Despite the lack of tabletop activity on this blog, this has actually been one the biggest gaming years of my life so far. However, rather than the wargames we have traditionally played in the past, this year's gaming has all been of the board game variety.

It was way back at the start of the year when this sudden urge to play a bunch of games kicked in, and since then we've had a whole bunch of games nights during which we have tried a whole bunch of games.

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Up first in our year of tabletop madness was Pandemic, a co-op game where you have to save the world from a host of diseases. We really like this one, but as it only really works for 3-4 players we don't get to play it often, as there are too many of us on games nights. I've had a few quick looks at writing a modified rule set that allows for lots of players, but as yet nothing has clicked into place.

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After that we tried two games that I got interested in after watching the Co-Optional Lounge, being Epic Spell Wars and Secret Hitler. Epic Spell Wars didn't really grab the attention of anyone in our group, but Secret Hitler has been a staple game pretty much all year. There's just something fun (and wrong) about trying to figure out who the fascists and their leader are, so they can be shot as soon as possible.

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I bought Super Dungeon Explore back in January when it was on sale at Amazon for the ridiculously low price of £25. I was looking forward to trying a dungeon crawler after Warhammer Quest didn't stick. Though it gets really good reviews, and I really like the visual style of it, we haven't played it after the first attempt. The game took way too long, and as it only supports a few players it's been really hard to fit it in anywhere. I still have high hopes for this game, but it all depends on if I can get some of my own rules working. If so, I want to grab the next version of the game, to give us loads more heroes to choose from.

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A strange game called Nuns On The Run was another game I bought. This game's concept is really interesting, but the execution of it doesn't quite work. It really needs everyone to know what they are doing and to pay full attention, as the hidden movement of the game can make it awkward to help players who aren't sure what they're doing. The game board itself is also really dark, prompting me to work on a digital version of the board, which you can preview below. I'm hoping to make it so that you can click on a location and it shows all the other locations that are in line of sight. My ultimate dream would be to completely remake the game digitally, so that we could play it using laptops, tablets or phones, but I don't think I quite have that skill.

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One of our favourite games has been the monster-bashing mayhem that is King Of New York. This supports 6 players (though we've poked at it so that we can play with 8), and involves players picking a giant monster with which to stomp around New York and smack the other monsters in the face.

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We've tried a few other games for lots of players, even mixing two versions of Cluedo together so we could play with 10 players, which was crazy. The most recent game we've played is a really old one called Buck Rogers: Battle For The 25th Century, which is kind-of a mix of a board game and a wargame. It's got some good ideas, but it certainly has the feel of an old game. We have not yet tried the advanced rules though, which might spice it up a bit.

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In recent months I've been convinced to pick up the brush once more, as in March we started playing Blood Bowl again. Though our last game was in June, I've somehow managed to continue my sporadic efforts, and I finally finished my Dark Elf team yesterday. Next plans are to update the humans, paint their ogre, then paint the Chaos minotaur. That will give me 6 fully painted teams. Seeing as I started playing Blood Bowl in 1994, this means my other 4 teams should be fully painted by some time in 2030...

A few years back we were really into playing Blood Bowl, enough so that I even made my own board to play on called The Stompin' Ground. All these years have passed and that board has never even been used, as I was always really unhappy with it.

After three years away from the game, new interest has been forming, and preparations are now complete for the continuation of season 6. So that we do not have to use my old original Blood Bowl board, I have finally gone back to the Stompin' Ground to make it usable at last.

Firstly, I had to do something about the crappy and almost sandpaper-esque grass mat that I had used previously. Slapping a nice thick coat of static grass over the top of it has taken away its roughness. I'm not so scared about using painted minis on it any more.

After that, the grid needed re-painting, as it was really hard to see. I think I found the exact locations of most of the crosses, but I guessed for some of the more hidden ones, and they are probably slightly out of place. But never mind. It's still a lot better than it was.

