A Little Progress on Lots of Things

My wife and son are on Spring Break, so I took a few days off to spend time with them and get some things done around the house. In between I managed to squeeze in a little time on wargaming things, but it's been so long since I've had a chance to tackle any projects I've been jumping from one to another.

My son was eager to "paint some little men". I bought some spare figures from Risk Godstorm for him a year ago which he's been painting while I work on my own figures.

I'm looking forward to playing some more multi players games of Hail Caesar but I don't have enough command bases to give each players a general. I got base coats on a few ancient commanders by Crusader and Warlord Games.

Giant Robots

I've also been tinkering with a sci fi game and got a little more done with the figures for it.  I've always had a weak spot for giant robots, having been raised on Transformers and Robotech.  I played quite a bit of Battletech and dabbled with the Clix version, Heavy Gear, Gear Krieg and taken a look every other giant robot game I could find. One of the things I like about "giant robots" was the gradual destruction of the mech. Rather than the more abstract degradation in other genres (an engine hit on a tank or ship for example), losing arms or legs on a robot is more visceral, but avoids the "ick factor" from the same effect if they were Roman gladiators.

I'm also not a fan of the extensive record keeping on separate sheets of paper for miniature games. For this sci fi game I'm working up I was hoping to keep all record keeping on the miniature itself. The larger 10mm and 15mm scale mechs available from the Clix version of Battletech and various sci fi lines are large enough that I think magnetic markers could be applied directly to the figure. Did your mech take a hit to the left arm? Slap a smoke marker on there. Did it get its arm destroyed? Rip off the crippled limb.

I've worked up a few demo figures cobbled together from Clix figures and EM4 generic robots, but after putting together some smoke markers to represent hits I'm not sure my cunning plan is feasible.

I tried a few techniques to turn hamster bedding into smoke markers, but I'm not too thrilled with them. I'm going to try creating some smoke markers from Woodland Scenics clump foliage  but the mechs might be too small to handle multiple markers. The magnetized limbs work pretty well, so there might be a way to make this work, but for now I'm a bit stuck.

GamingTable

With our impending move to a new house, I'm also planning on getting a custom wargame table. I put together a Pinterest board to collect ideas. Other than Geek Chic there don't appear to be any other manufacturers for wargaming specific furniture, so I might need to hire a carpenter to build the table I have in mind. Geek Chic is still good for ideas, and if I had a spare $15,000 I'd probably just buy one of their high end tables.