Shasvastii Special Armoured Corps Sphinx

Posted on by spbdave

A local Infinity gaming group has started running online painting competitions to keep the Infinity hobby alive during the eleventy-third* UK lockdown. Instigated by the local warcor, Lawrence, via the FB group as a good attempt to keep up peoples’ motivation, and morale too. They are a good friendly way to get some minis painted. There’s about two months to get a model painted up for the comp. I used the Sphinx as my entry for the second painting competition – I didn’t complete an entry for the first competition.

Shasvastii infiltration imminent… MORE INFO…

A look back at 2020

Posted on by spbdave

Ahh yes, the annual look back at the past year’s hobbying, and see how we measured up against the hobby progress we hoped to achieve mentioned back in January 2020.

Well a quick read of my hopes for 2020, and seeing what I have actually done over the last year suggests that its all doom and gloom.

  1. No, i’ve not managed to hobby more tidily or efficently.
  2. No, I did not paint more than I bought – or even attempt to 🙂
  3. No, I’ve not actually managed to paint much over 2020 at all 😦
  4. No, I’ve not attended any events – but that’s not my fault, damned Covid!
  5. No, the blog still looks the same as it did back in June 2014 (wow I hadn’t realised it was that long ago!)

So what did we do in the year of Social Distancing and Lockdowns? I’ve been working from home, and home schooling my lad – yeah right! So my hobby time took a massive hit this year. I’m massively jealous of people who have churned out multiple large scale armies over the various lockdowns, but there in lies the danger of social media. No one’s life is perfect and FB, and the like, only give a small filtered glimpse into other people’s lives. There’s no real indication of what’s going on in their life, and everyone is different. Hope you all are staying safe, and perhaps more importantly, sane over the course of the pandemic. Here is what I achieved last year…

Continue reading →

Armada – An Unboxing

Posted on by spbdave

Today was an exciting day as a number of packages arrived at the house today. One of them was from Goblin Gaming and contained my pre-order of Armada by Mantic Games.

I can’t actually remember how I stumbled upon the game, but its a naval game, and I like fantasy naval games*, I’m a boaty kind of person – hence I pre-ordered it back in September/October. That and my son liked the look of the ships – hopefully a winner if Josh likes the look of something.

Working form home, this box (and another that arrived on the same day) has been tempting me to sack work off and break it open all afternoon. However, its only tonight that I’ve managed to get a good look at what’s in the box.

Keep your weather eye open, and lets dive in…

Infinity Defiance Valkyrie

Posted on by spbdave

I recently finished up painting an Infinity model for the Mayacast Masterglass painting competition which was themed around the female models available from Corvus Belle. Here’s my entry…

Valkyrie, Elite Bodyguard

“There she is – hear her roar: Victory or Valhalla!”

Check out the other entries on FB here, there are some seriously good paint jobs there.

This particular model was a 2019 GenCon exclusive model, able to be used in the three Corvus Belle games, Infinity, Aristeia!, and the upcoming Infinity Defiance sci-fi dungeon crawler. This is actually my first Infinity Defiance model to be painted – hopefully I’ll have more Defiance to paint soon (technically also my first and only Aristeia! model too). My recent Nox Trooper was a test for the Defiance villians, the Shasvastii.

The model comes with the card for Defiance (and Aristeia!) and is usable as a none player character, making an appearance in the Demo Mission available to download from the Infinity website’s downloads page in the Defiance section.

If you look around you can still find her for sale, Corvus Belle did the cool thing made her available on line for a limited time around GenCon and available for retailers through their distribution channels. At the time of writing this, there are 6 in stock at Goblin Gaming if you wanted her.

More Images and some words….

Vallejo Shasvastii Nox Troops Paint Set

Posted on by spbdave

It has been a while since I last picked up an Infinity model to paint, definitely even longer since I played the game. However, an urge took hold of me and I ordered the Vallejo Shasvastii Paint Set. It helps that I’m a sucker for an exclusive miniature, but it was mostly because I wanted to try the paint scheme. That’s because I have backed the Defiance KS and I know fine well there is going to be some Shasvastii to paint. This post is about how I got on using the paint set and following the painting guide to paint the included Nox Trooper.

Shasvastii infiltration imminent… MORE INFO…

Splayedhammer Quest Project (part 3)

Posted on by spbdave

Following on from my previous post about building/cobbling together a version of Warhammer Quest. In this post I tackle building the board sections used to create the game’s dungeon.

The idea I had in my head was to create some board sections that would be fun to play on and hopefully be quite durable. These are some of the attributes I wanted my boards to achieve.

  • Durability – be a bit more than just a piece of printed paper/thin card.
  • Have some weight to them so they don’t move around too easily on the table top like printed paper and card would do.
  • Interlock, so as the dungeon builds up an accidental nudge doesn’t create an earthquake of dungeon collapsing proportions.
  • Be interesting to look at, I want there to be nice little details on the boards in a similar manner to the original artwork for the boards.
  • Be playable, not much point in making these if they are awful to play on.
  • Painted up to a good standard.

Well that’s only a small wish list, right?

I have to admit I didn’t really give much thought to alternative materials or methods and I just ploughed straight in to using what I thought would be best with no experimenting/research. Perfect recipe for disaster, don’t you think? Well lets see…

Read ON for more of this adventure