#DadGoals - Office Space

Doomsday Comes To The Office Park

During a rainy afternoon last week we played my daughter's first game of Heroclix.  She has had a collection of the figures since her brother and I used to play the game frequently a few years ago.  When I would go on clix buying sprees with my son we would always pick up one or two for her so she felt included.  All of her clix are female super heroes and from a mixture of the DC and Marvel universes.  Since my son is super competitive, my daughter really dislikes competitive games so I knew I needed to tweak the normal game for her to be interested.  Follow along after the jump for more pictures and the solution...

#DadGoals - A Kind Of Magic

A Whole Lot Of Trees And One Measly Elf...

My son and I recently bought a truckload of common Magic cards at a used book store.  We were able to put together a variety of decks for all the colors and we have been playing almost everyday.  It's been very enjoyable and more importantly I can beat my son at least a third of the time so it finally gives me a game system where I'm at least winning semiregularly.  The cards are from all across the twenty years the game has been around so it's a lot more fun to make decks this way than just buying some of the starter decks and boosters that are currently on the market.  As much as my son and I love playing WH40K or Heroclix, MTG gives us a quick game we can play in twenty minutes or less when he has lunch or recess break from virtual school.  Thanks for stopping by and stay safe out there!

#DadGoals - The Crusade Begins

Ambush at Gaiman’s Woods 

The Dark Angels Column moves along the base of the hill, unaware that they are about to be ambushed by the forces of the Deathwatch.

Now that we are caught up on the 9th edition rules, my son and I started a crusade campaign last weekend.  It was a lot of fun putting our crusade rosters together and thinking about the background of our forces.  We fought a 500 point battle with just a few units on each side and it was a fun and spirited struggle.  As per usual my son emerged victorious, but the final victory point tally was 21-19 so it was our closest game yet.  Plus I scored the moral victory of defeating his Watch Captain in hand to hand combat with my 4th Company Master Korlael.  The crusade rules added a lot of fun to the game and it's aftermath and the strongest recommendation for the new rules I can give is that it makes it just as fun to be the loser of a battle as it does the victor.  In my opinion that has always been uneven in other campaigns I have tried in the past so I'm eager to see how it plays out.  Follow along after the jump for more pictures of the battle...

#Dadgoals - The Battle Is Joined

 Beware The Ides Of March...

My son started collecting his first official 40K army back in the fall and he chose the elite Space Marines of the Deathwatch.  They are a perfect army for a ten year old I think, due to the low model count and ability to arm them with any thing that takes your fancy.  By February he had enough forces assembled and painted so that we could get in his first game with his new forces.  We still played with 8th edition rules, since my update to 9th edition had not arrived in the mail yet.  He placed the scatter terrain and we used my recently completed table tiles in all their wooded wonder.  As per usual he won handily, his small Deathwatch force laying waste to the numerically superior Red Corsairs.  My only moral victory was that the Predator won the tank duel and destroyed his Land Raider.  Once I digest all the 9th edition rules we are excited to start a Crusade campaign so hopefully I'll have some updates on that situation this spring.  Thanks for reading!

#DadGoals Dawn Of War

 In The Grim Darkness Of The Far Future...

My greatest nemesis... Unpainted terrain in the foreground of game photos.

As a measure of the long and winding road between reality and when I manage to complete a thought and post it, this latest #Dadgoals commemorates my 10 year old's first official game of WH40K that we played way back in late August.  We kept it very simple, just two troops units and an HQ on each side and we played the Patrol mission from the Dark Imperium box set with a slight alteration to the deployment since we only had three units per side.  Also in the interest of ease of first game play, we used the at this point well worn 8th edition rules.  I still need to learn 9th edition rules myself and it was nice to teach game rules that fit on one four fold card.  As usual with any of our match-ups my son won the game, but I may have mercifully forgotten to rapid fire a plasma gun a few turns in a row so as not to dishearten him by wiping out too many of his models in a turn.  He had a lot of fun and we will probably play some more games this winter after our current addiction to Blood Bowl wears off.  Follow along after the jump for some more pics of the action...

#DadGoals - Take Your Daughter To Blogwork Day

 Daughter's unicorn

🦄☺️☺️☺️☺️☺️☺️☺️☺️☺️☺️😀😀😀😀😀😀☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩🐚🐚🐚🐚🐚🐚🐚😀😀😀😀

                            Edited by floyd's daughter

Blood Bowl WIP

 Wolfenburg Steelers Test Model

My son and I have been playing a lot of Blood Bowl lately so my goal of painting my human team to match my favorite American football team is coming closer to realization.  I painted the base coats, shades, and simple highlights on this one model as a test for using the Steeler's colors on a Blood Bowl team shortly after I bought the box set a few years ago.  The black parts of the uniform were painted Abbadon Black and then highlighted with Dawnstone.  The yellow armor is Averland Sunset washed with Cassandora Yellow and edge highlighted with Flash Gitz Yellow.  

However as I paint the rest of the models on the team I think I'm going to go for a slightly brighter yellow for their armor.  So I have been adding to this Blitzer's yellow armor with layers of the old Citadel Yellow Ink and the now OOP Lamenters Yellow glaze.  I did shift the color away from the reddish hue the yellow pads had from being washed with Cassandora Yellow shade but the glaze layers have shifted things to more of an ochre than a more vibrant yellow.  Fortunately this player is the one fellow on my team who has accumulated some additional skills so his slightly different uniform than the rest of the team will be explained away by this burgeoning star player's individual streak.  The edge highlights will need to be touched up again and I thought of a great inspiration for the team logo while going through decals this evening but I will save that for the finished model post.  Thanks for following along and I will see you on the pitch!

