29/12/2011: Braggart

This is once again thanks to the guys at BCRPS, where I got into a game featuring Tony, Scott, and his step-son Josh. The thing I love about this game is simple: it's hilarious.

Knowing that Josh didn't really know how to play, I was trying to be as tactical as possible while making sure that everybody was in the runnings until the end. So while it wasn't necessarily tactically sound to use the 'Pick Pocket' card on Scott, since Tony had more cards, I chose to do so anyway because I'd been picking on Tony all the way through the game and I didn't want to bully Josh. It was particularly amusing since 3 of us, including me, bragged about rescuing the princess - only to have our claims shot down with a well-placed 'Liar!' card.

In the end, it was a draw between me and Tony - which, for how flexible the scores are, can't come up too often.

The lads at the club play this before the roleplaying games begin, and it's not looking likely that I'll have The Fakes practice on Thursday any more for a while, so there may be more of these coming up...

25/12/2011: Aye, Dark Overlord!

Come on Matt, surely you've got better things to do on Christmas Day than write another gaming blog?

Actually, no I haven't. With the presents opened, dinner eaten, Amy talked to, family entertained and my guitar played to the point where my fingers scream in protest if I so much as fondle the strings, I think I could do worse than write about one of the nicest experiences I've had with my family for quite some time...

The concept of Aye, Dark Overlord! is wierd but fiendishly simple: One of you plays a Dark Overlord, who is accusing his Goblin Henchmen of causing a catastrpohical failure in his plan to take over the world. The rest of you play the Goblin Servants, making up excuses to get out of trouble and passing the blame on to each other. The Dark Overlord expresses his displeasure by dealing out Withering Look cards; as soon as someone gets 3, that person loses and the game is over. The hapless goblin is dragged down to the Dark Overlord's deepest, darkest, dingiest dungeon to await a fate that even Kragmortha's best torturers haven't thought about yet.

So there's no real winner to this game, it's all about participation and interacting with each other. And if I can do that with my family - bearing in mind that my Mom and Dad are coming up on 60 and the kids are 18, 24 and 26- then it can't be too bad!

Happy Christmas, gamers!

22/12/2011: Kings of Chicago

How do I get myself in to these situations?

This one came about, as so many of them do, in the Roleplaying Club in Blackheath. I'd brought along a few games, but Pat had some too. This one, Kings of Chicago, reminded me and Paul of an old PC game Gangsters, that was absolutely brilliant as a concept though I found the game very difficult and rarely got very far. So I decided to give it a go, joined by Pat, Mel and Chris's brother Doug.

So how does this game work? You're chasing 'Power Points, which can be obtained by opening businesses in the city, having the most influence, or conducting mob jobs. You do this by driving around Chicago in a car, opening businesses if you have enough resources, shooting out anyone who tries to stop you, and every so often the resources, events and opportunities get updated. Details on exactly who has what are kept secret in a separate folder, one for each player which is a nice touch indeed.

That's how you win the game. However with four of us playing, it became a game of how do we stop the other guys from getting too far ahead? Example: Pat systematically clawed his way up to 7 power points largely by opening businesses. He was comfortably ahead of the rest of the crowd until I opened a level 3 business - which is basically as good as it gets -  and caught up with him, also at 7 points. At this point, I only needed to complete a job and open a level 2 business in order to win, which was never far from my grasp. So the other players had to do what they can to stop me: Using the police to bust my jobs, attacking my business,  using events to steal my resources. We didn't make this easy for each other.

So what do I think of the game? A good one, in all. The system is as good as it needs to be; there were no 'What the hell just happened?' moments and it was all pretty clear exactly what does what, and in what order. The only slight ambiguity that I didn't like was the fact that the cars move in squares based on how much you can roll on 1D6. I don't know what this purports to represent exactly, as at some point you're going to roll all 1s in one phase and by no stretch of the imagination should it take you 4 turns to get to the end of the road. This did happen on a number of occasions. However, this comes across to me as a necessary evil - you'd either have to use a specialist dice (not actually all that common,) or increase the size of the game to take 2D6 which nobody wants because it's a pretty decent size as it is. Is the experience representative of gangsters in Chicago? Well it's a board game, so in of itself probably not - but when we were playing, there were insults, threats, lots of "are you talkin' to me?!" backstabbing, loansharking, underhanded tactics and a ferocious struggle for power, so actually it's likely not all that far off. It's a good environment to trade that sort of thing and being role players, we were more than happy to get into the role of vicious gangsters.

Who won in the end? Well, Pat reckoned we'd have the game wrapped up in about an hour. This was at 8:30 and we were still playing 3 hours later, in a huge power struggle that could go either way and we hadn't got a hope of finishing before the club closed. So we counted up how many power points we all had, and we came up with the following:

In 4th place was Doug, who'd started off neatly enough but had some very bad luck with the driving and in the end his tactics looked like he was scavenging off the other players, which wasn't really working very we;ll for him. I'm pretty sure he ended with 3 points.

In 3rd place was Mel. He again suffered from bad dice rolls but used the opportunities to exert power over the city by taking over the most territory. The result was that he almost always had the police in his pocket and the extra power point awarded for having the largest territory; none of the rest of us had a hope of catching him up on that one. He had a lot of money but only a few businesses to show for it, which cost him in the end with 5 points.

In joint first with 7 points a piece were Pat and me. Pat had got a steady hold on a lot of the small businesses and built up a veritable army of gangsters which were working well for him, as we were never going to be able to affect this significantly. If he lost 1 business, he could just open another one quite easily. I'd done the most jobs and got a fair number of gangsters, but what really set me in the runnings was the level 3 business I'd opened, which continued to remain open despite Doug's best efforts to shut it down. This was a bit of a risk - if he'd managed it, the balance of power would have shifted very quickly, and my hopes for victory depended on keeping that business operational - but in the end it paid off, another half an hour and I'd have got it, I reckon. Having a gangster with the driving skill helped as well.

Thoroughly enjoyed it, probably won't play it again as it's not a new game and isn't for sale on Amazon so if I want it I'll have to chase obscure copies. But if you do happen across one and you're looking for a not-so-friendly evening in with a few friends, you could do far worse than this.

See you next time!

8/12/2011: Blood Bowl Team Manager: The Card Game.

I actually played this one down at the Roleplaying club in Blackheath; we're taking some time off the roleplaying games in the last couple of weeks of the year and using the time to try out some different board games and things like that. I've seen this one talked up by Fantasy Flight Games over the last few months and really wanted to try it out.

Before we did, though, we stated with a quick round of Braggart, in which you have to pay cards to make the most strategically fantastic boast out of everybody playing. Having never played the game, or indeed anything like it before, I fluffed it completely and came on to the bottom of the pile.

And now on to the main event...

Blood Bowl, when it was a Games Workshop game, looked really good and I'd always wanted to give it a try. Unfortunately it had been and gone by the time I got in to the hobby, and now it's been lumped into the forlorn graveyard of 'Specialist Games.' These are basically a collection of spin-offs from the core systems that GW produce and, once the initial excitement of the game has passed, absolutely refuse to give them any mid to long term support. And that is a crying shame because they've come up with some absolute gems in the past, but anyway...

The card game, I must admit, hit me with some incredulity. How do you do a sports game in cards? My answer was apparent as soon as I saw said cards; they shouldn't be news to anyone who's played an FFG game before and it's less of a sports game, and more of a battle system. Actually, so is Blood Bowl. So what happens in the game is that you commit your players to highlights of 5 seasons, and try and win the most fans by the end of the game.

This particular game we had Chris, who's game it was, playing Dwarves, yours truly playing Chaos, Paul playing Orcs and Mel playing Wood Elves. There are subtle and important differences to each team; the Wood Elves have more skills that will enable them to capture the ball, and Chaos are out to cause as much brutality as possible.

So how the game works is this: You draw a hand of 6 cards that represent players on your team. You then each take it in turns to commit one player to a game in the highlights. Each player comes with a number of points representing their power over the game, and once all 6 cards from each player are down, the side that has the most points is the winner of that game and gets any associated bonuses. These include coaching tactics to help you win more games, a 'Star Player,' more fans, or even a set of bonuses specifically related to your team.

That's the short version. In reality there's a lot more going on and we all know it. So... Each player you put down (beyond the most basic blocker) has a skill that can, on the turn you put him down, be applied to the game. This represents the character's influence over the game. For example, my Chaos Beastmen work as tackling muscle, and as it's pretty much taken for granted that they're going to cheat at some point, they automatically get a 'cheat' token, and then get to make an attack against any member of the opposing team, if there is one there. If that attack is successful, their card effect kicks in and they have to take another cheat token. Cheat tokens are skulls and one side, and on the other is an affect applied to the game at the end. This will be either more fans (What you're looking for,) more star power (Better than a kick in the teeth but not all that useful as you're unlikely to commit to a game you're not already sure you're going to win) or if you're unlucky, your player will be sent off. As the Chaos Blood Bowl team purport to be more interested in fighting than playing Blood Bowl, this isn't exactly uncommon.

