The well continues

Although I´m quite sick at the moment, I managed to fight myself to the hobbyhut with the help of my wife´s homemade applepie + vanilja icecream and godlike determination. I worked 20 minutes and returned to the pie..
 
I dryfitted and then glued the depron caps on to the well using normal PVA glue. Then I glued first columns with pins on place.

Note to myself: Superglue does NOT melt depron like it melts ordinary foam!!

After some though I realized that because the well will be removable and may encounter some "rough handling", I should have pinned the pilars to the plastic sheet under the whole construction. This would have made the well much more sturdier.

 To compensate this I drowned the depron caps with PVA glue hoping that it would make the bond strong enought.

Then some drilling, pinning and glueing and the pilars of the well were looking like, well pilars!

...hmmm....pie....

Zome Zombicide..

Game #4

Well it was time to tackle the infamous scenario #1 again!! Objectives are the same and today my survivors were Doug, Josh, Wand and Ned.

I decided to use the same plan as in the game #3 but without splitting the groups. Wanda rushed to open the door and what a suprise, a Manhole card! Fortunately just one walker emerged so rest of the survivors arrive to the rescue. But WHAT!! They can´t kill a one measly zombie and Wanda takes one for the home team! What a great start.

After some looting of the house (and objective) survivors prepare to rush out on smash some zombies which have been gathering outside of the house. Because Wanda found an beatifull, red chainsaw she decided to even the odds and walked camly outside.

The rest of the survivors looked how walkers and some runners had a feast with Wanda and thought that it would be a good idea to let the zombies come to them. And as you can see, things were heating up!

Survivors manage to mow down the first wawe of eggheads and Ned stumbled outside to hack the near by fattie to the ground with his axe. Josh was planning to join him but decided to search the room first and what a suprise! There was one walker lurking behind the couch! Josh tried to smash it with his pan but failed. Because Josh already had one wound from earlier fights Doug decided that Ned was the man how should be kept alive. Josh and poor zombie didn´t have a chance.

Unfortunately for Doug zombies got some extra turns, devoured Ned and crawled inside. Did SMG make 2 points damage? No.

 I were quite disappointed that I coudn´t make it even to the second building and then it hit me! I quickly skimmed thrue the rulebook and DAAARRRRNNNNNN!!!!!! Because I haven´t played this game alot and the mechanincs aren´t 100% in my backbone I had forgot that survivors could do three actions in a turn! I played this game with two. Although I live in a detached house I think that my neightbours heard me banging my head to the table!

Had to play a new game!

Game #5

Same scenario, same survivors, same equipment and now with three actions per turn.

Before I even noticed the survivors had looted three objectives and looted some nice stuff (including all important food).

Ned, Josh and Doug went ahead and cleaned the streets while Wanda were skating towards the guys. At this point all had reached yellow zone.

Wanda went to grap the fourth objective, Josh secured the back, Doug was ready to mowe down some zombies with his (again) twin SMG´s and Ned kicked in the next door, Crash!! Full house!! Fattie, walkers and runners. No worries, orderly retreat and let the guns do what they do best. But no! Extra turn for the walkers and some nifty spawning cards meant that things were looking quite interesting considering that two of my survivals were on the Orange zone!

Doug were caught pants down because he didn´t have anything else but SMG´s but Josh unleashed the secret art of nerd-jutsu and hacked down zombies with his katana. One still remained and bite Doug. Wanda and Ned also hacked down some zombies but decided to retreat to the room behind them.

Because walkers were depleted from the inventory they got some extra activations and rushed to eat some not-so-happy-meal!. Wanda and Ned readied their weapons and plasted out of the room while Doug let his SMG`s sing and Josh covered the blade of the Katana with zombie blood.

Needles to say that they were eaten.

 Conclusion

• Well the first game crashed to my stupidity 
• The second game crashed to my stypidity
• I think that the score is 0-5

New stuff...

Last week and today I finally got my latest orders from various shops. Biggest one was a box of foamboard which I got in a really reasonable price. There´s 10 A3 size boards and it cost me 28 euros! Great!!

Most of this stuff is going to my 3D Zombicide board which will be kicked off very soon!

Then my order from Ecscenics contained a add on to my hot wire cutter from Woodland scenics.

I have had hard time to cut straight corners from foam and I have thought about this product for a long time. The black plastic thinggie should act as a guide and help enormously when trying to cut straight. I will make a review of this to HCO soon. I also orderer some tree armatures and some special glue from Ecscenics but those will arrive later.

Maybe the most anticipated package contained some brushes.

