Rocks and buildings.

I finished some more terrain today. Mainly I just tried to seal the flock with a matt spray, which seems to have only half worked.

These buildings are punted up Sky TV connectors or something. Looks like you plug a normal Ethernet cable into these then into the wall? Not sure, don't care. I stuck a door in and am proud of what they have become.

New Starport Scum Characters

Meet Flint Church and friends. We may remember Flint from his time working bounties with Rhoro Tharik. Having been raised on a smuggling vessel, Flint spent much of his youth involved with that business, broke away to become an independent smuggler at 18, met Rhoro a few years after that and joined his crew. Then, having gone through that adventure, and having lost good friends along the way, he decided to settle down and start a family, using skills picked up from living on a ship to become a mechanic at a Sunspoke Mining colony. 

He is the NOT Malcolm Reynolds figure, second from the left.

The other figures are people he will meet along the way, some working at Sunspoke, others from other avenues.

Above we see a pair of hunters who make a living exploring new worlds for various corporations and governments. Skilled at survival, they have seen things and have some stories to tell.

Castle of Burgundy

Today my brother in law came over to play games. We have painted miniatures together on occasion, really got into Marvel Dice Masters together, and are now occasional boardgame buddies. He is 15. 

He got Castles of Burgundy for Christmas back in 2015 and never played it. My board gaming time has been replaced mostly by either work, playing with my daughters, spending time with my wife or painting/terrain building, then the occasional dabble of PC gaming (I am updating Starcraft 2 with about 4 years worth of patches right now).

Now I am not exactly well versed in the board game jargon these days, but I believe it is a "Euro-game". The idea is you earn victory points by building the best estate (I assume in Burgundy). You can add fields, buildings, river trade, and "knowledge" upgrades. The theme is quite cool, and different from my normal Sci Fi tipple, but I absolutely love the aspect of building an estate. I genuinely think that is my favourite type of board game. Build an estate/empire/space station/nation.

It took about 2 hours to play, but we were learning as we went. Next time we will get the game done in under an hour. I won't do a review as such, but playing today has rekindled my desire to game more with real people. I need to put more feelers out there to try and get a monthly get together organised, even if it has to be at my house. I am sick of playing solo, even though it allows me to play some pretty cool narrative based stuff.

I ran a youth camp from Wednesday to Friday. There were only a handful of lads on camp so when thinking of what we could get up to in addition to compass, map, knot tying skills. I decided I would bring some model making stuff, and my 6mm Horizon Wars forces. It turned out to be a great hit!

However, disaster struck on the first night when it was discovered that the marquee was not as water proof as I thought. My dice tray, after a couple of years service now needs to be replaced due to water damage.

I brought some yogurt pots, dunker tubs and bark. They all decided to build those tower/gun turret bases, for which I was too lazy to make rules.

Having sprayed them, I decided to just throw them down on the table and have a game. Each team had 3 infantry elements, two cavalry elements and a mech. I made the stats up as I forgot the rule book and they had a blast. First blood came quite quickly, but in the end after about 90 minutes we had to pack away our tents and the momentum was lost. The blue team won with 5VP against the green/orange team's 2VP.

I reckon I have come converts though.

NCU Force for Horizon Wars

"Join us in Paradise or we'll send you to Hell"

With a strap line like that, it is no wonder the Neo Christian Union took their followers and retreated to fringe space. Whether to avoid persecution or because their extreme views are unwelcome to many civilised people across known space, it was decided to colonise a system of planets out of the way. God willed it.

That was a long time ago. The Paradise system became something of a Bermuda triangle and was to be avoided. In recent decades, however, NCU Missionary Forces have been spotted pushing further out of the Paradise system. Missionary outposts have been found on a number of planets nearby including New Charon. 

New Charon had, however, already been settled by the Freehold, a commune of quasi religious folk who felt by escaping the central systems they could keep themselves clean of the evils of cybernetic human "enhancement". 

Below we have a typical Missionary force, bringing the light of Truth to the heathens.

Mechs are Iron Wind Metals, infantry are Brigade, light cavalry are GZG.

Bark Rock formations

I have had these pieces of bark for nigh on a year now, liberated from a play area. They have sat in a sandwich bag, annoying my wife for ages. With the summer here I finally got around to experimenting with them. In fact, a bigger factor in me finally doing this is my basing material: floor tiles from Poundland. Now I have these and see them working, I will probably be putting together a lot more terrain.

I have seen some amazing rock formations in my time, but wanted to try myself. Any comments are welcome. How could I improve them?

Crimson Skulls and new terrain.

Here we see the Crimson Skulls on a fairly innocuous job, looking for a research team that went missing while determining the potential worth of these crystal deposits.

The crystals were liberated from a local venue that had purple, shiny gravel. The bases are floor tiles from Poundland (pack of four), textured with Vallejo texture paste. Just a few more things to throw down on a planet surface.