Adepticon 2014 Champs Coverage

Another great year of Adepticon.  Had a blast and am still trying to recover my voice (from yelling over the crowds).  We had a blast running the 40k friendly and were happy with all the great games we had on the team tournament.

I figured since I never take great notes on the games, I'd just post some cool pictures and an overall recap with how things went.  This post will focus on the 40k Championships.

The great thing about this event was there was absolutely no pressure for me.  I was 100% committed to running the 40k Friendly on friday so no matter what if I advanced I planned on rejecting... like I really had a shot.  I ended up winning my first games, 2nd being against my team tournament and regular gaming partner Jeff (small world).  The third game I lost against Bill Kim who ended up winning the overall for Thursday, and the last game I lost against a great opponent with a beaststar.  Was my first experience against it and surprisingly I was able to take it out - at the cost of a good portion of my army.

I had a great time with 4 great opponents.  I think I ended up around 57th our of 220 players.  Not too shabby with as little practice I get in.

Here's the army in all it's glory that I took.

One thing I realized is I just hate static shooting.  Whereas the broadsides were a huge deterrent and a focal point for my opponents, I don't like not being able to move with them.  I think I'd much rather go a third skyray and third riptide to keep mobility.  Either way, Tau are getting shelved for awhile while I work on my imperial forces.

Now for the massive photo dump... captions in the photos!  I realized that either my camera is getting worse or I just was way too unsteady while I was taking photos.  Sorry if the quality wasn't 100%.  Time to get a tripod.

first round against Tyranids.  I stole the initiative which is really harsh when playing Tau.  Kind of went downhill from there.

Second round against Jeff's armor 14/13 brigade. Way more difficult then I thought it would be but ultimately pulled out the win.  Serious amount of lascannons!

Bill Kim's demons in round 3

The beasts of slannesh ended up being my undoing.  Just didn't have a solution to get rid of them.  Ended up having a sole kroot on the table at the end!

Round 4 opponent's beaststar elder

Killed the beaststar in the end, but didn't have enough to pull a win.  Going 1st is rough when there are jet bikes on the board to grab objectives.  

Next post will cover the 40k team tournament.

Droned Out, and Not-So-FLGS

I spent the weekend frantically painting, I give kudos to my wife for being patient with me this time of the year every year.  Yesterday was spent painting drones all day.  Whoa, they are monotonous.  I guess since it's the exact same model over over.  I'm about 90% finished with them: 8 marker drones and 12 gun drones.

Additionally, I painted about 25 flying stands.  I realized after playing tau for so long the drones pop off those flying stands all game long.  It gets super annoying.  Even though it'll be a bigger pain to transport them since they'll take up more space, I'm going to glue them down to the basing.

Here's where I left them at last night.  All lined up in their assembly line painting.

On to my little rant.  I went to my local gaming store Saturday for an Adepticon practice tournament. It was 1,850 and designed to prepare for the champs.  I really wanted to knock the rust off my dice and was excited to participate.  Made the 30 minute drive over and got my army out and set up on my display base.

After chatting with the other players I made it over to the check in.  Was #17, and heard an employee say, "well I guess that means we have an odd number of people".  I thought nothing of it.

Table pairings came and apparently they just went down the line for pairing.  When it got to my name they said I had a bye.  F@#K!  Maybe I am getting old, but honestly the point of playing in a tournament is "playing".  Not getting full victory points for a bye.  I don't want to wait around 2.5 hours until the next round starts.  Why they didn't have a ringer army was beyond me.

I went up to the counter and asked for my money back and to withdraw from the tournament.  The owner asked if I'd like to play a 1,000 point game.  My response was no, I was here to play my 1,850 list.  He then followed up with saying he could scrap something together.  I said no, I was looking for a competitive game (and didn't want to basically try to rush the game in a short window of time). Was this an unreasonable thing for me to expect?  Still not sure why there was no ringer army prepared since half of the time you'll get an odd number of people.  I've run many tournaments and it is just something you have to prepare for.

Packed up, then drove home.  On the way back my blood was really boiling and is making me reconsider going to that store anymore.  It is pretty irritating I basically wasted a few hours of my Saturday. At least I got to get a workout in and a little additional painting.

I thought more and more, is it time that I look at opening up my own store?  There is a lack of gaming stores in the Chicago area.  We have Games Plus in Mt. Prospect, and now Draxtar (my lovely experience Saturday) way out west in Batavia.  Not a whole lot in-between.  I know a couple of people that are interested in getting together to do this too.  Having been in trade sales at GW, I know how ridiculously hard it is to run a gaming store, but I wonder if I could make it work.  Food for thought...

Back to painting drones!

Adepticon TT Display Progress #3

We had a super productive night last night working on the display board.  In addition, we have some extra surprises that Danny worked on... going to really add to the overall presence.  After looking at the display more and more, we think we're not going to do a backdrop, it'll take away from the 3d aspect of the viewing experience.

I'm still psycho worried about the one platform that I jacked up the wires on, Greg and Jeff will be bringing it to Greg's work to get re-soldered.  Hopefully everything goes well.  We did a test run and by angling it in, it fits in my jeep, so at least that works.

We really went to town adding fake plants, and dry brushed up the extras and added flock and bushes, I really think it turned out well and captured the look and feel on what we wanted, basically the islands of Pandora from Avatar.  Onto the progress shots!

grrr... the bottom platform doesn't light up!  Hope we can fix it

I like how the over brush of the sand actually picks up the light

I'm working on more painting, heading over to a 1850 practice tournament at my FLGS this afternoon.  I gotta knock the rust off my dice!

