Greetings friends and welcome to the first instalment of the
Collardhammer special for 2026! The last couple of weeks have been full of
holiday festivities, returning home for Christmas and visiting friends in
Manchester. I’ve also managed to do some light hobby work and get some games in,
both with Emperor’s Children and for the crusade campaign I am running. The
focus for this post is therefore going to be a bit ore on the gaming side than hobby,
but I hope you still all find it interesting and enjoyable to read!
On the hobby side, I haven’t completed any cards since the
last post, so I’ll just show the general backlog page as it hasn’t been seen in
a while:
One thing that I have added is a tracker for cards where I’ve
started the work of actually painting something but not finished it. This most
often happens with multi model units, where I will finish working on one model
and maybe make a start on a few of the others but then get distracted by other
things, or run out of one the paints I need. This often somehow then makes it
harder to go back and actually finish the card, even though I know that it won’t
take as much energy as starting something else. I imagine this will be a
relatable struggle to many of the people who read this blog, so please let me
know what you do to avoid falling into this trap!
In terms of what I actually have painted over the last
couple of weeks, I’ve made a start on the first unit of 3 Flawless Blades. I’ve
completed one of them:
Truly flawless...
Keeping in mind what I wrote above, I am going to focus on
getting the unit finished before doing anything else. Generally, this followed
the now standard process for my Emperor’s Children, except for the sword. I
wanted the sword to look completely different from the other weapons in the
army, so went with a non-metallic metal approach. This generally went okay,
until I tried to give the blade a slight blue tint by glazing it with Pylar
Glacier contrast paint, which didn’t really add the tint and left a very glossy
finish. This still kind of works for what I wanted, so I am going to try to
replicate it on the other models, but I’ll probably try something else for the second
unit when I get round to them. For the army project on the whole, I am going to
finish the 1k list I’ve been playing with and paint something else for a while,
most likely Tomb Kings or some Sisters.
Moving on to gaming, the first game I played since the last
blog was at home, with the Emperor’s Children. One of my best friends, who I used
to the play the Lord of the Rings systems with, has been getting back into 40k
with Tyranids, so we arranged to have a 1k game of old school, kitchen table Warhammer.
I took all of my painted Emperor’s Children and the WIP Flawless Blades, plus
an extra unit of Infractors, while he took 80 Gaunts, the Swarmlord, a Maleceptor
(named Morris of course) and some Zoanthropes. We just played the Only War
mission from the core book as this was a completely casual game, using terrain
I’d accrued at home years ago.
We played on the actual kitchen table
This was really fun, with lots of great moments and back and
forth in the game. There is a slight issue that Gaunts do not do well into
space marine bodies when they’re outside of synapse range, which they usually
were, meaning that the early exchanges were a bit one-sided. The game ended in
a victory for the Emperor’s Children and was great fun all around.
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| Action shot of the EC chewing through Gaunts |
The second game I played was a big crusade game against the Orks in our ampaign. The Ork player in our campaign has been inactive for a little while for a number of reasons, so we had to come up with a narrative for them to reappear in the current plot. This has ended up revolving around them building a massive drill to carve their way through the catacombs, meaning that we played a 3k mission themed around guiding the drill through the cavern my Sisters are using as a base. My friend hasn’t played that many games, but their Stompa has become quite heavily upgraded, meaning that it’s main weapon frequently hits on 2s rather than the usual 5s. I struggled to answer it over the course of the game, with it killing most of my army. It didn’t help that my Knight couldn’t hit a barn door with its main guns. The game was fun, although it was also a showcase of how brutal crusade can be when some units get the right upgrades. I lost this one, but I’m sure the Sisters will come back strong.
That just about wraps it up for this one. I’ll be aiming to
get the Flawless Blades finished and possibly also a unit of Tormentors or
Infractors, so that I can play a fully painted 1k of EC. The same friend who
plays Orks in our campaign was also the main organiser of AoS in my local
playgroup, so with them having returned, there is a good chance of getting to
play some of that. Depending on how that goes, I might add some AoS to the
painting targets. Until that time, have a wonderful fortnight of your own
hobby!
Peace and love,
Ben
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| Toffee says hello! |
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