Necron goodness at Gamesday 2012

So, to get a few things out of the way:

• The retail zone this year was amazingly well organised (actually, the entire Gamesday was a superb experience). There was plenty of space, the queues were long but moving quickly, there were far less grumpy customers (but some people can never be pleased…), and as a result the staff were far less stressed than in previous years – cashiers with a genuine smile at Gamesday, who would have thought? Following several years of intense frustration, a big Thank You to the organisers, for having listened and come up with a very good retail experience.
• Yes, the Horus Heresy book was there. There were plenty available, and it is a very nice book. Far from cheap, but the quality of the book (and the contents!) make is well worth it.
• Plenty of good stuff as per ever, amazing gaming tables, super enthusiastic GW & Forgeworld folks, the works.
• At the Black Library I bought The Emperor's Might (and got it signed by John Blanche!), it is a superb book. It's even got some Necrons in it…

But the most important stuff (for this Necron fanatic anyway) was to be found at the Forgeworld stand. We know that the next Imperial Armour will feature Necrons, the Minotaurs and the Imperial Guard. No firm dates on publication, but April 2013 is a possibility.

 

 

 And below is a few of the Necron-y goodness we might find within when the book is finally released (there was also a folder of concept art to be perused, it's fair to say there is a bit of an obsession with insectoid forms for the Canopteks. Also, plenty of flyer concepts – yummy!)

 

 

 

The Necron Night Shroud:

 

 

The Necron Tesseract Ark:

 

 

The Necron Sentry Pylon:

 

 

 And terrain! One of FW's goals is to try and do dedicated terrain for the various xeno races, and the below might also make its way into IA12 (if it's finished in time). FW would also love to re-issue / create new Tyranid terrain, however there are severe technical difficulties with it, as the organic forms are pretty much impossible to remove from the molds.

Even if this Necron board section never gets released, it remains a good inspiration for custom-built terrain:

 

 

 As for my immediate future, I purchased a few Acanthrites. They should keep me busy for a while…

 

 

More 40k counters

This time around it's a bunch of counters I've used for the past few years - again the official GW counters (the green transparent plastic ones from 5th edition) just didn't do it for me. So I made my own, which I have now updated for 6th edition.

Print either version (20mm or 25mm), glue on top of bases if you want (again the Fenris ones aren't bad), and off you go.

I've also added some Apocalypse counters, for those really big games.

The file can be found here, feedback is appreciated!


In other news, I will be at Gamesday UK tomorrow, I'll be the guy in the orange dinosaur shirt.

Fixed the bad link

Thanks to Nick for pointing out the link did not work, it is now fixed. The markers can be found here.

Update - Nick's also posted a video on YouTube!

Updated objective markers

Nick at IDICBeer has kindly tested the objective markers, and suggested I add an 'X' one, to mark the objective with no value. So here is an updated sheet.
I have also added a two-sided night fighting token: simply glue the two tokens back to back (or glue them on either side of a 40mm disk).
The idea is that by having the token on the table at the start of the game, the players won’t forget to roll for night fighting. If night fighting does happen on turn 1, place the token moon-side up, and discard it at the end of the first turn. If there is no night fighting, place the token sun-side up. Ideally you then won't forget to roll again from turn 5. It's certainly not foolproof, but might help a bit.

ApocaFez Summer 2012

So last Sunday was this year's summer edition of ApocaFez. We have that one at the local club, and it's typically a bit smaller than the winter one at Warhammer World. Still…
We did not count the points - the agreement was that the players would bring in whatever they could play - and if they started to lag behind, their extra stuff would simply be blown up from orbit! Thankfully it did not come to that.
The Imperium, I am afraid, did get properly trounced this time. Each team scored 1/10th of a point per vehicle destroyed / structure point removed. On top of this, there were 5 objectives (secretly marked from 0 to 4). The xenos did score rather well on both.

The thing to remember for me is definitely the awesomeness that are the pylons. Usually us xenos dread turns 2 and 3, when the Imperium bring in their numerous flyers and start wreaking havoc and disgorging troops. The new skyfire interceptor rules put an end to all that, in quite a definite way.

As per before, a number of pics can be found on Flickr.

Quick objective markers

Played a nice game at the local shop yesterday. Necrons + Tyranids + Blood Angels vs. Imperial Guards + Grey Knights. We kinda got trashed (12 to 1…), but great fun was had. Lesson learned: do not deploy first when the deployment map is Vanguard Strike. The mission was Crusade, with 5 mysterious objectives. We used the new Munitorum battlefield objectives from GW to mark them on the board, but I wasn't entirely convinced by these: the dice have a tendency to drop from their holders, plus it was easy to forget to activate the objectives' special rules. So today I built some. They're large (40mm), and have the effects written on them. Hopefully that'll help. If you want them, you can get the PDF here. Print the sheet, cut and glue onto 40mm bases (I use the plywood ones from Fenris Games), and you're set. They're not fancy but should do the trick.

Yay! It's summer!

It's summer alright. And the British weather being what it is, I felt compelled to stay inside, and work on a number of unfinished projects. So, in order:

 

• tomb stalker the fifth, bursting from the ground. The most excellent base is from Anarchy Models (the web site is a bit pants – sorry Brian – but their stuff can also be ordered from Wayland Games).
• monolith the eighth (and I think last) in a series.
• 5 deathmarks I've had on my desk for months.

 

 

All WIP, but I've got good hope to complete them soon. As long as the weather holds…

 

 

 

 

New Apocalypse game means more craters!

 

So I went to Salute 2012 back in May, and met Andrew from Amera Plastic Mouldings. Following on my earlier disaster attempt to build apocalyptic craters, he very kindly agreed to show me how the professionals do it. I now have 20 of the very nice craters below, all that's left to do is trim and paint them. And if you want to buy some, Amera sells them here.

Our next Apocalypse game is scheduled for August 19, time to stop procrastinating and build some more Necrons!

 

 

 

You can't win them all

So I was going to ApocaFez, with 6 pylons and 7 monoliths, and I was expecting them to get blasted to pieces (as it turns out, I needn't have worried, I only lost a couple of pylons and one monolith). So – I needed craters. Serendipitously, From The Warp posted a cool tutorial on how to make craters on the quick. So off I went, cutting cardboard shapes and then outside in the freezing weather to paint the things with Gorilla Glue. So far, so good. Once it was all dry, I added more glue to the sides and went back inside the house. A couple of hours later, as night was falling, I went outside again to pick the craters up. The results were a little bit disappointing – the glue had not raised that much; but I figured it would be good enough and relocated the craters into the bathroom to leave then to dry a bit (what with the evening fog that was rising). Did I say fog? Like, water? When I came back to the bathroom half an hour later to check whether the glue had fully dried, I was presented with the horror below. Looks like outside mist + inside warmth made the glue want to party.

I wonder, what with the rumours of 6th Edition and Chaos getting a revamp, is this a sign that I should start a Chaos army?

(Epilogue: I did paint a few craters in the end, from Amera, which were put to good use.)

ApocaFez January 2012

We had a small game last weekend, at Warhammer World, for a friend's birthday. Pics are on flickr, here.