Random Roundup

This is more a log entry than anything specific. First, loot.

It was my birthday last week and I received the following:

The Bolt Action ww2 starter set - because who doesn't need a new era and project? Also a walking cyberman you can shoot. I have asneaking suspicion my sons picked this more for themselves than me. 

Morgul Knights and Riders of Rohan. This came with a catalogue:

Which rapidly became the Eldest's favourite book. Seriously, he's spent hours looking through it and I have to make up bedtime stories for him from it. 

This led him to want to play more with my miniatures:

And to him building his very first model:

This led to him wanting to watch The Hobbit movies. Unsurprisingly he liked the Orcs. The only thing that scared him was Gollum during the Riddles in the Dark bit, but luckily there is always a cushion for protection....

We also had a game night: 

You can see here how competitive we got when playing City of Horror because everyone took photos of the referecne sheets on their phones and were pouring over them. 

As always, the zombie apocalypse fun of City of Horror led to total carnage and lots of backbiting. 

Next up, back to some painting. 

Board game roundup

Myself and She Who Must Be Obeyed have been trying to get back into the habit of having a weekly game night with just the two of us and have also been having some friends round to play so this seems like a good time to do some potted reviews. 

Letters from Whitechapel

This is a classic of the hidden movement genre of game. One player is Jolly Jack, attempting to commit his vile crimes and get away from the other players, taking the role of the police. 

This is game of deduction and logic. Every time we've played it it has been very, very close and this one was no different. The only problem with this one is that it is very challenging puzzle and is not exactly what you would call a relaxing game. 

The view from Jack's end of the table. 

The components are absolutely gorgeous; the main board being an 1889 map of the Whitechapel district which is lovely to spend aged pouring over. The playing pieces are nicely turned wood making the whole thing a lovely tactile experience. 

This is great game that works well with two people but brilliantly with 3-5. 

Pandemic

This is another classic. In this case it's a co-op - it's all the players versus the game. You play the crew of the CDC trying to deal with outbreaks of disease around the world. 

The core of the game design is an engine which causes the diseases to accelerate like a snowball causing an avalanche. The players have to Marshall their resources and think about how to head off the rapidly advancing disaster. 

Things are not going well in the Far East. 

We've only played this once so we're just starting to get a handle on the nature of the decisions that need to be made; however it looks like a good one. 

The world is doomed! Head for the hills!

The components really work well at giving you the feel of planning a campaign on one of those big world maps you see in movies. The disease cubes being clear plastic is a nice touch as it adds to the modern feel of the game. 

My only small concern is that because the engine of the game - the AI, if you like, is driven by a fairly simple card mechanism, could it become slightly predictable? Only a few more plays will answer that question. 

Mysterium

This is simply fabulous. It's a co-op game but very different to Pandemic. Imagine Cluedo but with the dead man trying to finger the culprit. One of the players is the ghost of a murdered man in a Victorian mansion; the other players are psychics tasked with finding out what happened. The only problem is that the ghost can't speak - it can only send dreams. 

The possible suspects, locations and weapons. 

The dreams are art cards - and they really are little works of art - that the psychics have to link to the possible suspects, locations and weapons. We've played it with two people and are trying it with four this week: but this a great, great game. You should definitely get this - it works particularly well with a family as it shows exactly how well you can communicate with each other. 

The view from the afterlife

Roll for the Galaxy

We've played this a few time before. It is basically a stripped down 4x game where you are building a little galactic empire. As you can see from the photos, my empire in the most recent game was, frankly, crap. 

Seriously. Some tax breaks and a shipping contract to a pirate planet. Hardly Dune. 

The design of this game is incredibly elegant. The core dice rolling mechanism means that dice become workers, goods and currency all at the same time. It's a fast game as well it plays in about 45 minutes. 

The Empress of Known Space has a very neat playing area. And she won, damn her eyes. 

I would heartily recommend any of these games. 

Orcs, half-breeds and fearless vampire hunters

I've been having a bit of a trawl round ebay of recent days I scored some Mantic Orcs for my Dragon Rampant warband. I wanted to mix up the racial mix a bit, so some GW Orcs, some Oldhammer Goblins and these chaps should give a varied feel.

A unit of 6 to start - although I'll probably mix and match the varieties within Units in the end - and my first experience with Mantic.

They're... ok. Not as good as GW plastics and certainly nowhere near as good as Perry. Probably on a par with some Warlord ones I've dealt with. A little soft detail here and there and probably not as much poseability and variation within the units as I might like but they are dirt cheap.

Secondly, Dr Frankenorc is proud to present my solution to the fact that I find boar riders very silly: the Centorc.

This is a very simply cut and shut conversion of an old 4th edition Warhammer Orc and elf with some greenstuff chainmail and a mane added. As a proof of concept, it looks fine - certainly enough to make a unit of 6 look possible as heavy cavalry.

Thirdly, I painted the playing pieces from Fury of Dracula 3rd Edition. These were very soft on detail so I relied on quite heavy washes and highlights.

I also picked something else up on ebay that I'm very excited about but there will be an update about that next week....

Game Night Reviews - Memoir 44 and Battle of Hoth

frankly, Battle of Hoth sounds really wrong to me. For some reason, in my head, Battle For Hoth sounds correct. Anyway.

