The rest of "Sedition Wars: The Battle of Alabaster" -- Unboxing (pic heavy)

Welcome back, droogs!

Thanks for sticking with me during this period of infrequent postings. As summer yields to autumn, I feel more centered, empowered and inspired. I think that bodes well for "Dispatches" and for my hobby activities in general.

I don't want to veer too far from my topic tonight, but I do want to say Tracey and I have had some wonderful times recently. After a recent visit to the pain clinic, she felt good enough to actually go out to a restaurant for a meal. We went to the IHOP near our house, where she hasn't been in at least a year. The manager and staff always ask after her when I go in to pick up food for us, but her return there caused quite a scene. All the servers who know us came over for hugs, and Pam, the manager, actually cried. Which made me tear up. Nothing adds to the flavor of stuffed French toast with blueberries like fresh man-tears.

And there's nothing to make you feel like a success as a man, a husband, as a human being, for your beautiful wife to be looking into your eyes and tell you, "You are a good man." Wow.

Now, on to the unboxing:

For the "Sedition Wars" kickstarter, I plumped for the Biohazard level, plus the terrain pack, the THI suit, and all the characters with their strain-infected versions: Dr. Susan Ridley, Ramirez, Niven Banks, Hexen Phaedrus, and the crew of the Calamity. Well, the Calamity crew doesn't have strain-infected versions, but you know what I mean.

So here's the tidy little box these wave 2 minis came in.

While many people are unhappy with the material the Sedition Wars minis are made of, I think Brian Roe wrote a nice analysis of the materials. You can read what Roebeast had to say here and here.

Essentially, it takes paint well but moldlines are maddening and difficult to deal with. I'm going to keep that in mind as I work on them.

There's also a growing thread on Frothers about the slight stature and apparent shrinkage in scale of some of the plastic minis. The multitude of voices there will give you a better perspective on this issue than I can at this stage (although I certainly reserve the right to chime in later.)

On the non-minis front, this wave included cards and the instructional painting DVD:

The remainder of the Biohazard product comes in one big blister pack.

The terrain pack comes in its own separate retail-ready box. It's nice to have the diagram on back detailing its contents. (That's one complaint I do have about a lot of kickstarters: no packing slip in the box. I want to be able to quickly verify that what you think you sent me is what you really sent me, and that that matches up with what I requested.)

So here's the terrain:

Crates, barricades, teleport controls, security terminals, life support
terminals, havok guns, necrocysts, exocysts, gestation vents, macrophages,
spore engines and three each of male and female corpses. 

Narrow standard doors.

Wide standard doors

Airlock doors

Section doors

And all the add-ons come in their own little bags to keep their myriad parts together. That's another thing about these Sedition Wars minis -- it seems like everything is multipart. It's like buying from IKEA, in that I don't care if it's a flyswatter, if you buy it from IKEA it's gonna come in two parts with an Allen wrench.*

The Calamity Crew

Dr. Susan Ridley

Ramirez

Niven Banks

Hexen Phaedrus

THI Carapace

Once I get these minis unbagged and separated out, I'll get you better, clearer photos, and hopefully some size comparisons to other minis as well. I can't really work on them at the moment without the real risk that the tiny parts will vanish forever.

So that's it for today. The Empire of the Dead: Requiem level I pledged at should hopefully be shipped in a week or so, and the Zombicide Season Two and Toxic City Mall expansion should also ship soon. So more on those later.

Back to the boards, everyone, and I'll see you across the gaming table soon!

*I'm sorry that I can't remeber what comedian said this originally. I'd love to credit him or her.

Confession to make

OK, you readers have been too polite to say anything, but I hear the whispers of the questions through the vibrating power lines. My mechanical parts feel the doubt building in the stray electrons left by my posts.

"Christopher, why don't you ever post pictures of your painted minis?"

Because there are none. Not new ones anyway. To be honest, I haven't applied paintbrush to mini in over two years. And the last time all I did was spray-prime my nascent zombie horde.

It hasn't stopped my planning and acquiring minis to paint, obviously. You've seen those photos.

It's not for any insecurity about the results. I'm a decent painter, to what I consider a good tabletop standard.

My problem is finding, or rather making, space to paint.

Because I'm a hoarder. Every surface in my home is crowded and cluttered. The floor, to me, is a low, flat shelf.

God, it feels good to admit it in a public forum. I. Am. A hoarder. (Warning: Personal revelations only tangentially related to gaming follow. If you're a tl;dr type of person, you may want to skip to the end.)

For years I thought I was just sloppy. And lazy. And I am both those things, for certain values of sloppy and lazy.

It moved into full-fledged hoarding over the years, as health crises and family events chipped away at my stability. It's not to the degree of the people you see on television, mainly because I don't own property. (And no cat skeletons under the furniture here. Our cat is very much alive and a multi-clawed threat to my safety and well-being.)

My wife and I rent a two-bedroom duplex, and the clutter and collections and trash, sometimes all intermingled, have taken over both bedrooms and are threatening the living room and the kitchen.

