Gallery – Page 40 – An Archive For The Steinberg Shed Space Blog

Wolsung, In The World Of Deadzone.

A while back I ended a post with the words “more to follow…” Seems a long while since that post, and until now, but the game I predicted did happen.

One game of Wolsung was all it needed to show that we would enjoy these rules. Simple but effective. Short but conclusive.

I was concerned at first at the three turn game limit in Wolsung, but this is actually enough to feel like you played a whole game, and it helps to focus your actions in a way that guarantees you try to get the most out of each and every move.

Although our newly constructed Deadzone scenery was not exactly the table we expected to play our first game on, it worked well. Wolsung seems to favour dense scenery and height differences to add an extra layer of complexity to a simple kill the king style of mission. Most of the missions in the basic book are assassination games where a varying number of victory points are placed on the heroes and awarded for killing them. The new rules (post Kickstarter) seem to add more mission types but we have yet to attempt these.

Wildly differing height differences and raised walkways are something our scenery has lacked in the past. I am now considering how I can add these features to the Victorian town and other scenery in the shed without adding a too far out effect to the overall look.

For the first game I played the Triad crew and my opponent played the Inventors. 2 heroes, straight from the starter sets, and we were on our way. Our cat and mouse tactics were the result of not knowing how effective each others forces would be. The Inventers appear to be full of close combat specialists (heavily armoured Golems…) and magical buffs. While the Triad starter is all about staying in cover and completing surgical strikes, as they don’t seem to excel at either close or long ranged attacks.

Whatever their obvious strengths, the synergy between all members of a crew is a key factor for success in all the clubs it would seem.

Game two showed the need to hide high value assets and commit hard with henchmen.

Game three was Triad Vs Ash and Oak. The Ash and Oak club seems to favour long ranged snipers but can dish out the damage, up close, with their bruisers too. We proxied in figures for this game, as we didn’t have the starter, but we wanted to play the third club to see its worth. I never expected to find a use for the old man in a wheelchair that I bought at Overlord about 5 years ago. I think he is from the Dystopian Legions range. Great figure and a steal when I got him… The other members of the club were from various Empire of the dead crews and a couple of Wyrd Miniatures from Malifaux.

One lesson I learned early on is that my ranged Triad henchmen are not meant to try to fight in close combat with anything other than a mouse… Here she was mashed in one action by an Ogre Bruiser

Overall Wolsung will most likely dominate the table for the next few weeks. Until I go to Salute at the end of the month, which is when all manner of new toys will be likely to descend…

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.

A Family Dispute In Miniature, Soon Settled By The Local Police!

Family. Often the most difficult group of people you will ever meet. Often your interests will clash. When two mob bosses marry their interests and aspirations can lead to competition and conflict.

Picture Mr and Mrs M.

Mr M runs things north of the shed. A traditionalist and always supported by his goon squad (all with no fashion sense or understanding of camouflage).

Mrs M runs the south side with her band of bikini clad females. Far from traditional and all armed with automatic weapons and huge …smiles. Very distracting and great for getting the other mob guys to forget what they were doing just long enough to put two between their eyes.

Both think the other needs to be shown how to do things better. So they agree on a wager. Whoever takes the prize first, wins.

The prize in this case is the local security truck. Its route easy to follow, and its cargo profitable and easy to fence.

The only risk comes from the local police who have a station right in the middle of the drivers route.

Mrs M made her move first as the van left its first pickup. No finesse and no caution. Shoot first work out how to get the doors open later…

The van runs for cover and to the safety of the police station.

All that gunfire attracts the interest of the local bobbies pretty quickly…

Out they pour, truncheons at the ready. (This is the UK you know… Don’t worry though, the armed responders will be here in about an hour.)

As Mr M speeds in to try to steal back the initiative the first of the armed police finally turn up and start to fire their rubber bullets taking a few mobsters down.

As the standoff continues Mrs M runs out with a fierce look and a handbag to show those boys in blue what for.

When they show no signs of backing down in the face of her threatening eyebrows, she decides to run for cover. Finding the injured Mr M hiding behind a wall she has two choices. She chooses to let love rule and stops to protect him. Just as the bobbies with handcuffs rush in and manhandle her to the floor.

Its ‘Game Over’ for both Mr and Mrs M… Attempted robbery and possession of an unlicensed firearm… Gonna be hard time for the M’s it would seem.

Sometimes no one wins!

Until next time…

A Fistful Of Godzilla

This game was played about a month ago but as the post is only just getting put up it must be obvious to all that I am a little behind at the moment. We wanted an easy but fun game of Fistful of Kung Fu and wanted to add in the rules for complications and VIPs again. The last time we loaded the game this way I was swamped by a hoard of zombies… not this time.

