Plot armor for the win?

 

Uti...nn...(gulp). 

I played Jake at the FLGS (The Gamer's Guild SC) this past week in another recon sized game, which is all I can muster currently. The mission was close the pocket, surface scan and we didn't add any advantages.

My army with Juan Solo & the speeder just out of frame. 

My Rebels were lead once again by Juan Solo. I also had two super squads of rebel troopers with Z-6 gunners, The Jawas (Ewok slingers), the AT-RT with a laser cannon and my new T47 Landspeeder.

The FLGS owner in his natural habitat.

Jake had Vader, two squads of Stormtoopers, one with Del Miko, a squad of Scouts plus a sniper team, and the AT-ST with mortars. 

Here is how the game went to the best of my recollection:

The battlefield with my Jawas already on the board.

Even with low profile, cover, a dodge and surge tokens, the arrival of the AT-ST killed two of the little guys!

Jake's scouts moved up aggressively, and my first rebel squad to arrived, rolled a bucket of dice and deleted the scouts out of existance!

The AT-RT & T-47 meanwhile took a good chunk out of the AT-ST, forcing Del Meeko's squad to move up allowing him to repair 2 of the walker's wounds. 

Juan along with my second squad of Rebel troopers overload the right flank...

Rolling the same bucket o' dice as their sister squad and they wiped out the Scout sniper team. 

...and things were going so well. 

My Rebels dumped into Vader inflicting a few wounds. The T-47 hammered Vader as well, but he shrugged off all of the speeder's shots. 

Vader moves into engage the Rebels, killing about half of them. 

As Vader mauls the one squad, the other hoses down the Stormtroopers on the other side of the wrecked AT-AT, reducing the squad to two. 

Who are summarily finished of by the Jawas!

Vader uses the Force to pick up & slam down the first Rebel squad, killing one. He then moves into engage both squads. 

The AT-RT whiffs when shooting the AT-ST which returns fire, crippling the little walker. Del Meeko & friends meanwhile wipe out the infernal Jawas. 

Juan moves up to get into potential scoring position while Vader continues to grind thru Rebel troopers. Meanwhile the Speeder bootlegs around and finishes off the AT-ST. With only 3 models still alive (while reaping an awful toll, Vader was down to 2 wounds remaining), Jake ran up the white flag and the Rebels win!

*****

Well that was fun, if a bit lopsided. The 10-strong trooper squads, even without aim tokens were brutal. Rolling 15 dice each due to the Z-6, left Jake's smaller squads with little hope of survival in the face of such onslaughts. The T-47 did well, and probably deserves to be painted, having almost single handedly taken down the AT-ST. We didn't do a great job of scoring the mission. 

On turn 2, I think it was 4-3 in my favor. Jake lost both of his scanners, and...well, with both of us being newer players we focused more on killing each other rather than scoring. 

My post game impulse buy. 

20mm gaming and more cavern terrain

o/

They're a little bobbleheadish, but still pretty cool looking.

A few years back I looked into 15mm scale 40K due to the ever increasing costs of 40K minis and...I literally got laughed at. Skipping forward to the present and I have zero interest in playing anything GW as the costs of fielding something competitive are simply astronomical ($45 for a Lysander resculpt, seriously?). 

No packs, just their body armor. These are simple enough for generic sci-fi/near future troopers.

Anyways, I stumbled across some 20mm 3D printed Starship trooper minis, and ordered 30 for $33 including shipping & tax. The Etsy seller instead sent me 55! They all have rifles only, a variety of heavy weapons troopers are available and I may order some of those as well. 

Heading underground and looking for trouble. The guy with the striped base is the squad leader.

They also make a variety of 40K armies so the small scale and (gasp: affordable) 40K option is still there. We haven't settled on a system to use these with yet, but we are looking (possibly Down Range). As I received double what I was expecting, I gave half of the minis to my buddy Nick. 

Speaking of Nick...

He 3D printed up some more cavern tiles for me. 

Back when I first started buying my caves terrain, 3D printers were still a fairly new thing, and had not proliferated as they have by this point in time. As such, my originally purchased cavern tiles cost me a pretty penny. That said, they were still quite reasonable given the number I had purchased, and especially in comparison to say, any GW terrain. 

The nook is clear, move out.

