Building a Grimdark Battle Board

Posted by Comrade on January 15, 2026
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When you’ve been in this hobby as long as I have, you start to accumulate a lot of weird junk. Boxes of weird bits, curious packaging, interesting beverage lids, partitioned trays, textured plastic sheeting, that sort of thing. I’ve been dutifully collecting this flotsam for more than two decades, hauling it from house to house over the years, always adding, never subtracting, all with some vague idea that one day I would mash it all together with unhealthy amounts of glue and create some sort of grimdark Inq28-inspired sci-fi battle board.

Well, gentle reader, that day is today.

In recent years, I’ve scratchbuilt a table’s worth of rusted industrial terrain — platforms and barricades and control panels and pipelines — perfect for Inq28 and all manner of small-scale sci-fi skirmish games. The stuff looks nice on the tabletop, but what I’ve been missing was some sort of substrate to tie it all together … a game mat or prepared surface that finishes the aesthetic.

I always wanted to build a proper battle board, ever since I peeped a battle report from years ago, featuring some of John Blanche’s Inq28 warbands fighting it out in an oil-spattered Adeptus Mechanicus marketplace on some long-forgottten tech moon. The link escapes me, but maybe one of my faithful readers will dredge it up.

Anyway, my dream of building a proper battle board kicked into high gear when I was scrounging around a hardware store and found a beautiful slab of 1-inch MDF, cut to 32 inches square, calling my name like a siren at sea. At $1.75 out the door, I couldn’t beat the price.

It’s slightly smaller than I’d preferred (36 inches square would have been ideal) but beggars can’t be choosers.

I sealed both sides with Mod Podge and set to work covering it with all manner of accumulated debris … cross stitch grating, aquarium filter panels, straws for conduit and piping, empty medical device cassettes, plus tons of off-cuts and leftovers from various MDF terrain projects. Truly, it was a deep dive to the very depths of my DIY terrain bins.

Once I glued the large pieces down, I turned my attention to the texturing. I planned to add some fairly intense rust effects, so I liberally applied texture paste, sand, and grout mix in a haphazard manner, aiming for a patchy finish.

After that, the whole thing got several successive sprays of black primer, followed by metal spraypaint to give the whole thing a suitably sci-fi starting point.

A heavy black/brown wash followed the silver spray. It was a big bottle I’d mixed myself 10+ years ago, starting with Future Floor Wax and adding in brown and black paint plus water to create a rich, easy to apply wash for terrain projects. (It dries super fast, too, which meant this project could be accomplished in an afternoon.)

From there, I ripped up some chunks of old mattress foam and went to town with sponged-on rust colors: browns, ochres, oranges, as well as some weird turquoise to provide a little pop.

Trust me when I say that the sponged colors don’t look nearly so blotchy in real life. The silver base color really ties everything together.

I affixed some hazard striping details in a few spots that are likely to draw the eye. (Sidenote: we no longer sully ourselves trying to paint hazard striping here at Comrade’s Wargames, not since we ran across a beautiful textured high-resolution printable JPG that will meet our needs for years to come). Grab it for yourself at the link below.

Necromunda Hazard StripesDownload

The sponging was quick and frighteningly fun — I always do my best terrain work with old brushes or chunks of sponge, the bigger the better. I’ll probably go through and pick out a few details for further brushwork at some point in the future (such as the chain lengths draped over various pipes and grates). But I’m quite pleased with how this turned out! I even took a moment to arrange some of my existing terrain collection on my new battle board, just to see how it all looks together.

Chef’s kiss, I’d say!

Now, I wish I could say that this terrain project used up all the trash and random junk I’ve accumulated over the years. But I would be lying if I said that. While I’m pleased to get some use out of this stuff, my total collection of detritus barely shrunk. Oh well! I’ll be well equipped the next time inspiration strikes.

We’ll put this battle board through its paces in a couple of weeks with Shadow War: Armageddon. Stay tuned!

Hobgoblin: More Thoughts and Musings

Posted by Comrade on November 10, 2025
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We’ve settled on Hobgoblin as the game of choice for our annual holiday mega-battle (affectionally known as Apoc-Luck, since we each bring a dish and break for dinner midway through the evening).

