Doomsday monolith

Back in February we played our biannual Apocalypse game at the Guildford Games Club (I am told that we'll get an updated site Real Soon Now, BTW). So once again off I went with my little Necrons, including two Doomsday Phalanxes. The Doomsday Phalanx is a monolith formation, which includes the very special Doomsday Monolith. Blow this guy up and you're just back to facing regular monoliths, so it's quite important to identify it. Last year I was in a rush before our big game at Warhammer World, so only had time to create 'Doom!' counters (see the monolith to the top left on the picture below). It worked, but was not very nice, nor was it very always clear to the other players (especially if you were looking at the wrong side of the monolith). 

This year I had to do better. I tried to scratch build something, but unfortunately after a disastrous eBay experience I did not receive once of the crucial bits I needed in time. Come IDICBeer to the rescue. Nick had been reviewing some very cool pieces of terrain, which he picked from Neal at Leave no mini unpainted. So I bought a few packs (more on those later), and concentrated on the cyborg monoliths. It turns out these fit nicely at the top of a monolith. 

So here is a Doomsday Phalanx at the game this year. The Doomsday Monolith is the one to the left of the picture.

 I'll try and post better pictures when I get a bit more time but meanwhile, thanks Nick and Neal!

Oops I did it again

So… I dropped the box again. Bother.

 

Of Tomb Stalkers and storing them

I've been looking into storing my tomb Stalkers for a while now. I used to have them in foam cases, but bits kept on breaking - I've lost count of the number of antennas and other protruding bits I've had to glue back on.

So, after I'd finished painting my fifth one (at long last!), I thought I'd get smart, and store them so that the minis did not touch anything. Enter a custom foam card tray, with the Stalkers secured with Velcro tape. Great idea, works very well indeed. However, this was counting without the creatures' innate viciousness. Not being isolated anymore, they got aggressive towards each other, and one of them managed to get free of its bonds, and savaged the other ones. Look at the results below, it's quite distressing, really. When I opened the box the centre critter was still attacking the jugular of one of its comrades. Terrible, I tell you.

So it's back to the drawing board. And to gluing bits back on.

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.