WIP: Hex mat for Melee/Wizard

The packaging from a recent purchase of furniture for the home office left me with a huge sheet of thin styrofoam (some two feet by four feet) that just begged to be used for gaming terrain. I decided I needed a large playing surface for use with games of Melee and Wizard. I've played before on Heroscape tiles, which look good but take some time to set up and break down. So I decided to use those tiles to imprint a hexagonal pattern onto the sheet.

 After that, I coated the styrofoam in a mixture of white glue and water for protection before spraying it black. I didn't coat the sheet thoroughly enough, because the aerosol ended up dissolving some of the foam. It made a nice texture that looked nice with some drybrushed gray, so no big deal--but I did add another coat of water-glue mix after that. 

While I want this terrain piece to be versatile, I also want to use it for battles based on the arena maps from the original Melee and Wizard. Toward that goal, I replicated those patterns on my game board, which is just big enough to fit the maps from both games. Then, because the colors were so bright, I gave everything a dark wash to blend the hexes back together. You can see the Wizard arena on the left, and the Melee map to the right. Entry hexes are dark green and hard to make out in this picture; I plan to drybrush them with a lighter shade to make them stand out more. I will get more pics once it's done.

It's not much in the way of gaming projects, but I'm happy to be getting something done while on lockdown. I hope everyone is staying healthy, and we can all get together to start rolling dice and pushing around minis again someday.

Games in the time of coronavirus

These are weird times for everyone: Global pandemic, mandatory isolation, economic recession, toilet paper shortage, and probably, sometime soon, locusts. Thanks to this disease, my regular gaming location, Dragon's Lair, is closed, and the second annual FnordCon, set for this weekend, got canceled. But I can't complain; my wife and I are lucky enough to still be working, and our pantry's full. So I thought I would see how everyone has adjusted their gaming in this season of uncertainty.

With face-to-face gaming with my regular group not an option for the foreseeable future, I'm trying to get my geek on at home. My wife and I have been playing The Awful Green Things From Outer Space, teaming up as the crew and using some semi-random mechanisms to conduct the monsters. We still haven't managed to completely defeat the critters, but she enjoys playing it with me, and we both appreciate the quirky art. 

My spouse isn't, however, as big a fan of Terraforming Mars, so we've only played a single game together. Luckily, the solo rules for this board game are enough to keep me coming back again and again. While I miss having multiple opponents, it has a lot of entertainment value as I try to meet the victory conditions. And I'm using the Prelude, Venus Next, and Colonies expansions to get even more mileage out of TM.

I haven't done anything minis-related, but I may try to start working on some Ogre minis soon--or maybe I will paint up some of the scatter terrain or fantasy minis I have piled up. Maybe I can get something ready in time for the next game convention, whenever that may be. What about y'all? How are you adjusting your gaming to the new normal?

Wings of War

We did a little World War I aircraft gaming this month, playing Wings of War. My wingman and I flew German planes, against our opponents' British and French aircraft.

Gameplay is a little like X-Wing, with simultaneous movement from templates--but you pick three moves at a time, and shooting is resolved by card draw (everything from no damage to pilot wounded to kaboom). It was a good time, even though I got kaboomed.

Back to the Frozen City

This month we returned to Frostgrave, bringing our wizards and their warbands back to the Frozen City. Desiring to shake things up, we each took a wizard from one of the schools of the Pentangle from the Maze of Malcor supplement in order to play the campaign. I played an Astromancer. The first scenario had our teams searching the display cases of The Relic Room.

We started off with level 12 wizards, but were all slightly disadvantaged by the unfamiliar spells of this supplement. However, wizards of the Pentangle still can cast some spells from the main book, and both I and my opponent took advantage of the Wall spell as we tried to keep each other from searching the display cabinets.

Making the game even more interesting, you weren't guaranteed a treasure when you smashed open one of the cases--instead, there was a chance for a bog man, a bloodwave (proxied by Reaper slimes, above and below), or a shrieking wolf.

Still, I managed to get two or three treasures and avoided any permanent casualties. It's always fun playing Frostgrave, and I'm enjoying this campaign.

So here's a thing I painted

This is some sort of beholder-adjacent critter (spectator) from WizKids' line of Nolzur's Marvelous Miniatures.

I had fun painting this guy and his two companions (gazers) from the blister pack. They came already primed, and on plastic stands. I added an acrylic base to make the big guy more stable.

I'm a sucker for these out-of-the-ordinary creatures. You can't really tell from these photos, but I used color-shifting paints on the eyes.

I don't know if I will use this figure for D&D, but it will come in handy as a demon or other monster for our Frostgrave games, which we're still playing.

I have a hard time getting motivated to paint minis, even to a tabletop standard, so I am proud to get this out of my unpainted pile and into my gaming pile. I need to work on another one for next week.

Happy New Year!

Sure, my Command Post had a lot to deal with in 2019, so I didn't blog as much as I wanted, but I got to roll lots of dice and get plenty of miniatures on the table, like this pack of Ogres at MillenniumCon. Here's to more gaming in 2020!

Christmas present

I asked for (and received) the excellent board game Terraforming Mars for Christmas. It's a card-driven game that also uses a map of the Red Planet so players can track their progress in making the world suitable for human settlements.

Players act as corporations over a span of generations, accumulating resources and taking actions to increase three environmental factors (temperature, oxygen, and surface water) to Earth norms. This game is very thematic, with actions such as dropping a comet on the planet to add oceans or using orbiting mirrors to increase the temperature. It's a fun game, and I even got my wife to play!

What did everyone else get this holiday?