The site I had previously gotten my cave tiles from went out of business at some point and no longer exists. However, I found the cave STLs on thingverse and bought them for a mere $20. I passed them on to Nick who has a few 3D printers. He printed up a small test batch (now painted) that you see above. I told him that I wanted to be able to fill my whole game table with these and he thought that was a cool idea saying (quote): 'I'll start cranking them out.' 

So look for more on the caverns front here in the future. 

*****

In regards to my last post and the stupid number of page hits: by the time that this post publishes, it will have crested 3,000 'views'. 

Who is really reading this?

o/

Here's a preview of a new project.

Recently (as in the last two posts on both of my blogs), my page hits have gone thru the roof. My previous post on this blog crested 1000 views just this week! Yet no one comments. So where are these views coming from? Bots, Ai queries, or actual hobbyist views? I am sure that there are at least a few of the latter. 

Personally, I am thinking that this has something to do with blogger's new search link suggestions (which were declined for this post). According to my blog stats, a large chunk of views are coming from google as always, yet an extraordinary number of views are coming from a non-descript 'other' that is primarily US based (or so their VPNs say) and using the Microsoft operating system. 

Curiously, the old Faeit 212 is still a strong contributor of what I would call legitimate page views, but those are a mere pittance compared to this recent onslaught. So please, comment below and let me know:

Who are you?

You just murdered a child. WELL YOU KILLED MY TEDDY BEARS!

This post's title was a mid-game exchange from my most recent Rebels vs. Rebels game of Star Wars Legion. It begs the question: with Rebels like these, who needs the Empire?

40K isn't the only game to devolve into a big ol' scrum in the middle of the field!

This time around I played vs Anthony who is also learning the game, which put us more or less on the same level. Only a game or two ahead of me, Anthony's grasp of the rules were a little better than mine, but overall it was a fairly smooth running game. Well, aside from the need to keep looking up my keywords as I kept forgetting what they meant. Anthony was finding these answers online faster than I was looking thru the rulebook. Speaking of, what does Lethal 1 mean again? (I asked that at least 3 times.)

So here is how the game went...well sorta. I realized in hindsight that a good portion of the game went unphotographed. 

My Rebel Force lead by none other than Juan Solo. Note the Jawas are proxies for Ewok Slingers.

Anthony's force lead by Princess Leia who was none to impressed by the scroundrel wannabe on my side of the table...

The Battlefiled during the opening moves. The mission was Bunker Assault, I got cunning deployment, and Anthony had fortified positions, giving him several barricades for additional cover.

Anthony confidently sending his Wookies right up the middle.

My forces start to build heavily on my left flank, and summarily hit the deck as a T-47 Snowspeeder comes blazing in!

Juan, leading from the rear joins the vacation squad in taking the wrecked AT-AT's foot. Unwisely, I put the trooper squad with the astromech as far from my AT-RT as it could get.

Anthony's Rebels concentrated on the middle of the field for the most part, with the Bad Batch keeping in close to the landing pad.

The T-47 manages to wound the Mandalorian, while the Bad Batch pops out to hose down the Jawas (killing all but the leader) before falling back into cover.

My Ewok skirmishers meanwhile ran up the sloped hull side of the downed AT-AT and charged over the top into the rather surprised Bad Batch!

I believe I took 2 of them down with pointy sticks when the Wookies came roaring into the fray!

Ewoks vs. Wookies is not a Furry fair fight. 

The Ewoks persisted somehow though for as long as they could...

Disengaging from the Ewoks to let the Bad Batch to finish off the last of them, the Wookies proceeded to charge Din Djarin. They inflicted something like 6+ wounds which he simply shrugged off with his plot beskar armor. 

Just as the Bad Batch finished off the last Ewok, the AT-RT clambers over the AT-AT wreckage and charges in, killing the juvenile member of the squad, prompting the exchange that lead to this post's title. 

The Wookies disengage Mando and summarily obliterate the nearby Rebel trooper squad! Shortly thereafter, Din shoots with his pistol and flame projector, followed by Grogu doing 'the hand thing'. Between the two, the surviving Wookies are hit with so many tokens that I had a flashback of the old X-Wing game!

On the other side of the board, I had a lone Duros squad leader and the AT-RT left when Anthony's troops blew up one of my bunkers at the game's end.

In total, I believe that victory points were somewhere in the realm of 13-3, in Anthony's favor. A thorough ass kicking, though unlike my last SWL game, this one was far more enjoyable & I am looking forward to another game soon. 

