Mostly just minis this time

Yeah, fewer ponderances on life and attitude and all that, just gonna talk 'bout some minis this time.

Unless something creeps in, anyway.  It's a gamble.

First, I managed to finish off the trees that were the custom-build ones! Now all I've got left to finish are the... 9(?) smaller armature trees. I didn't get the other one I had completed out of the storage bucket for this pic, so it's the five I completed over last weekened with two of the finished armature ones in the middle for scale.

Overall super happy with how they're turning out, and they should help make a woodland/forest/ghur style of board really have some character without being cumbersome.

The metal washers worked out surprisingly well and the trees are quite sturdy!

Why yes, I did say "ghur" up there, glad of you to notice! My good buddy Dingar (who started his own blog called Mininomicon... check it out!) has been pretty amped on Age of Sigmar for a while now, and his joy and positivity has proven infectious to myself and Wargamer Ramblings so now, of course, we're working on armies for yet another game.  I actually already have a fully painted (well, like, almost fully painted) force of Ogor Gutbusters who reside in the Realm of Beasts - aka Ghur - but I've decided on painting up my forces of order now as well. I have some Stormcast Eternals that I am going to play as the Astral Templars stormhost chamber, as they also reside in the realm of beasts and thrive on honorbound battle with gigantic monsters and all that. 

I will probably take some liberties on the paint scheme once I get started, but overall this is their scheme.

Otherwise, I've been continuing to spend some time on NOVA prep, working on the beginnings of my 30k Zone Mortalis force and my Guild Ball Miners.  

For my 30k force, I've concretely decided on a Word Bearers squad with Zardu Layak, the Crimson Apostle, as its leader. A hardened taskforce of breacher marines and the Apostle's private retinue of relic reclaimers (a typical marine strike squad I am converting to look more cultish) accompany Zardu and his blade slaves and a Chaplain-in-training (run as a simple Centurion with the WB special rules to make him a psyker) to comprise the majority of the force, with the final piece being a unit of Gal Vorbak intent on screaming through the corridors and killing anything in their path. I'm trying to keep it very fluff-driven, so I don't think the list will end up varying too much even if it doesn't fair well in test games. I've also just learned a few days ago that summoning in 30k events is completely legal, so I'll need to get a unit of Pink Horrors painted up just in case I pull off a successful summoning in game.

Laying out all of the pieces for the Breachers and getting them organized. Yes that's a Monsterpocalypse mini in the background. Yes I have an addiction problem. 

Partially assembled; I was really surprised at the detail and number of pieces, kind of blowing my time estimate out of the water for their assembly. 

After several nights of assembly (about an hour each night) the Breachers stand ready for paint!

Airbrushed basecoat completed with the color Vallejo Air "Fire Red"

Now on to the Guild Ball Miners.

So.

Let's say this is a... mini review. 

As someone returning (though even that isn't a fair term, since I never really got off the ground in the first place) to the game of Guild Ball in general, this faction's release is difficult and frustrating.

First of all, this thing is only available to order directly from Steamforged games, even for gaming stores (at least as I've been lead to understand). And those gaming stores, when ordering it direct, are not given much of a discount on the item, which means they are not able to discount it from the "suggested" retail price of a steep, steep $80 USD. After resolving myself to spending the money on the box and having seen the quality of the miniatures in the Kick Off! starter box, I went to Steamforged's website to order. Nope, sold out. Too bad so sad no team for me. I began to look for options of sellers here stateside, and found only a single one (Discount Games, Inc.), and the price was still the non-discounted $80 USD. Gritting my teeth, I clicked the "Confirm" button and waited on my order to arrive.

Upon arrival, I found a very small box waiting for me. Like, Infinity miniatures boxes small. Confused, because I've seen the production quality of their other newer products, I pulled the sleeve off of the little cardboard box and popped it open to find a handful of unassembled minis in baggies. I'm clearly no stranger to assembling miniatures, and honestly I enjoy it quite a bit, but I will say the presentation was lacking for something I just dropped eighty-frigging-dollars on.

Pulling out the baggies, I found each miniature separated and including a resin base. 

