Variety is the Spice of Life...

In the lull of waiting for various pieces of writing to pass through the editing process and back to me for revision or rejection (hopefully the former), I have been chipping away at various hobby projects. I have come to the conclusion that I have far too many projects I would like to be working on, and far too many games to really give any of them justice. Naturally, and like any good wargamer, the projects I am working on are all for new things.

Aside from recording and editing episodes of the On Minis Games podcast (which I wrote about last time), I also managed to assemble my British force for Sharp Practice; I won't be writing anything more about them this time, I'll cover them in a later post.

In addition to these things, I have started refining a dice system that I think could work nicely with a Dungeon Crawl style game I have been working on in fits and starts for a while now, I have been putting together some scenery, and finally, mulling over which Ancients force I should collect for Sword and Spear.

The scenery I have been assembling is from the Spartan Scenics line of MDF 28mm scale sci-fi buildings. The Starter set is a extremely large and heavy box, full of a variety of buildings, corridors, doors and so on. The instructions leave a little to be desired, but everything does make sense if you group the MDF sheets by the letter codes. 

So far I have managed to assemble two buildings, and have a metric ton of MDF waiting to be put together. The scenery is very nice, with good details, and goes together rather well. All the buildings are designed so that the tops may be removed so the interiors are exposed, and everything is very modular. The Starter set is an excellent purchase, with a lot of stuff crammed in the box.

One of the two buildings I have constructed so far, with some 28mm Zanshi (Yu Jing models, from the Infinity Miniatures Game) added for scale.

As the photos attest these buildings are quite large, spacious, and have plenty of doorways, which may be blocked up by doors, or attached to corridors etc. These are not the two largest buildings in the Starter Set, and I still have a huge pile of stuff to get through (before I open any of the other boxes I may or may not have as well).

All the other stuff from the Starter Set, waiting for attention...

I also got some of the Spartan Scenics resin scenery sets - they have a whole collection of things to fill out and add detail to the rooms, from tables and monitors, to medical beds, cryo-pods, munitions cabinets, crates and even a pool table. I added some pieces to the room to see what they'd look like, and all I can say is that they are amazing.

The detail is spectacular, and they really add a lot of character to the rooms. I'm under no illusions as to whether they will get painted, but who knows... one day perhaps!

Lastly, the other hobby project that has been chewing away at my mind is what force to collect for Sword and Spear. Sword and Spear is an ancients set of miniature game rules, my good friend Quinton (whose blog may be found here) rather likes the idea of Romans, which leaves me indecisively trying to pick between Gauls, Britons, Dacians and Parthians, oh, or possibly Carthaginians. 

I have heard excellent reviews of this rules set, and being a sucker for historical games it has piqued my interest for some time. I am thinking of collecting a force in 6mm, partly because they are relatively cheap, and partly because I have always liked the idea of having a force in 6mm. Decisions, decisions...