Today we had the first annual Blood Bowl Tournament down at the club, organized and sponsored by a friend and his small gaming store. We ended up with 7 players competing for the trophy and some loot to go with it. I brought my newly painted (just finished yesterday morning) Wood Elves team, the Fannynannies. With not being to many players we all played each other and the highest score in the end would win.

The tournament didn’t get of to a very good start for me, loosing the opening game against a High Elves team. After that it went a bit better, only loosing to a Dwarf team and a huge win against an Ork team. With those 4 wins and 2 losses I actually managed to come in first place which was a very nice surprise. I have to say, I’m very happy with it as it’s not very often I acctually win these things^^. The best game was without a doubt my last game, against the organizers Chaos team. It was extremely close and kept going back and forward through out the whole game.

I’m looking forward to next years tournament and will definitely bring a new team to it.

For winning I got a trophy that will pass on to next years winner and a couple of picks from a box of loot with my choices being a 40k objective set and a Warhammer basing kit, both something I wanted to I’m very happy with it.

Then on Saturday I got recruited for another game of Axis & Allies but this time it was the new 1914 version we played. I got chosen to play the Germans, which I always hated in the WW2 version. The poor Central Powers did not get a god start at all and during the first 4 or 5 turns the borders didn’t move much against France. It went a bit better against the Russian player and after some almost embarrassingly good dice rolls I managed to trigger the Revolution and by that, eliminating him from the game. After that the Allies tried to blitz us before the units on the Russian front would make it back, but failed and soon after gave up.

The gave was fun but the rulebook was horrible. No index, scattering information under more or less unrelated topics and then the Revolution… That wins the Worst Written Rule award big time. I definitely enjoyed the game and would give it another go in the future.

Today I got some fun stuff in the mail. First I got a small package containing 600 small magnets that I decided to try after finding them extremely cheap on Ebay. The aren’t as strong as the usual ones but they are strong enough for most things I need them for. The second package was ‘In Her Majesty’s Name’ which was a nice surprise as I didn’t think it would get released until next week. I haven’t had time to read it yet but I will post my thoughts about it when I do.

Fortunately for me the rules hadn’t changes much since I played the last time and it come back quite fast. The problem for me was the lack of experience playing Italy and it didn’t go all that well.

We didn’t get a very good start but managed to turn it around after a couple of turns mostly thanks to my teammates and I managed to take over Egypt. After that it started to go downhill for me and somewhat for the German player, he didn’t get the momentum rolling in the war against Soviet and the British started making my life hard in Africa. When all of that was happening the Japanese player started to advance more and more into China and Soviet while holding his own against the US and winning most of their naval battles and it kept going better and better for him and when we stopped playing he had a big lead when it came to income. Unfortunately his advance into Soviet took to long and when me and the German player didn’t have enough support in Europe and by the Soviet front so we surrendered.

It was really fun to try it again after all these years and the rules seemed quite good but could use a tweak or three to make it a really good game. Will I play it again? Absolutely, but not to soon. The guy who owns the game was also talking about buying the WWI version of the game and that I will definitely try that version as I think it could be quite interesting.

After the surrender we decided to play a game of Battlestar Galactica which went surprisingly well as I managed to win as a Zylon.

So going over the trays around half of them doesn’t have any manufacturing errors that I can see and the other half was not as fun. It was raster foam but the problem was that are already glued to the bottom so it’s a pain in the ass to cut out the holes. But hey, for that price I’m not gonna complain much and I’m sure they are usable, it will just take some time.

http://www.feldherr.net/uk/foam-trays/special-deals/special-offer-second-choice-foam-trays-30-off.html

On other parts of the internet there has been some very bad news the last day or two, GW is shutting down Specialist Games which I can somewhat understand from a business POV but as gamer and as a long time fan of those games this news is sad and make me slightly pissed off at them. In my opinion, Epic: Armageddon might be the best game GW has ever made, even if all the work the last bunch of years has been done by fans, and it’s the same with all of them. I’m seriously considering cutting down on the GW spending a lot because of this, might be a somewhat silly response.

Me and a friend have been talking some about the “The Empire of the Dead” system as we both love that setting. While looking for some good reviews I found another game kinda in the same genre, “In Her Majesty’s Name”, a game that’s being published by Osprey and after reading through a pretty heavy thread about it over at LAF I went ahead and pre-ordered it. It should be released around May 20 and it was surprisingly cheap so I’m happy.

I’ve also (yet again) starting to consider getting a smaller scale WW2 game, probably in 6mm. I’ve found some ideas about using Battlegroup Overlord in that scale but I’m waiting for some more info about what rules you need to change. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll be able to pull it off

On the painting side, not much has happened. I finished the 5 Linemen for my Blood Bowl Woodies and the rest has gotten some more paint on them.

The Decimator is a nice and easy to build kit that I can highly recommend, the only part that required some extra thought was the legs and how tall you want them to be. I build mine somewhat taller then the photos from Forge World and with the shoulder pads on they land at just below 11cm tall. Now I just need to try them out on the table. I’m not expecting any miracles from them but it’s going to be nice with some non psychic power based shooting. The plan is to get 2 or 3 Plague Hulks as well to get some more AV models in the army.

On to the Toads. I just have one thing to say about them: Absolutely awesome. The sculpting is top notch and the casting just as good. The only 2 downsides with them is that first, they are quite a lot bigger then I thought and won’t really fit on 40mm bases, and secondly, the feet had some small problems fitting nicely to the body but it’s easy to fix with some putty and wont take much time.

http://www.sarissa-precision.co.uk/

The first two turns went really, really well and it was looking to be a good day to be a Daemon but it changed after that second turn and I started loose more and more and quite fast. By turn five I had control of three objectives and my opponent had the other two. Neither of us had much left of our armies after a couple of pretty brutal melee fights. I think that more or less the whole outcome of the game was decided with a charge distance roll on turn five. My opponent tried to charge in two squads of Arbites into my Plague Bearers that was holding an objective. I was in luck and he failed the roll for one of the squads, that followed with some very crappy close combat rolls I managed to win the fight and the game. Good stuff.

I’ve also made some progress on my Blood Bowl Woodies. The first five just needs a little bit of work so they should be done soon.