Children of December Based and Primed!

I've got my old DIY spray booth set up and now have the base for the Ice Golem as well as the rest of the Children of December crew primed and ready to paint! They're all mounted on Secret Weapon bases, and although it took some finicky pinning with 20 gauge beading wire (couldn't use my usual paperclip method due to the ultra-tiny feet), they're all reasonably securely fastened.

#hobbytiptuesday - Drybrushing

If you need to drybrush, I recommend a Taklon/nylon/synthetic brush, as the bristles are much more durable than natural hair brushes and won't get chewed up as quickly. What you can do is take a pair of scissors and cut all the bristles to an even length, that way the application of pigment onto your target is much more even and controlled.

#hobbytiptuesday - Brush Cleaning

Don't use dishwashing soap to clean natural hair brushes after use. These will strip the natural oils from the brush hairs and quickly ruin the brush. Ideally, use a purpose-made brush cleaner with built-in conditioner (or even hair shampoo w/ conditioner).

I Can Has Pictures Now? (Malifaux Ice Golem)

It's taken me half a week to find the bracket to mount the old overhead lamp I had been using for my photo booth setup - just found it today! I took some proper pics of the Malifaux Ice Golem finally, which I've been chomping at the bit to do since GenCon last year and our subsequent move - could anyone tell me if the Golem is actually teal-tinged (as it should be) instead of entirely shades of blue?

Getting the band back together...

I've spent the past few days going through my old half-dead paints that I haven't touched since before our move and have been bringing them back to life - 100% success rate thus far! Don't have the photo area set up yet, but I've got everything sorted and available to set up, with a card table cleaned off for room next to my painting desk. I have an overhead fluorescent put up and my painting area more or less sorted, it's just a matter of finishing organizing things and finding room for stuff to go. One set of drawers to build the next time I have a day off, and then hopefully I'll be back in business!

A "Quick" Game of Malifaux

 This past trip to visit the in-laws, my daughter and I both took our Malifaux figures to occupy some time and to see if we could sneak in a "quick" game over the weekend. I had 2 copies of the rule book, I had my stat cards and we were both going to play crews straight out of Malifaux Crew boxes - hers being The Guild's Justice, and mine being The Children of December.

 It turns out that she had misplaced her stat cards - no problem, I figgered, I'll just make copies from the book. We didn't have a Malifaux-specific card deck - no problem, we'll just use a standard deck plus Jokers. We didn't have any scenery - a search for random objects made a passable selection to cover a 3'x3' area of table. We didn't have any way of keeping track of Soulstones or statuses - some rummaging produced enough glass beads that we had enough of both on hand (mostly the status changes would be effects from Rasputina's magic, near as I could figger - but, we had an assortment of colors, just in case).

 We set up the play area, alternated placing terrain (a la Warhammer 40K scenery rules), decided on a 30 Soulstone limit so as to allow for some Upgrades and an extra cache of stones for each of us, flipped for deployment (Corners) and settled on the Turf War Strategy - we opted not to pick Schemes, because at this point, we were already an hour into things with no game yet, and my 10-year-old daughter was starting to get bored.

 Here's a picture at the end of the First Turn - she decided on being Second Player after we flipped for Initiative, we both moved our models, and the next turn it looked like the action was really going to begin in earnest! Unfortunately, I had overestimated her patience and the amount of time we had - the game was about called "done" at that point.

Lessons learned:

Have everything together ahead of time - tokens (we had none), stat cards, models, and scenery.

If playing for the first time, smaller is probably better - neither of us we're really familiar with the rules, and we probably would've had as good a time taking a token model or two each (Minions, say) and just using those to get a sense for the different interactions.

Never underestimate the amount of time it takes to get set up - there invariably will be something lost, missing, or in need of clarification.

Have fun - I enjoyed myself, but I think it was more the anticipation of things to come as opposed to the actual game (which cut off abruptly and didn't quite pan out like we both had hoped.) if you have to go smaller or trim out stuff to get momentum going, that's probably better than the "boring stuff" dragging on due to lack of preparedness.

Know the rules - While I'd given the rulebook a cursory read, it wasn't anything near thorough enough to play a game.  She'd never actually read the rules, so it was up to me to introduce all the concepts ( most of which I was a bit shaky on to begin with).

Not the greatest first game but not a horrible one, either. Hindsight being 20/20, there's a lot of things I would've done differently - I suppose most of this holds true for any game system.

Status Update!

  My family and I moved to a new house and are still in the process of getting the place situated. My prior posts about GenCon were about the last regular access and hobby time I had. We've got everything completely moved and while my painting and hobby supplies take up about a quarter of the basement floor, it's not much resembling a "painting" area at the moment.

 That said, I'll be posting some stuff upcoming: better pictures of the Malifaux Ice Golem, the base I'm starting work on, the rest of the Malifaux Children of December crew, some quality supplies I picked up from Secret Weapon Miniatures while away at GenCon, and a few other odds and ends. I'm thinking I might do some actual product reviews (now that I have various odds and ends I could review) and I really want to get back into the posting of work-in-progress updates.

A lot of stuff in the works, and not enough hours in the day!