Unfinished Project Overload?

Are you like me with so many unfinished gaming projects? I am not talking unpainted but unbuilt. Maybe I am just a hoarder. I know that pack ratting runs in my family. Just thinking of my marines, I was just looking in my bit box and saw like 5 assault terminators(black reach+lightening claws), 10 marines, 3 bikes, predator, half built landraider crusader. And since I have not bought anything for marines in well over a year, these have been sitting around for quite a while.

What do you have sitting around waiting for attention?

Blood Bowl: Pass Ruler Scaling

If you are going to build a custom pitch for your favorite Blood Bowl team sometimes you change the scale on the field to make it easier to play with your big guys. Making the squares a little larger makes it easier to get players in those tight areas and allows more space for prone players without losing track of their position from a slight bump. If you increase the size of the squares you also have to make a customer pass ruler to keep the game run vs throwing balanced. I have noticed people have a problem with this so here is what you do since math is not everyones strong suit.


The width of the whole ruler is 1.695 squares so if you scale to a 40 mm pitch squares gives a 67.8 mm width(40 mm* 1.695). The length of the thrower area is .87 squares so scaled to 40 mm is 34.8 mm.

The Quick Pass, Short Pass, and Long Pass sections are all 3.49 squares so 139.45 mm for the 40 mm pitch. The Long Bomb is actually a little shorter at 2.75 squares so a 110 mm for a 40 mm scaled pitch.

All of my numbers are for a 40 mm pitch. If you are building something like a 30 mm one then just multiple all the numbers by .75 (30/40).

All these numbers are pretty close and should serve you well in almost all games on your new larger pitch.

Epic Archive Coming Together

I have started to get my epic posts organized a little better. Check out the link on the right side bar in major series or just click here for Sons of Twilight Epic Content.

Blood Bowl: Gaspez-Arts Chaos Dwarf Team Booster

So to finish off the Gaspez Art Chaos Dwarves, I needed two more dwarves and another Bull Centaur and luckily they have just the miniatures to avoid any repeats. Here are the two additional dwarves. I got all of this team through Impact! Miniatures.


Plus the top of the bull centaur with different front plate and large spiked for his shoulder pads.

Disney Pixar's: Cars 2

I got to go to an advance screening of Cars 2 from Pixar with my wife and daughter earlier in the week thanks to Disney Pictures. Anyone who liked the first Cars will also like this movie. It has far more action than the first film since it is mainly a spy story. So both good guy and bad guy cars meet unfortunate ends either implied or just off screen. Sometimes my 4 year old (almost 5 where does the time go), got scared but usually by the time she crawled onto my wife's lap that part was over. The action level is more like The Incredibles than say Toy Story. The head villain car tells his minions that "McQueen must die". It has a nice message about friendship and standing by your friends but does not have the emotional depth of Up. Definitely a movie to take the kids to especially boys probably between 5-10 who have seen and loved the first Car movie.

Wayland Games Temporarily Drops GW Finecast

Wayland games has decided to temporarily stop carrying Games Workshop new Finecast line of resin miniatures due to excessive issues. They inspected a sampling of 60 miniatures from 2 deliveries and found a 55% issue rate. While some of these issues they not are not to the level where the customer would return the product, they do not meet peoples expectations for quality products. They have a bunch of pictures so all you people who doubted the issues with Finecast should check them out.

I wonder if GW really cares though. They are essentially waging a war on their online competition. Could they be intentionally feeding Wayland bad stock? Will this just make everyone who wants Games Workshop Finecast have to go into a GW Store to get it so they will have multiple copies allowing the customer to actually get a good one. I doubt both of these since you do not want to tarnish your brand for such limited gains between trade and retail price for the products.

As a note for my earlier polls. The models on the left are the finecast ones so people did have trouble telling them apart in pictures once primed.

Wrath of Ashardalon: D&D Boardgame Review

So for one of my father's day gifts I got the Dungeon and Dragons Cooperative Boardgame: Wrath of Ashardalon. My other gifts where shirts. I have the Castle Ravenloft game which can be used with this game to expand the possible adventures.


Box contains a divider for storage and all these parts. Interlocking board tiles. Card stock character and villian sheets, cards for random treasures,monsters, or traps, and keeping track of hero powers. Counters for hit points and the figures for the game.

