Another MDF Building

My second MDF building project was the cleverly named Small Business 01 by 3D DZYN.  The company popped up in a discussion on Lead Adventure and I quickly placed an order.  The choice of what to buy was limited by the fact that there were only a few kits available and this was one of the only ones with a photo of the product.

I was pleasantly surprised by what arrived.  The kit was quite small, with minimal extra wooden sprue material.  The paint was far darker than it appeared on the website.  It did come with a selection of precut signs to hang on the facade.

After giving the interior walls a quick shot of flat white spray paint to make the interior appear more finished, I set about assembling the kit.

While it's not a large structure, I was stunned by how fast and easily it went together.  It felt like the tolerances between parts were just a touch more forgiving than the 4Ground kit, resulting in a build with no need for trimming and sanding.

I touched up the exposed edges with Vallejo paints, washed the roof with thinned Citadel Dryad Bark, and called it a day.  The whole thing took less than four hours, painting and drying time included. 

While I like the kit a great deal, I would have liked to have a boardwalk included.  Additionally, the tiny lettering on the sign was a pain to paint.  Finally, I would have preferred to have only the facade painted.  As it is, it looks a bit too civilized.  If these quibbles seem really minor, it's because they are.  The model is a little gem and at $20, a good deal.

One thing to note is that it is small.  The comparison photo with the 4Ground building should clarify just how small.  There's nothing wrong with that, and I like a variety of building sizes, but it won't take up much space on your board.

Operation Coffeyville

Nearly five years on, I've still got my little Norman force and its simple early medieval village with cabbage patch and vacant pig pen.  There's still work to do, but it has been a fun project and one I plan to keep working on, if not with my full attention.

While I enjoyed SAGA for the most part, the rules struck me as being patchy and built more on exceptions than rules.  The turn phases were byzantine and kept us going back to the rulebook constantly.

Luckily, there's a new version of SAGA on the shelves and supposedly it fixes a lot of the first one's sins.  While I would really like to pick up a copy, I've been dragging my feet on doing so.  The new rulebook is only £10, which is great, but the necessary "Age of Vikings" supplement is another "£30.  It's not that I can't splash out nearly $50 on a new ruleset, but damn if there aren't a lot of other shinies out there competing for my very limited hobby spend.

And that brings me to the most recent direction, or as I'm calling Operation Coffeyville after a disastrous event in the annals of rapid bank withdrawals.

While sourcing reasonably priced structures for my Norman settlement, I came across 4Ground and it's outstanding range of MDF kits.  Most of the dark age kits failed to wow me (except the astounding great hall, but that would have been a missed car payment), their growing old west line was stunning.  Bright facades and working batwing doors added to their appeal.

Then there are the figures.  While Artisan and Crusader do some nice models, American manufacturer Knuckleduster has been churning out a huge range of computer-sculpted westerners.  The entire line-up is beautiful and without equal in gaming.

As my previous posted hinted, I've been kicking around ideas for Western gaming for a bit.  In the last few years I've painted a half dozen cowboy figures and picked up a few building kits.

So there it is.  Another project on the table, but not really a project in sense of the SAGA one.  This time it's less structured and lacking a timeline.  While doing this, I do intend to continue my slow development of my SAGA force and scenery.

MDF: the F is for folly

Back around 2007, my cousin called me up and pitched me on the idea of buying a laser cutter to manufacture and sell MDF dice towers and 28mm-scaled shipping containers.  I told him that it was a waste as the market was flooded with those and I couldn't see MDF scenery ever taking the place of resin and plastic kits.  I mean what buildings could possibly look better as lasercut basswood?

And here we are, 13 years later, and there are countless small companies cranking out surpringly beautiful scenery from sheets of wood.  I was wrong and the limits of my imagination led me there.  If anyone could have made it work, it was my cousin, a skilled modeler, tinkerer, and professional draftsman.  That said, I still think dice towers are dumb and everyone who wanted sci-fi shipping containers bought them early or raided one of the many liquidation sales when AT-43 was rejected by gamers who didn't feel like spending $35 for a pre-painted model of a gorilla with a bazooka or a set of rules that hadn't figured out how combatants could jump or climb.

Last winter, I was looking for a small project to occupy me during the cold and dark months, which here in northern Europe can run from October through April.  I had just finished painting a few Artizan Designs gunslingers and looked around for a building to put them in.  As luck would have it, Northstar was running a sale.  I tossed some Copplestone gangsters, two dozen Crusader hoplites, and an orange single story false front building from 4Ground into the virtual shopping cart.  Obviously, I'm not one to get bogged down by little things like focus or goals.

