July 2024 review

Welcome to August, and let us look back to July.

While I even managed to squeeze in a paint-meetup with my buddy Lukas, to get some progress on my Caledor Dragons, I unfortunately have to throw in the towel regarding the 18 miniatures in 3 month competition, as I really didn't get that much done on that Blood Bowl Team this month.

There were multiple reasons for that, one major aspect was the weather, as it was incredibly hot, which made painting in the evening rather exhausting and uncomfortable. On top of that, I got a bigger shipment from Nottingham, covering the majority of next week pre-orders for Horus Heresy and Legions Imperialis.

And beyond that, private life took over most of the weekends - causing a delay in the last month's review (posted on July 11th), and some large scale painting. While my wife and I browsed through paint samples, I found this palette that had incredibly interesting names, some of which I will certainly repurpose or use as inspiration for my Middlehammer Skirmish project.

As our oldest will enroll this month into elementary school, and had her birthday last weekend, we were busy preparing all that - along with painting one of the walls in her room in a nice flat green. So technically I did some painting, considering the area that I painted, I certainly painted more than I would have covered in 28mm or smaller. Anyhow, that including preparation and two birthday parties kept me busy.

As this renovation project and preparation for the upcoming enrollment brought us again to IKEA (where I was able to get some lids for my SAMLA this time!) I saw a sale on the discontinued Lego Bygglek range. This was an interesting colaboration by IKEA and LEGO, with some flaws, but at 50% off and even managing to get my hands on the very last BYGGLEK brick set (it was a display item and not intended for sale - but I could convince a very friendly service clerk to give it to me, as a display item of a discontinued range wouldn't make sense anyway and they could use the space in a more reasonable way). And at 6,50 EUR instead of 18 EUR it is certainly a steal.

I finished my coverage on the Road to CONflict this month, a recap of the preparations for the CONflict 2024, and will now pick up working on my Legio Astraman, as we now have the Road to Uulda IV ahead of us - the next installment of the Battle for Uulda campaign, and I have 2 month to finish the expansion of my maniple.

While the core is battle ready, but lacking some decals and final weathering, I want to add a Warbringer, two Dire Wolves (a resin and a plastic one), another Reaver, a Sinister Warlord and a Warmaster to the collection and have hopes to get at least half of them ready for that.

And I ordered a few things from my go-to FLGS Radaddel, which will be covered in upcoming reviews. A new gaming mat, and a few Archon Studio kits, along with some missing kits from the Spring release of Legions Imperialis, that I want to add to the coverage.

I am off to the next Horus Heresy audiobook, Mark of Calth, and swapped back from Bookbeat to Spotify, as my free testing period is over. Bookbeat does a lot of things better than Spotify, as the later already managed to mess up where I was while continuing the book from the web browser in my car ... annoying.

That's it for July and today, on saturday the first reviews and unboxings will drop, with a total of 7 around the weekend so stay tuned!