Last Week's Games: Pandemic, Pathfinder, Doom and Mordheim

I managed to make quite a bit of time for playing games this week! Unusually, I’m going to talk about the Hobby games first…

Let the madness begin...

A little on the nose, given what’s happening in the world right now (If you’re reading this after the fact, the world is currently in a state of confusion and panic over the Covid-19 virus) but Kirsty and I had a go with Pandemic over the weekend. Some people like this game more than others but when I’ve played it, I’ve enjoyed it. We certainly had a good time stamping out the diseases across the map – Kirsty was fortunate enough to choose the Medic, who could take out all the disease cubes on one section and is very good to have early in the game. We certainly made more use out of that than my ability – I’d drawn the Contingency Planner, who can pull an event card from the discard pile and use it again later. We beat the game, though on reflection we got some of the rules wrong. I’d forgotten that we were supposed to infect the cities after drawing an Epidemic card, and that we were only supposed to swap cards if we were in the city of the cards we were swapping. The latter, at least, would definitely have made a difference to the outcome of the game! We enjoyed it, nonetheless, and we’ll have another go soon.

Also, over the weekend, I continued with Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords. Currently they are trekking through the Vaults of Greed, and it was very satisfying to give them a dragon hoard to distribute, and to flatten one of my players with a trap – especially as he plays the kind of impulsive character that would be susceptible to triggering them! He was a little more cautious from then on. I then had a laugh with the Mephits, who seemed more at home playing in the bath than causing a threat, but I have a feeling the group enjoyed it a lot more than trying to fight them. We’re all still enjoying it but there is talk of pausing the campaign for a while and letting someone else have a go at running another game; we’ll see how that goes. I like running games, but I’ve not been able to play for a while!

I finally beat the Deimos Lab on Doom and I’m now at the Control centre. This is an interesting map, and I’m enjoying it, but the difficulty is bogging me down and I’m finding it hard to make any significant amount of progress. But Doom is the kind of game I can come back to whenever I like; the plot is very straightforward, and I don’t need to worry too much about remembering important points!

From humble beginnings...

Also, I made some progress with Mordheim: City of the Damned. With enough confidence in my Mercenary warband to tackle the fourth campaign mission on the bridge, I gave it a go and beat it quite easily (to be fair, my warband is vastly over-levelled now!) None of my men were put out of action, which is quite rare as even on my best day at least one of them usually drops. This is now the most progress I’ve ever made in the game; I came close with the Sisters of Sigmar but gave up after the fourth mission bugged out. It appears that I’m now in the second half of the game, so we’ll see how that goes. I had a go with another of the regular missions, but hubris got the better of me and some of my men ended up dropping to a rival Mercenary warband – usually the easiest faction to deal with.

Finally, I was pleased to be able to have some time in both Phoenix Games in Stourbridge and Warlords and Wizards in Netherton at different points in the week to paint a fresh squad of Chaos Space Marine Raptors. I haven’t quite finished them yet – got some finishing touches to put on their champion – but they’re looking alright, if somewhat different to the box art! I’m also carrying a small number of World Bearers around in hope of a game…

Last Week's Games: Arena, Fire Pro Wrestling World, Spyro the Dragon

Larger than it looks...

I carried on playing Arena and X-COM: UFO Defense, but the problem with both is that they were developed during a time before games were paced and balanced at the level we expect them to be today, and I found them to be frustrating more than anything else. Arena is looking like it’s going to be a long slog indeed. I had forgotten that the first major area where there is a plot-related quest – Fang Lair – is in Hammerfell, and because I am a Wood Elf and therefore started the game in Valenwood, I need to travel across both continents before I find what I’m looking for. On the one hand, you can fast-travel from the very start. On the other, if you try to travel further away than the next town, you’ll be killed before you get there and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. The result is that I’ve got a long way to go before I can move the plot along and will likely never get there without a substantial amount of scum-saving. The fact that having more save files appears to increase the likelihood of the game crashing is doing nothing to improve this! I’m having fun, but I’m not likely to see it through until the end.

Strewth, a triple threat cage match!

