Last Week's Games: Murder in the Alps, Super House of Dead Ninjas, Colonization, Ultra Street Fighter 2.

Last week, I managed to beat Regicide (see my review here) and after finishing a game that took me 60 hours to complete, I got right on a ‘Pick Up and Play’ kick, where I play a few games for a bit and move on. I know what games I ought to have been playing – Kingdom Hearts isn’t going to be finishing itself, and all the games I’ve bought as part of a series I want to collect would probably be a bit more significant if I played them every now and again. But picking up another 40+ hour campaign is something I’m rarely in the mood to do after beating a game of any significant length, (not that it should have taken me anywhere near that long to beat Regicide but somehow that’s where we are.)

I bet it was always cold though.

I initially looked to my phone, specifically Murder in the Alps. I discussed this last week, along with the reasons I was enjoying the game and a little cross with its payment model. However, I carried on playing and watching videos, getting to the end of the first two stories. It’s pretty good in an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery way, although all of the working out is done in the script – all you’re doing is finding the hidden items. The first story was pretty good, the second was ok but disappointingly short; I’m wondering whether Nordcurrent frontloaded their main efforts into the first story to engage people, and put less effort into the rest? I suspect we’ll find out as we’re going along.

A brief moment to collect your thoughts, then...

I tried a game on the PC that I’d been thinking I should look at for some time – Super House of Dead Ninjas. This is a fast-paced Rogue-like game where you play as a Ninja jumping down the rooms of a tower, slashing, bombing and, er, shuriken-ing your enemies as you go through. It reminded me of Rogue Legacy, unsurprisingly, but this has a much faster pace. Generally speaking it’s a solid experience, and does a lot to promote the “Just one more go!” vibe! As a pick up and play game, it’s excellent, though I don’t know if it will keep my interest into the long term.

Hopefully I'll build a map like this at some point.

One of the games that came up on Rock Paper Shotgun’s 50 Greatest Strategy Games was Sid Meier’s Colonization, and I’ve had that game for a while so I gave it a go. This purports to be an offshoot of the early Civilisation games, focusing more specifically on the period of history when what we now call America was colonized, up to the point where they achieved independence from European control. It was described as a far more focussed experience than Civilisation, and I believe it; rather than tell a sweeping tale of the dawn of the earth to the end of the Space Race for whatever that’s worth, Colonization focuses on a specific part of history that defined the people in the country that made the game, and educated me (I’d never really thought about the War for Independence before.) On the other hand, it’s an old game and not that easy to play; if you don’t know what to do in what order then you can fall flat on your face quite quickly. It’s my intention to keep on with this, but I’ll be using a lot of guides to get through it!

Shocking.

Finally, when I had slightly under an hour to spare last night, I had a go with Ultra Street Fighter 2 on my Switch. I can usually take or leave fighting games, but Street Fighter is probably the ultimate pick up and play game if you’re playing in single player mode, and a nice way to fill 40 minutes. I set the difficulty as high as it would go and played through most of the game as Ryu without losing even once, which I was quite pleased with. I eventually beat it as Vega, and was quite pleased to see his ending sequence substantially different from what I was used to (Street Fighter II: Championship Edition, where it was a text scroll.) It’s not a new game but most of the updates are in the right places!

Backlog Beatdown: Killing the King with Warhammer 40000: Regicide

I bought Warhammer 40,000: Regicide last Summer when I was on a Games Workshop kick. It was my intention to go for a complete collection of all the Games Workshop licensed games, and Regicide had the added benefit of me having seen some coverage on it from TotalBiscuit. It looked more of an oddity than anything else, but I managed to see it through to the end.

On this level, you have to kill, not capture, the enemy...

The game is essentially Chess set in the 40K universe, using the Space Marines and Orks as chess pieces to simulate the battles.  How Regicide differs from Chess is that once you have moved, you can use abilities of your pieces on an Initiative Points system to attack your opponent. This works on a percentile mechanic, and usually amounts to shooting them, or attacking them in close combat if you’re in an adjacent square. It takes longer to eliminate a piece using this method, but if you focus enough attacks in one place, you can take out entire armies without having to capture anything; the usual method for Chess. This is augmented by additional abilities from the various pieces: Devastators (Bishops) have the ability to focus their attacks to do more damage at the expense of being able to move, Assault Marines (Knights) have increased attack power after they move and can also throw Krak (anti-armour) grenades, and so on. This creates an additional strategic layer to the game and sets it apart from either Chess or 40K in a way that, for the most part, works reasonably well.

The game is presented well enough; the graphics are fine and the sound is good. The music is thematic, and loops in a way that runs just underneath your attention level and doesn’t distract. And the sound effects are all in the right places; the guns have a nice kick to them and the close combat attacks sound nice and meaty. The voice acting is competently-performed, and has no surprises for anybody familiar with the 40K universe; tough hulking warriors for the Space Marines, and barely-intelligent growling from the Orks.

