Shock Troopers finished, a small measure of redemption, Super Dungeon Explored

Waiting for an opportunity.  And varnish.  Mostly varnish. 

Details took longer than expected, as they always do, but I still got the Shock Troopers finished on schedule.  In retrospect I should have had a Bombardier handy to make sure my treatment of Man-o-War armor remained consistent as the Shock Troopers seem darker than the Bombardiers.  I guess I can call it diversity.  With the Shock Troopers complete I'm well above 50% painted (for Khador), which is very nice.  Once I get the Demo Corps done I'll be able to field a fully painted pButcher tier 4 list, which is always satisfying.

What can you do with an hour? Or a Dethcopta?

Adjusting is the name of the game.

Had another game of Warhammer Quest on Tuesday.  This time our party was successful in spite of losing the Barbarian in the second room.  Quest remains a brutal game, but perhaps not unworkable.  Throughout the game I was considering house rules on the number of extra events via power dice.  Limiting it to one at a time was my first thought, but on reflection I think that might be a bit much.  Two at a time is intriguing as it allows for problems to compound on each other, potentially 3 events at a time if you get two extra events while dealing with the standard room event, while not overwhelming the party with 4+ events in a row.  I've had some horrific power rolls in these latest games, so 4+ is neither impossible nor terribly rare.  Since more events take longer to do, which leads to more power rolls and more potential extra events, once the ball starts rolling it soon becomes unwieldy.  Next time around I may start tweaking and seeing how it works.  NGF also asked a question that had me stumped.  We did the good gamer thing for dinner: ordered pizza.  Said pizza arrived when we still had (potentially) 5 rooms to go, so we hurried along to the finish to avoid mixing pizza and cardboard tiles/cards.  NGF remarked on the length of the game, around 2.5 hours including dicking around time.  This is pretty standard for gaming and I told him as much, and in return he asked if there was anything that took around an hour.  This is where I'm stumped.  I have a few ideas, mostly combat patrol/40k in 40 minutes and battlebox Warmahordes.  Neither of those options represents the parent game well, though battlebox games aren't far off, so I'd like to find something that's a better fit.  I want something that is based around minis, something that requires collecting and painting which will eliminate most boardgames.  I'd also like something that doesn't take a full-sized (6x4) table to play and something that requires little to no terrain.  Not too much to ask for, right?

In other news I saw a post about lots of orks on 3++ this morning, one that reminded me of another post I had seen on fester 40k a while ago.  I have 6 Dethcoptas, mostly in pieces, none of which is a lock to ever see the table.  At the same time I have a single rocket buggy, and a trak at that, which is featured in every ork list I've written.  Since these examples look so nice, and I have a surplus of coptas with a deficit of buggies, I'm thinking I'll convert up at least 3 of the coptas into buggies.  I would change them all over if the base Dethcopta model wasn't so nice, plus there's always the chance that FAQs and new editions will make the coptas more attractive than buggies.  I have 3 buggies already, two wheeled shootas and one trakked rokkit, so I may do two conversions with trakks and one with wheels to make two coherent squadrons.  Of course if I did all of the coptas I have I'd be maxed out on rokkit buggies, which would be nice.  Plus I can always get more copta models via AoBR, Ebay, or something similar.  They should be pretty cheap.  I also think I'm gonna take a pass on converting the AoBR boys.  They should only be about half of the Slugga boys and they aren't all the same model, just similar poses, so hopefully they blend in well enough and everything looks nice.

Good timing

Warrior Priesty.

While looking around for Warhammer Quest alternatives, I found quite a bit of stuff about Quest itself.  This morning, Quest content fairly jumped off the screen to slap me in the face.  It started over at Blood of Kittens with a post about how Quest has fallen off the face of the gaming earth like so many of the smaller GW games.  Then there's a link in that post to a sort of petition/protest/yelling until things happen sort of blog about bringing back Quest and a link to an actual online petition for the same reason.  I'm sure I'll find more examples in the coming days. 

On the home front, I got to thinking about Quest at work last night.  Since my previous Quest companion asked again about the game, I got to thinking about ways to draw him further along the path to gaming.  Painting the stuff for Quest seems like a good first step.  I'd like to get the stuff that gets used the most painted first, which means heroes and dungeon portals/gates/doors.  The portals are pretty boring, while the heroes are detailed enough to be a bad place to start learning to paint.  Moving past that, the cannon fodder type enemies are the next step.  While the vermin (giant rats, bats, giant spiders) are where I'll likely start, goblins have a special appeal.  I'm missing a couple pieces from my Quest set, a giant rat or two and a bow-armed goblin, so I already use some alternate goblin models.  Considering Quest is something like 15 years old now, the models that came with it haven't aged well.  Everything is a single piece with a single pose, there's no variety at all.

