The Beard Bunker

People love the matched play missions, and I'm happy for them. Lots of variety, lots of numbers going up, lots of game balance levers for the designers to pull, and lots of randomness so that your games have great variety. People also love Crusade missions. Lots of ways to follow the narrative progress of your army, lots of ways to earn rewards you can use to smack your opponent right in the beans. I did plenty of this in 40K's previous edition, and wrote about doing so on this very site. And yet today's post is about why, after over twenty games of the current edition of 40K, I'm still playing the intro mission Only War. When I started writing this, I thought I was going to write a celebration of the narrative flexibility of simplicity, but it soon became an exploration of the way Games Workshop's game design style has resulted in my ignoring more and more of their rules, and even whole game systems. A good chunk of this avoidance is down to my finite brain capacit

Finishing stuff feels great. Completed vacuuming is infinitely better than vacuuming-in-progress, and despite the existence of the word 'gooning' (don't Google that at work) I'm not convinced it's something anyone enjoys. The wargaming hobby is built on the joy of finishing stuff. Finish building the thing, finish painting it, finish your kill team, your boarding patrol, your 1,000 point army. Given the varied nature of the tasks required to bring an army to the tabletop, most of us have some aspects that are joyless chores to be struggled through (for me it's cleaning mould lines) and that struggle makes completion taste all the sweeter . This nudges many of us towards a task list mindset, enjoying the feeling of nearing completion as units get marked green in the progress tracker and we close in on that most classic of numbers: 2,000 points. So recently, when I felt a random urge to paint some Imperial Guard, I thought: at last! I can finish off the last of my

Four years have passed since we first created the Eridani Sector setting for our games in the Warhammer 40K setting. It's serving us well, and in that time we've played multiple campaigns and events, but we also identified a problem: with a sandbox this big, you can end up getting pulled in lots of directions, and gaming weekends can become a bit unfocussed. Furthermore, if you have to come up with a reason why you and your opponent's armies are fighting in any given system every time you play, that narrative legwork can feel a bit laborious, particularly when you just want to play a knockabout game of 40K without thinking about it too hard, and still want that feeling of the battle contributing to a wider narrative. Our answer to this is creating some active warzones in the Eridani Sector, where longer wars are being fought across a system or small group of systems. Players in our group can still fight battles anywhere in the sector, but if their armies fit the sides prese

Greetings, fellow fans of evil teleport-capable slabs of excessive violence. I bring to you our preferred vehicle for such things... an upsettingly large amount of Word Bearers Terminators: Nothing like a freshly defiled church to whet the appetite for a bit of the ol' ultraviolence Yep! As is often my wont, I decided not to do things by halves, no mucking around with a compact, bijou support unit of termies, ohhhhh no. Big ol' brick of 10. As party favours go, that and a pair of Obliterators really make a spicy deep strike offering. They had their maiden run this weekend having been finished at pretty much the 11th hour and were a distressingly destructive presence all round. The dark gods are thoroughly delighted with my offering. First squad, the up close and personal one, very fond of flames I should caution you all, I ought to come with a warning label that reads "will wax rhapsodic about terminators with little provocation". I've always loved them, even whe

Herein lies the first part of my ongoing project to build (and paint I guess) a Thunderhawk.  I have previously posted about the motivations for taking on such a crazy project , so this is just the ongoing project diary. Day 1 Thunderhawk arrived!  I went through the box and got a bit intimidated by the sheer volume of stuff, but I’ll just have to grind through.   Day 2 Started clipping out and cleaning bits whilst listening to podcasts. Day 3 Got the laser done and lay it out on my desk.  This thing is big.  Starting to worry a little that the Thunderhawk is maybe a bit bigger than I anticipated.   Days 4-7 Periodically clipped and cleaned the smaller parts in fits and bursts whilst listening to podcasts, but spent way too much time distracted playing Factorio instead.  The factory must grow. Day 8 Finally got the Dremel out for the big bits.  I got everything set up but realised that even though the sun was still up and the weather was fine it was probably getting a bit late for maki

Herein we find the first of several posts I'll be making reporting my progress in what I am calling Project Capstone. I've been pretty keen on Raven Guard aircraft from day one.  Before even the Storm Raven existed I bought myself a Valkyrie for them to use (illegally of course).  When the Storm Raven appeared it was initially just for Blood Angels and Grey Knights (no idea why) but I went ahead and bought one anyway (despite how ugly is it too).  When Charlie suggested the Samalut IX campaign I splashed out and bought myself a Storm Eagle and by the time the campaign began I had space in either flying transports or Land Speeder Storms for every model that didn't have a jump pack or teleport homer. 5th company attached air wing Honestly I've always loved 40k aircraft in general.  I have loads of the buggers.  I built an entire Ork army around the idea of Ork aircraft.  I have a bunch of Forgeworld aircraft of various factions, and even more in plastic.  My love of them

Roads present terrain makers with a series of challenges and compromises. In today's post, I'm going to talk about how I made some road sections for my ongoing modular 40K cityfight board, and which compromises I made. Regular readers may feel like it's been a while since I last produced any of the board sections for this project, and they'd be right - to the tune of several years! This is a project I'm getting back into after resolving my indecision over how to paint the Sanctum Administratus . But at last, I've got something I always felt was lacking from my terrain collection ever since I got into wargaming in the 90s: roads. They're boring, they're ubiquitous, and you really feel the lack of them. At last, roads.