Sunday 17 May 2015

Playing new games!

With Will having received his Kickstarter copy of Xenoshift (with loads of extras!) and the approaching release of Kings of War 2nd edition there was no way I could turn down an invite to try them both out yesterday!
Xenoshift in all it's sleeved glory!


First up was Xenoshift. if you haven't seen this yet you can catch a walk through here. The game is very fun as you are humans trying to survive long enough to get everyone and everything off the planet as the aliens have now woken up and decided to clean house. What makes it so interesting is that it is a co-op deck builder so you can share resources and work together. This was something it took me a couple of games to grasp as I just wanted to see Will's guys be eaten in the first two rounds, until I realised that the base had now taken a beating and we were close to losing.
This is the moment we lost the first game as it donkey punched Will's men!

Reset for game two surely we would prevail now that we knew what we were doing.
It turns out the game is really well designed as you have three waves each made up of three rounds and you can only buy the really good stuff once you move up the waves so you feel confident at the end of each wave but the first round of each new wave is brutal as you are using mostly the units from the previous wave, which aren't that great against the beefier beast that come barrelling down your lane to bum tickle you! Once the dust settled on round 8 (half way through the last wave) we had lost with almost all of Will's units having been turned to the enemies side when they died and the alien boss then consumed them all to pump itself up to around 50 damage (our base only started the game at 30 health!). Such a fun game I look forward to getting four players together as it will get pretty crazy very quickly!

Next up came a test game of Kings of War (KoW) with my Ogres taking on Will's Elves. One of the things that has us so excited to play KoW is that it is so open in terms of army construction that Will could add in his Treeman he had just got in the post that morning despite the fact that all the rest of his army is High Elves. We didn't have much fantasy scenery but it is really that necessary, though I would have liked some impassable terrain to help break up the board but that's just because my army was so small.

Here is how we set up, I was in for quite a surprise when Will took his first turn.

What a lovely Treeman, he will make good kindling for my Ogre's camp fires!

I had forgotten that Seaguard have bows so I ended up getting pin cushioned in the first turn from Will's 40 strong horde of the pointy-helmeted blighters!
The Treeman is also a spell caster and can cast the Surge ability that allows a unit to move an extra 1" for each 4+ rolled on the spell. Will of course slammed into my Mammoth! 

We were using the red dice as wound markers and the fact that units don't lose models makes the game really quick and simple as holes appear when a unit dies but other wise you just get pushed back an inch and you opponent then gets to charge you right back!

You'll notice that the Treeman has gone to the great forest in the sky... we worked out very quickly that Ogre units multi-charging is utterly brutal.

Then again so is a huge wedge of Elves and a Dragon!

With most of the army gone the Warlock steps up to use his Fireball (15) spell against Will's Seaguard Horde which had taken some wounds already, he added 5 more..

...add to that a Nerve test of a maximum 12 and they were off! Will did forget to use his Wizard's Inspiring rule to get me to re-roll but it felt right the would flee from such a huge fireball. 
The final turn had me with just my Standard bearer and Warlock left. I made some really bad choices but what I enjoyed was that I could have done something about it had I realised they were really bad choices as the units are very maneuverable. Not having to worry about your opponent hitting you back and rolling all the dice in your turn (as there are no saves for your opponent to take) mean that it gives you a very different feel to Warhammer and I like it. Quick turns and not being locked in combat means that you can use units to speed bump the opponent but also know that you can shoot them next turn! I'm looking forward to more games with my Ogres!

2 comments:

  1. Can't wait to give KoW a try. I'm so tempted to stick all my skellies down on trays, I know I should probably play a game or two first though.

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    1. Let me know when you are available and we can knock a few games out to see how you enjoy it.

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