#DadGoals Any Given Sunday

 Blood Bowl Kick Off!

Our family went on an end of summer camping trip the first weekend of September.  My son was excited about painting miniatures and my wife was encouraging me to take along some hobby projects to tackle while we were relaxing but the idea of bringing all the different paints I would need to work on my Dark Angels or all the colors my son would want for his swelling chaos warband seemed like too much effort for a long weekend.  A few days before the trip I had a sudden lucky bout of inspiration...

#DadGoals Painting Fanatic

Chaos Warband!

My son has recently fallen in love with painting miniatures which is awesome and what I've always hoped for.  However I now have to adjust to finding him in my painting space at 8 on a Saturday morning or having days where he talks about fantasy miniatures and gaming for hours on end.  Some days I have to try and remind myself that when I was this interested in games and miniatures, I didn't know anyone else my age who had a similar interest, let alone an adult who would humor endless conversation about the subject.  All in all it has been a fun to have him jumping into the hobby with both feet and will provide plenty of content for the #DadGoals category in the future.  As long as I can survive the energy of a ten year old who lives in my house now being invested in my favorite hobby.

#DadGoals

 Minifinity War - Pregame

First Row - X-men in order of their comics first appearances.  Second, Third, and Fourth Row - Marvel MCU characters in order of their movie debuts.

My son spent the first two hours of his Saturday watching cartoons and using his MCU encyclopedia and Ultimate Guide to the X-Men to put all his Marvel minifigures in order of appearance.  Cue obvious jokes about spherical fruit descending not far from arborial progenitor of said fruit. 

#DadGoals

Revenge of the Calvinball

My son has been designing his own war-game with his Marvel superhero Lego mini-figures and a board he constructed for the heroes and villains to fight over.  Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes cartoon and our many games of Heroclix seem to be the inspiration of the current version of his creation.  There's no dice and combat resolutions are very subjective but the lists of powers are very true to the characters involved and it can be fun to a play a game with no sense of balance or traditional gaming logic.  For at least the first 30 minutes, then the disparity between the large amounts of HP characters have versus the small amount of damage the attacks inflict starts to make the game drag a little.  However the joy of sharing my favorite hobbies (comics and gaming) with my son and watch him create his own game more than makes up for the current lack of game balance...

#DadGoals

Cross-Time Caper !

All the best superhero battles occur in crowded office buildings.

My son and I got in a game of Heroclix over the weekend.  In a bit of alternate universe shenanigans it was the Legion of Superheroes versus the Agents of Shield.  My son rushed forward in the crowded office buildings confident that his usual strategy of crushing me under thrown objects would suffice against my non super-powered government agents.  However he was unaware of the Shield team's interlocking powers and buffs and his Legionnaires rapidly fell.  He came back at the end when Timberwolf took out Fitz, Fury, and Coulson in rapid fashion but then agent May saved the day in typical "cavalry" fashion.  I actually won a game against my son!!!  This is so rare it only improves my record to 2-20 vs him in Heroclix but it's progress.  More pictures after the jump...

I Am Not Surrounded! I'm In A Target Rich Environment! Part III

My son is insistent that we come up with some sort of rules buff for bayonets...

The #DadGoals Menace

My son and I got in another game of Kill Team to close out winter break and he beat me again!  We finally played a scenario out of the Kill Team rulebook and the game seemed to be going in my favor for the first four turns.  However with his usual uncanny dice rolling he took four of my marines out of action in the fifth turn and pulled ahead in victory points.  More on my defeat after the jump, along with some pictures to document the occasion...

The plain white primer bunker and barricade in the left foreground drove me so crazy in these pictures I spent most of January painting them...

#DadGoals

With A Vengeance

“There is no dark side in the gaming table, really. As a matter of fact it's all dark"

My son and I got in another game of Kill Team right before the holidays.  We played his hostage rescue scenario again and while I did better this time, he took four of my marines out of action in the last turn and snatched victory away from me as is his usual style.  I’m concerned he’s going to become a degenerate gambler someday because he thinks he can never lose.  This time my son went through BattleScribe with me and picked his own Kill Team.  He loved having control over what troops he took and what they were armed with, and he had a great suggestion about what specialist should take which weapons that I liked so much I incorporated it into my list as well.  Please check “positive contributions to an army list” off the chart of Warhammer parenting milestones.  Unfortunately we played on the darker side of the 8’ x 4’ gaming table so I only got one decent picture of the action.  

#Dadgoals courtesy of (Jerod)imusPrime at the Battle Mallet Podcast.

#DadGoals II

The Quickening

My nine year old son has lived up to my wildest dreams when it comes to wargaming but at times that can be a double-edged sword.  We had several hours together last weekend and we played a game he invented using Legos as the tabletop scenery and minifigures as the miniatures.  The game was an adventure party taking on a greater number of enemies with SWAT like building infiltration taking the place of the dungeon crawling.  Not that my son explained it that way but I'm trying to translate from 4th grader to gamespeak.

"I see we're going to need to solve this problem Adam West style"

#DadGoals

Last Saturday the day I've been waiting for basically since my son was born finally arrived.  We played our first game of Warhammer 40,000.  Technically we played Kill Team, but it was his first miniatures games on a real table with scenery.  Starting a few years ago we played Heroclix as super-heroes were the easiest hook into gaming.  Last year Betrayal at Calth came in handy as more than just the source of 30K miniatures, it was the first in-universe GW game we played together with miniatures.