Here's the thing. I bought the Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness boxed set because it has a bunch of Mk VI (beaky) space marines in it. Originally, I'd intended only to use those models with 10th Edition rules, but the Age of Darkness box comes with a 400 page rulebook in it, and I'm nothing if not...
I've been playing Mansions of Madness a lot lately, which is a game I love but also one that inspires a lot of thought about strategy and roleplay. In a tabletop roleplaying game, like Tales of the Valiant or Pathfinder or Shadowrun, you often make up a strategy based on how you think your...
I've been running a Tomb of Annihilation campaign for about a year now, and I can't honestly say it's been quite as nice as running a good module like Expedition to Castle Ravenloft or Rise of the Runelords. It's my fault, because Tomb of Annihilation is actually a sandbox. I understand the...
When the video game Banner Saga came out, one of the exciting things about it was that its sprites were all hand-drawn. From screenshots and game play footage, it looked like you'd be playing a Ralph Bakshi movie or a good Saturday morning cartoon. That seemed really cool to me, and so I bought th...
I'm reading The Hobbit again, as I live-action roleplay as a Tolkien scholar in an attempt to understand Middle Earth, its lore, and its effect on modern gaming. I'm reviewing each chapter of the book as I read, and this is my review of Chapter 6: Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire.
This r...
About 6 years ago, I bought a set of hero miniatures by Wizkids. They weren't the first miniatures I'd ever bought, but at the time they were the nicest, partly because they were already painted in the box (I didn't think I was capable of painting miniatures back then, and to be fair didn't really...
My 1st edition Warhammer 40,000 Kill Team is one of those books that I actually feel lucky to have purchased. I could have easily not purchased it. But I did, and I still have it, and that's good because 7 years after its release it's still one of the best introductory products into Warhammer 40,...
I have a handful of early Warhammer 40,000 Chaos Space Marine miniatures, which I purchased on TradeMe just to practise painting back when I was just starting to explore the wargaming hobby. I don't intend to play the 3rd edition of Warhammer 40,000 but nevertheless I thought it might be fun to...
We humans seem to really enjoy miniaturized versions of real world objects. We have doll houses and action figures and model trains and miniatures for gaming. I'm new to the game miniature world, and being new means I get the privilege of making a bunch of mistakes. Here's what I've learnt about the...
I recently listened to the Eye of Night audio drama, written by Gav Thorpe for the Warhammer 40,000 Black Library. It's a pretty short production, consisting of three files that total about 60 minutes in total. It's a proper audio drama, like an actual radio play, and it's a lot of fun to hear....
Visually, you can never go wrong by adding a skull or two. I don't know what it is about the insides of our own heads, but for some reason we humans think fleshless cranial bones are pretty cool. I'm no exception, and in fact I've had a tattoo of a skull on my arm for years now. Skulls are iconic an...
Like all humans, tabletop gamers sometimes make irrational choices. We do it in our games, but we also do it when choosing what game to play. I've written before about how I sometimes play a video game for its soundtrack, and I'm happy to admit that I play some tabletop games for seemingly trivial...
Monsters attack ancient Rome! Can your legionaries defeat them? I've been playing Broken Legions by Mark Latham, published by Osprey Games, and that's pretty much the premise of the game. I picked up the book because I like alternate history, and also because this seemed like an excellent excuse t...
I recently read the Warhammer 40,000 novel Ephrael Stern: The Heretic Saint by David Annandale, and this is my review of the book, with no more spoilers than you'd get from the back of the book. I picked this book up based entirely on its title (a heretic saint? How does that work??) and cool...
Armies in Warhammer 40,000 aren't meant to be static. Like the game world itself, your army is meant to be a developing force, with new recruits and veteran soldiers sharing the battlefield, learning and adapting and improving as they experience new horrors of war. To simulate that, Warhammer 40,...
Like many hobbyist game designers before me, I recently had the idea of taking photographs of beautiful fantasy-like settings, for lack of a reliable source of custom illustration, and use them in a game book. No matter how hard I tried though, I just couldn't make the photographs feel like a fantas...