AAR - Triples Wargames Show, Sheffield

I journeyed down from Darlington to Sheffield today, to attend Triples, a wargaming show that takes place each year in Sheffield. Triples is a weekend event so you can still catch it tomorrow if you're in the local area. It was my first time at the event, so I can't compare it to previous year's events, but it was a great show and fared well in comparison to the ones I've attended in York (Vapnartak, February 2014 and 2015) and in Leeds (Fiasco, November 2014). The event was held at the English Institute of Sport and was well lit (perfect for raking around in rummage bins! My favourite wargames show exercise!), very clean and just the right temperature! I'd very much recommend it and hope to go again next year.

Here's my loot from today:

• Wargames Foundry Ulfhednars - these are to join my ever-growing Viking Berserker force

• Copplestone Casting Gangsters - these will be used as US Government Agents in a 1930s Lovecraftian project that I've been collecting miniatures for since around January this year.
• Al Mukhtar of the Desert Dogs - the not-Lawrence of Arabia Dogs of War character from Warhammer - no specific use for him but I liked the figure!
• Wood Elf Warhawk Mage - no specific use, but I liked the various parts, he may end up having an operation...
• Cats and Foxes - again, no specific use, I just liked the figures. I guess the cats will languish around my eventual Dark Age town.
• Gollum - a really cheap miniature and I've always liked this one with the integral scenic base. I stripped the dodgy black undercoat from him tonight.
• Oldhammer Troll Slayer - again, liked the model!
• Battle-ready Eowyn - sensibly armoured female miniatures are always good! She may come in handy in my Game of Thrones project - perhaps as someone from Bear Island?
• Random Berserker - nicely sculpted figure, another one for the Berserker force. Not sure on the manufacturer.
• Random Warhammer Empire figures - one has a satchel and is brandishing a sword - he looks like he's running at some pace, so I'll be using him as an NPC/objective marker in game as a messenger that needs to be stopped/rescued and the guy in the fancier outfit with telescope will be involved in a pirate/nautical fantasy RPG my friend is planning.
• Oldhammer Knight - I can't quite remember the name of this guy, but I did a little jump for joy when I found him in a £1 rummage box! I'd watched the same figure for a good while on eBay but left it due to the price. He's miiiine! He might be a character in an RPG or even a hired sword for the upcoming Frostgrave ruleset.
• Oldhammer Dwarf Thief - again, potential PC - I just liked the skulking pose, the crossbow, the patched cloak and his characterful face! He's absolutely tiny though, practically Oldhammer Halfling-sized!
• Witch - I can't remember the shop these were from - the same as the Cats and Foxes and they had quite a large selection of different witches including some on broomsticks! I just liked this figure - she'll probably fit with my townsfolk!
• Some random sci-fi/near-future thug - another "I just liked the figure" purchase - I thought he'd fit in with my Judge Dredd Miniatures Game stuff!
  

I didn't take many photos of the games on display but here are a select few pictures of my favourites:

I believe that this is an official Crooked Dice display - really great stuff! My friends were taken with the streams in particular!

This is a display game that I've seen pop up online a good few times - a fantastic effort - lovely modelling, painting and the guys hosting the game were even wearing post-apoc costumes!

This pirate game was my favourite of the day - I have pirate-related plans on the go (if only I could find the time!) and this was a wonderful bit of inspiration!

Thanks for reading! If you went, let me know below! Let me know what you purchased at the show!

Vapnartak 2014 - Spoils of Wargaming

Well, Vapnartak was fun! It was bigger than I was expecting, with a lot of stuff that I'd have liked to buy (I'm looking at you, Lead Adventure/Empire of the Dead/Misc. Foundry) but I managed to keep my purchases to a minimum. I didn't exactly have much in my monthly budget for miniatures...

The spoils.

Treemen! I really wanted to replace the dodgy ones in my fledgling Wood Elf Hordes of the Things  force. The current ones are a) too puny to be a behemoth and b) striking a ridiculous Travolta-esque pose...

Previous Treeman...

