Sedition Wars rules are up

For those of you who stopped by the Coolmini or Not booth at Gencon, you will probably have seen Mike McVey demoing his new game.

For those of you who don't know, Mike has been in the business of miniatures for a long time- his resume includes quite a bit of time leading GW's 'Eavy Metal team, miniatures art direction at Privateer Press, and designing several of the industry standard paint lines, as well as sculpting for several major companies.

My favorite contribution might be the painting tutorials he's done. I actually got him to sign the first one that I owned (from a White Dwarf in 1992).

Currently, he's started up a company with his wife Alison called Studio McVey. They've been mostly releasing a line of limited edition resin minis that are easily among the best minis available. I could even argue that some of them are the very best. Please, go check those out. I'll wait.



Back? Yea, pretty awesome stuff. Now they're starting a line of science fiction minis, and they're starting on a game to go with it. Right now the game looks similar to Space Hulk, but with some pretty interesting infection mechanics (one of the starting factions reminds me of Halo's Flood- in a good way).

The thing is, they're releasing the super-early beta rules online, and hoping to get a lot of feedback as they continue to create the system. It is hard to say how it will eventually turn out, but if you want a say, go download the Sedition Wars rules and Map.

Dark Harlequins with a splash of flouresence

So, a little while ago, I received a commission to match some harlequins to an existing Dark Eldar force. My client, in this case, was very specific about the colors- mostly they would be in black and white, but they were each to have one bright color on them (selected from one of the bright colors on the Dark Eldar force).

Otherwise, the designs were up to me. I actually highly recommend treating harlequins this way. Aside from being some of the best minis that the Citadel range has to offer, they really do give you a free pass to go wild with your freehand. Reigning this in with tight color control is a terrific idea.

Since I don't play Eldar or Dark Eldar, I'll have a little more trouble finding an excuse to pick up some of these minis for myself. I do play Space Hulk, though, and I've seen some pretty strong rules for them that could easily be updated into 3rd ed. Still, they'll have to wait until some of my other projects are finished.

So, here they are:

Wyrd at Gencon

Wyrd miniatures had a few nice things going for them at this past Gencon- they were revealing a new board game based on their Malifaux setting, and some pretty impressive new items for their rather successful Malifaux line.

First off, lets talk about Puppet Wars. Malifaux players will recognize all of the minis as voodoo doll versions of their characters. I didn't get a pic, but the Baby Kade puppet is actually a little larger than the Malifaux character.



The game itself features a hex board with a Master puppet leading each side. The most interesting mechanic is that you can actually disassemble a puppet (living or dead) and use a "work bench" to upgrade another puppet using the leftover bits.

And of course, the minis are this terrific blend of creepy and cute. Mostly, because that's what Wyrd does well. Good stuff.



Attendees will probably have noticed that Wyrd's prize support this year was rather fantastic. Tournaments were often rewarded with Limited Edition nightmare minis (available at the con, and online during the event).

Now, all of the new Avatar minis were spoiled on the web, and I didn't get pictures of all of those. However, there were a few others that I hadn't seen:







And last, but not least, we have Sonia Creid- alternate and avatar forms together. At some point during gameplay, she's rather likely to learn to breath fire. Or breath firey dragons. At any rate, most of the new avatar forms are pretty crazy like this.

Sodapop is doing some great work

Ok, I've been home from Gencon for a week, and everything that I now am ready to post is probably old news- especially with the speed of the internet.

Still, I do want to talk about some of the very exciting things that I got to see at the con. So, we'll start out with my pic for the year- Sodapop Miniatures.

Sodapop have been giving up some great anime inspired minis for a while now. At their booth, they were taking pre-orders for Super Dungeon Explore (they had some production hiccups and couldn't release the game properly at the con).

If you haven't been following it- Super Dungeon Explore is a terrific line of cute little chibi miniatures and a vidoegame inspired dungeon crawler board game.

They also had some minis from an upcoming expansion on display. Check out the turtles:






Now, I've been following Super Dungeon for a while now, and I wasn't really surprised by the mechanics at their demo. It was really everything I wanted a dungeon crawler go be (kind of harkening back to Space Crusade, Heroquest, or Mutant Chronicle's Siege of the Citadel). It looked to me as though the game designers had played a lot of those games, and knew what worked about them (and what could be done better).

Something I knew would be at the con also were the rules for their new Relic Knight game. I play a lot of demos of miniatures games, and I am most often let down when nothing really stands out about a game. Relic Knight is the opposite of that- everything about it stood out as unique.

First off, there are miniatures. These are the anime-inspired minis we've been seeing from Sodapop for some time. Oh, and the internet doesn't really express how large Sebastian Cross' mech really is- they made an 80mm base just for him to prevent players from having to do this:



They were actually releasing a new faction at the con as well (the female demon is the first "Questing Knight" for the game. That basically means she's the first leader character without a mech). This pic is courtesy Beasts of War (because mine didn't turn out).

The game itself works off of cards- but in so many ways unlike Malifaux. The Relic Knight deck is filled with different color mana cards, and each character's card has a list of abilities and attacks that they use with the different colors. Skill numbers (like attack or defense) allow characters to draw more cards (making success more likely). But that's it- no dice at all.

They've also worked in ways to innovate the turn sequence along with everything else. This is really an exciting new game, and I'm convinced it will be taking off.

Zombie Wedding Photos?

When I make cake toppers for people, I often get emails of appreciation. Sometime, I get photos of how the cake toppers turned out on top of the cake.

This one caught me by surprise- they actually recreated the scene on their wedding cake. How cool is that?

This photograph comes to us courtesy of Paper Dolls Photography, Houston Texas (and they do some great photography, too).