These games are typically structured around simple scenarios, with instructions to each player that can be summed up as “bring all your painted models and we’ll shoehorn everything into a game.” Game balance goes out the window in favor of a grand spectacle of beautifully painted armies clashing on the field of battle surrounded by gorgeous terrain and scenery. Here’s a pic from last year’s Apoc-Luck game which sums up the aesthetic we’re aiming for.

I’ve done a few writeups here of our previous Apoc-Luck game days; check ’em out at the links below.

We’re planning a learning game of Hobgoblin later this month so other guys in the club can get up to speed on it. Personally, I think it’s an inspired choice for a mega-battle. Hobgoblin was developed specifically to accommodate this sort of play style: huge armies clashing, plenty of high drama without a lot of fussing and fiddling with modifiers and stats.

The lore of Hobgoblin is surprisingly well developed as well, which is a refreshing option after many years playing Grimdark Future and Age of Fantasy (both serviceable rulesets, of course, but bereft of lore until rather recently in their development).

So I wanted to record some thoughts and musings about Hobgoblin here, to inspire me and possibly serve other players out there who are dipping a toe in the game.

Hobgoblin is a game of matchups

In Hobgoblin, everyone builds their armies from the same core list of a dozen or so units, flavored with a short list of fun keyword abilities. Units have various to-hit target numbers based on what they’re going up against. Again, that’s shared knowledge … both your opponent and you both know that Monstrous Infantry are going to absolutely chew up ranged units or cavalry if they can get off a charge.

As you can see in this photo below from a game earlier this summer, John’s cave troll (a Beast, in the parlance of Hobgoblin) got in amongst my dwarven front line infantry and absolutely wrecked face with his big ol’ rock. John got the matchup he wanted, and I suffered as a result.

Doom Comes to Us All

In Hobgoblin, units don’t take casualties — they accumulate doom tokens, which slowly (or quickly, if you’re me) build up until the unit breaks and flees in terror. There are a few ways to remove doom tokens, but those techniques are really more about managing doom — delaying the inevitable — than they are about actually healing a unit up to its starting “hit points.”

Because of that, it’s important to understand that units will die in Hobgoblin. You can count on that, and you need to position your remaining units to take advantage of that certainty. Second rank units (reinforcements, coming up behind wavering units) are very important. They can plug gaps in the line and charge a weakened unit. You can’t move through friendly or enemy units, of course. So until the front line units die, you need to carefully marshal your second rank reinforcements to ensure they’re fresh and ready to charge in when the time comes.

Magic and Cursed Artefects Are Fun and Wildly Unbalanced

If the basic units you’ll use to build your Hobgoblin army seem bog standard, the same cannot be said of the magic system. Magic in Hobgoblin is dark, terrifying, and flavorful in a way that I’ve never encountered in a game before. The schools of magic, called “Abyssal Allegiances” in Hobgoblin, are straight out of a Lovecraftian tome. They’re utterly unique, and each Allegiance offers spells that affect the game in weird and different ways.

Same with Cursed Artefacts — in a standard game, you and your opponent each select one or roll randomly. It gets assigned to one unit (usually your general) and typically gives a distinct, narrowly applicable set of abilities to your unit or army. For example, you can have both players move twice in a turn, or steal a magic point from the opposing player, or remove doom from a friendly unit.

Abyssal Allegiances are extraordinarily fun; I love the flavor behind them, and the chance to swing for the fences with a particularly potent ability. They also have the potential to whiff badly as the game plays out. You may find that you unit positioning, combined with terrain placement or unexpected casualties, means your spells don’t do much for the majority of the game. For that reason, I have a hard time evaluating their effectiveness, and I’d definitely say they’re generally unbalanced against each other. Some Abyssal Allegiances just feel outright better in most circumstances. Of course, that makes a player like me much more likely to try to force the issue and make a “weaker” Allegiance work.

So all in all, I’m excited to dig into Hobgoblin this month, and to build a gigantic list for next month’s Apoc-Luck game. Stay tuned for more!

Grimdark Future: The Scouring of Hundvolst

Posted by Comrade on October 13, 2025
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I’m slowly working through my backlog of photos and content that I’ve been meaning to post over the last year or two.

One such info dump is our annual 40k Apocalypse game, which took place in December 2024. We used Grimdark Future for our ruleset of choice, since it was quick and easy to pick up and play; it has served our group well over the years.

