My Hordes Trollblood models arrived Thursday and I played my first "painted" game with them yesterday. It was a lot of fun having painted models; I must say they look great on the table. When they arrived almost everything looked great, except for the fire on my pyre troll and my kriel warrior standard bearer. The fire on both of them looked retarded, and that's after I asked them to change the fire from the original that you can see in the links.
It sort of boggles my mind how everything else in the force can look so great yet the fire looks like they got jiggy with the finger paints. So I got some paints out and did my best to fix the fire problem. Now I'm certainly not the best painter in the world but I think what I have done with the fire is far superior to what they did. However, overall I'm very happy with the finished product and it's going to be a lot of fun playing with them over the summer.

As far as yesterdays game went, I lost, but thats not uncommon for me. I seem to overextend myself frequently and put key pieces to my army in compromising positions. I was playing with Chief Madrak Ironhide one of the most durable trollblood warlocks and still managed to put him in a such a horrible position that I think it would have been difficult for my opponent to not win. For some reason I do not see the options on the table and do not pick my order of operations well when playing with a new force. I have helped others play new forces quite well but it's as though my powers of observation are ten fold better when I'm not actually involved in the game. I guess thats why I play the game, to learn and get better.

Speaking of Warmachine and Hordes, we are starting the final chapter to our campaign tomorrow and I'm very excited to get a chance to play my forces against a wide array of players here locally. The campaign has had an overarching story that has developed in the last couple of five week chapters. I wrote all of it myself and while I think generally the plot is fairly poor, as stories go, it has still been a lot of fun. Currently I only have five people committed to playing in the spring campaign but I know a lot of them are procrastinating to the last minute before giving me the lists they will be playing in our campaign (for the campaigns we are using static lists that can't be changed for the duration of the campaign). The fall and winter versions of this campaign had six and twelve players respectively and I believe we will have a similar number to the winter campaign this time around. It should be a lot of fun and you can look forward to hearing more stories of me overextending my force and getting crushed beneath the heals of my opponents'.