14/6/2011: The Horus Heresy

Once again I was playing against Dave and this time we swapped sides, me taking the Traitors and Dave taking the Imperium to settle the score when Dave beat me at Brother Against Brother the other week...

I started out very well indeed, making enough corruption draws to hold all the spaceports after a bit of co-exisitence combat, and managing to blow several holes in the Titans Dave had brought to bear. However I also used a Port Landing order to drop several reinforcements onto Eternity Wall held by Mortarion. This was to set the tone for the game...

In his infinite wisdom Dave decided to use Jaghatai Kahn wrestle the Primus Spaceport from Angron. This might seem to be an impressive tactical move since if he succeeded that would mean I would no longer have any claim on the Spaceport, however I'm pretty sure it was only because he wanted to kill the Primarch. Whatever the reason, there was no way Angron could stand up to being outnumbered for so long and he eventually fell, with Kahn taking the spaceport.

I had shored up my forces at Eternity Wall and was attacking the Palace where Rogal Dorn was mounting a solid defence, despite Mortarion's ability essentaially cancelling Dorn's ability out. The battle ended the only way it can when it's two leaders absolutely refuse to die: A bloody stalemate. Realising I was getting nowhere, I drop-podded a force of Tzeentch warriors on to Lion's Gate to attempt to take the Palace from both sides. However, Dave had other ideas...

Sanguinius boarded the Vengeful Spirit in an attempt to take the ship and Horus. After a furious battle in the Catacombs, he then made a move on Horus himself. The ensuing fight caused wounds to both sides but Sanguinius lacked the manpower to take out many of Horus' guards and lost the fight. Help arrived in the form of Rogal Dorn...



Horus falls under the full fury of two Primarchs...



I was all too aware that there was no way Horus could survive a sustained attack from two primarchs for long, and I also knew there wasn't a blind thing I could do about it. My only chance was to use the Frenzied Assault combined with the Relentless assault with Mortarion in the hope of striking at the Emperor himself - I had enough initiative to get as far as the inner palace and would need Horus to hold out for one more change of initiative while I initiated the final assault. Mortarion's part of the plan worked absolutely fine. Unfortunately the combined assault of Sanguinius and Rogal Dorn was too much for Horus, and he fell, giving the game once again to Dave.

My mistake here was obvious: I should have reinforced Angron at Spaceport Primus. By the time Horus fell under attack, we'd just gone past the point where a spaceport victory is possible, and had Angron still got the port that is what would have happened. In hindsight, there's very little point in reinforcing Mortarion; as Rogal Dorn can only use his special abitity in defence and would be cancelled out by Mortarion anyway, he is as unlikely to attack as he is likely to give any ground. So I'll know next time to pile as much as I can onto Primus, take what spaceports I can with Corruption Draws and hope for the best. I think while the game does require you to react to what happens at the start, beyond that you have to make a battle plan and stick to it, otherwise the opposition will wipe their bottoms with your written admission of incompetence...

Seriously though, good game Dave! Looking forward to the next one...

9/6/2011: Pathfinder: Souls for Smuggler's Shiv

Once again I find myself behind with my blogs! However, with only 5 hours to go before my next gaming session, it's probably about time I updated you all on what went on last week. Warning: MAJOR spoilers here...

We finished last week outside the cannibal's camp, which was good because that's where the lighthouse is and also where our estranged captain and his girlfriend had apparently disappeared off to. Our party doesn't really have a fighter as such. We've found that our two monks, Garond and Bronn, are pretty handy in a fight, as is our ranger Rassdass. Traugan the half-orc mage has got it where it counts up close, as does my character Raziel, if only by being mobile enough to set up combat advantage. Gorman's never really much good up close but his cleric abilities more than make up for it in the aftermath. Nonetheless, we have thus far tried to avoid such tactics as marching directly into the enemy camp and expecting to win a fight. So we spent some time scouting out the area; finding out where the sentries are, using Gorman's detect alignment/chaos to find out where our enemies were likely to be. We came in from the East, where the lines were apparently thinnest, and attacked a small hut with a wizend old woman in there. It turns out that she's a mage and did some horrific things to our psyche by cackling and granting us all misfortune, however she couldn't stop the onslaught of several angry warriors and eventually fell.

