Bargains

For about the last year I have been using trade-me quite a bit. It is a New Zealand Ebay equivalent I guess you could say. Last week I got two items I am pretty stoked about. Item one is a Monsterpocolypse starter kit a strategic war game with giant monsters. Whats not to love?

In all honesty I don't really know how to play but it is highly rated and comes with heaps of cool monsters and buildings and a map for only $30. I am picking it up at Call To Arms tournament in a weeks time. The second item is the Tantive IV which is a giant x wing spaceship. 

It is a beast.

I thought I would give some tips which hopefully apply to wider than just trade me.

1. Always ask for a better price. If you don't ask you will never know, and if they say no, no skin of your back! 
2. Create watch lists.  On trade me I have set searches for games I am interested in however don't feel any pressing need to get straight away. 

Here is a screenshot from my favourites,
I get an email if anything comes up every 3 days. 

3. Don't get it if you feel the price is to high, something else will alway come up. If the seller can't sell often they will re-list it with a lower price, I have got items this way a few times including the tantive IV.

I am sure there are other tips which are not on the top of my mind currently but you get the picture. Always ask questions, be patient, keep an eye out! If you have any other ideas put it down below. I guess I should share my major success story. Twilight imperium which is normally $150-$200 I scored for $29, bargain huh! I waited about 2 years before this bargain came up however I didn't care so much as its such a long game (looking at 8 hours) I knew it wouldn't get much table time. 

X-wing table complete

Last week I made headway on a space board to use for X-Wing. However to make it playable I had to mark out a 3 by 3 square. As it was already three foot wide I just had to divide up the length.

Marking the line. I was going to paint it white however I decided to go with blue in the end so the contrast wasn't so stark. 

I am happy with the final result. I preferred the table as solid space however the line had to be made for a game of X-Wing. Of interest, while cutting the wood originally I didn't think about size, so if you were to play two games of X-Wing at once, there would be one 3 foot side and the other about 1/2 a cm off. 

The table even looks good for an epic board game. My green felt however does provide an easier surface to use, namely when picking up tokens and cards. Here Dan, Alex and I are playing a game of Arkham Horror. 

It was nice playing Arkham Horror as it is truly a classic. The mechanic is very clunky although it is impressive that it manages to hold such a complex co-operative game and keep it fun. We didn't quite finish however I am pretty sure Shuddle M'ell would have consumed us and inevitably the whole world. 

Grr, I am Shuddle, call me uddle for short. 

Rebel Aces - B Wing

A new post so soon? It was kind of an emergency as this morning Fantasy Flight released info on the new B-wing spaceship in the rebel aces expansion pack. I guess I am pretty excited as I genuinely think the B-wing is one of the best spaceships in Star Wars X-wing at the moment.

The new B wing with the new paint scheme. 

Pretty good looking ship huh. Fact is I don't care much for how it looks, at first I thought it was an ugly ship and who would buy that however it has grown on me. However more importantly what does it add to the X-Wing game. First up the new pilots:

Both these pilots have pretty sweet abilities, Keyan being able to negate the negatives of stress which is especially potent with the new technology to stress enemy ships. Nera Dantels (cool last name) who effectively has a torpedo turret! I think with the release of the Tie Phantom who is criminally manoeuvrable lots of fans cried foul saying it is an unbeatable ship so FFG decided to add some more turret ships into the mix to negate this and here we have another and on my favourite ship!

Now another exciting addition is:

Now you can add crew to your B-Wing. Nice. Consider this for a admittedly point expensive ship

Nera Dantels with

B-Wing/E2
Recon specialist (gain 2 focus)
Dead eye
Advanced proton torpedoes
Ftorpedoes. 

at 39 points it is a tad silly however now you can take a focus action and get the focus you need to spend on firing the missiles with dead eye and then a focus to convert eyes to hits, with Advanced proton torpedoes this is insane as you covert up to 3 blanks to focus out of your 5 attack device. That is a huge alpha strike! Probably a better way to use Nera is

Nera with

2x F torpedoes

munitions failsafe

at 31 points still expensive but not so bad. The Ftorps are a 3 attack torpedoes which always stresses the target you shoot at. Being a turret it leaves the phantom little places to go and stress really hurts it. The munitions failsafe stops you from having to discard you torpedoes if it misses which with the Ftorps is nice as it stresses the ship either way. 

Needless to say I can't wait for this expansion and some more B-Wing shenanigans. 

Hello world and DIY X-Wing space table

Well it has been a while! I finally decided it is time to get back into the blogging world again! First off I better give a shout out to Paul from Dog of War for nominating us for a Liebster award which I will have to work out how to put on our website. I think that means we will have to nominate some lucky bloggers out there.

What have Dan and I been doing lately? Well after our last post we played a fair amount of FOW honing our skills. Unfortunately I am a terrible procrastinator when it comes to painting so that took a lull. Dan has been working on some large scale model planes. After FOW we played a fair amount of Star Wars X-Wing. I even attended a FLGS tournament and came 4th out of 13 which I was pretty stoked about!

Store championship range ruler! #selfie

With that in mind I decided for the upcoming Wellington Call to Arms tournament I will join in on the X-Wing tournament. It's pretty happening over here at 50mm game room. So without further to do here is my most recent DIY project.

The eery science of space, and a grassy knoll.

