Kickstarter – An Archive For The Steinberg Shed Space Blog

Wargames Table – Upgrade – Ceri Design

One of the Kickstarter projects that I have backed twice now sent out my items this week. Ceri Design is a small, UK based company, that makes and sells felt gaming mats. I have two mats from their earlier Kickstarter, a 3×3 cobblestone mat and a 3×3 simple street mat. Their latest kickstarter was to fund larger mats, this time in a 4×3 foot size.

I went for 2x Barren Ground mats so that they would cover a 6×4 foot table. They do that very well even though they are not specifically designed to go together as a 6 foot cover.

A very nice, generic, land image with a fairly muted colour scheme. Slightly greener than it seems when photographed but this will easily fit in with most of my scenic terrain. At £22 each (£44 for a 6 foot table) they are much better priced than lots of the other mats on the market.

Just my opinion but I do find that a lot of the Vinyl mats on the market are very shiny. That gloss finish makes them more difficult for me to use as the reflected light off them causes some smaller figures and scatter terrain to be harder to see. This is notable in some photographs that flash back when trying to focus on the details of items placed on them. Ceri’s felt mats are a soft matt finish so don’t have these issues.

Warehouse District

Our Dust Battlefield game is due to be played on an industrial table. Lots of cover and height changes. A great excuse to get out my various warehouses and workshops.

Along with a bunker or two to add a bit of WWII theme.

You can see I am making good use of my barbed wire rolls and the walkways I picked up from our trip to Salute.

The small workshop from Warbases and the pre printed units from the XLC Kickstarter.

And the new factory unit from Sarissa Precision. Now painted like the Warbases workshop using a sponge painted, layered application. Brick base in industrial grey and roof and windows in weathered black.

I’ve had some rust effect paint in the shed for some time and not often used it so it was a great chance to try it out on something.

Looks good on the window bars and the railings. Not so sure on the door. I think less is more with this stuff.

Overall a great little building that adds a little more to the collection in the shed. Likely to be well used. Just need to get those walkways done now…

Deadzone Scenery – Bigger And Bigger

A friend of mine popped over recently with his scenery pieces from the first Deadzone Kickstarter. He has never managed to get this built due to now having 2 small girls in the house and lots of other commitments.

We spent the last few weeks toying with this and putting the pieces together in our usual haphazard way. Mantic have managed, as usual, to send out loads of stuff but also miss out some vital parts. An example of this is the landing pad, which came packaged as about 30 pieces but without 2 or 3 main parts and no instructions what so ever…

We managed to build a suitable structure (with only a few blisters and sore fingers).

A couple of towers and 2 storey buildings later, we were well on our way.

Not too sure about the stairs we built but the overall effect is good.

My original Deadzone scenery is only a couple of storeys high and not too wide. This stuff was delivered in quantities that allowed us to build larger structures.

The stuff is flexible enough to allow many shapes.

Lots of firing points at varied levels.

We are about to play a game on this stuff so I have set it up as a 3’x3′ board. Lots of cover and lots of height differences.

The game… Wolsung… Not the most obvious choice of game for a set of sci-fi scenery, but the game should benefit from the mix of height and concentration of cover. As we have also never managed to play this game (my crew has been painted for ages and gathering dust) it ticks two boxes at once…

More to follow soon.

More Lasercut Scenery For The Collection, Going To Need A Bigger Shed Soon.

Some of you may recall that I began to build the scenery that came from the XLC Kickstarter recently. I’ve got the rest of it done now and a fine set it is…

For such a simple set of box style buildings, the effect is very good. The designs on the preprinted boards are better than any photo I can show you, and you really need to see them close up to take all the detail in.

Their scale is great for our 28-32mm games, and they are large enough to give a good level of cover or block lines of sight completely in most cases. You will see them in a number of upcoming posts, as they will definitely be featuring in a number of games over the next few weeks.

The containers and main warehouse were built, and the glue was drying, when last I posted about them.

The second workshop, or factory building, is now finished too. These kits have nice little extra touches to them, like the air conditioning units that get stuck on the outsides. This gives a slightly more 3D aspect to an otherwise flat box building.

The doors for the large and medium units are flat printed boards so cannot be opened and closed as such. So after much thought I decided to magnetise them. In the shed has been a sheet or two of magnetic rubber matting for magnetising the bases of miniatures. It has never been used for this, but that was its purpose when I bought it 8 years ago… This stuff is not very strong, as magnets go, but has been used to stick a few light weight things to other things over the last few years though.

It is, when used in long thin strips, up to the job of holding the doors in place for these buildings.

