Friends, countrymen! Lend me your eyes! Welcome back to the CollardHammer Special and apologies for the delay in posting for last week’s blog. Last week was quite busy, with multiple work socials and hosting a party for the end of Chinese New Year. That said, I still managed to squeeze in all the painting I wanted to do for the week (mostly on last Sunday after writing the blog). This week, I have painted half a unit of Imperial Navy Breachers, mainly for playing 40k, but also with a view to trying out Kill Team. On the subject of skirmish games, I also played a game of Warcry that I have some thoughts about.
I am not going to lie; I was genuinely dreading painting this unit. Metallic paints are very far from my favourites, particularly GW’s gold paints, which have always been very inconsistent for me. Additionally, painting white is always a struggle. However, once I settled into them, they were much more fun to paint than Battle Sisters. I suspect that this mostly stems from them being a Kill Team kit first and foremost – the variety of minis within the unit really helped avoid the feeling of heavy repetition and keep things fresh. The metallic armour I painted by basecoating with Balthasar Gold, washed with Nuln Oil and then drybrushed Gehenna’s Gold and lightly with Auric Armour Gold on the helmet, shoulders and top of the backpack. For the white areas, I applied Pylar Glacier over a white undercoat, washed the deep recesses with Drakenhof Nightshade and reapplied Skull White where the contrast paint had greyed the white a little too much. After picking out the details and adding some freehand inquisition symbols, I was very happy with the results.
Firstly, lets take a look at how my Trello board is standing:
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| Cards are finally moving! |
The pace of my painting continues to roughly line up with how I wanted to go about clearing my backlog. I undercoated the full unit of Breachers, the Inquisitorial Agents and a Navigator (who is low priority and not on the board), and completed 5 Breachers and the Gheistskull token. Returning to the theme of last week, I got most of this stuff all at the same time (around my birthday) and had been feeling a little overwhelmed by the prospect of painting a considerable quantity of infantry. This is one of the issues I am finding with collecting Imperial Agents. To field the army in 40k requires a lot of these Kill Team kits - Breachers are 90 points a unit, so not that much more than Guardsmen. However, if you are actually going to use them for Kill Team, I generally feel it would be nice to paint them to a relatively high standard.
With that in mind, here are the Breachers I painted this week:
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| Half a team of Imperial Navy Breachers |
I am not going to lie; I was genuinely dreading painting this unit. Metallic paints are very far from my favourites, particularly GW’s gold paints, which have always been very inconsistent for me. Additionally, painting white is always a struggle. However, once I settled into them, they were much more fun to paint than Battle Sisters. I suspect that this mostly stems from them being a Kill Team kit first and foremost – the variety of minis within the unit really helped avoid the feeling of heavy repetition and keep things fresh. The metallic armour I painted by basecoating with Balthasar Gold, washed with Nuln Oil and then drybrushed Gehenna’s Gold and lightly with Auric Armour Gold on the helmet, shoulders and top of the backpack. For the white areas, I applied Pylar Glacier over a white undercoat, washed the deep recesses with Drakenhof Nightshade and reapplied Skull White where the contrast paint had greyed the white a little too much. After picking out the details and adding some freehand inquisition symbols, I was very happy with the results.
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| The axejack, plasma gunner and sergeant-at-arms |
I am painting these in preparation for a campaign game day on this coming Saturday. I’m still not sure exactly what I am going to play – I am pretty certain that none of my options are tremendously competitive, with the choice of Veiled Blade for Imperial Agents and Penitent Host or Hallowed Martyrs for Sisters. It says quite a lot about the state of the game that I’d rather be on Veiled Blade (largely regarded as the worst detachment in the game currently) than playing Sisters. They’re just not fun for either player at the minute, and although it’s definitely bad, playing the full set of assassins at 1000 points is fun. The miracle dice mechanic still creates the feel-bad moments that people love to complain about but is now so weak by comparison to (say) Oath of Moment or Orders that it doesn’t feel very meaningful as a Sisters player. Given that both sets of their crusade mechanics revolve around discarding miracle dice too, I just loathe the idea of bringing them to the table. This is a shame because they are by quite a long way my favourite faction in 40k and over the course of 9th and 10th have developed a lot of personal lore. I’m not sure we need to go back to full miracle dice, but the faction is desperately crying out for some help.
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| The stars of the show for Veiled Blade Elimination Force |
Moving on to a happier topic, I played Warcry for the first time last week! My colleague rumbled me as a Warhammer player after he spotted me listening to a relatively well-known 40k Youtube channel in the background at work a few weeks ago. We got round to playing a game at a work boardgames night and it was actually really fun. Not only had I not played Warcry before, I don’t think I had ever even seen anyone play it either, but it’s pretty much just Kill Team for the AoS setting. Since it is an AoS game, it felt much more focussed on intense melee brawls and played out nice and quickly. I think we were finished within 2 hours, including a break for food. I really enjoyed the game, and I think after this batch of projects is complete, I will finish painting my Royal Beastflayers so I can have a fully painted warband for that game too.
For next week, the main objective hobby wise is to paint the other half of the unit of Breachers. If possible, I would also like to get the other unit of Breachers assembled, but this might be a bit of a stretch. Other than that, I also need to do some narrative development for the campaign itself. We started out with the idea that the campaign would be heavily grounded in Boarding Actions, with progression driven to a large extent by that type of game. Fickle as ever, my players have of course discovered they prefer full scale games, so I am going to try to square that particular circle. Until next week, I hope you have a wonderful week of your own hobby and activities!
Ben
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