And so it carried on for 5 seasons. But as will all Fantasy Flight games, there has to be a winner...

In 4th place was Mel, who made a really big effort at winning the major tournaments featured in the game at the expense of regular matches, an interesting tactic but a bit of a gamble which unfortunately didn't pay off.

In 3rd place was Paul, who appeared to be struggling but due to his card effects got a lot more fans at the end of the game. He only didn't come in ahead of me because I managed to use one of my Chaos cards to switch around one of the games and apply different bonuses for winning and participation.

I came in 2nd. I had ammassed the most fans by the end of the game but I hadn't taken into account that a lot of the effects of the coaching cards give you more fans at the end of the game.

For this reason, Chris quite comfortably came in first.

So, the Dwarves are the Blood Bowl Champions of the World for the time being. Unfortunately I won't be participating in tonight's game due to other commitments. I should hopefully be back next week though!

See you soon...

5/12/2011: Lord of the Rings: Warriors of Minas Tirith

A bit late posting this but my internet was playing up yesterday...

These guys were a bit of a funny bunch for me because I painted them almost entirely in Games Workshop on Monday Nights when I've been going in, so I didn't do anything at home at all other than the undercoat. Actually the Dudley store is not a bad place to paint because the air in there tends to be quite dry, and therefore the paint and even the washes tend to be dry by the time you get to the end of the batch. The lighting's good as well, or at least I think it is. A career painter probably wouldn't but my alternative is the energy-saving lightbulbs at home, which do the job but it is true, they do distort the colours slightly!

here they are, resplendent in all their glory - my soldiers of Gondor. What made me want to do Gondor? Well, when I've collected armies in the past, and I'm talking specifically about when I worked for Games Workshop, I tended to just buy whatever I felt like and figure out how it was going to work in the army later. With Lord of the Rings, my army is Harad, and I didn't really know how to put an army together in the usual sense; War of the Ring was coming out and I wanted to do an army no one else was doing and use Mumaks. So far, I win about as many games as I lose, but I was always inspired by the Gondor army in the War of the Ring rules, and how they'd used a relatively limited pallette (We're talking 50+ colours I've used for painting my Harad,) to create an army that looks quite good.

What I didn't want to do was plan out my army list. Not being funny but I find that quite constricting. I also didn't want to put together an army on an ad hoc basis because it almost always turns out to be next to useless when I put it out on the gaming table. With the Gondor army, I've gone for the middle ground in between - I know what I want and don't want in the army, and I know where I'm going with it, but in the meantime buy whatever I feel like from the Gondor range and build the army up that way. It's hardly wrong to add more core choices to a War of the Ring army...

For painting them, I largely followed the guide in the Lord of the Rings rulebook. The more interesting parts are starting them off from a basecoat of Tin Bitz, to the point where one of the GW staffers thought I was literally doing the whole army in bronze. Actually, drybrushing Boltgun Metal over this and highlighting it with Chainmail creates a nice rusty effect, giving the impression of seasoned campaigners who've been in the forces a while, have been round the block and know the game. The other cool trick from the guide, which is conducive to the same effect, was to paint their sheilds a very dark grey rather than black, to give a worn impression. To be honest, black is rarely a good colour to use anyway if you're going for realism, and that's quite important in Lord of the Rings where the models themselves are true scale rather than heroic. Realistic is a rather flexible term to use when applied to models, but the LotR models do take themselves a bit more seriously than the Warhammer ones or 40K.

The one place where I deviated slightly from the guide was with the faces. For those, I used Tallarn Flesh, washed down with Ogryn Flesh, Dwarf Flesh for the mid-tone, Elf Flesh for the highlight and then a neat little trick that Griff taught me ages ago where you water down some more Ogryn flesh and glaze the face, which ties all the highlights together. Bearing in mind that a lot of those colours, plus some others used elsewhere on the models, were released after the Lord of the Rings rulebook was published, I think it goes to show that I've been learning quite a bit! Which is good because I find faces very hard to get right. Especially when most of them are covered with helmets...

That's about all I'm going to say about them. So, am I collecting these for Lord of the Rings or War of the Ring? The movement trays would suggest the latter, though if I'm honest I'm a fan of both. I'm thinking of Lord of the Rings at the moment, simply because I could play a simple game with the stuff I've got now; they just need a few additions like a banner and a hero. And on that note, the next step for the army is Faramir, who I'm painting now, and the Command secion, who I've just ordered.

Whether or not I'll get any games in is anybody's guess; the 82s are starting back up again soon so Monday Nights will become busy for me again before too long. If I get a night off then maybe.

29/11/2011: Thunderstone

We were meant to be playing Dungeons and Dragons with Dan tonight, but he had to work, so...

This was an interesting game. For Monsters, we drew Undead: Doom, Humanoid and Abyssal. A lot of those guys - and certainly the first 3 that we drew - were horribly powerful. However, for Heroes we drew Dwarves, Outlanders, Feyans and the wizards that begin with S, I can't remember the name now. We didn't use them all that much. We also drew two Edged weapons and Goodberries, amongst other things...

Now, remember last game where I promised myself I wouldn't make the same mistake of trying to equip Dwarves with Edged weapons before I'd actually bought any Edged Weapons? So do I. I remembered it so well that the first chance I got I went straight for one of the Outland Warriors, who's effect is significantly different: 3+ for a basic attack, and then you can destroy a Food card for an additional 3+. As I rarely use Iron Rations in any game, I had no problem with destroying them, and the added Militia and Dagger combos that I drew - to be fair I had some good hands - meant I took an early lead with killing monsters. Careful use of the subsequent experience points meant that I got to upgrade the Warrior card, which was great because subsequent levels rely on drawing monsters in your hand to give the Outlanders a bonus to their already substantial attack. Combine this with the fact that by then I'd already got a some Dwarves and Edged weapons, and there were small times when I couldn't do a huge amount of damage in the Dungeon.

Dave was trying to employ a similar tactic but at the same time was throwing away all his militia cards. I can see why you'd want to do this - making your deck faster is never a bad thing - but militia can be useful sometimes, especially when you get them in numbers and can equip them with daggers. In some situations it would work, and I don't think that this was one of them. He also missed some opportunities to attack the dungeon, either because he'd missed the effect of some of his cards or there were points where he wasn't concentrating (there was a text conversation going on at the same time in the early stages of the game.) The most interesting thing he did was use the Banish spell to send the Archduke of Pain - which to be fair neither of us had a hope of beating at that point - to the bottom of the Dungeon. A risky move, considering that it's worth a whopping 8 victory points and it if' it's at the bottom of the Dungeon there's no chance we'd have been able to fight it again before we found the Thunderstone. In the end it wouldn't have made much difference, and since the game ended before either of us really got to grips with Wizards, Banish was probably the best thing he could have done at that point.

We were moving through this Dungeon a lot more quickly than we ever had before; I think this particular combination of Heroes had swung the game much in favour of the players. However, only one of us could win. And for once, that turned out to be me, simply because I'd killed more monsters. Also, Goodberries give you victory points as well, I had a couple of those. We had about the same number of top-level Heroes. The final score was 56-34. Quite a comfortable win for me, and certainly not usual; I was quite please with this!

Ah, and I misread one of the rules. 'Spoiled' does not mean that you destroy whatever it is the card is supposed to 'spoil.' It actually means you get to pick up one of the associated cards. As it happens, it didn't matter so much, as we were both playing to the same interpretation of the rules so no one was cheating. Something to keep in mind for next time though...

14/11/2011: War of the Ring

Sometimes, when you're playing games, things just don't work out. There'll be something going along in the game that will generally mean I haven't got a hope of winning and I'm knackered from the start. Ususally when this happens this is something to do with my opponent - power gaming does not sit will with me at all - but one could hardly accuse this weeks opponent of that; Lewis is a great kid and plays well. No, the problem this time was the scenario...

So to clarify, because it's been a long time since I played War of the Ring, I was using Harad and Lewis was using Isenguard. I've got a balanced but fairly low-powered force, and Lewis has got one of those armies that were built up gradually over a period of collecting. So was mine, as it happens. Which usually makes for quite a fair fight. But this time we rolled up Maelstrom for deployment, and we were playing Objectives. It was the deployment that got me. The fact that some of your army will turn up in any one of 4 table edges, if at all, scuppers even the best-laid plans and all you can do is hope for the best. I put my guys down where I thought they would be the most effective, but due to where most of Lewis' men ended up, the only character I have that is in the slightest bit effective - The Betrayer - was miles away from anywhere.

In retrospect, deploying The Betrayer with Haradrim Warriors was one of my worst ideas in playing WotR, since the Betrayer's effect will only really work at a distance if you put him with bows. The actual game itself was in essence a step-by-step guide in splattering my army, there's not much point talking you through it but everything I did, everywhere my troops went, the forces of Isenguard had something more nasty waiting for them. Hell, Lewis didn't even cast any spells with Saruman! He wiped most of my forces clean off the table and won two objectives to my one, winning the game quite comfortably.