Investigating the North we found our way blocked by a corral that apparently contained 4 skeletons. There was somthing about the general area in relation to the rest of the camp that made us feel it would be a bad idea to start any trouble at this time, so we scurried around to the South. We came upon a building that looked like it was a butchery of some description, where prisoners are kept and made to watch as their fellow captives are butchered and become dinner for the cannibals. We were heading ever onwards towards the area where the lighthouse was, killing a couple of cannibals along the way which, if I'm honest, didn't put up much of a fight. And then we happened upon the lighthouse itself...

This was a ferocious fight made all the more hard by our positioning. We were aware of a male and at least one female voice upstairs and Bronn, Garond and I snuck up the stairs to see what was going on. Unfortunately I fluffed my stealth roll and drew the attention to us, whereupon a man who looked like a stereotype Scottish Barbarian came charging down the stairs. A lot more tough and substantially more strong than the creatures we had encountered up to that point, the fact that we were fighting on the stairs of a lighthouse meant that only one of us at a time could effectively attack him. Raziel slunk back and covered the guy with his crossbow but the fact that there was always at least one person in front of him made this a very risky business indeed. Owing largely to the villian's penchant for smearing his opponent's blood all over himself, we eventually managed to wear him down and kill him without any losses to our own side. On going up the stairs, we found 4 young girls in a state of considerable distress. Calming them down, we learned that the two most prominent figures in the camp were the man we'd just killed, who was apparently the leader of the cannibals, and the witch we had killed earlier. We inferred that had we gone after the skeletons, we would have alerted the whole camp and had a much larger fight on our hands. And we also discovered that our captain and his lover had been here at some point, though they were not there now... We also found the room they had been staying in, and a shrine to some heathen God. We had the lighthouse, and as long as we can get it to work we have the means to escape the island. However, we had a feeling that this wasn't over just yet...

We assumed to kill all the cannibals, and on inspection of the camp found a hole in the ground we felt worthy of investigating. Underneath the camp we found a network of tunnels on which we discovered, amongst other things, a note, apparently from our captain. It turns out his lover, Ileana (I think) is a serpentine demon and he was under her ruse for most of the time since she boarded the ship. It was her influence that caused the captain to wreck the ship and cast us all off. Eventually, she betrayed the Captain, who in the note reckoned he was well on his way to becoming some sort of undead. And we learned that she was now headed west towards the Red Mountain to complete her work. The captain offered his apologies and beseeched us to kill her... We found a old and sinister serpetine cathederal, where we came upon the sort of spell that Ileana is trying to cast. We could let her do it... but with one more week to go, hunting her down and killing her just seems the right thing to do.

Incidently we found the captain in the not-entirely-surprising form of a ghoul. Killed him, obviously. It occurs to me now that the original plan was to kill us all and it was only by the intervention of the first mate that we and the NPCs survived. Even if we kill Ileana, the real hero of the story will be him...

7/6/2011: 8 ball Pool at Hare of the Dog, Birmingham

Yes, I'm documenting a game of pool. I take myself far too seriously! And all the Gods help me if I've got the name of the pub wrong...

Well, I'm not very good at pool, nor do I claim to be. I'm familiar with the concept of putting the balls into the right pockets, while at the same time arranging matters so that the cue ball is in the right place for a follow-up, or failing that at least in a place where I can make it difficult for my opponent. Putting all that in to practice, on the other hand, is tricky to say the least; it's not a set of motions I'm familiar with and knowing the theory won't help if you haven't done it for over 3 years!

I was quite pleased I won the blue balls, given my football team. My opponent was Chris Jeffries, and he was playing with a lot more power than I was. He would whack the cue ball in the direction of one of the yellow balls, I would gently tap the blue balls with what I hoped was enough power. In my case, I was rarely wrong, however I'm not too good with my aim and missed a lot more shots than I hit. Nonetheless, it came down in the end to a struggle for control over the 8-ball, and in those situations a lot of the time all you can do is whack it and hope for the best. It was when I did this that I put Jeff in a better position to get the ball in, which he promptly did. Well done Jeff.

Now I know what you're (possibly) thinking - is Pool a game I'm going to be playing a great many times? And the answer is probably not, but it's fun when I do play it however badly it goes. The aim isn't going to get sorted out unless I do a lot more practice to improve it, something I neither have the time nor the drive for. But hey - I'm always up for a game...

