Saturday 27 August 2016

Gates of Antares - Ghar and Bromite reinforcements

I painted these guys up a while back but have only just got round to putting them on the blog!

So I got a unit of little attack scuttlers as well as a command crawler, these have been painted to match the rest of the Ghar that I've done, and by the time that you read this they will have been rolled out at partizan by the Leicester Phat Cats demo team.  


To give the bromites some loving I splashed some paint on the rock riders, I even went a bit fancy with the air brush on the mouths to repersent larva and the like. 


 I've still plently of bits left for GoA so I'll continue to plug away at these models, really nice to paint just need to play more games!

Saturday 20 August 2016

30K second faction - The Mechanicum

Well it was bound to happen!

After a flurry of painting purple for the might LOYALIST Emperors children, I started looking around for something else to splash paint on.


As the local gaming group are rapidly gaining forces for various marine factions it suddenly dawned on me that the mechanicum were not represented so that was an obvious choice, As well as a game that I played a couple of months ago against them I was sold!

So I've started off fairly small and going for the classic buy, paint, buy more and so far its working!

I took some pics so I can do a stage by stage mainly so I can remember if I decide to expain the army in a few months! 


started off with a black undercoat, 


dry brush steely oil and pick out the bronze with brassy brass, dark tone ink for the metals, 


hit the panels with russain green and highlight with some cream mixed in, then a soft was over that to bring it back down, 


do some red for the visors blend the highlighting from a dark red to a base red, hit it with gloss varnish and all ready for basing, 






I need to do some more work on the magnos to give it a pop factor but as it stands its perfect for table top





I added a second unit and a domitar for a bit of varation, 


So thats the start of the mechanicum, I'll be getting a game or two in during September so expect to see some more action pictures of theis lot!

Saturday 13 August 2016

First Look - Iron Cross by Great Escape Games

Quite a while back I picked up Iron Cross from Great Escape games, and in the usual Anton manner it simply sat on my rules shelf until quite recently.

weridly enough I had Kris from Coalville and Phil from the Cats both gain intrest in the game at about the same time. So after a few games under my belt I thought I'd give my thoughts on it.


well its about time I got a pic on me on this blog!


The devious British side 


Turn one, the german tanks hold in the tree line and the mighty infantry advance on the right flank



the view from the infanty, nothing too exciting really 



until a couple of turns later and I've shermans and bloody scout cars to deal with, however one slight over sight was I didn't arm my guys with infantry anti-tank weapons.... Opps... 


the armour gun line was taking a right pounding from the fireflys! 


and the lone stug was holding its ground lovely! 


the objective well secured by the British!

so the game ended two objectives to one for the British but it was a brutal game with burning wrecks either side!


Gameplay:

Each unit generates a command token that you put in a pool, you start the turn with rolling for who can activate first and you simply pick a unit and declare the action with the unit, the non active player gets a chance to react and nominates a unit and its reaction, spends a command point and rolls over a certain target number depending on how many pins the reacting unit has. If the reacting player is successful they then become the active player and the non active player can choose to react. This enables the game to swing quite wildly so you could go mental and try and react to the enemy or stay cool as a cucumber and save it for yourself!

The other thing that makes this a little differant from all the hundreds of systems out in the geek world is that units can activate multipule times but you have to roll over the amount of command tokens and pins that are on the unit, so you can go "rambo" with your tiger is your lucky enough!

Killing stuff can work in a couple of ways, you can either pin the unit until it exceeds it moral value and simple removed from play or in the form of armour if you get a penetrating hit then you have a chance to pop the tank rather than pin it to death!

Lastability:

well its WW2 so its a fair scope of theaters to choose from the rule book come with late war lists for Brits, Germans, Russians and US, already they have addational lists on the website so hopefully the other nations will get some loving! Already the mighty Italians are up on the website.

As long as you have people intrested in WW2 then they will continue to play this system with you,

Models:

Well this is the brucey bonus! you can use what ever you like choose a scale and go mental! You have a fair few people who make WW2 stuff in various scales so the choice is fantastic!

Overall system wise its a great game and doesn't take itself too seriously, the rule book is about 12 quid so nothing in the grand scheme of things could be better laid out with some of the sections but once you get you head into it you will only reffer to the stats of your force rather than the actual rules.

Well worth a try! and you can get it from Great Escape here... http://www.greatescapegames.co.uk/

Thursday 4 August 2016

SLA Shiver Section - Daruma

A long long time ago when I was alot younger (and thinner)

I played a number of roleplay games with a number of guys who I no longer see, which isn't a bad thing as some were complete tools looking back!

One of the games that I really enjoyed playing was a system called SLA. About a year ago I spotted a trade stand at a show that has some SLA T-shirts and various other bits and bobs on sale and got chatting to the guys on the stand, Rather than the usual kickstarter approach that people were taking they did a pre-order system and once they had enough to cover the cost of the production then you'd get the models, quite a differant approch and for those people who can wait then it was a good way of working.

I decided to keep an eye on these guys and see what they came up with and these appeared as a preorder.... 


at the time they did an offer for two patrols and a T-Shirt so as these were one of my favourite NPC's within the RPG I decided to go for it!

the models are really nice and the versatility is great, you get a number of options for either pistol and baton or rifleas well as seperate heads that you can use,

These have been sitting on my desk for a while and eventully I got round to splashing some paint on them.


So in the usual Anton fashion I've opted for Russian green


fire support 5 man section 


assault 5 man section.

I put the red shoulder pad for a splash of colour to break up the green and used a spade decal from an old GW imperal guard sprue.

I wasn't too sure what I was going to use these for but no doubt it'll be for OSC or This is not a test and then then if by pure chance Daruma have confirmed that they will be doing a ruleset for a skirmish game using the SLA IP, this goes kickstarter within the next couple of weeks so it would be rude not to have a mooch at it!

If your looking for more info on the SLA models and RPG books then check out the link below!

http://daruma.productions/#

Tuesday 2 August 2016

July Summary and the pledge,

In a blink of a flash July has come and gone!

Weirdly enough the summer has hit the UK and with the blazing sun combined with the summer holidays I've been enjoying lots of down time with the GC.

Painting wise I've done next to nothing really as shown in my pledge, but its been a good month regardless.

Painted - 10
Bought - 10

Difference Broke Even!

this is the first time in 6 years of doing the "pledge" that I've broken even and painted such a low model count in a month.

I've a feeling that August will be the same again as I'm off travelling for a couple of weeks and with the school holidays in effect I'll be quite busy during the day!

I also need to refocus and one of my various muse's Mr Smith has given me a challange where we pick a model and paint it up going all gucci on it, for the First month 1/144 aircraft was choosen and I've mine on the way!



I'm hoping this will break the lack of mojo and wake up the Anton painting machine!