29/11/2011: Thunderstone

We were meant to be playing Dungeons and Dragons with Dan tonight, but he had to work, so...

This was an interesting game. For Monsters, we drew Undead: Doom, Humanoid and Abyssal. A lot of those guys - and certainly the first 3 that we drew - were horribly powerful. However, for Heroes we drew Dwarves, Outlanders, Feyans and the wizards that begin with S, I can't remember the name now. We didn't use them all that much. We also drew two Edged weapons and Goodberries, amongst other things...

Now, remember last game where I promised myself I wouldn't make the same mistake of trying to equip Dwarves with Edged weapons before I'd actually bought any Edged Weapons? So do I. I remembered it so well that the first chance I got I went straight for one of the Outland Warriors, who's effect is significantly different: 3+ for a basic attack, and then you can destroy a Food card for an additional 3+. As I rarely use Iron Rations in any game, I had no problem with destroying them, and the added Militia and Dagger combos that I drew - to be fair I had some good hands - meant I took an early lead with killing monsters. Careful use of the subsequent experience points meant that I got to upgrade the Warrior card, which was great because subsequent levels rely on drawing monsters in your hand to give the Outlanders a bonus to their already substantial attack. Combine this with the fact that by then I'd already got a some Dwarves and Edged weapons, and there were small times when I couldn't do a huge amount of damage in the Dungeon.

Dave was trying to employ a similar tactic but at the same time was throwing away all his militia cards. I can see why you'd want to do this - making your deck faster is never a bad thing - but militia can be useful sometimes, especially when you get them in numbers and can equip them with daggers. In some situations it would work, and I don't think that this was one of them. He also missed some opportunities to attack the dungeon, either because he'd missed the effect of some of his cards or there were points where he wasn't concentrating (there was a text conversation going on at the same time in the early stages of the game.) The most interesting thing he did was use the Banish spell to send the Archduke of Pain - which to be fair neither of us had a hope of beating at that point - to the bottom of the Dungeon. A risky move, considering that it's worth a whopping 8 victory points and it if' it's at the bottom of the Dungeon there's no chance we'd have been able to fight it again before we found the Thunderstone. In the end it wouldn't have made much difference, and since the game ended before either of us really got to grips with Wizards, Banish was probably the best thing he could have done at that point.

We were moving through this Dungeon a lot more quickly than we ever had before; I think this particular combination of Heroes had swung the game much in favour of the players. However, only one of us could win. And for once, that turned out to be me, simply because I'd killed more monsters. Also, Goodberries give you victory points as well, I had a couple of those. We had about the same number of top-level Heroes. The final score was 56-34. Quite a comfortable win for me, and certainly not usual; I was quite please with this!

Ah, and I misread one of the rules. 'Spoiled' does not mean that you destroy whatever it is the card is supposed to 'spoil.' It actually means you get to pick up one of the associated cards. As it happens, it didn't matter so much, as we were both playing to the same interpretation of the rules so no one was cheating. Something to keep in mind for next time though...

14/11/2011: War of the Ring

Sometimes, when you're playing games, things just don't work out. There'll be something going along in the game that will generally mean I haven't got a hope of winning and I'm knackered from the start. Ususally when this happens this is something to do with my opponent - power gaming does not sit will with me at all - but one could hardly accuse this weeks opponent of that; Lewis is a great kid and plays well. No, the problem this time was the scenario...

So to clarify, because it's been a long time since I played War of the Ring, I was using Harad and Lewis was using Isenguard. I've got a balanced but fairly low-powered force, and Lewis has got one of those armies that were built up gradually over a period of collecting. So was mine, as it happens. Which usually makes for quite a fair fight. But this time we rolled up Maelstrom for deployment, and we were playing Objectives. It was the deployment that got me. The fact that some of your army will turn up in any one of 4 table edges, if at all, scuppers even the best-laid plans and all you can do is hope for the best. I put my guys down where I thought they would be the most effective, but due to where most of Lewis' men ended up, the only character I have that is in the slightest bit effective - The Betrayer - was miles away from anywhere.

In retrospect, deploying The Betrayer with Haradrim Warriors was one of my worst ideas in playing WotR, since the Betrayer's effect will only really work at a distance if you put him with bows. The actual game itself was in essence a step-by-step guide in splattering my army, there's not much point talking you through it but everything I did, everywhere my troops went, the forces of Isenguard had something more nasty waiting for them. Hell, Lewis didn't even cast any spells with Saruman! He wiped most of my forces clean off the table and won two objectives to my one, winning the game quite comfortably.

