The Painted Thumb

Everyone should have heard the news by now.  Leonard Nimoy the actor who brilliantly portrayed the character of 'My Spock' on 'Star Trek' has passed. I am one of those Trekkies who is old enough to remember a world that included the original series TV show (and the short run of the animated TV show) and nothing else. No movies, No next generations, No J.J. Abrams... I remember hearing the news that a Next Generation TV show was in the works and I thought to myself, "Nah! It will never happen." I was a hard-nosed realist in those days and I couldn't imagine that Star Trek, or sci-fi television for that matter, would ever be as popular as it is today. I was so wrong! To put some perspective on the matter, the first episode of TOS was aired in 1966. Nimoy played the role of Spock for the first time wearing a gold turtleneck sweater. His last performance was a cameo in the latest movie "Into Darkness" in 2013! And all the episodes and ...

This past weekend, I had a game of Starmada with my friend Ken. He and I have been long time Trekkies. We both wanted to try a Star Trek miniatures battle. Ken even purchased the 10-pound grab bag of Starfleet 2400 miniatures from Amarillo Design Bureau. I have been gathering some plastic minis from bargain bins at local game stores and I borrowed a set of metal Starfleet minis from another friend. Between the two of us, we had enough figs to setup a reasonable sized skirmish battle. I attempted a game of Starmada before with Desert Scribe (some photos are here ). We were both unfamiliar with the rules and struggled with some the details. In my recent game, Ken and I did much better but there we still made a few mistakes in game play. Ken played the Federation faction with a 1x Command Cruiser, 1x Heavy Cruiser, and 1x Frigate.  I took the Klingon faction with 1x D7C command cruiser, 1x D6 cruiser, and 1x F5 Frigate. The game took three hours to complete despite the fact the r...