Miniature Tabletop Gaming Thread

It doesn't work for me either - I use the helping hand and clamp the model down if I need to hold it in place. I'm just very careful when I prime.

Works fine for me with plastic models. Not so much with metal -- with those I'll use double-sided mounting tape or just drill a pin into the bottom of the base if they're really heavy.

Just took this here shot of Orsson's Conquest in my makeshift light tent, and felt like showing off - not bad for a first time, I think.

Blutack may or may not work on 28mm metal, but 15mm metal and 28mm plastic or finecast work just fine.

In other news, I present to you the greatest customs declaration of all time:

That's excellent work! Even more so if it is your first miniature. It's neat which is always a difficult nut to crack for beginners and there's good attention to detail with the highlighting and detailing.

My recommendations on this would be to add a last highlight layer on some of the vertices using a much lighter colour (a whitish blue-grey for the black parts, a pale flesh for the red areas and pure silver for the gold bits). That will make it pop a little more. They don't need to be all around the edges just where you have three different vertices intersecting to bring up the detail a level.

Oh no, I meant that this is my first experience with the light tent - that's Orsson's miniature, and I do think it looks great. That's why I decided to use it as a subject - that, and its size makes it easier to focus on. Mine are just too awful at this point for photographical evidence that they exist.

I can't believe that you stole all my likes! I am agog, I am aghast...

I actually really appreciate that you're willing to take some nice shots of my minis in your fancy light tent! My awful cell phone pics are just embarrassing.

Thanks for the feedback, IainC!

It's harder to see in this context, but I did build up some highlights on the vertices of the red, black, and bronze/gold areas. For the silvered areas I did do some highlighting, but relied more heavily on drybrushing. I'm relatively timid with my highlights, which is why they're hard to make out here, I think. And going back for an even sharper line is a great idea.

I am always trying to improve with my technique and your advice is well taken!

I should also note that the base is unfinished. I got it to this point in order to take it to TempleCon, but I have some more painting and modeling to do with it. A few pieces of faction-specific wreckage and debris are in the works...

Slash cardboard box! Also, crap - probably should've gotten permission first, huh? Blame it on my unfettered enthusiasm. I should further point out that some of the detail is obscured by my terrible lighting, as well. As I further tune the lighting situation I think I can bring it out more, but at the moment the highlights are probably washed out. That photo's straight out of the camera, too - no postprocessing to speak of, so that's something else for me to look into. Obviously, I'll need to add lens flares.

PS: I hope the faction-specific wrecks aren't Menoth :(

You should play some games with it, see what foes it takes out, and decorate the base accordingly. ;-)

So "all Menoth" is what you're suggesting.

The flip side of that is that everyone has a bit of Mountain King stuck to their bases.

Huh, when I was painting I always just held it by the base. I had some "working"bases that I'd do a light glue job to, before sticking them onto the decorative base that the model was destined for.

Man I'm so tempted to get like the trollblood starter set and pick up my brushes again! If I felt like I wasn't totally rusty I'd just grab the collector's ed Dire Troll, but uhh I'm not sure I really remember how to paint any more!

Dooooo it.

The Trollblood box has some really fun models to paint. I love doing the tarnished metals and bright hides.

Interested in expanding your collection of X-Wing Minis with a vast collection of unofficial ships? Well, this guy has your hookup! Get 'em hot off of his Shapeways site before FFG (and a little-known company called ... Dibney? Disnob?) shuts him down.

If it wasn't for the fact that I can't paint worth a shit, I might be tempted to pick up a Starwing or a Z-95. He lists YT-2400 (Dash Rendar's Outrider) but I don't see it on his Shapeways site.

Stupid amazon had the troll blood box for thirty bucks. I guess I'd better get paints and brushes and whatnot as well...

Yeeesss...yessss!

Yeah, I just ordered a couple of Winsor and Newtons Series 7 brushes: a 2 and a 0. From what I recall the last time I painted my super small brushes never got any use.

I'm going to have to come up with a color scheme, I guess. I kind of like the default color scheme. I've poked around the web some and I saw a really nice dark gray skinned Extreme Mauler that tempted me, but I want to experiment with NMM effects on the armor plates and I'm afraid gray skin and NMM armor will just kind of turn into a blendy blob!

He uses the Micromachines Outrider so he didn't make a model for the rest of us.

I'm kind of tempted to get a bunch of Headhunters, some E-Wings and some Starwings, but I dunno. Painting these should be less of a problem than it is with most things. Just some basic details and a wash would probably look decent. Hmm...

Yeah, a 0 with a nice point is pretty much good enough. Did you get the regular-sized W&N or their 'miniature' line?

Just the regular I think... I didn't know they made mini brushes - what's the difference?

Shorter handle and shorter bristles, which they claim gives you more control and a finer point. I have a couple and haven't noticed a huge difference between them and my usual Raphael brushes.

ahh, it looks like I actually got one and one!

So hey, I'm starting to get a craving for Infinity. What do you think of it so far? What faction did you go for?

Not had a proper chance to play it, but I've been devouring info on it and reading battle reports etc. It does seem to be the answer to my need for a sci-fi Necromunda-scale game. I have a standing invite to play with a few people on some regular weekdays but work isn't allowing that at the moment.

There's an awful lot of misdirection and psychology involved which I suspect will take a long time to learn - all the hidden deployment, hidden Lt, and combat drop stuff means quite a bit of the strategy will come from stuff that isn't a known quantity to your opponent. Hidden lists is another thing that'll take a lot of getting used to, particularly as there's no easy way of learning what all the models do. No PP-style cards, and the PDFs are not ideal. But the game mechanics themselves seem really impressive; obviously it lives and dies on the whole "it's always your turn" idea with the reactive order mechanic and I think that's probably strong enough to make this game worth trying for anyone who likes the smaller-scale combat.

