On the Trail of Cthulhu

This is the first of two posts this weekend; this one is a kind of review of Pelgrane Press' Trail of Cthulhu RPG while the second will be a write up of the actual game.

I'm assuming at this point that no-one reading this blog needs to be told anything about Lovecraft or Cthulhu or, indeed, Chaosium's venerable Call of Cthulhu rules. CoC was the first game I ever ran and we played it every Saturday night for years before we moved on to other games.  But CoC is almost as old as D&D and the rules are a little creaky.

Trail of Cthulhu, then is a newer game.  It's about 10 years old - I've just not had a chance to run it till now.

The main rules change is reorientating the focus on investigation; in any horror game the key is always in figuring out what has happened and how to stop it. ToC assumes that the player characters are competent - a strange feeling for anyone who's played WFRP - and that they will immediately find any clue they are capable of finding if they look for it. So someone with Geology who looks at the weird rock will immediately gather that it is from some strange underwater environment.

The key thing here is that the emphasis immediately shifts from finding the clues to interpreting the clues - and in the modern gaming environment that's genius.

What do I mean like that?

Like most people I don't have a regular rpg  group who love near me any more. So this game, like most others I've run over the last few years, was done over video conferencing. The advantage of any system which forces the players to talk to each other and try and deduce what's going on is clear in that kind of environment.

The rules for general abilities are pretty elegant, using a points spending and resource management system to allow the players to be proactive and competent.

Overall, ToC is a cracking game which works well for playing over the Web. It's well worth checking out and is supported by a wide range of supplements. One thing I will flag up is that my hardback is.coming apart at the spine. It was one of the first print run so I don't know if any newer editions would have the same problem.

Now plan the next story...

Where the Iron Crosses Grow

I recently mentioned that I'd purchased a copy of Iron Cross to use to help my Year 10 students with their GCSE History coursework. Last night I had my first test game.

So first an outline of the rules and a mini-review seem to be in order.

Iron Cross is a scale agnostic game primarily designed for Late War Western Europe based on the Orbats included in the book, though other theatres are covered by free lists from the website. The book is £12, full colour and lavishly illustrated - including hits and tips from a couple of Hollywood greats.

I ordered the £30 set that came with tokens and I'm very glad I did - the use of tokens is key to the way the game played so having easy to use ones made life much easier.

Gameplay is very simple; there are no ranges except for things such as PIATs and Panzerfausts. If you can see it, you can shoot it. This is elegant as it makes the use of terrain and movement key, exactly as it was in Western Europe. All die rolls are made on a 1d10 or 1d6 and the core mechanics are pretty simple to grasp; taking incoming fire effects your morale and when a unit's morale is depleted they bolt. Again, this is an accurate representation of the historical reality, especially when Units can fall back and attempt to regroup - in effect 'healing'; so it becomes a question for the commander of whether to press an attack or whether to try to preserve your troops. Troops have their combat effectiveness degraded as their morale suffers.

As you can see, the core of the game lies in that holy grail of game design, choice; making the player weigh up risk versus reward and Iron Cross handles this better than almost any other wargame I've played recently due to the way it handles initiative. Rather than a traditional IGOUGO mechanic, the player has a number of command tokens. Each one of these can be spent to activate a unit on your turn - you can try to activate a unit more than once, but this gets more difficult the more you ask of your units and the worse their morale is. The genius stroke is that the player whose turn it is not can spend a token to interrupt.So it goes like this:

"I'll activate these GIs and they're going to move and shoot but running across the road then shooting the grenadiers behind the barn."

"Yeah, I'm going to spend and activate my machine gun team who are going to shoot them as they cross the road."

So when it's the other player's turn you are constantly weighing up whether you want to react or not; likewise, when it's your turn you are constantly trying to weigh up how to work around the enemy. And you can't interrupt every action - because if you spend all your tokens, when the active player passes the turn over to you, you'll have no tokens left to do anything. And as the active player you're always trying to decide when the best moment to end your turn is to ensure that you have some tokens left to react to the enemy's actions.

This makes for an incredibly fluid and fast moving game with feints, probing attacks, use of terrain; it's a good simulation of mobile warfare and, more importantly, a great piece of game design.

My only concern is that some of the rules in the book are not written as clearly as I would like; for example, I'm still not sure if an infantry unit firing on tank inflicts a morale marker. I think it does but the rules don't specifically state it does; and whether it does or not makes a huge difference to how infantry deal with armour.

