Vampifan's Views 36 - Monthly Musings 20

Vampirella displaying her bat wings by John Bolton

This past month my blog celebrated two landmarks. First up, it reached its fourth birthday on March 16th and secondly, I passed the 400 posts mark. The ATZ-FFO batrep that I posted was my 400th post. Yay, me!
March has been another busy month for me. Getting to play ATZ-FFO for the first time this year was an obvious highlight, and how cool it was for Vampifan to recruit Hannah Vaughn and her family.
I have managed to glue all of my model trees to circular MDF bases of varying sizes depending upon the height and diameter of the tree. I am now sourcing my trees from Carl at Grekwood Miniatures (GM). I recently ordered some weeping willow trees and some beech trees. The GM webstore is well worth checking out for trees as Carl offers a wide variety of tree types. My MDF bases came from East Riding Miniatures and were very reasonably priced.
I have almost finished painting my first batch of plastic figures from the Zombicide boardgame. I am busy painting the six survivors and 16 of the zombies (10 normal zeds, 4 runners and 2 fatties). Next up will be another batch of 16 zombies plus the fearsome zombie abomination. I am painting these so that they will be compatible with my current zombie horde and other contemporary figures. What that means is that they will all have textured bases the same as my other figures. I have seen lots of examples of painted Zombicide figures but I have never seen any that have textured bases. When I get the second batch painted I'll run a review of the figures and a review of the game. I have played a few solo games of it already, with the zombies winning most games. Individually, zombies are easy enough to kill but once they gather in numbers and attack in force they are virtually unstoppable. It's great fun!
Today is the last day of the Zombicide Season 2 Kickstarter pledge and it is an understatement to say that it has been a phenomenal success. As I type this, there are still about 12 hours to go and they are $15,000 short of the $2 million mark. I hope they reach it. Seeing as their original goal was for just $25,000 you can see just how popular this project has been. My final pledge amount was a whopping big $400.00. I have ordered both games (Prison Outbreak and Toxic City Mall), the zombie dogs packs, every survivor they offered, the extra tile sets and some extra tracker tokens. Roll on September when they start shipping.
On the card modelling front I have taken a break from making ground tiles. I have almost completed the Stoelzel's Derelict Building. For most people this would be a very easy model to make, but you ought to know my motto by now - always go the extra mile. What has really slowed me down in making this are the wooden boards over the windows. I am making all of the boards separately to give them a 3D effect and that is very time-consuming. Expect a review some time next month.

Brummie's Burgers - the newest fast food franchise to hit the market.

Carl from Stoelzel's Structures continues to impress me. He recently announced that he was going to design a fast food restaurant and he asked followers of his forum to come up with a name for it. I came up with three options, of which my favourite was "Brummie's Burgers," named in honour of my fellow blogger, Simon aka Brummie. A vote was held to decide which name would be chosen and to my delight, "Brummie's Burgers" came out top. I won a free copy of the model when it was released, but to be honest, having my choice of name chosen was reward enough for me. What is really cool about this model and further proof of just what a hero Carl is, he included a sheet of signs featuring all the names that were suggested in his poll. Thus, everyone who entered was a winner. I thought that was a lovely touch and very generous of Carl. Incidentally, I plan on making this after I finish making the derelict building. What is not shown on the promo photos I've shown above is that the restaurant comes with its own ground tiles that are compatible with those from the Undeveloped Real Estate set. I will be adding them to my restaurant model, although the restaurant will be detachable from the ground tiles to make it easier for storing away.
April is going to be a very exciting month for me. The highlight will be meeting up with fellow blogger Mathyoo who runs his blog here - http://mathyoo28mm.blogspot.co.uk/ He's going to spend a week's holiday with me before he heads down to London for the big Salute convention. As well as showing him around the area, I am hoping to get a few games of ATZ-FFO and Zombicide played with him. It'll be quite strange to have someone else to game with having been a solo gamer for far too many years. But I am looking forward to it immensely. I will, of course, keep you informed of what we get up to, as I'm sure Mathyoo will on his blog.
That's all for this month. Have a very happy Easter!