Painting Last Night on Earth with Nigel

As good as the figures that come with Last Night on Earth are, they are unfortunately unpainted and come as plain grey (for the Heroes ) and green/brown (for the Zombies). Steve had done some attempts at painting his Hero figures and Nigel asked if I was interested in getting together one day over the Christmas Break to paint our own figures; seeing as he had the Growing Hunger and I had the Hero Pack each as well as the base game. Nigel had found a great close picture of the figures painted in lovely detail as we set out with our respect Games Workshop paints to do as good a job. Unfortunately my Skull White had dried up and I had to get one from Andy, this was for undercoating.

Nigel used a white spray for his undercoat, which came out perfectly, whilst mine was very disappointing because the new Skull White was very thin and needed several coats. The paint volume had also gone down and annoyingly, a new lid type is used that is flip type and flips shut almost as soon as you have opened it.

Nigel and I with our lack of practise managed to get some base colours and skin tones done, but we found it very relaxing and enjoyable - I compared it to two guys sitting fishing :-)

Nigel emailed later about looking for another source of paints and said he found some at a company called Wayland Games made by a company that had dealings with Games Workshop in the past to make paints using the same paint mixtures and colours as the GW set. Sounds good.

Last piece of Memoir 44 products bought - Breakthrough maps!

The Breakthrough Maps for Memoir '44 have been on the shelf at Andys Battlequest Games for quite some time now - and each time I have gone into the shop I have picked it up and had a look and put it down again. In this period of Christmas sales and being silly with money, I picked it up and decided to buy it - I spend £50 a week on petrol just to drive back and forth from work yet I fretting for about a year over £28 for the maps. The maps themselves are ENORMOUS and cover a large part of our lounge floor, so a table will be no use. There are two maps in all, with two sides - snow, green fields, desert and beach. Plus it comes with a set of large scale games that make use of the maps. Now I have all of the Memoir '44 items so I had better start putting them to use!

Another game of Ticket to Ride India - beaten hands down!

Anita and I had another go at the amazing India map for Ticket to Ride: India/Swiss - again I was beaten hands down with Anita getting almost double my score!!

More Last Night on Earth and Memoir '44!

Today I picked up two more items for some of our base games - the 2nd Campaign Book for Memoir'44 and the Survival of the Fittest scenario box for Last Night on Earth. These are two great addons that are in no means small fry. The 2nd Campaign book concentrates more on the Far East campaigns, the Japanese invasion of South-East Asia and the subsequent American Campaign in the Pacific. There is also a campaign for the breakout of Normandy and another for the Fall of Poland. There is also an Air Aces campaign too.

The Survival of the Fittest box contains a whole bunch of new missions and punch out tokens for LNOE. It also includes a great sounding mission for barricading up buildings (including barricade tokens) and one for going out for supplies whilst fighting off the zombie horde! New weapons, cards, zombie and hero cards too.

Christmas pressies and Christmas Gaming!

Merry Christmas!! And happy boxing day! Great family Christmas all round with everyone getting something nice that they always wanted - as it is every year; we get one big present each and then lots of little ones. And my big present was Railways of the World! A massive re-imagining of Railroad Tycoon that uses a huge Eastern Seaboard map of the United States and one smaller one of Mexico. The game also contains huge "empty city" markers, lots of plastic trains, millions of hexagonal track markers, oodles of money, game cards and other play pieces. You just get loads of stuff in your huge box.

The basic aim of the game is that dotted around the map are coloured cities marked with a number and the game comes with a large number of little coloured wooden cubes representing different goods, oil, wood, steel etc. Each city has a number of random cubes placed on it as indicated by the number on the city and then the idea of the game is to simply raise money to place track linking cities and delivering a coloured cube from one city to another city of that colour. The game is based on Railroad Tycoon which in turn is based on the computer game of the same name and this is exactly what happens in the computer game.

Players can also upgrade engines to take goods further, score more points and get more money for delivering those goods. We haven't played it yet, but I have been through the very short looking rules (there is a short set for the game and then a short set for each map - there are also other maps you can get, Europe, Western USA, England and Wales etc.) and it does look great and easy to play yet very in-depth.

Looking forward to my first play against Anita!!

Also on Boxing Day we all had a family game of 7 Wonders - our family favourite.