Oh yes, those are Raphael 8404!! I have painted with GW´s brushes always and hated those all the way. The reason why I haven´t moved to another brand was the though that the quality of the brush wouldn´t be a factor on my skill level. Well it is!! A while ago I tried Army Painters brush and although that brush wore out pretty quickly I realized  how much good brush matters. Why Raphael? Because Ghool says so and when Ghool says something about painting you better listen boy! I will return to this subject later when I have spend some time with the new and shiny brushes.

Day´s thoughts...

The last photo session with miniatures with all the setup and lights and arrangements and test photos and stuff got me thinking how versatile this hobby really is. If I hadn´t started playing with these little buddies I would have missed a lot of interesting stuff. Besides the painting and assembling of the figures I have had to study quite hard on many subjects to be here where I am now. This does not mean that I´m a professional about these subjects but because of the hobby I know much more than I would know without the hobby and I can use these skills and knowledge in other aspects of life also.

Here is my little list what I have learned thrue my "career":

• Everything about painting. Studying "ordinary" art correlates also on figure and terrain painting. One HUGE source of inspiration has been Image FX magazine. Although it´s mainly about digital art, there is a lot to learn from the pages of the magazine and every issue is full of inspirational pictures. If you haven´t checked it out, start by browsing through the net site.
• Working with different materials and equipment.  If somebody would have asked me ten years ago what kind of stuff would my hobbyrack contain nowdays, I wouldn´t have a glue. Different kinds of wood, plastic, metal and other materials. Chemicals, special equipment and glues. Different working methods and safety instructions. The list is long and keeps on growing..
• Photography. Before this hobby I didn´t know nothing about photography but now I at least know that photo equipments aren´t cheap! =)
• Writing. Through forum post, HCO articles and now blogging my writing skills are improved alot. My stories are still dull as hell but the spelling has improved (I hope)
• Maths. From calculating odds in a game to measuring mold components or figuring out volumes, my math skills has refined alot.
• Patience! When you have worked with some project for weeks and mess it up in seconds without mental brakedown, you know that you have learnd something about patience.

Because I´m a teacher I can´t help to think why schools doesn´t utilize this kind of fantastic hobby in curriculum? It´s interesting (when choosing the right figures), educational (all the points above) and social. I think that it would just need the right person to do something about it. Ofcourse that person should really know something about the hobby because if he/she would make the students paint Kingdom Death figures it would be a short experience!

Best part still is the fact that there is so much what you can study, learn and add to your projects that there is now end to this hobby! And if you follow what people do around the globe you can realize that our hobby is taking huge leaps and transforming all the time.

Planning the well and some casting..

Planned more about the well on one city hex and dryfitted some pilars.

I´m thinking about adding some end caps also to these pilars. First tried with plastic but quickly moved to use thin foam, Depron. I should really use this stuff more. You can carve it like foam and because it´s thin you can wrap it around stuff (easy tile work for example to some tower).

At the same time made the first cast with my selfmade mold. These will be the end caps for the pilars on the statue hex. It seems that the mold works ok.

What is really fustrating is the fact that I haven´t still figured out how to coat/protect the corners of the hexes! I can´t move on to painting before the coating so things have slowed down a bit. I have tried woodglue, tape and "Goop". The "Goop" contains water, wood glue, acrylic caulk and some plaster. I have seen various videos from various terrain makers to use this but it wasn´t strong enought for my purposes.

I also planned to buy Foam Coat from Hot Wire Foam Factory but the shipping cost to Finland were obnoxious. Also Terranscapes recommended to use Boost with it and that combination seems to be near impossible to order inside EU. Well, have to continue the search!

Photo session with LOTR miniatures (Miniature Gallery Updated)

This has been on my todo list for ages but just haven´t had the right mood for it. Kickstart for this session was to find a reasonable priced tripod for my camera and now all my excuses were wiped off.
So yesterday I walked to my hobbyhut, set up my near professional level photocorner, searched all the little dusty boxes were I storage my minis and started shooting! Here´s a photo of my gear:

There is two lamps from Ikea (I recommend) with daylight bulbs, scratchbuild ligthbox, Canon 500D (which is very reasonable priced these days) with kit lens and the tripod. I have to practise more but managed to get decent pictures.

It was actually quite fun because now I had the chance to work again with the miniatures that I had been painting for so long. The downside of this was that it reminded me how much there is still work to complete every miniature but that didn´t depress me, coin has always two sides!

You can check out the pics from the miniatue gallery and I will add some army photos as well when I find all the miniatures. However here is few of my favorites:

 

Comments are always welcome! 

 

Updated HCO articles

Because I have been part of the Hand Cannon Online crew for over two years now I have had some time to write articles. I decided that it would be good to have somekind of list of those articles because time runs fast and at the moment there are 52 published articles.

