New destroyers

2 more destroyers, on my way to 3,000 points for July’s Apoca-Fez. Got these two used from eBay, cleaned them up in brake liquid and repainted. I suppose I could have spent a bit more time filing away the leftover bits of sprue, I cleaned up most but not all. It’s interesting how little attention people pay to the assembly and cleaning of their models before painting them (basing myself upon all the stuff I’ve got from eBay here).

That game I won

Can’t be bothered with posting pics at this stage, however we kept track of the time spent per turn, and we ended up with the following (3 players, playing the Broken Alliance scenario with 1340 points each):

Turn 1: 56 minutes

Turn 2: 1 hour 7 minutes

Lunch: 1 hour 22 minutes

Turn 3: 49 minutes

Turn 4: 59 minutes

Turn 5: 35 minutes

Turn 6: 21 minutes

Turn 7: 9 minutes

Doesn’t say much really, except that as expected the mid-game turns take longest, as this is when the armies really clash. As for the later part of the game, their duration is an indication as to how brutal the battle was. It’s not that we were getting more efficient, it’s just that there was not much left to play with.

As for lunch being the longest turn of them all, well that’s the French for you.

Objectives

Wanted some quick objective markers rather than having to use the green plastic GW ones. Built 3 of them, two with bunker hatches that had been lying around for more than to decades (!), one with a couple of scorpions.

My first crystal

My first attempt at terrain. The base is about 4 inches wide. Base is 10mm-thick foam card, plastered over then based. Crystals are foam, painted over as per the codex. 

The gaming table

So I got tired of losing.

I play Necrons, my son plays Tyranids.

I’ve got a shooty army, he wants close combat, so playing on the dining table (3x5 ft.) is all to his advantage. However I’ve got an ace, in the form of basic woodworking skills. So last week I decided to build a proper 4x6 ft. gaming table. I had a number of requirements:

• it had to be easy to assemble and disassemble,
• it needed to fit on top of the dining table (and the garden table, luckily they’re both the same width - 3 ft.),
• it should not slip while playing,
• and ideally it should have have a border (to be nice to Arzhel, who has a tendency to throw the dice too hard: they end on the floor and the house rule is that in that case they are ignored).

So off to B&Q I went, where I purchased some MDF, that they nicely cut in 2x2 ft. blocks for me, and in the afternoon I went to work. The results are below:

The garden table:

The board, packed and ready to go:

Deployed on the table:

And with the gaming mat on top:

Some details: I installed ‘side wings’, which are collapsible for storage, and help the board to nicely hug the table, preventing it from moving during play:

The board upside down, to show the ‘wings’:

The side sections are assembled using dowels, these are obviously not glued in:

I added hooks to make sure everything stays together once assembled:

Little bit of finition. I could not be bothered with using a mitre saw and box, so ended up sanding the corners.

All that’s left to do is to paint it, and play! I can’t lose now.