My Squats have taken once again to the field of battle! As the sun has now set on 4th ed 40K, my Squats appeared at Toy Soldier VII in Preston to take on all-comers.




They were joined by their regular friend, Inquisitor "Hood" Hargen, helping bulk them out to the 1750 pts required and defending their minds with his titular Psychic Hood. As I was also fielding a Callidus, Hargen was promoted to Lord Inquisitor, and had a mandatory retinue of suitable oldskool models, inclusing this old Judge Dredd Ape Gangster Citadel produced under licence in the 1980s. Here he is failing to kill an Eversor with a banana.





Vikarius's Battle Cannon mercilessly obliterating the Sister Troops choices. Although we were playing 4th edition, the missions were based on the 5th edition hearsay floating around at the time the rulespack was put together. That meant Troops were exterminated with extreme bias.




And here they are, fighting against some Classic Space Wolves. Old lead models with beards. Most of these Space Wolves were released in the Rogue Trader era. Lovely.



At the end of the tournament, they'd managed 1 win, 2 draws and 2 losses. That's impressive for Squats. Have to reconfigure them for 5th ed now.

In site news, I fluffed up the end of my six-month hiatus by missing it by a whole 4 days. Oops. There's been a bit of behind-the-scenes cleanup going on, and some changes will be coming int effect soon. Keep watching this space.

Today marks 6 months since Ninjabread was last updated.

So what happened Curis? Fall out of love with wargaming?

Well, I just got absorbed into other areas of the hobby. Painting my exciting new Ork army, attending tournaments and faffling with far too many side projects.

There's a few stories of what happened in the missing months over on the Dice Not Blog. There's even photos on the sporadic updates. I always recommend you give it a read.

So what does the future hold for Ninjabread?

You may well know I've been playing a lot of Battle for Armageddon of late, but I had yet to try the supplement Chaos Attack. (If you're interested, you can download them for free from Games Workshop's Specialist Games site.)

Chaos Attack is set during 500 years previous, when Angron invaded. He paused halfway through his campaign to build statues to the Chaos Gods, which allowed Logan Grimnar time to organise the second continent's defences, and summon a whole pile of Grey Knights. He was subsequently banished back to the Warp for 100 years.

You may also know that The Chaos Attack supplement allows you to field Squats, much to my glee. With this in mind I went over to Rob's to give it a go.

He rightly pointed out that since we were playing the First Invasion, Inquisitor Horst and the Golgothan Squats didn't turn up for another 500 years. However, much to my glee, turns out the Chaos side get Chaos Squats! Both Khorne and Nurgle flavours. Here they are having just stomped on Helsreach Hive with Angron himself and the Deaths Head Titan Legion.



(I wonder if the writers knew that Deaths Head were also an elite Waffen-SS division. Perhaps they were oblivious, like Simon Furman when he wrote the character Death's Head in the 1980s Marvel Comics.)

As a testament to the game's designers the Chaos play very differently to the original Orks. I was expecting them to swamp the Imperials under sheer weight of numbers, and then see if the Imperials could recover with their Build Phases. However, the Chaos player has to be more cautious, especially as he lacks the surprise attack rules. At the end of turn 8 I only had 4 Chaos counters left on the table, and lacked the numbers to occupy 2 of the 4 hives I'd destroyed. Rob had come very close to winning throughout, but was ultimately unable to roll a those 4-ups to banish Angron back to the Warp.

Great game. And there's a tonne of variants still to try.

Matt and I have been busy this last month getting our forces ready for the Games Workshop Doubles Tournament. For those of you unfamiliar with Doubles, it's two allied 500 point forces that have to conform to awkward restrictions for the 2nd elites, fast attack and heavy support choices. The real challenge of the event is choosing two forces that complement each other. Me and Matt chose Orks and Dark Eldar.

Orks and Dark Eldar? How can that be justified fluffwise? Well, to make things even more bizarre we threw something else into the mix ... Genestealers.



Once upon a time, a cunning Haemonculus had come across some Genestealers, those six-limbed aliens famous for stealing genes. His experiments splicing the Stealer DNA with his own creations weren't successful, creating only horrible deformed Eldar/Stealer hybrids (for which Matt had modelled up some Grotesques). The Eldar physiology wasn't tough enough, but their Ork slaves' was...

It all fits nicely together modelling-wise. The Dark Eldar Warrior plastics even have five crests on their helmets, making them look niddy.

My Stealer/Orks (Greenstealers) will be developed over the coming year into an complete and independent force. More pictures to follow when I've finished modelling all their new trophies on.

Trophies! Yes, they've got trophies from the many enemies they hideously butchered. Our weekend's Doubles gaming went rather well. We won four of our six games, managing to climb as high as table 6 for the last round before being smacked down by Allen and Nathan's Taudar. I did manage to shoot down a Holoed-up Prism though, as Allen had cockily parked it on top of impassible terrain where a its vectored engines did nothing to help my lucky immobilised result. With the new Ork Codex out that Kan will be getting a Kustom Mega Blasta made out of a Prism Cannon.

Nice thing about playing Doubles is the second player. We were able to spot the flaws in each others' tactics, and we could draw upon twice as much experience. I definitely want to do it again. Hope Matt does too, (not that my constant disregard for his advice cost us any games).

Roll on the 2008 Season.

My sweetly ignorant girlfriend is to thank for this strip. Being entirely baffled by wargames (other than knowing she's not allowed to touch any of my 'little plastic men') she actually reads most of the padding White Dwarf is full of, and picked up on their choice of words.

This is Ninjabread's 10th strip, which means I am now considering the site permanently established. You can go back to the beginning and see how the quality and style has fluctuated during these initial endeavours.

In other news, Ninjabread does indeed seem to be back and fully functional. In case you missed it I was having some issues yesterday. I thought I'd broken it with my own fiddling, but it turns out it was my hosting company's fault.

Welcome to 2008. I saw the New Year in in the Welsh capital city Cardiff.

Cardiff's main pull for geeky tourists like myself is that Russel T. Davies films a lot of his new reimagined Doctor Who here. The city is crawling with locations. In fact, Torchwood, Doctor Who's bastard offspring series is entirely set here. I find both series' Celtocentricity deeply irritating.

Wales is also famous for its national dish - cheese-on-toast. It's very difficult to find in Cardiff as the place is bursting with chain Italian restaurants.

Anyway, I did visit the Millennium Bay and admired the fountain. Problem was, that all those thoughts of running water made me need the loo.



Oh no! Turns out that very flagstone was the secret entrance to Torchwood!

Christmas holidays at last. I'm taking some time off to work on my super-secret new Doubles army along with Matt. We've dreamt up a bizarre double-team that's in some ways a 40K ménage à trois. It's all very idyllic at the moment, with phonecalls co-ordinating the two forces' colour schemes and dicscussions about how the forces will tactically complement each other - but that's bound to go out the window as pre-tornie panic sets in. Actually, there's only two more weekends until the Doubles. Oh no, panic's kicked in now.

Matt pointed out on the Dice Not Blog that the Host from yesterday's Doctor Who Christmas special reminded him of the classic Blood Angels captain.



Uncanny hmmm?