These things can be houseruled, of course, but it's just one of those things companies want to look at  - proofing for aspects other than errors. I think I'm right in saying that Magic: The Gathering and FFG for X-Wings have lawyers read their rules to check for clarity and reduce misunderstanding.

So how did it play?

Really well.

We set up a very simple edge of a village in Normandy with a mixture of terrain types. Three objectives - the truck was worth two as it had the Lost Ark of the Covenant in it - and two equal sides of 360 points. The US side was armour with two infantry units and the German side was infantry with two STuG III in support. The interesting twist here is that because the Germans had more units, they had more command tokens and thus the player - not me - had more options in making decisions.

Seems legit.

Here you can see the importance of using cover

Notice the wrecked tanks in the background

This is more or less the situation at the end of the game. In case you're wondering what the outcome was, look at the title of the blog. 

The game is sound and I will be using it again for fun - and I'll definitely be using it with the students. Highly recommended.

 Stay tuned for an update tomorrow on the new fantasy project.

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.

Going Deeper Underground

Last night we played....

Yes, Descent. Also known as Lazy Man's D&D. A good old fashioned Dungeon Bash with no planning or set-up required. 

For those that haven't played it, you create a dungeon for each quest from a series of modular tiles. One player is the Evil Overlord - think Sauron, Randall Flagg or Margret Thatcher - and the other players control heroes. Each hero has a class and career and spends XP to gain new abilities as well as new equipment. For your money you get a lot of stuff. I mean, a lot of stuff. And all very high quality. 

That's about less than a third of the stuff, by the way. 

There are around 25 quests in the base game and last night we played the first two. I was elected as Overlord - fairly predictably - and The Good Lady Er Indoors and a wandering RS teacher (lord, random encounter tables have really gone downhill) as the mighty heroes. 

Look, I'm going to cut to the chase of this little mini-review. Descent is great. It deserves a place on your table. In two hours we had more drama, laughter and stupidity that you normally get in a month's worth of RPG sessions. Including but not limited to:

-The goblin archers being so distracted by the Cleric's manly ass they were unable to shoot him

-The same cleric getting bitten in the same ass by a spider

-A dwarf being thrown across the dungeon by an ettin only to waddle back and smack the ettin into next week

-and, glory of glories - a TPK:

Of course, the joy of Descent: like Jaws in a Roger Moore Bond movie, they pick themselves up and dust themselves off ready for the next adventure. 

We'll be playing some more next week. If there's any interest I'll do a proper write up/review explaining how the game plays and so forth. 

Stripperiffic

This is more or less a product review. Hope it's helpful (I've not been paid for this in any way. If anyone wants to, though, feel free)

Stripping minis has always been a chore. My own personal favourite was always the old nail polish remover but the shift to plastics out paid to that as the acetone free stuff was never as good. 

Since then I've mainly been using brake fluid which, although brilliant, is seriously nasty stuff. Then a read a forum post about this stuff: 

Biostrip 20 is available more or less everywhere online and I got this pot for a tenner. It's like slightly watery PVA and this single pot will do for an awful lot of minis as you will shortly see. 

So, how do you use it? Well, you pretty much just dip the miniature in. For my first test I used the Orc Bloodbowl team and a lovely Saruman which I picked up at a car boot sale slathered in paint. 

So, we dip the minis:

And leave them for an hour. 

Within a few minutes you can already see the pigment starting to come off in some of the colours:

And within half an hour the paint itself is starting to crackle and blister:

After an hour a quick rinse and scrub with a toothbrush shows that this stuff is dynamite:

Only a couple of very thick dollops in deep recesses remain, such as on the Black Orc:

But these can be scraped off with a fingernail. The stuff is non toxic and doesn't smell of anything much, so I had no worries scraping away at it. Overall, the team looks more or less like new. 

The only problem I ran into was with Sir Christopher Lee; it turns out there was another coat of paint under the first - and this one appears to be enamels. 

Another dip and another hour and most of the second layer disappears.

So, the bottom line: this is exactly the product I've been waiting for. It makes stripping paint a minor job rather than a major chore, something you can set away while you're painting something else. 

As you're simply dipping the miniatures in fairly thick liquid, this one pot would easily be enough to conveniently strip a normally painted warhammer/40k/saga/lion rampant sized force with a fair bit left over. And for a tenner, that's hard to beat.