Mornings and Hobby Time

09.24.2017

I've been trying some changes to my morning routine to get my day off to a good (better?) start. So often I'm (mostly mentally) tired after getting home from work that I just don't want to do anything. I normally wake up anywhere from an hour to three hours before I need to leave for the office. My body sets its own schedule that I don't always have any say in. Instead of just laying around, I've started doing something. Granted, I'm not being super productive and accomplishing great goals to make my life better, but I feel like I'm not just laying in the bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the alarm to go off.

The first thing I don't readily want to admit to is that I've started watching Supergirl via Netflix. It's cheesy. Oh so cheesy. When I watched the pilot almost a year ago I decided it was too cheesy for me. Somewhere along the way, watching all the other comic book based shows that are out there, I decided I might need a little cheese. Morning, pre-work cheese seems to agree with me. Granted, there's no binge watching for this show. 1 episode per day is the max. Sometimes an episode might take 2 days. Also, in the intor of every episode where Supergiel's voiceover explains "my pod got knocked of course" makes me shake my head and giggle. For some unknown reason I find that funny.

I've also taken to trying to fit in 10 minutes of hobby time in the mornings. Lately, for 2 weeks or so, I've been working on painting the zombie explansion pack for the Walking Dead game. Since running out of zombies on my last game helped to lead to my early demise, having 6 more zombies available to feast on me should help. I know, sounds backwards, huh?

I've also picked up a couple of tidbits to add to the zombie game. Although the Walking Dead game minis are supposedly 1:48 scale, other scales can work depending on what they are. My first 'outer scale' addition is the 1:43 Breaking Bad RV. I'd had my eye on this and had asked the Facebook gaming group for the game if anyone had used it. Nobody had, but suddenly the Amazon item I'd saved was out of stock, looks like I spurred some people to try it maybe. I found another one in stock, and as a bonus it was about $2 cheaper than the first one I'd seen. I placed the order, it came in, and I grabbed a mini for size comparison.

The width looks just about perfect at 2 inches. It's long - 9 inches - which is ok, but the 3 inch height makes it close to the same height as the houses I got from PlastCraft. Hopefully those are incongruities I can get past. The RV needs to be dirtied up for the game though. It's WAY too clean.

Speaking of those PlastCraft houses, they were in need of something. The first thing they needed were driveways and sidewalks. I've got a plan for printing something appropriate out and gluing to some really thin styrene to prevent the paper from curling up. We'll see how that works. But that's not all they need. Much like the lack of power poles were bothering me once I put a rural scene up, the glaring thing that I noticed the houses were missing - mailboxes. Every house needs a mailbox. Thanks to Daniel at work having a 3D printer, and the Google giving me a link to a mailbox model, after some scaling tweaks I have mailboxes!

Now to paint and base those mailboxes!

Next batch of zombies have already been primed. 4 of the 6 I primed are duplicates from the ones I just painted - the expansion set used 6 of the same molds in the base set. I randomly grabbed 6, and even though I just painted 4 of these maybe I can remember to not paint them the same way.

I'm getting dangerously close to my 3rd game of Walking Dead.

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What Kind Of Blog

09.15.2017

I haven't said anything in about a month it seems.  Mosts of my posts these days are about boardgame prep - painting minis, scenery, etc.  Sure, I do other things, but not enough of anything of interest worth writing about.  Maybe I should just dedicate/convert the blog section to be dedicated to boardgame prep?  Most of what I read for fun these days is dedicated to that.  Maybe I'll ponder that until the next post here.  Or another month passes?

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Zombie Housing Authority

08.18.2017

Another round of quiet as I've been trying to force myself to learn Salesforce instead of painting and crafting the zombie apocalypse.

