New Year, New Toys

Well this should have been my first post of the year but that didn't exactly go to plan, best laid and all that.  Anyway, first up we'll look forward to the New Year ahead of us and my resolution; to really get the lead pile (or mountain) down and to aid in this not buy any new games or back any unexpected Kickstarters.  Now I say unexpected Kickstarters because there are a few this year that I (well Amy and myself) will be backing the first of which is running right now, Conan:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/806316071/conan

A great looking board game we've been following for around a year now and much anticipated (being a big fan of Howard's Conan).  Next they'll be the new Deadzone Kickstarter which introduces the Veer-myn to the game as well hopefully funding some more hard plastic kits which will help towards Warpath, which incidentally is the possible third Kickstarter at the end of the year.

Now unfortunately my resolution has already been (or more correctly will be) broken and it's all Alessio Cavatore's fault.  For those of you who don't know his River Horse company will be releasing a Terminator Genisys 28mm minatures skirmish game (distributed by Warlord Games) around June/July of this year to tie in with the new film:

http://www.warlordgames.com/announcement-terminator-genisys-the-miniatures-game/

As Alessio is the chap who brought us the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game I have high hopes for this one (plus terminator miniatures!) and if the game and film do well there could be more games/expansions to follow the potential movie trilogy.

Now it's time to look back a little and see what new toys were bought towards the end of last year and for Christmas.  The major additions were for LOTR/Hobbit, we'd both stayed away from the Hobbit miniatures for the most part but we finally buckled over Christmas and picked up the various miniatures we've been looking at or that fill holes in our collection:

A fancy box full of toys from GW

Now as I'm sure most of you are aware GW brought out one rather large 'miniature' last year, Smaug.  I was torn as to whether I should order one or not, I love how it looks but at that price point and the fact it's resin means I don't think it would see much, if any, table time which would make him an expensive cupboard filler (I don't think I actually have a cupboard he'd fit in though).  So not wanting to be without a Smaug I went on a search for a suitable and more cost effective replacement and I'm happy to report I struck gold:

Not only is Dragonslayer one of my favourite films from my childhood, and so making a great display piece, but this beauty will fill in very nicely for Smaug (but lets not get into the whole Wyvern /Dragon argument) in games of LOTR/Hobbit.

Here are the contents of the box, as you can see she's a big girl and made out of PVC

Here's the Mouth of Sauron on her base to give you a sense of scale

Next up for Lord of the Rings we have some of the miniatures I picked up from our Foundry trip:

I'll be using these as various types of Black Numenoreans; standard warriors with sword and shield; heavily armoured two handers; lighter armoured skirmishers; and heavy cavalry.  These miniatures won't be to everyone's liking but I have really taken a shine to them and think they fit the bill nicely having a slightly nautical air to them, which is inherently Numernorean, and added to that their main iconography is an eye!  Job done as for as I'm concerned.  A little bit of trimming here and there and the same paint scheme I've given my GW Black Numenorean's and I think they'll fit in nicely.

Next up we have the various pieces of scenery/terrain that has been bought or built recently, quite a lot of Deadzone which is now nearly complete (Amy is working on adding the detail and any weathering):

Completed DZ terrain

The pieces still being worked on

Here we have the Rohan village (still a few more pieces to buy for it this year) which has come from 4Ground:

Finally some hills and woods which were picked up at the Mantic Open Day, something we've really needed for some time and are useful for pretty much anything we play, we'll again hopefully be picking up some more this year:

Next we have something that I picked up (or at least began to) in November, the Babylon 5 miniatures game.  I'm a huge fan of Babylon 5 and it's my favourite sci-fi show so I was aware of the game by Moongoose and that it was OOP but after starting to re-watch the show again I started to look into it a bit more and found quite a bit of history with two games proceeding the Moongoose game (B5 Wars and Fleet Action, both from Agents of Gaming) along with an RPG and a trading card game.  Needless to to say after a bit of internet searching these arrived through the post box:

Closely followed by a lovely painted Drakh fleet:

An odd repair is needed and a few chips re-painting but otherwise a great looking fleet straight out of the box

I also have a Shadow Fleet box on it's way to me, again a bargain, but that'll be it for now while I try and finish off painting both Deadzone (you might have noticed the Plague I am working on in the back of a few of the photos) and my Batman Miniature Game crews, namely the Joker's and Penguin's.  The reason for Batman crews getting bumped up the queue is due to the English hardback rulebook going up for pre-order:

Again we're really looking forward to this and the GW 40k scenery we still have along with the Mars Attacks mats will look great for a dilapidated Gotham City block.

Finally for this rather long winded blog post we have a little WIP from Amy who has been working on her Necrons again.  Though we've long given up on the current incarnation of 40k these fellows work very well as Forge Father proxies in Warpath and as cyborgs in various other games:

This is just a small amount of the miniatures she's completed for them but they are the most recently worked on.

I hope you managed to stick with me until the end of this post but with the emphasis being on getting things built and painted hopefully you'll see much more from the both of us through the coming year.

Phil