Best Background Music for Tabletop Miniature Gaming

For Arcane Legions: Hans Zimmer, hands down. Que up some Hans Zimmer in GlooveShark, play all, and enjoy a night of thematic music for your epic conflicts! Actually, Hans Zimmer is probably the best background music for any tabletop miniature game, but maybe more for historical/fantasy themes like Warhammer Fantasy.

For Mechwarrior or sci-fi themed games (WH40k), the soundtrack for MechWarrior 2 (old computer game) is excellent. Lots of slow and heavy beat tracks that just exudes a 100-ton walking robot.

For Star Wars Miniatures: John William's Star Wars soundtracks of course!

Miniature Gaming: Arcane Legions Review

Tonight, we dine in ARCANE LEGIONS!

Finally played my first game of Arcane Legions the other day! For those of you who don't know, Arcane Legions is a mass-action, tabletop miniature game, focusing on scores of troops in various formations for epic-scale battles! Between spending all my time painting the Roman faction and magnetizing the entire game, i've not actually played the darn game until recently! So here is my review based on the first playtest.

Painted Roman Army from Arcane Legions

All the units of the Roman faction from the starter set have been painted! Finally!

Here's the line of thinking that started it all:
-Is there a tabletop miniature wargame with an Asian-themed army? Oooo, Arcane Legions has a Chinese-themed army, called the Han faction! And it's cheap!
-I don't want to mess up painting the Han army, so i'll paint a few Romans units to test out prep, prime, paint, and finishing techniques.
-They look pretty good, i should just finish painting the entire Roman army.

Man, that took forever.  Nothing kills creativity and excitement like monotony, and painting 10 identical units gets boring quick. Maybe if the sculpts were better, like units from games workshop with lots of detail, it would be more interesting to paint an entire army. But that means it would also take much more time to finish. I guess that's why most miniature games are skirmish-level, i.e. usually 5 to 10 units per side duking it out, because it's much easier to get them painted and start playing the game. Arcane Legions is a mass-action level, so 4 or 5 formations of 10 units each is typical.

Hateraid: I hated painting legs. Curved structures can't be painted with one careful brush stroke. You have to turn the figure. And each figure has two legs! and two arms! What a pain!

Loveraid:
-They look great! Much more fun to play with good-looking army.
-Worked out painting techniques like priming and finishing. Settled in on the ones i liked with a few test pieces.
-My brush stroke is much more controlled now. You get better after 40 figures so you paint more efficiently and faster.
-Figured out how paint consistency is related to how much paint is loaded on the brush. To keep thinned paint from pooling in crevices, you have to remove enough paint from the brush so it acts more like dry-brushing and paint will stay on the raised surfaces.

Future:
I'm probably only going to paint detailed, inidividual figures from now on. It keeps thing more interesting for me. I'll paint the Han faction when i'm all out of individual miniatures.