Last Week's Games: Regicide, The Savage World of Solomon Kane and Lost Cities.

After playing Eternal Crusade for a while, I had a go with another Warhammer 40000 game: Regicide. This is a 40K game based on Chess, with the different Space Marines representing the different pieces. Tactical Marines are pawns, Terminators are rooks and so on. Where it differs from Chess is that your pieces can shoot at each other with weapons and throw grenades for area-of-effect attacks, putting an interesting spin on the classic game.

Those obstacles block movement, funnily enough...

I’d previously tried this a month ago, but didn’t count it as my “new game” because I only managed to play through the tutorial. I had a go with a Skirmish match – as near as it gets to a standard Chess game – and I had some fun with it. The tactics need to account for having ways to attack the pieces other than capturing them like Chess. I was prepared for it to be an occasional curiosity rather than a game I’d put any substantial amount of time into, but there is a campaign I found strangely engaging due to the short length of the missions.

Some aspects of the game work, and some don’t. In the campaign, your pieces are deployed in a set, and you use them and their abilities to take out certain enemy pieces. It’s like a puzzle, as you manoeuvre your units in to the best position to capture a piece – an instant kill – while trying to avoid such a situation yourself. It also gives me some ideas for how I could run some short games of 40K; pitched battles are all well and good but the game is open to so much more! Where the game is let down, is with its Random Number Generation (RNG.) It uses a percentile ‘chance to hit’ system, which adds complexity to the mechanics but severely alters the strategy. It might seem strange for me to say this given that two of my favourite games of the decade are XCOM and Mordheim, both of which use RNG systems. But in those games you could affect the numbers it came up with – get closer, flank your opponents, develop your abilities etc. Regicide doesn’t have that, and the consequence is that meticulous strategy and puzzle-solving can be invalidated by the pieces being able to attack without having to capture. I’ve lost a few campaign games from making the right moves, but the key pieces falling before I can take the win, in a manner removed from the process of playing Chess. But then, I was never much of a Chess player!

Looks like a Witch Hunter...

I also returned to the Black Country Roleplaying Society after some time off, and joined The Savage World of Solomon Kane. From what I understand, this is a tale of swashbuckling and derring-do in a gothic horror setting, with Solomon Kane himself being a harbinger of righteousness. While he is the hero of the piece, he’s not above committing acts of outright villainy to achieve his aims! I’m playing an elderly sorcerer; able to perform magic but forced to maintain secrecy due to the world’s negative view of magic and witchcraft. And, we have the usual disparate party in the other players!

I approached this game with some caution as I know almost nothing about Solomon Kane, and I’m not fond of Savage Worlds as a system. But with roleplaying games, the enjoyment comes from the interaction with the other players, so I’ll give it a chance. It was a slow start this week due to character creation, but we’ll see how it picks up next week!

Apparently this is quite a common 'couples' game...

Finally, on Sunday night I played Lost Cities with Kirsty. This is a card game in which you compete to make the most money from exploring lost cities by creating long runs of cards, with additional twists: There are five possible explorations you can start, but starting those costs you 20 points potentially ends in negative figures. Also, you can bet to double your score at the start of a run – but this is applied after you’ve taken off the 20 to fund the expedition. It was a fun game while we were playing it, but the maths homework at the end was a bit of a chore!