No battle report but some Dreadfleet pics

Welllll............ I was going to write my battle report today about my lil game against the Deathguard but it was reallllly hot today.

The hotness is relevant as my PC is in my bedroom which has no air con but my painting desk is in the lounge room right underneath the air con!

So instead of typing in the heat, I painted some water in the nice cool air.

These are the bases for the Kracken and the High Elf ship and dragon. I am going to see which turns out better then enter the best one in a painting competition in my local GW store this weekend. I'm hoping the elf ship will turn out awesome as I am going to do some colour transition wet blending on the sails.

I will write battle report in my lunch break at work tomorrow in the nice cool office.

We interupt your scheduled broadcast for.....

Well I have done no Warhammer this week just past. :(
No painting as my light above my painting desk blew up
No playing as I was sick and/or at work or college. Boo!
I did get to go to a really fun Medical themed goth night club.

I made some awesome cuts on myself for it and then wrote a tutorial about it here.

Here is my licking my wounds Bwhahaha!
Seriously tho that fake blood is mint flavour!

Back to Warhammer in my next post as my friend came and changed my light on Sunday and I am going into the city GW to smash some Iron Warriors on Thursday night Woo!

Fleet of Dread - Why do you want dreadfleet?

(Here are my nautical babies WIP)

I have seen a few reviews about Dreadfleet. Some good some bad.
Most where the person has actually purchased it they are great things to say about it.
I am the same.

I pre ordered it and was a bit excited but also a bit 'hmm it's expensive and what if it only comes with crap or is annoying to play' Luckily I only really wanted it so I could paint cute boats and particularly the robot squid.

Imagine my surprise when I opened it and there was tons of stuff in there!
The cloth you play on is awesome and there are cards and dice and rules an all that.

Then the models! They are awesome! I am so excited to paint them. The ships are well designed and fit together really well. The terrain is clever and interesting.

I haven't played or read the rules yet so I can't really comment on that.

My only compliant was that the instructions to built stuff are in the side of the inside box, that was a weird place and I didn't notice till I was half way done and built one thing wrong.

A testament to it's coolness (at least that of the models) is my friend Luke, long time gamer and commission painter. He was saying 'err Holly why did you buy that it's crap and blah blah'
Well one of his customers asked him to build and paint their dreadfleet models. Now he is using the money he is getting from doing that to buy his own! Hah! told him it was cool!

It's been great seeing some other peoples painted ships, hopefully I can continue on mine after I fix the light above my painting desk :(

Cooking Warhammer Cupcakes

A few months ago it was my local GW store birthday party.
I thought it would be an awesome idea to make some 40k flavored treats!

The manager at the time loved Blood Angels so I decided to make some of them chocolate flavoured.

One of my good friends Deke was the sort of second manager there and he loves Nurgle so I made some chocolate ones for that too.

I needed to have a lot of ones that were easy to do and that I didn't care much about, what better for the task than ultra marines! So the large majority are vanilla flavored ultra marine cupcakes.

My First Apocalypse

There is nothing quite as exciting in a girls life than her first Apocalypse battle.
Lucky for me, mine did not have to be in a GW store with a bunch of kids.

I was playing at Midian games club.
Midian is a cool warehouse where a bunch of awesome creative people live.
At the moment they are playing a huge involved game with many 40k battles as well as Rogue Trader RPG.

I was involved in a game 4k pts a side. Chaos Maries and traitor Guard defending a claimed imperial city.
Sisters, Spacewolves and loyalist guard invading to try to take back the city.

Having been pulled into this at the last miniute I only had my normal 100pts list I use for small games. 1 Razor back being my only transport and 1 squad of long fangs my only heavy weapons.

Needless to say I sort of sucked at the start as the board was MASSIVE and I couldn't just run towards the battle (my usual SW tactic) because of all the artillery fire going on.

(that isn't even the whole thing! I cut off part of the left hand side!)

We didn't actually have all the things on the list that we were playing with, some people frown on that but a lot of these poeple where new or building their armies. Also as part of the larger story we could only use guard and space marines.

The guy who lives at Midian and is running this big thing is Herbie (a total creative genius) called apon his great 'Army of Proxy' which is impressive and amazing.

(Army of proxy looks pretty big and not all of it is there are there are about 7k pts worth on the table atm.)

