Its been a while since I've written, but that's purely down to being very busy, not to losing any interest in the hobby. That said, I've not had any time to actually play the game for weeks now. I'm a slave to my wife's schedule and if she works on club nights, I'm stuck at home. No way around it. But two things have got me excited about playing in the future: an Imperial Baneblade and Apocalypse.

I bought the tank as a joint project for me and the wife to put together in the cold winter evenings. Its a struggle for many of us to get our partners to accept our hobby, let alone join in. But my wife can be very practical and when I explained we would build and paint this big old tank together, she quickly got into the spirit. Its been great, these last few evenings, just sitting together, with something rubbish on the tv, slowly working our way through the sprues, chatting about life or whatever, and building a new toy. My wife gets the company of her husband and the chance to talk, I get a shiny new tank! When we get round to painting it I'm planning on trying some the techniques described in Imperial Armour's Masterclass book. Should be a challenge and a great way to build some skills.

Which brings me to Apocalypse. I played Epic back when it first came out so I was intrigued to learn the same level of warfare was nw being played at 'normal' scale. Thanks to ebay I got a nice cheap copy of the book and dived in. My favourite thing about Apocalypse is that you don't need to fit any force org chart or points limit. You just use your whole collection! Any imbalance between sides can be resolved by giving the weaker side extra strategic assets, and away you go. You can even mix armies - as long as you can justify some of the less likely alliances with a good backstory :)

And thats great when you've got a nice sized Space Wolf army and are wondering how to justify throwing an Imperial Guard superheavy in too. I had thought about making up some back story about the tank having been kept by the Wolves after the last war on Armageddon - the Administratum made such a mess of its relocation of the survivors the Sons of Fenris decided they didn't deserve their tank back. I mean, when your Chapter Master carries a Chaos axe, you can pretty much get away with anything, right? But now I'm thinking I'll just paint it in some nice IG camo pattern and use it as the centrepiece to perhaps build a future guard army around.

Apocalypse has really inspired me to think differently about how I'm building my army. Whereas before I might have been motivated to buy units based on what I needed to counter the FoTM on my local tables, now I can think about building an entire company of Wolves and chose models they are likely to have in their lair.

As you can see from the picture, my SW army is, so far, fairly Wolf Guard heavy. In fact, I have more WG than I do Grey Hunters :) Thats ok for a 1500/1750 point game where I can either use the all termy/all drop pod list, or a more traditional rhino based list. But for Apocalypse, unless I want to be used as either a strategic reserve to be dropped behind the lines, or an initial assault force to weaken those same lines, I probably need more troops. Much as I don't relish the idea of building and painting more marines, trying to squeeze more variations out of the same sprues again, that is probably somewhere in my near future.

I could do with some more Rune Priests as well, especially as I'm building my list as Logan Grimnar's company. I have an idea to make some wolf pelt cloaks to help them stand out but that's a few projects down the line. One or two more Land Raiders would be nice too, and I only have four rocket launchers. I would really like to use some of the new Forge World ones, perhaps with some of the older marks of armour. That would fit in well with the Grey Hunter background of them being trusted with the chapters most venerable and venerated weapons.

So, lots to do and lots to build. We should have the Baneblade built in a few more evenings and maybe even painted by Christmas. And then I need to find somewhere to play some Apocalypse - anyone know of games or opponents in the South Essex area?