Time to change gears?

02.24.2018

No minis update here. You'll have to wait a couple of days to see where the state of painting has gotten.

Thanks to an Amazon book coupon around last Black Friday, I picked up a copy of Gaslands. I like the general concept of the Osprey rulebooks - they supply the rules, it's up to you to get whatever is needed to play. It hearkens back to the days when I would read rules just to learn how a game came together with no real intention of ever playing (I don't know if this started with Star Frontiers or Gangbusters, both read through and through but never played). When I got the Gaslands book, along with the some other stuff, I did my usual thing of flipping through to see what it looked like before putting it on a shelf and mostly forgetting it was in the same house as I.

This morning during my breakfast & internet surfing I saw mention of Gaslands on one of the Board Game Geek forums. Huh, I have the rules for something with that name. I wonder if it's the same game? Other people have heard of it? Why yes, I am not the only person in the world to order a book! Before long I was perusing the Gaslands website to see that instead of downloading and printing all of the doo-dads for the game I could buy higher quality doo-dads for the game. I do love my doo-dads.

As of now, I've not yet ordered any doo-dads.

My reason for originally getting the Gaslands rulebook was to see how it fared against my all time favorite automotive combat game, Steve Jackson's Car Wars. While the excuse Jerry and I had for dropping Car Wars was that it had become bloated with a decade of additions and errata, we never really played the basic game correctly. Game rules have become a lot more streamlined since 1985. Maybe you can have the feel of cars zooming around without 3 pages of graph paper to keep track of what you need to know about your car and driver.

Now to see how inspired I am to actually try out a little mini-scenario with these rules and see how they feel. Imagine. Me. Playing a game.

So weird....

Permalink boardgames hobbies

Zombies and Animals

02.17.2018

My skill level for miniature painting is definitely Game Table. My minis look ok from about 3 feet away. I have friends that paint much better than I do, and they motivate me to be better, but I ain't nowhere near as good with intricate details as they are. But I don't let that keep me from painting. I enjoy my non-computerized hobby.

The first half of this month got 12 more minis painted. Since Walking Dead's Rick on a Horse only had 2 minis (Rick and horse are molded together on the base, so I count them as 1 + the zombie that came with them) I added in one of the Chronoscape minis to round out the batch. Thanks to Rick's Horse and Ezekial having a tiger, I painted my first animals that I can ever remember. Appropriately, I'm not too sure how my paint schemes for those animals match anything realistic as I used plenty of reference painting pics and there was a pretty good range of detail in those. As it was, I tried stopping before I screwed things up too much.

Things I learned this time.

• Don't try to use the very last of the primer in the spray can. It comes out to wet and pools in the details of the sculpt.
• Light/bright green is not a good background for yellow decals. Now that I've typed that, I think I typed the exact same thing a couple of years ago when I was painting Dust minis.
• Washes are my friend. I still do best when I can apply a wash for clothing right on top of the white primer.
• Don't use black for clothes. I've been paying attenting to some Batman Miniature Game painters, and instead of black they go with dark greys, blues, and even purples. On Negan I used the darkest grey I had and then applied the blue wash that I seem to love. It looks black enough but still has highlights and details.

 

With my focus on Walking Dead minis, this gets us to:

• 101 painted
• 24 to paint

 

Ever so close to wrapping up the Walking Dead stuff. 18 of the remaining 24 are the 3 big rules expansions. Once all of those are done, if I can get them painted before the next wave of minis is released, I'm going to return to the MDF buildings and try a test to see if I can print exterior details for the commercial buildings like I did for the interior of the last house. This will help make up for my MDF-painting limitations, plus with the help of Paint Shop Pro I could really get in some details that I wouldn't be able to properly paint. But that's all for another time.

Here's the latest hobby spreadsheet update!

Permalink gaming miniatures walking dead

January Hobby Update

02.04.2018

I was off to a slow start on the hobby front in January. The first shotgun house from 4Ground took longer than I thought it would to put togehter, because of course I had to try to do everything the hard way. While the outside of the 4Ground buildings are colored, the interior is just MDF. I had it in my mind to add wallpaper - I could do this with my trusty Paint Shop Pro! I also wanted to add glass to the windows. Glass, which is really the clear paper used in overhead transparencies.

The interior and exterior walls of the house are 2 pieces. Originally I was planning on sandwiching the transparency paper/window between the wallpaper and MDF wall. The transparency is thin enough that it fits between the inner and outer MDF flush enough that it doesn't bow the MDF or require any sanding - I checked, and even started a test sanding just in case. I scanned the walls and used this as a template in Paint Shop Pro to lay out my wallpaper.

Turns out my scanning process was one of those overkill areas. using the scan as my template for the wallpaper left a little white space around window and door frames. Looking back, just using the wallpaper texture of the whole area and then cut out the holes for windows and doors after gluing the wallpaper on would work just as well. Just be sure to do this part before gluing the inner and outer walls together. It should be easier to get into the windows with a razor blade to cut away what's needed that way.

Following the 4Ground directions I was armed with super glue, clothes pins, and rubber bands to hold everything together. It worked amazingly well. 48 years old before I went out and bought myself clothes pins ($1.88/100 at Wal Mart). I dry fit everything before gluing and it paid off a couple of times when I was about to put the wrong slot A into slot B. It didn't pay off when I didn't pay attention to the 2 roof pieces and glued the interior supports to the OUTSIDE of the roof panels. I didn't recognize this until the glue had set well. I could have tried to fix it, but I didn't trust pulling things apart to not break something along the way. In the end I found a nice roof shingle texture and jsut printed out a sheet full of shingles to glue to the roof. It fits right in with the PlastCraft houses that I've already made. My residential section now has 3 houses!

