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.