New Ringwraiths

Here is a post on warseer with pictures of the new mini's for the betrayer and the knight of umbar.
Here is the link to the post not the thread.

BFG at BoLS

I am guess blogging about BFG at Bells of Lost Souls.

My first post is here. My next post will likely about the turn sequence and the one after that will be about the models. Afterward I will likely post about each fleet lists.

BFG Game at Hobby Town July 18th

A few of us (me, the Bennetts, and the Lesers) are planning to play BFG at Hobbytown this Saturday from 10AM to 3PM or so. Join us if you want to learn more. I should have enough models for all to play at least 500 points.


Update:
A total of 8 of us showed up for BFG today, myself, the Bennetts (3), the Lesers (2), Chris and Harry. Harry is from Albany NY in town visiting friends. Somehow he found us on the web and showed up with 1000 pts worth of very nicely painted Chaos cruisers. I thought it was perfect as he allowed us to play four on four. I hope the next time he comes we can all set up another BFG game.

As it turns out, some other 40k players also declare themselves BFG players. It would be great if we can set up a club head to head competition!

We played 3.8k per side and had a great time.

The scenario was Fleet engagement; we chose Wedge and Chaos chose Cross. The two fleets deployed on long edges parallel to each other facing opposite direction. This prevented the Imperial fleet from charging Chaos with its armored prow. We did what we could to maneuver toward the enemy but seemingly always one arc behind. This led me to realize that Imperium should not try to come directly toward their opponent but should instead come on at a converging angle so that the current enemy ships are toward the one corner of our front arcs, expecting that once the enemy ships move, they will remain in the other corner of our front arc.

Previously I have also been reluctant to leave bomber markers on the table because of fear of being taken out. However, I think that the chances they will be taken out by ship fire is remote (requiring 6s to hit). When enemy carriers launches fighters to take out your bombers they aren't launching bombers or assault boats against my ships. In addition, interesting enough, damages taken by attack crafts are renewable (with re-rolls) similar to shields. By having bombers out, I have alsos extended the range of my bombers to 40cm per turn.

Final thought, the obvious thought. Concentrating fires to cripple ships is more effective than spreading fires across many ships' shields.

HobbyTown Update

Michael C (Aristo):
"Spoke to a new employee at Hobbytown on Saturday afternoon. He said his job is to handle all the people interested in Games Workshop stuff. He himself is big into 40k. He seemed supportive of idea to stay open til 9 pm, also to get group terrain and more standing tables for people to use as well as obtain more merchandise to sell. "

HobbyTown

As most of you know by now, we no longer has access to HobbyTown after 8pm. What this means is that

1. All current gaming nights (Thursdays) will have to be privately hosted. As we previously decided, gaming host decides the game and scenario being played.

2. As long as this works, we should be alright. But one of the reason we went with HobbyTown is to be visible, thus able to recruit new players into our group. If we want to do so, we will have to play on a weekend afternoon. Maybe once a month?

3. We might also want to revisit the idea of dues if this can help us maintain a desireable gaming venue

WotR Shopping Consideration

A thought on buying models for WotR. The current rules give 10 factions to play, and allows taking any combination of formations within each factions. But I suspect that there will be more detailed books for each factions as they did with SBG-LotR. If so, these books may place additional restrictions on what combinations are allowable. For instance, you may not be able to mix Gondor with Arnor for instance, or Corsairs with Khand. Please keep this in mind as you formulate your army roster and decide what to buy next. It may be better to be a theme purist with your army composition, at least for a while (to say 1000 points).

Priming

So, I have had various failures using spray primers, typically from over/under spraying and I have been looking for a paint on primer of some sort. So I ran across this article Priming with gesso. So I went down to my local art supply store and bought a bottle of the black gesso. You can also get white and tint it to any color you want. So far I have primed about 20 models and learned a little bit.

1. you don't have to dilute it 2. you should not just glop it on like the article says because you can get air bubbles in the gesso which can cause little pits when it dries as well as pooling at the bottom of arms, etc. 3. Use a good brush, I tried a cheap brush and it left a lot of bubbles. 4. most if not all of the bubbles go away. 5. you will never use that brush for anything else ever again.

I really like using it, it takes the guess work of using spray primers(humidity/space/coverage) out of priming. I would not use it as a base coat though. So far I have applied some paint over these gessoed models and the coverage is just like painting over any other primer. You can also fix any areas that you might have missed/under covered. Over coverage is almost impossible since you are literally painting the stuff on. However you can't go and prime 20+ models in a couple of minutes, but for me, unless I am doing a bunch of similar/same models that is not really a problem. I tend to work on 3-4 at a time.

Edit:
If you are looking for an example of what I call bubbles/pits, go to the link and scroll down the the pictures of the Urban Mammoth Junkers Convict Legionary where the black gesso was "glopped" on. Look at the detail picture of the shield, if you look at the "elbow" of the bird you will see those little pits I was talking about. Remember that this is not completely dry yet so the pits will probably shrink, but not disappear all together.