A Little Bit o' Painting - Blackstone Traitor Guard

been busy, but not a lot of hobby stuff though. here's what i've been working on.


BSF - Traitor Guard Done

After finishing off the (required; imperial/marines) BF Gothic fleets the main thing left of the table (until i shuffle something else up there) is Blackstone models.

The traitor guard finally got some solid brush-time and ended up 'organically good'.  lots of base colours, then lots of washes, then lots of dry brushing. seemed to go to plan.

batch painting eeeeerg,  but anyway, done.

they are more or less based on the official painting guide - at least the major tones/blocks. substituted whatever paint i had that was more of less the same hue.

Above is one squad worth. they're on 15mm bases as they are base type small (same as ur-ghuls, spindle-bots etc). the base manufacturer only does metric rounded to nearest 10mm (sometimes 5mm) far as i can tell. does the job.

And this is all of them.

The only really 'modelling' changes were removing the ground debris - rocks etc attached to boots  and the two sergeants are now slightly different from each other - one has the 'back spikes' and the other has a skull next to his boot.

reasonably pleased with the result - read: as much effort as i could be bothered with.

[later: just occurred to me to add a small 'trim' colour to differentiate the squads more easily (red v blue etc).]

this leaves me with just the beastmen and psykers from the hostiles to do!! kind of exciting, really getting through them now.

and of course the explorers/characters. the elf is still on the table (getting there... slowly). i think they're taking longer as they're one-of pieces so more brush washes and changes to get just one model done. will get there eventually. looking forward to a game soon (maybe today [maybe not]), and no excuse now all the 'basic' level hostiles are done.

as an aside, there is a small thread of local interest in the game. a couple of people i know (in passing) are playing and i wouldn't mind getting a multi-person game in if possible.


Other - BFG - eldar fleet...
Continuing work on the eldar BFG ships. Am painting up all the cruisers as a batch. not 100% convinced on the colours but that's a recurring theme. slow progress. lots of dry brushing (which is slow work).

[later: sample model]


Other - BFG  - NC roadtrip...
Might head up to newcastle for Feb session. Looks like there might be some BFG happening so might be worth the trip.


Re Epic Factions
This is going to sound like a half-whine (at least) but it's not meant to be. More a contemplation of something (vaguely) humorous i thought about....

So epic has a number of different factions. This is a good thing IMO as it makes the armies/factions/models more representative of what they're meant to be like in the fluff (fiction).
It's actually a nice thing to be able to run 'hordes' or 'air assault' or 'armoured' or 'skimmers' or 'titans' yada yada...

I've mentioned before that one of my biggest hurdles with the game is that 4 our of 5 times i'm not going to know what the opponent's army does (and i've also heard this comment from other people too) so you're faced with 'tricks' that your army has no counter for etc. You're fighting blind.

I've been playing a lot of chess recently and while the static nature of the pieces is (or at least used to strike me as) a little dull, it does mean that everyone knows what everyone else is capable of doing. Therefore it's intrinsically more of a strategic endeavour, rather than a 'bag-o-tricks' game (which i hate... ask 'Infinity').
It could always be argued that you need to learn what the opponent has... which is not practical/feasible given;
a) so few games per annum, 
b) number of list in a tournament, 
c) the theoretical nature of such a study,
d) etc

Anyway i was contemplating what chess would be like if you could sub-in 'trick' pieces - and it might looks something like...


during setup...
opponent: "i'm swapping my queen for a dark cardinal."
me: "errrr ok."
opponent: "and i'm swapping my king's knight with an enchanted unicorn."
me: "hmmmmm."
opponent: "and you're running... standard from the looks of it?"
me: "yeah."

during game play - first move...
opponent: "my dark cardinal takes your queen."
me: "what ?!  how ?!"
opponent: "dark cardinal can jump over any other pieces of lesser points value at any time."
me: "what?"
opponent: [scrambles briefly through army list pages]
me: "fine. then my king takes your dark cardinal."
opponent: "no, you can't take a dark cardinal by moving horizontally after it's just taken a piece horizontally. or diagonally if it's just taken diagonally. so you can only take it by moving diagonal now."
me: "what ?!"
opponent: "it's in the army list."
me: "fine. so nothing can take it where it is at the moment. how is this not checkmate ?"
[eyes start glazing over]

opponent: "the dark cardinal alternates..." [looks up army sheet, and taps on page] "...moving horizontally and diagonally to take pieces. so next time it can only take a piece by moving diagonally."

[annoyed pause]
"here, i'll put down a token so you can see which one it has just done."
me: [rolls eyes]

a little later...
opponent: "now my enchanted unicorn takes your rook. and also your other rook."
me: [eye roll]
"uhhuh... why?"
opponent: "a unicorn can make two consecutive moves, which gets him across the board here and here. and because it's also enchanted it removes any pieces from the square on the mirror side of the board if it's also occupied."
me: [flips board in disgust and vows never to play this stupid game again]


Until next time...