Ready To March

With Woofboot VII just around the corner, this weekend's battles are likely to be the last outing for my Empire army.

So for their swan-song, I'm fielding everything I have. And since everything I have is posted on this blog, that should make my army list easy to anticipate.

(although I have just painted one additional model, not featured here, just for the occasion)

That £80 Figures In Comfort case was money well spent.

The army is now all boxed up and ready to go. The best medium of transporting them in my rucksack appears to be the kitchen tupperware. Most of the foot regiments are going to smell like leftover bolognese (but after all, they are Tilean).

Gentlemen, I shall see you at the tables.

Make Mine A Large

After painting Brob for the Woffboot last year, I rather fell for the giant model. It's a cracker to make as well as paint, with an immense amount of colourful options on the sprue (he says, clearly just having read a press release from somewhere).

This head goes best with the whole Viking theme, I felt.
Although they were famous for their bone combs, less for the combed-in bones.

Ebay was my supplier of choice - I bid for and got a complete set of giant sprues, minus a few arrows, for a 'mere' £20. I opted for a dragon's skull on a stick, which I believe giants can buy at the fair from an appropriate stand.

Rank and Vile

I got the last four warriors from my box set done: -

They're pretty much straight from the box, although I've done some small conversion detail on the head of this guy.

Rumbles in the Dark

So! Time to play the new Hobbit game. This is my first outing with Battle Chronicler, so excuse some of the slight idiosyncracies of these shots. 

Generalling tonight will be Kraken and Krakeness, playing as the dwarves, against the goblin overseer Anders Wängdahl (official Woffboot name tbc).

Setup and Background

This is our first match, so I've picked out an introductory scenario in which four of the Dwarves (Oin, Gloin, Fili and Kili) must make their way across a narrow walkway through a throng of blocking goblins. They've got ten turns to get at least three dwarves across. If they don't make it, or if the goblins kill two or more of them, it's a win for the gobboes.

A Hoard o' Marauders

Another day, another twenty marauders. Not really, I wish I could paint that fast. But I've been chipping away at this lot steadily over the last week, and my current to-do list is now down to six. Plus thirty six plastic goblins and Gandalf and the dwarves and all that stuff. But I'm not counting that yet. 

Here's the new batch of Tzeentchian shields, ranked up and semi-individually: -

Happy Shoggmanay

In the spirit of starting as one means to go on, here's a new model for the new year: -

I finished this off a couple of days ago. Then I realised I could wait until the New Year and have a terrible pun as the title, and, well, it would take a stronger man than I to resist that.

Know what I mean, nudge nudge wink wink?

The black and blue theme worked well in the end, but the hair was a bugger to get as I wanted it. Nothing seemed to work, it was either too washed out or not blue enough. In the end, a surprise wash with thinned out Polished Blue did the trick, although it does mean he's got a slightly disco glitter look in certain lights.

Unboxing Day

So everyone's seen the Hobbit by now, I expect? Yes? No? Well, we can talk about my hurt feelings over that particular damp squib another time. This here's a gaming blog, not the graveyard I intend to bury Peter Jackson in.

Games Workshop, ever keen to leap on a marketing bandwagon (within a fairly narrowly defined lane of traffic, to be fair), have seized on the forthcoming trilogy to release a bunch of new models. And I, being ever keen to throw used money off a fiscal cliff, fell for the preorder offer and got this box here: -

The limited edition has indeed escaped from goblin town.
Unlike the reputations of the cast... no dammit I'm not getting into that here. 

It came in the post while I was out yelling 'Merry Christmas' repeatedly in Stockholm. That all went well, by the by, although the cost of providing endless Christmas cheer on stage was that I more or less forgot that real Christmas was actually happening at the same time, and was a bit too tired to fully appreciate all the sparkly lights and excellent hams that happen in Sweden.

But now I'm back home, surrounded by cribs and swaddling clothes that have nothing to do with the Nativity and everything to do with our lives this year coming, what better to postpone the assembly of the new cot than the glueing together of a plastic Sylvester McCoy?

This model of the 7th Doctor even has his spiky but loveable sidekick Ace tucked under one arm.
Wait, no, that's a hedgehog.

WoffBoot us, every one

It's been a quiet couple of months on the WoffBoot. Chiefly, I suspect, because two of its most prolific writers have been plying their craft (re: losing their minds) on the NaNoWriMo challenge to bash out a novel in the month of November.

This little web graphic makes it all worth while.

Unlike Warhammer, everyone can be a winner if they try hard enough, and both Kraken and myself succeeded in our literary endeavours. Sci Fi and Fantasy respectively, and I'm sure WoffBoot Publications would be only too happy to represent them.

I didn't manage to paint anything in December, although there are some half-painted Savage Orcs that are have been giving me the stink-eye recently. In fact, the only think I managed to paint was this tree ornament when I got picked to be my CEO's Secret Santa.

Painted in the company colours.
(Toadying corporate lickspittle that I am)

I regret giving him away now. Mounted on a 50mm base and he would have made a very festive Giant model for my Orcs and Goblins.

Happy Woffmas to all!