I’m happy to report that this week has been much better than the previous one. The “leaky” window seems to have been fixed and nothing bad happened for once in a few weeks. I also tried to be deliberate about doing things that I would enjoy to help lift my spirits. The first thing I worked on was pretty straightforward and not terribly exciting. Its another section of Farmer’s Fence which I did not glue correctly when assembling it. There should be a gap between the bottom piece of wood and the dirt but I wasn’t paying close enough attention apparently. An easy mistake to make but not a fatal one. I can always have some fence like this and some correctly assembled too. That’s three down but I’m going to need quite a few more before I can hope to use them in a game.
I also started working on some terrain for Hellboy because I’d like to be able to play it with fully painted terrain this year, if I can. I’m working on the biggest piece of terrain now and that is the Wizard’s Desk. Its multi-tiered and will take a little while to fully complete. I started working on the larger piece and ran out of Agrax Earthshade so I stopped which is a bit of a shame. It really needs edge highlights for you to see it start to come together. As it is now, it looks decent but is certainly missing something.
Once I ran into that dead end, I started on something even more exciting and that is some crystals/gemstones on a piece that goes with the desk. If you’ll permit a very short story, about five or so years ago, I had an idea to paint a Necron Lord with fiery colors instead of the usual green and steel colors that Games Workshop favors. This mini came with crystals on its base (and has apparently been retired because I didn’t see it on GW’s website). Unfortunately, I knew less about painting back then and botched a couple parts before giving up on it altogether. The biggest issue I had was that I couldn’t figure out how to paint crystals well. I haven’t tried any since then, surprisingly and this was my chance to try and rectify a previous mistake and learn something new.
There isn’t a ton of advice on how to paint crystals out there but the best information I found is by Vince Venturella on Youtube, which is no surprise, because he is a great servant of the hobby. He shares his knowledge generously to anybody who wants it which is truly admirable. Between his Youtube video and doing some photo referencing, I was able to work out what I wanted to do and I’m happy to say that it came out pretty nicely. Its not quite competition level painting but its still up there.
The one thing I would say about crystals is that having them be a little bigger and not too clumped together makes them a lot easier to work on. Getting smooth blends with maximum contrast wasn’t possible on some of these crystals because they weren’t tall enough. I have some more ideas up my sleeve to make this desk look cool so next week I should have some more interesting things to share with you.
While I’m still slowly catching up on comic books as part of the Reading Crisis of 2026, I was slightly diverted into rereading a series that I really enjoyed in the past and kind of had forgotten about. I thought I’d talk about the series here briefly and also explain why it makes me think of a dream wargame/board game that may or may not ever get made.
The series I read is Mouse Guard. Have you ever heard of it? Chances are probably not. Despite being around for ten plus years, it has had a really infrequent release schedule, partially because it is created by one man alone which is not an easy feat. Mouse Guard is a fantasy story about anthropomorphic mice that live in a fantasy setting where humans don’t exist or at least they never appear in the stories. If this sounds like Redwall, you’re not wrong! It has a lot in common with Redwall but I think it stands on its own as well. The main reason for this is the art and the way it uses scale to tell exciting stories.
I don’t know if Mouse Guard is realistic from a scale perspective but animals that would eat mice are huge in comparison like this snake. There’s also a fight with a snowy owl that is pretty epic. It makes you feel for the mice and what their up against and in a way, connect with nature. When you consider the mouse and what it goes through, it makes you realize how vast and interconnected nature is. These are also underdog stories which pretty much everyone likes too. For me, there’s a great sense of adventure in Mouse Guard which is my favorite part. I love that in Lord of the Rings and have found very few fantasy series really provide that same sense or feeling. Mouse Guard delivered it for me as I reread it for the first time since around 2014 and I enjoyed it so much, I’m thinking about hunting down the rest of the series now. It isn’t too hard to do that because there’s only 4-5 collected editions that have been released. This is really small and manageable compared to the vast majority of comic book series. So if you like these kinds of stories, I’d definitely recommend Mouse Guard. I think I enjoy it more than Redwall though I only read a couple of those books and felt burnt out on them as a young man as they get kind of samey. I’m pretty confident that Mouse Guard doesn’t have that problem.
That brings me to my dream game. I would love to see someone take Mouse Guard (or something like it) and create either a board game or wargame version of it. I know there is Mice & Mystics, which is a board game that is similar to Mouse Guard but it is fairly simplistic from what I hear and it is an older game now. Dungeon crawlers have innovated quite a bit since Mice & Mystics was released. Another game that is semi-related to my idea is Burrows and Badgers. It is a miniature wargame that focus on anthropomorphic animals but its more of a warband campaign game in the vein of Mordheim. I don’t think that format gives the same kind of feelings of adventure that a Mouse Guard-style game would provide. The challenge in my mind is making miniatures that capture the scale properly. Neither of the games I mentioned have tiny protagonists facing off against really big enemies and while I understand the technical challenges with making 10 or 15mm mice against maybe 54mm or 75mm scale enemies, it would look awesome being played and really bring that setting to life. The real problem would be terrain which is already kind of sparse for Burrows and Badgers unless you use generic fantasy terrain. All this is to say, I don’t think that my dream game is terribly likely to happen but it would be amazing to see and fun to play, if it ever did happen.
Kuribo's Painting 
Nice progress on that furniture, and those crystals look awesome! Running out of Agrax is such a show stopper for me that I tend to always have a spare on hand, it’s saved me a few times already.
Mouse guard looks very cool, I might have to look for it. I know you’re more into wargames, but Mausritter might be worth looking at, it’s a roleplaying game, but the scale element is very much present from what I’ve read. It would be interesting to make a miniature game out of it, you could almost do it at true scale, with mice being not much bigger than say a space marine and playing with real household items as terrain.
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