When I was a wee young lad, one of my friends had a board game called Escape From Atlantis, which I only got to play with him once. At weird, random times throughout my life, vague memories of this game have popped into my head just to say hello.

Last year, I saw that the game had been reprinted under the name Survive The Island, and I clearly must have mentioned this to some family members, as I ended up receiving it as a gift over the Christmas period.

Though eager to get stuck in, I first needed to give the game a little TLC to get it ready for the tabletop.

Firstly, like I've started to do with many of my other games, I painted some thinned PVA glue around the edges of the thick card pieces, to seal them and hopefully prevent potential minor damage in the future.

Secondly, though the wooden meeples all had their points values engraved on their undersides, I thought these numbers were a little hard to see. So to remedy this a little, I dribbled in some thinned down black and white paint to make the numbers pop a little more.

Lastly, one of the meeples had a small section that was spearing off, so I glued it and held it in place with a clothes peg until it was fully set.

We had a full five players for the game's maiden outing.

I had an absolute stinker of an early game, with my little dudes getting dunked into the water straight away. One of my five point guys swam all the way to one of the islands only to get chomped right before he made landfall.
I wasn't even able to save anyone until my penultimate turn, when I got 3 of my little orange meeples back to land to somehow grab second place with 10 points.

But there was no stopping the yellows, who were clear in the lead with 15. I can't remember who got what, but the other 3 players all had either 6 or 7 points, so were very close.

It's a fun little game and easy to learn, but because of its simplicity and how competitive it is, I'm not sure how much play it will get in our little group, as we tend to lean towards more co-operative experiences.

Just recently I was thinking back to when I played L: A Mathemagical Adventure a few years ago. Well, more specifically, I was thinking about the script I wrote for the "spider puzzle", and whether or not I could have ever gotten it to work had I not been so hasty to delete it before knowing all the facts.

It was annoying me so much, that I sat down and once again tried to create a script that would correctly work out a solution to the puzzle.

And I'm happy to say that, after a few hours of head scratching, I've got something that works.

It's certainly not as elegant as I originally planned. I wanted the script to "step" backwards and forwards through the route on its attempt to solve the puzzle, and keep doing this until it found a correct path. Thus, it technically would only need a single attempt to find a working solution, where it would just keep correcting itself along the way.

While I did my best to write in this backtracking capability, and while technically it does do this, unfortunately it doesn't work exactly as planned. It was just too hard to get the script to remember where it had been, and when to forget it had been there, if it has found another way through the puzzle, for example.

My fix to get the script to work is to let it work back and forth through the route for a while, and if too many attempts are made, then just reset and start again. This has made it so that the script can now kick out a proper solve every time. It's just a shame that, from what I can gather, the backtracking is rarely used on a successful solve of the puzzle. It instead just seems to luck into a correct solve after a reset.

Still, I don't care. It's something that I didn't achieve before, and now I have.

Spider puzzle solution

And then, armed with this capability, and still in possession of my old map scribbles, I thought why not go back to the game and make those nice replacement maps that I'd always wanted, after all?

In the background, my forest-making journey has continued.

While I already had some stuff I could use as new trees, as well as some weird-lookin' 3D-printable plants, I was inspired last year to try and scratch build my own when I came across the Karl Makes Stuff Youtube channel.

In one of his vids, he makes some simple and effective looking trees using wire and twine, and I thought I'd give it a go.

I wasn't happy with my first try, so it went in the bin. But a while later, armed with this experience, I set up to have another go with a better idea of what to do.

While not perfect, I was much happier with what came out of this little session. Then I just had to wait for the temperatures to get a little milder so that I could get some spray cans out and give them a blast.

I sprayed them each with different colours, using different combinations from below and above, so that there would be a bit of variety.

They're not particularly natural looking tree colours, but they are for sci-fi games so they can be whatever colours I want.

At this point, I still have no idea whether this is all going to work. I need to flock them with some "leaves" first, but to do that, I've got to make myself a bunch of crazy-coloured flock...

After my shambolic efforts at painting my Epic Evil Sunz, which took well over four years, an opportunity soon arose to try and right the ship somewhat.

This month, work has been very light, so I had an opportunity to dig my heels in and really try to get something done. Much like what I attempted with the Epic Androids a couple of years ago, I decided to start a project from scratch and try and smash the entire thing out in the time I had available.

My choice this time was another Ork clan, which was the Goffs. Perhaps I was being a bit silly trying to paint such a force in a single month. Yes, they are about half the size of the Evil Sunz, but one month is a far smaller amount of time than four years.

And on top of that, this clan included my other Mega Gargant.

What led me to choosing these ladz over some of my other models is that the Goffs predominantly wear black, a colour I think works by simply drybrushing it a dark grey then throwing a black wash over the top. Couple this with the fact that they were already undercoated in black and ready to go, I figured a huge chunk of the work could be done with very little effort.

I wasn't going to paint the green skin or white accents before the black wash, as I didn't want to muddy them. But it didn't take long to get all of the small models drybrushed grey, and get their red accents and metallic weapons all painted, so that I could get them washed. Just a few days through the month and in my head it felt like I was flying along.

I got the Stompas and Gibletgrinda to the same point, and then ran straight into a brick wall when the Mega Gargant rolled up to the painting area.

This thing was in a right state. There was still a lot of flashing to remove and filing to do, and bits had even fallen off since it had last been used back in the 1990s. Man, we really should have taken better care of this stuff back in the day.

I decided to stick with the gargant until it was completed, and it wasn't until nearly two weeks later that I could go back to the other models.

Something interesting with this lot is that these are the first 6mm infantry models I've ever painted that are on the Epic 40,000 "strip" style bases, rather then the classic square bases from the previous version of the game.

These other bases certainly make the models easier to paint, but they are so much worse in every other way. For a start, I much prefer the look of the old bases, how they make the models look like they are in a squad rather than just in a line.
Square bases also look better when they are "clumped up" for photos in my opinion.

Also, the long, thin profile of the strip bases seemingly makes them susceptible to bending. It's weird, but some of them just don't sit flat at all. All these years have gone by and I've only just realised this.

By half way through the month I was flagging big time. I wanted nothing more than to move on and play a computer game, or do anything else, but I just kept thinking about all of the painting delays I've had, and really needed this to be a challenge I didn't fail.

So I trudged on, and happily managed to put down the brush on Jan 26th, a whole 5 days early. Yeah sure, I didn't try as hard with these as I did with the Evil Sunz, and I still needed to flock the bases, but I'm classing this as a major win.

I've checked my little paint tracker spreadsheet, and I have noticed that if I paint another similar-sized clan such as the Deathskulls, I will be exactly 50% through all of my Epic models. So while I should probably get straight on with that, I think I really need a break from painting Orks for a while...

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So it's 4 clans down, and 3 to go. This one was painted in record time, for me anyway.

It's definitely good to get the Goffs done, to give my painted force some much needed close combat crunchin' capability.