Contest Mania!

Here's a little something to spice up everyone's weekend:  some intrepid HoP members are running contests and everyone (even you!) can enter for a chance to win fabulous prizes and the respect of a gender of your choice.

If you're really lucky, you might even get to drink from the fire hose!

Pig-iron Head Set Competition:  Star Forge is running a pretty nice contest that might net you some pretty cool conversion bits for your IG armies.  So long as you can follow directions, you have a shot.  But be sure to jump in on this one soon as it ends on the 6th!  Click here for details.


The Far Side of The Galaxy: Creative contest!  The Creepy Corridor is running their own contest and wants you to design a logo for their wargaming group.  They give you a ton of inspiration and all you have to do is share some of your mind grapes.  But here's the fun part:  The prize for winning is a mysterious mystery!  All I know is that it'll likely be mailed to you and will have something to do with wargaming.  Click here for details.

Badab Veterans' Competition:  The Fallen Princes in conjunction with BoLS very own Aventine need your help to move ahead with the revisions to the BoLS Badab war fandex.  Since Forgeworld went ahead and stripped all the mystery out of it, the BoLS crew are re-envisioning their work as supplement to the excellent IA9 and 10.  All you have to do is paint one of the characters the authors want pictures of and you could snag some sweet space marine related swag.  Click here for details.

The Weekly Top X - Homework Week! (But we’re not so gauche as to grade...)

Hello, hello, hello!  Welcome to this weeks Top X!  We're hangin' out on Friday due to Old Stuff day (voted least likely to ever have Hallmark cards) and Brent's 3 round bout with Space Chlamydia (or whatever he really had).  To make up for the sudden Change and in honor of that fact that we just hit 201 blogs, Brent and I are bringing you a super size Top X!

1) Blunt Force Gamer - Mantic Games Skeletons vs Games Workshop Skeletons
Brent: Here’s a nifty little article - so good you wonder why it’s not been done before. I rate this exercise as close to perfect, lacking only a paint job to bring it home. Nice, very nice.
Lauby: SKELETON FIGHT!  Now that that's out of my system -  there are a lot of companies out there who use the 28mm scale - but it's always "28" in quotation marks thanks to a complete lack of standards.  This is an excellent paper on comparative physiology to be sure.

2) For Holy Terra - Salamanders Vindicator 
Brent: It’s not enough for me to appreciate anything - for whatever reason, I’m always wondering about the man behind the screen. In this case, methinks the Great and Powerful Oz stretched his talent and tried something new. Fair play!
Lauby:  That siege shield is super cool.  I absolutely  love the offset Salamander's symbol.  Now all we gotta do is get Paul to write up an Apocalypse Datasheetfor that crazy dream he has before GW does.  Seeing as how they're likely to give it a critical flaw that makes it useless all in the name of adding 'character' to the model.

Gaming On a Budget: Testing, Testing, 1,2,3

Welcome back one and all for another installment in the best weekly money saving column written by dethtron.  Today I'm here to bring you some hot tips for saving yourself tons and tons of money in the long run by only buying the models you'll need and know will work together. 

For the past 5 years a large, motley collection of Dark Angels has sat upon my miniature shelves collecting dust as a testament to not doing the research before making a substantial investment in miniatures.  Although recent FAQ changes have changed my extremely low opinion of the viability of Dark Angels, these guys have spent far too long riding the pine and not getting much game time in.  If I had it to do all over again, I would have tested out several combinations of units several times before purchasing a single miniature for this force- and probably gone with vanilla marines instead.  How would I go about doing that that?  Well read on to discover some strategies to help you try it before you buy it.

User Content Wednesday - Building a Best of List

As you may have seen or already heard, today is Old Stuff day. For reasons that have nothing to do with Brent being under the weather, we've shuffled our schedule around to match the occasion.  This week's user post is a Stelek classic from almost two years ago. The man is prolific as hell and while finding a useful post isn't hard, sifting through his archives is a full time job.  Enter one of my favorite bits from Yes The Truth Hurts.

Some people just don’t understand how to build a Best Of list.

Others don’t understand why you’d want a Best Of list.

Well, let’s get this taken care of real quick.

Best Of lists have several things going for them:

Every unit possible can deal with armor AND infantry.

The list is balanced, meaning it can take a lot of incoming fire and still beat an unbalanced list.

Specifically, balanced lists have as many units as possible on the tabletop.

Sure, Kill Points can hurt a list like this but Kill Points makes the game less fun–and that’s not good for the hobby. Probably why most people don’t really like playing Kill Point missions.

