What kind of gamer am I? Well I guess this shouldn't be a surprise....

So in my wanderings looking for some good bloggers and sites to start my other other project; aside from painting minis with my friends, I'd like to create a tabletop board game. I know, right? What the hell does that mean? I don't know exactly, but I'm going to give it the old college try.

So me being me, there's a lot of research I've been doing, and clearly a lot of opinions abound on the interwebs. I'm working through Reddit, and some blogs, but one site that I was immediately impressed with is Quantic Foundry (probably because they are social science data nerds like me). 

So I started with their original 5 minute survey on online gaming style. This is a pretty brilliant survey approach since they can collect some demographic data and then get me to answer a bunch of questions because I am motivated to see where I land and potentially learn about new games that would fit my gaming style. So here's the first set of results:

Consider me flattered :)

In another 3.5 D&D campaign (and hoping we get back to one day), I think the sense of community with my gaming group, the fact that we're a mixed age group, and that we're all pretty nice, smart people really matters. So in terms of tabletop gaming, here is how I fared...again, quite accurate, imho: 

What is really interesting is that in r/l, I'm definitely one of the least conflict averse people I know. I don't enjoy conflict for conflict's sake, but if I have to do some ass kicking, I will. And, in turn, I have had my ass kicked plenty of times, so I've learned that if you engage in conflict as a tactic or strategy, the more real world consequences it has on you and your world. I wonder if people who have to deal with conflict (physical, political, social, emotional) everyday would choose games that mimic those situations/contexts in their gaming life? 

As the chart above chart reflects, in my gaming life, I avoid conflict almost completely. For example, I never thought that PvP was fun, and backstabbing or trying to get your party members killed isn't fun either. Now I do like games where there is some social manipulation involved. Diplomacy, The Resistance and Sheriff of Nottingham are all time favorites of mine. Diplomacy is super old school - I wonder if I could talk the guys into playing it with me again one of these days? Here's a tutorial on Diplo - this is more of a reminder to me to read back up on the rulez:



Now Resistance and SoN are much newer games, and quite fun. Aside from the fact that I have finally forgiven Wil Wheaton for his TNG character AND the fact that he has turned out to be one cool-ass, very cute, middle-aged dude, I'd love to play a game of Resistance one day with my buddies, but you need a minimum of 5 players for this to work. Wesley, I mean, Wil, has a channel called TableTop on YT and he is totally "Crushing" it with 1.4 million subscribers. Ok, I'll stop with the TNG puns now. 



Ok, hope everyone has a great Monday!

How to paint 3mm war minis and mini-turtles, part 2 (of many, I suspect)

Hey all - well after a very long and busy week, I'm settling down and working on an overdue part deux of our little painting project. Now, I've been slowly checking out the amazing work of seasoned super-nerds like Tim and Curt on their blogs. Also, exciting news that my friends over at PicoArmor are starting to (finally) port their website onto a mobile friendly platform (welcome to 2013, John and Jack!!). Additionally, both of the Pico guys are going to be more media savvy and start posting some cool pics and randomness that they have been collecting over the years. I will continue to help as best I can. One of them literally just signed up for FB this past Friday. I kid you not :)

Anyways, clearly the stuff that you can see on other sites is way more advanced than what I am posting now, but I am hoping that this "how to" will provide more of the step-by-steps for novices (like me).

So where were we? Oh right...beer...waiting for our minis to dry....more beer....and now onto...

I think this turtle is overcompensating for something.

So as you can see, our little friend is NOT a tank, but like I said, we were interested in painting some other minis as well. See how he is sitting on top of a little blob of clay? Well the reason why you need the wood with all the holes and the nails with a nice flat head is because you get to take each and every mini and stick them onto the top of the nails using something called "rope caulk".

This is something you can find at any hardware store. You take little blobs and stick them on top of the nails, and then it is pretty much what you think will happen until you have a block that looks like this:

At this point, we needed to take another beer break. Everything was stuck and ready to go, so we broke out the Gesso. Nope, that isn't a new brew by Revolution or Bells, but it could be, one day. It is a type of primer that, as it dries, actually shrinks right onto the mini, giving it better definition which, at this scale, is pretty limited real estate.

The instructions I was told was, put some in a bowl, and thin with sterile water until it is the consistency of milk. Dunzo! We first did our non-3mm tanks with the pure white primer. After that, then we added a couple of drops of army green before we attacked the tanks. This is the brand of modeling paint, not the colors we used :)

So then, you take some brushes, grab yet ANOTHER beer, and start to lovingly coat all of your minis with a nice sheen of tinted Gesso! I found that dabbing my brush in once was enough for at least two tanks. That is pretty much it for this stage. They key to this stage is having some great music on (which I think we're going to have to come to some agreement on what qualifies as "great music" among the nerds) and plenty of beer and stuff. It was nice because we had just started a new Call of Cthulhu campaign and both of my teammates ended up jumping out of a second story window because they were seeing blood pools and a bed was trying to attack them. I, of course, just quietly snuck back down the stairs and ran away :)

I'm really enjoying the painting project, even though at the rate we're going, it might be another two weeks before we're back together. But it is truly fun, relaxing and, with the right nerds, highly entertaining! Cheers!