Chat: Sigur’s Recap of 2018 #1

After having skipped last year’s recap I’m back to the format with a 2-parter. So what has happened this year?

The Year in Painting and Modelling

I started the year with a project of my own, for our yet-to-materialize Hordes of the Things campaign using 10mm figures (a scale quite close to my heart). I went for a fantasy Araby/1001 Nights theme for the army. The cool thing is that it allows for a TON of cool stuff to include, from Djinns to huge cannons.

Still not done, but I’m having fun working on this project. These will also work well for Warmaster due to the basing I’m using, so you’ll see those here on ToP once they’re all done. 

I’m noticing that a.) it I list everything I did this year this’ll take forever (apart from the fact that I’m sure I can’t remember them all) and b.) I’ll never ever be able to list all these in the order I worked on them, many of the projects of course overlapping. So bear with me as I babble on about things in random order as they come to my mind.

One of the big projects this year was almost all beligerents involved in the Great Northern War, all in 6mm.

Saxons

Russians

…and of course Swedes (with some GW figures for size 😛 )

Don’t worry, I also did GW things. Most of which you’ve seen already, some of which are coming up shortly:

In fact, I’ve done quite a lot of GW stuff this year. Some Space Marines, some Orks, and lots of Nurgle dudes.

…and then some more. First time I worked with the new-ish plastic Chaos cultists and I have to say that these are really nice figures. Sure, lots of copy-paste in there, but that’s OK. GW really seem to do a lot of antagonistic “small-time” factions now, which is great.

Of course, I also did a lot of Guild Ball minis again this year. Here are a few:

Another fixture of course – boardgames. As usual a bunch of Super Dungeon Explore figures…

..the Gloomhaven figures (not my favourites), and then the whole set of Nova Aetas minis:

Big, big Kickstarter boardgame. Huge minis. Like 35-38mm foot to eye. Detail sharpness and material are actually nice. So yeah, that was a rather large project.

Then of course there were the Harlequins which took a few years out of my life…

…and the finish to a quite new project for me, a 1/16th French Cuirassier:

Here’s the same figure (with plume added), next to some 28mm cavalry:

Once more, the American Civil War was a fixture in my own wargaming year:

Hopping back to Sci-Fi/Fantasy, here’s some Infinity “armies”…

…and a Malifaux warband:

The chap in the left, Francisco Ortega, has a big hat on. This hat had gone missing and after some back and forth Wyrd’s customer service was nice enough to send a replacement. This little hat went on an incredible journey (via FedEx too, for parts of it!). I think in the end it had gone to 6 different countries before it got home. If this hat could talk it would not only be fluent in a LOT of languages, but would also be able to tell quite a few stories.

Of course the new Smash Brothers game was released in December, so I had a go (just for myself as a bit of an exercise) at customizing two Gamecube gamepads:

Some larger scale figures I’ve been working on:

I’ll call him done for now. It goes without saying that while painting him I had a few reference photos of Brian Blessed at hand.

Five foot seven of Fury. Still a bit WIP. I guess I should finish her some time soon.

Another highlight, later in the year, was a few units and characters of Dwarfs I painted:

In the background you can see some terrain I prepared for the big christmas game. 

Which leads us to…

The Year in Gaming

…in which I’ll try to list all the different games I played this year. If I can remember them.

One of the big things this year was of course the beginning of our Longstreet campaign. 

Still our ACW rules set of choice for brigade level. Excellent mechanics, excellent campaign system. good fun.

Other rules sets I played for the ACW was Kugelhagel, one of the very rare German-bred sets of rules. It’s nice. I’d say it’s rather like Black Powder, but I prefer the activation system over BP’s and it works better with 28mm figures. 

Another one of my favourites which I played this year is Sharp Practice. Had quite a lot of games of this in 2018, not the least because I helped play-testing some scenarios for an upcoming supplement for this game.

Each time I played with Cpt.Shandy (of The Raft fame) and his excellent collection of 15mm ACW figures and terrain. Each time great fun. No game manages to weave a unique narrative to each game like Sharp Practice.

Late in the year I also got to try out Over Malvern Hill, a recently released set of rules in which each player has several brigades at their disposal.

Solid, solid set of rules. No gimmicks, nothing really new there, but they work really well. Recommended. 

I got to try the new Middle-Earth Strategy Game as well.

Yup, the rules work well. Made me look through the box of LotR figures I have lying around. So maybe more on this in the following weeks.

One of the hottest releases of the year of course was What a Tanker!. We tried it out right after release and it’s brilliant. Each player plays usually one tank, or more than one. I think it works best as a multi-player game. It can easily handle say 8 players and even more, so you could have two full platoons of tanks run up against each other.

It’s fast, it’s fun, it’s quickly explained, it has just enough friction built in and a very nice and simple campaign system on top. It’s a perfect smaller game in between ‘proper big ones’ or a game to finish off game night. Also works great for demo games at shows.

Quite probably my favourite game of the year was our Christmas game of Advanced Song of Blades and Heroes:

You always hear about these cool christmas games some clubs do, and this year we wanted to do something like this as well. So I temporarily winterized my fantasy/medieval village terrain, Painted a handful of fitting miniatures (my mate Virago did the same), and we had at it.

Cpt.Shandy and I played a warband of nasty Dark Elves, led by an even nastier green Troll, the Greentch. The night before christmas they were out to steal everybody’s presents. The Christmas Guardians (Elves and Gnomes), played by Virago and his daughters, tried to stop them to save Christmas for the villagers.

Brilliant game, just a good time. During the game I caught myself thinking “well, this is nice.”.

Honourable mentions go to the following boardgames: Commands&Colors (because it’s bloody brilliant), X-Com:The Boardgame (because it’s fun and different), Maria (because it’s great), and Inis (because it’s tense and fun).

For a recap of shows I’ve been to, terrain and plans for 2019, check out part 2 of my recap of 2018!