August Recap

I really should have written this before the NOVA Open, everything is a bit fuzzy now.  Anyway, fairly decent month of gaming for August.  As part of running the Konflikt 47 league, I managed to play two games at the monthly point level of 500 pts.  I also showed a new player Bolt Action with a small 500 pt game.

The rest of the month was pretty much consumed with painting.  From recent posts, you can see I knocked out a Firefly Jump Infantry squad for Konflikt 47, 2 new cars for Gaslands and a few Guild Ball Mason models.  I technically achieved my goals of having Guild Ball and Konflikt painted up for the NOVA Open, but with very limited selections for both.  Still, a win is a win.

Moving on to the NOVA Open, I'll go ahead and include that in this post while it is fresh in my mind.  Returning to the NOVA Open after a multi-year absence was pretty good.  It was really good to see many familiar faces and spend time with some great people.

Thursday was a pretty slow day for me.  I was registered to play in the Konflikt 47 tournament but multiple factors convinced me to bail on it.  I spent most of the day just wondering around and catching up with people.  For my taste and interest, the vendor hall did not offer much of a distraction and I ended the convention only spending $40 on the new Warlord US Infantry box (different sculpts that, hopefully, will help me get over the hump of not wanting to paint any more infantry units).  Mostly though, I just harassed my buddy John from the 40k Hobby blog.  This included Dave Taylor and I jumping into the photo shoot for John's amazing titan that was part of the charity auction.

Shamelessly stolen photo.

Friday I was scheduled for a Falconer's flight for Guild Ball, but again I let multiple factors convince me to bail on it.  Mostly because I am not sure I completely like Guild Ball and did not want to suffer through multiple rounds of it.  Instead, John's buddy Brian left a beautiful 4x4 terrain board in the dedicated hobby area that only had basic priming done to it.  He had hoped to have it completely finished by Sunday for a game, so John and I decided to surprise him while he was downstairs playing 30k.

On the left is basically what we started with, the right is
what we got done Friday in about 6 hours.

While we did have an airbrush to paint the crashed ship, our other
"tools" were pretty limited.

Aside from the ship and the scattered structures, this was
pretty much the definition of "finger" painting.

We rounded out Friday night with Brian buying us an awesome dinner for all of our work.  Later we managed to find a secluded corner of the hotel bar and were joined by several more awesome people.

Saturday saw the arrival of my wife and kids early that morning (their Friday night flight having been cancelled).  I met them at the nearby airport and helped them get the rental car loaded up and squared away, before being dropped back off at the hotel for my first event I would actually attend:  A seminar by Vince Venturella.  I've never taken a class with Vince but turns out he does a really nice job with his classes and, much like his "Hobby Cheating" series on YouTube, focused very precisely on the seminar topic of Battle Damage.  Having taken other vehicle based weathering classes this class was a very good compliment (for me) focusing on smaller scale damage (such as space marines).  Vince does a great job with his classes and I'm glad I took this one.

Saturday night was a Wrath of Kings narrative event I had signed up for.  It was 3 vs 3 player game, having the Hadross defending their home from a multi-faction invasion hell bent on stealing Hadross's latest genetic manipulation feat.  I played as one of the 3 Hadross players who successfully fended off werewolves, celestial animals, and mask wearing demon women.

Another shameless stolen photo.

It was a fun game on a beautiful board.  The scenario ended up being a little lopsided for the other team, even as we made adjustments on the fly to let them bring reinforcements back on.  Still though, I think everyone ended up having a good time.  Along with my 2 teammates, I walked away with WoK two player starter box.  The event reminded me of just how great of a game Wrath of Kings is,  to bad it appears CMON is letting it atrophy and die a slow death.  I wrapped up the evening talking with Todd, from the weekly hobby hangout, while he waited for his dinner and ate.

That pretty much wrapped up the NOVA Open for me.  While I did not fly back till late Monday afternoon, the conclusion of Saturday night had me back on family duty.  Sunday morning we met our close friends and their kids at the national zoo and had fun catching up.  That night, I just hung out with Alex while the girls went to the spa.

Anyway, that's it with August and with the NOVA Open behind me time to move on to:  more K47 stuff, more BA stuff, wrapping odds-n-ends up, and new projects.

January Recap

Been a little quiet on the blog, so I thought I would post a quick update recapping January.  I'm not sure a monthly recap is going to be a regular thing or not, I had actually planned to post most of this as more individual updates but never got around to it.  We will see...

On the "hobbying" front I have managed to get in a little bit of modelling every week.  No actual painting though.  Surprisingly time consuming, I did get my Malifaux and MERCS models transitioned from foam storage/transport to magnetic tray storage/transport (btw, I believe MERCS second edition comes up in Feb/Mar and includes rules to use a standard tape measure instead of the card based movement - should be interesting to see).  I also got 4 new guys for my Hadross Wrath of Kings assembled and based:  I wasn't really satisfy by (game play wise) one of the specialist from the starter set, so I wanted to either try a different specialist or add another taxi crab.

(The loner off to the side of the group was actually assembled last year)

I have also gotten 4 games of Guild Ball in over the month with Mike over at Mini Mayhem.  I continue to be impressed with the game.  So far Mike and I have only gotten 1 game in at the full team and table size (without terrain).  I'm holding off a post with more thoughts on the game until I get a few more under my belt.

I've gotten a little more connected into the Kings of War and (separate) Malifaux communities.  It has been a little hard but I think I'm starting to unravel the fractured gaming community here.  We will see.  I would really like to get out to one of the weekly Malifaux nights that has been re-established to show support but so far I just haven't been able to juggle it into the mix.  Hopefully soon.  There have been some rumblings about Frostgrave too, so I picked up the rules for that but haven't digested them yet.  It really looks like I am going to have to bite the bullet and get into Facebook though to help integrate into the gaming community down here.  *sigh*

The only other thing to note for January is I started and finished reading Caliban's War.  The second book in the Expanse series  Again, I can not believe that such frantic pacing can be maintained for the entire length of a book.  It manages to introduced some really great new characters that I hope to see again.  Hopefully this puts me far enough ahead that I can now watch the first season of the SyFy series.  For reading though, I think I am going to take a little break from this series and read something lighter, probably one of the new Star Wars books.  But then again Lois McMaster Bujold has a new book out:

This month (/next) we appear to be on course for closing and moving into a new house.  That should see the establishment of my new man cave, the return of all my tiny soldiers and my airbrush!  The harsh reality of this is that I probably wont have much actual time for hobbying for the rest of February and maybe part of March.