Category Archives: Warhammer Fantasy Battle

Warhammer: The Old World Which Factions to Choose

I’m a big fan of older editions of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, having started gaming and miniature collecting when the 2nd edition came out and then carrying on playing with the 3rd edition before taking a long break. Just when I got back into gaming I found out that the Old World was about to be destroyed and that it was all Age of Sigmar. I’ve collected, painted and played Age of Sigmar, and it’s OK. The game mechanics are actually really good and the games generally fun. The detail and design of the miniatures are awesome. But for me nothing can beat the nostalgia of those earlier days or Warhammer and the more traditional fantasy armies and battles. Ranked units of goblins and dwarfs, elves and men etc.

That’s why I’m really excited that Warhammer’s Old World is now coming back. A few years it was a vague rumour about square bases and a few teasing maps, but now there are more and more details and it looks like it should be out maybe later this year with any luck.

Warhammer-the-Old-World-Factions

Now that it’s so tangible I have started looking at my own collection of figures and started to think about what faction I might get behind. Empire of Man fits quite well with what I have but I’m always keen on Orcs & Goblins too. Perhaps the whole lot? Who knows. More thoughts on this soon. And hopefully some more info from Games Workshop about what’s coming to help me decide!

How to Paint Shields for Wargames Miniatures – a great tip

I have recently been painting some freehand designs on miniatures. This post isn’t about how to paint designs like those, but how to make a fairly standard design look more realistic. I have an Orc archer with a simple quartered design on shield, but I was concerned that it looked a bit flat – it’s quite hard to add highlights to a flat image – well for me anyway!

So I did a bit of Googling and found this great tutorial on how to add realism to shields on  the Pinman Miniature Painter blog. The idea is that you can add marks where the shield has suffered damage from people hitting it with swords. It’s quite a simple technique but really adds to the look of it I think.

Here’s what I managed to do as a first attempt on my Orc archer.

Orc Archer with damaged shield

It’s pretty simple to do – you add some brown and off-white lines, but looks quite good I think! For how to do it see Pinman’s tutorial!