Last Week's Games: Shogun: Total War, Warhammer 40K, Get Bit, Zombie Dice

Let's see who's standing at the end of this battle!

My new game for this week is Shogun: Total War. The Total War series is one of the ones I’ve been meaning to have a go at for a long time, and while there are a lot of games out there for it now, I have an almost obsessive need to play games in sequence, so I’m playing Shogun first. I played through the tutorials, which was just as well since the interface is unlike any strategy game I’ve ever played. I also had a go through the campaign, but I didn’t really have much of an idea of what I’m supposed to be doing; building up an empire is obvious but I found that battles are not to be entered into lightly! I did, however, have the foresight to set the win conditions up to something other than total domination. I remember playing Star Wars Battlefront 2’s Galactic Conquest mode with my sister years ago, during which I discovered that the problem with potentially endless campaigns is just that – they take ages, and you’ll lose interest in it long before you reach the end. I set up the win to take a certain number of provinces, and to survive for 70 years. But I think I might go back and restart, with a better idea of what I’m supposed to be doing.

I wonder if my need to play video games in sequence hampers my enjoyment of them somewhat. Am I missing some great games because I haven’t played the first ones? Anyone who’s played the Witcher series would probably say that I am; The Witcher 3 looks to be the best game in the series but I haven’t bothered with it because I haven’t played the first two to completion – and I’m unlikely to find time to do so! It shouldn’t matter with Total War because they’re stand-alone campaigns; not sequential storylines, but lately I’ve become interested in finding the core mechanics of the game before jumping in to the arguably-better later versions. Assassin’s Creed is a good example of this; I’ve missed the better games in the series because I wouldn’t touch them until I’d beaten the first. So I’ll see what Shogun: Total War has to offer. It looks really interesting and I have enjoyed it so far, but I want a little more out of it.

I continued playing Eternal Crusade on my laptop, but was pleasantly surprised when on Sunday I managed to go in to Warlords ‘n’ Wizards in Netherton and play the real thing! I got to play a game of Warhammer 40,000, using my Salamanders against Chaos Daemons. We played the Ancient Relic mission, which requires you to take and hold one objective for six victory points. I won because the objective way in my deployment zone. It was a good game but we had to it call early, and for my next one I’ll be using a substantially smaller army because I found myself looking at the rules for the new edition of the game far too often; it’s only my second game. Nonetheless, I like how the vast majority of the new rules are working out; especially how the templates have been removed so there is a point to Frag missiles now!



The front cover of the original X-Wing game.

Robots. Swimming away from a freaking shark.

I also had a game of Star Wars: X-Wing against the same guy, and managed to win with my tournament list consisting of 1^st-wave ships and characters. I was pleased that running the Trenchrunners worked, and I also learned not to fire Proton Torpedoes against a ship that has lots of shields and R2-D2, who recharges them!

I played some board games with Kirsty as well. The first was Get Bit, where you have to play cards to have plastic robots with detachable limbs swim away from a shark. There were the beginnings of a really good game in there but I wasn’t familiar enough with it to be able to explain it well enough for Kirsty to really know what she was doing! We also played Zombie Dice, which requires almost no skill other than pushing your luck. It is, ironically, brainless fun, which at the end of a long day is exactly what we needed!