Yet more battles have been raged in the universe of 40K-S, starting with a game that Scoob recommended because he wanted to do something a bit different.

In our biggest game to this point, which was 4500pts, he wanted us to be able to use our bigger, heavier hitting units.

We both rocked up with our two super heavy tanks each, as well as a plethora of random other units to support them.

As I'd gone with mostly tanks, Scoob was worried that his more infantry-focused army would struggle to take them out.

But some good Daemon deep strikes, particularly by the Bloodletters, minced a bunch of my tanks and gave him a fairly close win with 3424pts to 3277.

In the next battle, which was a more standard one at 3000pts, Scoob brought along his wife's Dark Eldar for their introduction into the rules, while I went with a fairly traditional Space Marine force.

The Dark Eldar proved themselves able to do damage, but were cut down with relative ease by their enemies. In addition, the two close combat powerhouses, Lelith and Drazhar, felt a little weaker than they should.

With us both having a strong sense that the Dark Eldar need some rules assistance, the game ended after three turns, with me pulling out the win with 2336pts to 1508.

And then after a couple of months off, Scoob again threw out the idea of another record 5000pt game.

As I would need to transport loads of army boxes to make that many points, I again elected to take both super heavies. I was a bit worried that this might unbalance the game, until I got there and Scoob plonked down all three of his Stompas, backed up by two Boyz mobs.

Though it's first volley took half the wounds off of one of the Stompas, the Hellhammer was immediately destroyed by return fire, so once again that tank was removed very early in the game.

The Shadowsword faired a little better, lasting into the second turn, though with just one wound.

By this point, all of my lascannons and Fire Dragons had finished off a Stompa and severely damaged the other.

The third Stompa charged into combat as nearby Orks hacked down the Avatar. It easily smashed up the Shadowsword with one weapon, but somehow Scoob rolled a triple one to wound the Leman Russ with the other weapon.

Though in the third turn, this Stompa again charged into combat and completely wiped three other units, by this point it was the last Stompa standing. Another volley of fire from my remaining units finally whittled it down, and left Scoob with just the two Ork Boy units remaining.

This one ended after three turns, with the score 4562 to 3862 in my favour.

There has been some more 40K-S scrappin' going on in la casa de Scoob recently.

First, I sent my Nidz back into action, and Scoob rolled out his Orks to meet them.

After I got quite outnumbered in the last game, and seeing how much I outnumbered his army by, I thought I'd have a decent chance here.

However, it took just three turns for the outcome of this game to be clear, as it was pretty obvious that the Nidz were now the ones outnumbered.

I definitely had a really hard time damaging the Battlewagons, which was not helped when my deep-striking Trygon got mowed down in short order by the Lootas.

It still gave us info though, in that a smaller, more elite army is capable of taking on a larger mob.

Then weeks later, after a lot of coding to add all of the other units and special rules to the game, as well as a new army builder and a new points calculator, we convened again for another game.

This one saw me bring my Marines again, this time with some Battle Sister backup, to take on hordes of Scoob's deep striking Daemons.

We actually managed to play the full five turns for this one, and it was pretty close throughout. It ended up being 1859 to 1674 in Scoob's favour. It would have been much closer, with him winning by just 13 points, had I not been a bit suicidal and thrown away my Land Raider on the last turn. But I was in "have fun" mode, and wanted to flame things.

It also didn't help that my multi-meltas failed to successfully wound for the entire game, as well as Scoob dropping some monstrous saving throws to keep lots of his Daemon foot troops alive in the last couple of turns.

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Sandwiched in between all of this 40K action was my first game of Epic-S in over two years. In this one, I went up against Gareth in a 3000pt game, where he took control of the Imperials, and I commanded the Orky ladz.

Because we were re-learning the rules, we took the first turn pretty slowly, and it probably took longer than all of the other turns put together.

We decided not to go to a victory point target, and instead played the full 5 turns, during which I had some really lucky mass saving throws.

By the end of the action, I had managed the tiniest victory of just 15 points, with the score 2192 to 2177.

It's not just Blood Bowl stuff in the painting queue. After finishing my Warlord Titans, I got back to some Orky goodness and have painted the Deathskulls Slasher Gargant.