I was shorted 1 figure in the box so I have sent a letter to customer service.

These are the 5 heroes for the game. Dwarf Fighter (not sure who scuplted this dwarf but I think they missed the idea), Elf Paladin, Human Cleric, Dragonborn Mage, and Half Orc Rogue. So pretty similar to Castle Ravenloft with those classes but with different races and Ranger traded to Paladin.

Here is Ashardalon, the biggest baddie in the game.

Two other large monsters: Otyugh and Rage Drake. I have a metal Otyugh from my chainmail collection.

Other adventure villians.

Sampling of the basic bad guys. There are 10 different basic bad guys where you get 3 of them.
There is an interesting dynamic in the game that if you get more than 1 of the same monster in play they get to both go anytime one would.

So to play the game you build up a deck of dungeon tiles based on directions from the adventure book, pick you heroes and powers, get the encounter and monster decks ready and start exploring. Pretty much every tile generates a monster and some also cause additional encounter affects. Castle Ravenloft had some problems with an optimal strategy of essentially always have the high defense heroes with the most hit points up front to get the monsters. This game appears to have some new tricks like large rooms that are revealed with a single tile draw.

Blood Bowl: Gaspez-Arts Chaos Dwarf Team

More of the unpacking of my Chaos Dwarf Blood Bowl Team made by Gaspez Arts ordered through Impact! Miniatures.


The basic team comes with 4 Chaos Dwarves, 7 Hobgoblins, and 1 Bull Centaur.

The 4 chaos dwarves all missing stupid hats of the GW team. Closer to the dwarves from the Hellcannon than the old school chaos dwarves. Pretty much all 1 piece models.

I do not really love the hobgoblin sculpts but they are no worse than the GW ones.

Bull Centaur comes in 6 pieces.

Not a friendly looking fellow. Again much better than the stupid hat ones from GW.

Blood Bowl: Gaspez-Arts Chaos Minotaur

I got a chaotic dwarf blood bowl team last year. The team is designed and made by gaspez-arts but I had it purchased through Impact! Miniaturesbut due to some intercompany issues they no longer carry the product line.

The first item from the set is a Chaos Minotaur.

All the parts. No real pose options but pretty nice looking.

Back side. A fair amount of vet points but still a nice looking figure.


Close up to the face. I still have not assembled him but I might do it soon.

Happy Father's Day to All the Gamer Dads

Happy Father's Day to all my fellow gamer dads out there. Here my daughter is helping me play Space Hulk with my brother not long after it came out. She also enjoys playing with my large collection of chainmail miniatures since I have some female characters in those and my 40K stuff is pretty much all male marines or unknown xenos.

Finecast: Can you pick the Crisper Model

My first Games Workshop Citadel Finecast related poll showed the up to 50% of responders were not happy with the quality of the miniatures. Even if I lump take the minimum number of responders for any of the negative catagories to account for people with bad outcomes finding my poll I still get like 20% problems, not very good.

So now we have two new polls to check the crisper claims from Games Workshop. Here we have two pictures of pairs of models both primed gray generously provided by www.brueckenkopf-online.com where they are doing a review of the finecast line. One is Citadel Finecast and one is metal. We know that detail appears crisper on finecast due to light contrast levels differences between the resin and metal so that has been taken out of the equation.

Can you tell me which is the crisp Games Workshop Finecast model and which is that old metal model?

First we have Logan Grimnar


Then we have the Empire Captain.


So take a guess with the polls on the right. I do not even know which is which yet so we will see. Good Luck.

Best Gaming Terrain Ever: Games Workshop Store

I saw a post yesterday at GalaxyinFlames that I just had to make sure everybody saw it. Back in the day some GW staffers lovingly crafted this for Games Day but some other staffers/corporate did not like the joke and destroyed it. Check out the post for the awesome interior detailing.

Getting Back Posts Organized

Recently a foreign language gaming blogger directed his readers to my site due to some of my Epic miniature pictures. While commenting on his post, I noted that he should check out my Blood Bowl miniature pictures since he had some blood bowl related posts and my Epic collection is weak sauce compared to my Blood Bowl stuff. He responded what is the link and I could provide him the topic tag but that grouped the posts across multiple pages.

