Blogomorph no.5

In which we visit space, repurpose board game pieces, and finally finish some dwarfs.

A 2026 Space Odyssey

I’ve been wanting to play a space wargame for a while now, spaceship battles being something I quite enjoy in books/games/movies and generally when I like something I wonder how to bring it to the tabletop.

To that end I’ve been looking around for a ruleset that would let me play some games, as well as looking for cool miniature ranges to scratch that itch. I had some specific things I wanted any rules to cover, and was struggling to find anything that did this specifically, although I have to say there are some great looking rulesets out there (e.g. Rick Priestley’s Space Battles, and Mike Hutchinson’s A Billion Suns amongst others). So I decided this was a great excuse to brush off my rule-writing skills and to make a space game!

I really enjoyed my foray into rules writing when I made the Masse d’Armes rules, it was a really interesting dive into an aspect of our hobby I hadn’t really toyed with before and gave me some insight into how tricky writing rules is! The rules for this game are an adaptation of my Masse d’Armes rules, keeping the core dice and upgrades mechanics but redoing the movement completely. I really want to capture some of the difficulty of controlling an object hurtling through space, so a lot of the effort has gone into making that a part of the game.

The rules are at an early stage (a euphemism for I wrote something but have yet to test it.) and I’ve been looking around for cool spaceship models to test the rules with (I am more than open for some suggestions!). So far I think the early play testing will be done with some of the pieces out of my Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition set, which is languishing unused since we got the 4th edition of the game. It’ll be a good opportunity to give some purpose to those components!

I also need to make or buy a space mat, and some asteroids because clearly they are a must in any space game. Sounds like I have a few weekends of crafting ahead of me!

On the Painting Table

First up, we have some finished Dwarfs!

These have been on the painting table for a few weeks now, so it’s nice to be able to call them done! I think the shield icons turned out ok, if you remember I 3D printed them on a filament printer which isn’t ideal for fine detail like this. They’re a tiny bit rough, but I don’t mind that on these old models, they would look more out of place on new plastics I think.

Speaking of new plastics, GW revealed their updated Dwarf range for Age of Sigmar, and amongst these was this very cool model:

I think I might have to pick her up for my old world army, although I will probably do a weapon swap, that axe is a little bit big for my tastes.

Finally, next on the painting table is the second Chaos Warrior from the Battle March set, this one is the banner bearer (well if corpses can be banners) for the unit.

So far he’s gotten an undercoat of black and a zenithal spray of everyone’s favourite colour (well at least John): Vallejo Dark Sea Blue. I look forwards to getting to grips with him, I’ve enjoyed slow painting models (i.e. one by one), it’s been fun even if my productivity has taken a massive nose dive as a result!