Space Pirates – The Birth of a Fleet

Painting a fleet of spaceships has been on my to-do list for a long time, but the complexity of a fleet and the sheer variety of ships I saw in most ranges were baffling. Luckily, GZG’s Ravagers seem to be a manageable challenge: there’s a Light Carrier, a Cruiser, two types of Raiders and an Attacker (these are approximately the equivalent of destroyers and frigates or torpedo boats) and that’s all. Experienced players might find this range of ships insufficient, but for me, it seems to be the perfect starting set.

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Summer Haul Report 2020 – aka The Treasure Hunt Goes On

This quarter has been busier than expected, practically I haven’t painted anything but have luckily had very good RPG (Cepheus Light and D&D) and wargame (Stargrunt II) sessions. COVID-19 is still around, so there was no wargame show to report about and the games I played were online, not face to face. But there is something reassuring about buying hobby stuff. This time it wasn’t panic buying like it was in the spring, but a more methodical one.

Let’s start with Patrick Todoroff’s Hardwired rulebook and The Tsim Sha Tsui expansion: these are both short, fifty-page black and white booklets with a bit of background, complete rules, list of equipment and a handful of missions for cybernetically enhanced agents. Sounds familiar? There’s a good reason: Syndicate, the old PC game was one of the inspirations for this game. The subtitle “Cyberpunk espionage and mayhem” refers to a cyberpunk setting, but it’s very adaptable – you can swap the agents with a black ops team, a commando unit, a squad of mercenaries, a recon or a SWAT team and swap the opposing security forces to insurgents, alien bugs, zombies, rogue AI robots, vicious gangs, or your favourite villains.

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