Space Marin- erm, Interstellar Commandos?

In a week where GW made the news in a way they probably aren't too pleased about, I'm posting about my Grey Knights army that doesn't have any Space Marines, hopefully avoiding any legal issues.

I've been pretty busy on the hobby front this past week, hence no blog last weekend.  I tried out the classic Vampire: The Eternal Struggle CCG last Saturday which was really interesting - I'm sure I'll be giving that another go.  Sunday I was helping out at my local shop, 7th Heaven Games, rearranging the layout for optimum gaming fun!  More gaming tables than ever so come check it out.  They are also doing a bit of fund raising if you are feeling generous- and even if you're not the deals are actually extremely good value anyway!

On Monday this week I played a 1000 point game of Warhammer 40k verses Will, using his Chaos Space Marines.  My Grey Knights army is really an Inquisition force, lots of human henchmen doing the bidding of Inquisitor Coteaz.  I've been collecting figures for this on and off for about 18 months now and I can field around 1250 points.

Slowly expanding the army as I find figures I like is a joy.  Its not creating a competitive army (it was never meant to be) so there's no 'must get the new meta-game beater' threat hanging over my thoughts.  This latest batch of Heresy troopers arrived on Christmas day and very pleased I was too.  On discovering just how many spare components I had from the character upgrade kit, I ordered another pack of troopers to get the most out of them.

Here's one of the reasons I was after some new recruits - the special weapons guys, with a normal rifle trooper for reference.  The heavy machine gun guy is very much in the aliens pose (and I have further plans in this area) and the flame thrower trooper has upgraded armour to help keep him un-toasted.

A rear shot so you can see the amount of kit these models have sculpted on them - ready for anything these troopers!

As I had 8 figures lined up and am currently running my army's henchmen as two rival 'houses' I needed to paint half blue.  Here's the standard troopers I've added.  The blues will get special weapon support in the nearish future no fear.

The other thing I was keen to add to my squads was some leader characters.  The character sprue Andy's created to supplement his troopers is great for this, in fact offering too many options for what I needed!  To get around this, I've magnetised the options for my two chosen leaders.

This allows me to run my grizzled commander with a chainsword or powerfist depending on how flush I am feeling and the red guy can switch to just a rifle if the Mantic trooper with powerfist I already have shows up.

I thought it was a good time for a bit of a recap on just how I was doing with the reds and the blues so here's a couple of group shots.  The first shows Coteaz and Frank overseeing the Blue house in full strength from the safe walls of my big bunker.

The second shot shows Deadlock (who I can't decide whether will be used as a Paladin or an Inquisitor going forward) standing proud over Red house.  The magnetised sergeant has switched to a third combination, I love those little 'rare earth' magnets - try looking for the 2mm ones on ebay if you are interested.