This poll finished a while ago, but I completely forgot to post up the results! So here they are:

Your favourite figure scale?

• 0% (0) Over 32mm?
• 54% (55) 28-32mm?
• 11% (11) 20-25mm?
• 34% (34) 15mm-10mm?
• 1% (1) Under 10mm?

Total Votes : 101

So no visitors favor painting 40mm/54mm scale figures? There’s some excellent examples for sale, like Hasslefree’s 40mm Artemis (she’s a naked warrior goddess so may not be safe for work), the new Femme Militant line (annoying Flash site though) and the failed Games Workshop Inquisitor 54mm. These GW figures tempted me, until they starting releasing the excellent 28mm Inquisitor retinue figures for 40k that is. I mean, why play Inquisitor with 54mm figures and a whole new set of terrain when I can just reuse my 28mm figures and existing terrain? Even so 54mm Inquisitor figures still crop up on TradeMe regularly and I’ve nearly grabbed one or two for display painting.

I myself am torn between the 28mm and 15mm scales. 28mm figures can have a lot of detail and be quite enjoyable to paint, but I’m such a slow painter because I like to try and achieve a reasonable paint job on each and every figure. For this reason alone I suspect I’m slowly swinging towards the 15mm camp, particularly after discovering how quickly one can paint an entire 1500pt WWII Flames of War force if you put your mind to it. This is the real reason both Flashpoint’s 17mm Moderns and Corvus Bellis’ 15mm Ancients attract me.

After discovering the joys of CD based terrain I’ve created a fair share of my own. However it never occurred to me that the plastic spindles they come in also make excellent sci-fi terrain!

That link is to a Spanish language tutorial on the ‘Toposolitario’ hobby site, but it’s rich with step by step pictures.

I suspect I’ll have to try this for myself in the future, possibly combining one or two spindles with the Bio Toxin Refinery I picked up a while ago - but have yet to use.

Via the Hirst Arts forum.

I’ve never played Ancients in the past but these excellent Corvus Belli 15mm armies are calling to me. For roughly $40US you get an entire 15mm DBA (De Bellis Antiquitatis) army in a boxed set.

They’re lovely looking like 15mm figures and after painting a Flames of War 15mm force I’m fairly confident I could knock them off without too much difficulty. Of course I’d have to play in North Africa again so I can reuse my table and terrain. That would imply Romans and Numidians would be good choices possibly?

Hmmm now before I go off half cocked I should find a copy of these rules and give them a read. Anybody out there got any DBA pointers they care to share with me? There’s also Warhammer Historical to consider I suppose.

My mini Pulp campaign is grinding to a close, largely due to GM exhaustion as I’m tired of writing and running scenarios rather than actually playing in them. I have a grand plan to publish the four scenarios I’ve used as a single PDF and hand that to somebody else in our gaming group to run so I can play it!

Anyway, for the closing scenario an Egyptian tomb is pretty much mandatory since I’ve already painted up the former occupant. Looking for a quick and dirty tomb that could be laid out in various patterns I scoured RPGNow for a cheap download, but couldn’t really find anything suitable.

So I simply cast the Hirst Arts Mold #203 (Cracked Floor Tiles) ten times and glued the resulting tiles down in various patterns on 3mm MDF. I considered creating low walls but didn’t bother in the end because it would require more casting, and walls would probably just get in the way during gaming. Having no walls also means the floor pieces can be freely laid out in any pattern.

After quickly painting the tiles with interior house paints and brown shoe polish diluted with floor wax I’m reasonably happy with them. These shots show the pieces laid out in a small tomb, decorated with a doorway and some of the pieces I created for the Cairo Museum of Antiquities set. I think they should create a suitable tomb for my hapless adventurers to pillage, or attempt to pillage. I should also point out that the layout I’ve shown in the photos is likely to differ from the layout I actually end up using in a scenario guys!

‘SamuliA’ on the Hirst Arts forums recently posted up a photo of this excellent dice tower. They were also nice enough to include Google SketchUp online plans too!

I’ve been considering creating a dice tower for a while now, as zealous players seem determined to roll dice across my modular textured gaming tables. A dice tower of this calibre seems a little classier than the empty, washed cat food containers I currently try to force upon players!

Not to mention people on the Hirst Arts forums constantly rave about Sketch Up so it might be time to give it a try.

Good, cheap 15mm trees are hard to come by in New Zealand. You’re either looking at ridiculously expensive model railroad tree kits, like those from Woodland Scenics, or a lot of time consuming wire bending.

So it was interesting to see this scouring pad tree tutorial from Wargames Terrain appear on the official Flames of War forum.

While I typically play Flames of War on a North African table I might just try putting a few of these trees together out of curiosity. I also wonder if they scale to 28mm well.

Dice wars is a Flash game that’s like a simple version of Risk with a large element of chance.

It’s a great coffee break game with some subtleties because reinforcement is totally random and the number of extra dice you get at the end of each turn depends on the largest contiguous area you control. This means the AI will constantly try to divide and conquer your land at the weakest point.

The starting map is randomly generated and you also chose the number of AI opponents (up to 7) so each game is very different.