Mixed Signals

Straight-forward gaming

I'm re-reading the Horus Heresy in preparation to start the sub-series Siege of Terra, and this is my review of Heralds of the Siege , book 52 in the series. Heralds of the Siege is an anthology, consisting of several short stories, and I'm going to review each one. The Grey Raven is the sec...

I know what you're thinking. You're asking yourself "Why is this Ironstrider Ballistarii from the year 40,000 CE fighting Roman soldiers in 44 CE?"

An robotic war engine in battle with Roman pilus cavalry.

Is it a simple matter of a misplaced decimal point? Time travel? A cloned Earth stuck in the past, like System 892 in Star Trek original series? Or...

I'm re-reading the Horus Heresy in preparation to start the sub-series Siege of Terra, and this is my review of Heralds of the Siege , book 52 in the series. Heralds of the Siege is an anthology, consisting of several short stories, and I'm going to review each one. Myriad is the first short...

In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the Genestealer Cult is a forbidden religious body of humans that worship aliens. And not just any alien. They worship the evil human-eating, legally-distinct [not] xenomorphs, the Tyranids. At first, I viewed them as a sort of an unexciting mishmash of Chaos Cu...

I like to be able to build characters for a tabletop roleplaying game quickly. A fast build is useful for a player when you're planning a short one-shot session and don't want to spend half of that session on character generation. It's useful for a Game Master when you're trying to generate several...

When I started painting miniatures, I painted the models that came included in board games. Those weren't exactly high quality miniatures, but they were fun and I was just excited to have painted playing pieces. Hungry for more, I bought the Games Workshop board game Blackstone Fortress, which inc...

I'm re-reading the Horus Heresy in preparation to start the sub-series Siege of Terra, and this is my review of Slaves to Darkness , book 51 in the series. By now, the traitor legions are getting awfully close to Holy Terra, but Horus himself is mortally wounded. Again. Still.

Things look bad...

I'm a hobbyist game designer, and I love looking at games for ideas on how to improve or change them for fun.

Blackjack is a simple card game played with a standard deck of playing cards. On your turn, you may draw a card from a draw deck and put it into your hand. Should you decide to abstain fro...

Before I plucked up the courage to try painting miniatures, I basically thought it was just too hard. I have bad eyes, not terribly steady hands, and I'd never done anything with paint since watercolours in elementary school. Eventually, I gave it a go and while I don't claim to be good at it, the r...

Having just read Leman Russ: The Great Wolf of The Primarchs books from the Horus Heresy series, I thought it appropriate to continue on to the next in the series. Graham McNeill's Magnus the Red: Master of Prospero is something of an ironic title, I think, because Magnus spends some time i...

I use Contrast and Vallejo Xpress Color paints almost exclusively, and I can't think of one I'd toss aside. I've noticed, though, that there's one Contrast paint I find myself using over and over again, and for sometimes very different textures. If, for some reason, you want to buy just one Contrast...

Before I started painting miniatures, I literally thought it would be beyond my ability. I have bad eyesight, a relatively short attention span (except when I'm obsessed and have hyper-focused attention), an abundance of energy, and unsteady hands. I couldn't imagine these traits being compatible wi...

Last month, I started reading Gate of Bones, and only realised after I finished that it was book 2 in the Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of Fire series. That says a lot for how modular Warhammer books are, and I really love that about them, and because I found Gate of Bones so satisfying, I didn't inte...

I don't want to hate the Space Wolves, but The Wolftime does the faction no favours. As a novel, it's got awkward pacing, a strangely anticlimactic story, and several unlikable characters. It left me disinterested in a faction that's pretty interesting on paper. I like the idea of space vikings,...

From 2017 until 2023, I was an editor for a blog site that got 2 million unique visitors a month. Whether I liked it or not, I had to learn something about the "ideal" blog post. As with all media, blogging is received in a specific way by most of its audience. People tend to read blogs differently...

Tabletop gamers have come up with three ways to measure distance in games that feature movement as a mechanic. There's the grid of 1-inch squares, there's the grid of hexagons, and there's the ruler or measuring tape. Over the past few decades, it's emerged that square grids are used for roleplaying...