I carried on with Fire Pro Wrestling World, which I’m finding addictive and a lot of fun. I’m still working my way through the Mission Mode, which is a good way to learn the key mechanics of the game but some of the match stipulations are rather odd, and I’ve had to go online to find out how to do it as the game doesn’t explain it to you. The one I remember is where you must win a Cage match having done a diving attack from the top of a steel cage. Even getting to the top of the cage without being interrupted takes a fair amount of work, and then you have to know where to do it and what button makes the attack – you only get one shot, and if you miss, you’ll be helpless on the floor as your opponent climbs the cage uninterrupted! The match I’m stuck on now is the one where you must let your tag team partner win the match. This is quite difficult to do as your partner doesn’t appear to be able to hold his own against your opponents, so you must do most of the work in beating them – but they’re pretty tough!

Dragoooon!

I had a go with Spyro the Dragon on the PlayStation 4. Kirsty bought this game roughly a year ago and hasn’t had a huge amount of time to play it. I played it because I wanted to be playing a game that I didn’t mind my daughter seeing when she woke up after her nap. But I really enjoyed it. It’s easy enough to play without getting stuck, (although apparently it gets tough later – I’m only at the second world!) and the bulk of the challenge is provided by collectables, which is where I’ve spent most of my time with it so far. I also liked Spyro, with his Sonic the Hedgehog-style ‘90s ‘tude. Having grown up in a time where pop culture was the domain of larger-than-life cartoon characters, it left me in a nostalgic haze, and was a refreshing change from the super-serious RPG characters or shooters. Speaking of my daughter, when she eventually woke up, she wanted to play, and even though she doesn’t have the dexterity to handle 3D controls yet, the game isn’t particularly challenging in the early stages and she had a fine time running around opening treasure chests.

With my hobby games, I spent some time in Phoenix Games while having my car fixed and started painting my Chaos Raptors in Black Legion colours, I’ll show you all when I’ve finished! I’ve also developed what I hope are some horror-based adventures for Dungeons and Dragons; short ones that will fit in to one or two gaming sessions but are paced well enough to give an interesting game to players wanting something a little different. I hope I get to run them at some point!

Last Week's Games: Regicide, Kingdom Hearts, Chaos Cultists

First of all, sorry I’m a bit late with this one. I didn’t get much sleep on Sunday night and had a very long day on Monday, when I would normally write these. By the time I got home I was exhausted and I knew I’d find it very difficult to focus, so I decided to put it off for a day, get some sleep and come back to it in the morning. I guess, if I was writing for a magazine with a deadline, I wouldn’t be allowed to do that, but this is somewhat different. I have a fair amount of people reading these blogs, but the majority of them come in long after I’ve published them – they sort of trickle in off search engines. I doubt anybody reading this in a month, six months, a year, or several years (it happens!) is going to care that I didn’t put this one out on a Monday, but they will probably notice if my writing is below my usual standard. So here we are. 


Orks, mate. They'll blow you up.

I carried on with Warhammer 40K: Regicide, I was hoping to beat it last week! It wasn’t to be, sadly; I got to within the last couple of levels of the Space Marine campaign to find that the secondary objective for the penultimate mission is, once again, to kill – not capture – all the Ork pieces. Regular readers will remember that this gave me some problems a few weeks ago with the final mission of the second act, but at least the playing field was somewhat level for that one! Here, you are outnumbered by quite a lot, and you will lose if either your Librarian (Queen) or Captain (King) are eliminated. Not being allowed to capture the pieces makes the game very difficult in that regard; I haven’t quite managed it yet but I’m sure I’ll get there if I tackle it hard enough!

Not to judge Square characters by
their fashion sense, but...

Elsewhere I played Kingdom Hearts 1.5, getting through the Agrabah level. Here, I noticed something a little odd about the platforming sections of the game – you don’t die from falling off the platforms. Instead, you fall to the bottom of the screen, or when appropriate, a different screen altogether. I’m not suggesting that it requires a suspension of disbelief, as quite frankly playing as a 14 year-old boy running around with a giant key, a one-piece swimsuit (I think) over a short jacket, shoes that are far too big for him and accompanied by Goofy and Donald Duck allows you suspend it enough to ignore the potentially harmful effect of gravity. But consider – when you lose all your health in the game, you click Continue and go back to the start of the screen you’re on. When you fall off a platform, you have to climb all the way up again, and if you’ve fallen into a different screen, this is actually quite a bit more faff than simply restarting the section. I don’t know, it may seem meaningless, but I think it’s a clever little bit of game design – they didn’t make it too easy to keep repeating the same parts over and over again in order to practice the platforming sections, so it gives a better incentive to concentrate.

