Episode 6 Return of the Fly Guy

In my spare time, when I'm not doing the things that I really enjoy doing, I mold young minds. No, I don't use clay. I'm talking actual minds. As crazy as it seems, I am a teacher and one of the stories that my students read is a series about a fly name Fly Guy. 

All the ladies love me

4 Corners of 30k - Week 10

Week 10 - Balance

What is the biggest complaint that you hear about most tabletop games?

You hear the words: "OP", "broken", "unbalanced" and more.

Games Workshop is one of the biggest culprits of being unbalanced; mainly do to it's release schedule for army updates.

I dare say that the Horus Heresy line offers something big to Warhammer 40k fans: balance.

Off Duty Gamer: Skull Island X, the stories so far

Yesterday marked the release of the 7^th story coming out of Privateer Press’ Skull Island eXpeditions digital

imprint. As a huge fan of the Iron Kingdoms fiction I’ve been buying every story as soon as I can but I know others who aren’t sure which ones are worth picking up, so today I’m going to go over each novella and novel in some detail so as to help our readers decide where to dive in. I’ve decided to do this in reverse order of release, since the older the novella is the more likely you’ve already read it anyway.

Twyg's Thursday Thoughts - Digital gaming and your hobby

Thanks wikipedia for this icon of video gamin'

As consummate gamers and hobbyists there's a lot of distractions out there for us to indulge in. I've noticed within the table top gaming community it seems as though the hobby can be all consuming for some, with painting, playing, and theory crafting (list building) taking a large chunk of the remaining time. As someone with limited time and only one foot in the hobby I find myself playing a lot of single player games that may or may not bump into the multiplayer realm. But is that a detractor to hobby for me (or anyone else) I don't believe so, in fact quite the opposite.

Lemme share with you what I'm playing and why I feel it helps my tabletop and war gaming skills. 

On PC I'm playing a lot of War Thunder, an exceptional WW II flight sim game where everything from your starting bi-planes to the end war jet fighters make an appearance. There's an excellent leveling up experience model, well done micro transactions and a lot of good old fashioned dog fights. So why would this help my table top game? In my opinion: it gets me thinking outside the box. Here I am in a three dimensional fight with many different planes (models) with different strengths and weaknesses. Sound familiar? 

All too often I'd leave the crons' doomsday ark in the corner sniping away with a 72" range gun, but now, what if I've got it lined up with terrain where someone will assume its line of sight isn't a threat? Suddenly a trap appears. What about that p39? It can't climb well, but woe to the person on the other end of its dive... Then there's the BF109, the exact opposite with exceptional climbing characteristics. Now, what happens of you turn around and do something unexpected? Use the P 39 to climb and just lurk high up... Never dropping. Will I get many kills? No, but have I made the opponents wonder what the hell, just to swoop down in the last few minutes and clean up. So now apply that to the doomsday ark. Let my opponent wonder why it's collecting dust, just to have them blunder into a kill zone... Nice! Think outside the box, make the opponent guess and more importantly worry...

Talisman prologue on the PC as well. We're all fairly familiar with talisman, and if you're not, you should get acquainted... If. You know it, then check and yourself what it'd be like to have objectives with just one player and class. By going through what's normally a full board game but focusing on one objective you learn a lot about how to figure out one of your favorite characters. For example, the Warrior can roll two six sided die in combat and take the highest one. But what happens when you land on a spot with three bad guys all rolling a d6 themselves? How do you manage him? Fully random, or are there things you can do?

Pulling it into tabletop you find your mind ready to be flexible and able to cope with specific situations, it's muscle memory now. You'll have a given character on the field who has a specific "trick", is now the time to use it, or later? Flexing those muscles will certainly help keep you thinking of the options available to you outside of just the random rolls.

Then there's a ton of iOS games, Magic The Gathering, Plague Inc, Star Command, Warhammer Quest, even Puzzle Quest...

So what games do you have that are flexing your brain muscles on your computer or device? How do they stretch your thought process with them? Hopefully it'll give you some new insight on your games and your tabletop... Good luck!

Twyg out

Episode 5 The Paintbrush Strikes Back

A long time ago, in an LGS far, far away a gamer was rolling dice and moving tiny metal elves around a table. It was a joyous time. The the dark forces that been changed the rules for the elves and the gamer some eff this crap, put the models in their foam, and placed them on a shelf in the basement. As tragic and rage filled as this ending was, it proved to be the beginning of something else. Later, as I walked around the store wondering what to do I saw . . .

Sick 'em boys

Skaven WIP update: Plague Monks!!

Working on the skittering horde, I promise paint will be flowing next week on these guys. The last unit of plague monks are being assembled!

4 Corners of 30k - Week 9

Week 9 - Melting Point

Well, there has been a lot of building and priming going on at the Swonkob Bo stronghold but waiting for product from the UK; is like watching paint dry. For an impatient buyer like myself, it makes getting things from Forge World a lackluster experience. Three and a half weeks of waiting and the Royal Mail finally showed up at my house. Ok, it was lackluster for 3.5 weeks but I was pretty excited when I saw the box in the driveway!

Initial thought when I saw the box: "AWESOME!"

Second thought: "CRAP!"

Are those my models?

You see, it broke 100 degrees on my car's thermometer that day; all I could imagine was the box in the middle of the oven of asphalt and a puddle of resin at the bottom of the box!

After a DEEP breath, I examined the contents of the box and, not only was everything below the melting point, it was all accounted for!

After looking over each item; the "wow" moment for me was the shear size of the Cerberus Tank Destroyer bag! It is HUGE!

Here it is next to an Ironclad box!

The instructions were elaborate and covered the ins and outs of the 35+ pieces of resin. I'm looking forward to putting it all together! But I promised myself that I won't build it until my painting table is clean; so clean it will be!

After drooling over the Cerberus Tank Destroyer, my attention quickly jumped to the Alpha Legion dread body. Oh yeah!

This is how it looked when I opened the box (less the arms):

I proceeded to remove the chaos iconography with a razor....well, except for those amazing hydras on the chest!

Within an hour of its arrival from the land of tea and crumpets, the dread looked like this:

It'll be easier to see once there's paint but the points on the edging came off clean and the chaos arrows are all gone!

Next week: Recon Marines and....wait for it...my Praetor!

Time to clean house!

Swonkob Bo - OUT!

[Images acquired from http://warhammer40k.wikia.com and http://forgeworld.com; images were used for reference purpose only, not for monetary gain]