For the game, Paul and I set up a narrative scenario featuring the siege of Hundvolt, an Imperial feudal world that had unfortunately drawn the attention of the evil factions operating near Warzone Endymion. Here’s the capsule blurb we came up with:

The feudal world of Hundvolst has suffered mightily under the yoke of the Imperial tithe. For
decades, village elders have watched as their sons and daughters were conscripted and
shipped off planet.
Now, the war has come to Hundvolst. Invading forces led by Heretic Astartes and foul xenos
scum have laid waste to the planet even as Imperial defenders mount a dogged defense. Mighty
armies churn the verdant soil of Hundvolst, reducing the planet’s forested hills and idyllic
villages into charred rubble.
The invasion is reaching its apotheosis. Imperial Navy ships, operating under a directive from
the Ordo Malleus, have taken up station above the benighted planet. In mere hours, they will
deliver the Exterminatus unto the cursed planet, scouring the surface of all life and rendering it
inert and lifeless – such is the Emperor’s divine wrath.
As the sun sets on Hundvolst, ragged Imperial units fall back to their evacuation sites. Several
plucky force commanders stage a daring raid to liberate the knucklebone of St. Theodosia the
Spiteful, seeking to spirit the saint’s relic away from the doomed planet and keep it from the vile
clutches of xenos and heretic alike.

The scenario was intended to give us a reason to set up a weird mash-up of a feudal low-tech Imperial world being fought over by monstrous sci-fi war machines and armies. We wanted an excuse to set up a battlefield with our immense shared collection of gorgeous Tabletop World resin fantasy buildings, for one thing. We combined those with Daniel’s Sector Imperialis tiles to create a pleasing aesthetic.

The game itself was absolutely massive, with each player bringing about ~5,000 points of their respective factions. It was a glorious stew of beautiful models, vehicles, monsters, and war machines. All fully painted, as is our standard approach here at Comrade’s Wargames.

The cathedral in the building above housed the main objective — the knucklebone of St. Theodosia the Spiteful. The factions were competing to see who could seize the knucklebone before the virus bombs of the Exterminatus arrived to turn the surface of Hundvolst into a primordial soup of biological matter.

Here’s a peek at the action inside the cathedral. It was a bloodbath as the forces of Chaos tried repeatedly to gain control of the sanctuary, only to be pushed back by the combined guns of the Imperial Guard and Adeptus Sororitas!

To be honest, I’m a year removed from the blow-by-blow action of the game, so it’s all a little hazy. I know we had some hot daemon-on-tank action, as seen below, followed by a gallant last stand by a gas mask-wearing commissar.

The streets nearer to the cathedral were choked with tanks as the heavy armor maneuvered for position. Troops scampered from cover to cover as the steel behemoths traded shots. The stone and thatch buildings provided tempting positions for heavy weapon squads, too.

The defenders of the Imperium — Astartes, Sororitas, Custodes, and Astra Militarum — mounted a brave defense, selling themselves dearly even as the clock ticked down toward the planet’s doom.

As the night wore on, the defenders rallied again and again in the face of the unending onslaught. But the forces of Chaos would not be denied their prize. Slowly, through gritted teeth and white knuckles, the defenders were pressed back and the attackers surged forward.

The battle reached its culmination as the forces of Chaos seized the knucklebone and began an extraction from the cathedral. Alas, this extraction turned into a rout as the combined forces of the Sisters of Battle and Imperial Guard fell upon the vile Heretic Astartes.

In a surprise no one saw coming, the defenders of the Imperium seized the holy relic, and an extraction squad managed to make it to a waiting Valkyrie gunship which lifted off mere moments before virus bombs rained down on the planet’s surface.

The image above shows the rearguard defending the landing site until the Valkyrie could escape. And then — a curtain was drawn back on the poor feudal world of Hundvolst, and no further missive is recorded herein about the fate of the world. Perhaps in a thousand years, Imperial surveyors might return and divine some clue about the ultimate fate of those trapped on the surface when the virus bombs fell. Or perhaps not.

Conclusion

As in years past, Grimdark Future gave us a great game that kept everyone engaged and rolling dice until the bitter end. We brought food and drink and enjoyed a meal together about midway through the game, as is our tradition with these end-of-the-year Apocalypse sized games.