So I decided I need to get these posts organized a little better so if people want to examine topics in a quick and visual way they can get to the posts they want. I added a link to these indexs on the top right column and will start getting them together starting with my original Games Workshop game Blood Bowl. So for a tour of my Blood Bowl Collection head over here.

Magi-Quest at the Great Wolf Lodge

A little more about on our last trip as a three person family. First, we went to Philly to visit my brother and his wife. We all took ER to an aquarium and an archeology museum (she loves "ancient things" like mummies). Then my wife had a blogging conference at a Great Wolf Lodge so I was trusted with keeping ER entertained at the water park for 2 days. Since she is a little young for the bigger slides we generally could spend about 3-4 hours at a time in different pools. This left us with a little extra time to kill after getting clean up between meals but they have an answer already there for us.

A Magiquest franchise. Penny Arcade had a little post about this a few months ago. Essentially this is a magic themed scavenger hunt around the halls of the lodge with RFID wands. Talking pictures, glowing gems, opening chests, and video displays constantly interacting with tons of kids moving back and forth. Each quest would involve finding like 5-10 different objects scattered in 5-6 hallways so a lot of walking around is involved. ER at first was very tentative since the first part of the game she saw was a final challenge in a dark cave against a tv image of a CGI dragon. ER is a bit of a drama princess and is scared of everything so this put her off. After watching other kids doing all the different challenges, she asked if we could follow another girl around who was doing it. I told her no but that meant she was ready to try it herself. She is still a little young for it since the game does involve remembering long lists or reading the quests in a book so I had to help her but after a little while she was able to remember what objects where in which hall and floor and could lead me to them.



Luckily no one at my location was all decked out in outfits but my little princess was still wanting a sparkly wand with a pegasus/unicorn on it so those cost a little extra but if you are better at limiting your kids it might cost like 8 dollars per hour for the 3-4 hours they could play the game if they were a little faster. It took my 4.5 year old about 4 hours to get through the parts she wanted to do (She would not do the fight the dragon quest). The thing that her most excited was when she say her name on the TV as having competed the second most quests that day and collected the 3rd most gold. They show on a special TV channel in the lodge rooms with stats from the top performers for the day, year, and all time. She was so excited she wanted me to call mommy during her meetings. You might wonder how a 4.5 year old can compete with older kids. It was during a week day and most older kids where not there anymore since school is still in session. We also started right at the 9 AM opening time and checked the TV after about an hour so the number of kids playing was lower.



We enjoyed it and I am not sure how I would have kept her entertained and active the whole time by myself without it. The one thing that I did not like was that when one of the quest objectives was broken you would go to the store and tell them and they would just give you credit for the whole completed quest. I understand that things break when hundreds of children use them a day and this would be fine if you were just trying to complete the quests and get the experience and treasure like a MMO but the point is actually to do the quests (keeping the older kids busy so Mom and Dad can have a moment of calm). So if the second of the 7 things you need to do is broken you essential do not do any of the quest. This was a bigger problem for us since the final adventure my daughter went on was to save the fairies and should have a big pay off where she goes into one of the themed rooms with a wall video display to complete it. This quest had a broken part so she did not get save fairies and get thanked for her help. The people in the store really need to be able to grant just the part of the quest that is broken and let you pick up at the next objective. This might not be the default for most people but it should be good as an option.

Finecast Rushed?

Does anyone think that the finecast product appears rushed out the door? While some of the models do look nice and "crisp", many seem to have minor imperfections, and some seem to be just horrible models. I think if the worst things were some small bubbles everyone would understand but as you can see from the raptor a couple of posts ago some models have serious issues.

Why did GW ship so many low quality models out to customers? The goal should be zero miscasts to customers and they definitely missed that. So if the process and the products were not ready why did they ship them all out. Why not cut the release level down and just deliver good models?

My guess is that yesterday was the start of the new fiscal year for GW so all those sales to independents for the release and the first wave of sales to customers at GW stores will get booked to last year to help make up for the slow start of the fiscal year and the time when the metal models were not available. Returned products will not show up on the ledger until next fiscal year probably. GW may have tried to hit their numbers for the investors at the cost of customer satisfaction again.

