Close calls and forging ahead

Hello True Believers,

So here we are, smack dab in the middle of April. That was fast. Not that I had any goals to hit before now, but still, seems time is in a hurry to get somewhere.

Welcome to my random thoughts on gaming. I'll try to organize them a bit though.

Latest temptations from GW, Blood Bowl and Shadow Wars.
I have to say, I'm digging the new models for Blood Bowl. The orcs in particular look fantastic. In the past, I had tried Blood Bowl a few times, and even own a couple of iterations of the PC game. There is one constant with the game in that it throws me into a blind rage pretty much every time I play. Something about those darn block dice just trigger that inner barbarian. Looks fun, seems fun, going to cause me to have an aneurysm one day.
And now we have the "spiritual successor" to necromunda with the new Shadow War game. I haven't delved too much into this one. I have owned a necromunda gang since that game came out. And the whole "gang campaign" game seems like it should be fun. One thing always bothers me though, the dreaded WYSIWYG. In most cases, I'm all for it. However, in a game where a character/model may end up changing weapons several times...I can barely get the motivation to convert/paint a model once. Now you want me to cut it up after the fact just because they now have a bolter instead of an autogun?? Screw that. I get that you want to represent whether its a heavy weapon, standard, or a CC kind of model..I do. But there is no way I'm going to cut up my classic escher models just because of a gear change. So necromunda sits on the bench.

Spartan Games reaches out...to late?
So I'm a big fan of Spartan Games. I love the models they come out with. I'm not so much of a fan of the rules sometimes...and definitely the sheer amount of games they keep pushing out, each one with little support. Well it seems they are trying to right their ship and have taken a big step with reaching out to the Firestorm fans. They've laid out their internal changes and a roadmap for the future. So it's a big "wait and see" with them. I hope the community hold their feet to the fire on this. They really need to change their ways if they want any hope of winning people back.

Leading the way for Flames of War v4
So I've invested in V4. I probably should have waited to see if the community would take hold of it first, but they suckered me in with the Africa focus. So now I'm going to see if I can help this game get some local traction. I think Flames is a great game, and I'm really hoping that V4 follows in that tradition. I'm going to go digging through my collection and see what forgotten DAK models are still in blisters and boxe and start working on them. I think I have a few units that are present in 4th that I had never used before. Also, the new command cards that were talked about might prove to let me use some of those units that were left out of the book. For instance, I could see a card that lets you bring Nebels instead of the 105s. At least that is what I'm hoping for. The best part is, assembling Flames units is normally pretty easy, so I will hopefully get a few done this weekend and then can add pics later. Hold your breath for that.....heh.

'Til next time...