Bolt Action - US winter (Nick)

Wow... over a year since the last update, doesn't time fly!! Still nothing from Carl, he's always busy and painting plenty for 'Open Combat' but unfortunately it never makes it here for us all to see - just too busy!

So it would seem I haven't finished anything to show in the last year - shameful I know and I can't quite believe it myself, I really must check my collections to make sure ...lots started and even 80-90% done. just not that final push to get them done and off the pile!

Anyway onto the goodies, even these are a month later than planned but I finally finished my first Bolt Action minis.

These are painted as reinforcements for the US winter army I bought from my good friend Gary Betts at the Britcon show last year.

....a third and final .30cal mmg, as US forces are allowed to take the option of three for a single force organisation slot:

...and the recently released M2A1 105mm Howitzer from Warlord Games (as is the.30cal) for some added punch - I also really like the model and put a bit of extra work into the base to create a snow bank emplacement:

These were just meant to be a few models to fill in some gaps in the army list, but having been totally inspired by the latest campaign supplement for Battle of the Bulge it is now the beginning of a whole new 1000pts in addition to the 1250(ish) I already have from Gary!!

Hopefully on the way are an Anti-Tank Platoon, with support from some Intelligence & Reconnaissance, and even Military Police on Harleys!!

...all of which I will be using in the W&P Bolt Action Escalation League at War & Peace Games Club on Wednesday evenings.

Beyond the Gates of Antares - Plastic Ghar (Nick)

A new year and already some new toys to show you that I didn't manage to blog last year... welcome to 2016, I think it's going to be a good one :)

As promised in my last post, these are the plastic Ghar battlesuits from the recently released starter set 'Strike Vector One - The Xilos Horizon' for Beyond the Gates of Antares from Warlord Games:

I managed to acquire these as pre-production sprues at the Derby show after I had finished demoing the game all weekend, so that I could carry on demoing the contents of the new starter set without having to borrow anything from the guys at Warlord.

These are the six battlesuits that come in the starter set (3x Battle Suit, 3x Assault Suit) and were the first Ghar models to be released... add these to all the plastic Concord shown in the my last post and you can see you get quite a lot of miniatures for your money in the starter set, as well as all the other bits that you need to start playing.


These took considerably longer to paint than the Concord, but a mixture of spray can malfunction, no specific deadline and less confidence in what the finished paint job would look like all contributed... however I'm pleased with the result and again would like to go back and add more detail, mainly the 'plasma' effect which should end up quite strong on these as the battlesuits are powered by rather unstable plasma reactors - hence the many areas of turquoise which is my chosen colour for plasma.

Unfortunately I have been less productive since the rush to get these Antares models painted, but have been working on several different projects - hopefully something will actually get finished soon so I can update the blog again... this time with something of a more historical bent!

Beyond the Gates of Antares - Plastic Concord (Nick)

So it's been far too long since that last post, and Carl still hasn't made it here it seems! (some excuse about publishing his own skirmish game 'Open Combat'  as a hardback book).

I left you with promises of much more stuff to come from that Bank Holiday weekend back in May... well various distractions meant a lot of starts but nothing more to show as finished projects, and to be honest, right now I can't even remember what it was I was working on except the start of my jungle terrain which I showed on our sister blog Tale of 2 Gamers.

So without further ado, here is what I have been up most recently...

These are plastic Concord from the just released starter set 'Strike Vector One - The Xilos Horizon' for Beyond the Gates of Antares from Warlord Games:

I actually painted these for the Derby World Wargames show in October, but wasn't allowed to post straight away as they weren't released. - in fact I painted them in just 13hrs from spray hitting bare plastic to how you see them now as they only arrived a few days before they were needed... quite a feat for me, and way more than I've painted for several years now.

I want to go back and add some markings to the unit leaders and special weapons (Plasma Lance) to make them easier to pick out on the table top as well as improving the 'plasma' effects... but they'll certainly do for now.

You get ALL of these (with a few options) in the starter set, as well as their opponents the Ghar which I will feature in my next post - there is a lot of stuff in the box, it's stuffed full of everything needed to play including the full hardback rulebook!

The 'orange' was a bit of a happy accident as I had Games Workshop's 'Fuegan Orange' ink wash on my desk and really wanted to use it, but I actually really quite like the result and will probably expand the army into a bigger force as an example of what to add to the contents of the starter set - but also to give me something very quickly that I can use in club games and possibly tournaments as and when they might happen.

I also knew black and ice blue would work really well with it, so I didn't have to spend valuable time working out a colour scheme I was just able to get my head down and paint!

That's all for this time, but it shouldn't be long until my next post, as the Ghar are already painted for my demo games and ready to blog.

Beyond the Gates of Antares - Scatter Terrain (Nick)

Not exactly the 'Lead Mountain', but having removed the fan blades for the previous 'Heavy Drone' conversion I was determined to do something with them... never throw anything away if it looks useful!

So I knocked up these two pieces of scatter terrain using some hardboard off-cuts, gravel and basing materials - the static grass tufts are some new self-adhesive 'wild tufts' from Gamers Grass, courtesy of Great Escape Games:

It's been quite a productive Bank holiday weekend for me, so more updates to follow shortly...

Beyond the Gates of Antares - Heavy Drone (Nick)

So it would seem Carl hasn't made it here yet with all the stuff he's painted, so it's up to me to show some progress instead!

I haven't finished painting anything since the previously shown droids that I did back in July 2014!!
I've had a few false starts and a starter retinue of Perry Miniatures 'War of the Roses' plastics built and undercoated for the excellent Lion Rampant by Osprey Publishing, but nothing actually finished until last night :-

This started life as a kid's Matchbox toy called 'Stratos Saucer', but thanks to the inspiration of a guy on Facebook has been re-purposed as a Concord Heavy Weapons Drone/Combat Drone for Beyond the Gates of Antares by Warlord Games until something this size becomes available officially - however this sort of Old Skool 'Rogue Trader' style converting of toys and/or household items is also being encouraged within the community, and by the author Rick Priestley himself who loves this sort of thing and has only just recently been using the infamous 'deodorant stick tank' in playtesting!

Hopefully this will now kickstart me into building and painting all the official models I've picked up from Warlord, starting with all the Concord C3 drones.

"These are NOT the droids you are looking for..." (Nick)

So I'll get the ball rolling before Carl comes along and puts me to shame with all the wonderful things he's been painting!

Here are two robots I knocked up as objectives/mood pieces for the Beyond the Gates of Antares demo at Warlord Games Open Day back in July.
They are actually a couple Renegade Robots from their Judge Dredd range... they still need a little tidying up and the bases finishing, but most of you will probably get the cheeky inspiration for the colour scheme:

I also started work on this Wrecked Robot by Ainsty Castings as a main objective... this one still needs plenty doing to finish it, but looked fine on the day as the hall's lighting was a bit poor:

Hopefully I will have more to show in the near future, but my progress has been rather poor recently and the Lead Mountain continues to grow quite substantially!

Haven't we seen you two before?

Well yes, as the title suggests, you may have seen us blogging before as we have a sister site Tale of 2 Gamers which is dedicated to specific projects between myself (Nick) and my gaming buddy Carl.

Rather than clutter up the project blog with other random or unrelated stuff, we agreed to start this second blog to run alongside where we could post anything else we were working on and hopefully start to reduce those Lead Mountains without feeling totally constrained to finishing 'To2G' related miniatures.

Unfortunately anything we post here will likely be a 'distraction' from those other projects, but at least it is progress of another sort... and this gives us both (and any guest bloggers) a place to vent these distractions!