Quality of the resin aside for a moment (but I'm coming back to it, don't worry) let's just say this to be clear: the included bases are bullshit. They're weirdly flat/low compared to normal lipped bases, they have no interesting or uniquely sculpted detail, and they have little depressions in them for the models to fit down into during assembly. That last part is only a problem because the models themselves have little bits of extra height attached at the bottoms of the feet and the tank treads to sit down in those depressions, and it's got to be addressed before using a different base. At least half of mine were warped and would have required me to heat them up and bend them to make them sit flat on the table, had I found myself willing to use them. You'll find this to be a common theme here, but lemme just say it one more time... this was an $80 box! That's U.S. dollars, not AUD. I understand price comparisons between companies in this hobby is a fool's errand, but a box with six models and tiny piece of terrain or two that costs eighty dollars should have sculpted bases. 

So, back to resin quality. I'm going to give it an "It's Fine I Guess" out of 10. It's not as great as, say, Privateer Press's resin, but the detail is still pretty good. Is it $80 good? No, not even a little bit. It's soft and reminds me of a #2 pencil eraser, and it has a lot of flash and places where the gates need be trimmed delicately so as not to destroy the cool details. Mine had a couple of ugly mold lines, too, which I found needed to be cut down (eww) because the resin did not take well to being filed. I have concerns about the lifespan on the smaller, thinner models, too. At least it was relatively bubble-free.

I really wish they had just kept their nice metal models if they weren't going to make something in the awesome plastics from their other (cheaper!) box sets.

Okay, some pictures:

Super irritated that this little ball of joy is sculpted into his shitty base. Look at that terrible mold line around the lip!

His base isn't perfectly round, either. I've done no trimming whatsoever here, it came that way. 

The Word Bearers champion might look like he's engaged in a fierce battle, but he's actually just being a bro and holding the weight of the drill in place while the glue/greenstuff dries.

Oh neat, look at this cool wood detailing in the prominently visible shoulder piece on the coolest model in the set... and the big mar in it from the resin gate being in the fucking middle of it. Who thought that was a good plan when designing the mold!?  

I mean let's be honest, I still love the set. I'm excited to get to playing Guild Ball, and these guys are definitely the faction for me aesthetically. But this should not be an $80 box. $50 would be a much more reasonable price point for the quality/quantity presented here, and $60 would be pushing it. At $60 I'd need to see like a couple of cool custom dice in the box, or maybe some friggin cards (yeah I know, I know, available online, but that just means I have to print them and cut them and deal with it and that frustrates me), hell maybe an art card, I dunno. Something more than just a cardboard box with baggies in it.

Overall super rad models, but would have much rather had them just be metal.

Oh, that reminds me. One more thing, while this rant train is a-rollin'.

Look at this badass thing:

Oh hey there coolest model for the Miners that isn't actually in the starter box.

So that's Colossus, one of the existing players for the Engineering Guild, and one of the two players that can be used with the Miners. That is an alt sculpt for him, designed to go explicitly with the Miners... and you cannot buy him. That's fucking stupid.

If you're a diehard Steamforged defender and you're reading this, please don't be offended or take this to mean I don't like Steamforged, or Guild Ball, or even just that model. Quite the contrary, actually. I love the shit out of that Colossus model.  It's actually one of the reasons this faction interested me and was able to pull me back to Guild Ball in the first place in this article reveal of the faction!  But he's only available, I'm told (as per the Facebook group), in the OP event kit. Seeing as this game has no scene in my area, no stores around here sell it at all, and I only have one other friend locally I can play it with... I cannot get this model without significant travel and effort. That is super frustrating. Do not like.

Okay, so bitching aside, that's pretty much the last couple of weeks for me outside of mega busy life stuff. Looking forward to trying to get more built and painted in the days to come, lord knows I have a lot to work on!

NOVA Prep and Personal Game Theory

Pulling back the curtain a little bit, I tend to write the title up top when I start a blog post and then just go with it, hoping for it to guide me in a semi-coherent manner towards a goal. So wish me luck.

Okay, here goes:

To follow the order of the title, let's start with NOVA prep.

Check it out here: http://www.novaopen.com/

The NOVA Open is an annual gaming convention hosted in Washington D.C. with a focus mainly on tournaments and events for tabletop games produced by Games Workshop and several other companies. I'm not much for conventions (mainly because I'm not much on crowds of people) so I haven't attended very many, but for some games they become a type of haven, producing a centralized location for us nerds to get together and play particular games. I've attended several CMON Expos, which were fun when they were small and shared space with their miniatures games, but lost their luster for me when they began to focus almost solely on their board games and attract more attendees. I've attended Adepticon once, and I think that may have been enough for me on that particular convention. And finally I've attended NOVA once, in 2017, and though I was only there working for CMON's booth and helping represent their Dark Age line (having just released the Skarrd rulebook, which I wrote some of the fiction for) I was considerably impressed with both the layout and the atmosphere of the convention. It was spaced out and comfortable, and it had a different attitude about its events. NOVA isn't the type of convention where you put down unpainted/unfinished models on the table with your ridiculous list designed only to crush in tournaments as quickly as possible.