And seeing as how I’m writing this in October, it’s a good reminder that we have just a few months before the next Apocalypse game. I’ll try to come up with a suitably epic scenario and tabletop setup, so stay tuned!

Shadow War: Armageddon Battle Report & Review

Posted by Comrade on October 10, 2025
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We have a penchant for old-school gaming here at Comrade’s Wargames, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’ve been eager to try out Shadow War: Armageddon ever since I came across some blog posts and Youtube videos about how it’s been rediscovered lately as a diamond in the rough.

Now, don’t get me wrong — Shadow War isn’t an old game, per se. It was released in 2017, just before the debut of the revamped 8th edition of Warhammer 40,000. But it’s imbued with a certain old-school sensibility that appeals to me greatly. How, you might ask?

  • It’s essentially a re-skin of the venerable and popular Necromunda skirmish ruleset, which itself is derived from 2nd edition Warhammer 40k.
  • In my opinion, 2nd edition 40k is a lousy ruleset for army-scale games, but it’s ideal for skirmish level games, where each players controls about a dozen (or fewer) figures. The super granular statline for a typical figure makes sense when you’re only controlling a handful of dudes.
  • It’s one of the last (if not possibly the last) of GW’s one-book-is-all-you-need titles. The main book contained everything: core rules, army lists, advanced rules, campaign systems, etc. There were no extra books to buy, at all, ever. (Now you can see why GW has no interest in this type of approach.)
  • The core rulebook contains a dozen army lists covering most 40k armies, making it trivial to get players of all stripes interested in trying out the game.

Lately, as the increasing cost of models and rapid pace of rulebooks and supplements has increased the barrier for entry to the Warhammer hobby, players like me have been rediscovering older rulesets like Shadow War: Armageddon. To further illustrate the Venn diagram for you: I’m an avid enjoyer of One Page Rules, so I’ve never really been a participant in the current GW treadmill approach to game editions and rules supplements.

Anyway, enough of that preamble! You came to hear about the game, right?

John, Jim, and I got together last weekend to try out Shadow War: Armageddon. The core book doesn’t explicitly include rules for multiplayer games, but we are seasoned veterans of the wargaming hobby, so it was simple to adapt one of the rulebook scenarios to incorporate three players, all competing to accomplish little mini-missions on the tabletop.

I set up a dusty, windswept desert battlefield replete with craggy rock formations and rusted industrial equipment. Here’s a look at the setup.

We played on a 4×4 battlefield, as advised in the rulebook. Weapon ranges are fairly short, and we concluded after the game that a 3×3 battlefield could easily have sufficed, even for our three-player game.

John fielded his grubby little Imperial Guardsmen, and Jim brought a stupendous number of Orks – 11 figures in total, I think. Contrast that with my Inquisitorial warband, which numbered 6 models. Yikes! Here’s a look at our factions as we started the game.

Prior to deployment, each player received a randomly determined mission objective.

John’s Guardsmen were trying to get across the board and exit from an opposing player’s deployment area.

Jim’s Orks were trying to blow up a tank of promethium (the 40k equivalent of natural gas + gasoline + napalm, all mixed together and used for a variety of purposes).

My Inquisitor was trying to isolate and assassinate the Ork warboss.

The game started with John’s Guardsmen moving purposefully through a narrow defile on the left flank of the industrial facility. They used the overwatch rule from Shadow War: Armageddon to great effect to cover their approach.

Waiting to meet them were Jim’s Orks, of course! He couldn’t just let those Guardsmen jog across the field unopposed.

The upcoming clash in this dusty back alley was one for the books. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, Inquisitor Coteaz sent his warband up onto the central terrain feature — a craggy bunker defended by a trench and topped with (you guessed it) some promethium tanks.

From this perch, they could watch both of the opposing warbands as they jockeyed for position in the outskirts of the facility. I knew the Orks had to come my way to accomplish their mission, but I also didn’t want Jim to have to face John’s Guardsmen alone! So, in a burst of tactical genius, I split up my forces. You’ll see later how this played out for me.

But first — back to that alley. The Guardsmen were creeping along, covering their advance with overwatch, when suddenly a mob of Orks burst forth and charged them in true orky fashion!

It was an absolute bloodbath for the Orks. We learned a lot about the casualty system in Shadow War: Armageddon. You aren’t outright dead when you take a wound, but most of the time you’re in very bad shape, with just a slim hope for recovery on the battlefield.