Interesting note some one posted on Facebook about a meeting with GW AU about the trade embargo. The list somethings that GW told them that the cost of finecast transition of tens of millions of pounds which seems very unlikely and if true only in some strange accounting trick way and verifiable untruths like 2000 people working at GW headquarters on model design and production which more like 200 company wide compared to 1200 in sales force at stores and 400 in admin roles.

In the Den of the Great Wolf

We had a family trip last month which ended with a two night stay at a Great Wolf Lodge. For those of you without kids, a Great Wolf Lodge is a hotel/waterpark. On the day you check in you get access to the park starting at 1 PM and have full access until closing at 9 PM on the day you check out. So if you live a reasonable distance away you can get a pretty solid day in at the pools before heading home after checking out.

Since we were there for an event for my wife, I had our daughter with me most of the time by myself. So we got to explore the water park together and learn what was fun for her. They do not let you bring in flotation tubes for kids but they do provide life vests. We had brought our own for her but decided to use theirs so we did not have to worry about having another wet object in our room.

The water park has many different zones enclosed inside in a 85 degree room which feels warm as soon as you enter. Being inside meant I did not have to worry about my pasty white skin getting sun damaged. I am so pale it looks like I am only come out at night. The first place we went was the toddler pool that had like a 1-2 ft depth and some spray zones. Attached to this was like 5 different waterslides built into a little hill. The top height was probably 6 feet with a pretty long length. The next stop was a larger pool with about a four foot depth with an area with basketball hoops for play. My daughters favorite area was a slow path that you floated down in a tub with occassionally things splashing on you. She would want to go around it like 4 or 5 times in a row.



They also had a wave pool which had about a 6 foot maximum depth and a 2-3 foot valley to crest. This is sort of small compared to a wave pool that I was used to as a kid which was like 12-18 feet deep and 4-6 ft waves but was nice since I could hold my daughter and hoop over the waves. I spent so much time doing this that one night it felt like I was still hooping while trying to go to sleep. They also had a water soaked play structured which is topped with a 1500 gallon bucket which would dump on to those below every few minutes. Right below this bucket was 2 water slides which where like 2 stories tall of twists and turns. You had to listen for the bucket alarm while waiting in line on the slides to avoid getting soaked. My daughter and I got up to them planning on going down together but when we got up there I learned that she had to go down on her own with me on the other side to meet her at the bottom. I asked her if that was OK and she said yes but did look nervous. We went down and when I meet her at the bottom not only did she enjoy it she demanded that we go back up to ride again. We also did an activity which had a rope net strung across a pool with flotation pads in it. You are supposed to hang on and work your way across but my daughter was not tall enough to react it so she just crawled from pad to pad and I moved them close together to help her jump from one to the next.


I tried it with the netting and expected more floation from the pads but it is not designed for the dads. Our trips to the pools always ended with a stop at the hot tubs to get warmed up a little before heading back to our rooms to get cleaned up. This should only be the last stop since it makes the other pools seem very cold.

I have not talked about the big water slides yet since I did not take my daughter on them even though I could have since while it might be pretty safe I am sure she would have been scared. They had 2 levels of these higher slides. The 3 floor high set of 4 different slides which go into and out of the building. One of the slides involved a drop into a big bowl where you went around a few times before dropping through a hole in the center. These were all fun but sometimes had a line when the area was busy. On our second day I was able to ride them as fast as I could climb the stairs back up since it was a weekday while school was still is session so not very crowded. I am not a huge thrill ride fan but I liked these. They also had a 4 story multiple person raft slides with three different choices. I only did one of them since you have to get paired with other people if you are riding alone. The ride I went on actually had powered parts which made it even faster than a normal gravity powered slide. I was not expecting that. I might have known what I was getting myself into if I had brought my glasses but I left in the room to not lose them.

We had a great time in the pools probably spending like 10-12 hours there during our stay. All the staff was friendly and helpful. I was constantly asking the lifeguards the time so I could meet my wife for events. They also had a nightly story time with both a short animatronic show and then a employee reading an extra large format book.



The only thing we did not like was the restaurant which was a buffet and we had a hard time find main course dishes that we enjoyed. We do not really eat seafood and many of the other dishes seemed very salty to us. We try to watch our salt by not adding extra but it is not like we eat salt free meals. We had already paid for the meals since we did not have time to go out and eat someplace else but in the future we would probably make time to go to other places in the area.