So, after not attending any conventions whatsoever in 2018, I decided that I really want to go and veg out for a whole weekend in 2019 rolling dice, and that NOVA should be the one for me.  Assembling a crew of like-minded locals, we set our sights on the myriad of entertainments in our future. Deliberations began, with some difficult decisions to be faced by avid omnigamers like myself and Wargamer Ramblings (I look forward to his NOVA prep update!). Ultimately the entire crew managed to find a single offering we could all agree on, with the rest of the weekend seeing us pair off or go on our lonesome way to play the other games we enjoy.

For me, I have 4 distinct projects I need to complete (and get in some practice games for) over the next 6 months or so.

1. Warhammer 30k Zone Mortalis 1000pt list - This will be either Mechanicum (as teased in blog previous) or Word Bearers. I am currently undecided. :/
2. Guild Ball standard 1-day tournament list of 6 models
3. Aristeia! tournament requiring a team of 4 
4. Infinity: After Dark event models, but point values for the event aren't listed as its a narrative event where we build the lists on the spot, so I'm going to assume a 300pt list roughly 

 All in all, easily doable, but I have a horrendous habit of getting sidetracked and excited about other projects, so...

I'm currently in a state of limbo on #1, so I've got some more research to do for that one.

For #2, after a day of deliberations and attempting to save money and read about the meta and blah blah blah, I took a deep breath, and with a clear head ordered the team that has made me feel excited about the game in the first place: The Minor Guild associated with the Engineering Guild, The Miner's!

Mechanical arms! A robutt! A mole! A driller tank! I love it alllllllllllllllllllll...

For #3, I actually was a bit caught off guard. I've heard of Aristeia! before, of course, but never really given it the time of day. But after a quick discussion about it (wherein someone else said they were interested in it, I googled, and promptly followed the shiny pictures over the cliff) I realized it was absolutely necessary for me to sign up for the event. The game itself is an anime/Overwatch inspired gladitorial arena pseudo-board game, which is cool, but it's the aesthetic that sold me. You can build your team of 4 from any of the available sets, but until I know more about the game, I'm going to try to stick with this set:

A robutt! A paladin! A wizard! A furry! By their powers combined... I dunno, like a quirky anime show or something? I won't lie, robot was like 80% of this decision.

And finally #4, for the Infinity: After Dark event, I think I'm going to work on some USAriadna forces. I have several I could choose from in my collection, but I think these will be the most fun in a narrative-game type of setting, which is without a doubt my favorite way to play.

The original starter army for the faction is shown here, but I'll probably swap some things out for fun.

And so with that, we're probably at a good transition point into the second part of the title...

Personal Game Theory.

This is coming from a bit of an epiphany I had the other night while "playing" a game of Kill Team down at the local store.

Phil, my dude, I know you read this, so know that I'm gonna blow you up a little here. But also know it is without malice and I love you homie.

But damn.

Okay, so here's a bit of an explanation with a breakdown of the game. Phil asked if I'd come down this past weekend to get in a game of Kill Team with him, which sounded rad and I was available, so down to HobbyTown I went. Phil had been playing a game with another local player when I arrived (whose name I'm not sure I ever learned, I apologize other local duder) and so when they finished, I just sat down and said something along the lines of "alright cool man, set it up however you like and pick a scenario, I barely know the rules and you're the experienced player here."

Look, that was my mistake. I own that.

If you've looked at my past blogs, you've seen that I play Orks. And whether you know me personally, or if maybe you were able to infer about me what type of gamer I am from those posts... I'm not a rules/gamey/competitive type of player at all. I build and paint models because I have an unhealthy obsession with super cool toys, and I play games to create interesting and entertaining stories with those toys. Winning/losing isn't so much important as having a fun time and making entertaining choices. I would much rather have my Orks die horrific deaths or fail their mission spectacularly while entertaining antics are occurring than I would enjoy winning a boring game.

For set up, the board was turned so that the long sides were between us, no terrain was added to the sparse layout that was already present, and Phil declared that our mission was to get our Kill Teams across the board and off the opponent's board edge. I thought to myself, Hey, cool! I play Orks, they want to run forward and try to melee anyway... I can make this fun.

