The Race of Champions - a Formula De report (Zandvoort race 1)

While this is not Oldhammer, it is a bit of retro gaming so it has found its way onto my blog! Been a very long time since I posted here so better this than nothing I say.

Eight of the world's greatest racing drivers lined up to take part in the first leg of the Race of Champions series. Zandvoort in Holland provided the venue for this inaugural event.
Taking part were Michael Schumacher and Nicky Lauda (both in Ferraris), Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna (both in McLarens), Jackie Stewart in a Tyrell, Fernando Alonso in a Renault, Nelson Piquet in a Brabham and finally Sebastian Vettel in a Red Bull.

After qualifying the drivers lined up on the grid as follows:
1: Lauda
2: Piquet
3: Prost
4: Vettel
5: Alonso
6: Senna
7: Stewart
8:Schumacher

Vettel made a great start and immediately powered past Prost and pulled alongside Piquet as the cars rushed down to turn 1. Lauda held the lead as the pack sorted themselves out behind him. Alonso got too much wheel spin at the start and was passed by Senna. Schumacher also made a poor start and trailed the field.
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Senna and Prost banged wheels in the middle of turn one with Prost suffering some damage to his car. Lauda meanwhile was too cautious into the first turn and was swamped by the field, eventually emerging way back in 7th place going into turn 2. Piquet meanwhile shot out into the lead followed by a flying Senna.

Disaster struck in turn 2 as the cars bunched up in the tight right hander. Vettel got his breaking a bit wrong, letting Alonso and Schumacher past. Alongside him however Prost and Lauda found themselves both trying to occupy the same piece of tarmac. The resulting collision put both drivers out of the race. Fortunately neither driver was hurt in the collision and both will be fit for the next race.

With all the confusion and carnage behind him Piquet was disappearing into the distance, a country mile ahead of the viscous battle for second place between Alonso, Senna and Schumacher. Vettel was trailing in 5th place with Steward bringing up the rear, already struggling to keep up with the pack.

The slow series of bends that made up turns 4 and 5 allowed the second place battle to close in on Piquet as he made sure not to spin out. Alonso picked a perfect line coming into the corner and would get a great run onto the following straight.

This allowed him to actually nose ahead of Piquet going into the second last corner. Schumacher and Senna were left eating the leader's dust as they struggled through the tight bends. Behind them Vettle was navigating the tight stuff as well with Stewart making a late charge back into contention for the minor places.

Piquet edged ahead of Alonso once again as they navigated the final turn, both gearing up into 6th gear as they set themselves to blast down the home straight. Stewart meanwhile was moving up alongside to pass Vettel.

The rest of the field weren't even in sight as Piquet managed to hold off Alsonso to take the first win of the season by a mere 4 car lengths from Alonso.

Behind them Stewart had made a daring charge up the field and was now fighting for the last spot on the podium. His charge came to an embarrassing end however when he spun on the last corner while trying to go round the outside of both Senna and Schumacher.

That allowed Senna to make a pass on Schumacher on the home straight to claim third place, with the German coming home 4th followed by a lacklustre Vettel and a limping Stewart.

That leaves the championship standings as follows:
1: Piquet 10 pts
2: Alonso 6 pts
3: Senna 4 pts
4: Schumacher 3 pts
5: Vettel 2 pts
6: Stewart 1 pt
7: Lauda 0 pts
8: Prost 0 pts

Race 2 takes us to Monaco.

Warhammer Quest on the iPad

It seems there is a growing interest in reviving many of the old Games Workshop boardgames and almost forgotten games on modern devices. The latest I have come across is this excellent conversion of Warhammer Quest into an iPad game. I am not an expert on Warhammer Quest by any means, having only played it a couple of times many many years ago, but this looks to be a faithful reproduction of the game.

You get to quest through various cities in the Empire, discovering new destinations and dungeons as you complete quests and slay the bad guys.

You start out with the traditional 4 characters, the barbarian, the elf, the dwarf and the wizard and there is an option to buy 3 different characters if you wish at $3 each (I think). The game itself cost $5 to download so the new characters do seem a little expensive, but fortunately they are not a requirement to play the game. Game play is turn by turn as per the board game with all the rules in place. You don't get to see the dice rolls which seems to upset some people but it really doesn't bother me, actually I prefer the game without an artificial dice roll occurring.

After crawling through various dungeons and emerging battered but victorious you can return to one of the settlements nearby to level up your heroes and buy new equipment and provisions. There are several difficulties you can play on which allow you to recover dead heroes or play on the hardest mode where a dead hero is dead for good - you can still recruit a new rookie hero from a settlement and hope they survive a little longer. 

I believe there are several other GW games that are being ported to the iPad, Space Hulk being one of them. There are so many GW turn based games that are simply crying out to be converted into the digital realm that I see a bumper crop of toys ahead of Oldhammer gamers. 

These are the pros and cons of dipping

A little tip of the hat to Roger Waters in the title of this blog ;)

I have decided on a project of dipping all the goblins for my Orc army. The models I have are mostly current edition goblins and I have to say I really enjoy them. They retain a lot of character and are scaled correctly to older editions of Warhammer Goblins which is very handy. So mixing and matching Goblins from various periods shouldn't pose much of a problem.

