Ok, I'll admit it. I'm a hoarder.

Today I got this from a nice fella from eBay – or nice... he/she got a lot of cash and I got this. Together with the reprint of Insignum Astartes. The thing is, I have 1500 pts+ of Space Marines. And of all that a Razorback and 5 marines are painted... But I still buy more stuff. Just to have it when I finally finish with the orks.

And you have to admit that using this model, with a jumppack, together with a chappy and 10 ass. marines would be a pretty awesome mini death star?

This dude apparently

Oh, and I almost forgot that I also have 750pts of Eldar just sitting there... Good thing I have a can of Army Painter dip for them. It'll probably dry out before I ever get to paint the eldar.

So, what do you hoard? Are you like me or are you a person in control of your urges and spending habits? Please let me know I'm not the only one out here... :)

the Thunderous 40K finale

Im just home from Uppsala after having watched the finals of an informal tournament hosted by my very good friend Lifter for his local gaming group and friends.


The tournament was set up mainly as an incitament to get people painting their armies. The first and most important rule was that everything had to be painted to an acceptable standard. Three colors, and details. No counts-as, and everything had to be WYSIWYG unless vetted by mr Lifter!

As a booster the price for the winner was €30 at Fantasia, the FLGS in Uppsala. An ad hoc price for most painted / effort was instituted as well.

Points played were decided by the least common denominator. If you only had 1050pts painted your opponent only played 1050 pts. Up to 1500 points.

(I was invited to play with my orks, and was soundly beaten in the first round by Space Wolves. It was a very close game, but nevertheless I lost.)

In the finals was Kristian, with chaos space marines. and Martin, playing chaos demons squaring off. A batrep of the final is coming up within the next 48hrs, i just have to write a more coherent story from the notes i took during the game (another use for the iPad in gaming. Can you spot the fanboyism coming? ;)) and check that I got all my facts straight. Mostly since I'm totally unfamiliar with how chaos demons work. There was a lot of "They can do that?" from me during the game. :)

In the meantime, hit the more link for some pics from the final. Both players had a 1500pts of really well painted and converted models. I cant really decide if Christians Defiler-temple or Martins greater demon of Tzeentch was the coolest model on the board. Both were equally awesome in different ways. (By the way, check out Kristians battle-church here. Simply astounding!)

For all you Erectus Astartes guys

BoLS did this three part tour over at THQ in regards to the upcoming title Space Marine. It's actually pretty good considering they have some gameplay shots in there. And it was really nice to see that THQ had a bunch of 40K gaming tables set up. Nothing sucks more than games developers not knowing what they're doing. Then you end up with Call of Duty: Black Ops and stuff like that.

Dakka Dakka Storefinder

I just wanted to plug that Dakka Dakka has a Store Finder in the progress. Currently it's in some sort of open beta, which means that you can add your FLGS (and CLGS) to it (I've already added a bunch of them :)). A service I wish was avaliable a month earlier. Then perhaps I would've been able to find the gaming stores in Frankfurt.

How to hobby when you don't have the time

Buy books. Read them to and from work. At least that's what I've done.

In order to keep the hobby-addiction running I occasionally have to work. In my case that usually means meeting people, meeting even more people, talking about what graphic design really is and how you – with small means – can go from "Looking like Russia" to "Looking like a confident business that you'd like to do business with". (I actually used those two phrases during a client meeting yesterday. Which netted me an assignment with them. Win win! :)) And then I have to sit down, write a ton of agreements and stuff and about 30% of my actual work is actual graphic design. Oh, the glamorous world of being a graphic designer!

To the subject at hand though... reading material. This just recently arrived from the good guys and girls at Black Library.

Horus Heresy: Nemesis, Legends of the Space Marines & Fear the Alien

Really looking forward to put my teeth into Fear the Alien since it contains "the first ever ork viewpoint story". It has to be either really good and funny or a literary catastrophe. I just have to finish Helsreach first.

Tomorrow I'm going to Uptown to watch the finale of a very local 40K tournament. Haven't written much about it since I got beaten by space wolves in the first round. By a small margin though. Three objectives on the map. I held one, the puppies held one, and the one in middle was held by noone. So it came down to points killed. I think I killed 640pts of puppies and my opponent killed like 645pts of orks. Really close and even though it sucks to have to determine a win like that it was really tense while we tallied up the points so it didn't feel too bad. :)


This post is dedicated to Lifter who sent me a message earlier asking if I had stopped writing. "You promised a post every second day or so!". Lifter, this is one is for you!

Tutorial: Czech out my hedgehogs. Part three.

Welcome to the third and final part of "Czech out my hedgehogs"! In this part we will deal with the basing and painting of the hogs. Click read more to czech out the third and final part!

Tutorial: Czech out my hedgehogs! Part two.

Welcome back to the second part of the Czech Hedgehog tutorial. Now it's time to build some bases for your hedgehogs. You know the drill, hit "more" for... more!

Tutorial: Czech out my hedgehogs! Part one.

So, I was thinking I should make a tutotrial for how to make barbed wire / czech hedhehog obstacles for your 28mm game boards. Czech hedgehogs are anti-tank obstacles made of L or H shaped beams, and were used in huge numbers during WWII. Even when tipped over they still function, and if you're dumb enough to try and tip them over with your AFV, you're essentially stuck. 

German illustration of tank traps.
Image from missinglynx.com

With todays tactics of layered / staggered defence I guess they're more or less out of fashion. But they do look awesome on the 40K-battlefield. 

My suggestion is to count these as impassable for vehicles, difficult terrain (dangerous if you add barbed wire) for infantry with a 6+ save. The L-beams don't give much cover, just look at Saving Private Ryan (@4:40 in that video) if you doubt that. 

A note on the hedgehogs you see in SPR. They don't have the end-pieces on because they were on concrete "feet" in order to keep them from sinking in the sand. If you plan to place hedgehogs on fairly solid ground you weld endpieces to them.

Now, Games Workshop makes a bunch of these, in the urban accessories set or something. The problem is that they're completely worthless. You do not want spiked ends on these since that would mean that your one tonne beam-construction slowly would sink into the ground. And from what I've heard, the molds are kinda crap. So hit the "more" link and away we go!

Forgeworld Kommandos sprues

Today the big brown van went by my place with a not so big box containing two of the Ork Kommandos sets and Mek Buzzgob! I was set out to do some work today, but I guess I'll have to ooh and aah a little first.

Since Forgeworld can't put up proper pictures of sprues on their website I thought I would do it here. The detail on these is amazing, as usual with the Forgeworld stuff (or at least the stuff I've been in contact with). There's a ton of flash though, not so much on the kommandos, but Buzzgob is 50% flash and 50% mini.

Enough of that. Here's the promised sprue pictures.

Front

Back

The kommandos, painted up (apart from the nob) can be found here: Forgeworld Kommandos done

Just shoot me, again.

There's this thing with limited edition stuff that I just can't resist. I was happily browsing BoLS or something when I suddenly saw that the Dreamer and Lord Chompy was avaliable to order on the Wyrd site during GenCon.

And I haven't even opened the Malifaux stuff I bought earlier!!! >_<

Ah well, what to do? :)