The building kit was a hefty bag of lasercut sheets that smelled like a campfire.

Over the course of two afternoons, most of the kit went together.  I'm not sure how much was my unfamiliarity with this type of model, or the fact that it was one of their first western kits, but the process was as smooth as taking the trash out by heaving the bag dowstairs to the cans and picking up the scattered trash afterward.

The directions were largely just photos, which left me scratching my head at times, trying to puzzle out what the picture was telling me to do.  When I did figure out what to do, the pieces often barely fit together.  My file set got regular use.

The final insult came while assembling the roof.  The main roof piece is large and on my kit, badly warped.  Even after spending days clamped to get it straight, there was still a pronounced bend.  Even after gluing in the supports and leaving the assembly in a mass of clamps, the whole thing is still warped.

I can say that I've done three other MDF kits since then, two of which were by 4Ground, and none have left me so frustrated.  Ironically, it's far simpler than one of their other kits I built, but it still took the most time.

The moving doors and roof hatch are neat features and the pre-painted aspect was nice.  A lot of thought clearly went into designing it.

On the other hand, the warping was frustrating.  Touching up exposed ends with paint still took another hour or so.  The kit is only £24, which at the time was about $32.   This is one of their cheaper kits and the prices can go up dramatically as the size and detail increase.  A word of warning on that pricing, though.  Shipping by Northstar or 4Ground has to come out of England.  That can add another £20 to the order, so plan accordingly.

On the whole, I like the result.  If Cousin Joe wants to buy that laser now and try his hand at MDF western scenery, I'd be glad to try out the result.

Rules of the West Part One

Back in the dark ages of wargaming, before Bolt Action and Cruel Seas, games were either robots and elves, or they were historical.   The latter class of games tended to be either dry war simulations featuring cardboard chits moved across a map, studiously replicating the Second Italo-Abyssinian War or they were masses of annoyingly accurate 15mm 19th century troops being pushed slowly around a board replicating Antietam.  These were only played by men who looked like George RR Martin.

Nearly two decades ago, we got Flames of War, which kept the beardy 15mm scale but went for more mass appeal.  In the process, it disproved years of speculation by the old grognard gamers that any attempt to make historical gaming fun would cause the Earth to spin off its axis.  It also caused steam to pour out from under those old man fisherman caps as gamers pitted battalions of IS-2s against waves of bren gun carriers.  A good time was had by most, especially the folks at Battlefront, selling crudely cast resin tanks for obscene sums of money.

Shortly before this time, the folks at Games Workshop created a little division called Warhammer Historical, which worked to combine the company's well known love of historical accuracy with its collection deceptively simple yet infuriating rules.  The Warhammer Ancient Battles rules were wildly popular and had spun off more supplements than anyone could count.

By the early 2000s, the historical division had added games covering pirates, Trafalgar, and cowboys.  That last one was Legends of the Old West, and it became something of a legend in gaming.  It allowed players to build and outfit their warband, er, gang in a way that 40K players would find comfortingly familiar.

Legends of the Old West, or LotOW for those in the know, was slickly produced, with 136 glossy pages full of background info and color gaming photos.

Behind the glossy cover was a reasonably solid game with an extensive campaign system.   That campaign system had some good elements, but like the rest of the game, had issues that drew calls for a heavily revised second edition.  As it stood, a runaway leader could emerge early and little could be done to stop them as they amassed equipment and gunfighters.

One aspect that marks LotOW as distinctly a product of its time is the amount of bookkeeping required.  Character sheets, infamy tallies, equipment inventories, payrolls, etc.  Every posse should come with one figure in a green visor, carrying a pen and ledger.

For a game with so many things to keep track of, there are surprisingly few options for the types of gangs you play.  It's limited to cowboys, outlaws, and lawmen.  No native groups.  No cavalry. No Mexicans.  Those all get added in the Plains War and Alamo supplements, but how much those factions work in the context of the first book is up for speculation.

The final mark against the game is the questionable handling of minorities and women.  They're all only hired help, and not even allowed to be fully part of a gang.  The powers they bring to the game are cringeworthy.  The treacherous "bandido" has the ability to shoot even when it risks killing one of his comrades.  The soiled dove moves around the board projecting a blinding sexual allure.  While he doesn't get a firearm, the Chinese railway worker has access to ancient herbal remedies, and both he and the Indian have the "heathen" special ability.  Yikes.

It's a game I could see getting into as a long running campaign among friends.  The rules are a touch crunchy, but no more so than 3rd Edition 40K.  Where it doesn't work is as a pickup game.  Just creating a gang requires a ledger and more fussing around than a beer and pretzels skirmish game should require.