My mum and sister visited today, to spend some time with the Aurora-monster, and they brought with them a bountiful harvest of a bag of gaming miniatures. 

The haul includes (from Space Hulk, 1st edition) 10 terminators and 29 genestealers, (from Advanced Space Crusade) 9 tyranid warriors and 15 space marine scouts, 10 genestealer hybrids, a chaos sorcerer from Hero Quest, 35 plastic orks (without arms or weapons), a handful of metal orks I don’t remember ever owning, and a random collection of really old Citadel Miniatures including some original Talisman figures.

And… an ork warboss on a wyvern, a 10 strong House Escher Necromunda gang and a box of Skavenblight Scramblers for Blood Bowl.  Those were give to me by a friend of my sister.

What’s missing?  Well, I had a huge Eldar army, tons of Epic stuff, and a reasonable collection of Skaven.  Here’s hoping they can find some of that stuff…  But in the meantime I have tons now to paint.

- Alistair

At the moment, adhering to Ruth’s new Task Centred Therapy, we are sitting at the computer table painting miniatures.

For the last few days I have been stripping the paint of a number of old Grey Knight models (Games Workshop’s finest) and have been trying to set them to the current paint scheme.  It helps that I had only ever finished six of the beggars in the old scheme, a turquoise and silver theme that isn’t particularly grey or knight-like.

But they have all been under-coated, base-coated and dry brushed with the new style (pics to follow) and I’m embarking on the details tonight.

And in a spirit of encouragement Ruth has joined me.

Ages ago I had my hands on a box of Eldar Guardians, sitting on the shelf, unbuilt and unpainted.  She had painted one in the past and decided that she didn’t want to do any more.  That’s fine.  But now she has the challenge to paint each of the figures from the box (sixteen in total) in a different style to the one before it.

Hey, at this rate most of them might even be done by the time baby arrives…

- Alistair

To explain, when in my teens I had extensively played Warhammer 40K (an Eldar army and a Genestealer Cult, but not at the same time), enjoyed Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and dabbled in Warhammer Fantasy Battle (with my impressively unpainted Skaven army).

Recently I’ve been getting back into my gaming in a serious way with semi-regular Call of Cthulhu games with Guy Incognito and Charming Manipulator. Before that I spent some time playing Magic: The Gathering, Star Wars (very possibly the greatest Customisable Card Game ever produced) and Call of Cthulhu (the card game, not the role-playing game).

All good fun, but it’s just not table-top. Table-top gaming is just sooooooooooooooo much more fun. And it’s not just the playing of the game. It’s the choosing/painting/customising of the models that’s all part of it. And other forms of gaming just don’t compare.

Hey what can I say, I’m a geek…