Great XLBS
I love the Viking TV series and I’m about as far into the series as Warren. Really enjoying it. This has also sparked a resurgence in interest in Saga and I have finally painted up 2 4pt armies and played my first game this week.
Watch Black Sails. It is amazing, bit saucy in the early episodes 🙂 , but the action is great and the plot is intriguing. I am really looking forward to Frostgrave Ghost Archipelago and hope that North Star create a Pirate crew plastic box set.
Ben – The snow bases. Try some dirty snow. Mix a small amount of brown earth / forest floor scatter into your snow flock. You get the well-trodden snowy path look rather than virgin fresh snow. Also, some brighter green tufts on a small muddy piece of base will give you colour and not look out of place.
Hobby Night Live – yes please. I attended the Hobby weekend and really liked the opportunity to focus on a project. I still haven’t finished my army, because I was late getting my army dipped during the weekend. Once complete, which should only take a short while; I must get a pic of my finished army shared on Lloyd’s forum. Also need to send to Army Painter to get the money off voucher that they offered. 🙂 I will start painting my spot prize miniatures soon but feel the pressure not to waste the opportunity to do a nice job with an exclusive miniature. Thursday night sounds fine to hold the live night.
If we have another Hobby weekend I think you might want to set it around some methods of painting rather than a particular game. I think the last hobby weekend worked because we were being taught a technique, rather than being especially eager to play the new game. I don’t have an airbrush, but can see that using airbrushes might make a good focal point for a hobby weekend.
Then again, perhaps a game like Frostgrave where you only need to paint a 10 man crew and a few encounter table bad guys would be a cool basis for the weekend. I know that the tables are very terrain hungry for Frostgrave, but teaching attendees how to successfully use Hirst Arts moulds would be a cool element. Maybe getting to use the cast pieces on the last day as part of the tables.
Rules and too many games – No one says you have to buy them, but it does feel like there are so many new options that finding opponents for a game can be harder. You do get the extreme of some groups only playing 40K or only AoS for months on end, but the other extreme of playing too many different games doesn’t help either. You want to get your money’s worth by playing plenty of games of your latest purchase, but your friends have already moved onto the next big thing.
Rules wise, my favourite game of last year was The Walking Dead. So simple and yet every game I end up at a moment where I have to make an important tactical decision that really taxes me. Deep enough to keep coming back to it, but light enough to be easy to explain to new players. The industry sees the need for new blood and the consensus seems to be that simple low hobby intensive games will attract them. It doesn’t feel that the older, bigger games are being abandoned though. Thankfully. It feels as though the bite size games are just a vehicle to get you to commit to bigger miniature count and more hobby intensive games. They don’t seem to have their head in the sand though, because the games that stand out as bloated (by even their biggest fans) are getting their new versions to make the leap to the cash cow games easier.