How To Design A Faction Logo

I thought I'd post this graphic (below) as a visual reference to show part of the behind the scenes process involved in developing a faction logo for games (or anything really). In this case the logo in question is for the Nanomei faction from Anvil Eight's board game Aetherium.

We went through a similar process many times during the creation of the original Aetherium game box. It's easy to come up with something quickly, but if time is spent and thought given to a logo like this you can develop something far better than your initial sketches might suggest.

Do You Remember The Castle?

Tabletop Workshop's plastic castle

You may remember about 18 months ago I was waxing lyrical about a new range of plastic scenery that I'd recently 'discovered'. Tabletop Workshop created a series of kits that were perfect for my Medieval gaming. Alas not long after I'd invested some birthday money in their rather fantastic plastic castle kit the website disappeared and their Facebook page fell silent.

I never did get around to building much after the blog posts about it, but it's always been in the back of my mind as a project waiting in the wings. I think many people were rather sad that such an innovative company with a great product range should have fallen by the wayside.

Only last week, whilst tidying up the spare room I found the castle box and it reminded me I have a very exciting project in store.

Warlord Games' new Citadel

However, lo and behold this morning I discover that Warlord Games are releasing their new Citadel model… a model that looks remarkably, exactly the same as the Tabletop Workshop Castle!

They're also telling us that separate walls, towers and gatehouses will become available very soon.

Could this be time to resurrect my castle project? Is the gatehouse they're talking about is the famed gatehouse that TW were developing right before they disappeared?

Needless to say, Warlord haven't mentioned TW at all giving the impression it's their doing. Regardless, if it means that this kit becomes available again then I'm all for it!

The Underhive Gaming Group

I decided last month to be proactive with the gaming. The gaming friends that I'm in touch with are somewhat scattered around Kent and we never get together en masse – in fact some have never met each other. I created a group on Facebook and managed to get everyone commenting. I also booked our first gaming day into the diary for April 2nd and we had a blast!

First of all thank you to Bull and Mr Awdry, the stalwart gamers, for coming over and leading the charge. We were joined by two peeps who have appeared on this blog before, Chris and Ryan (Malifaux Fugs is back!). I've called our little gaming group The Underhive as a tribute to the gaming group Bull had back in Tunbridge Wells many moons ago, where I turned up as a 40k newbie and was introduced to Necromunda for the first time.

I decided we should start nice and slow with Zombicide: Black Plague and it proved to be the perfect choice. Bull and Michael are fellow Black Plague backers so needed no introduction, Chris has been over and played BP before and Ryan is an original Zombicide addict it seems.

Ryan was a late arrival, so the four of us started with the first game, racking up what was a relatively easy win (though with Zombicide veteran Bull leading it was not surprising). As expected there were some comedy moments, like Chris being unable to open any doors with his character Samson (dwarves are clearly too short to reach the door handles!).

We jumped straight into a second game just as Ryan arrived. He took a little while to acclimatise to the dice as Anny was unable to hit anything for three turns. Chris had to leave early, so after a spot of lunch the four survivors shared out the extra characters and carried on. Alas things went south and Clovis found he was unable to outrun the Abomination – mission failed. Undeterred we reset things and went again, this time a smooth running machine.

A few rash decisions by yours truly towards the end put a question mark over our success but faith in the dice got us through (above) and we strolled to the exit for our second win of the day.

Fantastic day I think it's fair to say. Everyone said how great it was to finally get a group together after almost years of talking about it. Let's hope this is the first of many!