Hobby Time: What's that on my desk?

It's been a while since I talked about exactly what all I'm working on! I used to do this periodically to keep myself motivated, and I think I'll have to get back to it. Since moving to Portland, I've found that my exposure to different games is a lot more broad than in the SF Bay Area. There is an active 40k crowd, but I'm finding that they tend to play on nights that don't really work for me (the weekends are for camping and hiking, not sitting inside). Because of this, my 40k hasn't made it out of storage just yet, and with other games around, it seems to be fading into the background.

Without 40k stealing all my time (and funds), what am I doing for hobby?

Infinity

Obviously I'm heavily invested in Infinity, and I've been doing a ton of community building at my local stores. We started with about 4 dedicated players, and since I've been there, we've more than doubled. In a fit of insanity, I've also helped create a mountain of terrain, on a budget, enough to cover 5 boards, for about $300, I'll be posting a full article on this next week, to help give some resources and inspiration for people trying to equip their FLGS for such a terrain heavy game, or just for you to help make a good looking game board on a budget.

In addition to building copious amounts of terrain out of household junk and Home Depot treasure, I've just joined an escalation league with Onyx, which will force me to get my ass back to painting.

Guild Ball

After giving my first impressions, I quickly finished assembling the rest of my team and The Union allies, now they're ready for basing and paint! I'm a bit intimidated to paint these models, because the teams are so small, I really feel the pressure to make sure each one is amazing as I can. They're all named characters with personalities, so I want to be sure to capture all the individuality that I can, as well as practice painting tartans, which will come in handy when I get to painting my Infinity Caledonia.

Beyond the Gates of Antares

While talking with different game publishers, I had a chance to meet one of the fantastic chaps at the head of Warlord Games. After talking with him a bit, as well as meeting another of their team at Adepticon, I took the plunge. With a starter set in hand, and a decent starting force of Isorians, I've decided to give them solid try. I've already assembled my Isorians (seen above, they were fantastic to build), and I'll be doing an unboxing and first impressions of the starter set, later when I get to assembling the Ghar.

Rumbl

Alright, now for the big thing. For the last 8 months or so, I've been working on an app with two of my good friends, called Rumbl. We will be doing an official launch and announcement in the next month or two, but for those who are interested, here's the idea. Rumbl is a community for miniature games (initially), it allows you to find people in your area to play games with. In addition, it tracks your rankings and builds out leaderboards for your local gaming area. Soon it will have the capability of also showing where gaming is taking place (stores and clubs) as well events in the area (so you'll never miss a local tournament). You can find some more details on our site: WannaRumbl.com

We already have a lot of partnerships already lined up, including Warlord, Mantic, Dreampod 9 and Hawk Games, with many more publishers that we are currently negotiating with. But that's not all, our system will actually support EVERY miniatures game we put into it, there are just extra features for partners, so don't you worry, we will surely be supporting Warhammer 40k and helping you find even more people to play with.

Well there you have it, I've been busy as hell with the new job, new house, and soon to have new baby, but I've also managed to squeeze in a bit of time to at least build a bunch of models, now lets see if I can make time to paint it all! While I was at Adepticon, I was able to pick up a sweet Sotar 20/20 Badger Airbrush and compressor, which I'm hoping will help speed up the painting process, but since my experience with an airbrush is fairly minimal, it could get interesting...