Literally garbage

These are some quick-and-dirty terrain pieces made from household detritus that I had been hoarding like a packrat. Inspired by the crafting videos from Wyloch's Armory, but boiled down a bit, I made these by spraying the base color, gluing on greeblies, heavily drybrushing with silver, and then drowning in a black wash.

This first piece is what I like to think of as some kind of alien computer or scientific instrument. As you may have guessed, this is the plastic blister from a AA battery pack, with a couple of sprues from old Warhammer bases glued on top.

Next is a power generator made from the tray holding the cookies inside the box. You get bonus points if you recognized it as coming from Girl Scout cookies (unfortunately, I don't remember which kind). In addition to the plastic sprues on top, I glued water bottle caps to this side, and some unused bases that came with some WizKids unpainted miniatures to the other side.

Last is this device, maybe some sort of engine or other mechanical contraption, from the packaging that once held an electric toothbrush. Add some sprues and the plastic fasteners that come with cold cuts from my supermarket deli, and we have a nice piece of alien machinery.

While Wyloch and other crafters use browns, grays, and blacks for that grimdark aesthetic, I wanted my sci-fi terrain to be more colorful, like the fantastic images from my youth. The spray paints I used (Rustoleum Paint + Primer Satin) looked bright when first applied, but the weathering toned it down the right amount to make these pieces look like they belong together on the tabletop. Not bad for what started out as a bunch of junk!

Returning to gaming with Stargrave

Our first miniatures game since the pandemic began (yay vaccines!), so I rebased my old Rogue Trader-era figures as my Stargrave crew (all original 30-year-old paint jobs, except the commissar, who I painted within the last decade or so). The Bastard Squad is led by Al S.T. Claar, the comissar. He still thinks he's in a 40K game, so he has some words about the Emperor he would like to share.

Since there were four of us, we had plenty of terrain to fill a 6' x 6' table at the game store. We decided to just play a generic game with all four players to get to know the rules.

Mechanically, this game is very similar to Frostgrave and Ghost Archipelago. But with weapons like grenades--and grenade launchers--it's not a good idea to bunch up.

My captain made the mistake of getting out in front of his men. The idea of hand-to-hand combat was just too enticing.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the board, another player's space goblins were having a hard time accessing a data loot objective. That's because he didn't have a hacker in his crew, which gives you a +6 when you try to download data. His basic crewgoblins kept missing their target rolls, prompting me to joke that they're standing in front of the termal confused, asking each other, "Which one's the 'any' key???"

Meanwhile, my Sentry, Whome, was mixing it up with a bunch of United Federation of Planets crewmembers.

All the shooting meant a roll on the Unwanted Attention Table, drawing in a bounty hunter. As luck and the placement dice roll would have it, he appeared on the side of the board right next to my guy.

Some ship worth fighting for (or over)

Remember the spaceships for my space war? I finished repainting and modding this one a couple of weeks ago after gaining some inspiration from watching crafting videos from Wyloch's Armory.

What was once a Space Union vessel is now the Kaye MacGuoyo, a short-distance sublight cargo hauler that is impractical for most spaceship gaming but very useable for a sci-fi skirmish, such as Stargrave.

Whether hiding behind or in it, figures can take advantage of this spaceship's port and stern hatches, along with a flat dorsal deck suitable for storing more cargo or for tactical use as combat positions.

The 'Uoyo lacks any FTL capability, such as a Bachman-Turner Overdrive, instead relying on its four Neerglaw pseudogravity caps to reach low orbit for in-system planetary hops.

(I originall had this ship outfitted with larger, more cumbersome éloD agrav units, but I prefer the sleeker look of the smaller engines.)

This was a pretty easy piece to make game-ready. I just unscrewed the top and bottom parts and spraypainted them (brown bottom, grey top), then drybrushed and washed (thanks again to Wyloch for inspiring me to get this finished). For the engines, I popped out the propellers from the nacelles, glued together these engines made from pill and tea plastic bottle caps, painted them metallic brown, and attached them.

