Charge of the Light Brigade!

Game three... not as many pictures, since it was mostly 3 Thunderfire cannons ignoring cover every turn.  Remove minis, repeat.

It was a really nice looking board, though, with a mat that matched the terrain perfectly!

All set up, looking for some action.

Had to get all the way across the board, so I had anything that could move quickly on the right flank...

They could move faster, however, with a pair of drop pods.  How I long for my old 4th edition Demonhunters.  Would have been an interesting 'welcome committee' waiting for them :-)

The only action of note was Mogul Kamir leading the wolf riders to victory over the scouts in the speeders, with a little help from Saint Morrigan.

I actually did kill a lot of stuff from the Smurfs.  Probably more than in any other game.  I think just about all of their mobile units were gone...

Then onto game four, the Tide Changes...

Hey, that's MY statue...

So, we continue with game two... the inter-family Guard spat.  This particular Inquisitor had proven troublesome to the Sisters... so it was determined that he should feel the wrath of the living Saint.  Curse him and his little dog!!

Here's what was waiting for him.  Lady Chenkov and her conscripts, as well as Saint Morrigan.

I had no pie template weapons in my list, but for one brief shining moment, I did.  This pie represents a shoot down of the one flyer I saw all weekend.

Perhaps the snow was pretty deep, since it did not crash hard enough to kill all that many Guard...

Moments before impact.  INCOMING!

And now for the Death of a Salesman.  One who was peddling a false brand of Inquisition thought.

I learned the hard way that my Sisters should have brought better snowshoes if they were going to be more heavily armored than their Guard allies.  How else do you explain all the results of 1 or 2 on difficult terrain tests?

It was nice to see the all plasma Leman Russ in action!!  Even though it was pointing at me in the distance...

And here's what everyone was fighting over.  A statue of the Living Saint.

Towards the end of this game, I had started to realize the futility of using the ADL, or any cover for that matter.  So, I decided to reach out and touch someone.

It almost worked, as a secondary objective was to control terrain pieces with troops (or use denial units).  We only played to turn 4... with more time, some of these units could have started eating up the Guardsmen.

Such as this example, where Saint Morrigan tore wide swaths through the Misguided Guard single handed.

This wider view shows you the scale of the scrum on the center.  Mogul Kamir had driven his unit of Rough Riders all around the board to assault that Leman Russ.  Many penetrating this were made on rear armor in assault, but rolling '1's on damage tables does not work so well :-)

You can see that I am trying to get as many squads into those woods as possible.  On the other hand, they were mysterious woods with lots of Angry Birds inside that would pecj you to death if you disturbed them.

The conclusion.  The Guard won.  Just the wrong one, infortunately.

Let the games begin

As some of you already know, there was this small matter of the tournament yesterday.

Many of you also know that I have never been a fan of 6th edition, and I become less so every time I play it.  Yesterday was a confirmation of why I look to play other games instead. :-)

However, the games needed to be played, and those newly painted minis had to get some action!!!!!

The first game was against a top 16 player, who had a high powered eldar/DE list.  This is where I would learn about the dreaded triple play of re-roll misses, re roll saves, and deny all cover.  It would make for a very long day, and potentially cookie cutter games...

At least I got to set up the ADL! :-) never got much use out of it though, as it would turn out.

I knew I had done a lot of minis, but seeing them in one mass like this actually scared me quite a bit!  Yikes!  Who was insane enough to paint all those?  That guy needs help.

As you can imagine, the Brookfield Zoo arrived quickly.  With all the re-rollable saves, it was not hard to arrive mostly intact.

Holy smokes!  At the walls!  Not to worry... Sergeant McGerggar stands proud at the gate...

Then there were less Highlanders.

Girl Power!  Saint Morrigan leads the Seraphim in a valiant counterstrike!

Then they all went away.  Rinse and repeat.

The second game was bound to be a donnybrook... a throw down between Guard/Inquisition and Guard/Inquisition!!!  We just had to find out whose methods would triumph.

All the troops set up in the snow.  We did have close to 100 inches this winter, after all.  Get out your snowshoes!

It really was fun and satisfying to see everything set up on the table like this,

More Guard!  And they brought giant rockets...

Student body right.  Getting whacked behind a wall that seemed to be invisible, with all the psychic aided twin liked weapons and no cover saves.  So, might as well start moving out.   Terrain pieces were an important objective here.

This pesky guy had been a thorn in the side of the Sisters, so he would have to be dealt with...

So, would the Sisters and their Highland Guard succumb to frostbite?  Would they withstand the constant barrage of missiles?

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion.

Leaping ahead...

I realize that this is leaping out of sequence, but the camera that has the images of the roof construction is in the parking lot right now!

So, you get treated to the first images of the army and completed board together!

Actually, this was my first view of it as well, since I had to paint one of the squads from 2:30 this morning until 6:30 am... that was very rough, and very frantic!  There was a point where I really thought it was not going to work out...

Somehow I was able to stick with it, and keep pressing ahead no matter what.  I am on hour 53 with just 2 hours sleep, so this post will be mostly just pictures :-)

I was so rewarding to see it all together!  This project in particular was very daunting, given all the other mayhem going on around it.

I was also nice for Victoria to see it just before the first round was to begin.  Many thanks to her and Mr. Justin for helping make it all possible!

Thanks to Cathy, Ray, Rich, Jon, Caius, Domus, Marty, Dennis and many others for giving me so much help in so many ways.  This was the one project that had to succeed, regardless of physical and mental costs :-)

Thanks to everyone for stopping by with kind words... and votes as well!!!

Yes, I love my new cart!  It made it incredibly easy to move everything around!

The windows had just the blue glow I was looking for with the LED lights!  Yes!!!!

Let there be light!

OK!  On to the windows... the key element to the entire structure.  Originally, I was going to paint them all with a special paint on acetate, but time would not allow for that.

Plan B was the only thing I could think of, and that was printing them out on inkjet transparencies.

Fortunately Ray (of Offworld Designs fame) had some sheets, and he sent them home with Cathy

I manipulated as many as I could in Photoshop to make more unique windows.  I didn't want to repeat the same one over and over again!

Here's one of the printed sheets.  I have to say, the old Epson 1280 did a decent job with them!

The the hard part of attaching the 40+ windows began!!

I was lucky that a small amount of wood glue was enough to hold them in place.  I didn't want to risk super glue fogging up the plastic sheets, as happens with canopy windows.

I was also glad that I had done all the walls in sections.  It would have been brutal to glue them in reaching through the columns, etc.

Working on the upper level pieces!

Shiny!

The blue glow of Chartres was just what I was after!!!!

It got a little tedious after so many windows, but it was worth it in the end.

The upper levels rise!

Now some interior shots...

A few of the columns in place!