The takedown animations are suitably brutal...

The bulk of the game revolves around the Campaign; a series of 50 levels that put the Blood Angels against the Orks in various different deployments and scenarios. There are primary objectives that you need to achieve to beat the level: Eliminate a certain piece, move one of your pieces to a certain square, use a certain ability on a specific piece. There also are secondary objectives that you can complete to achieve a higher score, and these tend to be more specific: Capturing a piece rather than killing it, don’t lose any of your pieces, use a certain ability in a specific place. Depending on the mission these can be very tough, but they make for a fun challenge! However, the level design isn’t always on point. Granted, there is only so much you can do with an 8x8 board, but some of the objectives are designed in such a way that the only way to achieve it is to replay the level over and over again until the AI makes a mistake. That, coupled with the random number generation, means that some of the later missions in particular are won more through luck than judgement.

Sadly, this is all the game really has to offer in its current state. Skirmish games of Regicide – as close to chess as the game gets – is probably enjoyable against a live opponent but the servers are almost completely dead and it’s all but impossible to get a game. If you’re going to play ‘Hotseat’ (both players on the same computer,) you might as well just play chess or 40K. As the points you acquire from the campaign are used to unlock customisation options like different skins and weapons for use in the Skirmish mode, there’s not much incentive to get those either. The single player can be fun, but the sometimes unfair difficulty and RNG makes it frustrating more often than not, and renders the game very difficult to recommend on that basis. I enjoyed it, but it’s a 40K game; I was always going to like it. I don’t necessarily know if anyone else will.

Final Score: 2/5. If you’re sure.

Last Week's Games: Regicide (I beat it!) and Murder in the Alps

For the second time in as many weeks I find myself apologising for being late with this blog. I wanted to beat the final level on Regicide before I wrote it, so that I could write about beating Regicide! But by the time I eventually did, it was far too late in the night to write anything meaningful about it and I had work the following day. But I’m here now, and I finally managed to beat Warhammer 40K: Regicide.

Well you're about to die, sonflower...

If you’ve been following my comments on this game you’ll know that Regicide can be a bit hit-and-miss with its level design. Some of them were great, but some of the levels and secondary objectives were designed so that it was only possible to do it if the A.I. made a mistake. Thankfully, the final level of Regicide was an absolute beauty. The Space Marine’s objective is to take down the Warboss (King,) with the secondary objective of eliminating all of the Orks. The Orks have the advantage in numbers (they have two more pawns than normal and the Space Marines have two fewer,) and the placement of the terrain makes them difficult to deal with. It took many, many attempts; I found myself taking out as many of the Shoota Boyz (pawns) as possible to stop them throwing Stik Bombs at my Librarian and Captain (Queen and King,) as they do a surprising amount of damage if you ignore them. The Weirdboy (Queen) is always a messy piece to contend with, the Lootaz (Bishops) are brutal in surprise attacks and the Stormboyz (Knights) can be lethal if you forget about their movement patterns. The Meganobz (Rooks) are very hard to take down, thankfully I managed to capture them both. But even after all that, the Warboss is a very tough opponent; he doesn’t take much damage no matter what you’re firing at him, and can call in a shield every few turns. The only way I found to beat him was to use my Terminator (Rook) and Librarian to force him to the back of the board and into a Checkmate position, but even then there was always the risk of him using his bombardment move to attack my Captain from a distance!

Nonetheless, I managed to beat a game that I’ve put roughly 60 hours into. The ending was… well, thematically, it fitted. But the set-up from the intro video and some of the cut-scenes promised a lot more than it delivered. There was a potential set-up for a sequel, but Hammerfall Publishing are not an active presence right now and unless someone else picks up the rights, I can’t see it happening. I’ll try and have a review out by the end of the week!

I’ve also been playing Murder in the Alps, the first Hidden Object game I’ve played. This purports to be a murder mystery, and you solve puzzles and clues in order to progress through the game. It looks great, with a graphic novel-type vibe, and the script is well-performed if not particularly well-written. The hidden object sequences, while far from the most exhilarating gameplay mechanics around, nonetheless give a nice sense of accomplishment if you manage to get through them without help. I’ve found myself pleasantly engaged!

Who dunnit? Probably not the girl in the middle
since that's who you play as.

However, the game is let down by incredibly poor pacing with its payment model. It works, as many free-to-play mobile games do, on an “energy” system, whereby anything you do in the game takes up a certain amount of energy and you have to either buy more, or wait until it recharges naturally to keep playing. The trouble is you’ll only get about 10 minutes of play out of the game before you run out of energy, and because it has a very slow recharge rate, you’ll be waiting for almost a day before you can play again. When I was playing I discovered I had the option to speed this up by watching advertising videos, but I don’t remember it being there when I first started the game!

