Gorram's Grand Army Project

The last few weeks have been a little more scattershot in terms of what I’ve been working on. I have a secret project that’s taking most of my hobby time but it is feeling a bit sluggish at the moment. With a four day weekend, I finally managed to get my first game of Epic booked in so to shake things up a bit, I thought I’d try and get through the rest of my army.

The small second wave of models and the first book expansion were released in February so managed to get two boxes of space marine support units to add in. I also still had a whole bunch of vehicles to paint up so I spent Friday getting everything primed and ready to go.

One of the few benefits to crippling social anxiety that I have been developing for the last few years is that the night before I know I’m going into a scary social situation, I don’t sleep. Sunday for example I was going into a new space, to meet new people, play a new opponent and a new game. Saturday night I got two hours of sleep. I did manage to paint the remaining 11 vehicles, 8 Tarantulas, 8 dreadnoughts, two Rapiers and finish six more Rhinos I needed to field a fully painted army though. Well except the decals… they didn’t seem like a great idea while sleep deprived!

My first game (and my opponent’s third) took place at one of the local club’s Sunday afternoon sessions. I haven’t been to the club since pre-Covid but given how close it is to home, I really should make more of an effort. It was a lot friendlier than I remembered from 2018/19 and there were four women in the room which I think might be the first time I’ve not been alone on that front. That might not seem like much to most people here but it genuinely made a difference to me. We also managed to find an original Titanicus box in the terrain pile with cardboard and the polystyrene buildings in it.

As to the game – it was a mess. Weirdly for a GW game, not really because of the rules, I just couldn’t keep any of it in my head and the page flipping was constant and exhausting. 24 hours later, the rulebook is still an awful mess – I don’t understand how in this day and age companies still suck at putting sections of rulebooks in a sensible order – but the game itself doesn’t feel bad. With some work on my part to remember basic traits (or create a decent cheat sheet for myself), I think it could be a lot of fun. The combat is fast and models die quickly so it feels like a heavy attrition battle. I’ll give myself a couple of weeks to read the rules and then I’ll try to get another game in. I don’t think I scared my opponent off with my incompetence…

The main other takeaway for me is that I want to get working on terrain for this scale. The club is mostly historical so there wasn’t a great selection for our purposes. I’d also like to get a table together for my own flat. I have a box of the Warcradle plastic stuff they just released but after looking at it in depth, it will actually be more expensive to fill a table with than the GW stuff. I have some resin stuff in a box somewhere that will do the job for the flat but I don’t fancy carting all of that along the road to the club (I don’t drive so my back is pretty much my only mode of transport for it). Time to go throw some more money at the Goblin of Gaming.