And by 'next Friday' I meant 'a month later'

I've played a fair amount of Heavy Gear lately, and made some actual progress on my painting as earlier mentioned. Britt and I played a refresher/learner game (since he hadn't played with the new Field Manual rules yet, and I'd only played one game with them myself). We had a good time, although in retrospect we both think that we stocked the table with too much 'area' terrain, which Heavy Gear doesn't seem to recommend or handle too well. We realized this when we found out that we could only actually hit each other with grenades. Sometime in the next week or two we're going to try it again, with more discrete units of terrain, maybe we'll actually be able to shoot each other like God and the good folks at Dream Pod 9 intended.

Here's some shots from our game - my guys are MILICIA - the blue MP cadre and the grey war-criminal cadre; Britt's guys are Northern Guard in dunkelgelb and black (very slimming):





See that grey dude on his ass in the last pic? That's a bad outcome for the grey dude. Not pictured: my blue dude who got blown to smithereens by an errant grenade from his former squadmate...

Then a little bit after that, there was a one-day mini-campaign-tournament thingy at The Game Connection, and I took my freshly (mostly) painted WFPA 'Jump' Dragoons and a platoon of also-airborne infantry. Problem was that I didn't realize that due to the format, I wouldn't have enough Support Points to actually airdrop either unit more than once. So I said screw it and put the SPs into CPs, which is all that let me hang on as long as I did. I was able to put a real hurting on William's MILICIA guys (which hurts, as the MILICIA are my first and favorite HG faction), but I wasn't able to push him off the gasworks objective in time, giving him the win. This put me on the defensive against Tyler's Black Talon force for the next two games, and it was a walkover for him. Skill 4, two actions, jump jets, AGMs and light railguns - I did what I could, but there was no real way I could keep him from destroying his three objectives in game two, and in game three I couldn't even get anyone off the board (not even my Hardy Aller tank, which came on and got roadblocking Claw-series gears airdropped in behind it before I conceded). Losing meant you didn't get a chance to repair 'dead' gears, and infantry were never eligible for resupply, so all in all I'm not sure I took the best force for the setup.



Here we see two surviving infantry squads standing up to a Vulture gear. It went better than I could have ever hoped, in that Tyler's Vulture didn't murder them before jumping past them to fire on the hovercraft they were guarding.

Still, it's a great game, with great minis, and I've finally broken my painting phobia. My paintjobs aren't great by any means, but they look fine on the tabletop, and I can already tell that my WFPA guys look better than the MILICIA who hit the paint table before them. Unfortunately now we are heading into a typical NC fall, which means my days of good weather for priming are going to be few and far between. Over the next few weeks I have a bunch of projects I need to get glued up so that when one of those nice days pops up I can take advantage of it by getting all messed up on paint propellant in the backyard.