Not one of my better games, really. I need to put myself in a better mindset for playing games in the shop; I can't really stop to think about things and that does cost me.

Until next time. I actually think I'm clear on the blogging front for about 12 hours...

4/11/2011: Warhammer 40K, Chaos Space Marines vs Necrons

I went down to Games Workshop for a game of 40K before I went to pick Amy up from the station. With the Necron release only a day away, it was suspiciously fitting that Mark, my opponent, should be a Necron player, giving the old rules one last battle before the new ones came out...

Things didn't get off to a good start for me. We got Shane at the shop to roll up the scenario and deployment, and we ended up with Annhialation (I'm far better off holding objectives!) and Spearhead deployment. Spearhead is my least favourite because it means that I've got the furthest to travel across the board before I enconter an enemy, which when I'm up against a gun line almost invariably means I'll be shot to pieces before I get there. I decided therefore to make use of the craters strewn around the battlefield for defence, and aim right for the centre. Initiative was going to be vital, so I chose to set up first and take the first turn rather than react to Mark's deployment. I kept my Chaos Lord and a squad of Raptors in reserve to take advantage of Deep Strike, and began...

Mark set up with a crowd of Necron Warriors on the front line and with his Destroyers on the flanks. I knew there was a Monolith in reserve as well. As I had the first turn, I threw my Posessed Chaos Space Marines at the army; they'd rolled up Scout for their special ability. Very few would pick this as their first choice, I suspect a large part of the reason you don't see Posessed in many Chaos armies is that they are quite unpredicatble. However, the role they play in my games rarely goes beyond using them as a meat shield to draw the enemy fire, and it is a tactic that works fairly well. I also managed to take out a couple of Necrons with my Havocs, but they later succeeded their We'll Be Back roll.

Mark took his turn and wasted no time in immobilizing my Rhino with his Heavy Destroyers. He also took a few pot shots at my Chaos Space Marines, one of them had an early night but other than that to no avail.

And now for my first mistake of the evening: I brought on my Chaos Lord on with my Raptors via Deep Strike. My Chaos Lord has wings and is well within his rights to do this, and sending him out without support is suicide and I know it. My mistake was that I brought them down far too close to the main Necron line. As you can't move after you Deep Strike, yes I was close enough to shoot them with their pistol weapons for all the good that did me, but was also in a prime position for them to rattle me with rapid fire weapons next turn before I could even think about getting in to combat. And that's not to mention the Monolith that had appeared, as these things so often do, out of nowhere, who's Flux Arc was doing me some serious mischief. As expected, most of my so-called 'Command Squad' got shot to pieces by all that Mark could put in to it, amazingly about 3 of them survived.

I tried to make up for it by going in to combat. I went straight for the Necron Lord, and to hell with the War Scythe; if I was going to have a hope of winning I had to stop him from using his Ressurection Orb. The only way I was going to manage that was to win combat, get him to fail his leadership check and catch them on the initiative roll-off where I had the upper hand. I managed to win combat, but not by enough to give them anything like a hard run at their leadership check. Mark used his Monolith to teleport the Necrons out of combat, and my lord went down to gunfire in the following turn.

My only kill point of the game came from gunning down the Heavy Destroyers with my Havocs, and to be fair I should have done that a long time before they immobilized my Rhino and took out two of the Havocs. The rest of it... the Chaos Space Marine squads couldn't do much with the Monolith so close, any attempt to destory it was failing horribly and the small amount of damage they were doing to the Necrons was quickly rectified by the We'll Be Back roll.

The battle was over quite quickly with only a very small number of my Chaos Space Marines surviving. Mark had once again one it quite comfortably. My army is not geared to dealing with very hard-to-hurt targets like that and the more I game with it (to be fair this was the first time in nearly a year,) the more I feel as though they need a complete overhaul in order to get even close to being effective.

On the other hand, it might be time to get my Sorceror back in on the action. He did OK last time...

War of the Ring blog coming up soon!

3/11/2011: Space Hulk

Me and Dave hadn’t played this for a while so we got it out as our ‘Main Event’ game last week. It was a typical bloodthirsty affair but as it had been so long since we last played it back in March, we could approach it from a fresh angle of tactics.

