Wednesday Workbench 22 March 2023; Judge Dredd - Block War

 

As you can see, there's actually nothing on my workbench right now. That is a purely temporary state of affairs, of course, but I haven't decided what project to tackle next. It hasn't been completely empty since the end of the Challenge - yesterday it had my airbrushes in various stages of being deep cleaned, but that's all done now.

On Monday I took delivery of a pre-order I'd placed in January:

Yes, the Block War expansion for Judge Dredd, plus a couple of freebies.

Para carrying casualty - I've already got this, so I'll make a gift of it

1812 Russian line infantry, to add to all the other sample sprues I have.

Block War Expansion

The pre-order was for the expansion, plus the first three associated packs. Looking through the rules, it looks like another eight packs are set for release later on (from bits mentioned in the rules but without previews, there should be more).

Block War

The expansion contains an A5 format rulebook, a pad of record sheets for players' blocks in the campaign, 2 figures of belligerent residents, 3 new Armoury cards and 15 Block War cards (which replace the Big Meg cards from the main game).

Mega-City Resident Mob

The pack contains 10 belligerent resident figures and 3 cards (1 x stats, 1 x Armoury, 1 x Big Meg)

Fatties At War

The pack contains 2 "fatty" models - Fats Hambo and a fatty battering ram, and 4 cards (2 stats cards, 1 x Armoury, and 1 x Big Meg)

Justice Department Riot Control

The pack contains 3 figures (2 Riot Judges, 1 Assault Judge) and 4 cards (2 stats cards, 1 x Armoury, 1 x Big Meg).

I've had a read-through of the rules and they look as though they should make for an interesting campaign between 2 or more players. There are 12 scenarios split into Early, Mid and Late phases (4 for each). There is an escalation factor in the games - in early phase scenarios you get 75 point, mid phase 100 points and late phase 150 points (NB - points/models available can be affected by certain block upgrades, details of the scenario, special abilities, Block War cards and results of preceding scenarios). Added to the rules are heavy weapons emplacements 

Each player selects their Block from one of 65 types, although it's not clear (other than through their random number of block upgrades) what effect beyond the number of structural points the block has on the game. Maybe just for a bit of "colour" - how many levels and how many residents per level. Winning a scenario will cause structural damage to the loser's block.

Update - on taking another look, the type of block does have an effect and (in one case) the population/level. However, the number of levels seems to have no effect. 

For the block factions, players get to select their roster from the Block Gang, Citi-Def, Fatty, Robot lists and any non-Judge characters. There isn't a Justice Department faction, but one of the block upgrades and certain Block War cards can bring in one or more Judges under your control during mid and late phase scenarios - as four of the 15 cards can do this and each player picks 3 cards from the deck, there is a very good chance of both players being able to bring in and control Judge models (although Judges can never target each other). Each block must have a "champion" - there are stats (and special rules) for these, but I don't see why the Champion couldn't be a Block Gang Lieutenant, a Citi-Def Lieutenant (figures not released yet) or one of the two named Fatties (Dick Porker and Fats Hambo); you could add the special rules for Block Champion to them by upping the points cost.

I've got pretty much all the scatter terrain I need for the 'tween-block plaza scenarios, but might get a few more pieces. 

This expansion is definitely positioned as a perp vs perp game, whereas the main rules (the scenarios at least) are aimed more as Judges vs perps which can lead to a major imbalance in the activation system if you don't use one of the house rules that have been suggested by players and one of the designers). From figure previews that have been seen, it looks like "The Day The Law Died" will be the next expansion and that will pit Judges vs Judges - also a more balanced game. The heavy weapons and new Citi-Def models might also suggest an eventual Apocalypse War expansion.

AHPC XIII - 15th (And Final) Submission

 

As predicted, this submission took me very close to the wire yesterday - it was just before midnight that I finished writing the post, six hours before the deadline. If I hadn't stayed up working through Saturday night I wouldn't have got it done in time. Of course, if I hadn't spent so much time working on that backdrop then I wouldn't have been in such a rush at the end.

Full post here

Backdrop

Cargo

Figures

Small Scale Ships

Spirit of Camberwell

As you can see, I went a bit overboard with the weathering. I started off just trying to obscure the white edges of the decals and maybe add a couple of damage chips, but realised that some of my sponge dabs were a bit too large and heavy. So, I needed to add lots of smaller, lighter dabs to obscure the heavy ones. Then I tried softening them with a thin airbrush coat of the orange base colour and airbrushed streaks with a dark brown...

...and completely forgot to do any weathering on the landing gear!

Still it doesn't look as bad as I thought, and at least the orange isn't quite so lurid now. Mind you, I could probably have got that with just the dark brown streaking.

Saturday Workbench 18 March 2023

 

OK, so it's actually Sunday here in the UK but it is still Saturday to the West! Tomorrow is the final day of the Challenge, and I'm frantically trying to finish things off in time to get everything photographed and the post written before the deadline.

Today has mostly been cutting up the decals I've made, gloss varnishing the Type S ready for adding decals, painting and gloss varnishing the backdrop pieces, priming and base-coating 1/270 and 1/1000 versions of the Type S (I thought that if I do have time to get them finished, they'd make a great addition to the post - I'll just have to see how things go tomorrow), painting up some snack and drinks machines for the backdrop and adding decals to everything that needs them.

Speaking of the decals, they've been an absolute nightmare. First off, when I went to print them, my inkjet printer wouldn't output black. I knew the cartridge was a bit low, but there should have been enough. Luckily I had a spare cartridge, so I put that in, hit print and...yes, not printing black. After about 30 minutes of going through the cleaning, deep cleaning and print head alignment processes, I finally managed to get it working. Of course, that was about 2am on Thursday night/Friday morning. Yesterday I hit them with gloss varnish to seal the ink in.

This evening I was adding the decals to everything. The small ones for the cargo items were (mostly) good, the ones for the Type S went on nicely. However, I had real problems with the ones for the backdrop, possibly because of the size. The 36 x 56mm ones weren't too bad, the 16 x 96mm ones were a touch tricky, but the 36 x 196mm ones...let's just say that there was a lot of swearing. Luckily I had made sure to print extras of each, which was all well and good until I accidentally picked up one of the boards to move it after applying a top coat of MicroSet, and of course my thumb just happened to land right on top of the softened decal, pulling it up as I removed my thumb. And no spares remaining! I've printed another sheet and varnished them. I'll have to apply that one tomorrow.

Tomorrow (today, I guess) will see me doing lots of varnishing, some touching up around the edges of decals on the ship, some weathering, some more varnishing, photography, photo resizing and then writing a rather long blog post for the submission.