Greetings. I am Stebloke, and I am a bit strange. This website contains my blog, where you can read about the things I create, the games I play, and any other things I get involved in.

I make this blog mostly because I like to look back on the things I do and feel nostalgic, but also because it motivates me to keep doing things outside of my otherwise boring and mundane existence.

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There's been a lot of printing, cutting, sleeving and laminating going on recently, as I've been working on even more games to bring to the tabletop.

Up first, I got the new version of Secret Hitler, in Secret Sith Lord, all finished and ready for some action. I even managed to come up with a better plan than the paper envelopes we'd been using all these years, as they would constantly wear out and would need to be replaced. Especially if alcohol was involved.

The next game to get some attention was Black Sonata. I'd printed out the tokens for its expansion back when I printed the base game. But I've only now pulled my finger out and printed all of the expansion cards. The expansion is called the Fair Youth, which means in addition to finding who the Dark Lady is, you also have to go around looking for the Fair Youth. Sounds a bit dodgy to me, Shakespeare.

The final game in this little print marathon is a bit of a dodgy one. I've been wanting Whitehall Mystery ever since I saw gameplay on Youtube a few years back. But it was unavailable here in the UK for ages, and Scotland Yard did nothing to quench my desire.

The damn thing is, it seems at some point earlier this year, there were a few copies of another print run available here. But like the idiot I am, I completely missed it, and now they're all gone again.

So I've been a bit of a dodgy geezer, and printed my own, until it's (hopefully) available yet again. I just need to make a screen for Jack to use, which I can also use when the printing police come looking for me.

Just print more copies of the game! Jackasses!

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Now I'd finally got the Black Sonata expansion fully printed, I decided it was time to bring this game to the table again.

Up first, I thought it prudent to play a vanilla game without any expansion content, to help me remember the game.

This first effort did not go according to plan. The Dark Lady's double backs along her route confused me, and on subsequent laps I could only manage vague recollections of where she'd been. Because of this, I searched many times in empty locations. However, I managed to get two good searches on her late on and managed to win. The victory was quite hollow, however, as I had no fog cards left, and only 4 cards in the stealth deck on its last rotation.
This all gave me a meagre 4 points.

Just a warm up, though. I hoped.

In the second game, I made it much harder and much easier at the same time. I chose a more difficult route for the stealth deck, used the tougher Dark Lady cards from the expansion, and also added in the Fair Youth component. However, what turned the game in my favour was that I allowed myself to take notes this time. I have no idea if you're "supposed" to be allowed to do this, but it really did make it much easier.

For the Dark Lady's first rotation, I jotted down all the landmarks she visited, while I went all over the board hunting for clues about the Fair Youth's hideout. So at the end of that rotation, I sat there and worked out a good chunk of her route, as well as nailed down where the Fair Youth was hiding.

So, after I got enough clues to the Dark Lady's identity, I was able to successfully finish the game with both tasks completed and 44 points in my back pocket. A much better effort, but one that I would never have managed without keeping the notes.

I guess it's all my own fault, but my hope that 2023 would be a big wargaming year has pretty much turned out to be a false hope.

Nevertheless, a couple of weeks back we got the chance to play our first proper wargames of the year.

Up first were two games of the new 40K 10th edition, which were released for free a little while back in the form of basic rulebook and indexes.

In the first game, Gareth got to pull out his own models for the first time, as he's been collecting some Space Wolves. He went up against Scoob's new Tyranids that came from the Leviathan starter set.

There was no use of point values, and two armies that looked roughly equal were chosen. There was also no worrying about proper scenarios or objectives or any of that stuff. We all agreed that we just wanted to see the basic rules in action, to allow the two generals to get into the shooting, chopping and munching as quickly as possible.

At the end of the day, most of the basic troops on both sides had been dealt with, but Gareth conceded that he had little left to deal with the two bigger bugs after losing his Dreadnoughts, so it seemed the Nids had won this first little skirmish.

The day after, I challenged Scoob's Nids with my own Hive Fleet Odium bugs. Though we used the same board, this time we added objectives, and decided we would count up points at the end of each turn depending on how many objectives we held. Then we both promptly ignored this and charged headlong at each other. It just didn't seem right for Nidz to sit there holding objectives.

After just a few turns, I barely had anything left on the board. If I remember right, it was just a single Ravener and a few Termagants. Yeah, it was clear Scoob had taken this one.

