Sunday 11 February 2018

The Votes are in for the 'Music / Musician' Bonus Theme Round



Hello Everyone!


Our third bonus theme round is complete! We had 34 participants submitting entries providing their various interpretations of the 'Music / Musician' theme. Below are the results of the voting. 




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Here are the Runners Up:

AdamC's 'Four Guys Fiddling Around'





StephenS' 'Soul Music'





and DaveX's 'Polish Vistula Legion Drummer'




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The podium finishers are:

Third Place: DebD's 'Female Bard with Lute'





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Deb will receive another 25 points in recognition for her stunning submission this round. Wonderful work Deborah and congratulations!!
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Second Place: MichaelA's 'Guinny & the Grail Seekers'







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Michael will receive another 50 points to add to his total. Beautiful work and very funny Michael! 


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And in First Place: 

SidneyR's 'The Polish Drummer'








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Absolutely wonderful work Sidney! (The subtle conversions on the drummer and his letter of recommendation are just brilliant.) For claiming top spot on the podium Mr. Roundwood will receive another 75 points and a gift package from Simon over at BigRedBat (who, I should mention, is soon to release the English Civil War expansion to his popular 'To The Strongest' rules). Congratulations Sid, we all look forward to seeing the next chapter describing your fraught but fascinating town of Laarden.


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Once again, a BIG thank you to all the participants of the 'Music/Musician' bonus round for your sonorous interpretations of the theme. Terrific work! 

To end, please remember that next Saturday midnight (February 17th) is the submission deadline for our next Bonus Theme Round: 'Childhood', so cast your mind back, or look to your own children / grandchildren / nieces / nephews and show us your interpretation of this theme!



From ByronM - Yet another unit of Greek Spartans (80 points)

 Once again, more started than finished this week, but then I was out of commission for 2 days with a flu bug so that explains some of it.

All I managed to actually finish this week was the unit of Greek Spartans with black lambdas.  I had meant for the last unit of Spartans to be the third colour of decal that I had, but screwed up and made them red.

This gives me an 8th unit for my Greek forces, so I am technically 1/2 done what I wanted to get done for the challenge this year for them.  Too bad its past the 1/2 way point in the challenge!
With this group of Warlord (Immortal) figures done, it is onto other manufactures for a little while at least.  I have more of these left, but they are still in boxes, and with a bunch of Foundry and Victrix figures here and ready to paint, I am going onto them for the coalition forces that will be fighting the Spartans.

While I am doing all Greeks for the era and making them as two separate forces, they are being done so that they can be used together as a large force against Persians at some future date. The two forces will be Spartans and allies vs Athenian and allies.  With 4 core units of Spartans done, 3 allied units, and only 1 Athenian unit, its time to worry about the Athenians for a while.

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Well  done Byron, you are certainly getting through them and surely you can get the other half done before the end of the challenge?  No need for the shoes and socks to come off for the maths, a straightforward, but still impressive, 80 points! 

From JasperO: Catapults cannot pass! (35 points)

Phew, my ballista is finally done. 'Stuff' got in the way and prevented completion for the BFG bonus round, but having seen reconstructed versions in real life, I'd like to think it would've qualified. German reenactors once told me their catapult was challenged by the local German army unit to launch a projectile at an army jeep parked a considerable distance downrange. The reenactors were proud to relate how their artillery piece did not disappoint and planted several kilos of stone in the jeep's engine compartment...


The Wargames Foundry Caesarian centurio in command of the artillery detachment was shown earlier, but the crew and piece are new. Now I just have to build the rest of a Caesarian Roman army. (25pts)


Tomorrow it's PolderCon 2018 in Utrecht. Guy (also a participant in this Challenge) and I are both running participation games. To make our lives easy, we're using the same table, just alternating Chain of Command (me) and Black Ops WW2 (Guy). Guy's game involves various parties trying to gain objectives around a Chateau in the countryside. Obviously, having been taken over for an HQ, that needed a checkpoint. I had one from an old Warlord set. Painting those black/white/red stripes on an uneven surface is a pita... The checkpoint doesn't nearly fill a 6x6" box, so I'll leave the points to the Saturday victim minion. (The mini is just for size)




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What fabulous work Jasper!  The ballista and crew are just sensational and worth every one of their 25 points.  Lovely additional pieces too and whilst not a full terrain cube the quality is such that I have no trouble in awarding them another 10 points giving you 35 in total.  Best of luck at PolderCon 2018 and we look forward to more splendid work from you in due course.

From TeemuL: More Astra Militarum Cadians (50 points)

Ten more brave Cadian soldiers for my growing Astra Militarum force for Warhammer 40000. Well., the store campaign I was aiming for is almost finished and I have yet to play a single game... Being a sick for over a month (or taking care of the rest of the family which was sick) dramatically reduced my painting time in December. Anyway, these were already primed and I needed something to paint for this week, so I grabbed these.


They are 10 metal Cadian troopers from Games Workshop, in the dirty red-yellow-blue scheme I have chosen. Nothing special in the paint job, but they look decent.


One sergeant, one plasma gun and eight regular troopers. I found out only during painting, that one of them is actually a loader of some heavy weapon team, something I missed, when I primed these. Buying minis second hand has some troubles. Luckily I have some heavy weapons waiting for the paint, so I can fix my error.


Next week there will be something else, Lord of the Rings and terrain have so far eluded me on this Challenge, so may be I try them next. We'll see.

Risky close-up


10 troopers should give me a nice amount of 50 points, getting me above the 500 point line and keeping my target of 800 still in the sights.

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Well done Teemu, lovely job Sir!  You have managed to turn these round in double quick time and earned yourself another 50 points to your tally.  Keep going that 800 points target is now in range!