2011 Golden Skulls Painting Challenge

This weekend the L.A. Battle Bunker held a "Hobby-Pocalypse" - a non-stop 33 hour event filled with painting competitions, mega-battles and mini-tournaments.  The festivities included their 2nd annual Gold Skulls Painting Challenge, the store's own version of the Golden Deamon.

Last year my Slann won 1st place for Fantasy Large Model and my Saurus hero won 3rd place for single fantasy figure.  This year I entered my Stegadon in the Vehicle/Monster category.  This year's competition was much tougher.  I took 3rd place after thinking I wouldn't even make the first cut.  Apparently, their was some heated debate about this particular category amongst the staff judging the event!

The staff put on a great event and it was fun to talk shop with all the great miniature painters.  You can check more coverage of the weekend at the store's facebook page.  I managed to get a few clear shots of some of the awesome models:

New Plastic Saurus Hero Picture

I'm usually not in the business of posting about new and upcoming releases (yes, I did it for the Tomb Kings, but that was to prove a point about the direction 8th edition is going) but for the first time in a long time, we're getting a new Lizardmen model:

Courtesy of BoLS

The new plastic characters that we've been seeing over the past few months are very exciting, even if they lack any options.  I like this guy as he fits in with the style of the army without looking like a re-sculpted Temple Guard model.  I've been wanting to paint an albino Lizardmen hero for some time now, so this model will be the perfect opportunity.

According to BoLS, this will be released mid-September for $13.25.

A Quick and Dirty Finecast Review

Prior to our last big game of Warhammer Fantasy, my friend Justin picked up a Citadel Finecast Rock Lobba to add to his goblin army.  He just bought it the night before and he needed to assemble it before we headed down to the Battle Bunker to, um, do battle.  I haven't bought a Finecast model myself so I was interested to check out the assembly process.

Assembly

Night Goblin Theory-Hammer: the Many Layers of the Onion

My best-warhammer-buddy Justin's Night Goblins and my Lizardmen have been seeing a lot of each other on the tabletop.  We've also been discussing ways to make the goblins more effective.  His army is not intended to be a super competitive face smasher, but it still needs to function well.  The army is primarily composed of big blocks of night goblins with fanatics, lead by Skarsnik.  In support he usually brings war-machines, trolls, an Arachnarock Spider or giants.  There are no orcs in the army, only night goblins and supporting monsters.  That's the way he likes it, nothing but sneaky gits that often squabble and occasionally kill each other.

After we exchanged several e-mails about goblin tactics, I came to the conclusion that to win with a night goblin army you have to think like a night goblin - i.e.sneaky bastard!  My theory is that the army needs to operate in layers.  The goblins won't win many straight, stand up fights against another army by going at them head on.  They need to whittle their opponents down so that when it comes to gettin' down to the nitty-gritty (close combat), the enemy is weakened enough to where the gobbos can do some damage.  It was as if orc gods Gork & Mork (or perhaps FAAC and WAAC) had come into alignment!