Tabletop Teacher

Just a quick post, which I won't be publicising to #warmongers, or the other Warhammer hash tags. I read an article which said that 100 search engine visitors per day would result in $100 AdSense revenue in 6 months. Since I get triple that, I thought I'd start running ads on here. Since I have no clue about how this works yet, or what it will do to my site, I'll be doing a trial run for a week. If everything goes okay, then I'll leave it on, and you can support the blog just by visiting! If here are any issues: Browser slow downs Dodgy Adverts Anything unsuitable for children ... then I'll take them off. One of my pet peeves for a lot of tabletop news sites is the fact they take forever to load on my work laptop... and routinely get blocked by the school firewall. Since this blog is meant to be a resource for teachers and students, I don't want that to be a feature of my blog. Ok, here goes. Hopefully everything goes okay, and I'll post u...

One of the first bits of art I did for the blog! It's hard to imagine that I'm sitting here writing this blog post now. I'm not sure I've ever written 300 of anything, let alone articles and posts for a single project. So I'm pleased to be doing this post now, particularly as I'm not at a Parent's Evening or in an exam for once! So lets look at some stats: Post count: 300 Days active: 267 Posts per day: 1.12 Previous posts per day: 1.12 Still maintaining my posts per day, despite an increasing number of days. What this means is that my post rate over the last month has been much more than one a day, keeping that average above one. Total page views: 89,515 Views per day: 335 Views per post: 298 Prev. per day: 193 Prev. per post: 173 The last time I wrote one of these birthday posts (the 6 month birthday post ), I had a page view count of 45,140. I've nearly doubled my readership in the last month, and I have only you guys r...

This popped up on Faeit212 , one of my more trusted sources for Games Workshop news. Death Guard Griffon You can tell it's Chaos because of the spiky bits Faeit 212 then released this image of a better look at the new tank coming our way: Suspiciously similar to my Nurgle's Gardeners colour scheme You may be forgiven from looking at my latest posts from thinking I'm a news site. Well not really. I get excited by new information and the little bump in views I get from my BREAKING NEWS posts, but I rarely if ever post a picture without comment. For what I do here (analysis, reviews, guides and ego stroking usually), I have to put in a little more research and hunting around. It's the value I add with this blog, as I really don't have the time to spare to trawl the net for fresh news. But I thought I'd share some of the research I did on the above tank. And maybe you can see the frustration I have with some "hobby blogs" out there. ...

I'm addressing this now, but really as part of a larger criticism of table top gaming reporting. Right now we have the following evidence for new Primaris Space Marine models: Taken from Faeit212  but not hard to find on Games Workshop's webstore And that's it. Really, that's all we have. No, that forum post which swears it's reliable isn't good evidence. No, that Youtube video of the person who wants you to trust that they have seen the models isn't good evidence either. This is all we have. The issue is that it's a relatively easy prophecy to sell. There will undoubtedly be such models later on. It's from Warhammer 40K's flagship faction, and these are models that have been in the line up for the better part of two, if not three decades. They will come out, and as long as the model descriptions are vaguely Space Marine like, they will be judged as being accurate. And then someone will give the rumour mongers more credit than ...

As I shot past the 6 month mark without realising, thanks to a combination of 8th Edition and exam season kicking off, I thought it would be a good idea to do a quick stock check of how things were progressing now. In case you were wondering, unlike the other two Birthday blogs where I was at a parents evening, I'm acting as monitor for a GCSE exam as I write this. This is like an unofficial invigilator, who is just a spare person to take people to the loo, escort unwell students to the school nurse etc. There's not much to do apart from work on a laptop at the back of the exam room, so I have some time to do this. The blog was started on the 24th October 2016, so we're closer to the 8 month mark than anything. As of when I write this (14th June 2017), there are the following stats: Post count: 261 Days active: 233 Posts per day: 1.12 Previous posts per day: 1.27 Laws of averages fully coming into effect here. As long as I stick to a post-a-day s...

... by Frankie. Alongside some more factual pieces, Games Workshop has started to write some faction specific articles to show how they will fare in the upcoming 8th Edition: "Today, we start a new article series where he (and a few others) will talk about how the new edition is going to affect specific factions, and what units they think we’ll be seeing more of. We start off with Chaos Space Marines – take it away Frankie…" Frankie runs big events for 40K, such as the Las Vegas Open, the Bay Open, and the new South California Open. What are these? Haven't a clue, I live in the UK, and my wife would kill me for spending thousands of pounds on flights to push around toy soldiers. But I assume they must be a big deal for GW to use this man as their mouth piece. With all that said, I think we can simply discount these faction "guides" as waffle for new players. There isn't much new information here, and it generally boils down to telling ...

