Warmachine, Part 2: Assembly and Painting Begin!

First, some bad news. The sand table inserts, despite turning out great, got warped so they don't fit into the table. So I've had to go with a different solution for that. You'll see it later, and no it wasn't the Zuzzy mat.

Anyway, for those unfamiliar with miniature wargames, let me show you what you get.

So, just so were clear, this are individually bagged minis (sometimes they come on sprues that you have to cut them out of), but they aren't put together. You have to do that yourself. Sometimes, it's a bit like getting something from Ikea without having instructions. Luckily, the Warmachine minis are pretty awesome and its evident what you have to do. That doesn't stop it from looking like this when you take them out of the bag though.

So, a little bit of super glue and a couple of hours end up producing the following:

Priming them is the next step in the process. You prime the minis so that paint will better stick to them when you go in to do detail work. You want to prime in colors that make sense for what the base colors of the mini will be.

The first army was Khador. Their colors are darker in nature, as seen by the mini here (not painted by me):

I primed black because of this. If I could have found a red primer, I would have used that, but black will work. It may mean I need to layer on more paint when painting, but that's OK.

To prime them, I put a little bit of tacky stuff on a piece of cardboard (obviously the black one there) and primed each individually. The goal is to do it enough to coat the entire mini, but not so much that it pools and ruins detail. So you want to keep the spray can at least a foot away while spraying too. You'll go through a bit this way, but they turn out good.

The next army was The Protectorate of Menoth. They are more of a white base. (again, not painted by me)

So I primed these guys white.

Yes, I did mess up the bases a bit moving them from the painting cardboard piece to the drying area. Live and learn! I have to do the bases with dirt and fake grass bits anyway, so I'll touch those up then. I'll give the primer a full 24 hours, then the actual painting will commence!

Warmachine Update: Table is done!

So the sand ended up working well, and has now been painted. Only fail was doing it in the basement, as it wasn't well ventilated. That isn't exactly true...It ventilates up into the house, so I'm having to air things out.

Only thing left is to put some straps on the boards so that they can be easily put in and pulled out. then to get decorations for the table.

Anyway, here are some pictures:

Warmachine, Part 1.5: Battle Scars!

OUCH!!! Got that trying to scrape excess sand off...but most of it is stuck on, which is exactly what I want! More glue tomorrow, and we'll see how it is after application on Wednesday.

Warmachine, Part 1: Building a Wargaming Table

So this past week I was introduced to Warmachine.

Warmachine is a tabletop minis war game, in which two armies from a fantasy steam punk universe duke it out. As my mom so aptly put it, "Oh, so it's expensive army men." Pretty much...

Well, I'd ordered the Two-player battle box, which comes with enough units to field two small army groups. One for me, one for my son. Kids make a great excuse to get into a new expensive hobby. After all, it's father-son time, though my daughter has already informed me that she wants her own army too. So knowing we'd need an area to play, I went about researching to make a table for us to use.

A standard Warmachine game takes place on a 4'x4' play area. Sure I have two 6'x2' tables in my game room, so I could just put them together, but I wanted a surface that fit on one of the and was the proper size. I went in with a few goals.

1. Spend as little as possible. Serious war gamers may scoff at the notion, but I didn't want to spend a bunch of money as the game could honestly be a bust with my son. I don't foresee that happening, but I also didn't want to spend a ton because it was going to be done as a family project and it's been awhile since I've done any construction.
2. Slightly modular. I didn't want to put the terrain surface directly on the base board as I plan to use this for more than just Warmachine (Wings of Glory and X-Wing, for instance) so I wanted to put a lip around the outside then place tiles inside that had the terrain surface on them instead.

I figure that if the game is a hit, we'll eventually build another table, but for now what we came up with will do.

So this is the wood I bought, most of it was really cheap.

• 1x 4'x4' board for the base
• 2x 2'x2' wafer board for the tiles
• 4x 4"x4'x1" planks to rim the outside of the base (slight mistake here!)
• 1x 1"x8'x1/2" furring strip, cut in half to use as a support

Now, with the planks I purchased, I didn't even think about the fact that I'd end up with corners. I'll have to figure out a good way to fill those in. Anyway, construction is pretty simple.

In between putting this together, we were also getting ready for something else.

We'd be using the glue and the cheap paintbrush to put the sand onto the wafer boards. But first we had to prepare the sand.

Why prep the sand? Well, when you buy sand, it's generally decently wet. Wet sand tends to clump a lot, so we would take a bowl of sand and put it under the hair dryer until it was dry enough to fly everywhere. We figured that was a good indication of dryness. After it was dry, we'd put down a bunch of glue in about a quarter of a board, spread it around, then put the sand on top.

You probably noticed that I lined the wafer boards with duct tape. Since wafer board can be a bit rough around the edges, I decided to line it. Eventually the boards were done and I let them sit overnight to really dry, figuring I'd knock off the excess sand and repeat putting sand down in the morning if necessary.

