Playing more Battlelore!

Will had recently become the owner of the two new Undead armies for Battlelore so it seemed like a good opportunity to dust off my copy and see how well the Daqan army coped with the Undead hordes. 

Finally Playing Dark Age : Initial Thoughts

So myself and Will met up last night to finally dip our toe into the Dark Age waters. We had both read through the rules and scoured the unit cards, but, until you finally get a game or two under your belt, it's difficult to really tell how it plays and how effective some units and abilities are, or even what they actually do in some cases.

So first impressions.
The rules, in a mid game reference situation i was pretty impressed. Despite initially seeming quite complex, it's just a case of getting the process down. Attackers assault value plus targets defence value, plus / minus any modifiers, then roll under that value on your D20. I was also impressed with how precise the wording is throughout, I can't recall any ambiguous situations that arose.

The missions plus secondary objectives all seem fairly varied and are THE method for winning the game, most missions seem to end once a player has hit 3 VPs or so, forcing you to really play to the objectives and not get too distracted. This also leads to it getting very bloody, very quickly. Which also leads to another big plus for me, it's VERY quick. We bashed out 3 games and dinner in an evening, considering these were also learning games involving more rules referencing than would usually be the case, I thought that was darn sweet. I think once were a bit more familiar we could easily bash out 4 or 5 games in an evening.

All in all I was thoroughly impressed, it's quick, the alternating player activations keep you involved, it's got quite a bit of complexity with the special rules but with them all being printed on each units card coupled with the low model count it really works.

The only downside is I'm now eyeing up lots more unit cards for my wish list, now that I better understand what they actually do!

Learning about co-op X-wing.

Just a quick post to let people know about a co-op rules set for x-wing which I think may fix the game for me as I have found the straight up kill each other missions of x-wing a little too MtG with all the upgrade cards. Here is the link docking bay 416. There are a few bits to print and cut out but if people are interested I am happy to organise it all.

Fiddling with mechanics and points.

I had an hour or two when the wife went out on Saturday so I thought I would do my first little test of the mechanics I put together for a Sci-Fi game (I really need to give it at least a working title). Just a quick test of the movement, ranges and damage mechanics.

Wondering how big an army should be?

I've been putting together my rules set for a Sci-Fi game where you can use any companies models and so have been coming up with the usual armies including your standard humans, genetically enhanced warriors, orcs, alien creatures etc. As part of it I have been pondering how to create the points costs for the units and I thought the best place to start was with how many models/units I wanted in each army. So I thought I would ask other people what they want from Sci-Fi armies. I was thinking a Standard army should be around 2,000 points, there seems to be a reason most companies use this number but I can't say that I know it. I figured that a standard human army should have something like:
4 Characters
4-6 Units of basic infantry
2-3 Support units
2-3 Vehicles
I wanted the game to play quickly (set up to pack away in around 2-2.5 hours) so figured with the reduction of dice rolling down to To Hit, To Damage and then the morale roll at the end of the phase you could probably get more models on the table but is it better to have a game with fewer models/units that are harder to kill or a quick game with lots of models that are easier to kill?
I thought a Space Marine style elite force should have average:
1-2 Characters
2 Units of basic infantry
2 Support units
2 Vehicles 
So what size would you want your Sci-Fi army to be? Does it even matter? 

Quick Sunday sesh

Thought I'd start posting about some games I've been playing!

Kicked off with a brand new copy of Terror in Meeple City (the game formerly known as Rampage) someone brought, so unfortunately there was some assembly required! With 4 people helping out though we were soon set to cause some mayhem:

Leonard the Long-Tail surveys his prey.

This is a game in which I'm all about having fun with winning an occasional bonus (well, it hasn't happened yet). There was much chaos with people moving aggressively, breathing fire aggressively and of course flinging buses to try to snag some teeth from the other monsters.

Leonard tried making a move on Gloria and got smacked upside the head.

Eventually we had a weird endgame situation where the next person to knock a meeple off the board would lose instantly, but the last building tile needed to trigger the game's end was precariously balanced on the edge of the board with a meeple still standing in it. Eventually someone sucked it up and knocked off the last meeple. I scored a dismal 10 with the winner racking up 33 by continuing to smack the others up and steal their meeples.

We next played Specter Ops - no pics unfortunately! - which I've been eager to try. I was a standard Hunter playing The Puppet - we had the full 5 so there was also a traitor in our midst. Blue Jay was the spy and tried pinning the suspicion on me with some cunning equipment use - luckily I was aware of the tools she *could* have and talked my way out of it! A few turns later we deduced the traitor (who revealed and slunked off into the shadows before we could call a vote) and started closing in on BJ. A desperate breakaway attempt was intercepted and the Beast pounced on her for some nasty damage. With limited escape options available, she fell on the next turn.

The opening seems quite important for the Spy - the Hunters quickly close in and they need to make a reasonably clean getaway without blowing too much equipment (which I think was BJ's downfall here). Awesome game!

Playing more Epic the card game.

Having had a chance to properly go through the rules and play a few games last night I relaised just how different Epic is to magic. We had initially assumed you can play events like instants in your opponents turn but this turns out to be extremely wrong as there are only three points you can play the, and no one may ever play a card 'in response' to a card. This changed the dynamic quite a bit as it allowed players to act in their turn without the worry of something being killed just before they eanted to use it. You may only play a card in an opponent's turn: 
- when attackers are declared
- when blockers are declared 
- when your oppoent says they wish to end their turn

The other odd thing is that there isn't one attack phase but as many you want. You can attack with one champion then play a card and go through each one in turn if you wish. Also, if one creeature blocks all attackers are considered blocked. It takes a lot of getting used to but makes some of the other cards make a lot more sense.

Overall I'm really happy with it as a 'let's punch each other in the face with monsters' game which doesn't take itself seriously. One of my frustrations with MtG has always been the need to manage Mana so now I can cast crazy Dragons without the need to deck build. Squee!