During the course of all this painting, I finally ordered some proper wet palette paper and sponge, so the old Greggs wrappers that I'd been using can all go.

I had no idea I'd saved up so many of those wrappers. Just how much Greggs did I used to eat? It's probably a really good thing that I don't do that job any more.

Now Scoob's game room is ready for some action, we've played a couple of games of our 40K-S rules. It's been quite a while since we've mucked about with them, so it was about time we started to evaluate whether or not it is a rule set that we should keep developing.

Firstly, in a roughly 1800pt game, I rocked up with a very simple Space Marine army, only to have Scoob drop a Stompa on me. Still, I was empowered by cheeseburger pizza, so I gave it my best shot.

We didn't have very long to play this game, so only got 2 turns done. Surprisingly, my waves of bolter fire caused some good damage on the Stompa, while the Stompa's guns were less effective than what we would have thought.

But then, while a couple of my other units tried to deal with the Ork Warbikes on the other side of the table, a horde of Ork Boyz charged out of the Stompa and into combat with my Tactical Squads, hacking a bunch down.

I'm guessing things would have gone downhill for me from that point, but we didn't have time to continue this little test.

A couple of weeks later, during which I spent hours staring at code and spreadsheets in order to improve the army picker, and get more units into the game, we went to war again.

In a roughly 2800pt game, I saw myself commanding my entire current Eldar force, minus Lelith Hesperax, against pretty much all of Scoob's Tyranids.

Now, back when I first started to collect Eldar, I also started to collect Tau, with the idea being that they were going to be allies. Of course, the idea was that the Tau were going to handle the long range firepower, while the Eldar moved onto the board to deal with the remaining enemies at much closer range, and also handle objectives.

Unfortunately, with absolutely no long range firepower in my Eldar army, barring a twin Bright Lance on a Wave Serpent, I could only try and kill the Nidz by getting close. And as you may have guessed, being close to the Tyranids is exactly what they want, and my little pointy-eared lads and lasses got their faces absolutely munched on by all those bugs.

By the end of just turn 2, the outcome of the game was pretty obvious, and I called it.

Got to say though, I was very disappointed that we only got two turns done in about 6 hours. Sure, we were constantly discussing rules ideas, and we stopped for a while to fill our greedy bellies with Chinese food, but I was hoping these rules would run way faster than this.

Still more work needed, I guess...

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Way back in February, before I lost access to the work unit for good, I got the Epic Goffs and Evil Sunz set up for their varnish coats.

For all of the metal models, I hit them with a thick gloss coat first, before then giving all of the models their matt spray down.

There's been no Epic painting since then, except for some sporadic work on my Warlord Titans that I started to renovate back in April.

The Epic 40K metal titan needed the most work on the armour, but because of the design, with all the hard edges, it was probably the easiest to paint.

The old "Beetleback" titans have lots of large and curved armour sections, and I never know how to deal with them at my skill level. I always feel like I should get an airbrush for models like that, but I don't want to spend all that money on a tool I may only use a handful of times.

I decided to once again use some of my many transfers on the two plastic Imperial titans. This time, I made a bit of a cock up when I painted matt varnish over the top of them. I shook the varnish up, then took off the lid and got some varnish from the underside of it, rather than squeezing some out onto a palette. I should have absolutely taken the latter option, as I didn't notice until it started to set that the varnish on the underneath of the lid had started to go a little lumpy.

And now that lumpiness is evident on the models.

Sigh. I mean it's not that bad, but still...

Painting the Slaanesh titan, I completely forgot from when I was painting my black Hive Tyrant all the way back in 2015 that the shitty GW washes can't be thinned with water. So once again I ended up with little white spots in all the recesses, and had to patch things up as best I could. Fucking hell GW. Your washes suck. I mean what kind of water based acrylic paints can't be thinned with water?

At least when I threw on another transfer I didn't cock it up this time.

Getting around to the Tzeentch titan was also interesting, as I was having to finish off a model that I had started an entire 14 years ago.

There were lots of details that I think I was just going to ignore back in the day. But older, more critical me wanted to make a bit more of an effort. I also added bits of paint to the transfers to hide how bad they had gone down back in the day. It's not ideal, but better than it was.

I did actually finish these models yesterday, but I'll wait to snap piccies until their respective armies are also done.

Which might be a while...