I don’t know what will happen next week, as most of my free time has been taken up by this week’s content, but we’ll see what happens!

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!

Last Week's Games: Kingdom Hearts, Regicide, XCOM, 8-Ball Pool, Crossword, Sniper 3D Assassin

An interesting week this week. Six games to talk about!

I progressed with Kingdom Hearts, beating the Deep Jungle and making it as far as Agrabah before I stopped. At this point you have to do some back-tracking to allow the Gummi Ship to fly to other worlds, but I’ll take this opportunity to talk about an element of Kingdom Hearts 1.5 that wasn’t in the original – The Gummi Missions. This takes the form of certain objectives when flying the ship between worlds; like scoring a certain number of points, or taking out a certain number of enemies with a particular kind of gun equipped. I consider this an improvement, as previously there was no real reason to do the Gummi flights other than to get to the next world. It gives something extra for the completionists, and I would love to unlock them all.

This took me a few goes!

I also continued with Regicide, finally beating the end of Act 2 that I had been stuck on for ages! I progressed several missions in to Act 3 as well, the game being good at promoting the “just one more go” mentality, and it was quite late into the night before I realised I should stop! The screenshot was one I did myself (normally I pull them off Google Image Search,) because of something going on with Facebook over the weekend. I’m in a group called Gaming Dads, which given the levels of nastiness that can plague the internet is a really nice group to be in. Sadly, one of the members recently lost his partner after an illness, and her funeral was on Saturday. To show our support, we were supposed to upload a screenshot of what we were all playing over the weekend, with the tags: #tucker #wegotyoubrother. I chose this game because it was most convenient to do it on my laptop; I’m glad I finally found a use for Dxtory in the end!

I was ill on Thursday and had some time off work, and I played a bit of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I continued a game I’d started in November, and it didn’t go very well. In the space of a few missions I’d lost some of my best soldiers. It might warrant yet another restart but I’d been doing pretty well up until then, and I’d had to deal with a massive setback during the one time I beat the game so you never know.

An old picture but does the job!

But I was very interested in the games I’d been playing on mobile devices! I’ve been playing 8-Ball Pool a lot this week, and I think of all the games I downloaded onto my Kindle Fire 7, this is the one I’ve enjoyed the most, simply because there’s a measure of skill involved rather than just clicking on things until you can’t click on things any more.

I downloaded onto my phone a couple of other games: Crossword, which is as it sounds – crossword puzzles. I’ve never been much good at this but I’m sticking to the easy puzzles for now, and the game does help you: The clues you solve correctly lock and have a beige colour on them so you know, and you can ask for a hint. You have a limited number of these but you get three every time you beat a puzzle so that’s not a major issue. Sometimes I use a website to solve the clues, which might be considered cheating, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to find different ways of saying things. It might help next time I play Scrabble!

Also I’ve been playing Sniper 3D Assassin: Gun Shooter. This is a game where you’re given a target to shoot at, and you have to kill them with a sniper rifle or suitable weapon. I’ve been having fun with it but I’ve reached the point in the game where I have to start paying for things in order to carry on, as I need to buy a new weapon which I can only do with diamonds. I’m not sure how long I’m going to put up with being forced to watch ad after ad in order to keep enjoying it!

So, a busy week!

 

Last Week's Games: Kingdom Hearts, Regicide and Ticket to Ride

A difficult boss to beat. Some might say...
He was tricky.

I was quite busy with games this week! I carried on with Kingdom Hearts 1.5, getting as far as the Coliseum. It was a pleasure to go through Wonderland again, and the harder difficulty setting means that the fights are challenging – I had to use a continue for the first time. I also noticed that, as I’d chosen the Guardian class at the start of the game, Sora’s abilities were developing differently; I was getting different powers to assign to my action points than I was used to for the warrior class I usually pick. I did this because the characters that you meet along the way are usually fighters, so I could conceivably swap Goofy out for, say, Tarzan and still have a balanced party.

Unusually for me, the highlights were the boss battles, the Trickmaster and Cerberus. I had to analyse their attack patterns and find out what attacks work best and where in order to defeat them. The Trickmaster took a few goes! Maybe I’m enjoying boss battles more as I progress through games in general, possibly because I’m taking them as a welcome change of pace that I actually have to think about.

Not quite the mission I was on but
it looked a lot like this.