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A few days after our first foray into 40K 10th territory, it was the turn of the game I was most looking forward to getting back to, in the form of Epic-S.

It's hard to believe that it had been a whole year since we last played this, so its time was certainly due.

Scoob and I had loads of options to try out. The Eldar and Squats had now got full rules, while the Nidz had been buffed after last time, and the Androids were now fully painted and very much ready for the tabletop.

In the end we decided to try an Eldar vs Nidz showdown. With Scoob on a Nid kick at the minute, he went for the forces of the Hive Mind, while I took command of the pointy ears.

Unfortunately for the bugs, they seemed a little doomed to fail from fairly early on. Even though their psychic powers had been buffed, we continually forgot the psychic phase, denying them this resource.

In addition, this was without any shadow of doubt, the best game I can remember ever having in terms of dice rolling. After an embarrassing first turn shooting attempt from the Phantom Titan, that saw it hit just one of ten 5+ attacks, my luck completely changed. Case in point, on the second turn, the Titan's next attack saw it hit eight of those same attacks, which caused massive damage to the Hierophant Titan scuttling towards it.

From this point on, Scoob had poor to average rolls, while mine were nearly all ridiculously good.

The 6000pt game ended after three turns, with the score 4212 to 2649 in my favour.

Though it seems the Tyranids are still underpowered, it's hard to take any real data from this battle considering what happened throughout.

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So, well over a year since I started renovating my old "Hilly Rocks", I've actually taken another slight step towards their completion.

While all of the terrain was out for our recent games, I managed to get around to drybrushing all of the rock walls. They will need another round of washing and drybrushing to get the look I want, but at least a little bit has been done.

While I was doing this, I noticed one of the pieces had warped, and the edge section was bending up off of the tabletop. Sigh. Something else that I will need to fix, I guess.

I'm really not sure why, but just recently I had the hankering to retrieve an old electronic game from the loft and give it a good old renovating. The game in question is Super Cup Football, made by Tomy back in the 80s. Ordinarily, this thing runs on batteries, but I wanted to change that, along with a bunch of other little tweaks.

Up first, the entire thing needed a massive clean, not only to remove all the dirt but also those silly stickers I'd used to indicate which lever controlled which player. So I went over it with WD40, followed by using some toothpaste with an old firm toothbrush to really get into the corners. It's mostly come up pretty well. I just wish I could do something about the state of the pitch.

Now, I sure as hell wasn't going to bother with batteries for this old clunker, so I decided it needed to be mains-powered. To achieve this, I removed the wires that took the power from the batteries to the motor, and drilled a hole through into the battery compartment that the wires could go through.
Then I got an adjustable power supply that came with a multitude of different attachments. One of these, originally meant for an LED strip, was perfect for the job. It allowed me to screw the two wires into it, so the mains adapter could then be attached and unattached at will.
The only thing needed after this was to drill a hole so that the power cable had access into the compartment, and all was golden.

I also gave the game a good clean under the hood, paying attention to all of the whirring rods, before re-greasing them to allow the players to move up and down the pitch as freely as possible.

Speaking of movement, there was one little problem I was unable to solve. All those years in the ever-changing temperatures of the loft have slightly warped the plastic pitch, meaning not enough pressure now pushes down on some of the boxes that move the players. This in turn means the little gears sometimes don't fully connect, and some of the players can stutter a bit as they move up and down.

I saw someone on Youtube, in the middle of repairing one of these games, who also had a similar issue. He glued on an extra thin layer of plastic to create a bit more contact and pressure, but while I have tried a similar thing, it doesn't seem to have done much.
Oh well.

The last thing that I could do to update this old beast was to repaint the players. I'd originally added a little paint to the red team back when I was a kid to make them look like Man Utd, but the blue team were untouched. I decided both teams needed work, and I've made them look how very generic red and blue teams from many years ago would have looked. I think it suits the style of the game much better.

So that's it. All done. Who knows if this thing will ever actually get any use again. But at least it's an option now if anyone ever fancies it.

For now, the poor old rattler has gone back into the loft, so that I can move on to something else...

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Back in August, I got to play a whole bunch of 8 and 9 player games of Secret Hitler while on holiday with a group of family and friends. We'd not played this in many years, but it only took a little while to get back into it. The new players we introduced to the game also seemed to really like it, and upon returning home, I started work on a new version of the game. This version is based on a community re-skin of the game called Secret Sith Lord.

I'm looking forward to finishing it so we can play the game without some people feeling like a right bunch of Nazis.