Over by the promethium tanks, a brawl was developing as Jim charged his Orks up to assault the trench line. I had two models available to defend — Interrogator Lysander Frost and Virgil the Huntsman, who was armed (fortuitously) with a flamethrower.

As this bloodthirsty scrum was developing, Jim’s warboss bravely stepped out of hiding and entered the fray. He started by throwing grenades, then decided to wade into combat and try to draw off some Inquisitorial acolytes.

As it happened, the warboss ended up within charge range of Inquisitor Coteaz! This was literally my game objective — slay the opposing leader! I couldn’t let a chance like this pass by.

Throwing caution to the wind, Inquisitor Coteaz raced into combat against the warboss. For a turn or two, it was a fair fight… we traded blows but no one seemed to gain the upper hand. Once some more Ork boyz joined the fray, things went sideways quickly for the Lord Inquisitor.

Here’s his final stand, just before he was cut down in single combat.

Luckily, his broken body was spirited away by Interrogator Lysander, to be healed and restored to the Emperor’s service.

In doing so, Lysander’s attention was taken away from the Ork boyz scrambling up the hill toward the promethium tank. Oops!

All it took was a tiny little distraction to seal the deal for Jim’s Orks. This silly Ork warrior blew up the promethium tank in a fiery explosion, ensuring victory for the greenskins even as the Imperial factions retreated to lick their wounds.

Feedback from the guys for Shadow War: Armageddon was generally positive. “It definitely scratched an itch,” was how Jim put it after the game. SW:A had all the accoutrements that would normally turn me off from a GW game: super granular stats for figures, weird corner case rules like ammo rolls and crawling 2″ per turn when wounded, inexplicable wargear missing from the army lists.

But I’ll be honest with you — it works. The whole package plays smoothly and is imbued with a healthy dose of nostalgia. The clunky parts are a glorious love letter to earlier editions of Warhammer 40k. And it’s such a small scale game that you just don’t mind flipping through the rulebook to uncover mundane rules for grenade deviation or melee attacks on pinned models.

For me, the most appealing factor is the “one rulebook is all you need” approach. The rulebook is out of print, but PDFs can be found without a lot of effort. And that’s it — no further buy-in is needed. The rulebook contains army lists for nearly every 40k faction you might want.

So we’ll be playing this one again, for sure. In fact, we’re already discussing a campaign to see how our little warbands can level up and improve their position. Stay tuned for more!

The Expedition Soldiers On

Posted by Comrade on September 30, 2025
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I’ve spent some time lately returning to my fantasy dwarf heartbreaker army — The Expedition to Hearthspire. This army has been in existence, either in concept or on the actual tabletop, since the late 2000s, when I scraped together a handful of dwarves to play A Song of Blades & Heroes with my old game club back in Chicago.

Since then, my collection of dwarves has increased consistently. Models became units. Units became a small army, then a larger army. Now I’ve got a fairly vast collection of painted dwarves, ready to undertake the quest for the ancient city of Hearthspire. Here’s the latest family photo, taken last month when I mustered the whole group for a game of Hobgoblin with John.

After that game, I felt inspired to paint up some reinforcements to further bolster the dwarven throng. Hobgoblin is an old school rank-and-flank type of game that encourages large armies. So I assessed the current state of my dwarf army and identified the distinct need for some elite, heavily armored dwarven infantry to anchor the center of my battle line.

I found what I was looking for in a big box full of various units and figures from Scibor Monstrous Miniatures – one of my all-time favorite makers of chunky, characterful dwarf models. (Yes, it’s true, I have so many Scibor kits in my dragon hoard that they have their own dedicated box.)

These guys were a lot of fun to paint up. I’m not always fond of bare heads (something about my lack of precision and patience when painting faces) but these guys weren’t too difficult.

I painted these guys up over the summer, and they’ve yet to see the battlefield. I’m sure they’ll eventually take to the field in a game of Hobgoblin – I played a session earlier this year with John and got my butt kicked. (And I convinced myself the reason I lost is because I didn’t have a sufficient critical mass of armored dwarvess. Problem solved!!)

Stay tuned for more content in general from Comrade’s Wargames. After a long drought, I’m easing back into the saddle to share more quality hobby content with my tens of readers.