2025 review

So we're only a couple of months late on this one! After playing catch up with post from last year, it's time to take a look back over last year's resolutions. There were a lot last year, a bit optimistic I think, but given the event of last year, I'm not surprised there are several outstanding. 

1) Finish painting Drop Pod

This has been done, and it was done just in time for them releasing a brand new drop pod!

2) Paint Land Raider

Again, this was done, although I do need to go back and add some transfers at some point. 

3) Varnish Field Ordnance Battery 

Varnished and based, although not yet used in game. I also have some more on route. 

4) Quickshade Rough Riders

Another success, all 10 varnished. 

5) Varnish additional sisters of battle

Additional models all done and sorted. 

6) Paint Subduction squads

Two squads plus extra painted and varnished up. 

7) Paint Sanguinary Guard 

A full squad of 6 finished, plus some additional characters completed as well!

8) Paint Armiger Helverins

Painted up and transfers completed. I'm not sure though if I've varnished them or not!

9) Paint Emperor's Disciples Blade Guard

All 6 done, alongside some more characters. 

10) Paint Sisters Canoness 

Two jump canoness painted, varnished and bases. 

11-15) as above but varnish models

As mentioned above, all the models have been varnished. 

16) Varnish Inquisitorial Agents models

Pretty sure I've done this, but can't actually remember. 

17-19) Build, paint and varnish Grey Knights Terminators

Ok, so the first fail of the list, and it's a big fail! I don't actually own these models yet! I am still planning on getting them, but have been holding off due to some rumours of a range refresh. 

20-22) Build, paint and varnish Sisters Rhino

Another failure and in the same way, I have yet to actually buy this model, so building and painting are a bit tricky. I do intend on getting the model, it's just a case of when. 

23-25) Build, paint and varnish Death Korps Engineers

Three squads and a bit built and primed but not painted yet. Hopefully I will get these painted this year and they will be on the 2026 resolutions list. 

26-28) Build, paint and varnish Death Korps Artillery 

Another unit that I do not own and as time has passed, I'm not actually sure I want to. I don't think the rules are great and I'm not overly keen on the models. They are nice little diorama pieces in their own right, but there is just something about them that I don't really like. 

29-31) Build, paint and varnish Field Ordnance Battery 

I have two squads of these on order from Forbidden Planet through the Combat Patrol Magazine. At roughly half price it's a good deal, plus I plan on using a number of the spare bits to finally convert up my Wyverns properly!

32-34) Build, paint and varnish Death Korps heavy weapons squads

I have build and primed two Kreig heavy weapons squads plus I've built an additional heavy weapons squad. I hope to get these painted up this year alongside all the other Krieg units!

35-37) Build, paint and varnish Death Korps Command Squad

I have built, primed and started to paint these models. About half the models are painted but I haven't made any progress in quite a few weeks. Again, I'll hopefully get all these painted up this year. 

So, I had quite the list last year. Not sure how I expected to get though all of them with a small person inbound! So how did I actually do? Well 19 and a bit completed out of 37, so just over 50 percent! Not to bad. I think some of them were a bit optimistic as I didn't even own the kits to several and sill don't! Some of them will go on this year's list, some of them will not but there will be more on that in the next post! 

All in all, I am pretty happy with the amount of stuff I have done and hopefully can finish off a lot of these this year. 

Northern Invasion photos

 I'm just going to photo dump all the other photos from the Northern Invasion 2025 tournament here for your viewing pleasure. 

Extra models

Alongside the marines I painted in the last post, I also had a number of other random models that I painted and built. 

The only models that I actually painted were these AoS Gryph hounds. 

I have painted these up to act as cyber-mastiffs for the subductor squads I painted up last year. I really only need two of them but I have several, eight actually, so decided to paint a more. Three others were nicked by my boy for his D&D character to act as familiar's for his elf ranger. (I think ones an actual pet and the other two are familiars)

I have two more that are unpainted as I don't actually have a need for them and so am waiting to paint them up, plus they are on bigger bases as the pose means they don't fit on 25mm bases, required for the doggos. 

Next up is a new Inquisitor. I already have four Inquisitors, Lord Inquisitor Laurissa and her cabal of Inquisitors, consisting of Inquisitor Sophiana, Inquisitor Tamhas and Inquisitor Jameelis, well, now they have been joined by Inquisitor Danihael. 

Inquisitor Tamhas has heavy Scion leanings, Inquisitor Sophiana has Sister of Battle vibes and Inquisitor Jameelis is AdMech influenced, so Inquisitor Danihael needed to lean another way, so he's gone more of the imperial guard route (or maybe imperial navy?). 

He is armed with a shotgun and sword, or combi-weapon and inquisitorial melee weapon. 

I'm not sure what colour scheme he will get yet, most of the inquisitors have a blacka and red scheme, except Sophiana, who has purple and black, but I'm tempted to go for a different scheme here, maye more green or blue(if I go navy). 

In addition I also built some more other models, the Combat Patrol issue 31, a Chaos Dark Apostle. This come with one chaos marine and two other models. After some minor conversion work, I've made a chaplain (maybe?)

Some minor work is still needed to finish off the green stuff work on the book. 

So of the chaos runes and details have been removed and one of the shoulder pads was replaced with a generic one. 

I'm looking forward to painting this model up but I actually don't know where I'm going to use it. It won't fit in to the Eagle Knights (Blood Angels), Dark Guardians (Dark Angels) or the Stone Dragons (Space Wolves) but might have fitted in to the Emperors Disciples (generic SM\Ultramarines) or Brazen Hawks (generic SM\Deathwatch). My first thought was Brazen Hawks but I'm pushing this towards Gravis armour. So that really only leaves the Emperors Disciples, or maybe I'll put it in to the Doom Eagles?

I will have to see what happens. The last models were the two Dark Disciples that came with the marine. These two required some work to remove the various chaos iconography and details but nothing too difficult. 

The most difficult part was filling in the chaos star on the book holder. This was filled with green stuff and I also put some scrolls on the top side. 

These will be painted up to match the three AoS models I painted a while back. I still have no idea what I'm ever going to use these as, but they will make a very cool looking squad of models (maybe some sort of Inquisitorial retinue?)

The AoS models in question. 

 

1k game 2

 After game 1, game 2 was a bit of a relief. This was more of the type of games I had been hoping for, with a very quirky list! 

The guard list I was facing was one Basilisk and lots of troops! And I mean lots! There was at least 120 of them!

I was really worried that I was going to struggle to actually get through all the bodies and he was just going to rampage all over me and bog me down with sheer numbers and for a some parts of the battle field, that's exactly what did happen!

The long fight!

One area where this happened was in the centre where two of my dreadnought were. Both ended up in combat with a 20 man squad of guardsmen and while they did not take much damage, a couple of wounds a piece, it took a long time for them to get through the guard as well! With just 5 attacks hitting on 3's it took a long time to chew through 20 guardsmen. 

The rhino had a similar problem, as it got swamped on an objective and spent much of the game just trying to squash guardsmen, rather unsuccessfully!

The Rogue Trader and Voidsmen again did very little, just sitting on the back field objective chilling. They probably could have done something this game but holding my home objective was good enough. I had thought about splitting the squads and running the voidsmen up the table but decided to just let the Deathwatch get on with it. 

This was a really fun game, with both of us just having fun and not worrying about who was winning or scoring cards or more accurately stopping the opponent scoring. 

The game very much swung in my favour towards the end but to be honest, if I had lost I wouldn't have minded at all, this was probably the best game of the weekend and my opponent was really in the spirit of this tournament, silly list and zero shits given.