The Beard Bunker

When you regularly play with the same group of gamers you tend to get used to what everyone else has in their collection and when something new comes along we tend to talk about it long before it ever gets to the gaming table. Sharing your excitement with your friends is part of what makes the hobby fun. The shared enthusiasm is a good motivator to continue painting, collecting, and gaming. However, sometimes it's also fun to do something in secret. There is a joy in casually sticking a brand new and unexpected unit down on the board during deployment. Watching your opponent's facial expressions pile up in a mess of confusion, recognition, panic, excitement and surprise is one to behold. So with the recent Nerd Thunder I knew I had to do something special.   Several ideas went through my mind, including a Chaos Renegade Knight. But when Charlie offered up a box full of Space Marine spares, including a bunch of tanks I knew what I must do. An Iron Warriors Spearhead de

Introduction We all went to Warhammer World to play with little plastic men and tanks and this is the record of those events… at least, the interesting ones, we’ll leave out the bits about the M1. As is typical for me, this post is slightly scattergun, consisting as it does of three parts:   1.        A Battle Report 2.        Our thoughts on 8 th Edition 40K 3.        The reflections of a General new to apocalypse Just to add to the schizophrenic feel of the post, the battle report has been co-written by myself and Charlie. So if it makes no sense, it’s Charlie’s fault*. Guard taking up defensive positions The Scenario Essentially, the Thousand Sons and some corrupt Imperial Guard lackeys were attempting to summon Baraqiel, a terribly scary daemon prince of scariness. How to power said infernal ritual? By sacrificing the poor little orphans of Saint Bernisia’s 'Home for Tragically Troubled Youths'. Unfortunately for Team Evil, a Farseer of

Today we have a kitbash of the Ortan Cassius model from Deathwatch: Overkill to turn him into a captain for my fledgling Deathwatch Kill Team . If memory serves, the head is one from the tactical squad box (if not, lemme know in the comments and I'll edit this!) and the sword is from the Grey Knights set. That technically makes it a force sword, but zog it, I like the look of it and fundamentally it's a sword with a techy bit to tell people to expect power-stabbing. Other than that, conversion work was pretty minimal. I considered removing the purity tassles, but they're integral to other elements of the sculpt like the chain holding the book, so instead I altered the character concept slightly to explain his proliferation of devotionals and oaths of moment. There are a few elements of the paint job which didn't go as planned, most brutal of which was his left eye. Ye gods. Painting 28mm eyes scares me at the best of times; I can barely see what I'm doing, but

Seeing a lone woman on the cover of the second edition of Age of Sigmar gave me a reaction I didn't expect: pride. I don't even play AoS , but there it was. Pride. This hobby has been a big part of my life, and much like Frank Turner , I am f---ing proud of it. The creativity, the enthusiasm of fellow hobbyists (well, most of them) and the time I spent working for the company showed me how the hobby legitimately gave kids who couldn't be arsed with maths, art or reading a reason to bother and helped them improve with real life stuff? Yeah, pride is definitely the word. There is one thing that dented that pride: the way GW's storyworlds tended to be populated with monsters, more monsters, and white dudes. Things have been changing over the last few years, and it's been great to see. And now, a woman standing alone on the main cover art? This feels like a gratifying milestone. Badass. The female Stormcast Eternals starting to come out are the sort of thing

One of my current motivational techniques is to have all my assembled models on display in my cabinets, even if they aren't finished. This makes the unpainted ones stick out like sore thumbs, and shame does the rest of the work. Thus, shame has pushed me to complete the first usable squad for my small Deathwatch collection. I think of these space bros as recent acquisitions but as we all know, time accelerates with age. When I happened across the photo below, the SD card told me it was taken over two years ago. Gods dammit. At this rate, when I'm eighty, I'll be referring to President Donny 'Fart Horn' Trumples as "that guy who was in office the other month." Dear gods, please let that not be literally true when I'm 80. He'd only have to change the US presidential term limit and drink so much Diet Coke that he discovers its hidden embalming effects to prolong his existence. Right, back to the 41st Millennium. At least that's comparat