Sunday will be my big paint day, I hope to basically do the painting marathon and get everything done.  Still have about 2 hours left on my riptide, a few hours on the skyrays, and the 20 drones!

Adepticon TT Display Progress Part 2

Here we go with more progress, I'll have the captions tell what's happening in each of the pictures.  We met again last night and proceeded to get the rocks glued on and finished as well as the first layer of sand on the base.  Our craft store shopping experience proved successful as well with the tons of plants we got, especially the "root" like looking ones.

We disguised the cables with brown electrical tape to cover them up and will eventually wrap those in leaves. While wrapping one, unfortunately one of the light strips came unsoldered.  Jeff and Greg are going to attempt to repair/salvage what we have - keeping my fingers crossed!

I also realized after getting home that now by adding the rocks to the top of the top platform, it is now taller then the opening to the rear of my jeep.  So we'll need to do a test run to make sure we can angle it in, otherwise we'll need to chop some of the top off.  Good times!  The fun of projects, always something coming up.

Sand is added

rocks waiting to be glued on top of the islands

assembled project, the core is done! now if only it will fit in my jeep

first layer of brown applied to sand, electrical tape covering wires

adding roots to the islands

Danny hiding in the massive amount of foliage... Shrouded!

Where we wrapped up for the night, we're slowly getting there!

In the painting front, I probably have about 3 more hours left to finish my last riptide.  About 3 hours left on the skyrays and about 5 hours on the 20 drones.  Going to be coming down to the wire.  I'm debating on whether I go to a practice tournament tomorrow to knock some rust off my gaming skills.

I'll have some progress shots tonight when we finish up, the goal is to get basically most of the board finished.

Adepticon TT Display Board Progress

It's that time of year where we are scrambling to get everything ready for Adepticon!  I've been a little quiet on the hobby front lately but this project has really sparked our creative energies.

We're running Tau and our team (Adeptus Film Company) is doing a play on Pandora from the Avatar movie... I won't give away all the cool back story but the thought was to do floating islands like the movie and integrate glowing discs with the Tau icons.  One of our team members, Greg, is a graphic artist and is a genius when it comes to coming up with these ideas.  No way we could have pulled it off without him.

We built up a new cart to mount this to, with some sturdy casters... no wrecking all the hard work with broken wheels!

We spent a couple weeks ago flushing out the core of it and both Saturday and Sunday last weekend working on the display.  I'll throw captions in the titles of the photos so you can see what we're working on!

The foam rings that will serve as the undersides of the floating islands

Danny and Greg sanding out the rocks

Jeff creating the final foam ring 

Greg is assembling the core of the islands

Danny dry brushing up the sections

The finish core of the islands taped up

Here is what it looks like before we start adding everything on top of the platforms!

where we left off before finishing for the weekend.  You can see added overhang rocks and  putty to go over the edge.

This week will be super busy finishing this up.  We need to add additional rocks over the top of the "discs", sculpt them and putty them up.  Then we'll be adding a swamp to the base.  I picked up a bunch of fake plants and roots that we'll be integrating, as well as sanding and putting fake grass/foliage on the base themselves.

Only a week and a half left!  Outside of this I still need to finish a riptide, 2 skyrays and 20 drones!  Argh!

Infinity Display Board / Dice Tray / Order Counter

I came up with an idea after playing Infinity a couple of months ago.  My dice kept bouncing around and I was half tempted to buy a little dice tray.  Then after thinking I needed a more effective/quicker way to count my orders and move my army around, I sketched out a design to do all three!

Here's my first concept work of a multi-tray.

The dice rolling area is plenty of room and the right height to roll a handful of d20's.  I felt lined it to dampen the roll and keep the noise down.

The order counters are pretty basic.  I just did a floating circle and painted on the arrows and numbers.  It probably needs one more coat of white paint.

Everything else was a few coats of a high gloss black lacquer.  This should keep it shiny and new!

The tray on the end to display my army and move it around has a floating insert.  I'll decorate that with the similar effects I base my armies in.  I'll also do a bit of a backdrop that "tells the story".  It will be removable so I can rotate out armies and display them on a shelf when I'm not using my multi-tray.

Hope you enjoy, and inspire your own DIY tournament trays.

First Infinity Models Painted: Ariadna Loup-Garous

I've been in a bit of a painting slump but am finally getting back.  I've been assembling terrain like a madman over the last couple of months.  My goal is to get 4 4x4 tables at my house for infinity so I can start hosting.  If you've ever played the game you know how terrain intensive that is!

Here's my first batch of miniatures I painted for my Ariadna Merrovingian Strike Force.  I started with the Loup-Garous.  I love how this link team performs in the game, they're brutal.  It looks like they may be one of the more intensive paint schemes with all of their capes.

What I found is the real challenging part for me is switching scales.  All of the tiny straps and details that are way easier to paint on heroic 28mm.  Now that I'm looking at the pictures zoomed in, I want to go back and touch up some things.

I basically went with most of the color schemes straight from the book.  It was fun doing such a small batch of models.  I could mix paints on the fly and it allowed me to try things I wouldn't normally undertake if I had to batch paint hundreds of models (or tanks).

The bases I used are from Dragon Forge Design.  Great product from those guys.  I am not totally sold on the grass I put on the bases, but I wanted to break up the drab concrete a little bit and figured grass would be growing through the cracks.

Now onto the rest of my Ariadna models.  The next batch will be the troopers as well as the Chasseurs.