I also had to remake the scoreboard areas, as a lot of the paint and glue had peeled off, making it look very untidy. I've contructed the new ones in a different way to minimize that problem in the future.

It's not that great, but I'm happy to use it at last. Hopefully, the little 6-team league we've arranged will begin soon, and some stompin' will finally happen on the Stompin' Ground.

Unfortunately we failed to continue our interest in developing the 40K-S ruleset, though to be honest it was nearly there the last time we had some games and probably won't take much more effort to finish when we get back into it.

Our interest these last few weeks has all been about an old game that nevertheless is fairly new to me - Warhammer Quest. I had only ever played once before, which must have been at least a decade ago, and our party was wiped after just four board sections. How hard it seemed, and how little I knew of the rules, always left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth and I never had much interest in trying it again or learning it properly. I was always much more motivated to play the games I already knew the rules to such as Blood Bowl or Epic.
Wanting to keep the gaming wheels turning I have however started to get into it as it seems it's the only game Scoob wants to play at the moment.

To try it out we did a series of four games, of which we only managed to complete the first one, and the fourth of which led to the deaths of two of our four characters. Again the difficulty and the surprisingly long time it takes to finish a game have annoyed me a little. But Scoob assures me once the characters are levelled up a bit it becomes much more fun. So rather than quit or start again, we have decided to keep the two survivors and ramp things up even more, by switching to a 6-man party. I've bought some new Reaper Bones models rather than use the old Warhammer models that I had been using, but they've proven a bit troublesome to both prep and paint. Due to the very flexible plastic they are made of, some of the models arrived badly bent, and I've had to try reshaping them using boiling water. But still some problems remain.

On the painting side, you can tell there's a lack of detail compared to the original metal versions, and at some points I'm having trouble knowing where one colour should end and another begin.
It seems the only thing I have managed to do with little trouble over these last few weeks is print off some new, larger rooms for the game, to allow for the bigger party and the extra monsters that will be needed. I actually made most of the rooms myself which was pretty cool to do.

One of the other things that annoys me with the game is the fact you have to roll the dice for the monsters, either rolling them against yourself or against your team mates. So along with the new models and dungeons we are preparing, another thing I wanted to do was make some random dice rollers. Now the computer will roll against us and I'll feel less of a dick for rolling all those sixes against Scoob.

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In Blood Bowl news, I finally got around to trying to turn Tifa into Bertha with an old Warhammer model's cloak and a whole load of green stuff. She looks absolutely shite, but I'm no sculptor and I've done the best I can. Hopefully some paint will help her fit in with the other models somewhat.

I've also had a lot of trouble undercoating Impact's Amazon team. These ladies are made of the same Trollcast Resin that the Sarcos team are made of, which gave me no trouble at all. Though I prepped them exactly the same with the soap and toothbrush scrub recommended for such models, the white Halford's spray I tried just flaked off them almost immediately. So I had to scrub them all again, and assumed it was the spray that was at fault. However, I then bought some Army Painter white spray, after being very impressed with their blue a few months back. But still the same problem persisted. I would say that the Army Painter spray flaked off even easier that the Halford's spray, and once again they had a scrub to remove the paint. You can see on the picture below that very little of the spray managed to stick after a gentle scrub.

In the end I've had to paint Skull White onto them with a brush, which seems to have stuck fine. I have no idea what was going on there.
Overall very disappointed with that Army Painter white, as it has laid down a fairly rough texture on the new Reaper models as well, making it even harder to paint them.

Though I wasn't planning on buying any more stuff, I couldn't help but round my Blood Bowl teams up to 10 (should not have made it 9 with those Lizardmen I tell ya) with the purchase of Impact's Amazon team and a Willy Ramtut star player, who looks freaking bad ass. I went looking for a good model for Bertha Bigfist, as I like the idea of a female Ogre star player, but all the ones I could find looked either too pathetic or were far too large. I'm wondering whether my old Tifa keyring can be converted up, but that would require skill which I don't have. But she is scaled quite perfectly for the task...