And then Phil put down his Eldar, and for the first turn proceeded to shoot the absolute shit out of my Orks as they found themselves unable to both move forward to cover in the sparse environment and return fire with their shitty orktastic pistols. Making matters worse, the layout also left the majority of the Orks without an avenue to move into the Eldar forces for melee without first standing in the middle of an open road for a turn. There was only one spot of cover in the middle where, if I rolled a 12 to charge, an Ork could make it across the gap to melee. A small group of grots with a couple of Orks tried to move up the side of the board towards the single Eldar model that had moved forward, hoping to get into melee and be safe from the onslaught of gunfire, but they either didn't roll high enough or were gunned down by Eldar overwatch fire. Again, I thought to myself, Well... okay... this is okay, it's first turn. And then he's got to try to begin completing the mission as well, so I'll keep trying to rush forward and maybe I'll roll well enough to tie something up in combat as we get closer to each other.

The view of the board from my perspective. Deployment was a box in the bottom-middle. By the time this photo was taken, the line of grots off the mat to the side had already been shot down after they tried to advance on that right side of the board. 

Oh cool, a gun emplacement. Let's run at it! This will be fine.

Nope. Nopers. Nope nope nope.

Like any smart Eldar player who would want to win a typical game, Phil only moved 2 of his models... 1 laterally to line up better shots, of course, and the other being the lone Eldar that had previously moved forward actually retreating back to his teammates so that he would be out of charge range. Failing to roll the boxcars (that's double 6's to the rest of you) I needed to cross the gap with each of my Ork Kommandos, they again had to sit and get blasted to pieces in cover, or move out into the road and hope the luck gods would carry them through. Beep Boop decided to channel his inspirational character R2-D2 and chance sitting in the road for a turn, but he was immediately blasted to pieces. Several more Orks were summarily shot down while hiding in cover, killing over half of my force, and ending the game with a break test at the end of turn 2.

So back to my point on Personal Game Theory. Did I have a point? Shit.

When we play these tabletop games, unless we're playing in a structured environment like a planned event (and still even then, I suppose), each participant is going to come to the game with a different set of expectations for how things are going to go. And I don't mean expectations of winning or losing, but in how the game itself is set up and the attitude of it. I, for example, do not take any game "seriously" unless I am participating in a tournament with the express purpose to win. At that point, aside from common courtesy and manners, we are playing a game with a strict ruleset and guidelines and our ability to think on our feet, execute a plan, achieve an objective, etc., within the confines of that ruleset is the goal. At any other time, I'm going in to a game where a rulebook is like a really strong suggestion, but ultimately things can be changed or altered to ensure the fun times for both players. I'm there to hang out, laugh, roll dice, and create a fun story.

It's true.

But that's just what I'm bringing to the game. And assuming that the other participant(s) in the game is coming to the game with the same mindset is, and will always be, my mistake. My fault. So I can't be mad, or upset, or whatever at Phil for playing the game with his own plans and intentions and expectations for how the game will flow. I can't even assume he had the mindset to "kill kill kill win win win" despite the game having turned out that way, because it could have just been a series of unfortunate circumstances for the Orks that carried them down the path of ruination.

There has been a lot of talk in recent years, what with the rise of podcasts and all that, about the notion of there existing a type of "social contract" when two people are going to play a game. In that contract, everything about the game is considered, whether it's the models themselves and the level of hobbying necessary to play (assembled models? painted models? proxy models? stand-in pictures for models?), the ruleset/edition of the game you're going to play (8th edition? including the new rules from this supplement/codex? using the online errata?), to the mindset and attitude of the game itself (win at all costs/competitive? learning/training/preparing for an event? "beer and pretzels" dice-rolling silly funtime? telling a story in a roleplaying game fashion?), and all manner of minutia to consider. And when we game with a certain group of friends or local players, we tend to fall into comfort zones of knowing what to expect both at a certain venue and from particular players themselves.

Our hobby is an oddly social hobby filled with all manner and types of personalities, and we need to make sure that if we're willing to come to the table and play, we also need to be ready to adapt our expectations so that each participant is going to have a good time... otherwise what's the point?

...and now, too, I know that Phil's the type of dude who's gonna bring an airsoft rifle to a water balloon fight.

SO WE GON' PLAY FER REALSIES NEXT TIME, PHIL. GET READY.