On the figure front I stuck with Walking Dead minis. Morgan (with son Duane and zombie wife) and Maggie & Arnold (with random zombie) were the first WD minis I've painted since November. My detail skill was lacking on this batch and things just weren't clicking. Skin tones weren't looking right. The paint was either too thick or too runny. Sometimes you have to admit when things aren't going right, but I didn't want to give up or start over. If ever there was a time for "board quality", where things look ok from 3 feet away, this would be the time to take that. And take that I did.

Roughly halfway through the mess of the above, I went ahead and primed a "prone figures" pack of 6 minis. I was expecting all of these to be zombies, but a half didn't have the zombie-holes that mark most ofthe WD figures as zombies. I ended up doodling with these while messing with the first batch above. As my specialty is normally washes, I applied different washes to the prone minis, playing around with colors and seeing what might and might not work. It was a nice little test. If nothing else these minis are a lot more colorful than the route I usually take.

By the time the first batch of minis were based and sealed, the prone batch was ready for basing. Basing these was just adding some grass flock as there wasn't too much free room on the base thanks to the prone figure taking up so much space!!! A day later these were sealed and done.

Thanks to a clerical error in my spreadsheet, my original counts for what was left to paint were off. In the Walking Dead group of minis, now I've got

• 90 painted
• 35 to paint

 

The next batches are already started. Ezekial, with a tiger, and Chris & Julie are mostly finished. The batch after that I just primed today and includes Rick on a Horse. I have no idea how to paint Rick on a Horse. This should be interesting. Frustrating. And interesting.

As I like organization and the good use of a proper use, which I learned in no small part thanks to my hetero life partner, here's my updated summary spreadsheet. Green rows are minis I want to/am likely to paint and play with. Orange rows have a low probability of being worked on (but I actually liked painting those Dust figures when I was getting started, so you never know). Red rows have the least chance of getting painted. Am I really ever going to paint 600 Zombicide minis?

Permalink gaming miniatures walking dead

Old School <> Streaming

01.28.2018

Back in the days when tv stations had numbers, tvs had knobs, and nothing could be watched on demand, the local Fox station (which was and may still be channel 54) would theme a block of movies on Saturday/Sunday afternoons if there were no weekend sporting events going on. A batch of 3 action or sci-fi movies was common. They were never the best movies, but if it weren't for watching during the weekend I may never have learned I actually liked the Robert Urich space epic Ice Pirates.

As most know I have plenty of movies taking up shelf space. I've got more than a handful purchased since Black Friday that I've not yet watched. My whole reason for buying movies has always been "when I'm in the mood to watch (whatever movie) I don't want to bother with going out and renting it, I want to just pick it up, put it in the player, and start watching." My penchant for buying physical discs doesn't hold as much merit these days since it's admittedly easier to just click a button to stream said movie, but a habit started in 1989 is hard to break. The supplementary reason for buying movies instead of renting them is that I will often watch a movie more than once. Back in the video rental days, if I watched a movie 3 times it was more cost effective to buy it than rent it. These days I've been training myself to wait for a good sale on a movie than rushing out and buying when it's initially released.

Enough of that rambling tangent. I still like movies I've seen plenty of times. Part of me misses the days of turning on channel 54 and finding "Hey, these are some good movies they've decided to show today". To the chagrin of my old boss when I was working at the video store, I would often leave the tv on 54 on Sunday afternoon that play movies to tempt people to rent - but it still worked, people would rent what they saw playing on broadcast tv anyway. The other day Spaceballs popped into my head for some unknown reason. Well that would be a fine movie to watch. Spaceballs was not present in my movie collection. I could stream it for free on Hulu. I could rent it for $3 on Amazon, or buy the digital version for $10. Instead of any of that, I bought the disc for $10 and had to wait for it to be delivered. Saturday, sandwiched between Wonder Woman and Spiderman: Homecoming, I watched Spaceballs. While not one of those channel 54 weekend movie blocks, it was still a good batch of movies to watch together.

Next weekend it may be time to revisit Ice Pirates.

Permalink movies/tv/dvd random

A lotta painting to do.

01.07.2018

Part of my resolution(s) for the new year is to not get as much crap. I've got a lot of crap. I like getting crap, for whatever reason. The "getting" has often been the peak of my experience, ignoring "what to do after it's been gotten". Over the last year I noticed, or maybe concentrated, on my hobbies getting narrowed down to things that I both enjoy and don't feel overwhelmed by. The main constructive hobby I enjoyed was prepping for board games. Games that I don't necessarily play.

I have a lot available to paint. 2166 unpainted minis. That's a lot. If I were to paint 1 per day, I'd be finished in 2023. Those are just the 28mm scale figures. There are still different scale minis for other games - Team Yankee (1:100 vehicles), space stuff (Star Trek Call of Duty, Firestorm Armada) - who knows if I'll ever get around to painting any of that, honestly.

I'd told myself before I was going to concentrate on painting what I've got. I spent the weekend going through what I've got. I found minis that I'd forgotten I'd ever gotten. Some of them I can't see ever using. Why would I need 600 Zombicide minis? I played 2 games of Zombicide and didn't really care for it. Sure, I can use the minis for other games... but 600???

Making a list of what I've got to paint, as well as what's been painted so far, helps put things into perspective. Mainly, I have enough shit to paint for a long, long time, and with that in mind I have no need to get anything else that needs painting for the next half-decade minimum.

Except for the Star Trek Adventures game, once the miniatures start coming out. Those I can get. I mean, it's Star Trek. How could I not get them?

Next up will be to prioritze some of what I've got to paint. Some of those found minis would be useful in Walking Dead/Batman boardscape I'm constructing in the background. Cops, for example. I found batches of police from 3 companies - and who can't use more police in the world I'm creating? Nobody, that's who.

Permalink gaming miniatures hobbies