The Beard Bunker

  This post is more a public service announcement than an article, but since I've poured a lot of love and effort into the subject of this announcement, and since I'm not taking up our regular Monday slot with it, I figure the world will cope. Just about. Back in October, Jeff finally brought his Word Bearers up to Oxford, and we spent a week enacting an orgy of miniature violence known as the Raid on Lachesis . A self-contained week-long 40K Crusade campaign with a big ol' campaign map, a lot of narrative, angry marines, and a whole bunch of truly heroic Imperial Guard. This post, then, serves purely to direct those of you who enjoy this sort of thing over to Goonhammer. It's split into five parts, because we did not skimp, and this way it's easier for you to savour it over multiple sittings. Part 1 : rules, maps, artwork, lore. Part 2 : The players that fought in the campaign, and their armies. Part 3 : The beginning, in which there are Imperial heroics. Part 4 :

Agendas are central to 40K Crusade, and Crusade is central to the Beard Bunker’s 40K experience, as is pretty obvious to regular readers.  It is our jam, marmalade or other sandwich spread of choice.  There are many Agendas to choose from, but despite this we normally see just a few used over and over again. In today’s post, Tom and I are exploring why that is, and why we like being rewarded for doing things beyond the winning the game and killing the enemy. GW has grouped Agendas into some incredibly intuitive categories such as “Purge the Enemy” and “No Mercy, No Respite”, but largely they can be grouped into two different camps. Spoilers: both of those camps have their place, but one is more fun than the other. Category 1: Getting XP for things you were going to do anyway Tom:  Simplest in this camp is indisputably “Reaper”; gain 2XP for the unit that destroyed the most enemy units.  This is probably the Agenda most easily guaranteed to succeed, but there are lots of others in the

Since I moved house four years ago and seriously re-engaged in this old hobby of ours I have collected six different armies (starting back in 2019 with Da Ork Airforce ).  And by “collected” I mean I have at least two thousand points of reasonably balanced models fully painted to a decent standard.  And by “six” I mean six armies of soup, spanning ten different sub-factions.   I did not set out to do this.  This was a mistake.  I neither condone nor recommend this behaviour.  But if you are thinking of starting a new army as a small side project, you might want to read on… The Aquisition Phalanx in most of its glory. Why Seriously though, why a new army, and why this army?  Like all good stories, this is a love story.  I read The Infinite and the Divine and fell deeply in love with Trazyn the Infinite.  In my defence, I started playing 40k a long time ago when there was a lot more overt humour in it, so I’ve never taken it too seriously.  He is without question one of the more “memey”

Tom:  A year ago we did a review of our past year's efforts and ambitions for the future.  Let's try that again.  If you want a quick recap, you can see last year here . The Bunkerites as a whole have leaned hard into Crusade this year.  We started big in February with the Brütal Crüsade Week , had several smaller events and lots of one on one games through the year and capped off the year with the Raid on Lachesis (which we haven’t posted about yet here but Charlie has been writing about over on Goonhammer ).  Planets have burned, wars won and lost, wurrbone stolen , and Legends forged.    Naturally wars are only fought with great logistical support, and a certain amount of hobby effort has been required to sustain this conflict, to populate the battlefields with scenery to fight over and units to fight with.  Let's have a look at what everyone has been up to shall we?

After decades of hobbying, I have become psychologically conditioned to get unreasonably excited by the prospect of owning a complete Battle Company of Space Marines. Because I am a big brain clever man, I am pootling towards this long-term goal with a paint scheme that takes 5-6 hours per dude. In pursuit of this foolish vision, I have rounded out the hitherto five-man Squad Castus with a second combat squad. The stock kit has quite repetitive posing, with 4/5 dudes on the sprue in classic firing positions. I don't mind this - the pose looks fine en masse - but I felt the urge to add some visual interest to the squad. First, and least interestingly, one dude got a gold skull on his helmet to denote the combat squad leader.  Mildly more interestingly, I built a guy to be firing his sidearm while his overheated plasma gun cools down. This presented a bit of a painting conundrum. Plasma guns are generally depicted as having some sort of translucent casing over the top of the gun, bec

In a game as complex and varied as Warhammer 40,000, the fortunes of individual units rise and fall over time. Sometimes years, sometimes decades. If you've ever found yourself lamenting the way your off-meta units languish in the carry case, never seeing the light of day, perhaps we can tempt you to join us in the cult of maxmin. What is maxmin? It's when you knowingly bring crap units to a game, then either savour the challenge of getting something out of them, or achieve a zen-like acceptance of their impotence while enjoying the sight of them on the table. You may well have lost the game just by turning up, but this does not sour the heart of the true maxminner. Max-maxmin vs min-maxmin Look, this is a broad church. Max-maxminners willingly build their whole army to be unrelenting shite. Just turning up to a game of Warhammer Fantasy with a pure goblin army is, arguably, getting there. On the flip side, min-maxminners might enjoy putting a single crap unit in an otherwise s

Stormborne Dwarves hold steady during the Battle of the Northern Pass I returned to the Old World in April this year, starting out on a new roleplaying wargame* campaign. Now that we've been at it one evening a week for 6 months, I thought I'd give a broad update on how it’s going, and share some of the minis I’ve painted up for it. Jon and Drew are, respectively, playing a (drunken) Empire Captain and a bull-headed young Bright Wizard. Their characters, and the regiments they command, can gain or lose skills depending on how the story unfolds. The regiments can also grow or shrink in size, depending on recruitment rolls and battlefield casualties. *Explainer: what's a roleplaying wargame? Rather than a player versus player experience, a roleplaying wargame is when one player is the Game's Master (or GM), and the other player(s) function much like the players in any other roleplaying game, but where the conflict is resolved in battles rather than skirmishes. Players ha