Not so bad. Pretty much just used black spray paint for the base layer (I had to use 2 cans) and blue to create the nebula/stars. As you can see its outside drying right at this moment. Next step is to paint a white stripe down the centre to split the table into two as its 6 by 3 where a standard x wing game is 3 by 3. Conveniently enough it can work as two tables side by side or the 6 by 3 size works perfectly for the x wing epic rules.

"Play more games" Wil Wheaton.
(Yes I did back Wil Wheaton's Table Top season 3 while we weren't blogging). 

German Recon Platoon

I have been in a bit of a protracted hobby funk recently.  I have struggled to get motivated to pick up a paint brush, let alone blog about it.  Steve has been carrying the blog for some time now.

I have finally got around to painting up a recon platoon to go with mu Fallschirmjager army.  Mobile recon is helpful with the FJ because they are a pretty static bunch.  A lot of lists for them have infantry scout platoons for recon, which I did not like the look of.  The Ersatz FJ in Bridge by Bridge have the option of a halftrack platoon, with a sdkfz 250/1 as command and 250/9s in support.

Battlefront were out of the 250/9s, so I sourced these guys from Forged in Battle.  They have the built in base which I am not a fan of generally, but the quality of the casting was quite good and there was a lot of detail on the halftracks.  Here are the pictures:

Hopefully it will get me motivated to do some more painting!

Attack Wing: D&D

Thats right folks, Dungeons and Dragons are making a game utilising the FlighPath game system seen in such games as Star Wars X-Wing which I have blogged about now and then. The game will be called Attack Wing: Dungeons & Dragons.

But there are no spaceships in D&D right? Well apparently players will control dragons which they will fly around the table. As far as I am aware like Star Wars X-Wing and Star Trek Fleet Captains they are releasing a starter set with 3 dragons. However unlike Star Wars and Star Trek D&D is planning on introducing ground units like giants and wizards.

Dogfighting dragons huh? I think it sounds like it would be a fun game and adding ground units will make it a more diverse game. However my gripe would be that in the space dogfights the manoeuvre dials which are used to fly can be quite clinical with either basic turns, banks or moving straight forward, this works well for spaceships, I would imagine Dragons to be able to move in a more versatile manor. Who knows what will happen anyhow, I look forward to see what they come up with. Admittedly I probably won't get this game due to already investing in Star Wars X-Wing. 

FOW free for all AAR part one

Another games club, another Flames of War game. This time I am using the 3rd US armoured division which are confident trained rather than confident veterans. I was doing my research and as the Americans have a lot of firepower they work best as trained. I guess the rational for this is to hit scores are based on your opponents skill rating so it really doesn't mater what your skill rating is. Trained armies win in shoot outs and veterans in assaults. Anyhow here is some photos of the first part of my 3rd US armoured division versus Dans fallschirmjäger army at 1300 points. The scenario is free for all. 

The set up after my first move. I started my armoured rifle platoon out of their halftracks defending the objective. 

I moved my 76mm shermans up with the recon to prevent Dan from ambushing with his cheeky panzerfaust teams which can spring an ambush from area terrain. We are not quite sure what that involves however as Dan was using buildings at one point. If anyone has any clarifications that would be great. 

  I used my command 75mm sherman to shoot smoke to reduce potential harm from Dans pathers. 

My thunderbolt got its first flight however only being strength one I had to reroll my first batch of successes of which I got 100% of my dice rolls only to get 40% on the second roll, hitting on a 2+. 

A mid game drink. Quite a tasty one. Unfortunately there are no records of Dans last turn but it involved some movement but and no successful shots. 

In round two the thunderbolt bombed Dans panther and a pak40, unfortunately the panther saved his armour save but the pak40 couldn't stand the heat!

Afraid for my tanks I moved them all tother up my left flank with recon protecting them from surprise ambushes.

I moved my mortars into position to provide covering fire and smoke. 

Success Pak40s smoked reducing the threat for my shermans in the open. 

 A view after my turn. Once again Dans next turn goes undocumented but it invoved him moving up, sprining a ambush with a panzerfaust team on my armoured mortars and like me rolling miserably scoring 0 hits, oh except that Pac 40 I blew up.

The next turn involved me advancing my shermans shooting some covering smoke, while I was at it destroyed his Pak 40 platoon and foolishly assaulted one of dans fallshirmjager platoons. 

Dan's platoon was still pined from last turn but all his troops had panzefausts and were at 100% strength. No amount of covering smoke could prepare me. He missed all his shots from the teams in the smoke but the three out managed to all hit. One 76mm sherman was destroyed and one bailed. Then in Dans turn he finished them off. 

My armoured rifle platoon did managed to destroy 2/3 of Dans armoured recon teams on the other side of the field however.  

In Dans turn he advanced and took out half my armoured mortar platoon with the rest of his panzerfaust teams. 

Then we called it a night. We are planning to finish this game in a fortnights time. I feel though we destroyed a platoon each I feel Dan is at an advantage as my platoons were more costly and he is in a good position. I guess I jumped the gun with my assault where I should of sat back moving and shooting which Americans are good at. Also I forgot to use my recon to lift gone to ground, doh'. 

For a second run with the US armoured devision I feel I did well and learn some hard mistakes I shan't make again in a hurry, namely destroying my 76mm shermans by assaulting a fully armed platoon. I am looking forward to revising the force and trying again. Plus despite everything we had a great time!