Last night was game night, and we played two fairly abstracted wargames. So here's my review:

Lego: Battle of Hoth

Like all Lego boardgames, this is short and sweet with a very elegant set of rules. There are four different troop types, each of whom can attack in a different direction for different ranges. In practice, you can't go far wrong if you regard it as chess on a strange shaped board. It's a lovely little starter game, taking about 10 minutes to play with fabulous little pieces. It also affords the possibility of a guy on a tauntaun taking on an AT-AT and I don't care where you're from, that's entertainment.

All of the bits are of a high quality as you'd expect from Lego and there are enough rules variations to ensure that the game has replayability. As long as you don't expect much tactical depth and you're happy with a large amount of random chance you'll enjoy it.

Memoir 44

Firstly, as a boardgamer, you have to respect a game that puts this many toys on the table. Like Merchants and Marauders and other 'ameritrash' games (a term which isn't perjorative to me, I love big sprawling monsters as much as I love delicate, elegant eurogames) your table is soon full of cards, infantry, armour and terrain. It's like having a proper wargame but all in one box.

The basic game refights the Operation Overlord campaign from the parachute drops on the 5th June through to the liberation of Paris. The key engagements are represented by scenarios. These scenarios are historically accurate within a given level of abstraction and are often asymmetrical to the point of being one-sided which leads to one of the game's master strokes; you play each scenario twice, with players swapping sides each time. This keeps the 'game' side of things fair and also immediately doubles the playing life of the game.

Myself and m'learned colleague, by the way, are three sessions into the game campaign so we've experienced most of the rules.

The basic game system is, I believe, adapted from command and colours. You have a certain number of cards which allow you to give orders to certain units. I'm a big fan of friction in game systems; real life us never mechanistic, so rules systems that allow for difficulties in getting units to do what you want are fine by me. Combat is by dice, so we have two elements of random chance - the cards you've drawn and your rolls on the dice.

This game is honestly excellent. Anyone interested in WW2 or wargaming should own a copy. My only big caveat is this: it is entirely possible to have an appalling run of luck due to the two chance systems running together. I had that experience when playing as the Allies trying to take Pegasus bridge. I didn't have the cards I needed and when I did get a decent card, the dice were against me. Needless to say, D Day needed to be called off.

This chap is in trouble as soon as their orders come through. 

Updates on the painting stuff after the weekend; hope to see you then. 

The Pledge

As you may or may not recall, I took the Pledge at the beginning of this year.I would paint more than I bought.

Well, the total currently stands at:

Bought: 217
Painted: 133

So I'm not doing too bad, actually.

The big problem I've got coming up is that I backed the Blood Rage Kickstarter for the boardgame; the problem is that due to the massive funding it got the stretch goals mean that it's going to come with night on 100 figures. Do I count them towards the Pledge? I've counted the Bloodbowl figures I got second hand but that's a bit different.

Proof that I bought the boardgame for the sake of the game comes from the photographs I took the other week. When we reorganised the book cases, I had to accept that I have a board game problem:

There needs to be some variation on Alcoholics Anonymous for people like us.

Rex

This is not the game you're playing. Ish. 

One of those holy grails of boardgames, the old Dune game has a towering reputation. It's been 20 years out of print, though, so not really any chance of playing it.

Enter Fantasy Flight Games, who got the rights to the game system but - due to the usual intransigence of the Herbert Estate - not the Dune setting. The result is Rex; an updated Dune, reskinned with the trappings of FFG's Twlight Imperium universe.

I've wanted it for a couple of years and finally got it for my Birthday back in January. This last week was the first time I've managed to get a game of it together. As a game involving lots of diplomacy and backstabbing it works well with more players. It takes up to 6 but I had 4.

First things first, as you come to expect with FFG, the components are every high quality and the game is gorgeous to look at.

It's just a real pleasure to have this thing on the table.

Gameplay is very simple; you move your units around the city trying to avoid the moving bombardment; the winner is the person who holds 3 key strongholds at the end of a game turn - or the most at the end of Turn 8.

The complexity comes in the asymmetry; every player race has a different, game-breaking advantage. So one player has a lot of traitors tucked away; another gets all the money bid by other players for equipment; another wins automatically if no-one else has three strongholds at the end of turn 8 and so and so forth. The game comprises blind bidding, movement, resource management and wargaming in equal measure.

You also have the opportunity to create binding alliances with other players - and break those alliances at the moment of maximum convenience.

Moving your units into an area of this sci-fi Stalingrad that's occupied by enemy forces triggers a barney. Combat is done blind, with troops and resources committed on cunning hidden dials (the grandfathers of X-Wing's movement dials) with leaders plugged in. This is where the strongest hint of Spice lingers - there is a chance that your leader is, in fact, a traitor owned by the enemy; and if he is, then you lose automatically - no ifs, no buts. Just like Doctor Yueh.

Our game went very well; it all came down to a fight over one sector at the end of Turn 8. It was a real nailbiter that went down the very wire. A clever conceit of the rules system is that each race can achieve victory in different phases of the turn, so right up until the last moment, anyone could snatch victory.

This was a great evening's play which everyone thoroughly enjoyed - even She Who Must Obeyed, who cordially hates science-fiction. Basically - get it and play it. You won't regret it.