The last of the buildings is a more quirky, L shaped, factory. This will be more useful for blocking lines of sight on a table, or as an objective, as although the 3 roof sections come off, no part of the building is that big or accessible enough to put many men inside.

All in all, this a great little set of buildings that will add to my already wide selection of scenery in the shed. The scenery collection in the shed is really becoming something that affords us a wide range of choice. With our habit of flitting regularly from one game to another, setting up and gaming on a range of tables from a range of periods is no longer a problem.

Pausing To Post About My Post.

The Dust painting marathon has paused recently with an unfinished medium walker and its weapons sat on my painting table. This is sat beside two cows and a goat that came in the Achilles expansion that supplied my new Sigrid. Yes, I said two cows and a goat! What other game supplies such varied options of things to paint…

Dust is undergoing some trouble at the moment. I will not try to increase the fog that is covering various social media sites and forums at the moment. Enough is being said by various people without me adding to the mass of info out there. I just hope that this can be resolved to the benefit of the current form of the game and to allow the recent Kickstarter backers to get what they are due. I decided not to invest in the Kickstarter but I am keeping my fingers crossed for those who did!

I haven’t been entirely lazy over the last few weeks. I’ve got a game or two in and played with the various newly painted units as planned. Losing each and every time it would seem. I may need to paint up more infantry soon to keep my opponents from feeling that they are not being challenged.

The final things that can be blamed for my pause in painting are a couple of items from a Kickstarter that I did invest in. These turned up quite unexpectedly in the post, and surprised me, as I was unaware that these had been sent out.

Not many Kickstarters I have backed have been this close to being on time. The project was run by Chris Braunston from the XLC. This, purposefully small kickstarter, raised enough funds to produce a run of this exquisite preprinted lasercut terrain. I think that it worked out so well because they set their goals at an achievable level. So many Kickstarters run on and on and become unmanageable in the end, with stretch goals slowing the original production plans to a grinding halt. I invested to the sum of £45 and was rewarded with a set of workshops and warehouses which came with these nice shipping containers.

Unlike some of the prepainted items I have from other manufacturers, these are pre-printed boards, so have a high definition finish that looks stunning. I have started putting these together and have the large workshop and container set done so far.

I can’t state clearly enough how good I think these look. I always look at scenery as playing a key role in games as it sets the scene as well as giving a varied playing surface. These will look so good that they may make my other items look out of place…

When you get them out of the box they look pretty dreadful…

Then when you peel the protective backing film away the finish becomes apparent…

More photos to follow when the other builds are done… If anyone is interested in the items shown here, or would like to know more, I suggest you visit them at thexlc.co.uk. They have a limited site at the moment but I expect, once the Kickstarter completes, they will have this range available for purchase.

Never a copper about when you need one…

Early March 2013. A friend emailed me to let me know about a new Kickstarter campaign that was being run by West Wind Productions. What is it with friends justifying their own purchases by getting someone else to buy in too?

Empire of the Dead was getting a new lease of life and would include lots of new factions and new rules. Of course I was not able to resist. I was however a little new to the whole Kickstarter thing and didn’t know what to expect. I bought in at a reasonable level and sat back to wait for the campaign to close and to get my product. The wait lasted until November of the same year. I learned later that this is a swift turn about for a Kickstarter, as another game I bought into, Heroes of Normandie, took a whole year to come through in the end.

I have to state here that both have been well worth the wait…

To bide my time as I awaited the fulfilment of the campaign, a campaign that provided more extras than I could ever have expected, I picked up a few London bobbies and a town mob deal that provided me with more civilians than I would ever need. My trusty matt varnish again deposited a slightly frosty tone on the test models, to my dismay… I am still trying to find out what causes this on the odd few figures…

I had chosen to invest in the West Wind Kickstarter for the chance to get my hands on a new Peeler faction known as, Supernatural Branch, including the boys from, Hell Division. These were a police force that sported all kinds of toys to deal with supernatural troublemakers. Net guns, Gatling guns and mechanical guard dogs being the best bits!

By the time all the bits came through we had found a new passion in place of Empire of the Dead. These guys were, however, special enough to be painted up forthwith and a special game laid on in the cramped city in their honour.

That cramped city was growing thanks to the VBCW range by Warbases. Post office, shop and pub were added along with their Flemish house. All work well with each other and I think that they fit the style I was searching for from the start. Posters add to the flavour and a few more items, to add to the imagery, would be seen on the table in time.

Some of these guys friends have been seen recently on my painting table as not all were painted up first time round.

Next up, we discover Bolt Action!