With these factors in mind, a box of goblins looks like a good place to start.  Goblins are straightforward models to assemble and paint, especially night goblins, and a single box would cover the 12 goblins Quest requires with plenty left over to spare.  I could walk my friend through the whole modelling process, starting with clipping bits off the sprue all the way through basing and varnishing.  With the spare goblins I could set him loose in the kit to build whatever looked nifty.  Unfettered kitbashing is one of my favorite parts of the hobby, but one that I engage in rarely.  I'm too stuck in the minis-as-game-pieces mindset to do this too much, which is a real shame, but I could shoehorn that desire into this project and scratch a couple itches at once.  If the goblin experiment worked out then there'd be orcs and minotaurs to expand to, plus the heroes.  The big sticking point here is redundancy.  I already have a Quest set and I have all the pieces (somewhere), so there's no real need to "replace" them.  If Quest was still around I could just make this a very elaborate and involved Christmas gift, but that's not the case anymore.  All of that is down the road though.  In the immediate future, I think I'll prime up some of the vermin if I can get hold of a day that isn't horribly humid and go from there.  I'm on the fence about basing them, but I may end up jumping off that fence later today and getting a pack of square bases.  I've seen a couple people's quest to paint all the Quest contents in my search for Quest related materials so I have a couple ideas for basing.  The usual sand/ballast approach won't work so well for a dungeon crawl, while painting tiles on the bases doesn't work so well either considering all the dungeon tiles are colored differently.  If I tackle this sort of project I'll probably end up doing the bases differently, maybe building some rubble or something onto them, but for now this is (potentially) about getting pieces finished and luring a friend into the paint and brush side of the hobby.

Surveying the field

Adventure games ahead.  And maybe danger.

While I see the little white and orange B across a number of gaming blogs that I frequent, I never thought that having Blogger go down for a day or two would disrupt my usual internetting half as much as it did.  I have a battle report and painting update on deck, but for now something topical.  When I wrote about Warhammer Quest a few posts ago, I managed to forget my feature of the game: no need for a GM.  This has less to do with solo play than playing as a pair.  Lone wolfing is just...creepy, but games like Warhammer Quest make it possible for two people to game without setting one up as the GM.  Obviously there are plenty of ways for two people to game, but I'm after methods for people not already in the hobby, or even just for something a little different.

It is was with this in mind that I cast about a bit more on the internets, looking for games similar to Warhammer Quest.  I found more than I expected.  Beyond Descent, which I already knew about, and HeroQuest, which is basically Warhammer Quest, the dungeon-tile-crawl genre is well represented.  Wizards makes a pair of games, and perhaps another is forthcoming, using D&D 4e as the base.  Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon look like what you'd expect from D&D the boardgame.  The pieces look to be of good quality, judging from the unboxing video, but the minis are a little underwhelming.  I think I've been spoiled by the new GW sets with all their bits and construction options.  Dwarf King's Hold from Mantic, like the WotC offerings, is what I expected from Mantic: a close clone of the GW counterpart, but with enough twists and reshapings to make it something different enough.  The internets say the dungeon tiles are flimsy though, a point which torpedoes the decent minis in the box.  Heading a little further afield you run into games like Runebound, Talisman, and others than fit a similar genre of adventure board games, but lack the tile and mini component that I'm looking for. 

Ultimately this is just an exercise in market research.  One of the great problems that I face as a gamer, and surely many others do, is a combination of a short attention span and a collecting compulsion.  Scattering your attention across multiple games saps you of not just money, but also time and other mundane concerns like storage space.  Much as I'd like to play every game out there, in the end you have to make your choices.

Back to the...past

Remember this one?

No painting to speak of since the last time.  Instead I got in a bit of gaming.  I have a non-gaming friend who causes me to be locked in an eternal debate: whether or not to try and bring him into the hobby.  The benefits are obvious, while the drawbacks are less so, but in the end I decided to give it another shot over the weekend.  To that end, I pulled out an old gem: Warhammer Quest.  I've tried a toned-down version of Uncharted Seas with this guy before, who I'll go ahead and acronymize as NGF, with a modicum of success at the time, but no real retention afterwards.  I thought Warhammer Quest might work a little better as it's a familiar game type, being Diablo the board game in effect, plus the various little gribblies that need paint would be an easy introduction to painting should things get that far.