This was at the end of the night

So after knocking the excess off in the morning, there were multiple spots where the blue hadn't been spread very well so there wasn't any sand. I had used the entire bottle of Elmer's Glue, so I took a 4oz bottle, cut it with water, and tried a different tactic on these parts. Instead of pouring glue, I took the brush and just spread it onto the empty areas. And instead of kind of gently sprinkling the sand on, we just packed it down onto the glue. I have a sinking suspicion that the sand may have actually absorbed some of the watered down glue, but I'll give it a few hours then knock off the excess again. If it ends up being a failure, then I'll chalk it up to a learning experience and get one of these.

Cargo: The Quest for Gravity (Insanity)

So the Steam sale was this past week and I picked up quite a few games on the cheap, as it's a great time to do so. Well, one gem that I found was called:

I've not completed it yet, and have merely played a few hours, but I'm ready to declare it the strangest game in my Steam library. It's a game that could have been developed by Picasso having a fever dream while having dropped acid. I've tried to think of other words that could accurately describe this, but really the only fitting thing here is the meme

Yeah, that is a true statement in terms of this game. Essentially the earth has been destroyed, but not totally, just enough that most of it got blown off into the atmosphere in decent sized chunks. Apparently gravity has mostly disappeared as well. This seems to be the work of three giant robot heads who all call themselves Manipu: Deus Ex Machina. They travel around an island dangled from a conveyor belt and talk to you about how much humans suck and break things. But just mostly, its you and the Buddies...oh, that's right, I haven't talked about the Buddies. Have you read Hyperion by Dan Simmons? No. Fix that. If you have, then the Buddies remind me of the Bikura, only if the Bikura were all midgets, spoke in rhyme, and were infinite supplies of fun. I apologize profusely for the next image, but I have to share the crazy. It's the only way to keep myself sane.

It's a Buddy chain! Wooo! So yeah, FUN is the currency in Cargo, and you get FUN by doing stuff with Buddies. Don't worry, your mind going to the bad place just now...that doesn't happen, I hope. Anyway, you get FUN from Buddies by kicking them (they enjoy flying and will eventually float into the air and explode, giving you lots of FUN) or taking them on boat rides (which also makes them explode) or racing them (you got it, explode) and I'm sure numerous other things as the game progresses. You then use your FUN to buy parts to build things like boats or cars. The system here is very Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts, where you get to decide where to put various pieces of the vehicle. Kind of cool.

I mean, overall, the game is oddly fun, a lot of the time because you're just going on this near nightmare fuel adventure to see where it takes you next. Controls aren't the tightest thing in the world and take some getting used to. Oh, there is also this thing with music, where you collect notes and set up little music areas for the Buddies to dance to. The more Buddies dancing, the more FUN you get.

It's just...bizarre. It's $10 right now, and I still kind of recommend it at that price. It has a sandbox mode as well, where I assume you just get the parts and blueprints to build whatever. I'm definitely going to keep playing, but the Captain did just inform me that he has a plan to capture some buddies and breed them. Uhhhh...remember how I said earlier not to worry? And did I mention you get your tutorials in-game from the Buddy Band?

Yup.

Live from WWE RAW 1000

Wooooooooo! I'm currently in St Louis with my son for WWE's 1000th episode of RAW. It's his first live show.

We're fairly high up, but visibility from where we are is great. Should be a great show!

Video Game Worlds are SCARY

So I was watching Felicia Day's latest Flog here and eventually she gets to the user submitted question of the week. The question seemed harmless enough, merely asking, "If you were to live in a video game world, which world would it be?" Since she had a Q&A panel at Vidcon, she posited that question to people there.

Answers were what most people would expect. Hyrule, Azeroth, the world of Portal. Though early on, someone mentioned Fallout. I laughed a bit at that, but then it made me start to think about the question. Does it assume that we'd be heroes or heroines in this world once we were transported into it? Or would we be our current selves, transported there? Because, well...If it's the latter, well, screw living in video game worlds.

Why? Think about just how scary each of those propositions above is.

• Hyrule - Evil constantly trying to take over the world. Also, punk kid kicking my chickens or breaking my jars.
• Azeroth - Deathwing, nuff said.
• The world of Portal - Well, its Earth...a dystopian future version of Earth, it seems. Even then, indicating you wanted to live in that world would suggest you wanted to be a test subject.
• Fallout - Again, our world, but drinking radiated water does not sound like my idea of a good time.

I started running through other worlds in my mind, and not many of them seem particularly pleasant. Even Animal Crossing is terrible, because we'd end up owing Tom Nook for the rest of our lives. My wife's suggestion of Mineral Town from Harvest Moon doesn't sound particularly bad, but it also isn't somewhere I'd necessarily want to live. 

All in all, a majority of video game worlds are very scary for the people that live in them. That is why the players are there. They are there to fend off the evil or serve to make the world even worse. Either way, unless I'm able to go in as a whoever the player character is, then my answer is none.