Planetstrike: Defence of Somewhere-or-Other

The faithful servants of the Emperor line up their forces...

...and face up the combined 'Nid and Ork horde.

The alien scum appear on the horizon

What the heck?!? Guess what gets shot at first?

Perhaps surprisingly, very few run away. But then the deep striking begins...

It wasn't entirely obvious until now just how much the Imperium was up against.

Aw heck...

Sadly, Lord Creed takes his eye off the ball whilst answering the call of nature. Not even a Death Leaper can distract him from the task in hand. It is believed this ultimately led to the downfall of the loyalist forces.

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Cue the pantomime chanting...

Then comes one last, valiant stand before the alien scum achieve victory. What on earth are Orks and 'Nids doing working together anyway?!

Hold on lads, I have a cunning plan...

...ah, that's not quite what I had in mind

Ruined Tower

I am so impressed with the moulds from Hirst Arts. If you haven't used them I strongly suggest investing in a few! Here are a few images of my first major project using the fieldstone moulds. When you consider that it is a long time since I last used plaster of paris I think it turned out rather nicely.

Toxic Waste

In the process of basing a few bits of pipe terrain it became obvious that a toxic waste pool was required. Initially I was tempted to get one of the proper pour-it-out-water-scenery offerings but, partly because I didn't want to spend money and partly because I couldn't be bothered to go to the shops, I thought I'd try just using PVA glue.

But I ran out...

So instead I hunted around the garage for a suitable alternative and came up with some UniBond wood glue. It's fairly thick stuff so I didn't end up with it pouring through all the unfilled gaps at the bottom of the pool. Also it dries a really nasty yellow! To be honest it looks like toxic waste even without painting.

Ork Horde

Alex has been beavering away painting his first ever group of Orks. To be honest I've been heavily impressed by just how much time he has been able to spend patiently painting away. When you take in to account the fact that he has never done this before, the results are quite impressive.

Not too shabby I reckon. I'd better get painting some more figures if I'm to fight off that lot!

Space Marines Unit

Finally finished my first figure painting project in years (having children will do that to you). These are from the Black Reach set - still got to finish the terminators, commander and dreadnought!

Terrain Project Part 3 - Finishing Touches

And by finishing touches I basically mean lots of glue and flock! I keep telling my son that there's nothing you can't do with PVA glue. So far he doesn't seem convinced, but we have yet to come a cropper when using it. If it doesn't stick, then that's just because you didn't use enough PVA glue!

Anyhow, here are a few images of the finished game board. The hills were fixed to the board with loads of PVA and then the whole thing was flocked with a couple of bags of woodland scenic's turf - one bag of green blend and one earth blend (again, stuck down with a suitable quantity of PVA glue.

As can be seen from the last image I used some gravel to represent the rocky cliffs. That needed a lot of PVA, plus regular coats of PVA afterwards to make sure they were stuck fast. I ended up pouring small amounts of PVA over the stones over a couple of days to get them to stick properly. Also I sprayed a coat of watered-down PVA over all of the flock after a couple of hours just to bond it to the board a bit better.

Finally, and after everything had dried, I sprayed each of the boards with varnish (satin in this case) for an added layer of protection.

Terrain Project Part 2 – Adding the Hill

Now, any good terrain just has to have hills and just like the Games Workshop Realm of Battle Gameboard we wanted them as well! Taking the same modular approach we also decided on having one big hill spread across 4 of the board squares and the material of choice just had to be polystyrene. To be honest, that's mainly because I couldn't get any foam-board!

Polystyrene is fairly difficult to work on without a hot wire cutter, as well as being really messy. I don't have a hot wire cutter (and yes, I did go out and try to buy one!) but I do have an old, cheap soldering iron. It's one of those soldering irons that uses a metal loop between two points on the hand grip and an electrical current passes through the wire to generate the heat. By stripping a length of electrical cable to get at the copper wire and replacing the original soldering iron element with my new, really long one I had a makeshift wire cutter! What's more, it actually worked (you can see it in the first image).

The rest was pretty much plain sailing and I happily carved out a hill:

That's about it for now, though there is still the problem of carving that hill in to four pieces, one for each section of the base. As you can see, we created a nicely sloping section to the hill and topped it with a much more steep inclined section - ideal for gun emplacements to hang out on!