I picked up a couple of buildings from Plastcraft Games. They've just released a new line, Urban Landscape, with buildings that should fit the rural setting I'm going for. It's a line so new it's not really featured on their website. The buildings are made of a high density foam that you super glue together. The buildings only have exterior details which are printed on the foam, bit ti's all really good quality for what it is. As a bonus, the roof and porches are made of wood/HDF which ups the overall look well. Each of the houses took around 20 minutes to put together. There were no instructions (supposed to be available on the website, but they haven't made it there yet), but going by the front and back pictures on each box everything was fairly straight forward. In the end I didn't have any leftover pieces and nothing was falling off, so I'm going to say I did it right.

My game board is slowly evolving. I started with trees and a road. Road signs and power poles came along. Now there are some buildings to get in the way. What's next? Honestly, I don't know.

I've mentioned it before, but I have to keep an eye on getting carried away getting crap stuff. I like buying things. I have shelves full of shrinkwrapped things I enjoyed buying. There's lots of things I want to get and do with my scenic gameboard I'm building up, but I'm forcing myself to wait until whatever I'm wanting to buy is ready for me to work on, and not sit on a shelf until then, which makes it more likely to have something else I want to work on come sit on the shelf beside it later.

There are 2 companies that have buildings I want to add in, building with interiors. There's another company with a nice selection of vehicles I want to use. All 3 of these are in England, so shipping will take a little while. But I'm not going to allow myself to order all 3 at once, and I'm putting off the first (whichever it may be) until I'm actually ready to start on whatever it's going to be, even if I have to sit around for a month waiting on a boat to cross an ocean.

Besides, I've always got a couple of dozen figures to paint.

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Power Poles and Signs

07.27.2017

Another 6 weeks or so of silence. No games played in the interim, but I've been making more scenery. Power poles and street signs!

I also put together a pseudo-table topper for gaming. Cork panel covered in felt, glued to a lazy susan.

In looking at scenery other people have made, I've really enjoyed the little bits added for realism, bits that have no effect but make all more immersive. That's the route I've decided to go. Don't worry so much about huge, looming buildings for minis to run around in. I'm going to have a Curve Ahead sign that actually shows the right direction for the curve.

Maybe I'll get a huge, looming building later.

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Game Time - Finally Walking Dead

06.18.2017

It's been about 6 weeks since I mentioned I'd started painting the minis and scenery for the Walking Dead game, and I probably started working on it a month before I mentioned it. For once I had a goal of "paint X amount of stuff and then play the game." I like painting and prepping more than playing most games, so actually having a goal of playing a game was somewhat novel. This past week, I reached Point X and played the introductory game/mission of Walking Dead All Out War.

I promptly lost. But it was fun to watch me lose. I played a 2nd game with a larger area and managed to survive, just to make me feel better.

The 2 games I played used 10" and 15" square areas with no obstacles. I set up a lot more than that just because I wanted to see how everything I'd been working on looked. It looked pretty cool. As a bonus, I ended up enjoying the game as it was quick to setup and play through, with solo rules that aren't too hard to remember (especially with a quick reference sheet handy) while still frustrating enough to be a challenge.

Having a defined play area seems to be what controls the difficulty in this game - you can only run away so far.

The first thing I noticed when I set up my (unused) play area was that my intersection really needed some stop signs of some point. I'd planned on making some later on, and thanks to a YouTube video I even had a route to take, but the lack of signs in the middle of the board bothered me enough that it became the first thing I messed around with after playing.

Originally I was just going to put a stop sign with cardstock printed street signs glued on the post, but that would obstruct part of the signage. There were also a couple of failed attempts at merging/crossingt the signs, but the cardstock wasn't stiff enough and ended up being too wavy. Thanks to a helpful suggestion from Daniel at work, I ended up gluing the paper signs to 0.25" x .06" styrene strips, which I attached to the stop sign post (a styrene H-beam) successfully with some thick/gel superglue. With everything I've worked on lately, this turned out to be what struck me as the coolest.

Next up is 2 more barricade walls from the scenery pack that I overlooked, and my first attempt at putting together an HDF building. This is my practice building from a long-ago Black Friday sale before I get to the really good 4Ground buidlings!

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