The Mighty Eighth: The Apostles of Contagion

Lord Necrosius and two Helbrutes

I made an Apostles of Contagion warband for my Siege of Vraks games.The Apostles are an anti-Typhus Death Guard-breakaway warband. Necrosius is a foul sorcerer famous for spreading the zombie plague.

I have resurected the Apostles for The Mighty Eighth and reformed them into a 100 power point warband.

Chosen

Lord Necrosius' personal Honour Guard is a section of chosen chaos marines equipped with pistols and chain swords. They also serve as The Apostle's close combat specialists.

1st Company

Three sections of plague marines with a nominal strength of seven men per section, generously equipped with plasma weapons and melta guns.

2nd Company

Three sections of plague marines with a nominal strength of five men per section (only two shown). The second company is formed from plague marines that do not trace their heritage back to the Death Guard.

Ancient Plague Predator

Provides heavy anti-armour support as needed.

Plague Vindicator

Heavy support for cracking open fortifications.


Hopefully this lot will prove to be a balanced 100 power point army for 8th Edition games. If not, I always have my Nurgle daemon detachment and super-heavy cursed plague machines to turn to.

The Mighty 8th: First Game of the new 40K

My regular opponent, Shaun, and I used to play 40K campaign battles three or four times a month but all this ended with the advent of the turgid 6th edition.

The Mighty Eighth has reawoken our interest so we set up a simple test game of my Alpha Legion versus Primaris Marines in a straight forward shoot out at the Gothic Corral. Shaun's standard smurfs stood in for the Primaris.

First thoughts are:

It plays smoothly and is very Siegmarine, aka Age of Sigmar, but the running order of the turn phases is different and measurement is base to base.

The only core 'special rules' are one rule for each weapon type - i.e. pistol, heavy, assault etc.

You can't shoot into a melee or while within a melee, otherwise you can freely target almost anything within line of sight.

Base to base measuring and no melee ranges (other than two bases deep) makes the close combat system much smoother than AoS.

Heroes are back; a Smurf captain took out a whole unit of chaos cultists single handed.

The game ended after three turns and the result is shown above. A Primaris tactical team and two units of cultists had been taken out and the Helbrute was on its last legs. From our experience with AoS it seemed likely whoever won the initiative would win the game so we just rolled for it. The Smurfs won and so were awarded victory, probably fairly.


Overall: Good fun.

40: The Mighty 8th - New Smurfs

In honour of the launch this week of the mighty 8th, I decided to paint some Smurfs, my  first since the original Beaky-Box boys were first issued in plastic - 30 for £10!

As paint has moved on a bit, I airbrushed some Mr Hobby Metallic Blue using a nifty double-action model that I recently got from Rochester Models for the princely sum of twenty five smacker - which is a hell of a deal. This paint is not designed for airbrushes so I added some bespoke flow enhancer and a bit o' car windscreen wash to dilute the mix after undercoating in Army Painter White.

Five Smurf Cadet Snipers.

Some more Cadets all set to win their spurs.

Sea Lion: Operation Gigant

So what, I hear you ask, have I been slaving over recently?

The answer is above, Operation Gigant, the German second front in the invasion of Britain.

With new units, new factions and scenario ideas, the Germans move north, yay, unto the hallowed fields of Nottingham...and thereabouts.

Yours for a princely sum of £12.99; on preorder now at Warlord Games.

PS I nearly titled this "Woops! I did it again."

Arcworlde Undead Pirates of the Black Coast

These great Arcworlde models were a Xmas present from my long term opponent Shaun and I got Andy Singleton of Volley Fire Painting Services to do a 'standard wargame' job of painting them for me in exchange for a Sea Lion Invasion Barge.

I must say, I am deeply impressed with the results.

The eyes really make the models.

Mind you, I painted the bases and looking at these photos the edges need another coat!

Some swamp thingies: note the way Andy has used eye colour to link the beasts to the pirates.

And a swarm of rats. Wherever there are undead pirates there must always be a swarm of undead rats. It's traditional, like mummies and scorpions.

Shaun bought the models from Rochester Games, Models and Railways who carry the full Arcworlde range.

Arcworlde are roughly 1:48 in scale.

Mediocre Painter: Judoon

Warlord Games Judoon

These models come as one piece and have very little in the way of mould lines and no flash.

Very easy models to paint to a reasnable standard. I used a white undercoat, gloss black topcoat and deep red for equipment such as pistols. The gloss black was lightly drybrushed in chome to bring out the detail. The Rhino-head was painted cream and treated with GW's amber wash.

The bases were built up with Milliput and painted with Tamiya 'concrete' textured paint.

PS: sorry there is a lot of 'digital noise' on this photo because I shot it in unhelpful lighting conditions.

Warlord Games: Tenth Doctor & Companions

The Tenth Doctor plus Companions, possibly the best loved of the new series Doctors.

And some more UNIT troopers.