Dave went first as the Terminators. With a few good draws in his command points, he decided to leave behind a rear guard and use the rest of his Terminators to ‘run it up the middle.’ His tactic was to get as many of his Terminators as he possibly could to the crossroads that would give him a clear run to the objective that he had to flame. Despite my initial attack on the Sergeant at the front using around 3 or 4 Genestealers, the combat prowess of the Sergeant proved to be too much for them and he cut through the first wave quite easily. He used the Flamer to block off his rear, so that my Genestealers couldn’t get to him without flaming themselves. It might have worked, but for one obscure rule that Dave either didn’t know about or had forgotten – you can move and shoot as part of the same action. So he might not have needed to use so many action/command points to get the doors open, and might even have got the final doors open had he remembered, just by shooting them off. Whether he’d have got a flamer down there is anyone’s guess, because I had swarmed the area by then and cut most of his guys to pieces. Of course, when the Flamer falls, it’s all over, and this is how the game ended for Dave.

"You can't live without the fire; it's the heat that makes you strong.."

I had no such problems with the rules and did try the ‘run it up the middle’ strategy again, but without a rear guard and unfortunately I wasn’t very lucky with the command points so there weren’t that many extra actions my guys could do. Nonetheless, I made it right up to the crossroads at the end of the bottleneck, but I couldn’t get the door open and got swarmed by the mass of Genestealers Dave had amassed up there by then. He had apparently forgotten about my exposed rear, but that didn’t matter since I had all the Terminators in the same place anyway; Dave ran through most of them with considerable ease. Finally I started to get a bit more lucky with the command points, and engaged in a last desperate tactic of flaming one side of me, flaming the other, then running through the flames to make a dash for the objective. Needless to say, it was all over as soon as Brother Zael stepped in to the fire…

So, another draw, which isn’t ideal but better than the losses I’ve been amassing lately with the Horus Heresy and Thunderstone games. Next time, I might try putting a Terminator on overwatch on the left hand side of the bottleneck, to try to cut off one of the places the Genestealers can attack from and hopefully use the opportunity to get the door open to the room we have to destroy. Until then Dave, it’s another furious stalemate on the Sin of Damnation…

Just a thought that I think I’ll share with you all: Generally speaking, you need to get a six on one dice to shoot and kill a Genestealer with a Terminator. At first glance, this appears to be a bit harsh, given how good Space Marines are supposed to be. But look again… If you roll 2D6, there is a 1/3 chance that one of those dice will land on 6. If you took one shot in 40K, there’d be a 2/3 chance of a hit, and a ½ chance of a wound, which makes a 1/3 chance of a kill, so it’s actually near enough the same. Granted, in 40K Terminators would be allowed to fire twice because of their Storm Bolters, so effectively you’ve got half the chance of a kill that you would in 40K, but I would suggest that is representative of the low lighting and claustrophobic atmosphere on Space Hulk that make those targets so difficult to destroy. Maybe I think a little too much about this… but after all, those desperate, claustrophobic atmospheres are what make Space Hulk so much fun to play.

40K game coming up next…

An Expansion to The Horus Heresy?

This has been on my mind as well...

Just so there's no confusion here, I'm on about the board game published by Fantasy Flight Games. The reason this came up is that there has been a discussion on the forums about the possibility of an expansion to the game; basically speculation as to whether or not one is being developed, or if it's even possible. The most likely outcome at this point is that they may expand on some of the cards that you need to play the game, since the currently exisiting decks can be a little limiting. The whole thing is available to read here: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=170&efcid=1&efidt=356284&efpag=0 but as I've already posted on it, I thought I'd offer my take on the matter:

An expansion to the Horus Heresy itself seems unlikely. Black Library are publishing a wealth of background information on the matter including a series of about 20 novels, but if you read them the major battles that occur are kind of integral to the fact that Horus ends up at Terra and bombs the place. It would be no fun trying to recreate the entire Istvaan V massacre, for example; Horus has to win that and the game setting would have to reflect it, and for many gamers playing games they know they haven't got a chance of winning is no fun at all. Same with the battle between the Thousand Sons and the Space Wolves; I haven't read that but since the Thousand Sons make an appearance at the Siege of Terra, it's pretty obvious which side wins. So I can't really see them expanding on that because given the setting and the game mechanics, there's nothing to expand on.