Not one of my better games, really. I need to put myself in a better mindset for playing games in the shop; I can't really stop to think about things and that does cost me.

Until next time. I actually think I'm clear on the blogging front for about 12 hours...

4/11/2011: Warhammer 40K, Chaos Space Marines vs Necrons

I went down to Games Workshop for a game of 40K before I went to pick Amy up from the station. With the Necron release only a day away, it was suspiciously fitting that Mark, my opponent, should be a Necron player, giving the old rules one last battle before the new ones came out...

Things didn't get off to a good start for me. We got Shane at the shop to roll up the scenario and deployment, and we ended up with Annhialation (I'm far better off holding objectives!) and Spearhead deployment. Spearhead is my least favourite because it means that I've got the furthest to travel across the board before I enconter an enemy, which when I'm up against a gun line almost invariably means I'll be shot to pieces before I get there. I decided therefore to make use of the craters strewn around the battlefield for defence, and aim right for the centre. Initiative was going to be vital, so I chose to set up first and take the first turn rather than react to Mark's deployment. I kept my Chaos Lord and a squad of Raptors in reserve to take advantage of Deep Strike, and began...

Mark set up with a crowd of Necron Warriors on the front line and with his Destroyers on the flanks. I knew there was a Monolith in reserve as well. As I had the first turn, I threw my Posessed Chaos Space Marines at the army; they'd rolled up Scout for their special ability. Very few would pick this as their first choice, I suspect a large part of the reason you don't see Posessed in many Chaos armies is that they are quite unpredicatble. However, the role they play in my games rarely goes beyond using them as a meat shield to draw the enemy fire, and it is a tactic that works fairly well. I also managed to take out a couple of Necrons with my Havocs, but they later succeeded their We'll Be Back roll.

Mark took his turn and wasted no time in immobilizing my Rhino with his Heavy Destroyers. He also took a few pot shots at my Chaos Space Marines, one of them had an early night but other than that to no avail.

And now for my first mistake of the evening: I brought on my Chaos Lord on with my Raptors via Deep Strike. My Chaos Lord has wings and is well within his rights to do this, and sending him out without support is suicide and I know it. My mistake was that I brought them down far too close to the main Necron line. As you can't move after you Deep Strike, yes I was close enough to shoot them with their pistol weapons for all the good that did me, but was also in a prime position for them to rattle me with rapid fire weapons next turn before I could even think about getting in to combat. And that's not to mention the Monolith that had appeared, as these things so often do, out of nowhere, who's Flux Arc was doing me some serious mischief. As expected, most of my so-called 'Command Squad' got shot to pieces by all that Mark could put in to it, amazingly about 3 of them survived.

I tried to make up for it by going in to combat. I went straight for the Necron Lord, and to hell with the War Scythe; if I was going to have a hope of winning I had to stop him from using his Ressurection Orb. The only way I was going to manage that was to win combat, get him to fail his leadership check and catch them on the initiative roll-off where I had the upper hand. I managed to win combat, but not by enough to give them anything like a hard run at their leadership check. Mark used his Monolith to teleport the Necrons out of combat, and my lord went down to gunfire in the following turn.

My only kill point of the game came from gunning down the Heavy Destroyers with my Havocs, and to be fair I should have done that a long time before they immobilized my Rhino and took out two of the Havocs. The rest of it... the Chaos Space Marine squads couldn't do much with the Monolith so close, any attempt to destory it was failing horribly and the small amount of damage they were doing to the Necrons was quickly rectified by the We'll Be Back roll.

The battle was over quite quickly with only a very small number of my Chaos Space Marines surviving. Mark had once again one it quite comfortably. My army is not geared to dealing with very hard-to-hurt targets like that and the more I game with it (to be fair this was the first time in nearly a year,) the more I feel as though they need a complete overhaul in order to get even close to being effective.

On the other hand, it might be time to get my Sorceror back in on the action. He did OK last time...

War of the Ring blog coming up soon!

3/11/2011: Space Hulk

Me and Dave hadn’t played this for a while so we got it out as our ‘Main Event’ game last week. It was a typical bloodthirsty affair but as it had been so long since we last played it back in March, we could approach it from a fresh angle of tactics.

Dave went first as the Terminators. With a few good draws in his command points, he decided to leave behind a rear guard and use the rest of his Terminators to ‘run it up the middle.’ His tactic was to get as many of his Terminators as he possibly could to the crossroads that would give him a clear run to the objective that he had to flame. Despite my initial attack on the Sergeant at the front using around 3 or 4 Genestealers, the combat prowess of the Sergeant proved to be too much for them and he cut through the first wave quite easily. He used the Flamer to block off his rear, so that my Genestealers couldn’t get to him without flaming themselves. It might have worked, but for one obscure rule that Dave either didn’t know about or had forgotten – you can move and shoot as part of the same action. So he might not have needed to use so many action/command points to get the doors open, and might even have got the final doors open had he remembered, just by shooting them off. Whether he’d have got a flamer down there is anyone’s guess, because I had swarmed the area by then and cut most of his guys to pieces. Of course, when the Flamer falls, it’s all over, and this is how the game ended for Dave.

"You can't live without the fire; it's the heat that makes you strong.."

I had no such problems with the rules and did try the ‘run it up the middle’ strategy again, but without a rear guard and unfortunately I wasn’t very lucky with the command points so there weren’t that many extra actions my guys could do. Nonetheless, I made it right up to the crossroads at the end of the bottleneck, but I couldn’t get the door open and got swarmed by the mass of Genestealers Dave had amassed up there by then. He had apparently forgotten about my exposed rear, but that didn’t matter since I had all the Terminators in the same place anyway; Dave ran through most of them with considerable ease. Finally I started to get a bit more lucky with the command points, and engaged in a last desperate tactic of flaming one side of me, flaming the other, then running through the flames to make a dash for the objective. Needless to say, it was all over as soon as Brother Zael stepped in to the fire…

So, another draw, which isn’t ideal but better than the losses I’ve been amassing lately with the Horus Heresy and Thunderstone games. Next time, I might try putting a Terminator on overwatch on the left hand side of the bottleneck, to try to cut off one of the places the Genestealers can attack from and hopefully use the opportunity to get the door open to the room we have to destroy. Until then Dave, it’s another furious stalemate on the Sin of Damnation…

Just a thought that I think I’ll share with you all: Generally speaking, you need to get a six on one dice to shoot and kill a Genestealer with a Terminator. At first glance, this appears to be a bit harsh, given how good Space Marines are supposed to be. But look again… If you roll 2D6, there is a 1/3 chance that one of those dice will land on 6. If you took one shot in 40K, there’d be a 2/3 chance of a hit, and a ½ chance of a wound, which makes a 1/3 chance of a kill, so it’s actually near enough the same. Granted, in 40K Terminators would be allowed to fire twice because of their Storm Bolters, so effectively you’ve got half the chance of a kill that you would in 40K, but I would suggest that is representative of the low lighting and claustrophobic atmosphere on Space Hulk that make those targets so difficult to destroy. Maybe I think a little too much about this… but after all, those desperate, claustrophobic atmospheres are what make Space Hulk so much fun to play.

40K game coming up next…

An Expansion to The Horus Heresy?

This has been on my mind as well...

Just so there's no confusion here, I'm on about the board game published by Fantasy Flight Games. The reason this came up is that there has been a discussion on the forums about the possibility of an expansion to the game; basically speculation as to whether or not one is being developed, or if it's even possible. The most likely outcome at this point is that they may expand on some of the cards that you need to play the game, since the currently exisiting decks can be a little limiting. The whole thing is available to read here: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=170&efcid=1&efidt=356284&efpag=0 but as I've already posted on it, I thought I'd offer my take on the matter:

An expansion to the Horus Heresy itself seems unlikely. Black Library are publishing a wealth of background information on the matter including a series of about 20 novels, but if you read them the major battles that occur are kind of integral to the fact that Horus ends up at Terra and bombs the place. It would be no fun trying to recreate the entire Istvaan V massacre, for example; Horus has to win that and the game setting would have to reflect it, and for many gamers playing games they know they haven't got a chance of winning is no fun at all. Same with the battle between the Thousand Sons and the Space Wolves; I haven't read that but since the Thousand Sons make an appearance at the Siege of Terra, it's pretty obvious which side wins. So I can't really see them expanding on that because given the setting and the game mechanics, there's nothing to expand on.

