My first game was against an Imperial Guard ‘parking lot’ style army.

Notable events:

• I blew up a Chimera with a Ravager on my first turn in Dawn of War. Didn’t kill any dudes, but it was cool.
• My personal objective I selected was Assassination. His most expensive unit was a Leman Russ Plasma deal. I spent the whole game shooting at it with Dark Lances and only destroyed it on my last turn.

I did, in fact, lose. The score was 6-1.

Second game was against Tyranids. It had a Hive Tyrant, several units of Genestealers, a Tervigon, some Gaunts and a few Mycetic Spores. Fully painted, too, and it looked great!

Notable events:

• Genestealers outflank into my Warriors and destroy them. Of course, they were camping on the objective I selected for my Personal Objective.
• I tried taking back the objective with Wyches, but they eventually fell, too.
• Assaulting a Hive Tyrant with Incubi, an Archon and a Haemonculous is not that great an idea.

Lose! I think the score was 7-0 this time.

Final game was against Necrons. Two units of Warriors, Nightbringer, a Necron Lord, a Tomb Spider, small unit of Paraiahs, a Monolith and a unit of Destoryers. He had a setup where he could light up his Monolith and the Tomb Spider (which was a FW Tomb Stalker). Very cool.

Notable events:

• Assaulting Nightbringer is nigh impossible with Dark Eldar. Assaulting anything close by the Nightbringer is also impossible.
• I should have paid attention to the Phase-Out rule. I went after all the wrong things.
• My blob of Warriors ended up holding my Personal Objective in the end, preventing me from getting another total loss.

Yep…lost again. 6-1, I believe.

After all that, you’d think I’d give up on the Dark Eldar. Nope. Here are some Wyches I finished this week:

I’m working on some Incubi now. They should be finished really soon!

The formula for the armor is:

• Basecoat P3 Sanguine Base
• Edge highlight P3 Sanguine Highlight
• Edge highlight GW Warlock Purple
• Wash in recesses GW Leviathan Purple

I’ll probably do a set of 5 Wyches next to get a skin tone going.

We arrived Thursday night and picked up our pre-registered badges. those who were among the first 1,000 received a random Warmachine plastic battle box in their swag bag. I think the best thing I got in mine was the painting magazines, which it seemed everyone got.

Friday we walked around the convention area to check out all the craziness. The 40K hall was packed and I saw a number of pretty awesome army displays. I went to check out the Forgeworld booth and discovered a line nearly out of the door. Later, we went to the Warhammer Fantasy area. They also had a number of display boards that clearly took a lot of work and talent to create. eventually, Dominic and I checked in at the Privateer Press area for the Eternal War (Iron Arena?) event. We played one game against each other wherein the Circle emerged victorious. Dominic then played against a Cygnar player from Texas (I believe) where he eventually lost. The original plan was to return from dinner and play more games, but we ended up just hanging out watching MenothJohn (from Lost Hemisphere Radio) go up against a Farrow army. Sometime during that day we also went to the Games Workshop Battle Bunker. Honestly, I was not that impressed. There were tons of tables they use for their events, but the store area was just like any other LGS that carries their products.

Saturday morning was the Warmachine Team Tournament. Matt “Cheaty” Beaty was my teammate with his Retribution army lead by ravyn. We checked in around 8:15am and began round 1 near 9:30am. Game #1 was against a Circle (eKaya)/Cryx (Mortenebra) team. The only eventful thing (other than both our casters getting killed) was Matt’s Mage Hunter Assassin coming from waaaaay downtown to assassinate Mortenebra. Oh, and my mistake in having the Feral attack the now inert Deathjack. Game #2 was aganst a Cygnar (Seige)/Cryx (Deneghra) team. Matt and I came close to winning by control points, but I ended up putting Kaya out too far, which got her killed. Ravyn got done in a bit later right before the turn we probably would have gotten our 3rd control point. Game #3 was against a Skorne combo army (Xerxes and Mordikaar). This one was lost from the word “go”. I don’t think we had enough anti-infantry to deal with all of them, especially resurrecting Eviscerators and Cetrati with Defender’s Ward. I did manage to get my Shadowhorn behind his lines to throw Molik Karn back toward their deployment zone to land on the Shaman. Game #4 was against a Khador (eVlad)/Cryx (Terminus) team. There was nothing eventful here other than the Mage Hunter Assassin surviving a number of attacks from Bane Thralls. All the games were good games and our opponents were all really very cool. THough I do have to say the number of Cryx players seemed a bit high. I know a Cryx army won the Hardcore tournament the day previous. Our friends on another team won their first two, but lost the last ones. Our team’s army was at least considered for best painted, but was beaten out by a Skorne/Legion army that did look pretty good. We eventually made it over to the bits trading area where Dominic was looking for some Trollblood models for a new army and teamup with me for Gen Con. Almost immediately he found someone and he purchased some models from him. The rest of the night was pretty much discussions about the Trollblood team for Gen Con.

