2017 In Review Part 2

Welcome back to DaanofWar’s 2017 hobby highlights!

Part 1 left us just before the big wedding. The wedding was great. We had to take an enormous ammount of pictures, sit in chairs, sign papers, eat loads of stuff and party our asses off. Here’s a picture of me and my wife making an attempt at posing for a photo:

So, with all that nonsense out of the way I finally had some time to paint my warhams again:

As can be seen in the images above, I put my Raven Guard on hold for a while and continued the work to rebase my entire Chaos Space Marine army. The new edition of Warhammer 40k was just released and we were going to kick off a campaign at the GameForce, so I really wanted to give my ‘good-old’ chaos marines a bit of love and attention. I had good hopes that they might be viable again with the new rules and I was pretty hyped to see if my old army could come back with a vengeance.

Having rebased most of my marines: This is a shot of my first 500pts battle against Naut’s Grey Knights. Not only did I instantly learn that Grey Knights are pretty good in the new edition, but units of 20 marines die waaay too easily to morale checks. Never again.

During the rest of the campaign I started noticing the pattern that I was not only losing a lot of the games, but that I was also losing them fast. Most of my games were over by turn 3. Also, the hope I had for my chaos army catching a break rules-wise this edition were shattered when it turned out that not only was the core of my army (my 40+ chaos marines with bolters) not very points efficient, but they also lost the option to take an extra close combat weapon. This made my entire army a lot less viable as I found myself stuck with a lot of units that did not excel in any of the 3 main phases of the game.

With each new game I played each month I realised more and more that I needed to do a lot more than rebasing to salvage my chaos army in 8th edition. All of this got me a bit down about the new edition, so I wasn’t that sad when ForgeWorld announced that the Horus Heresy would be staying with 7th edition and I could happily continue working at my Raven Guard again.

Above is the first model that I did when I started working on my RG again. Pretty happy with it and a nice change of pace from the drop pods and the storm eagle that I still had to finish.

Another reason for needing to hurry with my Raven Guard was the upcoming Scale Model Challenge. As you may remember from last year, the Scale Model Challenge is a fairly large miniature painting convention that’s right next door for me and since we had such a blast visiting last year I managed to get us a spot for the club for 2017. The idea we had to wow the crowds was to try and display the sheer ammount of Heresy we have going on at our local club by building a giant Isstvan V display board.

Here’s some work in progress pics of how we built the board:

Thanks to a lot of help from friends we managed to finish the table just in time for the SMC and with all of our armies on top it turned out to be a roaring succes:

Also, to finish my big 3000 point Raven Guard project in style, I took the second half of the army (the part that I painted this year) to Armies on Parade at the Warhammer store in Eindhoven:

I was super proud to have finally finished everything after almost 2 years of working on it and my efforts were rewarded by a nice gold pin for Best Army Theme.

The final thing that I went to in 2017 was the first Gurash Wars event in November. First time I went to a narrative e Horus Heresy event and it was a blast. It was a long way to travel, but it was worth it to take part in the ongoing story and see a lot of cool new Heresy armies. Here are a few impressions of the event:

So that was pretty much it for me in 2017. A lot more has happened so far in 2018 though, so I’ll save all of that for the next post.

Victory or Death!