I recently had the great pleasure to play another game of Legions Imperialis; I’ve written about some previous games here. This time I brought what I expected to be a decidedly unbalanced and thoroughly uncompetitive, but hopefully fun and destructive, 2000pt list.
Since the start of the year I’ve been attempting to paint every day, even if only for a few minutes – and, in truth, on most days it has only been for a few minutes. But that’s fine, and I also forgive myself on the days when for one reason or another I don’t paint at all. The point is not really what I do each day; the point is building habit, and breaking down mental barriers that make me imagine things as more difficult than they really are.
Anyway! What I’ve been working on through January has been some additional detachments for my Imperial Fists. These are all units that featured in my last battle report, but at the time they were “reinforcements from allied White Scars”, i.e. primed in white and otherwise unpainted. I’m currently working on the first of two Mastodons, though today we will be looking at a Xiphon Interceptor and a trio of Kratos heavy tanks.
I left you hanging back in Orktober 2024, and for that I’m sorry. I was held hostage by my own bullshit life. The good news is I did actually finish that model; he was converted and painted that same month, and has even been entered into a couple of competitions!
Do check back on that original post if you want to learn about how this conversion was put together (it involved a lot of different resin parts, but wasn’t really all that complicated). Today I’ll mostly share a few work-in-progress photos, talk about what I remember of the painting process and the choices I made, and share a gallery of the finished model from different angles.
My partner and I have many traditions around the Christmas period. Decorating a tree; letting our cats get covered in pine needles; eating too much… the usual stuff. We also have some slightly more unusual traditions, such as hiding tonttu around the apartment for one another to find, and painting overpriced Warhammer commemorative miniatures together. Over the last five years, we’ve done Da Goff Rocker, Terminator Chaplains, and several festive versions of Da Red Gobbo and his squig, Bounca.
Da Red Gobbo is a slightly weird character for Warhammer 40,000, although that is in the context of a setting where the most famous named characters are silly shit like Ferrus Manus (cod Latin for “iron hands”, and this is the grand-daddy of the Iron Hands chapter) or Roboute Guilliman (so basically Robert Guillaume/William, or abbreviated in UK English Bob Bill). YouTuber Arbitor Ian recently did a fun video on the origin of Da Red Gobbo, who is essentially somewhere between a mythic revolutionary figure for downtrodden workers and slaves, a parody of internecine factional strife, and an anarchic Santa stand-in. And people say Warhammer 40,000 is too serious. Shout-out to the commentor who dubbed him “Leon Grotsky”!
All right, that’s the intro out of the way. Let’s talk about the model.
It’s been a slow year for hobbying, following on from an even slower year for hobbying. Aside from something really stupid (which I did finish and I do really like, so I might eventually finish writing about that and share some photos) I can’t even recall what I might have built and painted last year. That despite moving into a new apartment, large enough to dedicate an entire room to hobbying. Thin gruel indeed, but life has its challenges and hobbying, after all, is a luxury.
So in comparison, 2025 was a highly productive year, and it was thoroughly dominated by one game: Legions Imperialis.
Over the last few months I’ve been lucky enough to play a few games of Legions Imperialis, Games Workshop’s 2023 epic scale game set in the Horus Heresy (aka. that time all the chads and chuds in powered armour were slapping one another about). I actually picked up a copy last year, but it took me a good six months to build and paint everything in the starter box. Life is hard, ok.
My opponent for both games was the inestimable Michael Halila, and he’s written some great battle reports over on his blog, Freodom. I won’t attempt to recreate the wheel, but I will summarise a few of my own thoughts regarding both games.
This weekend I played my first game of Blood Bowl Second Season, and in so doing introduced my girlfriend to the real beautiful game!
Initially we had planned it to be an introductory game that lasted just a few turns, to learn the rules before we started playing properly. In the end we played 6 turns before calling it for the evening, and the next day we returned to the game and played through the remainder. Sadly, there are no photos of the game, although most of the teams are as-yet unpainted, as we chose to start playing before painting our teams.
I brought a Lizardman team; I’ve been wanting to play them since the days of Cyanide’s first Blood Bowl videogame, when a friend would field them against my Dwarves. The lineup was 4 Skink Runners, 2 Chameleon Skinks, 4 Saurus and a Kroxigor, with 2 team re-rolls available. The Mesozoic Marauders roared defiance from their dug-out!
