Monsters, Mutants and Mayhem

Back on the Crusading front, I’ve been working away at some new figures and ideas. With the number of dragons I’ve somehow accumulated, I thought it’d be a good idea to mount a bad guy on one. I gave him an overly sized masking tape axe, the sign of a true bad guy. Textured and […]

Speed Painting Adeptus Mechanicus

I suppose for some folks out there ‘cheap’ might not necessarily be about money, but has more to do with time spent. On the odd occasion that I build and paint something from Games Workshop, I normally go for the ‘cheap’ speedy option. My Thousand Sons tutorial is one of the most popular pages on […]

Putting My Money Where My Mouth is and Working on Some Dinosaurs

I’ve done this before, but after much changing around in my hobby room I’ve misplaced my previously painted Dinos, and sparked on by my £5 wargaming challenge post I though I’d have a go again. I went slightly over budget (£5.99, forgive me, I’ll say five ‘Hail Featherstones’), and nabbed a bag of small Dinos […]

A Saturday Morning Cartoon SKIRMASH

Cue the power metal intro as colourful heroes and villains dart across your 14” CRT TV screens. Three Dice of Power have fallen from the gods above! Heroes and villains rush into the bleak valley to claim them. Vlad the Vampire darts forward, screeching like an animal, heading for the central Dice. Polar the Bear […]

The Big Battle

So I finally managed to get my new armies to the table and let them have a go at each other! The ‘Good Guys’ were as follows: That’s 5 Templars, 5 Handgunners, 5 Grenadiers, 5 Shining Templars, 2 Nephilim and a Warpriest. The ‘Bad Guys’: 5 Devildogs, 10 Wraiths, 5 Hellknights, 5 Sauracens, a Golem, […]

A Cheap Wargaming Challenge

With Games Workshop (or are they just Warhammer now?) putting up prices again, hobby spaces online are flooded with negative comments. Considering Warhammer figures are already overpriced, you can understand the complaints. But this blog isn’t about expensive hobbying, it’s about doing it on the cheap. So here’s a question, how cheap can it be? […]

A Necromancer and a Golem

I must be tapping into something here, it is odd for a wargamer as stricken with butterfly-ism as badly as I am to find as much continued focus on a single project as this. Although truth be told, my childhood collection of Britain’s ‘Knights of the Sword’ bought from Kettering’s town market may have something […]

Good vs Evil

Progress has been slow again this last week, mostly due to me coming down with man flu. However I have finished a surprising amount off considering how bad I’ve felt. I spoke last time about expanding my forces and expand I did! Working first on my evil forces, as stated before I rebased and touched […]

Expanding My Crusade

I’m still playing with my Templars and horrors despite a slow hobby week. As you’ll notice the demonic forces gained a dragon, a heavy hitter to counter that Nephilim. Unfortunately for the demons however, the Templars have brought another Nephilim to bear. This one particularly penitent: I hope to get him painted over the next […]

The Holy Abomination

‘There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.’ Genesis 6:4 I’ve been having fun thinking about the Crusade my Templars […]

Templars vs Sauracens

I’ve had a couple of bags of the ‘bad’ knights for a while. I’ve used up a few for Wartomata in Deathzap: But that uses up very few, and I hate seeing poor quality toy soldiers go to waist. I imagined a portal to Hell or a parallel dimension opening up during the Crusades. So […]

Deathzap 3 – 2nd Edition

Deathzap 3 was probably my favourite of the ‘simpler’ versions of the game. I like to imagine it as that easy to learn, difficult to master type thing, but you’ll always have rose tinted glasses when it comes to your own games. I played a game this morning of the latest version I could find, […]

Trash Nurglings

Babies abound on Amazon. So I bought some, these babies in particular: A day later I had 90 for £5.99. I was hoping they’d be large enough to play the part of Plague Bearers, however they were about half the size I needed (although two in a trench coat might do). So I settled on […]

Baby Dinosaurs

After the success of my Porridge Baby, I wondered if it would be possible to make an entire Nurgle Daemons army out of discount toys and cheap Amazon purchases. So I turned to Beasts of Nurgle and/or Chaos Spawn. Naturally I bought a bag of baby heads and a bag of dinosaurs. Luckily they were […]

Cheap Box City in a Box

Terrain is a struggle for any wargamer, and especially for wargamers as eclectic as me. It’s not really possible to collect terrain for every era and fantasy world in every scale from 2mm to 54mm. My biggest issue is the space required, so I came up with a potentially useful solution. Children’s stacking boxes can […]

England Invaded

My attempts at sticking to a few things this year are once again frustrated. Maybe a better New Year’s resolution is to not restrict yourself to one or a few projects at all, but just let yourself go nuts. While putting some much needed washing in the machine, I saw a A5 rulebook jammed in […]

The Saga of Porridge Baby Part 2

I’m kind of blow away by how well this has worked. When I was looking at expanding foam splatted on pizza boxes in the back garden I was cautiously optimistic, but I couldn’t have imagined things were going to end up. So from where we left off, I spent a lot of time plugging gaps […]

The Saga of Porridge Baby

Bolstered by my recent success in building a Dreadnought for my Death Guard army, I set about turning another idea of mine into reality. I felt convinced that expanding foam was a great way to build your own Great Unclean One. Putting down rough shapes onto cardboard was where I started. Not having used expanding […]

Still SKIRMASHing

I think it’s important to know with a project when you’re done. Sometimes a painting is finished before you choose to stop, and the paint you added after that point only served to make things worse. The same goes for miniature painting. Films and books can sometimes be over-written, too clever, too well structured that […]

Making Your Own Nurgle Dreadnought

Last week a friend and I finally got a game in of Grimdark Future. Wanting to try something different, I pulled out my Death Guard army. I’d long forgotten how much I loved this force, and after a cheeky victory, I was itching to add more. Key to my force were two Dreadnoughts, and I […]

The Small Skirmish Obsession

So I’ve recovered from the plague, and in a post fevered state threw together yet another small skirmish game. I suppose you can blame this on the fact that Darkfell was really designed to be a Mordheim replacement and for some reason I’ve been playing it with superhero-ish figures, the two just don’t quite fit […]

Deciphering Darkfell

All the feedback for WOTH was fantastic and I’m looking at doing a post soon trying all the different options and seeing the pros and cons. If you’re wondering what I’m on about, the post and comments are here: https://deathzap.co.uk/2024/01/10/deceptively-difficult-deployment/ So in taking a small break from WOTH to gather data, and to come back […]

Deceptively Difficult Deployment

I’ve been working on my first version of WOTH (War of the Hominids), a simple game where you take 6 apemen and make them fight your opponent’s 6 apemen. It’s all lobbing rocks and ripping arms off. I’ve mostly cracked the core of the game, with a small niggle regarding ‘objectives’ (if apemen even have […]

Returning to Darkfell

Darkfell is my own Mordheim, with a sort of ‘anything goes’ vibe. Medieval armour, 20th century guns, magic, alchemy and cyborgs. I’ve posted a few times on Darkfell before, and much like Deathzap written several rule sets for the setting. The last rule set I put together I called ‘The Wager’, and you can find […]

Play testing Ghost Legions

Christmas has been extremely busy and I’ve had little to no time to get to the desk, however I have managed a lot of theorising and some play testing. It’s all very much in the early stages, but I’m figuring out a solid core system for expansion: SETUP The game is played on a 60x60cm […]