Sunday we all got packed up and made one last visit to the different areas of the convention. I was finally able to hit the Forgeworld booth and pick up a con-only Chaos Dwarf for a friend in Canada. We passed through the Warmachine area and watched a game being played in the Championships (I believe); eDoomshaper vs. eThagrosh. The game ended up going to time and both sides had taken heavy losses. Before leaving, we saw something I don’t think I’ve ever seen: a guy on the verge of tears apparently as a result of something that happened in one of his games. One of the Privateer Press employees was trying to calm him down and Jen, the woman who runs the Press Ganger group walked away saying she’d never seen it before either. It was all very surreal.

The ride back was uneventful other than Dominic and I talking about doing the Trollblood teamup for Gen Con. Nothing concrete was decided for my side, but he’s set on a beast-heavy list with eDoomshaper.

Anyway, here are a few pics I took. More can be found in the Gallery.

Let’s see…I played Brian a few weeks ago where he played pKreoss versus my eKaya at 35 points. It was a good game, except I think I cheated him toward the end. I had used Kaya’s feat to get up close to Kreoss with most of my army. Kreoss popped his feat, knocking all my dudes down. Kreoss and others attempted to kill Kaya, but she kept transferring damage to a Stalker until he died. Where it turns out I cheated was reaving the fury from the Stalker, giving Kaya more fury to allow more transfers of damage.

I played Mike using Kromac since I wanted to try to even the odds since I don’t know Kromac all that well. He ran pVlad along with Widowmakers, a Manhunter, Kodiak, Berserker, a Destroyer and a War Dog. Mike’s dice were against him the whole game. Tharn Ravagers held up A Kodiak most of the game and the rest of my army had Vlad on the run fairly early. I ended up winning, but I still feel the biggest contributor to his loss was his dice.

This past Tuesday I played a team game with my Adepticon teammate, Matt (Retribution), versus Dominic (Protectorate) and Greg (Khador) in a Killbox scenario. We played where the team as a whole had 15 minutes to complete their turns and played their turns individually. The problem each team had was that the first player on each team usually took up more than half the time, leaving the second player a much shorter turn. The only player to lose their caster was Matt since he used Rayvn(?) to wipe out the Great Bears who were on the Retribution’s front lines. Kaya only had 4 hit points left when we broke up the game as a few of us had to take off. I have a feeling that since Feora nor Irusk had taken no damage at this point, Kaya was next to kick the bucket and give them the victory.

I am really enjoying playing Hordes with my fully painted eKaya army as it relieves the tension of feeling like I need to put more work into building up the models and get painting done. I’ll probably assemble and paint my Argus and War Wolf at the very least since they were birthday gifts from my awesome wife.

I’m still thinking on a paint scheme for them. I’m thinking that it’ll be a dark purple with some Warlock Purple-ish edge highlights. Similar to the Severed Kabal shown on GW’s site, only a lot darker.

I’ll probably pick up another unit of Warriors and an Archon model at least in the next few days.

• Played Ogres a few times in WHFB. Got beaten enough that I figured it must not be the army for me, so I sold/traded them for High Elves.
• Played a game or three of WHFB with the High Elves at one of the Circle City Circuit tournaments and felt pretty good about how they play, though I did get trounced most of the time.
• Won a painting contest at Circle City Circuit #2 with a Ultraforge Treewoman. There were only two other entries, though.
• Painted a High Elf Battle Standard Bearer to very high standard for the Scibor Painting Contest. I also entered Pandora, Candy and my Lord of the Feast. Pandora was chosen for the final voting.
• Assembled and painted more than 50 points of Hordes Circle Orboros for my eKaya army.
• Played in a Warmachine invitational tournament where I won game 1 and lost the other two rounds.  No worries, though. I got to hang out with some good friends and talk about painting with some folks.
• Started playing Warhammer 40,000 again since Games To Die For is running a 40K league starting at 600 points. I bought into Dark Eldar. Played my first three games and ended up winning just one against Imperial Guard.
• Bought a Wacom Intuos4 Medium tablet and Painter 11 with which I’ve done some practice drawings. They didn’t turn out as well as I hoped.
• I’m currently taking a Life Drawing class at Ivy Tech to try and improve my drawing skills.
• Sold/traded a lot of the smaller miniatures games and CCGs in lieu of those I can find opponents (and models) for. I’m still working on dropping Infinity and Malifaux. I also unloaded a bunch of roleplaying books to clean up stuff I know I’ll likely never use. I’m keeping Pulp City and MERCS for now.