The new ones are from Kallistra Miniatures and are nice and bulky - I'm going to sculpt another in a similar style, but with a silver birch feel (it'll be a bit skinnier/taller).

Sheep! As suggested by Spacejacker (of Tiny Solitary Soldiers) for the bases of the giants (Behemoths) allied to my dwarf army.

My housemate wants me to build him a Harry Potter "Forces of Voldemort"  Hordes of the Things force - I'm a fan of the books and films and I really like the idea! Obviously I'd need a "Good" army to pit against them - the stag was purchased to paint up as a Patronus...

I also picked up a skeleton (54mm? Maybes.) and a lion (10mm), just because. All of these misc. metals are from Irregular Miniatures. The skeleton might become a Behemoth for my undead Hordes of the Things, or an objective (I'm sure my necromancer would like to get his hands on the remains of a titan giant...).

A busted up Celtos figure from the tabletop sale. This is as a gift for a gaming friend - it'll be his God for his Hordes of the Things barbarian army. He'll get a nice sword and a cork-base..
Finally, I picked up a new pair of clippers, some Citadel Bloodletter glaze and some round MDF bases. My current clippers were looking shabby, I fancied the glaze for use with the Hordes of the Things undead (and I got some use out of it straight away on the beards of the Forgeworld Chaos Dwarf unit I completed last night). As for the MDF bases, they always come in handy - I also have some pine cone/cocktail stick creations that I've wanted to make some better bases for for a while (they're currently on normal 40k bases) that were to be used as spiker plants in the jungle terrain. The smaller bases are perfect for this. The larger ones will be for objective markers.

Did anyone else attend?

Spoils of Wargaming: Studio Miniatures Indiegogo Zombies!

Just a quick post - I'm sorry that these have been few and far between recently! I wanted to show this lovely addition to my zombie horde - the Studio Miniatures plastic zombies have arrived! For a grand total of £18.64 including postage within the UK, I received the above: 40 plastic zombies, a zombie George Romero, a zombie version of Shaun (of the Dead) and another zombie that I can't quite place...

Pretty darn good! I'm back at my parents house for the night, with these on a tray table next to me - the first dozen or so have arms and legs!

Regarding the new plastics - they're very nice, better than the Wargames Factory ones but very similar. They share similar issues - they're small, especially when compared to the metal Studio Miniatures zombies. The detail is crisper, which is definitely a plus, but they seem slight - they're definitely closer to standard 28mm rather than 28mm heroic. I'd have preferred them heroic-scale, but nevermind - they'll still fit brilliantly with the rest of my horde! This takes me up to around 80 zombies now...do I need more? Probably.

Actually...I also have another 26 WWWII German Zombies...

Halfords Haul

If you're of the hobbyist persuasion, check out Halfords (the car/bike shop) - I was in a few weeks back and they had an interesting hobby tool selection (possibly for customising/detailing cars and the like?) that caught my eye. I popped in yesterday to pick up some grey spray primer (I'd ran out of the black spray I normally use and fancied a change...) and saw that the whole range had been reduced to clear. I needed some new clippers and ended up with two new sets, a pair of "Japanese scissors" and a precision oiling pen - they were all £3 each. They sold various other interesting tools, including some decent looking pin vices. Check it out whilst they might still be there!

Cleaning up old paints...

Decided to do a bit of housekeeping on these old paints and brushes that I bought at the car boot sale.

I broke out the cleaning wipes (and the WD-40 pen for labels/gunk) and cleaned up the bottles, removing any labels that were too far gone (red paint had seeped behind all but two of the pots, so I had to remove them) and using a pair of tweezers to remove these rings of dried paint that had accumulated around the caps - thought they almost-Olympic symbol that was left over was oddly cool!

The finished article - I wasn't actually aware that the old old Citadel brushes were actually sable. These have cleaned up quite nicely - the brushes even got some hair conditioner...


As I've mentioned, I'm over the moon with this little haul! Really happy I went!

Spoils of Wargaming: Car Boot Sale

I ventured out to a car boot sale yesterday with my parents - normally I'll be looking for tools and terrain materials on the cheap, but yesterday I managed a nice haul from one stall...

