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,...
Once you learn the rules to Warhammer 40,000, you're in for a nasty surprise. To play the game, you also have to learn the rules for your army. You need to know your army special rules, you need to know your warlord's enhancements, detachment stratagems, unit and character abilities, plus the core...
For me, the Blackstone Fortress and Cursed City releases of the Warhammer Quest boxed game from Games Workshop are practically perfect games. They're extremely replayable, but they're board games and are, appropriately, bound to their boards. They each tell a specific story. Blackstone Fortr...
I'm playing a historical fiction campaign about Gaius Avidius Cassius's attempt to appoint himself Emperor of Rome from his seat in Egypt, and Aurelius's fight to stop him. The plot is based on the historical events of 175 CE, but the battles never happened due to Cassius's assassination, and my Egy...
The facts are these: in 175 CE, Gaius Avidius Cassius, a Syrian Roman general stationed in Egypt, declared himself Emperor of Rome. The problem was, Marcus Aurelius was already the Emperor of Rome and had been for years. It seems there was some miscommunication (or subterfuge, we're not sure which)...
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?"
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
There's a good argument that when you play a wargame, you're the General of your army. You have a seemingly god's-eye-view of the whole battlefield because you're getting constant updates from your soldiers on the ground. And yet, for me, I tend to willingly fall back on RPG tropes like "but my char...
Browsing through the local second-hand market, I came across a rare game book called Magnamund Companion. This 100 page soft cover book was sort of a setting guide for Joe Dever's Lone Wolf RPG series. Now that I own a copy, I've read it from cover to cover, and this is my review.
Lone Wolf i...
I'm still new to the hobby, but by now I've painted over two hundred miniatures from 2 cm tall to 20 cm. I've made lots of mistakes but I've learned to avoid some and fix others. And yet I still experience a little trepidation when faced with a new miniature. I guess it's that paralysis you hear a...
Snarling Badger recently released Deth Wizards, a skirmish wargame in which you play a necromancer and undead minions. I've enjoyed Snarling Badger products so far, and I like the idea of playing a necromancer with a little team of wights and wraiths and zombies. I bought the physical book and th...
I remember when I first learned about washes. It was a Youtube video demonstrating a dip wash, where you take your entire painted miniature and just dip it into a tin of watery paint, shake it off, and let it dry. I wasn't painting miniatures yet, myself, but it made an impression on me, because the...