The Inaugural Grenzstadt Invitational

After a nine-year absence, my garage saw the return of tabletop wargaming yesterday!

When a friend's son started talking about getting into the re-launched edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battles, myself and another former player mused about getting back into it (yes, similar to what I said about Warhammer 40K three years ago, let it go) and two new players entered the fray. 

Warhammer was Games Workshop's iniital mass combat game and although it features fantasy races like elves, dwarfs and armies of skeletons, it is built around massed units maneuvering around a largely open battlefield, Napoleonics-style, not individual skirmishers fighting in dense cover - a style of play sometimes called 'rank & flank.'

Once I knew a pool of five players were available for the revamped Warhammer: The Old World, I asked if they might be interested in a tiny, two-table tournament at the end of summer, and they all quickly agreed. And to be clear, this is not a tremendously competitive group, eager to establish their superiority, but busy people who understood how a deadline could serve as a great motivator for building and painting!

I already had two armies on hand for this game, but the sizes of the bases (the little platforms each figure stands upon for uniform ranking) had changed. This meant over a hundred infantry in my Empire (human) army alone needed to go from 20mm to 25 mm bases, and the cavalry needed updating as well. Daunting!

This was almost enough to put me off the idea entirely, but thankfully some wise person came up with the idea of making oversized movement trays (something we've always sued for ease of maneuvering) with slots for the old base sizes, and another beautiful genius made 3D printable versions that Jeff graciously produced for me. 

I hated having to cut up the old 20 x 80mm bases (with 4 figures on them) that made both packing and ranking so much easier, but even this worked after a bit of applied snippery.

Basing the trays to match my figures was more of a chore than anticipated, but worked out okay in the end, even if it ended up making some of the fits a we bit too snug.

And after literal decades of knowing my cannons and mortars would look better if based, I finally made artillery bases.

At any rate, life conspired to keep one player away and two players from painting their armies, but four of us gathered early Saturday with completely assembled 1000 point armies and plans to get three games in before supper.

Averland Militia (Empire)

Tomb Kings

Wood Elves

Dissenters of Wing Kong (Grand Army of Cathay)

But this was not to be.

After a brief concours to see each other's armies and cast ballots for pageantry and presentation, we got into our first matches around 10 am. This was my second game of Warhammer in over a decade (and first game ever for one player!), and I was constantly referring back to the rules to make sure I was not conflating editions.

Questions flew back and forth between the tables, and our newbie-style pace meant there was only time to get two games in, but a good time was still had by all. After the sportsmanship and pageantry ballots were factored in, my two draws gave me a single point lead over Sean's incredibly tough, undefeated, and (self admittedly) slightly cheesy Tomb Kings of Khemri. And to be clear, Sportsmanship was a tough ballot, because both my opponents were a joy to play against! It's a nice problem to have, to be completely frank.)

I was already uneasy about winning my own tournament, but knowing that had we actually battled, Sean's two monsters would have rocked and/or socked my puny Averlanders with only a slight chance of my artillery causing them any real sort of inconvenience. With this in mind, I snugged up my tourney marshal hat and declared the Inaugural Grenzstadt Invitational a tie.

Congratulations Sean!

Despite only getting two games in, everyone agreed that the day was well spent, focused on wargaming and camaraderie, pushing toy soldiers around, rolling handfuls of dice and alternating from being delighted and horrified at the results of said rolls.

The applesauce bee happening just outside my garage door (hosted by my wife and her sister but involving everyone not playing Warhammer) was very productive - like, 50+ liters of pure, uncut sauce with an unknown street value - and somehow we managed to not get in each other's way, which was an added bonus. The cooks even benevolently provided some of the fruits of their labours to the players as a parting gift.

Game-wise, my veteran halberdiers aquitted themselves well, while my artillery was not terribly effective, misfiring on two sonsecutive turns in my second game before getting taken out by coutner battery fire. My 20-strong unit of handgunners were pretty decent, successfully defending a small hill from a heavy infantry charge that was decimated by withering fire before they ever got to grips with my unarmoured fusiliers.

In the end, what I really learned is that I really need and want to play more games of Warhammer again, especially with these fellows, which is a nice feeling to have after so long a pause! Perhaps the Second Annual Grenzstadt Invitational will have even more players?

Still More Monsters of the Manual

Even without comparing it to subsequent editions, the very first Monster Manual for what was then called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was simply not a very good book. There are some typos and formatting issues and such, but the biggest reason is the art. 

Much of it is just not very good, drawn by seemingly whomever TSR could get to sketch something up by the deadline for the first-ever hardcover D&D book. There are exceptions (nearly everything by David Trampier, for instance), and a lot of entries have no art whatsoever, which is probably (?) worse.

But how many nerds like me did that 1977 book draw in and then never let go? Many of those images are still conjured up behind my eyes by the mere mention of the names of these esoteric creations, regardless of their quality.

And over the four decades I've played D&D, I have always sought to fill in the corners with some of the more iconic monsters and some other personal favourites, many times just because of the evocative memories of the art that accompanied them.

Most recently I added a displacer beast (mentioned in my 2020 post about iconic monsters in miniature) as well as a pair of perytons - harpy-like stags that not only consume human hearts, but whose shadows reveal the silhouette of a man and not a beast (tragically irreproducible in miniature form).

It's been six years now since that monster post, and I have been filling out the corners of my Monster Manual collection:

There are a number of things preventing me from having a truly comprehensive index of MM miniatures (lack of funds, time, storage space and interest to name but a few), but adding a few classics like these has been pretty rewarding - even for someon who only plays D&D in person perhaps a dozen times a year!

Canned Tragedy, or "Whoops..."

The road to hobby hell, it seems, truly is paved with good intentions.

The Space Hulk boardgame was my introduction in 1990 or so to the Warhammer 40,000 universe: board sections to lay out a derelict spaceship (the titular hulk), counter for doors and other details, and most critically, the miniatures: 20 or so alien Genestealers, and 10 Space Marine Terminators in Tactical Dreadnought Armour. Sure, they were primitively sculpted but they fully captured the imagination, and laid the foundation for my first two 40K armies, as well as over a decade of working with the publisher, Games Workshop.

About a year after parting ways with GW in 2007, I picked up a copy of the revamped game (with far cooler figures) from the Kingsway store I had once looked after as manager, then cell manager, and finally regional manager. The box was damaged so the manager kindly discounted it for a former colleague.

I have unpacked the box a few times, long enough to have applied a coat of blue to the 'Stealers and red plus a black wash to the Blood Angel marines, and there is photographic evidence of having played with Totty in 2018 - which may be the only actual game I have played with this set.

The unfinished nature of these models began nagging at me of late, and in truth, I have no earthly idea why. But for whatever reason, I was compelled to dust off the Genestealers recently with the intent of completing them in 1-2 weeks.

With the blue applied to their carapaces, it was really just a question of  painting over the exposed fleshy bits and then coating that with a purply Speed Paint, and finally picking out the claws, teeth, eyes and other details.

Oh, and the bases, which are overwrought and underbalanced but I love them. Speed Paint stood me in good stead once again for things like extensive skull-based inlay or wiring trunks and such.

A couple of weeks of listening to podcasts and Project Hail Mary interviews (as well as the awesome audiobook), and they were all done - not great by any stretch, barely good in places, but completed and table-worthy after nearly two decades! 

Now just to varnish them. I grabbed a full can and headed to the front step, shaking it vigorously.

I was on about my third pass when I realized I was re-priming my models. 

It had been so long since using this particular spray, Roughcoat, that I had completely forgotten that it was a grey primer, not at all like the 'Ardcoat gloss varnish I had confused it with. 

I raced into the house and tossed them into the sink with running water. I soaped up a soft -bristled brush and took that to them as well, but it accomplished very little.

Well, that isn't quite true - the moisture re-activated some of the first-generation Speed Paint I had used, de-tinting many of the heads and hands of my fearsome aliens, as well as leaving fuchsia spots on the counter top that took significant effort to remove. And I suppose some of the fresher primer was washed or rubbed off as well.

Most people I have related this mishap to have been very understanding - a 'there but for the grace of God go I' sort of thing I imagine. And even my initial fury at my own stupidity has relented a bit now, five days later. I mean, at the end of the day, even marred like this, those 'Stealers still look better to me now than they did unpainted.

I am unsure what, if anything, I will do about these models. I may try inking them or touching them up in some fashion, or perhaps I will just play with them as is.  For the time being, they are just going to sit in the box until I finish the Terminators - hopefully completing them within another decade or so. ; )

Back to Base-Sicks

Once again, a legacy wargame from my past may potentially be in my future, resurrected, Lazarus-like, by the son of a friend.

My first love was always the sci-fi setting of Warhammer 40,000, but the "rank-'n'-flank" mechanics of Warhammer Fantasy Battle had a undeniable appeal all their own. 

With densely packed units of infantry and cavalry wheeling and marching across a largely open tabletop, rarely questioning which units or models have line of sight to the others or who has cover , while evoking the pre-20th century maneuvering of historical battles such as Gettysburg and Waterloo, WFB was a classical wargamers dream - but with dragons and giants and wizards to keep things lively.

The game was discontinued shortly after I left Games Workshop in 2007 in favour of a wildly different skirmish game (Age of Sigmar) set in the aftermath of the destruction of WFB's setting, a fantasy-tinged, vaguely pre-renaissance Eurocentric globe simply called "The Old World".

So when GW announced a return to rank-n-flank with a ruleset called Warhammer: The Old World, I was happy so see it, sure, but didn't see any real applicability to me. When my young associate said he was getting into the game with a Goblin army and asked if my Empire force might be interested in a small scale scrap, I had to give it at least a look, didn't I?