What FFG might consider, and I've heard nothing about this at all and I'm purely speculating here, is putting some elements of the Horus Heresy in to a different gaming system all together. Still using the Horus Heresy background, but essentially different games. Again, I haven't read all the novels in the series, but how does a Space Hulk style stealth-em-up sound for Battle for the Abyss? A Roleplaying scenario based on Legion? A questing knights style game, which could probably be done with cards, to represent the early days of the Dark Angels? A space treck through the warp for Flight of the Eisenstein? If these things can fit in to board or card games, then it's Fantasy Flight who have got the imagination to make it happen, and it wouldn't necessarily have to tie in with the currently exisiting game. So what would you like to see?

The other bit that was mentioned on the forums that I wanted to comment on was an exansion that would use the Horus Heresy system to represent the war on Armageddon. On the surface, I think that's a fantastic idea; the 'mass battles' system that HH uses would be great to put on Armageddon and give you a feeling of controlling the whole war. I think that game would work very well. It's not going to happen though, for a number of reasons discussed on the forums, not least of which Games Workshop won't let them do it.

Now there's a lot of spiteful blogs going around about GW at the moment so let me be clear on this: My comments are to do with their intellectual property and their licensing agreement, and less to do with their so-called illicit business practices. For Fantasy Flight to produce games based on the Warhammer/40K background, they have to have a licensing agreement. For those of you who don't know what that means, well, FFG have to ask GW permission - and in all probablity pay them some money - to produce games based on the background. FFG have now produced a wealth of games based on Games Workshop's intellectual property. Now I don't claim to have read their licensing agreement, and I certainly haven't played all the games, but one thing is common to all the games FFG have produced: You can do NOTHING in those games that you'd be able to do by wandering in to Games Workshop one day and asking for an introduction to the game. My obvious example is Horus Heresy, you can't buy that game in Games Workshop and they certainly don't have a game like it. (I never played Epic 40k, but even if there were similarities in the mass-battle system GW don't support the game anymore.) Blood Bowl has been and gone, but FFG have released a card game for it. There are certainly no more roleplaying games you can buy at GW anymore, and FFG have produced quite a few of those. And FFG's games that do involve battles have completely different systems to the games that GW now produce and support.

Stay with me here... Think about what happens in the Horus Heresy game, it's participants, and it's game system. You can buy none of them as a model in Games Workshop. You can't buy a model of The Emporer, or Magnus the Red, Rogal Dorn or Fulgrim to use in games of 40K - and quite rightly so; there's enough balance issues in 40K as it is without putting the Primarchs in the mix. And yes, I'm aware that there are some published rules for use of the Primarchs in Apocalypse or whatever, and apparently there is a model of Angron floating around Forge World, but they're not readily available from the shop, and I've certainly not seen either. Then there's the Adeptus Custodes, the Mechanicus, Pre-Heresy World Eaters, the Fabricator General - I've never seen any of those at GW. What FFG have done is created a game that GW does not even come close to replicating with the models and systems that they have at the moment. I'm not saying they never will - perhaps one day they'll come up with a version of Apocalypse that requires an entire housing estate to play on, in which case it might be possible to use the Primarchs without unbalancing the game; I wouldn't put it past them - but for now, they seem to be happy with their 'replace the core games and army books once every five or so years' strategy.

Whereas Armageddon... The battle was every bit as huge, granted. But if you think about what happened and who participated in that, you'd find that with a more, for want of a better word, contemporary piece of 40K history, GW have the grounds covered to be able to replicate it themselves. There was Ghazkull and the Goffs, who you can buy and paint, Commissar Yarrick and the Armageddon Steel Legions who you can model off their exisiting products, and the Space Marine chapters involved were Black Templars, the Salamanders, and I'm pretty sure the Dark Angels were involved as well, possibly even Blood Angels. You can get models for all of those things already, and there's nothing in the setting that can't be represented from the terrain that GW now produce. So even if FFG had approached GW with the idea, GW are not going to want FFG to build a game that can be done with GW's currently existing product. If people want to do a Armageddon campaign, they can do already do it with the GW stuff, so GW's response would run along the lines of 'Sorry guys, we've got that bit covered already.' Which is a shame, because the system would work really well for that battle.

Now I'm aware the guy on the Forum referred to the original Chaos invasion of Armageddon. I'm not entirely aware of the story for that but I would imagine that GW have all that covered as well. So that kind of expansion seems unlikely.

There is of course the fact that the game may not be big enough to warrant an expansion; would enough people buy it? Well, it's fun to speculate...

I'll be back with some game reports in a bit, but I've just realised what time it is and I really do need to get out of bed now.

See y'all soon...

New models: Khorne Bezerkers

That is actually 500 points...

So here they are, resplendent in all their glory... the beginnings of my new Khornate Chaos Army. And todays Daily Mirror.

How this came about is that I had some Khorne Bezerkers left over from the Chaos Space Marine Battleforce that I got from Games Workshop way back in 2008. I was missing a few sprues out of it; there were only 4 out of the 8 Bezerkers in the box and as I later found out, no backpacks for them. But I didn't notice until a couple of months after I had it and couldn't really do anything about it. So they remained dormant for a while...

Seriously, don't mess...

Then earlier this year I started collecting Orks, and thought how cool it would be to put Ork arms on Khorne Bezerkers so they could use Ork Swords and Axes instead of the usual Chainswords. Not a bad idea, and from this an army list was drawn, but I was going to need a lot of Orks for that and so far I had ten, so I put it on the back burner for a while.

Now, I've been collecting Orks, and Orcs, for most of the year. I've even gone for some Space Marines. But the Chaos Gods do not lose a Champion lightly, and I kept coming back to the army list I'd drawn up. Looking back, the list I came up with is as near as I ever get to power gaming, although I wouldn't strictly speaking call it that because I'm quite sure my army would go down easily to any half-capable player. But at some point, I was going to have to do this army. It was in my blood...

I really liked all 4 conversions on the Skull Champion.

So I got myself down to Games Workshop and brought myself some Bezerkers. Combined with a Lord and the 4 that I already had, I had a 500 point army right there. It was when I broke them out of the pack that the problems started to arise. I noticed that the Bezerkers had some quite distinctive backpacks that the ones I already had didn't have. I also noticed, when trying to assemble them, that the backpacks don't really fit the model. This is nothing that can't be solved with a modelling knife, and you might expect better from Games Workshop these days, but you have to remember that these models have not substantially changed since at least the late 90s, (the actual sprue says 1994,) and it's going to take more than a minor niggle with the fit of the model to persuade GW to re-design them when, aesthetically at least, these models work as well as they need to. The missing backpacks was easily solved by using some other backpacks I have from my old Chaos Space Marines, including the Champion's backpack which, for lack of knowing which sprue was which when I first got those boxes out, I never used. The other problem was more to do with my Army list, as it happens. I wanted the Skull Champions to have plasma pistols and power weapons; the option is there in the codex but the models come with neither. Enter my conversions...

I didn't really intend to convert much of this army as it is something I wanted to put together reasonably quickly for gaming (goodness knows I need a better army than my current one!) but it's Chaos; you can't not convert Chaos. The most obvious ones are the weapons, where I reverted to my original idea of putting Ork arms on the Bezerkers. Keeping it to the Skull Champions was, in retrospect, an easier option, and fits in with my usual trick of keeping characters in the army (basically whenever there is an option to take a Champion-type character, I always take it because I like the character they bring to the army. Especially Chaos.) Plasma pistols were a little more tricky; I had to find some (hard,) and then convert them so they would fit on the model (a little easier.) I ended up cutting the hands off the Champions and sticking the plasma pistols on whatever remained; it worked but they point the guns a funny way. I think next time I might just glue on the whole arm, if that will work. For one of the Champions I gave him the helmetless head that comes with the Bezerkers, and an Ork Jaw to use as an oversized face mask. Ridiculous, but I like it. The other, I gave a different head, I'm pretty sure it was out of the Possessed set that also came with the Battleforce.

Then I had to paint the things...

Mad as badgers, the lot of them.

I began by using almost an entire pot of Mechrite Red in the Spray Gun. This was not intentional, but the gun became blocked and for some reason I could never get the water/paint balance right again after I'd cleared it. But, the Bezerkers were suitably red. I then drybrushed Blood Red over the armour, again thanking my lucky stars for the Foundation paints as this would have taken a lot longer if Mechrite Red didn't exist. (I would have known, by now, not to paint Blood Red straight on to Black, but I would have taken ages building the colour up from Scab Red up to Red Gore, then Blood Red...)

And that's as much as I'm going to say about that for now. There is more, but as I'm pretty much going to paint the army in the same way, it's ground I'm going to cover in future blogs. No, I'd much rather talk about this beast for the time being...

"I'll thank you not to mention my sense of timing and proportion..."

Anyone recognise this? I worked Games Day 2009, and this was the model that came with the ticket - and any staff who worked there. And yes I KNOW - it's a Warhammer model, not a 40K model. Fact is, I really don't care; the model was sitting in a bag of models awaiting assembly, and to be honest I would much rather see it on the table being used in whatever capacity than get rid of it. Don't get me wrong, I see the value in the model as a collector's item, and I'm pretty sure I could have made a tidy sum for it on Ebay, but that's never what I intend by buying models, or otherwise obtaining them. I want to see them kicking ass, not being stuck in a cabinet! My painting's not that good anyway.