I have elected to turn these guys into something of a semi-speed painting exercise using the Army Painter dip that is proving popular amongst many gamers these days. I am certainly no expert in using this stuff, but what I have learned is that you need to paint lighter than expected as the dip will darken all your colours and I have also discovered that the dip is very forgiving of sloppy paintwork as it does a great job of hiding small errors and tying the paint job together. Take these Night Goblin fanatics for example, I sprayed them a grey/khaki colour as this is the colour I want all their clothing to be, then painted the skin, some brown areas and metal. No more than a few minutes spent on each. Very simple painting, nothing detailed and in truth rather heavy handed.

Then I dipped them and left them to dry overnight. The dip does an excellent job of shading the models and bringing them to a standard that I think is game ready. They are nothing spectacular by any means but an entire army painted like this will look very unified and comfortably to a tabletop standard.

I am unable to leave them like this as I have to add some highlights and details, but I am very comfortable playing with them in this state till I get round to doing that. With some flocking on the bases they will be welcome in my army any day. Here are the squigs that I have gone and dipped in the same manner.

Again nothing fancy but good enough to play with. They do all need a coast of matt varnish to get rid of the gloss look though! And finally here is a unit of squigs that have had a little more attention paid to them. Not much more than some simple dry-brushing and basing with a few details picked out. I am very happy with the results from a very simple painting process. More painted miniatures on the table is always a winner in my book! :)

There is a lot I can do to turn them into well painted miniatures but that really isn't the point of this project. So what are the cons of dipping? Well I would say that you are not going to get top quality paint jobs out of dipping so don't use it if you are looking for a Golden Demon winning army or anything that is going to grace the pages of White Dwarf or CMON. But for the time and effort involved I can highly recommend this for certain armies. Anything dark and dirty is well suited to dipping, undead are ideal candidates. High Elves, for example, are not going to suit dipping much though, there a cleaner, crisper paint job is required that dipping isn't going to provide. I do stand to be corrected on this point though as I do think it would be possible to get some good effects with High Elves, but the point in general stands I think :D

Still alive and spawning Orcs

I haven't had a chance to post anything on her in a while now. Nor have I had much opportunity to get much gaming or painting in the last month or two. But I have done a little and while I haven't been making much headway on getting miniatures painted I have added a fair number of new troops to the growing Orc horde. They are not all GW miniatures but they all do fit into the Oldhammer feel. There are even a few modern GW squigs running around - they are great miniatures and I love the comedy and chaos they bring to a game. - used only when playing a modern game of Warhammer though, unless there is a 3rd edition equivalent I could substitute them for?

Anyhow, by way of inspiring myself I took a few pics of the entire Orc collection so far. I think I have enough now to keep me happy for a long time, so now I can look at adding a few of the more exotic elements to the army. I definitely need more warmachines!

So much painting still to do! As soon as I finish another unit I will take much nicer photos and put some more pictures up.

Identifying old lead

So a good friend was kind enough to give me a huge load of old miniatures over the weekend, stuff he no longer used in his own vast collection or was simply too old to find a place any more. 

The problem is I can only identify around a third of the models so I am asking for your help in identifying the rest. Some I know are Citadel and can identify easily enough. Some are Grenadier, some may be Citadel but I am not sure, others I have no idea what so ever! This is going to be a pic heavy post, but I have optimised the images so they are all relatively small (in kb) and will load quickly. 

So lets get on with it then.

1: First up is what I assume is an early Citadel chaos mutation

2: Some sort of bugbear/beastman? Appears to be Citadel from the base.

3 :Lizardman type no idea on the make.

4: I am pretty sure this is an early Citadel beastman.

5: Appears to be an Orc, company unknown.

6: Citadel I think? Maybe an early beastman as well.

7: Orcs from an unknown company (plastics)

8: A lizardman type from unknown company

9: Beastman/Lizard from unknown company

10: Orc from unknown company - could be an Ogre as it is on a large base

11: Citadel Orc from early 80 or so I beleive

12: Orc from unknown company - could be an Ogre as it is on a large base

13: Orc from unknown company - could be an Ogre as it is on a large base

14: Orc from unknown company - could be an Ogre as it is on a large base

15: I suspect these are Grenadier Hobgoblins

16: Grenadier Orc I believe 

17: Pre-slotta Citadel Orcs. I recognise a few that were continued into the late 80s with slotta bases

18: Citadel Orcs from the mid 80's

19: Orcs from an unknown company. Look a bit like they are meant to be Black Orc types

20: unidentified Grenadier miniature

21: Citadel Orc dated 1984. A shaman of some sort?

22: Grenadier Orc riding a dinosaur/wyvern/cold one?

So that's the lot of them. I eagerly look forward to working out what a lot of these guys are, that's half the fun of this Oldhammer gig after all :) Please let me know which miniatures you are able to identify.

A small gathering of Orcs

My small horde of Orcs is taking it's time growing but it is growing little by little. More importantly I am making some (slow) progress at getting them painted. The command models to complement the plastic Orc boyz have now been painted and fit into the unit perfectly.

Some close ups to reveal all my flawed painting...

Now a group shot of the assembled horde. Led by the as yet unnamed lvl 20 Black Orc hero riding the Wyvern, a Skull Krusha keeps the troops amused, while a lonely Troll waits in the background (his friend seems lost in the post). 3 Orc archers on wolves trot down the road, followed by a lvl 10 Orc hero with crossbow riding a boar. 2 units of 10 arrer boys soften up the enemy before the unit of 19 boyz, a unit of 14 biguns and 9 Black Orcs close in to get their blades wet.

All in all this lot amounts to a little over 1000 points which is a decent start. I will be adding more Orcs and some Goblins to the list as well as an allied contingent of Chaos - Kaleb Daark, 5 Chaos warriors and 2 Minotaurs so far.