Beginnings

For several reasons I have decided to start up a blog to help keep track of my gaming and painting.  I've been a 40K player for almost a decade now, and while I still enjoy the game, I don't tend to play it much anymore, so, inspired by the community at my local FLGS, Imaginary Wars, I decided to start playing some new game systems.  I started with Dream Pod 9's excellent "Heavy Gear."  They had decided to start a growth league for HG, spanning several months.  It is a small scale squadron based game, with a lot more tactical depth than I was used to from 40K.  And it was considerably cheaper to get into.  This game has been around for many years, and has gone though many revisions, streamlining and simplifying the game.the sheer amount of factions and models that exist for the game is rather impressive, and to see the variance of different mech designs they have is awesome.  Just for reference, they call their mechs "gears."

I decided to Pick up a starter set for the Northern army.  This included the rulebook needed to play, and 2 squads of gears, a fire support squad, meant to sit back and provide heavy fire at a range, and a strike squad, an elite squad of fast, well armed gears to get in at a closer range.  To add more points to my force I picked up a Thunderhammer, which is a walking artillery piece.  This is easily my favorite model in the game that I have seen, and photos will be getting posted of it soon.  This brought my army up to 800 pts just in time for that level of play.  The last level of the league was 1000 pts, and to get to it I purchased a recon squad.  As the name implies, it is a lightly armored, fast moving squad of gears, which have the ability to spot for other models using target designators.  Unfortunately I was not able to make it in during the last few weeks of the league, and as such was not able to use them until a few weeks ago.  While the league is now over it remains a fairly popular game at the store and has a small, but regular group.