The table was setup to represent a warehouse district and had all manner of open spaces and blind corners. Plenty of tall terrain was new for this game too. I expected to see lots of sniping from afar in this one.

I had the Arab influenced terrorist while my opponent went for plenty of goons with guns and a couple of connected mob bosses.

My secret weapon was a MG armed truck (played as a bruiser with the long move, protected and big traits). The extra mobility and strength didn’t help it to last as it became a bullet magnet early on. Maybe I should have gone for something not so yellow to help it hide better.

We also had a large visitor for this game, in the form of GODZILLA…

The game was played with the mission objective of ‘find someone’. In this case it was all about finding the mob boss’s best gal. She was hiding in some piece of undisclosed scenery. All I had to do was stop them finding her, and if they did find her, I was to stop them from rescuing her.

Very soon I had lots of targets in my sights, where ever they chose to hide.

Godzilla had other ideas though. She was just out to find lunch, and was roaming the battlefield munching down on anyone foolish enough not to run for cover.

Sadly that was all to often my own men…

Nowhere was safe to hide and soon she had the scent of perfume and was off to find the boss’s best gal herself.

Surprisingly the dame survived the chewing of some huge teeth before being run out of town by the mob boys. Sadly that only left my own men to provide pudding in this game.

The game played out nicely with all the random movement ending up where it made sense for Godzilla to go. I would have liked slightly less attention from such a large opponent. I guess I have something about me that attracts these things.

Red Bricking Everything

After the success of the Warbases workshop project, I have had a run on touch ups to the other MDF buildings in the shed. The red brick colour that I used for the workshop was done with a staple for my MDF buildings, artists ink. I first came across this stuff when I wanted a colour wash for some miniatures. Let me tell you, it’s useless for that! BUT, it is great for MDF buildings as it soaks into the wood and gives a nice finish while still leaving any engraved lines very visible.

The red brick colour is done using a red earth shade. At about £6-7 a bottle from my local artist shop, this stuff is not cheap, but it does last, and a little goes along way (and when you are done, the bottle and pipette can be used for any other paint mixes you want to make up).

The police house got a coat of red earth to start with and shows the contrast of the old, plain wood, colour (on the roof and door) and new brick quite well in this photo.

The Pub was next and looks great with its red brick look. I even, finally, added in the red to the brick wall at the bottom of the greenhouse too.

My Flemish house has very plain, high walls, so needed to be more than base wood colour too. The dormer windows got a coat of uniform grey while I was at it. They suddenly became very obviously wood coloured when all the other surfaces were painted. As the tiles are dry brushed in this colour it ties in well with the roof as well.

The police house was finished with black window frames (no white plastic frames in Victorian times). I used a lighter grey for the buildings name plate, and door surround on the building as well. Then the problems started…

While I was adding the grey, I accidentally splodged some in the upper right hand corner, above the door. As it was a tiny mark, I thought a quick touch up with the red earth ink would be enough to cover it up. This however resulted in a much darker shade in one area of the wall. Applying two coats of ink changes the colour completely… The darker area looked very obvious and I had no way of lightening it.

So I decided I could either paint the whole wall again, and hope that the corner became less obvious, or I could add in other areas of darker brickwork to make it look like it was a variation in the brickwork. I opted for the latter, but the size of the accidental change in the corner remained very obvious compared to the other areas of repainted bricks. The only other way to fix it was to cover it up with something…

This little item turned up in the post just in time to sort things out and cover up the majority of the problem. Its a 1/48 scale, train set police lamp. It comes complete with a little LED bulb and wires. A little more than I needed, as I don’t trust my electrical aptitude enough to power up a wooden building in a shed that is so full of flammable objects.

I’ve lots of other buildings still to paint up in the shed. But, now that I’ve set on a basic brick colour, I think about getting started on the others. I do plan to mix up a couple of pots of ink with a lighter and darker shade, to gain some variation, so that they are not all the same colour.

Warbases Workshop Finally Gets A Touch Of Love

This little Warbases building has been on the shelf for a good couple of months. It was the trial roof for my bigger warehouse but after that was completed the momentum stopped and no further updates have occurred. This is a lovely little building with lots of nice touches like sliding doors.

That has however changed. I had a quiet half term when my daughter was home and I couldn’t get any games in. I did get lots of time to break out the paint brushes and finish a few projects.

The basic paintjob was a whitewash to 3 walls and red brick to the remaining side. The whitewash was applied using a small piece of foam and some watered down white paint. A stippled coat of white was applied with the aim of getting an aged and heavily repainted look. This came out as a bit too clean. So, the foam was dipped into my paint brush water (a lovely dirty, green tinged pot of filth) stippling that over the wet white did the job well.