2/6/11 Pathfinder: Souls for Smuggler's Shiv

Not much to say about last week's escapade; there was no plot-bending revelations or nothing like that, it was mostly exploration and no small amount of fighting. We were also without Bronn/Garuda/Paul (for the purpose of the game all the same person) for tonight as he was off on his holidays, lucky for some. Picking up from a couple of weeks before, the Tengu had come on the ship called the Crow's Tooth, and seemed quite interested in us challenging the cannibals. Before we did that, however, we journeyed North towards the two islands at the North West section of the map in search of the lighthouse...

After crossing a slippery but nonetheless traversable causeway, we came upon an island literally covered in fungus and decay. The stench was appalling. We happened across a shipwreck - everything from the wood to the sails covered in fungus, but otherwise in good condition - which turned out to be the Night Voice, which was the ship our Gnome friend back at the camp was after. Investimagating the ship proved problematical as we were accosted by Vegipigmes, (sic) and fighting them was difficult for me as they were resistant to the piercing damage a Rapier would instigate. The best I could do in that situation was scurry around the back of the monsters and set up combat advantage; this worked very well except that no one was really rolling very well so it took a while anyway.

While investigating the ship, finding some documents of interest to the gnome, I remembered too late that I also had a Dagger+1, which can either be slashing or piercing and would have easily hurt the monsters. I kept that in mind as we came up on a pillar of fungus/stone, because whatever we found in there was unlikely to be good...

What we eventually found was a human skeleton covered in the fungus; it suddenly became animated and got us in a desperate battle. I tried my usual tactic of using my mobility to set up combat advantage, unfortunately this time I failed my tumble roll and fell flat on my face. This also left me open to the skeleton's tentacles, (yes, tentacles,) which proceded to gouge several large holes in me and leaving my character for dead...

The rest of the party killed it in the end and I've got a good friend in Gorman (Dave) who helped me with his healing powers once again. I suffered penalties to my stats but it was nothing a couple of days exploration wouldn't cure. Long story short, we eventually found ourselves at the south-west corner of the island, where there is a lighthouse, and what looks like a whole lot of cannibals...

1/6/2011: Thundertone: Dragonspire

Interesting one here...

I was asked to try out this card game from AEG (No idea what it stands for, presumably the publisher.) I played it once again with Dave, who is the only person I know who would play a game like this so the choice of opponent was obvious really! This is going to be in two parts - a recollection of what went on in the game, and because I was asked to comment on the game I'll offer my comments here. I'll give a description of the areas I was asked to comment on and you can decide for yourselves whether or not I gave it a high score...

So the idea of the game is that your party is trying to obtain the "Thunderstone," a mythical artefact that will help protect the world from impending doom. The game is for 2-5 people and whoever gets the most victory points - achieved by killing monsters or having particularly powerful artefacts, spells or heroes - is the winner. How it works is that on your turn, you can either "go to the village" and use the monetary value of the cards you have in your hand to upgrade your deck by buying new heroes or better equipment, "Enter the Dungeon" and kill any one of 3 possible monsters that are in play with penalties to your skills depending on where in the dungeon you are and what equipment you have, or "Rest," where you stand and do nothing or throw one of your cards away. Each time you kill a monster, another monster is drawn from the 'Dungeon Deck,' until eventually you come to the Thunderstone (shuffled into the last 10 cards,) and when that reaches the first level of the dungeon, the player that caused it to do so claims it for his own. As far as I know there are no victory points available for it, however it hands over the game to the player that owns it in the event of a tie.

If that sounds complicated, well, it is for about the first half an hour, but once we'd got used to the game mechanics we were merrily building decks and entering dungeons as much as you like. More complicated - but all the better for it - is the strategy of building decks. You start of with some basic cards which are useful but of fairly low power. When you start buying different monsters and equipment, you need to try and balance your need to have reliable cards with the fact that if your deck gets too large, it will take far too long to get the card you need. Almost certainly at some point you'll come across a 'disease' card that will give you penalties to your party as they attack, and the smaller your deck, the more likely they are to come up as well. Monsters that you kill are added to your deck and are counted for victory points, but they rarely do anything to help you once you get into the dungeon; is it worth throwing some victory points away so that you can increase your draw rate?