(put it in perspective with Herbie, Stephan and Matt and it looks MASSIVE)

The game was fun as on my side I had Herbie who is mega skilled in 40k, Matt who is more of an RPGer but knows a bit about 40k and in true 'Holly' fashion I have forgottent he 3rd guys name. He is new to 40k but played a lot of Flames of War so was a good strategist.

It was a kill points mission which is my favourite but as I was slow into battle my wolf lord on thunderwolf only got to murder lots of stuff on the last turn :(

The long fangs did kill some stuff but the razorback sucked and got blown up pretty much immediately.

After a huge nurgle tank with a puss cannon exploded and pretty much killed most of both sides Imperium won in the end :)

I took some less lame pictures on my camera which I will upload later as my army looked the best and was the only one that actually had minis for what was on the list hahahaha!

Also I corrected a lot of people on rules which was cool. I sometimes doubt my rules knowledge and it can be hard with loud annoying people who think they know what they are talking about, as a newbie and a girl I feel shy about contesting peoples knowledge but I find if you are polite and informative about it people who are not wankers are happy to know what the actual rules are :)

Tournament end

So in the end I obviously didn't win anything for playing.
My painting was good but not 100% complete so no win for that.
What I did win, was best sportsmanship, I like to think it's because I am fun to play and not because I was the only girl hahaha. At any rate I got a cute certificate and some fun playing experience :)

Tournament - Part 3

The third game was after lunch and was based on who got what type of scores in the first games.
So we all stood around waiting to see who would have to play who. I was fairly confidant due to my suckage in the first two games that I wouldn't have to play any of the really good people.
I was a bit nervous because so far I had been able to play people I knew fairly well and I didn't want to play a total stranger as I am still pretty much a newbie.

This game was pitched deployment annihilation YAY my favorite.

So they drew the names and the only pair of pretty young kids drew Max an I, they were about 12 or 13 and one kid practically cried when he found out and then got even more upset when he drew me and had to face the Space Wolves rather than the Iron Lords.

He was playing a blood angels army so don't know what he was worried about.
Clearly this kid had not seen my previous games and was worried for no reason.
Also he had this.....

A Furioso Dreadnought, I didn't really know the rules for this, I find playing hard at the moment only because I don't really know all the rules of the other armies.

So I thought I killed a dreadnought in the last game I will smash this one in the face.
Not realizing of course that this guy has some mental rule about every attack that lands and is not saved he gets another attack or something like that.

So this guy by himself pretty much killed all my Grey Hunters and Wolf Lord.
The remnants of my army where killed in the face by Astorath :'(
So another loss to me.

Brother in arms, Max SMASHED the other kid who had a demon army, so that was at least something.

Tournament - Part 2

So my second battle was against Courtney's Deathguard terminator army.

This was a spearhead deployment with 5 objective markers.

I was a bit scared of this game because I had never really played against a terminator army and I have ZERO terminators in my army.

It turned out ok! My army was much faster, I also have a standard bearer and mark of the wulfen in each of my grey hunter squads which made my combat awesome.

It was going quite evenly until the 5th turn. A whole lot of my grey hunters were in combat with the terminators, some of my guys died so I removed them.

As you do I removed the ones that didn't have special weapons or abilities.

This took a few of mine out of base to base contact but as the combat had already started I was under the impression that as long as they were in B2B at the beginning they could still use their attacks. Courtney said that was wrong and as they were not in B2B they couldn't attack

That mean I lost that objective and then we were going to roll to see if there was a 6th turn but there wasn't enough time so I suggested we not bother and Courtney could be the winner.

I didn't argue about the B2B thing because it was my first tournament and about my 5th game of 40k ever. After the game ended I went and asked one of the store guys about it and he confirmed I was right, it just goes to show that you shouldn't doubt yourself and even if you're wrong and you contest someones decision you will learn the right thing, and I really think playing should be about fun and learning.

Also my Brother in Arms, Max, got smashed by the other Deathguard army he played in that round :(

Why has it taken me sooooo long to write these posts?

Because I have been working on this :)

The man is there for illustrative purposes I will be using a much cooler model in the finished product. Also this is an annoying brittle fiddly thing to put together BUT HOW COOL IS IT!

Tournament Virginity - Part 1

So on the 26th of March I went in my first tournament. YAY.