What FFG might consider, and I've heard nothing about this at all and I'm purely speculating here, is putting some elements of the Horus Heresy in to a different gaming system all together. Still using the Horus Heresy background, but essentially different games. Again, I haven't read all the novels in the series, but how does a Space Hulk style stealth-em-up sound for Battle for the Abyss? A Roleplaying scenario based on Legion? A questing knights style game, which could probably be done with cards, to represent the early days of the Dark Angels? A space treck through the warp for Flight of the Eisenstein? If these things can fit in to board or card games, then it's Fantasy Flight who have got the imagination to make it happen, and it wouldn't necessarily have to tie in with the currently exisiting game. So what would you like to see?

The other bit that was mentioned on the forums that I wanted to comment on was an exansion that would use the Horus Heresy system to represent the war on Armageddon. On the surface, I think that's a fantastic idea; the 'mass battles' system that HH uses would be great to put on Armageddon and give you a feeling of controlling the whole war. I think that game would work very well. It's not going to happen though, for a number of reasons discussed on the forums, not least of which Games Workshop won't let them do it.

Now there's a lot of spiteful blogs going around about GW at the moment so let me be clear on this: My comments are to do with their intellectual property and their licensing agreement, and less to do with their so-called illicit business practices. For Fantasy Flight to produce games based on the Warhammer/40K background, they have to have a licensing agreement. For those of you who don't know what that means, well, FFG have to ask GW permission - and in all probablity pay them some money - to produce games based on the background. FFG have now produced a wealth of games based on Games Workshop's intellectual property. Now I don't claim to have read their licensing agreement, and I certainly haven't played all the games, but one thing is common to all the games FFG have produced: You can do NOTHING in those games that you'd be able to do by wandering in to Games Workshop one day and asking for an introduction to the game. My obvious example is Horus Heresy, you can't buy that game in Games Workshop and they certainly don't have a game like it. (I never played Epic 40k, but even if there were similarities in the mass-battle system GW don't support the game anymore.) Blood Bowl has been and gone, but FFG have released a card game for it. There are certainly no more roleplaying games you can buy at GW anymore, and FFG have produced quite a few of those. And FFG's games that do involve battles have completely different systems to the games that GW now produce and support.

Stay with me here... Think about what happens in the Horus Heresy game, it's participants, and it's game system. You can buy none of them as a model in Games Workshop. You can't buy a model of The Emporer, or Magnus the Red, Rogal Dorn or Fulgrim to use in games of 40K - and quite rightly so; there's enough balance issues in 40K as it is without putting the Primarchs in the mix. And yes, I'm aware that there are some published rules for use of the Primarchs in Apocalypse or whatever, and apparently there is a model of Angron floating around Forge World, but they're not readily available from the shop, and I've certainly not seen either. Then there's the Adeptus Custodes, the Mechanicus, Pre-Heresy World Eaters, the Fabricator General - I've never seen any of those at GW. What FFG have done is created a game that GW does not even come close to replicating with the models and systems that they have at the moment. I'm not saying they never will - perhaps one day they'll come up with a version of Apocalypse that requires an entire housing estate to play on, in which case it might be possible to use the Primarchs without unbalancing the game; I wouldn't put it past them - but for now, they seem to be happy with their 'replace the core games and army books once every five or so years' strategy.

Whereas Armageddon... The battle was every bit as huge, granted. But if you think about what happened and who participated in that, you'd find that with a more, for want of a better word, contemporary piece of 40K history, GW have the grounds covered to be able to replicate it themselves. There was Ghazkull and the Goffs, who you can buy and paint, Commissar Yarrick and the Armageddon Steel Legions who you can model off their exisiting products, and the Space Marine chapters involved were Black Templars, the Salamanders, and I'm pretty sure the Dark Angels were involved as well, possibly even Blood Angels. You can get models for all of those things already, and there's nothing in the setting that can't be represented from the terrain that GW now produce. So even if FFG had approached GW with the idea, GW are not going to want FFG to build a game that can be done with GW's currently existing product. If people want to do a Armageddon campaign, they can do already do it with the GW stuff, so GW's response would run along the lines of 'Sorry guys, we've got that bit covered already.' Which is a shame, because the system would work really well for that battle.

Now I'm aware the guy on the Forum referred to the original Chaos invasion of Armageddon. I'm not entirely aware of the story for that but I would imagine that GW have all that covered as well. So that kind of expansion seems unlikely.

There is of course the fact that the game may not be big enough to warrant an expansion; would enough people buy it? Well, it's fun to speculate...

I'll be back with some game reports in a bit, but I've just realised what time it is and I really do need to get out of bed now.

See y'all soon...