Hobby musings

It's been nearly a month since I managed to post anything on the blog and even before that there was quite a pause. After the painting challenge I had a massive slump in painting time and frankly didn't really get anything done the whole of April. Now with May having come in I've slowly been getting my gears turning again and minis are getting painted!

My painting station is quite a mess at the moment with tons of half finished projects in there and everything just randomly thrown in. There's a bunch of monsters for Frostgrave, loads of Flames of War stuff, some 40K chaos and yet more Epic 40k Space Marines that are all in a varying state of readiness. I really need to get my act together and start finishing stuff to clear the table as it's now in the state that it starts to feel a bit overwhelming at times! Luckily about half the Frostgrave stuff is just waiting for basing as are the Terminator units for Epic 40k (which actually have been painted for nearly a month now). I guess it's slowly getting there.

Even though I haven't been painting too much, I've actually gotten quite a few games in with multiple Flames of War games, as well as some Hail Caesar and the first games of our Frostgrave campaign. So all in all quite an active period, just not on the painting table. There was also a new event in the Finnish wargaming calendar with Porocon being held for the first time. The event featured the national championships in Magic the Gathering and also had a large 40k tournament running. My club was there to promote other aspects of miniature gaming with 3 historical games on show as well as an Infinity game. I was running Flames of War with a Market Garden scenario from Band of Brothers featuring the attack on Nuenen.

I also scored quite a nice find from the 2nd hand market there with a guy selling old Citadel stuff as well as boardgames. I bought myself a Leonardo di Miraglio mini that I'd been looking for for months already. But when I saw a Team Yankee boardgame from the 80s going for 5 euros, I couldn't help myself and had to get it. I've tested it playing against myself and it seems to be a pretty decent game even if slightly favoring the Americans. Still it's funny to throw that in when other are playing the Flames of War variant :)

I've also finally managed to go through the last pictures from our trip to UK and edited all the hundreds of pictures from Warhammer World. So stay tuned for that :) Hopefully the wait won't be as long as it was between the last couple of posts.

Salute pics

Finally had the time to go through all the pictures I'd taken during our trip to London and Nottingham. Two 8Gb memory cards full was quite a task, but at least it's finally done :) Major cause for the amount of pictures was Warhammer World, but I did shoot a few at Salute as well ;) To be honest there would have been far more pictures if I hadn't forgotten to reload the battery of my DSLR before Salute, which lead to me having to be a bit more careful when to take pics and to remember shutting the camera down immediately after pictures were taken.

All in all it was a great show, with plenty of cool things on offer. Some tables I'd seen in wargames magazines over the years and some I'd followed through various blogs during the build phase before Salute. However it was sometimes a bit business like compared to the other wargames shows that I'd visited. Plus the amount of games that were just purely played through without any real interraction with the crowd was bit of a surprise. Still great fun through the day and I'm quite sure that I will visit Salute in the future as well!

I had a quick meet up with some other bloggers at the Annual bloggers meetup. Nice to see the people behind the blogs that I've been following in the last few years. Too bad I had to leave quite soon as the missus arrived earlier than expected and I had to keep her company for the rest of the show.

Blogger meet-up. I'm hiding behind Ray. Pic stolen shamelessly from Tamsin's blog

Lots of great looking games on show and trying to go through them all really was quite a task. Funnily enough my top three tables were next to each other and easy to view. First up a Peninsular War table which I think won the Best Demonstration game award.

My personal favorite from the whole show was a 7 Years War game with masses of beautifully painted miniatures and an amazing looking city at one end of the table.

The last of the three was a Winter War game with Finnish troops defending against a Russian assault coming over an icy lake. The terrain was amazing and there were some nice additions with tanks sinking through ice as well. Historically maybe a bit fantasical, but still a great looking game.

A great looking scratch built village on a table run by a few very charming older gentlemen. All the terrain was scratch built from various items. Plenty of model railway and doll house items, but there were some pretty ingenious material solutions like decorative roses meant for a dress being painted up as cabbages.

Dalauppor was running a Viking themed game with some great looking minis and ships. All of the ships were scratch built and the town with a half finished ship was a really nice addition.

Hawk had a great stand with plenty of eye candy including a true scale troop carrier ship and a 5-up version of a Dropfleet Commander Battleship. Having backed their recent Dropfleet Commander Kickstarter it was really great to see some painted examples of the models. I didn't get any Shaltari miniatures from the KS, but now seeing them live I'm really starting to regret that a bit. They look far better than from the pics that they had on show during the challenge.

 

A great looking Mad Max game with vehicles converted from toy cars. They had suitable clothing for participants as well!

4Ground had an amazing stand with plenty of great looking tables demonstrating their different product lines.

The painting competition had plenty of amazing entries on show. Some very nice conversions and quite a few great looking larger scale minis and busts as well.

Perry showing new and future projects

Probably the cutest game on show and my better halves favorite was Minion Racing with the table surrounded by enthuastic kids vying for victory!

And finally a bunch of general pics from around the show of some cool tables and miniatures.