As the Sun Rises!

Here's some shots of a game I had with Ben of Empire's Comic Vault in Sacramento.  Tau vs. Space Wolves at 1750.  Believe it or not: in all the years I've been playing this was my first game facing Space Wolves.  Yeah, I play Tau.  I've been playing them since late 4th edition and have seen the army change quite a bit. Any how, some particulars about our game:

Dawn of War, Big Guns Never Tire with three objective and Tau taking the initiative (I've been unusually lucky with this over the last dozen or so games).  Being a fan of random chance, I suggested we randomly place the objectives adjusting their locations per the rules.  The board I made for Ben is a three-part modular design, so a D3 to determine the section the marker lands in then another D3 to locate its final position.

The Tau reserved a Monat Twin liked Fusion Blaster suit and the Wolves reserved their Landspeeders and Scouts.

The Rune Priest and Predator were the main targets for the Braodsides and Hammerheads while the Suits and Devilfish worked on the tactical squads.  The Wolves, for their part, weathered quite a storm of rail fire and ultimately claimed victory.  In all a very fun game!

As I play more games, and become more familiar with the rules, I plan to start reporting more detailed battle reports.  

Multiplayer Mayhem at Empire's Comic Vault

Here's some photos taken of the carnage. The points were a thousand each. Cliff played Space Marines, Ben played Tyranids and I played Tau. The mission was The Relic. All I'll say is that by turn four Ben's Tervagon had sprouted quite a bit of gaunts. Fourteen in one spawning alone!  The Crisis Suits went away by turn three as did a team of Fire Warriors.  The Marines had the objective but had the Tyranids hot on their trail.  For a thousand points, it was a fun and tactically challenging game. Next time, I plan to take notes for a better Bat Rep.

Procrastination and Inspiration

Procrastination.

It's less than a week away from Great Escape Games' Warhammer 40K Contest of Champions and I'm still getting my Blood Angels army together.  The project this afternoon was to convert the usual power plants on my Assault Marines  into Jump Packs. I had dropped the Packs back in 5th edition to score the Lazerback. Now that tanks have a slightly more difficult time in combat and troops become even more important, I decided to grow the Assault teams 10 deep putting Jump Packs on one and the other ride the Stormraven.  Thing is, where I am, Jump Packs are direct order only...soooo I can either wait two weeks for my Local Friendly Games Shop to get them in...or wait about the same time for GW.  Nah...I decided to just convert them.

Here's a few photos with some pretty basic but important tips when doing something like this. First off,  use a razor saw with a miter whenever you can and be sure to sand off the burs before replacing the stock back in the miter for the next cut.  If you don't, there's a decent chance that the material will lift a bit at the burr causing your cut to be less than perpendicular. At least for this project, everything needed to be consistent and accurate.

See what I'm talking about.  This makes a big difference when you're working at milometers.

Once all the vector thrusters were cut...

...it was time to mark off and cut the intakes.  This didn't take all that long but I did cut extras just in case.

Now that the main form of the Jump Pack was coming together, I went in to some details like the exhaust nozzels shown above and the bit of shielding shown below.  Here's another tip: layout the bits you need to cut so that the cuts can be repeated comfortably and consistently. Here I laid out the shielding so that the last cut would be the one that frees all the pieces at once.

These next two shots show the models with their packs. If you click the images, they'll open up a larger version for better viewing.  You'll notice several other steps that went into rounding out the effect but I figure these are self explanatory.  The main tip here is to make sure that whatever conversion you plan to do on a multi-model scale, you should make sure it's easily repeatable which also means making sure you can gather all the elements you used the first time around.

Of course, I did paint these but figure I'll let you see the final results when I post the display board I'm making for the army.

Enjoy!

So...what's going on?!?!

My brother and I have been playing a few games a month now for about 5 months under the 5th edition rules. In that time, we have taken enough photos of the games to pretty much compose a story board of mayhem, destruction and all kinds of fun!

So, coming soon: PHOTOS!!