Then on Monday, when I was having some work done on my car, I spent some time in Phoenix Games in Stourbridge painting my remaining Chaos Cultists. I used to go in to the shop quite a lot, and even ran a Dungeons and Dragons game for them for a couple of years. I don’t go in so much anymore, mainly due to family and work commitments, but Brett and Steve are always happy to let me sit down and paint while my car is being fixed. And it was nice to see Emile and Matt, who were previously in the DnD game, having a game of Konflikt 47.  I didn’t get my models finished; I wasn’t expecting to as I take my time with my painting. But I got a good way in to it and I might even pick them up again in the week while I’m off work!

I’ll see what I can get done next week!

Warhammer: Age of Sigmar First Impressions

So Warhammer: Age of Sigmar is now in full swing. It’s an interesting game. The substantial departure from the iterative nature of the last four editions of Warhammer means that the game has changed entirely for better or worse. Some people like it, some people hate it, some people and some don’t know one way or the other. That being the case, I thought I’d give you my first impressions:

 

Context

The army I’ve chosen for Age of Sigmar is Stormcast Eternals, and my current pool of models come from the Age of Sigmar Boxed Set. I’m also participating in an 8-week ‘Slow-Grow’ league at my local game store Phoenix Games, where the wound limit for the games are going up in increments of 25 every 2 weeks. Therefore, these remarks refer to the fact that I’ve mainly played 25 wound games so far.

 

What I like

A lot of people complain about the apparent lack of strategy in the game, but as I was always rubbish at Warhammer anyway, I actually like the fact that the amount of strategic manoeuvres and choices you make in the game are reduced. On the balance of having so much strategic choice that you could potentially win the game before it starts just by choosing what models to have in your army and deploying them properly, and so little that the entire game is decided on dice rolls, Age of Sigmar definitely leans towards the latter but there is enough going on to keep a ‘casual’ gamer like me engaged.

My Lord-Relictor. Don't mess.

For example, for a 25 Wound force, I picked the Lord-Relictor, Three Retributors and Five Liberators. The rationale was: because I had eight models in the whole army, I was almost always going to be outnumbered. I therefore stuck the Retributors at the front, the Relictor at the back and the Liberators in-between. Therefore, the enemy force would have to tackle the Retributors first, who are deadly in combat. The Relictor could use his power to heal the Retributors to keep them in the fight a little longer, and the Liberators could mop up whoever was left afterwards. That’s been my strategy for the four games I’ve played so far and it works reasonably well.

I also like the way the combat works. It’s clear what you need to hit and wound – no faffing about with tables – so that bit’s simple. The challenge comes from deciding what order to do the fights in. It’s about second-guessing what order your opponent will do everything in, and what you can afford to lose. Do I use my one remaining Retributor, or my Liberators for my first attack? The Retributor probably won’t do much damage on his own and will leave the others open for an attack, but if he’s attacked, he won’t be able to fight at all. Do I attack the Khorgorath or the Blood Reavers? The Khorgorath is doing a lot of damage, but if I kill enough of the Blood Reavers, they may then fail their bravery check and I’ll take out even more in one turn. It’s these kind of decisions that make up the fun of the game for me so far.

What I don’t like

Currently the only thing I don’t like about the game mechanics are the balancing issues coming from having to integrate every faction into a brand new system. I know moaning about balancing issues in any Games Workshop game is like complaining that grass is green, but in previous editions they tried, at least. In Age of Sigmar, you can take anything, no matter how elite or rare they purport to be, as long as they’re in the same faction. And even then, they’ve lumped a lot of the factions together so their war scrolls can be combined. You don’t even need to take a commander model, since you can nominate any model as a general. My first game of AoS didn’t go too well, as the guy I was playing used an Empire force of an Elector Count, three Demigryffs and a Hellblaster Cannon, and there was not a single modicum of restrictions in the rules to stop him.

Needless to say I enjoy it a lot more when there is some balance in the chosen forces!

Conclusion

Age of Sigmar is a very different experience to Warhammer. There’s less going on than I might expect from a conventional wargame, but as I’m not very good at them, I’m kind of enjoying this ‘lite’ version of it. There will be questions raised about balancing issues; there always are. But when I’ve won, I feel like I deserved it because of my force selection and manoeuvres, and I’ve been having a decent amount of fun with it. I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops!