Christmas Mumblings - 2011 Recap

I feel the urge for a meandering end of year mumble, and seeing as I can ramble on as much as I like on this little corner of the interwebs, I shall indugle myself. It is Christmas after all.

It's been a pretty amazing year for Warhammer Fantasy Battle. The new army books are  in my opinion, a real step up for the game, having taken a more balanced approach to the armies and taking us away from the intolerable power-creep of 7th edition books. More of that. The fact that the next army book out, by all account is for my own army, the vampire counts, has me more excited than a puppy in a room full of brightly coloured bouncy balls. Keeping with books, I really liked storm of magic.

Wait, hear me out. 

It's great fun. It's not a tournament friendly supplement, unless you want to instigate mass bloodshed. It's a great variant on the game that takes itself not at all seriously. I mean, a spinner? That said, you can field a shedload of different monsters, blow up buildings and generally have a laugh, which is kind of what this whole hobby thing is about. Plus, it's got a fimir in it.

On the flipside, Tamurkhan. What a book. Now that's a serious warhammer book. Beautiful is the only way to describe it, in it's production, content and the fact it has a chaos dwarf list. More of this, Warhammer Forge. More now.

On the model front, we've had some good times, and some bad times. On the plus side, GW has upped the ante once again, giving is some just wonderful plastic models. This was the year of the gribbly, with the arachnarok, warsphinx, thundertusk and so on. Some really great kits got released. The tomb guard, ironblaster, Nurgle champion, wraith, all excellent. However, stories of malformed finecast figures continue to terrify me. I am quite reticent about buying anything finecast from GW. I mean, why should it take three days to clean up one figure?! Jack from Fields of Blood shocked me with the amount of work he had to put in on his Haemonculus. Especially when I have bought many resin figures from other companies and never seen more than the teeniest of air bubbles, if anything. Why can't GW get this right?

There have been other good releases, the liquid greenstuff is legend. Finecast brush, not so much. Dreadfleet was a wonderful looking game, and actually very enjoyable. Seeing as I play vampire counts, chaos dwarves and fimir, this has been a good year, and next year promises more. A new VC army book and model releases in January (joy), the new monstrous arcana book from Warhammer Forge (more fimir) and rumours of a new version of either Bloodbowl or Necromunda,(or something else entirely). I'm pretty a pretty happy fellow.

On my own projects, I started this year planning to continue my vampire counts and start chaos dwarves and fimir (using the warriors of chaos list). Rumours of a new chaos dwarf list halted the dwarves, and as I got engrossed in the fimir I decided to concentrate on them until I had 2,400 points done. I have about two thirds of the fimir built now, with the first unit of fimm well under the paintbrush. I've been experimenting with getting decent water effects, and a goodly fimir update is not far away. For 2012, I imagine I'll stick with the fimir. It takes me a while to get an army done (vampire counts ten years and counting) but I'm planning on taking the fimir to those tournaments that will permit them, so I have to stay focused. Added to that I'm really enjoying the project.

Oh, and on another happy development, there's this.

With that, I wander off into the Christmas season. Have a good one folks, that's all from the mumblings for now!