Add in some of the 1/43 scale signs, a couple of bins and a petrol pump or too…

Just a dirty up of the roof was needed to finish the overall look (again a healthy wash of dirty water with a drop or two of army painter ink to darken it slightly).

Job done…

All garages need some thing to work on so a small collection of cars has been collected recently.

The Audi came with bullet holes painted on it already…

And with a 70s Ford Granada police car they are perfect for our Kung Fu games of late.

Our future games look like they will have lots of tough coppers driving about on the table trying to stop all the mayhem from happening.

VERY happy with how this has come out…

LaserCut Card – Better Than I Expected, And Some Excellent Finishing Touches

A couple of posts ago, I had a photo of the Urban Scatter that I got from Lasercut Card. At that point it was only undercoated and on the table because it was out when we wanted to setup for a quick game. Since then it has been painted and a few new scatter terrain items have been added to the collection courtesy of ebay.

The colour scheme for the wheelie bins is very local as the bins outside my house are just like these, orange top – recycling, black top- regular rubbish.

The larger industrial bins are copied from my local corner store (the one beside my local curry house actually).

The petrol pumps are 1/43 scale diorama pieces from an ebay seller in Portugal. A great couple of items at very reasonable prices. These are aged and full of nice touches.

He also sells a range of signs in a similarly aged fashion. All great items for adding extra touches to the buildings on my gaming table. These are destined to be put on my Warbases workshop when it finally gets finished off.

The last of the Urban Scatter items is this, now very dirty, skip.

Painted yellow as all proper skip companies in the UK seem to paint their skips this colour.

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.

Dust Battlefield: How To Lose A Battle In Three Simple Steps

Dust was revisited recently, with a fast and dirty game of Dust Battlefield played on a smaller than normal table. This turned out to be, for me, a lesson in not taking a game for granted.

Lesson one: Don’t get cocky!

With all my new units to choose from I fielded a truly mixed bag of units, as I thought a force of very specialised units would allow me to easily outclass a small force of SSU shock infantry with only 2 walkers on their side.

Specialist units, it turns out, are very mission specific. For example – fast moving units only work if the table is open enough to freely move on, and static kill specialists, once their optimum target is out of sight or eliminated, become almost useless…

Lesson two: Don’t overreach!

Specialists cost more! This leaves a smaller force. Fast moving troop transports can quickly leave their support behind… When this happens, if they are not fielded in sufficient numbers, they will find it difficult to hold their ground for long. With my force, one transport does not a spearhead make…

Lesson three: Never underestimate a lady driver!

Koshka… What can I say… One hero. in a medium close assault walker, looks like it should be easy pickings. Easy pickings until I find out that that hero has the ace pilot skill. The chance of a third action every time she activated, along with two goes per turn, provided by a ‘Get Moving You Bunch Of Monkeys’ command action. That lady driver was driving my way from turn one. Before I even had time to blink she was in my flank and causing havoc.

When I finally finished her off I had very little left to contest the game with…

All that was left was a bit of mopping up by the SSU. When the smoke cleared I had to admit that I had lost.

Lesson learned? Unlikely, as I will probably have to see this happen a couple more times before I finally realise that all those shiny specialists have their limitations.

I still need to get the majority of my basic infantry painted, lord knows I have enough of them, but they are not so much fun to paint as the walkers and heavies tend to be…

A Fistful Of Kung Fu, Without All The Kung Fu.

We managed to fit in a quick game or two of Fistful of Kung Fu recently. We seem to be playing the game more as a 70-80s gangster/police TV show, instead of in the planned Hong Kong movie style. I have to say though, that it seems to lend itself well to any over acted, movie based, period.

Using a 3×3 foot table and keeping the gang points to about 300 made it fast and bloody.

I got a chance to try out some of the smaller bits of new scenery I have picked up recently, as well as getting the warehouse out again. The roof is as unfinished as expected but is likely to get some love soon so watch this space…

I must paint those die cast trucks I bought or the table will look like a black and white movie soon.

Picked up a cheap 4×4 and caravan in the local pound store. Not quite to scale (modern 1/43 cars are a bit BIG).

Dug out my old, and long out of print, Battlefield Evolution figures from Mongoose Publishing for this game, as I still can’t find a suitable 70-80s style gang that makes me happy as yet.

Plenty of cover and props to activate (translate that to trash cans to dump on peoples heads and shelves to topple on the bad guys)

We played the complications and VIP rules for these games too. These can range from good old fashioned zombie invasions to spreading fires on the table.

The more observant of you may have spotted some new large and small wheelie bins (trash cans to my American audience) and a large skip. These are the Lasercut Card, Urban Scatter items. Currently undercoated in silver (the only full spray can I had at the time…) More on these later.

We are still enjoying this fine little game, and with the painting and construction in the shed again focused on scenery, I suspect this will continue for some time.