The Lure of the Loyalist

Opening the workshop today with quite a gloomy weather in Istanbul. The past week and the weekend continued to offer me little time to spend on the hobby, so no painting post today, sorry. Instead, I delved into a mini that I’ve thought of for some time and spent some quality hours playing board games with my dearest friends over the weekend. Hop in to check out what I’ve been up to.

“Wait till I get my claws.”

As the above photo suggests I’ve been putting together the Death Company Dreadnought that comes out of the Deathstorm set and I find it to be a blast really to clean up and assemble. No wonder the loyalist scum pick these models by the dozen. I missed the cutting and cleaning on the models, I guess this will give me the necessary will to jump to painting other models, right when I get ample time for a nice session.

It was a very close call on the selection of the chassis between Death Company and Furioso Dreadnought. Decided to go Death Company by a very small margin.

The first few sessions were quite fruitful, not much to build up now except for some details on the chassis and the claws. Of course, there are some join lines that need attention too.

Contrary to my past posts, I’m leaving out the steps I took in assembly to save them for an assembly tutorial via Prezi, the tool I mentioned last week. Needless to say, stay tuned for a zooming action on how to properly assemble and save yourself some hassle during cleanup in the coming weeks.

The past Saturday we hosted a little get together for my friends from high school and we got a chance to both blow off some steam from the past week and just to have some plain old fun with unusual board games. After a few rounds of Saboteur, a card game based on bluffing and maze building, we jumped into Relic, another Fantasy Flight Games board game taking place in the Warhammer 40k universe that pits the players on a race to reach the center of a board filled with the usual hazards you’d encounter in “the grim darkness of the far future”.

The first few rounds after setup went a little slow but we picked up the pace as we went along.

Something, somewhere went terribly wrong for Rewendor, as the dice gods (or the Ruinous Powers? I keep losing track) were clearly not in his favor…

…which in turn results in my delight in his plight! Fitting for a true agent of Chaos, don’t you think?

Xasf of the Mechanicum is on a roll… which served him well for the endgame.

“Next time Gadget… next time.”

The game is based on a combination of a card and dice mechanics that allow the players to move through the tiers set on the board. The players level up as they progress to better shoulder the trials set closer to the center of the board and gain attributes that allow them to manage harder encounters at each turn. The game deserves a full review on its own (another thing on the to-do list I guess) so I will not delve too much into the details. However I will mention one thing that got me interested a lot more than expected: the player tokens are actual busts of the characters and they’re beautifully detailed and yes, they’re begging for a cool paint job!

Here’s the set of characters we used. From left to right, Xasf picked the Techpriest Enginseer, I opted for the Rogue Trader and Rewendor chose the Ultramarines Captain.

Here’s the complete set of busts. They’re just gorgeous to behold with a TON of sculpted detail. Can’t wait to get my hands on these for painting!

A special thanks to Xasf here for thinking I’m talented enough to do them justice… let’s hope I won’t get carried away with all the models that are piling up!

Lastly a shot of the remaining resin kits that I’m planning on preparing this week. Shorter sessions lend themselves well to clean-ups and knife work so I’ll hopefully get these ready along with the other models that need cleaning (Random Encounter, Obliterators and the metal Varghulf). Then I’ll need to shift my order of items in favor of the 54mm dwarf, since the deadline for submission is getting close!

At least I’ll be eating away from the kit mountain. Ah, I love distractions.