Waargh!

So there I was, churning slowly through Tom's christmas presents (4 boxes of orcs and a Tiger tank, eclectic or what?), when the D6G did it again. I was listening to their one year on review of WH40K 5th edition and they praised it so highly that before I knew what I was doing I was in my local friendly professional gaming store (firestorm games, trade street, Cardiff) looking to get a new army. This was where I had my meeting with what I believe is termed a Hammerhead. I was weighing up the pros/cons of getting the rules and perhaps a codex or 2 when over he came. In the next five minutes I managed to get three words out, but he did give me one nugget that was useful. He pointed out that the Black Reach box set had around 750 points for both the orks and space marines, as well as the rules but without all the fluff. As I can take or leave the fluff of the 40k universe I realise that this might be a good bargain, so I bought it.

When I got it home, I was very impressed with the standard of the plastics especially the defcopters. My son has claimed the orks for his army, and I think that gives him 1000points, but he still needs some runtherds. I've tried getting some on e-bay, but without much luck. I may have to bite the bullet and order them from GW.

I had a load of amazon vouchers through work so as well as appeasing the wife with some books, I bought 2 boxes of chaos space marines (emperor's children and thousand sons) to finish off my chaos army. However amazon has sent me a box of noise marines instead. I don't mind as they look cool and will probably go on the painting able next, after black reach, before the victorix british and the warlord ECW, as well as the 10mm stuff........

I had a game!

So my wife got me a year's membership of my local friendly gaming store (firestorm games in Cardiff), but I hadn't had a chance to use it yet. Then my brother promised my son that if he came to visit he'd play 40k with him having been quite the player himself back in the day. So he came down this week, and we held him to his promise. However, we didn't play 40k as neither my son nor I have a complete army (1500 points) so we decided instead to play our usual 19th century game but using the Warhammer Historicals Great War rules.

On a table with probably too much terrain we had a blast. I learnt that artillery is can be devastating. Somehow even when the barrage deviated it was always into one of my units; and my brother learnt not to charge infantry in cover with lancers. We managed a six turn game before packing up, and as usual my appalling dice rolls lead to a German victory. In my defence if the last assault phase had been kinder, I may have scraped a narrow win. As it was a failed morale check saw my 24th foot disappearing in to the distance taking a platoon of the 88th with them, and the final nail in the coffin was the scheduled appearance of yet more lancers making their appearance on my baseline.

All in all a good week, but no painting done.

Lent is over! So have celebrated by taking advantage of the Renegade minis offer to increase the size of my WW1 armies so the lead mountain looks like increasing.......