Edit: Blogger likes to add links in all over now. This is a new feature, though I am not sure if I like it or not. If they want to add features in, how about showing typos in drafts again? That was a great feature that disappeared at some point.

The Rebellion Continues!

 o/

While the temperatures here in South Carolina are unseasonably comfortable, it won't stop raining long enough to allow us to go outside and actually enjoy it. As such, rainy weekends make for good mini painting days and as you can see, I have been doing just that. 

First up, another Rebel AT-RT. Perhaps the third time is the charm and I won't sell this one. Maybe. Prior to my last post featuring the vacation squad, I sold most of my previously painted SWL Rebel army, barring the Ewoks, Jawas and the unpainted models (well, except for the hideous Luke Skywalker sculpt, I tossed him in as a freebee). 

New & improved basing, with no question in regards to the base's quadrants. 

I wanted to change the way I base the miniatues as you can see here, in part because I really like the my new AK texture paints, and also becuase I am all but out of the type of sand that I was using for my Rebels previously and do not recall where I had gotten that from. It has been years since I acquired it. 

I noiced that the pilot's posture matched that of the Duros trooper in the prior post (I had another yet to be painted) and so did a simple head swap on the two models.

I have also changed the inking using the AK streaking grime that as become so pervasive in my paintjobs here of late, due to it imparting a darker, dirtier and gritier look. The Ewoks were spared as they're basing never matched to begin with and being little teddy bears, they're painted a little differently anyhow. 

I think the swap worked pretty well, and it gives this fairly generic model at least a small bit of unique visual appeal.

The Jawa's basing will get covered over with the AK texture paint to match the rest of the force. I ordered a few more to use them as proxy Ewok slingers (same stats), and their droid trapper will get the oh so appropriate 'insatiable curiosity' upgrade which allows him/her to steal upgrades from opposing units in base-to-base contact in exchange for an automatic wound on the unit. 

May I present to you my commander: Juan Solo. He looks like he has a black eye in this pic, so he apparently lack's Han's uncanny Luck rule. I'm still debating on whether or not to order him a Wookie sidekick named To'bacca. 

Curently, Legion has eliminated the generic commander option which makes no sense as there are minis for just  that purpose. I know that when 2.0 finally drops that there will be custom, build-your-own commander & operative kits for each faction which I am looking forward to, but I see no reason why the current one needed to be eliminated in the interim.

To make Juan's pistol, I just trimmed out the center of his blaster rifle and reattached the gun's barrel. 

At this point, My Rebels are down to a generic, 3D printed Jedi mini, the Ewok trapper (I really don't like that model) and six total Rebel troopers (including both weapons specialists) still in need of paint. Plus the forthcoming Jawas. I should be able to knock those out here shortly before the new minis come out. Honestly their miniature line feels terribly stale, so the refresh of new models will be quite welcome.

And who knows, maybe if I can find someone to show me how to play, while not playing said game like they're in a fucking tournament, then SLW will lose it's Bolt Action-like feel of  'I want to like this game but...'

The Vacation Squad

 o/

Liberating yet another vacation destination from the Empire!

Last week we went on vacation for the week, spending part of the week with family in North Carolina and then a few days in Washington DC. As with our trip to Tennessee earlier this year, I figured that there would be some down time in the evenings, and so brought my paint box and some minis (or 'dolls' as my wife's aunt called them) along for the trip. 

A few token vacation pics. 

A USMC M-60, my favorite tank of all time!

The lighting in NC left a lot to be desired for painting, but was much better at the Airbnb in DC. That said, I was able to get all of these painted to a state where they were ready for inking. We had the weekend at home to recover from the trip during which I was able to finish these minis off. 

Yes, I really mean recover! It was 100 degrees every day in DC by the way...

MPL-57 Ion & Z-6 support weapon specialists.

They both have backup blaster rifles, neither of which will ever be used.

A basic trooper and the squad's token alien, a Duros. I just saw on Wookiepedia that the Duros' eyes are red, so will touch that up here shortly.

The Duros will be the squad's leader, as he (?) is the easiest to distinguish from the others. 

Two more basic troopers, the guy on the right is still my favorite sculpt out of this old set. 

I went with a motley assortment of colors on this squad's kit, unlike those squads that I've painted in the past. 

Lastly, another R2-FU Astromech to repair the AR-RT.

Edit: looking at these pics, I wonder if I should go back to using the camera on my old phone...