The Tallyman 28/02/16: Slow-er Progress

Ok so, the "slow month" of janurary was a bit of an under estimate of how slow a month can really be. Turns out the Open University has a thing called "deadlines" that I'm supposed to meet? Who knew! Anyway, on with the show.

February was a bad month for the Tallyman, Nurgle won't be bestowing any favours at this rate. Lets start with the good (ish)... 

I started work on these guys! They're very much WIP at the moment, I think this is just after base coat and wash, so very early stages. I thought I'd get these guys done, because numbers 1,3 and 4 were part of the Colony 87 kickstarter, and with the dawn of the Return To Colony 87 kickstarter currently in progress, it's probably time to get these painted up.

Ok, that's the positive side of the scales sorted. Now I'm sure that there's no way i would panic buy something that I've previously had no interest in, just because it was being discontinued...

Ah, bugger. So anyway, the story is Games Workshop decided to discontinue the Tomb Kings. This move upset a lot of people, but it's kinda unreasonable for us to ask a company to keep stagnant stock around just so we won't miss it. So when the Red Sand Timer of Doom (tm) popped up, I had to take the plunge and pick up some of the models on the chopping block. I'm sure I won't regret this.

I also picked up this guy from eBay - I'm not going to lie, this was a 100% impulse buy. No idea on the range or manufacturer but it looks like a fun model, and I'm sure I can squeeze it into a chaos warband or something. 

Ok so, two months down and the scores on the doors are currently at 2 Painted : 7 Brought. So my leadpile slowly rises. Hopefully I'll conquer it before it crushes me.  

Kickstarter Roundup - Die Hard Minatures

It's the one we've all been waiting for:

Diehard Miniatures: Oldhammer Fantasy Miniatures

A very promising range of models, the Chaos Warriors and Undead are particular stand outs. Between Oldhammer, Mordheim, AoS, Kings of War and Frostgrave pushing it's way into the limelight, the models won't have a hard time finding a place in anyone's collection.

Diehard Undead, not an average model among them.
Way above standard.

There are some very interesting potential stretch goals coming up, or (I assume) future products if the line is successful, one that caught my eye was the "Lesser Spined Dragon", which sounds like a younger cousin of a certain Best-Dragon-Model-Ever. Time will tell.  

At the time of writing it's at around £6,400 of a £35,000 goal as it enters the "Kickstarter Dead Zone", the middle 20 days of a project. I would of preferred the project to be somewhere around £11,000 at this point, so at the moment, nothing is certain. Back the project HERE.

Kickstarter Update! Mantic Does HeroQuest.

 Erm, I mean Advanced Dungeon Quest... Hero... Saga...

Throwing caution to the wind, Mantic have launched their newest Kickstarter (and it's still not Warpath V2 - the Veer-myn will have to wait) Dungeon Saga: The Dwarf King's Quest - a surprising ballsy move considering GW, MB and King.com's lawyers haven't done anything recently justify their commission.

Lawsuit jokes aside (although they did manage to get themselves in trouble with Geek & Sundry) their campaign is chugging along well, with almost $360 thousand dollars raised with 18 days left to go. If it picks up the pace slightly, it can easily become Mantics biggest Kickstarter to date.

(L-R) Khal Drogo, Disco Mage, Dwarf, and Useless Elf

Mantic have a history of delivering their Kickstarters (mostly) on time and, if the comments are to be trusted, they're turning away from their Restic for the models in this game, which is surely good news.

Sadly, this isn't KoW: Skirmish or, what i'd prefer, Kings of Warbands, It's still a cool looking retro dungeon crawler very much inspired by HeroQuest (and the solo play rules are intriguing... it seems entirely possible for you to run the game as the GM for AI-Deck controlled Heroes and Villains... an odd prospect).

Plus the KS-Exclusive Resin collectors editions are too good to pass up!

Anyway here's what your $100 will get you:

Mars Attacks Kickstarter!

Look at that! Now, whilst I've backed Mantic's latest Kickstarter, I'm not a huge Mars Attacks fan (it was always more popular stateside than over here). But what i am, is a huge Judge Dredd fan.

Mantic's latest update had this as an upcoming goal.

Well, I'm sold.

Zombicide Season 2 Kickstarter.

So, Zombicide Season 2 is here and on Kickstarter. And it would be remiss of me to not point out that, rather unsurprisingly, it's preforming quite well (it's at $970k at the time of writing).

On the face of it, it looks like we'll be getting 153 new models (including the Zombie Dogz, but not any of the stretch or extras) which, if your pledging to get everything (-the original game) works out at, as base level, of less than $1 per model. Which seems like a fair enough deal to me.

Now, I missed Season 1 on Kickstarter, so I jumped onto backing this within 5 minutes of the campaign opening (just enough time to miss all the early bird specials). IT's slated for a September release which, knowing CMoN, it's likely to be in my hands early October - which is quite a nice deadline for me to paint my Season 1 set.

Full list of what you currently get at the Fugitive ($150) level after the break...

My year in hobby - a roundup

Turns out, the world didn't end...

So as 2012 drew to a close (noticeably un-apocalypsey) I decided to sit down and take a look back over the last 12 months of hobby (the awkward past-tense is because I missed the end of the year. Sorry about that) and make some 2013 hobby-resolutions.