If it were just me, I might ignore it and just go full-on batshit crazy and become "that guy" in our little town, with the house the kids warn each other away from with the judicious use of campfire tales and sleepover horror stories.

But even as the indecision, insecurity and, at times, obsession inch closer to overwhelming me, I am consumed with something more powerful.

The love of my wife. I love her with the white-hot heat of a thousand suns. I would pull the stars from the sky for her. I would drag souls to hell for her. If I could heal her crippling genetic disorder with a smoothie made of severed heads and blended babies, I would become the greatest mass murderer this planet has ever seen.

But I can't. So I won't. (Who am I kidding? I abhor violence IRL. I even have trouble transgressing my own moral code in a VIDEOGAME. I am the only person who plays Grand Theft Auto and stops at the stoplights.)

Instead I am fighting the bad programming in my head that makes the stacks of boxes and mounds of clothing feel like castle walls and parapets, protecting my too-oft-wounded heart. Even as I shoulder Sisyphian guilt over the condition of our home, I also feel safe. The clown prince of clutter. A king of rags and patches.

I gradually make headway against the clutter littering the floor, which has reduced the amount of our home my wife can access to about 25 square feet.

Unfortunately, even if it were spotless, she couldn't move much farther anyway. She suffers the genetic disorder ankylosing spondylitis, which I think I've written about before. It's sometimes called "bamboo spine," because as it progresses, it fuses the spine into one solid mass of bone. It hinders her movement and leaves her in constant pain. She gets about some with a walker, mostly by wheelchair. Drugs manage most of the pain and the muscle spasms.

She has made friends across the world on the Internet, as have I. I try to make sure she has as much access to information, communication and entertainment as possible. Now I'm fighting my own brain, my fear, to return our home to a state of which she can be proud.

It approaches irony that the artistic release of painting minis would do much to ease my mind and soothe my brittle feelings. So all I can say is ...

Yes, soon. I made big strides on my days off this week, and I plan to do a little more each day. Eventually, I'll have enough of a clear work area that I can drag out my minis and paints and get to work. My goal is within two weeks. I'm also using this as a motivator:

Studio McVey painting competition on Wamp

Having just acquired Sedition Wars (and having a few of the metal SW minis as well) I am spoiled for choice. And the entry deadline isn't until April. Even I should be able to hit that.

I'll be back later today with more about the Empire of the Dead: Requiem kickstarter (to which I've already pledged.)

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

An in-boxing then, not an un-boxing

I promised an unboxing for "Sedition Wars: Battle for Alabaster," but there are so many of them out there right now I don't want to burden the Interwebz with another one that won't really add anything to the conversation. But there are some issues I can address.

First of all, packaging: This thing is huge!

And deep, too. This isn't a game to put on your bookshelf. It's a game to make a bookshelf out of. I may use the box this came in to add a room on to our apartment. It's big. B-I-G.

My meaty hand rests on the giant game box.

This is how thick the box is. Alternate use --
keep your trailer level.

Those of you who are members of the Miniature Addicts Anonymous on Facebook have already heard me talk about this, but I had a surge of disappointment because my Biohazard set of extras did not include the special edition resin Lt. Kara. I did, however, get two of the Mike McVey signed print of the cover art.

This is the Studio McVey painted version of the special edition
Lt. Kara from the Kickstarter website.

My second piece of signed art. I offered to send it back,
but CMON told me I could keep it. Hmmm, eBay maybe?

Now I'm nothing if not a whiny, entitled, overprivileged manchild, and that kind of mispack can just suck the joy out of a much-anticipated delivery. Two quick emails, one to Cool Mini or Not and one a message through the Kickstarter system itself, outlined my problem to them.

I seriously did not expect an immediate response, given that they're in the early days of shipping out the game. CMON's customer service sent an automatic reply acknowledging my issue, and I swear before I finished READING that email, I had a personal response from Ginger at CMON. She promised they'd ship it out as soon as possible, most likely the next day, and send me a tracking number. This was midafternoon on Tuesday, the 15th. On Thursday I got an email with the tracking number from Ginger, saying it had been sent out the previous day, AND I got a message through Kickstarter wanting to make sure CMON customer service was handling the issue to my satisfaction.

Here's the extra-special version of Lt. Kara herself, what Mike called in the Kickstarter
Updates "Tech-comm Lt. Kara Black." They've done special rules for her, in a pdf.
 Hard-card to follow in later release, I believe. Download her stats at alt-Kara stats

The package arrived Friday morning, less than 48 hours after I'd reported the issue. (It helps that I only live a few hours from CMON Central, I suppose.) But they were exemplary in fixing a problem that was, to me, serious. I told them Ginger deserves a raise.

CMON has always done right by me. This is the third Kickstarter they've been involved in that I've supported, and I'm sure it won't be the last.

Sedition War is in!

Just as it says on the tin, I received my shipment of "Sedition Wars: Battle for Alabaster" today! I'll take some unboxing photos later today for a post tonight. Eager to dig in ...