Tablesscapes - from Secret Weapon Miniatures - a review

Well, another thing that came in while I was away was my order from Tablescapes.  These are 1 foot by 1 foot terrain boards in themes made by MisterJustin over at Secret Weapon Miniatures.  They were supposed to deliver last October, but through a series of unforeseen events, improvements and flat-out delays, they just arrived now.  Boy are they worth the wait!!!

Enjoy...

War Machines of the Lost and the Damned

Ok, I did a video overview of the bundle as it came in, enjoy.

  A very good offering from the guys at Forge World!  Hopefully I will be able to blog about how cool it is soon, I'm off to read it now...

Thoughts on Sanctus Reach

  Now that Sanctus Reach has come, and presumably gone, I'd like to offer some thoughts on the set, all the products in the 'range', if you will.  I can sum up my thoughts pretty succinctly, I think.  A missed opportunity, and a great effort.

  I say this because, as always, this is a great presentation from the games workshop folks.  The two boxed sets are very nicely done, if a bit pricey.  The rulebooks are very nice and the novellas look very interesting.  I have some time on the road coming up, and I am bringing both books to read.  They are big pront, so it whould be easy to get throguh.

  The Stormclaw set is pretty sweet, if I do say so myself.  The new orks and space vikings are very cool, brilliantly executed and you do get a lot of value for the money in the set.  I'm not a big fan of the grey canine keepers, but I do like me orkses, and me gotz lotz of kool orkses.  The models have a great character to them and will look good in any Space Wolf or Ork army.

 The campaign game that comes with Stormclaw, and is extended in the 2 boxed sets is pretty decent, I think.  It has really good feel to the missions and as far as I can see, it follows the narrative pretty well.  It's always nice to read a piece of the fluff and then be able to duplicate it right away.  I think that is a really good way to bring people into the game, in small chunk like this with good rules, good presentations and a good "look and feel".  What's really nice is that you get the models you need to do the campaign missions in the box.  Nothing else to buy.  Sort of.

  You see, herein lay the problems as well.  The Stormclaw box has the nice small rulebook, the minis you need, the campaign books with the missions and all the nice stuff.  Alas, the box is missing dice, rulers and templates.  Now this is not really a big deal, but how much of the 97 cents worth of plastic to add those items would have hurt the bottom line?  Really?  This means nothing to long time players and gamers, that stuff is easy to get, but what about the new guy?  The guy just starting out.

   The problem here is also two-fold.  They made this a limited edition.  So it's gone now, not on the shelves, unless you're lucky.  So that new guy that is looking for a way to get in on the hobby doesn't have that resource anymore.  Kinda sad.  It would almost make sense if we see a whole bunch more of these themed campaigns in the future.  Then this would all make sense, but if not, this is a product like that I think missed the mark.  It is probably well sold out, so it had a positive effect on botttom line, but I think the long term lack of foresight will bite old GW again...

  So, I guess I am really glad to have all these items, it's a good set of items and I feel like I got what I paid for.  But all in all, I see it as another small mis-step in the marketing the GW does.  Maybe this is just the first of many small campaign box releases, and if so, I'll eat these words.  But if not, I think they missed a big chance here.

Grukk agrees!

     

Conquest: The Card Game - Unboxing Vid

  Hey folks!  The fine folks at Fantasy Flight Games have given us a CCG (Collectable Card Game) to play in the 40k universe!  Yaaaaaaay...

  Here is the unboxing video....  hopefully tomorrow, or soon I can get a play test video out!

Here is the link to the game on Fantasy Flight's website...

Enjoy!