see next week.


PS: After the event, I'm directly going to Ingolstadt to visit my girlfriends relatives. So, most likely there aren't going to be new articles until Tuesday.

Children of the Horned Rat

Quuuiiiieeeeeek! Hide your children! The Skaven are invading our lands! Well, okay, miniature Skaven at least. But nonetheless evil and spiky (yes, ouch) little creatures that I learned to love since my friends gave me a box of Clan Rats as a birthday present in 2010. I bought an Island of Blood box not long after this. Today, I'm going to show you the first decent pictures I was able to make of this army. Expect a quick painting tutorial in the near future.

Weapon Teams are the reason I am collecting Skaven. Mischievous rats yielding heavy weaponry with the Warhammer Fantasy equivalent of uranium ammunition? Lovely! But I'm still waiting for Games Workshop or Warhammer Forge to release a proper model for the Ratling Gun (I'm rather unimpressed by the current version).

The Skaven Master Moulder and the Warlock Engineer are nice miniatures. I love to paint warpstone and warpstonish cables - so, yeah, I loved painting those two a lot.

Rat Ogres are great miniatures! I love their look and the possibilities to convert them are endless (trust me, as a chaos player I know what I'm talking about).