I painted the windows will some color-shifting black paint, then some color-shifting white in the upper left corners. Some orange paint dabbed on for rust here and there, and now this piece is ready for us to fight over, fight for, or fight from.

1 Gigasun

The spaceship combat game A Billion Suns finally arrived at my local game store. I'm looking forward to trying this game out; the resource management (starting with no ships on the table and giving a limited number of orders each turn--not to mention trying to win the game while expending as little as possible) looks extremely interesting. The rules can accomodate two to four players, and there is a campaign system as well. This book is from the author of Gaslands, but the combat engine is completely different, and there are no specially marked dice or templates required. The scenarios (multiple for a single game) look interesting and play out on separate maps, with players having the option to jump fleets between the game boards. Now that we're getting ready to start in-person gaming soon, I can't wait to introduce A Billion Suns to my group.

"Space ships for your space war"

Browsing online for cheap toys to use in Stargrave, I came across the Space Union line of sci-fi sets, advertised as "Space ships for your space war." According to the packaging, this toy line is made by Peng Rong out of China. I found two items, once looking like a SHIELD helicarrier, and the other like a more conventional science fictional vessel.  

Each was under twenty bucks, and free shipping. I got a whole lot of toys for my $40. Not only were they large models, suitable for use in 28mm skirmish games, but each big ship carried several smaller toys, a mix of flying and ground vehicles. 

The set incuded a couple of scale-indeterminate winged craft that could do in a spaceship game, a tracked tank that might work in Ogre, and even a die-cast sedan. While the car is too small for 28mm, the construction-type hover vehicle and the four-legged walker (which will make a nice robot guardian) are the perfect size for Stargrave and other sci-fi games, like Mutants & Death Ray Guns.

These toys have a lot of potential in my scenarios as objective, opponents, opportunities, or even just scatter terrain. Unfortunately, the low price of these sets means the undersides of most of these vehicles are hollow, but that won't be an issue in most games. 

Still, it's a lot of bang for your gaming bucks. These spaceships just need some new paint jobs, and they'll be ready for use as terrain features or objectives. Their size means they will block line-of-sight and provide vantage points, which will make tactical situations interesting. All in all, I'm happy with my purchase.

Now I'm off to work on my space ships for my space war. 

3D tiles for Terraforming Mars

So I got my Big Box expansion for Terraforming Mars recently, and it is certainly big. I had pledged for the small box, with just the 3D tiles, but instead they sent the Big Box, with the tiles, storage containers for various game tokens, and boxes for the cards, all designed to fit in the huge box that's big enough to hold all the expansions. Like I said, this expansion is large--more than twice as deep as the box for the original game. I have plenty of room for all the expansions I own (Prelude, Colonies, Venus Next, and the extra maps). 

The storage is pretty well thought out, and it's easy and quick to pack and unpack the game. The box with all the stuff is kinda heavy, though. And while the 3D terrain tiles don't affect game play, they certainly do enhance it. I like the way the greenery and city markers, as well as the special project tiles, look on the game board. I also got the transparent plastic domes as an add-on, because they look cool, too. 

This product also came with some promotional cards: 18 new projects and two new corporations. So I played some solo games, using each of the new corporations on each of the three maps (six games in all), and succeeded in terraforming Mars each time! It was fun to have this new terain out on the map, and I'm looking forward to playing this with live opponents once our group starts face-to-face gaming again.

Stargrave is here

 

I just got my copy of the Stargrave rulebook, and after hearing about it for so long, I'm looking forward to playing a few games. With more people vaccinated, it looks like in-person gaming will pick up again, so I need to star assembling my crew. 

While the official Stargrave minis look cool, I have a bunch of old Rogue Trader figures I plan to dust off and get on the table.  Here are a few of them, which I used in Hordes of the Things until the Great Lead Avalanche of 2010. Not sure exactly how I will stat them out, but it will be fun playing once more.