I'd like to draw your attention to the brass, that I painted using a guide found in my most recent edition of White Dwarf (Can't think of the number off-hand; it's talking up Dreadfleet at the moment.) How it works is this: First, paint the brass a mix of Scorched Brown and Shining Gold. Then, layer on a neat layer of Shining Gold. I'm pretty sure at this point you wash it down with Devlan Mud (another one of GW's better ideas.) Then pick out the highlights with Burnished Gold, and finally a very light drybrush of Mythril Silver on the raised areas. I was a bit heavy handed with the silver but other than that I think it worked quite well and certainly added some dept to the brass areas.

The axes, by the way, are supposed to be a Daemon Weapon - that's how I'm going to use it at any rate. The colour is supposed to be Obsidian, an idea I got from the Skulltaker article way back in White Dwarf 34somethingorother. It didn't work quite as well as I'd hoped but it doesn't look bad. Finally, I was quite pleased with the cloak and particularly the dirt on said cloak. It was first painted black with a bit of grey mixed in, (this actually required two coats as I did it from red,) and highlighted with a bit more grey in the mix. The muck was Khemri Brown drybrushed on with an old drybrush, and the dust was Denheb Stone done in much the same way. I think that looks very effective.

So when are we going to see these on the table? Probably not all that quickly; as it stands now the army relies on a very quick short game and I envisage it being shot to pieces as it tries to slug across the table. A later version of the army list includes Rhinos for everything but right now it's just these guys and I don't much fancy their chances against an Imperial Guard Gun Line. What's next for the army? If I remember rightly, a Chaos Defiler. That'll be interesting, especially as I have yet to buy such a thing; right now I need to finish off those Orcs, paint some pieces of scenery I've been working on, and there's a load of Soldiers of Gondor that would benefit from some attention as well. And that's just the models I've built. Busy, busy! Not planning on getting any games in next week as I'm fairly certain that the only night I'm going to be free will also coincide with the one day I have to be up early for a conference. If I get any painting finished off before, say, the middle of the week after, it will be a miracle. But watch this space, I've worked miracles before...

8/10/2011: Pool

I had a game of pool against Jeff once more, and I'm afraid once more I didn't make it all that easy...

To be fair, he wasn't playing much better, and when I ended up putting the balls guarding the pockets, which was entirely untintentional but I'm not complaining, I doubt he was thanking me for it. It became a battle of attrition really, and as soon as Jeff started potting balls he was on a roll and I hadn't got a hope of catching up. I had one chance before the 8-ball went in to pot 5 of mine, and I ended up leaving him open for another easy win.

Apparently the tables I play on aren't all that good! A good thing that I'm not very good either. It saves me a lot of trouble. Well done Jeff.

5/10/11: Thunderstone

OK this was a bit of a strange set-up:

Dave and I have had a few goes at the Thunderstone series now, and since his Resident Evil game is played in much the same way, we decided for the first time to use Randomiser cards, which as the name suggests randomly determine what Heroes will be available, what monsters they will face, and what items will be available in the village. It was a bit of a funny draw, we had Dwarves, Redblades, Amazons and Clerics for our Heroes, and Ooze, Undead: Doom and Dragons for our enemies. Our weapons seemed quite poorly equipped to deal with them…

Taking inspiration from what I’ve been doing (I don’t quite know why as Dave has won the last 2 games of this,) Dave immediately set to work on building up his magic power. As we only had Clerics who could use magic, he had to concentrate mainly on what items he could buy. He bought all of the Lightstone Gems and used the money from these to buy most of the Fireball spells while keeping his deck fairly small; on paper this meant that he could be rocking a lot of magical power at any given time and he wouldn’t even need to use a hero to do it. We’d made things very difficult for ourselves by drawing three very powerful dragons as the first 3 monsters in the dungeon and we needed an equally powerful attack in order to take any of them down; Dave’s combination of spells and light did him well enough to take an early lead, but I wasn’t out of it yet…

My strategy was to use mainly Dwarves. They’re not wonderful fighters in themselves, but they get a huge bonus to their attack if you give them an edged weapon. We only had one edged weapon in the game – the dagger – but having dwarves gain an extra 4 attack points every time you equipped one turned out to be invaluable in some stages. However, my deck grew so large that I couldn’t count on being able to draw daggers and dwarves in the same hand, so I took to recruiting Redblades instead, who have a larger attack bonus that isn’t affected by weapons in quite the same way. This took a long time to pull off, but when I did, I could sometimes bring more pain to the Dungeon using cards that have attack effects than Dave could ever hope to manage by drawing fireball cards.

Unfortunately it was too little too late for me. We reached the end of the night and Dave had to go home; we counted up the victory points and Dave had almost double the points I had. I’d have needed a miracle just to stay in the game to the end…

Reflecting on it, my strategy was a good one – I just went about it the wrong way around. Redblades always get +2 to their attack whatever happens, whereas Dwarves only get +1 unless you equip them with an edged weapon, which since the only one available was a dagger often made them little more use than the Militia that you start the game with. Granted, the effect of adding the weapon to Dwarves is huge and only a fool would fail to take advantage of it, but if I’d have brought Redblades first, then I could have done some moderate damage without it being contingent on buying extra weapons. I could have then got in some early kills, and bought some more daggers – and finally Dwarves.

Of course, the Randomiser cards make it extremely unlikely that we’ll ever play with exactly that combination again, but at least I know what I should be looking for next time. Also, checking back over the game we did misinterpret some rules with regard to what counts as a hero and what doesn’t, so we’ll have to concentrate a bit harder on that next time. Still, all in all a very enjoyable game and one day I will have my revenge on you, Dave. Oh yes. I will have my revenge…

Batman Begins (Xbox version)

I've had this game on the Xbox for some time. I gave it another run through last week since Amy has re-kindled my interest in Batman, and here's what I think of the game:

For a bit of context, I've got all the Batman films since the Tim Burton movie back in the 80s, and I've enjoyed all of them up to a point. However, the Batman Begins film really did put some extra strength into the franchise. The acting was (generally) far stronger; Christian Bale makes a far more believable character out of Bruce Wayne for not having to be nice to absolutely everybody, and for having character flaws that don't necessarily involve his alter-ego. Michael Caine was wonderful as Alfred for his sense of humour and also for the fact that he's not as passive as the versions of him I've seen in the past. The villains were beyond excellent; not much masks and make-up going on in favour of more intricate, urbanised bad guys in the shape of the Ra's Al Ghul and Carmine Falcone. An idea that the film explores briefly at the end is that people like The Joker, The Riddler, The Penguin and Catwoman came about less as an intentional antagonist to The Batman, but rather as a reaction to a vigilante in a costume. Scarecrow is, of course, a law unto himself: He creates his costume and persona for his own reasons. But the overall theme of the film was dark, gritty - and the added element of Batman causing fear came far closer, in my opinion, to what Batman was supposed to be. He might be athletic, but so is Spiderman, any of the X-Men, Green Lantern or anyone you care to mention. He might have gadgets but so does James Bond. But rather than fearing his enemies, he gives his enemies something to fear, and that's what makes Batman unique.

This was going to have to play a huge part in the game in order to pull it off, and as a system, it works quite well. Try rushing in to a fight and you are reminded that Batman is, after all, just a man, as you get your proverbials handed to you by five very angry thugs, probably with guns. Take the time to look around the area, however, and you'll soon come up with different ways of tipping the odds in your favour; dodgy scaffolding you can collapse with a batarang, a pipe you can hang from to pick off your enemies without them knowing, or setting off some explosive barrels. Once they're suitably terrified, drop a Flashbang on them, and you can take the vast majority of the enemies out without having to resort to fighting. It's satisfying to do, especially if you like things with a little more depth than 'Let's find something and kill it,' but don't want such a challenge that it is hard to work out what to do. It is a little simplistic, and the auto-target tool means it will rarely take you long to work out what to do, but you have to remember that the only game before this that came even close to having fear as its main mechanic was The Thing. It was a brave move, and really did push the PS2 version of the game to the limits of it's machine.

Get up from that one and you're a braver man than me...

The game has sometimes been criticised for its length (it's not long by comparison of some other games,) but actually it's as long as it needs to be. The 'Fear' mechanic would probably get old if the game were to last any longer; it's just about the right length so that you can do pretty much everything there is to do in the game without getting bored before you reach the end. And there is a lot of fun to be had from what the game gets you to do; it's never taxing to work out what you have to do to beat the level, but the look on the bad guy's faces when they know you're there but can't see you is worth it. When the time finally comes where you have to have a straight fight and kick ass, there are combos for the avid gamers, but button-mashing works just as well. The targeting system is a bit clunky - you'll be tearing one guy a new one, and suddenly start running across to his mate on the other side of the room, and you won't be able to help but blame it for some untimely deaths.