I picked up small forces for Pan Oceania, Yu Jing, and Nomads. The Yu Jing are probably my favourite models. Be warned that most of the models are really finely detailed and quite fiddly to assemble.

Two issues for me are terrain - the game demands a LOT of good terrain - and the unfocused nature of the rulebooks. The fan translation/re-edit of the rulebook is pretty good but there's still a bunch of things that aren't entirely clear.

Cool, thanks for the info.

I gotta admit that part of my attraction to it is the terrain -- there's something terribly appealing about a table dense with buildings and alleyways.

yeah, love the infinity models, but man, does it look like it has a lot of rules.

Then you're golden.

I've started fiddling with some laser-cut MDF terrain. Can't remember who does it off the top of my head but I'll check when I'm at home. There's a few companies springing up to do terrain + misc bits specifically for Infinity - Micro Arts Studios, Sarissa Precision, and a few others - and they do look really, really sweet.

It does but helpfully they keep the number of different weapon types and available skills to a reasonably sane level, and each faction shares them all (with a couple of differences here and there). It's the complex interactions of these abilities and the way the order system works that can really lead to confusion, and that just needs some gametime to get your head around it.

One of the brushes I ordered arrived yesterday and it... wasn't in the package. Just a padded envelope with an empty plastic cylinder inside. Fortunately Amazon refunded my money in like 30 minutes, and gave me free next day shipping on a replacement to boot. Woot!

I finally put those turrets together. I came up with the seemingly brilliant idea of putting round Buckyball magnets in each component so they would stick together but break down easily yet still let the turret swivel. Unfortunately physics did not like what I was doing and saw fit to make sure each magnet rotated a bit when I was gluing it in place, leaving me with a bunch of bases that actually repelled their tops (only one worked as intended). It was a real Charlie Brown moment, let me tell you.

Fortunately I had a bunch of incredibly strong rare earth magnets and was able to use them to pull the magnets out of the bases before the glue fully set. I couldn't do the same with the tops as I'd stupidly used Superglue on those, so the only solution left was to put some metal on the bases as the magnets in the tops would stick to that regardless of their orientation.

I tried a screw with a big head, but it didn't work because the empty bit in the middle gave the magnets nothing to stick to, so they moved over to the edges of the screw head and didn't like up properly. The only thing I could think to do was glue an incredibly thin layer of metal on the top of each base, smack in the middle, which meant I had to find some incredibly thin metal. I went to the hardware shop and all they had were sheets of fairly thick stuff that probably would have curled up at the edges when I cut it out. I looked around the house for stuff to salvage. Washers were out, thanks to the holes in the center (and they're also kind of thick). Then I was putting some papers together using a small binder clip. Eureka. Metal doesn't get any thinner than the stuff used to make a small binder clip.

I took the tin snips to it and it cut into rectangles effortlessly, so I superglued those on the bases last night and the solution worked great. The tops stay centered, swivel easily, and are on securely enough that you can pick the entire unit up by the top. All that was left was drilling some shallow holes in each top for the gun barrels, supergluing those in just right (which was easier than expected), and suddenly I had a half dozen turrets (you can see the only working two-magnet attempt on the left, and the kludged binder clip solution on the right:



The only problem is scale, which is pathetic. I do plan to make some bigger paper or foam towers, though, and these fit nicely in my box o' stuff, so I consider it a shallow victory:

That reminds me of my buddy who magnetized his 40k vehicles. On his first attempt he bought some stupidly strong magnets that were larger (and stronger) then he needed. They were in fact, stronger than his glue, so if he tried to remove a piece, the embedded magnets would come right out with it.

Yeah, it's really easy to go overboard with today's magnets. The upside is that you can use really, really small ones to better effect than I thought possible.

Just gonna vent a little here, I have two big pet peeves with tabletop gamers and the internet.

1. Players who are all like, "I care not for the maths proving me wrong, for I am so skilled I can make said stupidly subpar unit amazing".
2. And Players who are like, "If my opponent does X, then I can totally counter them with Y, therefore Y is awesome", when X is something that no sane player would ever do, and Y is actually a rather lame thing.

Both of these players-types don't seem to be able to comprehend that they are basically relying on their opponents being subpar, and that they will find themselves failing hard if they ever leave their bubble and play against someone of equal or greater skill. They don't seem to understand that the reason why using math works is because we assume as a baseline, two opponents of equal skill.

I have just the opposite problem - my magnetized Menoth stuff was too heavy for the magnets I used, and things kept falling off. I used rare earths, but I should've bought stronger ones. Lesson learned.

Those tiny turrets made me laugh really hard for some reason. Maybe I should hit up the drunk thread?

People fighting math drives me nuts. "Don't take that shot, you need to throw 108 dice to expect a kill, and if you shoot me you'll lose your bonuses." "But I totally killed this guy one time with this exact shot, and that's all I need to get on the objective!" "Oh, I didn't realize it worked one time, that changes everything!"

I came across Tre Manor's successful (but over) kickstarter today. Some really nice looking stuff. His direct site. Some are NSFW.

Those are some pretty top notch sculpts.

The guy with the hood looks like Old Link to me. =)

Oh man, on the site, I have never before seen a naked male monster model with full genitalia. Yay?

Reaper unloading the Kickstarter Bones kits. Holy crap that's a lot of minis.

Some of that is MINE, MINE, ALL MINE!

I like how at about 0:45 you seem them finally get their system sorted out and it starts to go smoothly. Been there, done that, have the t-shirts. Human bucket brigade is suprisingly efficient for unloading trucks of lots and lots of boxes.

I still haven't heard anything about my DYOM other than they hope to start it in May. I'm getting kinda antsy!