Defenders of Averland, where social order is defined by hat-size

The very first thing I discovered was the crushing revelation that pretty much my entire Empire army would need to be re-based. You see, the infantry of my human-sized army (and anything simliar or smaller size, such as Elves or Goblins) was mounted on 20mm x 20mm square bases, where larger figures (Orcs, for example) were mounted on 25mm square bases. This meant a row of four Savage Orc warriors took up the same frontage as five of my Empire spearmen, giving me a slight advantage over this larger, sturdier foe.

On the other hand, the larger bases would make it far, far easier to rank figures up tidily, and made them less vulnerable to template weapons, such as dragon's breath or exploding cannonballs and the like. So I didn't have any philosophical opposition to the idea, but the effort to recalibrate to the new regime might be prohibitively labour-intensive.

Now, if re-basing woes sound familiar to you, you may recall a similar lament when the current edition of Warhammer 40,000 was released in 2003, complete with free rules and army lists. This had an undeniable appeal to my budget-conscious wargamer soul, but nto only was it a lot of rebasing, it was a lot of different rebasing, and the potential enjoyment never seemed to equal the expenditure of effort required, so I never started, and now a new edition is already on the way anyhow, so bullet dodged perhaps?

I feared a comparable outcome of my survey of WOW, but in searching out the quickest way to rebase entire armies, I came across an intriguing prospect: since formations of soldiers are typically moved around on holders called movement trays, what if you didn't rebase your figures? What if you adapted larger trays to hold smaller figures, achieving almost exactly the same effect?

A Spanish hobbyist on YouTube demonstrated how to achieve this with corrugated cardboard and tape, moving from a ruler approach to pre-printed templates he generously provided at no charge. But cutting out 100+ individual slots for my figures didn't seem like a huge improvement from re-basing them, to be honest.

Thankfully, I was not the only individual feeling that way, and a helpful soul has made 3d-printable files for trays precisely like these available on the interwebs. 

For such things, it is remarkable to have a friend with overlapping interests, in this case, miniatures and 3d printing. Did I mention he is also my young associate's father and is likewise being drawn along in this young man's wake? Delightful - the more the merrier!

At any rate, he graciously printed up a set of trays that should enable me to re-purpose my Averlander army in a much, much shorter timeframe than rebasing them.

Certainly, painting and texturing these trays to match my existing armies will be somewhat time-consuming, but compared to all new bases?

I am still perplexed as to what to do about these 4-man bases I put together around 2005, the cuitting edge of wargaming expediency at the time. I have five of them...

Now I have to decide if it is easier to somehow cut the base into four pieces or maybe sand down the slot ridges in the tray - but the uneven columns that would result make me shudder.

At any rate, the idea of an army I painted two decades ago and which hasn't been touched in probably 15 years returning at long last to the battlefield has a lot of appeal to me in terms of both spectacle and effective recycling. Wish me luck!

(Christmas) Village People (and Creatures)

One of the highlights of Christmas decorating in our house is the setup of the girls' Christmas village, hand-painted by their Oma and gifted to them over many Christmases when they were younger. It is a pretty immense setup and Audrey has added a larger display area, some fluffy snow, lampposts and trees.

In addition to setting it up in an aestehtically pleasing way, Fenya and Glory add an intriguing narrative to the arrangement of buildings, with an upper-class and lower-class side, interpersonal intrigue and undertones of corruption and comeuppance. 

One year for fun I dropped in an immense, evil-looking action figure and some zombies, much to the delight of Glory's friend Ally, but this year I started sneaking in one miniature per day from my collection, starting on December 1. No one noticed until the ninth, and since I was not explicitly told to stop, I continued all the way through Christmas. Thankfully my family shares my sense of whimsy and are all great sports.

I shared my progress over six instagram posts during the holidays, but wanted to document them here as well. Please enjoy Advent Incursion 2025!

Old West fiddle player

Old West pugilist

Old West uh...saloon worker

Old West chuckwagon cook

The Mirror of Galadriel (LOTR)

Celeborn of Lorien (LOTR)

Queen Galadriel (LOTR)

Stormtrooper

A yeti tyke (D&D)

Chwinga nature spirit (D&D)

Yeti parent

Reghed Glacier nomad (D&D)

Stor- you know what this is

Snowy owlbear (D&D)

Wolf (D&D but not exclusively)

yes, another one (they look cool in snow)

The White Moose of Lonelywood (D&D)

Duergar King, Xardorok Sunblight (D&D)

Saoirse The Beloved, Warlock (D&D)

Invisible Frodo (LOTR)

Saoirse's familiar, Nivius (D&D)

Algetha Dawnseeker Ogolakanu, Barbarian (D&D)

Goliath werebear Oyaminartok (D&D)

White Dragon (Arena: the Contest)