Party-building is interesting as well. I should point out here that Dave and I were using a fairly basic 'starter' set of cards that the game recommends which gave us a selection of fighters, thieves, clerics and wizards. While the monsters we had to face gave the impression that a balanced party would be the most useful (some monsters can only be damaged by magic, for example, or can't be attacked by heroes that don't have any weapons,) the reality is that this isn't practical. It's unlikely you'll draw a party to enter the dungeon that is both balanced and powerful enough to do any significant amount of damage - a fighter, for example, does not do the same kind of damage as a wizard, so while two fighters would probably make one very powerful attack, a fighter and a wizard would result in two not very powerful attacks. No, it is more useful to focus on one or the other and be aware of what your opponents are doing so you know which one to go for. I chose to focus on magic and built my party around wizards and clerics; Dave went down the fighter route and got mainly fighters and thieves.

We made it quite difficult for ourselves because after a preliminary scramble to get into fights in the dungeon, we found ourselves having to face three extremely hard opponents and had to slink back to the village to regroup. This was when our parties began to take shape. However, Dave had the advantage in that he had killed more monsters than me, and could use the experience points he'd gained as a result to improve his heroes; it therefore took him less time to get back to the dungeon and take out two orc warlords who are worth a huge amount of victory points. We carried on - by then our attacks were powerful enough to take out most comers - until we came to the monsters that stuck a significant penalty for attacking them, at which point we were forced to play a bit more carefully. Eventually the Thunderstone appeared and went to Dave, and as he'd earned more victory points than me, so did the game.

So, what do I think of the game?

In terms of build quality and value for money, in general it's very good indeed. The box seems sturdy enough and allows room for the upcoming expansions, and the artwork on the cards is beautiful. The 'board' is a nice touch, not crucial but if you've never played a card game before then I guess it's useful as a guide. Coming from a background of Games Workshop and Yu Gi Oh cards, it's a great change to be able to explore aspects of each of the heroes/villains that you come across in the game without necessarily having to spend hundreds and hundreds of pounds on a new deck or a new army. One slight aspect that niggles - we noticed that the cards were bending quite easily, even after one game, and the way they are stored does not lend themselves well to deck protectors. My advice? If you get the game, keep in mind the cards are going to take a bit of looking after.

In terms of theme and originality, there's not much to go on here if I'm perfectly honest. Heroes and Wizards, Orcs and Zombies, Dragons and Magic Stones, I've pretty much been aware of all of those things since the age of 4, and nothing will surpirse anyone old enough to have read Lord of the Rings. The Party Building system is interesting and I like it a lot; it's a new spin on the idea of building a party and going to war. But we've all done Dungeons and Dragons or Warhammer before; there's nothing new here.

The game took a while to get going but once it had nothing could stop us. We'd grasped the fundementals of the rules and rarely had to reference them, which meant we could spend the majority of the time we were there playing the game. Never a bad thing! The instructions could have been clearer, I think, at exactly what means what. For example, we didn't know, and pretty much had to work out for ourselves, how 'Strength' affects the heroes. You use 'Attack' values to attack monsters and Strength didn't appear to have an effect until we discovered that you need a certain amount of strength in your heroes before you can use some of the game's more powerful weapons. An index or glossary would have helped. But for how often we have to reference the rules in the games Dave and I usually play, it was a refreshing change to see a game that, once we had got it, we could just pick it up and have a play should we wish to.

Is the game balanced? Difficult to say on the precedent of one game with two people. With hindsight, Dave had me on the back foot for most of the game, and we're used to playing card duelling games so we were looking for ways to hinder one another's progress; it's not a strategy you'd necessarily employ in a game like this but we like it! The game can have up to five people, at which point I would suggest the ways in which you can build and upgrade your party become far more limited, i.e. there are rarely more than 2 top-level cards for each hero type, which means that only 2 players can ever have the top level of any given hero. This will lend a competitive edge to the game but I do wonder, if the game ever featured the full compliment of 5 players, whether one or more of those players would find themselves out of the runnings quite quickly.

All that being said, we had a top laugh playing it, we really did. There's a nice sense of achievement that we get from killing the higher level monsters, and while we're hardly working together to do it, it's not like we're killing each other's monsters either which is a nice change. It is what it is - a great way to spend a couple of hours playing a fun game with some friends (though I doubt games would actually take a couple of hours to play once you know the rules) and I can't fault it for that at all. Dave loved it, and went home promising to look for ways in which to get hold of a copy himself.

If he does, great, but this copy of the game is being returned toda so I doubt I'll be playing this game again in the near future. But, here's to hoping; the game has a lot more to offer than I had time to explore and I'd love to give it another go.

Roleplay tonight, look forward to my next story about my life...