I guess that’s not all that much for almost 8 months.

In the near future I hope to post some pictures of the models I’ve painted and maybe some digital/traditional art I have done.

Of course, I went to Gen Con a couple of weeks ago. The convention was awesome as always. Fred and I hung out a lot together playing HeroClix. I played in a pre-release event for the next set, Web of Spider-Man, which was cool since Spider-Man has been my favorite comic since I was a kid. I saw a lot of people I hadn’t seen in a while at the convention, though regrettably, I didn’t spend much time with them. I ran several Pulp City demo events like I did in 2009. This year I added on a tournament and a scenario event where Ulthars are invading the city. This was Maciej’s idea. We only had 6 people for the tournament, which was 4 less than the tickets we sold, but it still went well. I think everyone had fun.

For the most part, since Gen Con the main focus of my time has been on assembling the Pulp City miniatures Maciej has been so kind as to provide me with for my work at Gen Con. I have a total of 26 to assemble, with 8 left to go.

Several of us in the area bought into MERCS, so I have assembled the five models I bought at the convention. Joel has been reading up on the rules and I hope to try this game out soon.

I’ve been on a big superhero-gaming kick lately. Fred and I have discussed playing a Savage Worlds game using the Super Powers Companion. I bought a setting book from 1st edition Mutants and Masterminds to use as the backdrop. Should I fin a time and place to run this, I think it’ll be a blast!

I’ve also been working on promoting Pulp City more in the area. I did a demo game with Bryan and his girls last Sunday and come September 12th, I’ll be running another demo event. The latter will be run much like the Ulthar event at Gen Con, though not all the minis will be painted, unfortunately. I still think it’ll be fun.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. I hope to get some pictures posted and maybe a battle report or two for stuff I’ve been playing.

Anyway…this game was my second for the Blasted Heath league. I won a 4 player King of the Hill game the previous week against Joel, Cory and Jim.

I won the roll, so I had him deploy first. His army looked something like this:

• Adeptis Rahn Shyeel
• Phoenix
• Dawnguard Sentinels (Leader and 9 Grunts)
• Dawnguard Sentinel Officer & Standard
• House Shyeel Battle Mages (Leader and 5 Grunts)
• Mage Hunter Strikeforce (Leader and 5 Grunts)
• Mage Hunter Commander
• Arcanist
• House Shyeel Magister
• Mage Hunter Assassin
• Narn, Mage Hunter of Ios

The board had two forests on either side of a river crossing the middle of the board horizontally and two hills on either side as well.

Phoenix was all the way to my right, then the Sentinels front and center, behind them were the Battle Mages, Arcanist, and Magister. To their left was Narn and the Assassin followed by the Mage Hunters. Of course, the Advance Deploy stuff was further forward.

My list looked like this:

• Kaya the Moonhunter & Laris
• Gorax
• Feral Warpwolf
• Pureblood Warpwolf
• Druids of Orboros (Leader and 5 Grunts)
• Druid of Orboros Overseer
• Shifting Stones
• Swamp Gobber Bellows Crew (Leader and 1 Grunt)
• Lord of the Feast

I fear the Mage Hunters because I thought they could get around my stealthy tricks and forests (the latter turned out to be correct, but not the former), so I deployed most of my stuff (Kaya, Laris, Shifting Stones, Pureblood, Feral, Gorax and Swamp Gobbers) in or near a forest in my left corner. The Druids and Lord deployed in the forest on my far right.

