The Beard Bunker

We love Warhammer 40,000, as I think this blog has demonstrated over the last 14 years. We're all working on 40K projects right now . And we would like to use the current, official rules as we have always done, connecting us to the wider hobby community. We just... can't, anymore. Over the last few years, our gaming group has found the game harder and harder to play. We love the setting, we love Games Workshop's miniatures, we love getting around a table with each other and telling a story via the medium of dice and loud noises. This post is intended as a constructive explanation of why Games Workshop's strategy towards its rulesets is forcing us to come up with our own solutions. We would prefer to use their rules; that would mean a lot less work for us! Perhaps one day we'll return to doing so, if things change enough. This is not an attempt to bash Games Workshop; the intent is to provide feedback. I lack the hubris required to think my writing this might have an...

Three years ago I wrote a frothing fan-rant about how my Successor Chapter would canonically possess however many suits of Terminator plate I'd painted, and that this meant they'd acquire it very slowly.  To prove this point, I have only just now finished painting the multipart kit to bulk out the five beautiful push-fit boys I got in the Leviathan box. A ten-man squad of Terminators does, it has to be said, have quite an imposing heft to it. It also provides the backbone of a proper teleport strike for boarding enemy ships (460 points at present, once a character's along for the ride). It also provides justification to paint more characters in Terminator armour, next of which will be a Chaplain. I'm also a huge fan of the Ancient in Terminator armour. The Captain is cool too, which I guess means at some point means a Terminator Assault Squad... and so the cycle continues. I'd better paint some Scouts first, though, or this strike force will get too top-heavy. Cyc...

In the immortal words of Britney Spears, “Oops!... I Did It Again.”  This time it wasn’t entirely a surprise.  Unlike my usual approach to these articles, I don’t have a complete army ready to share already, instead I’m taking a more Jeff-like approach and intending to bring you with me on this journey.  I don’t want this project to become all-consuming, so I’m intending to lean on the lessons from my previous armies.   Why I mentioned in our yearly update that I’d been thinking about some Aeldari Corsairs.  There’s a few models in the Aeldari range I’ve always really loved.  The Wraithknight is one, the plane another (and I do love warhammer planes).  So there’s been a constant niggle in my head about finding a way to get a small force of Aeldari together to mostly ally with other Aeldari players, but allow me to knock out a few of my favourite units.  And, yeah, ok, a Wraithknight is not a small commitment, shush you.   So when G...

An 80th birthday present is not be the realm of book tokens or a pack of socks. With my mother reaching this milestone last year, and my father getting there this month, it seemed apt to go at least somewhat further. Making something felt more meaningful to me than an acquisition. But what to make? Then I hit upon the notion of making something for each of them that would symbolise what they'd chosen to do with their lives. Today's post will be about the process of making them. It's not exactly our usual content, but hopefully you'll enjoy the diversion. So, Mum's present first. She has been known to enjoy painting (this is an understatement) and has spent much of her life appreciating and aiding wildlife, so a painting representing that in some way felt right. However, to keep things a bit comedy (and within my skillset) I decided I would make the painting preposterously tiny, requiring a level of detail and precision entirely at odds with her preference for looser...

When we decided to hold the first ever Beard Bunker painting competition, we needed a neutral figure, since we all painted different armies, but we wanted someone suitably powerful and impressive.  So who better to choose than the intergalactic space warrior, leader of the Recyclons from Sigma IX, Count Binface! Ok, well, maybe that's true, or maybe with all the recent hype about him we found out about his official mini and decided it would be fun to all buy him and paint him and thus came up with the idea of a Beard Bunker painting competition.  Tomayto tomahto. If you have been living under a bin rock , and don't know who were are talking about (not unlikely for our non-British readers), the good old Beeb has done a good summary here . Tom Starting with myself as probably the least interesting entrant, it didn't really occur to me to do anything special here.  I just wanted a tiny Binface painted accurately to his r...

Paint the perfect tiny face in only twelve hours! Paint a hundred miniatures to tabletop standard in a day using this simple trick! Hone your tournament build by avoiding these underpowered units! Actually I'm fine, thanks. Online discourse has a tendency to cater to extremes, and I find this to be a common presence even with hobby content. Things are frequently either about getting the best possible result, or the fastest possible result, but here's the thing: neither of those approaches are actually fun . Unless you're a competition painter, optimising for extreme detail means dying of old age before you finish your army, and optimising for extreme speed will usually produce an army that you don't feel quite so satisfied with. The overwhelming majority of wargamers spend more time building and painting their miniatures than actually gaming with them on the tabletop, so it's pretty important to find what makes you enjoy the ride the most. I suppose partly it comes ...

When I was a kid, Forgeworld was churning out Imperial Guard tank variants and other vehicles in all sorts of delightful flavours.  At the time, I wasn’t collecting Guard, nor did I have the money, but I always looked at them with great envy.  By the time I finally started collecting Guard, many of those kits had become plastic GW models (Baneblade, Valkyrie, Hydra,...) but alas some of them disappeared from the lineup.  My all time top favourite of them, perhaps of any Forgeworld kits, is the Destroyer Tank Hunter.  And now I have one. Ethics Ok, let’s be clear, this is not a Forgeworld original.  I have looked, and I can see on eBay they go for £200-300 painted and I’m pretty sure those are also fake.  I could have converted my own out of a Leman Russ, I’ve seen people do it, but in general you don’t get that unique Destroyer Tank Hunter shape.  Freddy Mercury put it best: “Fat bottomed girls, you make the rockin' world go 'round.” I’ve also seen ple...