Yay me! So yesterday I reached my 200th post on the blog. Had I been paying attention, I would have written something a little better than a simple joke on how some teasers and pictures look like gardening equipment, but there we go! Also, somewhat ironically, I'm writing this post at another parents evening... just like the previous birthday post. First parent. Here goes! Well that was quick. Let's do some stats to see how far we've come. Post count: 200 Days active: 157 Posts per day: 1.27 Previous posts per day: 1.7 Not surprising really, as I've had the last two weekends off, but the post count per day has gone down. It will continiue to drop as well, as we get into higher numbers, but as long as the counts per day stays above 1, I'll count it as good. Total page views: 5257 Views per day: 33 Views per post: 22 Prev. per day: 24 Prev. per post: 14 A bit of improvement here, which is good. The scale of increase has been n...

A few times a week I'm reminded of just how much a hobby this is, as opposed to a lifetime pursuit. Today is a particularly stinging example of where gaming is on my priority list. It's Sunday. This, for most, is a day of rest and relaxation after a strenuous day at the coal face of whatever 9-5 job you have. I was supposed to be at a special birthday game, a one-off Dungeons and Dragons session for a friend of mine. I had a character rolled up weeks ago (a Seraphon inspired War Cleric), and was really looking forward to my first game in nearly months. I am currently at work. It's an exeat weekend at my boarding school, which means we kick the students out for the weekend to give the various house staff a break. Think about that for a second. When your job is running a boarding house for students, you literally do not get time off until term is done. However, we have a couple of students who are coming back from a football tournament early, and thus need someon...

... Okay. So, the above Twitee and I had a little tiff over some differences in opinion. They didn't like it when I suggested that the latest Rumour Engine picture was an example of ineffective marketing . Who they are isn't actually important to the content of this, and since they've seen fit to delete the tweets where we had our little internet scuffle, I pretty sure they've realized just how embarrassing what they were saying was. No need for naming and shaming, and if you're thinking of looking for who this was I urge you not to. As they have taken it upon themselves to delete the tweets, I think I can claim victory. I think that's all I'm going to do in terms of protecting this person though. I'm still human, and did take a great deal of offence at how they treated me, with all the unprovoked attacks on my character. I'd like to remind them, that they came after me, and thus I owe you not a damned thing when it comes to the after...

I feel like I've passed a milestone, having had my first Twitter spat on social media! No hard feelings @ Warhammer AoS , we're all just nerds bickering over plastic soldiers (or in this case an accessory to a plastic soldier!). However, it might be that some people think I'm being too harsh on the Games Workshop Marketing team... which is odd considering how much praise I've heaped on them since I started writing. Either way, it's perhaps best I show you what good marketing is, so you can see the difference (with an apparently necessary caveat that you should not take professional marketing advice from a Physics teacher's table top gaming blog).  Paid post will go up tomorrow, with a scenario based on attacking an army's camp. This was uploaded to the Warhammer 40K Facebook page, about a day after the pistol went up on the Rumour Engine. So, why is this any better than the pistol? It drops new information. The line there at the end fo...

I write this somewhat tentatively, as I don't want to really scare the Games Workshop marketing team away from continuing their Rumour Engine program. But the latest picture , in my opinion, is a bit rubbish in terms of speculation hype. This is why: it's a pistol. You can generally assume in the grim dark future of the 41st Millennium that most people have one of these. They're not exactly rare, and there's just one character really famous for using them, Cypher, the possibly-Fallen Dark Angel  RENEGADE SPACE MARINE COMPLETELY UNRELATED TO ANY OF THE UNFORGIVEN, AND WHO PROBABLY DOESN'T EXIST ANYWAY. Even Cypher RENEGADE WHO DOES NOT EXIST can't be a good candidate for this piece, as he'd generally be holding the pistol. What's worse is that this is clearly not even meant to be an integral part of the model. It's a whole holstered pistol. We only ever see that as optional extras, or accessories to put on other models. They usually...

100 posts yesterday! It just slipped my mind as I was so keen to get on to my Work in Progress picture for the Brushido competition. Whilst I'd like to jump into a full in depth analysis of how my blog has been doing over the past few months, school has just started in earnest again, and I don't have the time. Frankly I'm just happy I've been able to make one post a day since writing, meaning a shed load of material for people to look through. Must tidy up at some point though, so people can browse through more effectively. Also, according to my most trusted new source, Cadia seems fine . Don't know what the fuss is all about. Thanks for reading. If you liked what you saw, and you want to help out, please leave a comment. Sharing this with your friends, and following me on Twitter , Facebook or Google+ would also be hugely appreciated. If you have anything you want me to look at, let me know in the comments below. I'll probably be able...