Additionally, the more the opponent is trying to minimize his Kill Points–the better off your army is.

You see, having lots of FOC slots filled means you have lots of targets. Until 40K becomes FOW, there are exactly two armies in the game that can split fire. Demons can, but are ineffective at it because they can’t torrent the enemy. Tau also can, and are also effective at it. So everyone else that has 9 bolters and 1 multimelta, will be firing the multimelta at tanks while the bolter guys stand around carrying their ‘I am a wound marker’ posters above their heads.

Today is Old Stuff Day

Thanks go out to the folks behind Warhammer 39,999's Old Stuff Day.  If you don't already have something set up to help make this not only the only Old Stuff Day ever, but the best one to boot, make sure you grab one of your own old posts and repost it. 

We here at the HoP are excited to see the outpouring from the community for this event.  It's great to see everybody working together towards a common goal like this.  Don't forget that whenever you have an old post you want to bring back out into the daylight again you can e-mail a link to info@houseofpaincakes.com for consideration for our User Content Friday.

All of the details about Old Stuff Day can be found by following this link.

Duality, Redundancy, Optimisation and other bad words.....

So there's a lot of 'buzzwords' used to describe what 'competitive' armies need (or are alleged to need).We hear the words 'Duality', 'Optimization' and 'Redundancy' thrown around a lot in the community but what the hell do they actually mean to the average gamer?

You hear complaints about 'net-lists' making all armies end up the same or 'Spamming' units making your army competitive but boring to look at and/or use.

Contests and Community Initiatives

It wouldn't be Monday if someone or something wasn't there to remind you about all the shit you forgot to do over the weekend.

Contests:

'Tie or Table' Adepticon Art Project:  TastyTaste and his team mates need your artistic mojo for their forthcoming victory in the Adepticon Team Tournament.  The rules are simple and the prizes are grand.  Cash and fame!  Be sure to submit your meme-art by the 15th of March.

Pay It Forward:  Miniature Wargame Conversions is running another crazy-ass contest.  This time there are 12 prizes - one of which is some kind of mystery prize.  I imagine it's draped in some kind of red velour shroud.  Be sure to enter soon - the drawing could be anytime this week!


Community Initiatives:

Wargaming Tradecraft Find-a-Blog:  Our good buddy Dave over at N++ is compiling his own network index thingy of blogging goodness forged with the spirit of FTW in mind.  The general idea is that its a quick and easy way to find blogs with content you're interested in.  It's cool, its easy to get involved with and it even has infographics! 

GDMNW BlogDex:  In a similar vein, GDMNW has started a similar project.  Enter the BlogDex.  Check out the details on his blog.  And tell him to join the House of Paincakes while you're there!

You can never have enough exposure, right?  So go join both of these fine networking initiatives.

Have any contests or initiatives of your own to promote?  Shoot us an email at info@houseofpaincakes.com, and we'll see what we can do!

New Member Monday - A New World Record!

 [Edit: I missed one two three - Lauby]

Holy cats has it been a busy week at the House of Paincakes!  I'm so shocked I can't even swear - and that's one of our main 'things'.  Jeepers and odds bodkins!

Previous to this last week, our record for new members had been around eight.  This week we managed to clear 13 14 15 16!  I've got a ton of links to share, so I won't waste anymore space with my non-swearing.

Oh, and if I missed anyone, give me a shout out in the comments and you'll get some special pimpin'.

Heck, this NMM is so big it actually needs a page break!

[Weekly Whimsy] For Ron

[Welcome to Weekly Whimsy! Forfeiting fidelity to family (for a moment) in favor of fans and far-fetched dreams.] 

Look into my eyes - you will see
What you mean to me
Search your heart - search your soul
And when you find me there you'll search no more

Don't tell me it's not worth tryin' for
You can't tell me it's not worth dyin' for
You know it's true
Everything I do - I do it for you - Bryan Adams, Everything I Do, I Do It For You
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As most of you know, Ron put FTW in hiatus earlier this week. Many tributes and accolades have been made, many thanks have been said, and many comments posted about the great wealth Ron bestowed to the wargaming community. A great number of wiser, more eloquent and better spoken friends and fans have had deep words of respect and admiration for a man who put a heartbreaking amount of work into making our gaming lives all the better.

Ron has spoken very passionately and honestly about his rationale for hanging up the ropes, and trying something different. It's honestly quite refreshing to see a man value his family this much and actually put words to action and do something to better his family situation, rather than just pay lip service to it.