They were up against a Shambling Undead team consisting of 3 Skeleton Linemen, 2 Zombie Linemen, 2 Mummies, 2 Ghoul Runners, and 2 Wight Blitzers. Also boasting a juicy 3 re-rolls, the Frytown Gooligans huddled, mumbled, drooled and snarled gutturally as they strategized pre-game!
I feel like one post in five on this website involves me acknowledging that I’ve not been writing much, but I guess a gap of around 10 months does warrant some response. And, well, my working life saw me shift into a new role around this time last year, and it’s been really tough, and I’ve had very little energy to put into writing, hobbying or even my social life. Things are, at last, getting a little better. And I’ve been keeping a personal journal which I’ve gotten surprisingly regular at updating, which is nice. So it’s not all bad.
Anyway! It’s October, and that means it’s ORKTOBER! Last year I entered a Midwinter Minis painting competition on the community Discord, and my retro 90s Snakebite Squighog Boy (plus period-appropriate cactus) caught enough attention to snag me a runner-up prize. With that in mind, how could I resist entering again this year?
This time around the challenge was to convert any ork model, to at least some degree, and paint it. Nice and simple, very open. I’ve not really done much converting before – in the 1990s as a child I cut the arm off a Van Saar gang leader and glued on an Eldar power fist, and I once glued a cocktail stick to a 2nd edition plastic Goff’s back for a banner – so this was a bit of a challenge. But in for a penny, in for a pound, right?
During October the YouTube channel Midwinter Minis ran a painting competition. Dubbed #Sporktober (a portmanteau fusing Spook, Ork and October) it offered prizes for painting Undead or Ork models in a vibrant and colourful 1990s style. I hadn’t painted in that style since the 90s (when my painting was, quite literally, childish) and I had never entered a painting competition, so I decided this was a perfect opportunity to amend both!
The greatest obstacle for me was that I had two work trips during October, which effectively took me out of the country for two working weeks, reducing the time I had available for anything else. I also misjudged exactly when these trips occurred relative to the submission deadline, because I am very smart. The end result of this was that although early in the month I’d developed a clear plan for what I wanted to paint and assembled my chosen model, when it came to the actual basing and painting I had exactly three days to get everything done. Well… why not make a challenge more challenging, eh!
The basic idea was to follow the 90s colour scheme for the Snakebite ork clan, particularly the old Boarboyz. I also knew that I wanted to break out some of my very old 1990s Citadel paints, at least for some base coats. And finally, I wanted to include a simple base decoration that in some way recalled the period – eventually arriving on the idea of making a miniature spiky cactus, something familiar to anyone who read White Dwarf in that decade.
A quick administrative note: in the interest of stretching my writing muscles a little more frequently, and publishing a little more frequently to this sadly neglected blog, I’m going to try writing small pieces about stuff I’m doing or am interested in. This might mean some posts seem a bit weird or undercooked… more so than usual, anyway.
I’ve again been playing Slitherine Software’s second most recent 40k offering, the not-quite-a-Civ-game and definitely-a-mouthful Warhammer 40,000: Gladius – Relics of War. If you don’t know, the potted description is that it’s a hex-based strategy game that looks a little like Civilization or Warlock or Fallen Enchantress or any number of other civ games, but in practice it’s a great representation of the grimdark setting of 40k, because you will never stop fighting. Want to hang back and fix your economy? Good luck, pal.
The game is brutally tough on higher difficulties but, happily, it works well as a multiplayer title. I’ve been playing multiplayer games with some friends and friends-of-friends against AI teams and sometimes things go well, but other times one of us is stomped into dust before anyone else can help them. It’s luck of the draw where you will start out; if you’re close enough to support an ally, that’s good. If there are other players between you, that’s not so good.
Still, you can only blame random deployment so far: knowing what you’re doing with your faction is also very important. Our most recent starting games left me feeling like there was a lot I had to learn about playing as everyone’s favourite voracious bug swarm, the Tyranids. I’ve started a practice game to experiment with some stuff, and figure out possible build orders for the faction. Here’s what I’ve got so far…
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