You can find the list from the upper bar and I will update the list as more articles appear.

Zombicide!

So how deadly the Zombicide really is?

If the boardgame Zombicide isn´t familiar to you it was a phenomenal Kickstarter succes. by Guillotine Games. As the name indicates it´s all about survival and smashing zombies. Because the internet is full of reviews i won´t bother to write one but if you are interested you can check one from HCO. 

Ok so this isn´t a review nor battlereport. What then? This is just an example how magnificent and brutal this game can be. Yes, you have may guessed that I like this game, alot! One obvious reason is the fact that I can play this by myself.

I randomly picked my characters and ended up whit Doug, Phil, Wanda and Amy. Here you can see how the starting equipment was dealt.

I have decided that I will play the scenarious in the right order and won´t move forward until I have completed the previous scenario. I passed the tutorial with first try (it would have been quite sad if I hadn´t) but the scenario 01, City Blocks has given me a rather brutal welcome. Survivors start from the center bunker and the objectives are to collect all the objective tokens (with green on the map), find some food(canned food, rice and water) and reach the exit point.

  This will be my third try of the scenario. In the previous games I have kept the survivors together but now decided to split them in two groups: Doug and Wand, Phil and Amy. This way I have two fast moving survivors, door smashing items and some back up in both groups. Doug and Wanda headed to take the upper left objective while Phil and Amy went to get the center left objective.

Everything went smoothly for the first rounds. Doug got the objective and found katana and chainsaw. Amy also reached her objective and found a SMG from the same room. Looking good! Plan was that after this the groups would join their forces and clean the upper right house. Sadly I decided that before this Phil and Amy could also grap the objective from the near by house because there were just a few zombies wandering around and the distance was near to nothing.

Amy plasted the wandering zombies with her SMG (reaching the yellow level) and kicked the door in. Hello!! The house was occupied by two fattys and their skinny friends. Oh, did I have something to deal with the fattys, no!!

At the same time Doug smashed a door from the upper house. Hello!! What a (s)warm welcome!! (picture is after one zombie move phase)

Panic was knocking on my door. Now it was time to join forces and try something, like survive! Before this thou there was the always warmhearted zombie spawn phase. First card, 0 zombies! Second card, 4 walkers!! Third card, 4 more walkers!! At this time the storage of walkers depleted so all walkers got extra turn!! WHAT!?!?

No worries, don´t panic! Doug can just start up the chainsaw and make some zombie chow. While Doug jerked his saw, Wanda smashed few zombies with her pan. Doug got his saw running and it was running beaaauuutifully, resulting 10 chopped zombies!!! Last spawn card, 2 runners!! Holy sh*t, all the runners are on the board!! What does that mean? Extra turn for runners and consumed Doug and Wanda.

How about the other group? Well needless to say that they were also little bit too slow.

Conclusion

What did I do wrong?

• The splitting of the groups was not a mistake but not to join forces after the two objectives was. If I hadn´t been too greedy I think that I could have survived longer.
• Doug did not give Wanda the Katana that he found from the house. Because of this she didn´t have a chance when the zombies rushed to the same zone and she coudn´t use the pistol.
• Well, I lost in four rounds!!

I like this game alot. I don´t mind about the rule that if you shoot in a zone which is occupied by another survivor you hit him first. This makes the melee weapons crucial to have and doesn´t make the guns too overpowered. I have seen things like this on the forums and without the shooting rule the melee weapons would be deserted.

From the game one I have had one house rule and that´s about searching. Forums are full of discussion about the searching rule and some people tend to camp in one room and use the search until everybody has as much equipment as they want. What a spoil!! I house ruled this so that every survivor can search the room once! This way they can have some equipment but not everything. I think that this is quite "realistic" and it might be the thing that has resulted my 0-3 record against the game!

Hope you liked this post. I will post more when I play more! Comments and critics are always welcome!

Now go and play/build!!

JCoo

The Beginning..

Well, why new blog when there is triljons out there? 

I´m mostly a terrain maker and tend to post my projects on different forums to get some feedback and also give my own effort for the community. Because I don´t medle with only one genre or game it has been quite laborous to post about my proggress in numerous forums. In addition I submit time to time some terrain articles for Hand Cannon Online so it takes a fair amount of time to do all this.

Despite of this I like to bring my works under the critical eyes of the readers because this way I can improve my work and also my skills. So how to solve this dilemma? Create a blog! This way I don´t have to mind any genre specific boundaries or game related unwritten rules. Also I can write small updates of my thoughts or ideas which are not big enought for the HCO. Great!

I won´t completely abandon the forums but when I´m in a hurry, my order of posting will be here, HCO and then the forums.

I´m always open for good criticism so bring it on!