Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Update sans photos

I've had a couple of photo-heavy updates that have been waiting for me to get the photos off the camera.  And I realized if I kept waiting then I was never going to get anything posted.  So I decided to just do an update and then post pictures as I'm able to.  The problem is that with the new baby, I can either work on projects or blog about them and I've been choosing to work on them.  But I'm going to try to update at least once a month and try to keep to a Wednesday schedule.

To keep myself accountable, I've added that to a task on my Google calendar.

Speaking of Accountability 

All wargamers have a lead mountain.  As I believe Neil of Meeples and Miniatures said, it's easier to buy new figures and be enthused by a new project than it is to finish an old one.

I still have Orcs and goblins unpainted from my very first foray into miniatures gaming in 1988.  Will they ever get painted?  I hope so.  But right now fantasy isn't high on my list.  But at least they are nice old Ral Partha figures instead of Games Workshop!

To keep myself accountable, though, and to make progress against my goal of getting things done, I've decided to create a Trello board.  A Trello board is a kanban board which in this case means its a glorified bulletin board with electronic sticky notes.  It's a project organizer, so in itself that doesn't make me any more accountable.

Opening it up so that you can see it does.  :-)  Here's the link:  Colony13 Kanban Board.

You can even vote on what I get done next.  No promises to follow the voting, but you never know. :-)

Project Update

To give a little context, here are the projects I am working on:
  • Create bocage terrain for Chain of Command (completed just before board started but I want credit for it here.  I have pictures and a tutorial coming for this - they turned out great!)
  • Paint miniatures from the Battlestar Galactica board game.  It occurred to me that these are the perfect size for also playing 5150:Fighter Command (see here) and that it would be more fun to play the boardgame with painted miniatures anyway.  And I will be using my custom 3d-printed flight stands with them.  Status: Vipers and Heavy Raiders are 80% complete.  Colonial ships about 20% complete.
  • Tripods.  I loved the Tripods series of books -- I always called them the White Mountain series but whatever.  The tripods were the stars of the show.  And Alien Dungeon's tripods for All Quiet on the Martian Front fit what I had in my imagination perfectly.  I received the starter set as a birthday present last year and got the tripods built...then decided I really needed to deck them out in LEDs.  And add some 3d-printed parts.   Never mind that I had no idea how to do the LEDs.   So this project has dragged on...but it's going to be completed this year.  As of two weeks ago, the build is completed, the basic paint job on the 3 tripods is done, the LEDs are in hand and so are the 3d printed parts.   I'm hoping to have this completed in the next 4 weeks - or at least get work-in-progress shots up here
  • Victorian Sci-Fi.  My Red Coats on a Red Planet campaign is starting up again.  I hadn't called it that before but here are the previous posts.  I had started this using Too Fat Lardies' Platoon Forward ruleset and am re-invigorated by their new Sharp Practice 2 ruleset to replace 2-Hour Wargames Colonial Adventures.  Painting wise this means finishing up my British colonial platoon - these are primed and ready to be painted using the excellent Perry miniatures.  And a few heroes from Warlord Games and a certain Zulu movie.
  • Following that I have my New Anglian Confederation 15mm platoon and armored platoon from Ground Zero Games -- for Tomorrow's War and the upcoming Chain of Command: Fighting Season. These are painted to base color and just need inking and weathering -- and another try at a airbrush camoflage now that I have my airbrush back in working order.  Mind you, I've never yet achieved a satisfactory result with an airbrush and if this one doesn't work -- you might want to watch eBay.
  • Last but not least I have the Hanging Tree, the Floating Castle (both previously blogged though I've made a lot more progress since then) and Gamecraft Miniatures excellent 15mm MDF middle east buildings (again for TW and COC:FS)
And that's all for tonight.  Take a look at the board, feel free to vote or leave comments and I will (hopefully) be back in a week with some photos!