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 keeps me motivated to keep pushing on with my backlog of little projects and tasks.

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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 cheesburger 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...

I recently took on the task of cleaning out my niece's PS4, as it sounded like it was auditioning to become a helicopter.

I didn't realise just how many different PS4 models there are, and I had to hunt through a bunch of different Youtube videos in order to find some useful ones.

The tear down went easy enough, except for the Blu-ray drive's power cable, which I clearly yanked on a little too hard, and snapped one of the wires.

I stripped the entire console down into its parts, before cleaning and dusting all of the covers and components as best as I could for someone who doesn't own a compressed air can.

Then I went to town with some cleaning solution, and I got that APU and heat sink sparkling, before looking at putting it all back together.

While it was open, I figured it made sense to replace the little battery in there, as by this point, the old one must have been running on fumes.

When I've replaced thermal paste on my PCs before, the recommendation is always to put a pea-sized amount right in the middle of the chip, so it gets spread out when you screw the heat sink down.

But here, I read that it was recommended to gently spread it out beforehand. I'd never done this before, but I gave it my best shot.

Then I just had to wait for a few days, until the replacement cable rocked up so that I could put it all back together.

I suppose my own PS4 will need doing at some point.

Not looking forward to that...

A few months back, I got Scoob to take a look at my current Super Dungeon Explore rules, that I thought I'd pretty much finished last year.

We played two games, and while the rules worked fine, and the games didn't run on too long, there are still issues.

Primarily, we couldn't even complete the first level in either game, and both times got pretty much stomped.

Yes, I know this game is very heavily reliant on dice rolls, but level one is supposed to be proper easy mode.

Now I'm sure I could just tweak the enemy power levels down a bit and the hero levels up a bit, but I've had a few more ideas that will need a while longer to implement.

So once again the game has found itself on the "needs more work" pile.

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While we played a few games of Secret Sith Lord over the last couple of years, I always got the impresson that most people still preferred the original Secret Hitler.

And because it didn't seem very thematic to continue to call the Separatists "fascists", and the Loyalists "liberals", I decided to print up an updated version of the original game.

There are a few components I can re-use from my old version, but some things really needed the update.

And also, Star Wars sucks now, so it's best that nothing reminds me of it.

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I recently got asked to make my debut in Scoob's new gaming room.

With the official 40K rules really not taking our fancy, and our rules not ready for any games yet, Scoob put forward the idea of trying One Page Rules again.

This time, he fancied trying the co-op game Star Quest, in which you make a few characters, and send them onto the tabletop in an attempt to meet some random objectives.

Neither of us knew much about the rules going in, so there was a lot of reading and head scratching as we were setting up.

All I'd read going in is that the game usually kicks your ass all up and down the board, and that certainly happened here.

We'd got to make our way over the board, which took 6 turns, then hold an objective for 6 turns, then make our escape at any corner of the board.

In the early stages of the objective-holding portion of this mission, as the second wave of enemies came swarming in, it became very obvious that we were not going to succeed. Our characters, which included my Guard officer, The Wolf, and Scoob's Ork, Gitface, were heavily wounded, highly stressed, and still surrounded by survivors from the first wave of enemies.

We decided to call it there, and I think we were both left a little unsure of the ruleset. It's certainly got its good elements, and we will know a bit more about how to create better characters going forward, so it might be worth playing again.

But ultimately, for me, it was a message that I need to get my finger out of my ass and get those 40K-S rules fully up and running.