That many

Well, looking back over the last year it's fair to say that my entire hobby life has been dominated by a single word - Kickstarter - I've personally backed 17 projects (it would of been 18, but I missed the Zombicide one)

Overall I'm pleased with my kickstartering, and I'm happy that I helped (although in a small way) to push though some cool products (2013 is the year of the board game, take my word on that). One downside is that kickstarter has contributed, in a major way, to the Hobby ADD that I, and most hobbyists, suffer from (more on that in the resolutions).

As well as all that GW have released Dark Vengeance and whatever incredibly long title they've given the Hobbit boxed set. Both of these are pretty cool (I'm certainly going to pick up the Hobbit box as soon as a have the cash spare) but Dark Vengeance have helped me in two ways. Firstly it gave my the right kickstart (arh, it's everywhere!) a Lost and the Damned army for 40k, and secondly the bits helped me establish my small eBay shop as a genuine place that people goto to buy stuff, we have repeat customers and everything now! (More on that at the end).

Anyway, enough looking back, lets look forward with the hobby resolutions!

1: Choose a damn army, and finish it! - I've got a pile of unpainted models that's just going to get bigger and the total number of painted armies I have is still zero. In 2013 I want to redress the balance slightly and end the year with at least 1 painted army.

And, in direct contradiction to the above...

2: Get into some of the smaller games systems - the initial buy in for 40k and Fantasy is too high now, so I'm going to investigate some of the smaller systems (I.e. Kings of Warpath, HoMachine, Malifaux, Dystopian Legions) and see how I like them.

3: Make a games table and play some games - I've finally got a hobby room now (so I can stop doing my hobby at work), all I need is a games table (related to resolution 2, I can only spare 4'x4' so the skirmish style games would fit just fine).

4: board games! - I've already pronounced 2013 to be the year of the board game (just up there, see?) so it's time for me to put my money where my mouth is and actually buy some.

I think that's all the resolutions for now (hobby ones anyway, I've got a re-occurring rowing machine related one from outside of the hobby) but what else for the future?

Well, I mentioned above that I have a small eBay store called Pandemonium Games. I run it mostly in my spare time (my main jobs are running an online store that sells recycled and environmentally friendly gifts and operating a Waterjet Cutter - how do you end up with jobs so diverse? Finish university with a BA) but recently it's started to punch above its weight and is beginning to prove itself as more than a distraction and is starting to turn into a viable business.

Whilst currently we're no Wayland, or Troll Tader, or Bitz Box we are starting to carve out our own little niche. All of this is great news, because owning a games store would be pretty awesome. To further help this, once we've got the website up and running, I'm going to make Officina Chaotica the official blog of my store.

What this means to anyone reading this (and judging from my google stats, I'm talking directly to a single Russian spambot) is that very occasionally (once every couple of months probably) I'll post something along the lines of "Hey! This is a thing we have, if you want it, you can buy it here!".

The upside to all this is that since this will technically be a company blog I'll be able to work on it during work hours, so I'll be able to post more! And, if I'm cheeky enough, I could try and argue that me doing hobby is actually me working on content for the blog. That might not fly though.

Happy, belated, New Years and have a great 2013!

Matt.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Kickstarter roundup:

Whew, it feels like all I do is kickstarter summarys. But I think I'm addicted, no wonder the dragons den dragons keep throwing their money at sauces and airline cases. Anyway, what have I thrown my money at recently?

The two I've backed, that have finished their campaign, are Red Box Games and Reaper Bones. Red Box make some very nice models (the "chaos warrior" guys are especially nice, as are the wraiths), but a bit costly in metal - which is where the kickstarter came in, now it seems they've got enough cash to start producing models in plastic... Or resin... restic. Similarly, Reaper Miniatures have taken to kickstarter to help fund production on their Bones line (I think I covered this on a previous update) - good news is, they've got their funding - they're now the second most funded kickstarter in the games category (beating doublefine). Due to the stretch goals smashed, the amout of models you got from a $100 pledge is absurd. The addition items are pretty cool too, the artwork for the giant cthlulu is especially neat.

As for active kickstarter, I've been on a few. Soda Pop's Relic Knights are pretty sweet, if you're into their anime stylings - they might be a bit marmite. The demon guys are especially nice models.

Mantic Games are back! Yes, it seem just yesterday that I was backing Kings of War v3 (which I should be getting my reward for next week) now they're back, cap in hand. And what a cap it is. I dropped $150 on this as soon as I saw it pop up on Twitter. I'm a huge fan of Speedball 2 (it's one of my favourite games, ever) so a tabletop version with rats, orcs and dwarfs seems like its almost made especially for me. From what I've seen of the Veer-min team, they're very nice models (some of mantic best).

And now the on I'm most excited about:

Dreamforge Games have teamed up with Wargames Factory to produce a plastic Titan. If you read those last two words and didn't scramble off to back it, nothing will convince you. Except that it's a plastic Titan for under $100. The only reason I ordered 1 was because they chose their grey-knighty one for their first release, if it was the Mortis (a chaos titan with a skull head) I'd of ordered two, or three, by now. One of their stretch goals is to produce a 15mm Titan, which makes it perfect size for a knight titan. I'm excited.

Something that may turn people off is their collaboration with WGF, as a while back there was a serious amount of bad blood surrounding that company and their new owners. but I'm hopeful for this new venture, and I hope it leads to lots of nice plastic titans to come.

Of course kickstarter isn't the only crowsourcing site for games company's. Indiegogo is what we've got over here in Europe. I've not really explored it (my credit card is very thankful of this), but I've seen some of the completed projects (Titan Forge in perticular) and I'll be keeping an eye out there in the future.