The Beard Bunker

The Beard Bunker is all about narrative wargaming.  But the games we play ourselves are not the only source of 40k narrative, GW has been making major bank from our collective narrative thirst for decades in the from of Black Library publishing.  That said, and don’t tell my teenage self this, but a lot of what they publish isn’t actually that good.  I think my teenage self and people like me are pretty much their core audience, nerds with more enthusiasm than taste.  A lot of what BL publish can be summed up as “Bolter Porn”, i.e. exciting descriptions of battles and gunfire and big damn heroes gurning and killing aliens.  Unfortunately it is, in my opinion, not actually all that interesting.  Once you’ve read a few you’ve read them all. Contrawise, BL do have some extremely good authors working for them, as well as some decently mediocre, and have published some really excellent books.  The problem of course is always sorting the wheat from the chaff...

An honest review of a product I bought, Anvil Industries has not sponsored this in any way (I highly doubt they know we exist).  This is my first experience buying virtual 3d models, rather than physical, and I jumped right into the deep end with a large highly customisable vehicle model. (Please note, as mentioned later, the chainsword on its back is a custom addition and not part of the base kit.) What is it? The Light Assault Mech is a highly customisable digital model from Anvil Industry’s “Digital Forge” range, designed for you to print yourself.  What you purchase is a .zip file full of digital files you can use to customise your own model.  The end result is about a dozen separate pieces printed out that you need to stick together to build the finished model. Customising Anvil seems to have tried quite hard to provide for the full spectrum of customisation here.  At one end of the spectrum they have provided the files to build this standard model as is, withou...

Wherein the author explains a quick and easy way to paint a classic Cadian tank scheme, and reviews two new (to me) products to make life easier.

The Battlezone Fronteris: Nachmund box spoke to me. "I could be a forward operating base for your space marines," it said. A credit card fuge immediately followed. Look, I know space marine FOBs are supposed to be brightly coloured lego bricks that fall from the sky, but this felt like a good fit for basic, prefab structures that (a) have narratively useful self-contained objectives and (b) could also fit other contexts, making it more multi-use. Which, given the price of GW terrain, is kind of a must. If you're wondering about whether you, too, would like this terrain in your life, this post will endeavour to offer some useful information.

Em recently got very excited about doing some fantasy skirmish gaming and was looking around at building up a Frostgrave warband. Her research led her to the newly released Warcry, specifically the starter set, with it's generous pile of scenery and a feral looking warband she was intending on using as her Frostgrave warband. Since it arrived as a complete game we decided to give it a try. This would be my first real dip into the Age of Sigmar universe since they blew up the old World (it's still too soon). This is our thoughts on the game. Emma's Thoughts What's in the box It's hefty, and so is the price tag. But if you break it down into 'normal' GW model costs, everything in there is really a steal (as I've discovered is usually the case with these boxed sets).  I have to be honest, the set first appealed to me because I could see the Untamed Beasts models working great with my newly purchased Frostgrave wizard (the Jaguar Boudi female shaman mo...

Greetings all you hive scum and curious uphivers! Come to admire the architecture have you? Because you should, it's a bit pretty... As we're a little bit immersion obsessive here in the bunker we wanted our Necromunda Zone Mortalis experience to be just that little bit "extra" compared to the bare tiles. Don't get me wrong, the tiles are lovely and some of my favourite floorplans that GW has ever put out there. But there's something unintuitive about a 2D black shape blocking line of sight. We needed something more, something that told stories, something with a third dimension... Shop at: https://ttcombat.com/collections/industrial-hive I looked around a lot of different shops offerings and eventually fell for TT Combat's varied range of walls and corner columns. I liked the fact that it wasn't all "just wall" and had that "functional architecture" vibe that I feel the underhive needs. The pieces are all laser cut from M...

Greetings fellow bunker dweller! We're all doing a bit of a 2018 retrospective before launching in to the inevitable hobby glee that will be 2019, and now it's my turn! Casting our minds back to the early, early cold days of 2018 we were in the frozen depths of Frostgrave: Critterwatch episode 1 took in these cuddly characters While my borderline offensively bruising warband grew Still very much enjoying Frostgrave as a game, it's ideal to pick up for a spurt of games. Advance the personal narrative of the wizards and then put it away again for a while. It's also a place for me to park random fantasy miniatures and monsters that I like the look of but have no other purpose for. Hurrah for collecting facillitation! The oh-gods-why-so-long-to-paint bikers The real meat of 2018 though was once again the Blood Angels, I had another burst of BAngles keen and this translated into a few new units bringing me ever closer to a full company of psycho vampir...