I was scared actually because it meant I had to play against strangers and since coming back to warhammer I had only played 3 games with my Space Wolf army. Also I am the only girl I have actually ever seen play in the store and the only one in the tournament.
At least this was just a little tournament in my local GW and I knew a few of the people a little bit.

It was a 1500pts brothers in arms tournament so you are in a team with another person, you play seperate games but your scores count together at the end. There are three games where you get a Win, Lose or Draw and if the person would play you again. Then you display your army and they shop people give you points for painting. You also had to have 3 objective markers.

My first game I had to play my friend Tom who has Tyranids. It was Dawn of War deployment, control and capture with 3 objectives. I was going ok as the Tyranids had to roll something to be able to deploy and Tom kept failing up until about turn 3 when they all zoomed in and that annoying one that comes up from under the ground came up right in the middle of my main force of grey hunters right near my objective.

Then came the Genestealers! I hate those guys! My bloodclaws killed A LOT of them but not enought. We took ages to finish combat and so didn't get to go past the 4th turn when we ran out of time. We both had an objective and one was contested so it was a draw.

My brother in arms Max was using Iron Lords (Chaos Iron hands guys) and he drew in a game against Crimson Fists.

This is long so I will post the other battles seperately.
Here are some pics of my WIP objective markers for my Space Wolves.

I figure they are kinda like choosers of the slain birds. They are the dark eldar Razorwings.

40k Bases - Ice Bases

Sorry everyone but I really hate flocked bases, and I really dislike that grit people stick on.

One of my other base dislikes is that weird fluffy looking snow.

I guess if you are making a whole army quite quickly flocking and little rocks is really the best looking fastest way. I still don't like them.

So, since I am taking my time with my army construction/painting and since Space Wolves home world of Fenris is an awesome chunky ice rock, I figured I would use my skills to make some resin ice bases.

I did look around online and find a few ok snow/ice bases by they didn't have the icy glacial look I was after.

I am entering a Lukas the Trickster mini in a little painting comp at out local GW and thought it would be a good time to make the ice bases so Lukas could have an epic massive one.

I'm not sure if I should stick these to a normal black base or what next, but am so happy with how they turned out.

Any comments or suggestions?

Why Space Wolves? Picking a 40k army

(Leman Russ by Calavera666)

It can be a bit confusing and annoying to pick and army to play when you are newish to 40k.
If you have friends who play and particularly if they have preconceived loyalties and prejudices it can become even more frustrating.

Of all the different bits of advice, from friends, blogs, shop staff, nosey strangers, the most poignant and helpful was: 'Play an army that you really like.'

Sounds simple, but it's true, if you go into the hobby and try to pick the 'best' army to win or the truest, hardest, most impressive, complicated, unless you like the look of them, their storyline and fluff, you are ultimately going to end up bored or annoyed with them.

The time and money you have to invest building painting and working out strategy for an army is substantial so love for that army is what is going to pull you through the late night painting and gluing, the remaking lists when you lose and the rest of the journey that is getting an army to a point you are really happy with (I find most people including myself are never happy and never stop striving for a better army in all facets of the hobby, but still I mean happy enough)

When I meet new people into warhammer and tell them I play Space Wolves some of these peoples reaction is, 'ugh power gamer'. Usually this comes from people who play imperial guard or eldar or something else a bit less obviously powerful and less simple.
I have even had someone say that the Space Wolf codex was 'bull and is practically cheating'

Annoying but anyway my point is I actually had no idea that Space Wolves were a 'good army' when I picked them. I liked the way they looked, I liked their story and their fluff. Even with my limited understanding of the rules they seemed to have a strategy that I found attractive (me being a sort first ask questions later type person)

I decided that I liked the sound of Harald Deathwolf and that I wanted to make an army based on him as his 'thing' it tons of wolves and I love the look/idea of Thunder wolf Cavalry an Fenrisian Wolves.

I made a rough list of all the things I like and it actually turned out to bed a fairly competitive 1500pts list but I also really loved it.

Now most of my nights and weekends are taken up with making and painting these models but I am really enjoying it and taking my time with my painting and converting, so at the end I will have a well painted army that I still like.

There was one other factor I had to take into consideration when picking my army. A lot of my friends play, and obviously I will end up playing them a fair bit, so I wanted to pick an army that would be fun to play against my friends and not an army to similar to their armies.

These are just my opinions but I really believe if you really like your army and believe in them, that has to give some good luck to your dice too right?