Song of Blades and Heroes

I have been pretty much bogged down over the summer, not much time to work on any
projects.  Well, that is not exactly true... I have been working on a commission, a very
small commission that should have only taken me a week or two,  however I seem to
have discovered the sculptors equivalent of writer's block. I have been slowly working
my way through it and I have finally almost finished it. When I have a commission under
way (even when I am procrastinating with it)  I can't work on other things,  this is the
main reason I haven't done any blogging for a couple of months.

Now that I have almost finished that project I feel ready to get back to everything.
I have managed to keep up a regular game session most weeks over the summer. We
moved on from playing Warhammer 40K and have moved into a Song of Blades and
Heroes campaign. This is the first time we have played SoBH, so we played three or four
games before getting into the full campaign. It is a really nice system, simple and easy
to pick up, but it still manages to capture the essence of the different races and fighting
styles.

Using the three expansions, Song of Gold and Darkness, Song of Wind and Water and
Song of Deeds and Glory gives a varied and interesting selection of scenarios to play
but it does mean that we need a good range of terrain and other scenic pieces to cover
everything from swamps to deserts and everything inbetween. You also need a several
statues, monuments, pentagrams and also magical terrain items.
I didn't have a great selection of fantasy terrain, in fact I didn't have a great selection
of standard terrain, whether it be trees, rivers etc., so I have been busy over the last
few weeks putting together some stands of trees and now I am working on some rivers,
swamps and other odd scenic pieces.
Once I have finished them I will put together some photos and a tutorial going over how I
have made it all.
In the meantime I will just say that Song of Blades and Heroes is a fun system that offers
simple rules and a flavoursome campaign system. It isn't perfect, but as long as you're
not looking for a seriously competitive game it is well worth a look!
One of the other players in my group, Jeff, has posted some photos of our games this
blog you can see them HERE, HERE and HERE.
 Jeff has just bought Song of Arthur and Merlin and Flying Lead, two variants on SoBH. So it will be interesting to see how they develop too...

Crowdfunding, Wolsung and Sedition Wars

I signed up to three or crowdfunding projects last year. So far they have all come good!

The two I am going to look at today are the ones I have most recently received the good for.

First off, we have Wolsung, a Steampunk Skirmish game produced by Micro Arts Studio (MAS) in Poland. The crowdfunding project was launched on Indiegogo and well exceeded they initial goal, although that compared to some of the bigger crowdfunding projects of recent months, it was still quite a modest project.

The project was set up to produce a hard-backed rulebook for a set of skirmish rules based on the popular Polish Wolsung RPG rules. However, along with the rulebook MAS also included most of their range of Wolsung figures and some really attractive laser cut buildings and scenics as part of the promotion.

Having access to a laser cutter I haven’t actually bought any laser cut stuff from anyone before, so I was quite intrigued to get my hands on some of this so that I could see just how someone else designs theirs…

I also took a fancy to quite a few of the figures. Now, if it comes down to it, I probably wouldn’t have signed up to this one if it had just been for the rulebook. I already have more than enough different Steampunk rules, but I still need some more interesting figures before I can consider starting to run a game. So I threw in my name and over the course of the promotion I increased my contribution several times.

Here is what I ended up receiving, in the parcel, late last year.

Firstly we have the rulebook and the laser cut building. The second photo shows the other two laser cut packs, a raised walkway (including the Wolsung ruler) and some market stalls.

Next up we have a faction starter set and some resin barrels/boxes. Finally the various blister packs of figures (including a couple of packs of MAS’s very nice resin bases).

 

Just yesterday I finally received the first parcel from the Sedition Wars Kickstarter project. I say finally, as I subscribed to this one back at the end of June last year and they have been promising to deliver from about September onwards… However, as the project was one of the Kickstarter runaway successes it is easy to see how the scale of production forced the delivery time back.

Sedition Wars is a board game based in the world created by Studio McVey. It features a group of human troops searching their way through a building complex and fighting a selection of mutated monsters (think Aliens meets Space Hulk). Now I can’t say much about the game mechanics yet as I haven’t had a chance to read them, however the miniatures are fantastic and the artwork on the board tiles and in the rest of the game materials is of an equal level.

This is what I got:-

Wow, what a box, UPS managed to puncture the box, but fortunately there wasn’t anything missing or damaged inside!

Not quite so impressive once out of the huge box, but for a board game it come in another very large square box… The other items here are the “freebie rewards”.

Once in the box you get a better idea of all of the contents. 50 miniatures with bases plus dice, counters, game boards etc.

I haven’t un-bagged any of the Sedition Wars miniatures yet as I really don’t want to loose any of the bits. I am clearing the current projects and then I will be spending a bit of time getting them together.

I will be spending more time on the blog looking at both of these games, as I assemble them and prepare to play.