Grim Harvest

 o/ 

Wow!

While playing Battletech at the FLGS there other day, there was another game in progress that I could not  resist taking pics of. One of the guys there is a 'professional pirate' he even has business cards!

 Seriously, he travels up and down the eastern seaboard visiting historic sites, museums and schools giving talks on the life of a pirate in full costume. He told us that he will even appear in a forthcoming episode of Expedition Unknown later this spring on the Discovery channel!

Adam Marrow, the game's creator himself. Note, all of the unit cards, instruction booklets, were full color and high quality prints. 

Anyway, Adam is developing his own miniature game called Grim Harvest and the game these photos came from was 'playtest #22'. All of the minis & terrain were 3D printed at the FLGS, and painted in the 'past month or two' (seriously, wtf?). Jake (who co-owns the FLGS) said their first playtest game about a month ago used boxes and a 'janky looking house print' for terrain. In that short span of time  Adam's creation has progressed to this! 

Jake at the shop said (quote) I can't believe I printed that, it certainly didn't look like that when he  picked it up from me!

The game itself is a fantasy, cooperative survival game of some sort. I don't know anything beyond that other than to say that visually it looks amazing!!!

No Ewoks, I checked.

I thought the castle was from Tabletop World, but it was also 3D printed.

Mordheim anyone?

I really wanted to take this home, not that I have a place for it.

No idea who was NPC and who was a player character (if any).

Another badass looking mini.

 I believe he is aiming for Kickstarter, so I will be sure to post about it when it goes live. May try to get in a playtest game or two as well!

Star Schlock Astro-Guard

Psst: Did you hear that?

Hear what...?

(slight pause)...that. Better go check it out... 

The squad as a whole.

The guy with the red striped helm is the Squad sergeant/leader.

Judging by these sculpts, the sculptor apparently likes his women petite and leggy. 

The squad ID numbers are on the backs of their helmets. 

One of these is not like the others...

There are 10 unique sculpts so that there are no duplicates within each squad. However I grabbed two of the same and as such they have different numbers on them. The second set of 'twins' in the back will get the same treatment whenever I paint the 2nd squad. 

This marks the first full squad complete for me in 2022. I batch painted these which isn't much fun though is effective, and cranked them out over the course of two days. The last two days of my 'Rona quarantine in fact (the bofors turret in my prior post was also mostly a quarantine project). 

Of course I only started painting on all of these once I returned to the realm of the living. Usually I hear folks complaining that towards the end of their quarantines that they're bored out of their minds. I'd imagine that most mini painters like myself instead find themselves being rather productive.  

Sweep & clear in progress. 

I got these minis plus a 2nd squad along with almost as many robots, which sorta look like kitchen accessories with legs (think free roaming coffee grinders), out of the Star Schlock Kickstarter a little ways back. These have a bit of an old school Imperial Guard feel and I painted them to suit rather than the garish colors seen in the KS itself. 

Sergeant and the lasgun support trooper.

Interestingly, these came with 20mm bases, and I based everything on those aside from the 2 support weapon troopers per squad which are on 25mm bases (one of which was by necessity). As such these guys (and gals) now work perfectly in my cavern terrain, with only the support troopers having to stick to the wider corridors/caverns. I think that's a bit representative of their weapon's unwieldiness in tight quarters.  

Best not stop and smell those alien flowers, they're likely toxic!

The squad sergeant (denoted by the red stripe on his helmet) and 7 other basic grunts are only armed with pistols, with the support troops having a lasgun and grenade launcher equivalents. Thus I figure they're essentially Redshirts an 'away team' sent to a planetary surface, or an asteroid mining facility or whatever to investigate...something. 

The two likely heading to their doom that were in the first pic (and of the 'in action' pics, this one is my fav!). 

My buddy Hoss is a fan of this mini line and is wanting to try Stargrave. I'm guessing these guys along with my cavern terrain will be excellent for trying that game out (once I refamiliarize with the rulebook...).   

Another group shot, looking a bit more dynamic than they did on my kitchen counter top!