The graphics and settings are brilliant and compliment the film setting; it has the dirty, gritty vibe that makes Gotham City so special and it is suitably bleak; far from Adam West running around in broad daylight carrying bombs. The music is tied in with the film and works well, and the voice acting is for the most part good. One very careless blunder of using the same sound patch for different types of enemy spoiled it a little - Ninjas from the League of Shadows have their own voices, but scaring them with a dropped scaffolding triggers the same fear reaction you heard from Dr Crane's thugs earlier on in the game. But for the most part, the game is presented very well indeed; exactly the level of detail you'd expect from a film tie-in.

So, a game that looks and feels great, if not executed terribly well. It's worth a look though, and 5 years after buying the game I still went back for another go, so it's not without staying power.

I'm a bit busy for games at the moment but I've had a go with Buffy the Vampire Slayer so you might be hearing from that quite soon...

19/9/2011: Thunderstone

I got the original Thunderstone game for my Birthday, and we gave it a go tonight. Actually it was a dice roll between that, Resident Evil, or talking about a novel that Dave wants to write about Tau and Orks. But I'm glad we gave this one a go. It's been far too long...

OK so there are some differences between this and Thunderstone Dragonspire that I played with Dave a few months ago, but they're mostly aesthetic differences and the general flow of the game remains the same. It's been a while, though, so for the uninitiated: You take a party of heroes into a dungeon to take out as many monsters as you can. You need to find the Thunderstone - shuffled into the last few cards - which stops the game immediately, and you gain a number of points based on the amount of monsters you kill and how many points they are worth; the one with the most points at the end of the game is the winner. Instead of going in to the dungeon you can spend some time in 'the village,' where you buy upgrades and more powerful heroes to aid you in your quest, and is literally the only way to deal with some of the game's tougher monsters.

I should mention that we started off with the basic starter set of cards. Normally they would be randomised but the starter set gives you a fairly balanced set of heroes with enough nasties to provide enough of a challenge. We started off with a basic party which would, as ever, needed to be added to. My tactics centred around building up my magic abilities, so I bought a lot of Elf Wizard and Clerics. Neither of their effects are all that much good until they get levelled up; the Cleric's effect of swapping a Disease card for another card is useful but a bit of a gamble because you don't know what the next card will be, and by the time you work it out your already committed into walking into the dungeon; you have to fight something, regardless of whether or not you can win. The attack power of the magic cards are fairly low at first and there are no magic cards in your starting hand, so it was a long time before I could venture into the dungeon to kill any monsters. The upshot of all of this is by the time I finally did, Dave had already got a lot of kills and levelled his heroes up quite a bit.

I began to pull it back when it transpired that because I was so dependent on magic, I no longer needed my militia or any of their associated effects; dropping those cards gave me a more efficient deck and there were a lot more options open to me for attack. I maxed out one Elf Archmage, which certainly helped but I can't quite figure out their effect; you get to put a monster from your hand back in to the dungeon. You don't get to fight it again because the Thunderstone will come up long before you see it, so all you're doing is throwing away victory points. The only reason I can think of for doing it is removing some low-reward monsters to speed up your deck, and in a game with more people that might be a reasonable tactic but it wasn't really going to help against Dave; if I didn't kill something, he would. So, I kept blasting the monsters with magic and whittling down the dungeon, until the Thunderstone was revealed...

Between the Thunderstone and the two of us there were two Nixies, who considering how proficient our decks were by then were very easy to kill. I killed one, and then Dave drew a bad hand so I killed the other, claiming the Thunderstone and ending the game. But did I win? We counted up the victory points, Dave had 39, I had 36. It was a close run, but in the end the game went to Dave.

So what went wrong? Well, Dave spent the earlier part of the game building up an attack force of Squires and Knights, even managed to get a Lord at one point. However, their effects relate to Militia and he'd thrown most of those cards away, making their effects next to useless. He was building up some magic in order to tackle some of the better monsters in the game I was nonetheless making a meal of, he did get an Archmage in the end and it was helping. His fighters, however, were of far more use when it came to dealing with the only monster in the game that halved the magic damage and couldn't be hit by weapons. Worth a whopping 6 victory points, the game was going to go to whoever had that one, and it was only really Dave who could have done it.

So, tactics for next time? Well if I play with that particular combination of cards again I'll think about building up some fighting skill as well as magic. It might be an idea to start off collecting some fighting cards and build up the magic power later in the game. It all depends on what gets drawn in the next go... but it will be interesting to find out.

Well done Dave, it was a close one but you won fair and square.

4/9/2011: Pool

Just a quick one...

This one was at Ye Olde Foundry in Dudley, where I was doing a gig on the same night. I was there with Dave, and though he always insisted he plays his best pool when he's drunk, he still gave it a good go...

I almost feel compelled, when there are blue balls, to try and go for them given my football team. Tonight was no exception but my good fortune ended there. I wasn't exactly concentrating very hard but I could not hit a ball accurately from then on, and ended up losing to Dave still having the majority of the balls left on the table. Not one of my better efforts. But then again, I never said I was any good at this...

New Goblin Spider Riders/Orc Warboss!

 This has been on the cards for quite a while...

I got the Goblin Spider Riders out of the Orc and Goblin Battalion; I've worked out a 500 point army based on the contents of that box and the Orc Warboss I brought on the same day. I used the experimental way of painting the Goblin skin that I did in my previous blog some months ago, however one problem I have always had with Orcs and Goblins is that I find painting the same model over and over again quite dull. I soldiered through it but to be honest these sometimes feel more like work than actual fun. Still, for me painting is a means to an end anyway, and I wouldn't do it if I didn't think I was going to get a game out of it at the end. An odd sentiment, given that I've only played 2 games in Games Workshop so far this year, and they've both been Lord of the Rings games...

Wouldn't want one of these in your bath...

So with these, I stuck to the colour scheme used before, as I said. However, this time it didn't work quite so well; I suffered from the curse of the white undercoat. When you miss a part with the black undercoat, what you're left with is a part of the model that's, well, black. This usually happens in what would probably be a shaded part of the model anyway so you can get away with it to a certain extent. Not so easy with the white undercoat, where you're left with a white splodge that looks like you can't paint properly. You can't tell from the photo because of the lighting (you try it at 1am!) and also because it most often occurred around the back of the model, but the mistakes are there. I also think I was a bit heavy-handed with the red; the colour is only really supposed to be used for decorative purposes in this army, and the abundance of feathers made the use of it a lot more frequent than it probably should have been. Still, they do look like an army, though I have yet to see what the effect will be like when I put the whole thing together. Stay tuned...

Are you talking to ME???

Honorary mention to this fellow, who will be leading the army. I actually painted them at the same time as the goblins I painted before... but I completely forgot to paint the Snotling on his shoulder! That was a part of my motivation for doing the Spider Rider Goblins next; I use the same mix of Snakebite Leather for the skin of the Goblins as the Snotling so I could tie the two together here. The overall effect of the paint scheme works well for this Orc Big Boss I think; it's mean, it's gritty, he's got this huge f**koff axe that even the best of us should know to keep away from (in actual fact, it's the Tormentor Sw- er, axe, which on the off chance you take a wound from it and survive, gives you Stupidity for the rest of the game. Not much use in low points games because it's rare you come across anything with more than one wound, but that doesn't mean I won't come across any ethereals that I'll need a magic weapon to deal with...) and I really like the mask because it's impossible to tell what he's thinking, though his posture suggests that it won't be anything good.

So what's next for the army? Actually, nothing at all just yet. I have this sort of rule: For every 250 points of army I collect, I have to collect 1 piece of scenery. That way, by the time I have a sizeable force, I might actually have a collection of scenery to play with it on! Fences and walls will therefore be next, very boring, but I've never painted them before so it'll be worth giving it a go. After that, the Orcs for the army maybe, though I have Space Marines and Lord of the Rings stuff to paint as well so we'll have to see.

See you soon!

17/8/2011: Resident Evil

I'm actually thinking of writing to Bandai and asking them to rename their Resident Evil Card Game like this:

RESIDENT EVIL: NEW AND EVER-MORE INVENTIVE WAYS FOR MATT TO GET HIMSELF KILLED.


Not hard to see how this one went, but it's worth noting that Dave had decided to play the hard version of the game - where all the monsters do 10 more damage than they're supposed to, and any effects are applied twice. This - plus my overconfident stupidity - is what cost me in the end...

At least it won't take so long to set up now that we've got it - there's 6 core items that are included in every game, and the remaining 12 can either be a pre-set that the game suggests, or 12 of whatever the hell you like. I think Dave was all for the latter but I think that could lead to a very unbalanced game if you don't know what you're doing so I insisted that we follow the 'Classic Horror' pre-set, at least for now.

