July Hobby
Filed Under: Hobby
An Executioner test model. In the background: Rogue Element Gaming, the best battle report channel on YouTube!
I feel like I did lots of hobby this month but I don’t have much to show for it. So maybe I didn’t? Let’s look back and find out.
Games Played: 5
This month I played my first game of the new General’s Handbook for Age of Sigmar, and Spearhead. Lots of Spearhead.
The GHB game went in my favour. I was able to fairly effectively swarm the Tzeentch castle, preventing them from scoring very much and wiping them out in Round 3. I’ve found my Spiderfang models to be decent enough in Path to Glory, but is it possible that they’re actually okay in matched play too?
The day after we returned from Arran I played a practice game against Callum’s Seraphon.
It didn’t go well. I chose to let him go first and got charged. My stuff died way too fast and it was hard to catch up. But I got to apply my lessons in another game against Seraphon at the tournament the following Sunday.
I’ve written about that here, but TL;DR: 4 fun Spearhead games, in which I generally played pretty well!
Models Finished: 10
I finished 10 Bleakswords for my Cities of Sigmar/Dark Aelves collection.
While painting these I daydreamed about what I’m going to do with my multitudinous Dark Aelves long-term. The next Cities of Sigmar battletome will come out at some point in the next year and a half, and when it drops the remaining Dark Elf and Dwarf stuff will enter the Legends Pipeline, migrating to a battletome supplement PDF, and becoming Legends a year after that. Obviously I don’t have any insider info, but I’d be very surprised if that doesn’t happen. The question is what will happen to the old Dark Elf models after that? Will they be promoted back to first-class status in The Old World? If they do, then when I eventually get tired of playing with my models in AoS, maybe I can do some rebasing and give the groggy game a go.
Acquisitions: 14 (and a bit)
I picked up two more lovely Reaper Minis for the opportunity pile: a barbarian and a mage of some sort.
Feeling good about Spiderfang grots, I finally pulled the trigger on ordering 10 more Spider Riders and another Arachnarok Spider.
I immediately started building them all. This weekend I shall get them all ready to paint and prime them. I’m building the Arachnarok with a War Party on its back.
This frees up the Shaman model included in the kit to go on a 25mm base and independently zip around, casting spells.
The Spider Riders kit you can still buy is actually slightly different from the Spider Riders I already have, which are all from the Battle for Skull Pass starter set. They’re very close though – I wonder why they ended up with two kits for this unit. Maybe the Skull Pass ones shared a sprue with other units?
Rich also sent me some miscellaneous old models he doesn’t think he’ll ever paint. I haven’t included them in my acquisition count because I’m not sure I’ll ever paint them either, but I haven’t really sorted through them yet.
Works in Progress
You can see my current project at the top of the article: a Dark Aelf Executioner, one of a unit of 10. For these I’m inverting my usual Cities colour scheme, giving them red cloaks and green accents. I wanted them to be bold and ostentatious, as befits a mortal wound-dealing unit, so I also put a lot of gold on their armour.
Rich kindly sent me some leftover Gitmob Grot spears, so I gave one to Droggz, replacing his weird meteor mallet. I like the meteor mallet but an upwards-pointing spear creates a much better silhouette, and it’s hard to argue with that.