Various retro White Dwarf magazines, plus a couple of promotional brochures and a how-to-paint guide.

Two Citadel brushes (a bit busted up, but salvageable), a jar of brush-on polycement (still viable and great condition - only 22 years old!), a lovely selection of classic paints (bottles obviously a bit paint-splashed, but the contents are almost mint condition, plus an unopened pot of Skull White), half a tin of white spray undercoat, plus a mint-in-blister Teclis of the High Elves. Pretty darn brilliant, considering the lovely little retro geekfest I've been having recently whilst reading the great Realm of Chaos and Warhammer for Adults.

Plus these Lord of the Rings books thrown in - all of the above cost me £9! Great day at the boot sale! I've started cleaning up the brushes and paint pots and drooling over the old White Dwarfs - I love the cover of Plague Fleet! 

Spoils of Wargaming: Black Cat Bases - Robots and Ghouls

I've recently picked up a few different miniatures since seeing a recent release from Black Cat Bases featured over on the Post-Apoc Wargames forum - I've had my eye on a number of different miniatures from Black Cat after buying some terrain pieces over a year ago and this release finally made me cave in and buy...

This brilliant little miniature is what made me finally reach for the debit card - billed as a Friendly Robot over on the Black Cat site, this guy is clearly supposed to be Claptrap from the videogame Borderlands. A key feature of the game, Claptrap was a rather annoying series of little robots that had to be rescued and fixed in a number of different locations throughout the game. I bought two of these - one to be the up-and-running version, the other to be an objective marker having been scrapped. Again, lovely little model - the moldlines are a bit annoying but it's a rather odd shape, I wouldn't have liked to have had to cast it...

Another splendid miniature here, again in the robot section over on the Black Cat site but a little different to your standard robot - this is a Brain in jar on tracks - quite a sci-fi and pulp classic and can be found in many different films and comics. My mind springs to one of the protagonists in the Fallout 3 add-on, Point Lookout, and Herman Von Klempt, the Nazi head-in-a-jar from the Hellboy comics. Going to be interesting to paint! 

Another couple of miniatures that I've had my eye on for a while for my zombie project are the Black Cat Ghouls. In the Left 4 Dead series there is a type of "Special Infected" known as a Hunter - basically a human that has been infected but has reacted differently to what has turned the vast majority of the other infected into mindless savage zombies. In the case of the Hunter they are rather stealth-based, able to leap large distances and climb buildings with ease before pouncing upon a survivor, whereupon the survivor is pinned to the ground and attacked savagely. 
As shown in the image, 1 Ghoul crouching is very close to the in-game hunter and I have seen the Black Cat Ghouls used as such a couple of times.

1 Ghoul crawling shows another Ghoul crawling along - the preferred method of movement for a Hunter when they're not leaping. They tend to skulk around and pounce on isolated survivors in order to pin them and not only attack them themselves, but allow other infected to attack too...


All in all, I'm very happy with this order - I'd recommend Black Cat Bases to anyone interested in similar wargaming subjects - they have a large range (massively varied too) of miniatures for a number of different settings. I'm very happy with the casting quality, order arrived rather speedily and everything was present and correct. Each of these miniatures cost £2 - I ordered on the weekend and received them on Tuesday, how's that for fast?

The Spoils of Wargaming

Bit of a new "feature" this, in the same way as the new "Conversion Corners" I've posted over the past couple days.


In these posts I'll be basically showing off my latest purchases. Which won't be a great amount at the moment, but here's the first - a bunch of ork bits from eBay. I'd been looking for the kan and dread weapons, but the spares from the nobz boxed set and the arms from the plastic stormboyz were going rather cheap - I liked a lot of the cool bits and pieces from the nobz set and the other arms will either be used with various conversions or donated to a friend.

The dread/kan arms, on the other hand, will be used for some kitbashed/scratchbuilt chaos engines - they'll be used as dreadnoughts in my renegade army - for which I've picked up numerous bits and pieces for over the last few months...