Because we knew how ferociously hard the enemies in the mansion could become, we didn't venture in there for about an hour, instead using our turns to build up our collection of weapons in to something we could actually use. My character was Claire Redfield, and her effect is making her ammunition count as 10 more than what it actually is - invaluable, as I then don't need to draw so many ammo cards in order to fire the big guns. I had to make sure I got my hands on the full-bore machine gun - you need a lot of ammo to use it, but I had the character that would have made it all the more easy.

I have a peculiar gaming mantra: while I tend to play defensively, I'm also aware of the benefits of taking risks - after all, as I'll happily tell anyone who'll listen, not taking risks is how Napoleon cost himself Russia. So after building up a sizeable collection of weapons I was the first to enter the mansion, and I was building up a good set of kills and commendations. I never got so far ahead of Dave that he wouldn't have been able to catch up if he'd killed the Uroboros plant - that monster is worth 8 commendations and as soon as it dies, the game ends. The fact that it can kill most of the female characters and a significant number of the males in one fell swoop usually decides the matter without the need to count up your commendations, and I only avoided this because I'd come across some herbs earlier in the mansion that boosted Claire's health from 70 to 90. Nonetheless, for a while it all seemed to be going my way.

This was never going to end well for Claire...

And then it happened - I went into the mansion with 45 attack points and came across a Hunter. In the normal game, that would have been fine. In the Hard game, I fell just short of being able to kill it, and it wasted me for 50 points. In a moment of intense stupidity I decided to go back to the mansion without healing myself, with about the same amount of attack points, and came across a Licker. And again, had this been the normal game, I'd have gotten away with it. But no. There was the licker with 50 attack points, and me with 45 and about half my health. The ensuing battle was very short.

So, another game handed to Dave via my reckless abandon. To be fair, going in to the mansion again without healing myself was the worst idea I'd had in a long long time, and it cost me, but in all other respects I think I played quite well. Always looking forward to the next one, which won't be for a while because I'm extremely busy in the evenings and probably most of the days next week.

Painting blog coming up next, see you soon...

New Space Marine Scouts

Hello! It’s been a while since I’ve posted on here for a number of different reasons, namely holidays, band and work, but I’m back now and I’ve got t-shirts or pictures, hopefully, if I can get it to work, for everybody.

Firstly, a quick note about the role-play: The regular readers, if any, will have noticed I’m not posting any more blogs that relate to things that went on at Role Play club. Just so we’re all clear on this, I’m still in the club, and the only session I’ve missed since I joined was the week I was on holiday. And I still play the games and I really enjoy them. But the obligation to blog them up every single time I did it was, I have to be honest, more work than fun, so I won’t necessarily be doing it again. Or at least, not any that relate to the club; if I do some home games I might think about it but I’m a long way away from that yet.

So, on to the main event: Space Marine Scouts!

So what’s brought this on? Well, judging by the fact that a great many – if not all – hobbyists paint or play Space Marines at some point, I found the temptation too hard to ignore. It will be a nice change to play with a ‘good guy’ army, and having Space Marines as the heroes of the universe lends a nice protagonist nature. What I didn’t want to do was get a Space Marine army by getting a Battleforce, or Assault on Black Reach; no standardised forces for me thank you. I much prefer the idea of a bitter struggle, a desperate fight for survival and really developing the characters in my army. Enter the Black Consuls…

All the Space Marine Codex has to say about the Black Consuls is this: “Recorded as annihilated at the Siege of Goddeth Hive, 455.M41. Current status unknown.” Deliberately vauge, but I think that’s the whole point: To a certain kind of hobbyist, it’s nice to fill in the gaps for yourself, and I’m one of them. The codex doesn’t say where Goddeth Hive was, who wiped the Consuls out, or why, and I’m not going to assume responsibility for this. What I am going to do is create the chapter again, after a desperate attempt to rebuild its former glory. What I will say is this: Though the chapter is now active, its master knows not to make a show of it just yet. They are nowhere near the strength they need to operate in anything other than the utmost secrecy…

Inspired by an article in a recent edition of White Dwarf, I decided to gear the army around Cities of Death, which so far has lended itself to how I’m doing the paint job but there you are. It fits in with the idea of remaining in the hive to rebuild the chapter. All Space Marines start out as Scouts, everybody knows that, so Scouts was the best option for me to go with. I gave them a Heavy Bolter because I’m picturing having to deal with more infantry than vehicles, and besides with the reduced ballistic skill of the Scouts I feel they would appreciate the ability to fire 3 shots per turn rather than 1. With Scouts, Hellfire rounds is an option that I fully intend to employ, but I need to be careful when and where; just because they can do something doesn’t mean that they should.

Sergeant Collatinus leads his brothers into yet another conflict...

For the painting, this is the colour scheme described in the codex, black and gold. I don’t know how I’m going to reconcile the shoulder trims should I decide to include regular Space Marines in the army – the colour scheme changes with each company – but I’m a long way from that at this point, and Scouts don’t have shoulder trims, so problem solved. I’ve done some battle damage on them as well; I wouldn’t usually be inclined to do this with Space Marines because they do make an effort to look after their armour and equipment so battle damage on Space Marines is not as common as you might think. However, the idea I wanted to get across here was of seasoned campaigners; they may be out on missions for weeks or months before they get a chance to come back and maintain their equipment, and would doubtless get in to a few fights along the way, so most of these models are going to be damaged to a certain extent. One thing that worked out very well I think was the appalling damage to Sergeant Collatinus' right eye, done by being a bit clever with a modelling knife, red paint and a purple wash, giving him the look of a man who's just lost an eye in a fight and still wants to come back for more. I am pleased with the way the skin tone and fatigues work with the armour; colour selection was actually quite important for this. One thing I wasn’t too happy about was the freehand; you can’t see it on the photos but I was trying to paint their squad number on their shoulder pads. The insignia on the left shoulder didn’t work out too badly, but the Roman numerals on the right shoulder looks like they were done by a 6 year old with a white chalk. I might have to re-do those at a later time; it’s not something I make a habit of because I don’t like going over old ground but I do want this army to look quite good so it will probably become necessary.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Where did I come up with the name? Actually I didn’t come up with it at all. As they are the Black Consuls, I thought I’d name them after, well… consuls. So I dragged up a list of consuls off Wikipedia and named Brother Sergeant Tarquinius Collatinus after one of the names I found. With my usual approach to things I will probably name them all in order. Now, if you know anything about the Roman approach to names, you’ll know that there was usually a ‘praenomina,’ which would be the equivalent of your first name. The consuls were no exception but the choice of first names was very limited and in a formal setting you’d usually be called by your family name anyway. So I decided to leave them out of my army, reasoning that 2 names were quite enough for a Space Marine to be getting on with!

So what’s next for the army? I’ve brought a captain for them, and I’m quite excited about this one because it’s not a model you would typically see leading a Space Marine army. However I’m tied up in some other projects at the moment, not least of which the Goblin Spider Riders I’ve been painting on and off for a couple of months now. Who knows what will come next? See you then…

26/7/2011: Resident Evil

No, not the video game. Completed that years ago when my old friend Matt Marr was good enough to lend me his Playstation while he went on holiday. If you follow this blog with any degree of regularity you'll probably have guessed that this is another game that I play with either cards, dice or boards, and in actual fact it's a card game. Hence the name Resident Evil: The Deck Building Game. I should probably have put that as the title but to be honest I think I might get more views if people come on to this site thinking I'm on about the actual video game. So now that you're here, you may as well read on...

So this is something that Dave put me on to. The mechanics of the game are not dissimilar to Thunderstone: Dragonspire that we played a few weeks ago, but is just different enough to make it feel like a different game. Probably the most significant difference is that there is a genuine risk of death, as I was to discover. For another, the strategy of the game is set in place by the character you play (chosen at random from characters who appeared in the video games, though I don't recognise some of them,) and the cards you buy; there are weapons but it's not like you're building a balanced party or anything like that, it's a case of get tooled up, go into the Mansion and kill things. But it's the same thing that you have to do to win; kill the boss (in this case a plant called Uroboros,) and the person with the most points at the end of the game based on how many monsters you killed wins the game. There are other differences but I won't bore you with the details.

So how did I get on? Well... not all that well actually. The character I drew was Rebecca Chambers, who's special ability allowed her to 'trash' cards (throw them out of the game so there is no chance of drawing them again) and hand cards over to one of the other plays. Playing competitively, this skill is invaluable later on in the game when you've got a lot of cards to draw and several useless ones to get through before you find the card you need. I was prepared to use the skill, but not before I'd made a couple of foolhardy journeys into the mansion early on and nearly killed myself. I did this wondering how bad it could possibly be; in some cases I was still playing Thunderstone but the fact that in Resident Evil you can't actually see what you're attacking until it attacks you compelled me to test the water (or mansion) as it were.

