Friday, December 30, 2011

Year of the Gear: Heavy Gear Blitz!




Tonight my buddy Jason and I kicked off a long awaited and prepared for event, our innagural game of Heavy Gear Blitz! Since Bayou Wars, we decided we were going to shift...ahem...gears...and play something new in 2012. After some deliberation, we decided on Dream Pod 9's mech battle game, Heavy Gear Blitz! Now, I had purchased the rulebook and a unit box back in 2009, but like many games I acquire, it made it to the back burner in lieu of the more popular games we were playing at the time, like Warmachine or Warhammer Fantasy.

Then, something strange happened.

This past Bayou Wars, there was a gentleman demoing Heavy Gear in the dealer room. He showed Jason how to play. And before long, out of nowhere, Jason had become a full fledged member of the Pod Squad demo crew for DP9. In trying to convince me to play, he later would show me the model that single handedly got me into the game full tilt: The Hussar.

I was hooked.

I didn't know who the faction was or what they did, I was playing them. Turns out, the Hussar is a specific model only available to a new faction DP9 was releasing in December, the New Coalition, or NuCoal for short. The NuCoal combined the best in Terra Novan gear technology with the remnants of the Port Arthur Korps tech to make for one new, super bad ass Heavy Gear faction.

Sadly, this was October when we began planning this, so we would have to wait till DP9 released the new faction so I could have something to play with. In the mean time, I spent many a night reading the DP9 forums, reading old HG books and watching how-to videos on YouTube.

Then, sometime after Thanksgiving, my new NuCoal faction book and General Purpose squad arrived and I was in business. I assembled the models when I got the chance and resigned to paint them up as quickly as possible. You see, I tend to acquire armies faster than I can paint them, but I was determined to play with a fully painted force in Heavy Gear, so what to do?

Enter Army Painter.

Following Jason' s lead, I too decided to use the Army Painter method to quickly but nicely paint the models for the tabletop. I had purchased some Army Painter products for use on my Incursion! game, but after seeing how well...and fast...his models turned out, I had to try them on my NuCoal models. More on the painting process later (it went unbelievably well), but I soon had my GP Squad painted up and ready for some action.

We decided to meet on 12/30/2011 at Big Easy Comics to begin our year long gaming experience Jason has dubbed "The Year of the Gear". Meaning we will take this next year to learn, paint, and master all there is learn about Heavy Gear Blitz! We have committed to fully painted forces, incremental list building, and making terrain specifically for the HGB scale.

So the fight for Terra Nova has begun! Jason will be commanding the forces of the Northern Polar Region while I will fastidiously marshal the power of the NuCoal forces to protect our City-State from the Polar aggression.

For NuCoal!

The only question that remains is: which faction will YOU play?

Strength and Honor,

-Wicked