Per the usual, I don’t remember what happened each turn (maybe I need to bring a notebook or something), so I’ll just go over the highlights. In the early parts of the game, the Assassin owned the Lord of the Feast without him having done anything. Narn cleaned house for most of the game, finishing off a Gorax and eventually (spoiler alert!), epic Kaya. At one point, Kaya made three separate attacks against the Magister, needing only 7s and rolled no better than 5. This was the theme of most of my die rolls in this game, except later in the game when the Feral Warpwolf trampled through some infantry to reach Rahn. All the free strikes against him missed thanks to Forced Evolution. He made two boosted attack rolls and didn’t boost damage, missing killing Rahn by 2 points. Kaya then fell the following turn after being chased around the previous turns by Narn and a few other models.

Cory ended up winning the game, and what an awesome game it was! It was a very close game in the end, but I still feel he had me on the ropes pretty early with Narn and the Assassin running around killing my models. Cory is a really good player who is not too competitive, but competitive enough to kick your ass when it counts.

Brian and I decided to play a 35-point refresher game (for him) with his brand new Menoth models. I changed my list up just a tad by bringing the Great Bears of Gallowswood and resisted the urge to bring the Behemoth instead of the Destroyer (and some other things).

His list:

My list:

We rolled off for terrain deployment and rolled off for who went first. I decided to have Brian go first.

First turn was just him moving his models forward. Templar was to my far left, next to the Bastions. The Deliverers and Feora were to the right of them, with Feora taking shelter partially behind the Bastions and Deliverers. The Daughters moved behind a high wall in the center of the table and were mostly out of line-of-sight, but across half the board. The Vanquisher and both Paladins of the Order of the Wall were on the right. The Deliverers tried to fire a few shots into my group and managed o kill a Widowmaker. Feora put up the wall of fire in the center in front of the Bastions. My turn, I moved everything forward, paying special attention to where the Daughters were. I moved the IFP forward, but did not use the “mini-feat” and placed the Old Witch in their midst to prevent the Daughters from getting in contact with her. Of course, I cast Iron Flesh on the IFP, as always. Widowmakers took a few pot-shots at the Deliverers and might have been in range of and killed one. The destroyer tried to shoot a Paladin and deviated into the Vanquisher, which took no damage. The other models merely moved forward.

Second turn, again most of his models just moved forward. The Daughters charged the one Widowmaker on the edge of the woods and did not kill her. Deliverers took a few shots and managed to do some damage to the Kodiak. The wall of fire was placed in front of my Manhunter and Great Bears, protecting the Bastions. In my turn the Manhunter tried charging through the wall of Fire to get to a Bastion, but caught on fire and died. Man, POW 12 hurts!! The Great Bears charged the Templar, barely missing the wall themselves. The two that got in contact did a lot of damage, taking out the cortex and nearly removing the right arm. The Widowmakers took a few shots at the Templar and finished off the arm. The Destroyer tried again to damage the Paladins and failed. The Kodaik trampled the lone Widowmaker in contact with the Daughters and a few of their number, only managing to kill the Widowmaker. The IFP charged the Daughters, killing only one of them. The IFP officer ordered the Defensive Formation and had a few members engage the Vanquisher and place all of them in Shield Wall. Scrapjack moved around to the right of this setup to get lined up with the Deliverers.

Third turn the Bastions charge the Kodiak and attack one of the Great Bears. The Kodiak gets hurt pretty badly, but the Great Bear survives. Paladins charge the Destroyer and one does a whopping 15 points of damage and the other does 10! Daughters leave combat with the IFP to engage The Old Witch. They do little to no damage. Feora attempts to burn all the IFP in front of the Vanquisher to get him disengaged by the IFP, but manages to kill all but one of them. Feora pops her feat, setting all but two Great Bears and The Old Witch on fire. I think the Deliverers fired into the Widowmakers, killing all of them. On my turn, I rolled for all my Fire continuous effects, thinking I was going to lose a lot on this. In the end, I lost three IFP and one of the Great Bears took a point or two of damage. Scrapjack charged into the Deliverers and killed one or two of them to clear a spot for Old Witch. Old Witch uses Unseen Path to teleport next to Scrapjack and attacks Feora with a boosted attack roll that hits. Boosted damage only does 3 points. I figured my goose was cooked at this point. Old Witch’s second attack is boosted to hit and does. Boosted damage rolls TRIPLE SIXES to barely finish Feora! Holy moly! How epic!!

I kinda felt bad beating Brian in a refresher game, but he was cool with it. As always, Brian is a great opponent and Warmachine is over and over, proving to be a great game!