Now at that point Dave and I decided to play the 'realistic' version of the game, where once your character is dead you are out of the game. The other version is basically you miss a turn if you die and come back the turn after with full health. I chose 'realistic' because there's a lot more at stake when you're about to die, and therefore the game is more fun... but it was time to regroup and it was a long time before I headed into the mansion again. I built up an impressive collection of cards to use once I got in there, and decided to risk it. After all, by refusing to take risks, Napoleon cost himself Russia... I actually managed to pick up a herb that healed me a bit, and took down several monsters, maxing out Rebecca's ability (which came in very handy later,) and giving me a nice selection of commendations (points) with which I could comfortably win the game were it to end at that point. Dave was trying to pull it back but the monsters he was fighting were of relatively low power and he wasn't getting all that many rewards for his efforts.

Then, as I prepared myself for another excursion into the mansion, disaster. I came up against Uroboros, and found myself 15 points short of killing it. It, therefore, killed me, and Dave won the game by default.

So what to do next time? Well, I won't be ne-he-hearly so quick to go into the mansion next time, knowing that the weapons you get at the start of the game really aren't up to much without at least some augmentation from some of the other cards. The Uroborus monster takes a whopping 90 points of damage before it will go down so I need to be sure that I'm capable of delivering such a blow before I venture in too many times. What I'd really like to see though, and this is very little to do with the game, is more players. The game carries up to 4 people and right now it's just me and Dave. It's great and we really do have fun playing it, but a 3rd and 4th player will lend a new element of strategy to a game like this that we just don't have at the moment.

Still, not complaining, it's been a great night and I'm really looking forward to the next one! Incidentally, I might be buying Thunderstone before too long. Games like this are really too much fun to let slide.

Off to Plymouth for a week next week, so unless I complete Final Fantasy: Tactics Advance or finish painting some models before I go on Sunday (Not likely, it's taking me ages to do both) that'll be the last you'll hear from me for a bit. See you in a couple of weeks!

Yu Yu Hakusho - Ghost Files, Tournament Tactics

It's been a while since I did a video game blog, but then it's been a while since I've played a game long enough to finish it...

Some of you may remember last March I talked about Yu Yu Hakusho - Spirit Detective, and that I wasn't overly impressed by the game and that I hoped Tournament Tactics would be better. Turns out it was a significant improvement on the last game. When I turned it on and started playing, my thoughts were: 'Hey, this is more like it, the graphics are about as good as the GBA ever got, and the gameplay is far closer to what I've come to expect from most of what Nintendo have released on their handheld consoles for the last decade.' Well, I didn't actually think that word for word, but you know...

This game apparently follows the story of Yusuke Urameshi during the 'Dark Tournament' period of the saga, where Yusuke and his friends enter the tournament to destroy Toguro and his team. All the characters from the first game are there, including Kuwubara, Hiei and Kurama, plus a supporting cast of other playable characters. The plot for the game centres around recruiting these other characters in various different locations in the island, and journeying to the Dark Arena to face off against Toguro. Dialogue is basically limited to speech-bubble cut-scenes in between levels, and while Atari's script is certainly not on par with their Square contemporaries, the personalities of the characters are brought out more by their interaction with each other. Kurama, for example, is nice and polite to everybody, while Hiei goes out of his way to annoy Kuwubara, who appears to have a thirst to prove himself. Ironically the least interesting character is Yusuke, who's brattish spite but with his heart in the right place is about all you get from him throughout the entire game. Nonetheless, if only for this reason the game is far superior to it's predecessor.

The actual gameplay won't be a surprise to anybody who's ever played a game with 'tactics' as a suffix. You take a maximum of five characters out in to the game. The action happens on a 'game board' style series of levels, and the characters can move a certain amount of squares that the level is divided into, depending on their move rate. They have a selection of actions, including attacks, which develop as the game progresses, using items and performing actions such as taunting the opponent and recovering your spirit energy (more on this later.) Some of the levels have specific missions, however most of them involve killing demons, which take the shape of humanoid animals and get progressively harder as the game goes on. So far, so Final Fantasy meets Dungeons and Dragons.

A Lion roars at the Masked Fighter, while the team prepare to stike...

Where this game differs slightly from this very popular and some may argue saturated style ('tactics' style games have been around at least since the mid 1990s, in fact I'm pretty sure some of them were derived from Space Hulk, but anyway,) is combining the Spirit Energy system with Initiative. I'll explain how it works, but it will take a minute; skip a few paragraphs if you really don't want to know about it and read on in the knowledge that I haven't come across a system that uses quite this same set of circumstances before or since.

Right. Spirit Energy starts off as what most RPG players would recognise as magic, mana, MP, whatever. You have a certain amount of Spirit Energy you can use in one particular stage, or level, and once it's gone you either have to manage without it or use a special action to recharge it. Where it differs from the usual incarnation of magic is that the greater majority of standard attacks also use Spirit Energy; you can't decide not to use it or you'll never make any attacks. That's certainly the case in the first few levels, anyway.

Initiative is in essence the order of turns; certain actions take more initiative than others. Moving, for example, costs initiative, all attacks do, some more than others, and the special actions certainly use initiative as well. So you might do a fairly low-powered attack which uses 10 initiative and be able to move again almost straight away, or Yusuke's Spirit Mega Gun - the best attack in the game - costs 50 initiative and the other characters might get another two or three turns before he can act again.

Combine these two things and the tactical nature of the game with the implicit strengths and weaknesses of the characters, and you've actually got quite a complex and well-thought-out system which can actually be quite interesting to analyse. Very broadly, most of the characters have most of the following:

• A fairly basic, low powered attack that doesn't use any Spirit Energy and not much initiative,
• A basic attack that is quite powerful and does use Spirit Energy,
• A ranged attack,
• A linear attack, that is to say an attack that hits the 2-4 spaces in front of the character,
• An attack that for lack of a better word I'll call a blast, that affects a number of squares around the character in different shapes depending on the character,
• A reasonably powerful attack that uses no Spirit Energy but uses a lot of initiative.

Learning how to use the different characters effectively is an interesting challenge and in the latter stages of the game becomes crucial. Chu, for example, does not move very quickly, his ranged attack is poor and he doesn't have a linear or blast move, but once he's levelled up and gets in close, he can be extremely powerful. He also doesn't carry a lot of Spirit Energy, which when Chu has all his attacks lends a new level of tactics - if speed is of the essence, it may be better to use his Crusher Kick, which uses a lot of Spirit Energy, than his Headbutt, which is his most powerful attack but uses a lot of initiative. Yusuke and Kuwubara do not have attacks that don't use Spirit Energy, so in the longer battles they will be useless for at least one turn while they recover it. Hiei is awesome - he can't take a lot of damage (relative to some of the tougher characters, anyway,) but can hit the demons very hard and very fast with his dark attacks, and has a reasonable selection of attacks to keep using once his Spirit Energy runs out.

A great system, but one that unfortunately only really has the chance to shine in the more difficult levels towards the end of the game. Up until about two thirds of the way in, most of the battles can be won by splattering the nearest demon with your most powerful attack and hoping for the best; some battles are harder than others but you'll rarely get stuck to the point where you need to take the time to think about what you're doing. There are a few levels, though, that are absolute beauties. One specific stage quite late in the game is where the characters have to kill all the demons on the stage plus three floodgates, which spawn out another two demons every so often. The floodgate towards the back of the stage spawns Wolves - by far the hardest of the demons to deal with - and if you try to fight your way through the two gates that spawn Cats and the other demons on the level, you'll find it flooded with Wolves that you haven't got a hope of beating before they beat you. Your best chance is to take that gate out first, and very quickly - but the only character who can take out Floodgates with one attack is Yusuke, and even then, the attack needs to be overdriven (the overdrive system being remarkably similar to Limit Breaks and such.) So Yusuke needs to do enough on his way up there to fill his OD meter, still have enough Spirit Energy left in the tank to perform the attack, and the other characters need to be nearby as well in order for them to support Yusuke so he doesn't get left out on his own. Therefore the other characters need to use their ranged and quick attacks, perhaps not dealing with the demons as systematically as would be usual, but nonetheless necessary.

The sound is as good as it needs to be; the background music is cheesy and not-too-overblown, and all the bells and whistles happen in the right places. Instantly forgettable, but let's be honest, how many games have you bought because someone's said to you, 'Wow, did you hear the BGM from that game?' Not many.

While I'd hardly say this is the best game I've ever played, it's an entertaining enough package to keep you going for a while. Both the storyline and the level-up system is quite linear, so there's almost no replay value (unless you re-he-hearly enjoy setting yourself challenges like, I don't know, max out all the characters, or play through the entire game using Yusuke as little as possible, in which case fine but there are other games out there, you know?) but if you can keep at it, it's fun while it lasts. How it measures up to the anime or the manga I don't know, probably not all that well, because game adaptations of this sort of thing rarely go as well as the publishers would probably like. But if you're not a fan of it, it is if nothing else a solid game that will give you probably about a weekend's worth of entertainment if you really push hard.

So what's next? I'm playing Medal of Honour - Frontline on my Xbox at the moment so maybe...