Now in Colour

A productive morning of drybrushing

Plastered and First paint

Things are likely to get a bit more wordy and a bit less pictorial as I am now back at work ( that assumes I can convince the IT support chaps to remove my own blog from the blocked list) . Thus a few days have gone past since last update .
The boards have had a couple of coats of plaster for texture and filling and their first coat of paint has been slapped on . They were still wet as I photographed them thus the extra shiny look .
I have also included some more pictures of the cacti with black scorpion cowboys for scale as requested .

Next up a word about try something new month.

Ready for texture

Okay between family commitments and bank holidays have managed to get all the carving and sanding done .
Have also put in the woodwork and building bases .
Next will be plastering and base textures .
One of the things I love about projects like this is how the morph and alter as you do them ,

you'll notice the addition of a bit of cliff face to one end .

Just a little bit of sanding and carving this morning
Added in some of the paved road that will be very overgrown when finished.

Just a quick update
due to the timely arrival of Johnny Hawkwind with some blue foam
have got the base ground layers done and a few of the higher levels
also started carving .

 This is a rough idea of the ruined settlement

Whilst the Blue Foam structure is drying on the MDF base boards I thought I'd start on the Horticulture .
These Cacti are from a Scene-o-rama set by Woodland Scenics that Rob picked up for me from Hobbycraft .

Malifaux Scenery

WE are planning on running some try something new sessions at our local Club . One of the games we are going to promote is Malifaux so I am going to build a purpose made 3 by 3 table to give the demos a real punch .
This is a re-animated project that I started about a year ago having only built one tile of the nine .It will be called "The road to Latigo" , Latigo is the home of the Ortegas who are my primary gang and top notch guild enforcers .This is the plan

And work so far

Cutlass - A first Impression

                     Last night at 4TK we played our first couple of games of Cutlass by Black Scorpion . The basic premise of the game is a pirate skirmish game with an ongoing campaign system . Having always enjoyed Mordheim the chance to play something similar but with pirates was not one I could avoid . Alongside the more "normal" human pirates , privateers and Royal Navy the game allows for dwarves, elves, undead and orcs (including a cracking giant) so there is a good range of options to suit everyone .
                        Our games last night were just a trial of the rules system and we didn't go into the campaign rules as we wanted to get to grip with the basic mechanics first of all . I have to say that the mechanics were quite different from the usual run of the mill stuff but really rather excellent . Now assuming we had got it right (and given the experience of the players , somewhere in the region of 90 years between the 3 of us, I think we did) the first interesting element was the action point system .
                        Both forces roll for their action points at the start of each turn and the highest scorer becomes the active player , they then spend their points and keeping activating models until the opposing player can interrupt , they decide to pass or they run out of points . Each action point that is spent allows the player to do a single action (move or shoot or fight etc.) with the number of models indicated by the number of remaining action points ie. if a player has 8 action points and spends his first point on a move then he can move 8 models if he then uses an action point to shoot then he can shoot with 7 models and so on .When an opponent finds that he is in a situation to interrupt he must spend an action point  but only gets a chance to activate the interrupting model despite the number of remaining action points . This means that the spending of action points in itself is a very tactical decision and can lead to some excellent and difficult choices.
                           The core combat mechanic was another excellent surprise and very intuitive when shooting fighting and damaging the players dice against each other ( a system similar to one we used in Rezolution ) which keeps all the players in the game all the time . A models stat line is given as a series of dice ranging from D4 to D20 and is effected by various conditions that either raise or lower the dice used according to whether they are beneficial or detrimental , ie. if a model was shooting it would be using its accuracy dice lets say  a D8 and its opponent would roll its dexterity dice a D6 for example , the shooters dice would get reduced to a D6 as his target is behind cover and the target may be injured and thus his dice would be reduced to a D4. these dice are then rolled and the defenders is taken away from the attackers and the charts in the book are checked to see the effects . These rolls are open ended so if the highest roll is scored on the dice then another  similar dice is rolled and it's  score is added to the result . This system is used throughout and makes it very quick to pick up and easy to judge what needs rolling .
                                        All in all we found the system very playable and enjoyable with a sound set of core mechanics that led to some excellent tactical decision making and fast play with plenty of mayhem and unexpected results.

Navy Lark

As promised better photos of the Navy Figures I picked up at Salute.
All told took me about 12 hours of painting and quite happy with the results.

Also Played our first couple of games of Cutlass tonight but will do a proper review in the morning.

Done

Finished with 10 minutes to spare .
I'll do a proper post and better photos when I get back from club.
They should of been blooded by then as well .

Painting Finished just the varnish and bases to do

All the Clothes done other than red ( need to be properly awake for that)
All Flesh done
Just detailing and basing to do tomorrow

So Far

Not much done so far
a few base colors and thats it

The Challenge Begins

And thus we get to the meat of the blog.
The first of the Salute purchases to hit the table.
A set of Royal Navy figures for Black Scorpion's new
Cutlass game . Which we're playing at club on Tuesday .

In the background you can just about see the Buildings I picked up for VBCW from Warbases .

Salute 2011

A few photos from Salute 2011
sorry aboout quality but I'm not so good with a Camera