Hey everybody,
March has felt like a long month, do you think? It seems to have been a long time since I last wrote one of these retrospective blogs, at least, and I was a bit concerned that I might have missed it! It’s also been a fairly slow month, in many respects, although I think that’s possibly due to me taking a week off work to sort the garden out, which meant my hobby time was otherwise fairly limited!
However, I did get the Tau Commander painted up quite quickly, which I was very pleased with! It didn’t seem to take all that long, either, so I was pleased with the progress there, though said progress then seemed to just atrophy, as I began casting about for other projects. I did have a pretty hefty focus on Warcry, and have managed to get all of the Red Harvest terrain built, as well as the Tarantulos Brood. I still have some of the Darkoath left to put together, but it’s getting there!
Warcry is such a beautiful game though, and I love how GW are still putting out content for us to devour. The Tome of Champions 2021 is a good example of this, keeping the game fresh with stuff all the time. Of course, I don’t play it anywhere near as much as I would like, so it’s hardly at risk of going stale for me, but even so! I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to get some more games in soon though.
Kill Team Nachmund has been released, as well, and so I’ve also been spending time building up that, starting with the Corsairs and then terrain, as well as the Heretic Astartes upgraded models. This last in particular has now got me in full flow with my Chaos once more, as I’ve been working on some Black Legion guys as a bit of a palette cleanse following two-and-a-bit months of painting Sa’cea Sept. I do keep thinking that I need to return to the Tau, of course, but I do feel the need to get something different painted.
The Black Legion are proving to be a little troublesome for me, because of the amount of detailing etc, and I’m not all that sure about the scheme right now. I think Chaos Marines are probably just one of those model sets where they are difficult to get painted well, due to all of the baroque finery. In comparison the Tau were a piece of cake! For now, I’ve decided that I’m going to get five Marines and the Sorcerer finished, all models that I had started working on a long time ago, so it’s definitely something that I need to get finished!
Star Wars
March has been quite the month for Star Wars as well, though, as I have been reading The Fallen Star and watching the Prequel movies. My wife Jemma isn’t entirely fussed on watching them, but we started watching the Prequels mid month and have decided to just keep going through them all, so that’ll be good! It’s got me thinking about re-reading some more of the Legends books and comics, as I did talk about in last month’s blog, and so I’m planning to do something throughout the summer, so watch this space for that! Should be quite a hefty series of blog reviews and so on, but hopefully it’ll be interesting for you all!
We also had the first trailer for Kenobi, which is excitingly coming out in May, so not too long left now! Mandalorian season three is still on the cards for the end of the year, as well as the Rogue One prequel series Andor coming out at some point. This photo was doing the rounds in October 2021, purportedly showing what we could expect in 2022, but with Mando being pushed back, who knows when Ahsoka will be coming back to the screen?
Watching the movies has put me in such a Star Wars mood, though – that probably accounts for some of the hobby dip that happened. Though I have got those Legion miniatures out of the attic, so who knows whether that will be a feature going forward?! Legion is something that I have thought about a lot over the years, though my first serious thoughts came when we were a couple of weeks into the first Lockdown, and nobody really knew what was going to happen. It was a nice distraction at the time, but I ended up not doing anything with this as we all settled into the new normal, and I went back to 40k. Well, maybe something will happen this time?
I’m always a bit wary of making these sorts of announcements, because I invariably get distracted, but hopefully it’ll be a big summer of Star Wars here on the blog!
Arkham Horror LCG
I have surprised myself this month by playing a couple of games with this, getting three-quarters of the way through the campaign before (spoiler alert) my investigators were killed! In my game day blog on Tuesday this week, I had said I wasn’t sure whether I would shuffle up and try again, or accept their fate and close the book on Innsmouth for the time being. Well, I have decided to close the book, and have dismantled the decks for Stella and Zoey – they weren’t a bad pair, if I’m honest; I just don’t think I was as into everything this time around for some reason. Possibly because I was snatching games where I could, and not really making the time to enjoy the game.
I’ve since made up two new decks, using Ursula Downs and Lily Chen, and I’m pondering my next move as regards which campaign I’m going to set off for. I’m currently favouring The Forgotten Age, though the allure of the new Edge of the Earth is also calling to me! I did feel bad for skipping TFA when I embarked upon The Circle Undone, more than twelve months ago now, but obviously campaigns don’t need to be played in the order they were released, so that doesn’t really matter.
My Ursula deck is pretty standard fare, leaning heavily into her already-high investigation attribute to really bolster this, and then use it (so far as Seekers allow) to fulfil other tests, too. The theme of using one attribute for another is more prevalent in the Mystics, of course, but Lily is a curious one in that she has a very high combat attribute already, so I don’t necessarily want to include a lot of spells that allow her to use her willpower for everything. I have included those spells like Rite of Seeking that allow her to investigate with willpower though, and there are a couple of ways for her to improve her willpower too, as I tend to split my party in games, to cover more ground, and so I like to have my investigators able to be as flexible as possible.
Lily is also curious in that she is a Mystic who can only use Level 0 Mystic cards, but can lean into Guardian cards up to Level 5. Whether that’s simply to allow for her to use the butterfly swords, I have no idea, but I find it interesting that this is going to likely become a deck that bears no resemblance to its beginnings, although of course we shall see how that transpires! I’ve only played a Mystic a couple of times, but I seem to recall there are a lot of good, higher-level cards that I like. Hm.
At any rate, Mystic and Seeker are my two favourite classes, and so I am looking forward to taking these two out, whichever campaign I decide to embark upon!
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