Gue'vesa (aka: Humans for the Greater Good)

 o/

My Heresy Lab Kickstarter minis arrived this weekend, and I'm quite pleased with them. Hell, I wish I'd gotten more! This KS finished up in early December of last year, with an ETA of March/April of this one. Considering that (1) it's a Kickstarter and (2) Covid, it's a pleasant surprise that they were only delayed a few weeks. 

These came with 32mm bases, however my Tau infantry are all on 25mm bases. As such I had to scrounge up some 25mm bases, all of which had already been used previously. 

The casts are crisp, clean and of superior quality and came with only one complaint: one mini had an unfortunately located gate on the helm. It's removal took with it the raised helmet stripe his/her companions have.

The full squad.

These will serve as my Fem Fa'Tau garrison army's pathfinder squad (I say garrison as it's almost bereft of heavy weaponry). Armed almost entirely with small arms and accompanied by a lone Piranha, they're basically a force that was left behind to hold recently captured ground whilst the frontline continued to advance. 

This Xenos species is as-yet unknown to the Imperium. Whilst this rarely seen species (known to the Tau as the Aww-Zees) is of little threat to the Imperium (despite that this one appears to be carrying some sort of rail rifle), the fact that yet another species has thrown it's lot in with the Greater Good should be cause for alarm...

In total (now that these have arrived), the army clocks in at a little over 500pts. It's probably a pushover, though I'll still field it as-is at some point.

The Jasper

o/

Late last year My Beloved Wolfy and I made a rather expensive (for us) Impulse buy, and on a Kickstarter no less. We bought ourselves a new dining room table. Most people right now are thinking so? That's gaming related how? Well. It was a Jasper, meaning its not only a dining room table, but a game table as well!

WIP: this is as far as I got Friday evening before calling it a night.

Unlike most kickstarters that I've backed, this one only ran about a month late on the estimated delivery time. Part of that delay was due to feedback on a short run of prototype tables, several of which were damaged in shipping. Resulting in a redesign of their packaging. Yeah, I'm okay with that sort of delay. From what I understand, as soon as the project was funded (in approx. 9 minutes!), mass production started!

3.5' x 5.5' of no dice rolling off of this table's surface gaming space!

The tables' manufacturer is a small custom game table manufacturer in Jasper Missouri. Previously, they built the Duchess game table which I would have liked to have gotten, but couldn't afford at the time. Their other tables are laughably out of our reach, but we splurged on the Jasper.

You'd never know this was game table if we didn't tell you.

Aside from a few inquiries from Wolfy along the lines of where the fuck is MY table?!?, the wait for this KS was mercifully short. It took a week or so to find a home for our old dining room table (Florida, though we're only trucking it as far as Knoxville). We disassembled that, and I lugged its dreadfully heavy parts into other rooms for temporary storage. Thus, with our dining room cleared, I started assembly Friday night. 

Removable cup holder optional location #1: on each corner of the short table edges. 

The instructions were nigh on fool-proof...ha! I bested that theory in no time at all! Mistake #1: 'No honey I don't need any help, I can do it myself.' Followed immediately thereafter by mistake #2: trying (in futility) to get the incorrect bolts into what I thought were their allotted holes. 20 wasted minutes later....and I realized my mistake and it was fairly smooth sailing from there. 

Removable cup holder optional location #2: the middle of the long table edges. Regardless they don't ever need to be on the gaming surface!

Plenty of room for an X-Wing map,
whilst having a 1/3 of the table top for lists, tokens, etc. 

Well, enough rambling: its built! Looks great! is solid as hell, and the finish matches our chairs perfectly! Neverness is slated to come over this evening for the table's inaugural game. So look for a battle report from one of us soon.

My never used Kill Team map. Could probably move that table section to the center and still have 2 side-by-side games going!

a standard Battletech map sheet is about the size of the KT map, but even my over-sized hax map fits perfectly (something I made sure to of when I printed it off some months back).

After some deliberation, we rotated the table 90 degrees for a better fit for the room. Here it is, all set up for 40k vs. Neverness who is currently enroute.