I also carried on with Regicide, the 40K chess game. I cleared the level I was stuck on last week! On the other flank of the board were three Ork Shoota Boyz. These weren’t part of the mission objective, but the objective targets were deployed in a defensive formation that was tough to crack. Out of a need to try something else, I attacked the Shoota Boyz, and found something that I’d forgotten about – In chess, you have to move; you can’t forgo your turn. So once I’d eliminated Shoota Boyz, I forced the Storm Boyz and the Meganob to move and break formation. At this point, the battle became a lot easier. It still took a few goes – a lot of it is still reliant on the random number generation – but the different approach helped!

I breezed through the next couple of missions, before getting stuck on the last one. The last mission in Act 2 of the Blood Angels campaign involves having to take down almost an entire chess set of Orks. You have all your pieces except your king and its pawn, they have all theirs except their queen and its pawn. Your objective is to take down the Warboss (King.) I once again fell down on the secondary objective, which in this case was killing – not capturing, the conventional method – all enemy units. I’d worn the Ork forces down to just the Warboss and a Meganob. Unfortunately I’d misunderstood the objective and killed the Warboss first, ending the mission but as the Meganob was still alive, I failed the secondary objective. What a way to mess it up!

Finally, on Friday night I sat down for a game of Ticket to Ride with Kirsty, Fran and Phil. I’ve said it before but not for nothing: one of the main indicators of good game design is how small the gap between picking it up for the first time and understanding how it all works; the other three had never played the game before and were playing very well by the end! My three tickets at the start of the game had stacked, and I took over much of the West Coast of America quite quickly. Not wanting to deliberately throw the game for the benefit of the people who’d never played, but also not wanting to dominate the game without them even realising, I then took another two tickets which stretched out to the East side – not quite to New York, but near enough. I reasoned that if I could achieve those tickets as well, I would definitely have earned a win! I nearly managed it as well, but then Kirsty, who felt she was well out of the runnings by then, blocked the last route I needed to take! So I lost the points for the two tickets I’d been brazen enough, which cost me the game. Fran won in the end, and we will have her quote of “Eat My Steam, Bitches!” running through our heads forever more.



Last Week's Games: Kingdom Hearts and Regicide

One rather prevalent theme running through this blog lately is not having time to play many games these days. It’s becoming somewhat cliché now, but it’s true; between everything and everyone I’m supposed to be dividing my attention between, I basically get Monday afternoons to sit down and play some games. And not always then! Last Monday I spent the vast majority of that time shopping, ironing, sorting washing out, doing a couple of bits and pieces for work that need doing, and of course writing this blog.

Some people didn't like the Gummi sequences.
I love them!

What didn’t help was that the game I chose to play was Kingdom Hearts 1.5 + 2.5 Remix on the PS4. Not that the game itself is bad – quite the reverse, actually. But because it was a recent acquisition for me and I hadn’t played it yet, I felt compelled to wait for the game to download before I could play it. I actually had the option to jump straight into the game, but from what I understand from others who have done this with all sorts of games, this rarely amounts to more than a title screen, and as I was talking to someone on Facebook Messenger at the time I thought I’d stick with that, for what turned out to be roughly three quarters of an hour for a 4.5 gig download. I know that waiting for games to download onto the modern consoles is a thing that happens now and shouldn’t be news to anybody really, but I’m not used to it yet! I’ve heard it said that it’s to do with the structure of the PS4; no matter how fast your internet connection is, it can’t receive more than a few megabytes at a time. Given that my laptop would have done that download in about a third of the time, I have no trouble believing that!

The upshot of all this was that by the time I’d got through it, I had about an hour to play the game on Monday night. But it’s always nice to play a game and enjoy every moment of it! Kingdom Hearts is an absolute joy to play; a successful integration of familiar characters if you’re a fan of the Final Fantasy games, and a lovely bit of fan-fiction if you like Disney characters. The version I’m playing at the moment is Final Mix, and I’m not entirely sure what the differences were supposed to be but the only one I’ve noticed so far is that the sounds on the background music was slightly different. The composition was the same but the instruments had been… improved? I don’t know. I like it for now, but I had it tested in Traverse Town. I’ve got a lot of investment in that theme; that gorgeous clarinet melody over the piano accompaniment is potentially the most welcoming, yet hauntingly lonely 16 bars of music I think I’ve ever heard and I didn’t want that messed with. It turns out there’s an extra keyboard (I think) sound added above the melody; I was sceptical at first but in the end I decided it adds to it more than not.

I was actually looking for a picture of the Death Company.
Had to make do with this instead.

When I had some spare time with my laptop I played Regicide for a while, the 40K chess game. I’ve been stuck on a level for a while now, where I have to eliminate three Ork Stormboyz (Knights) and one Meganob (Rook) with three Tactical Marines, (pawns,) Three Assault marines (Knights) and a Librarian (Queen.) The problem I am running in to is that I’m going for the secondary objectives as well, in which none of my pieces are allowed to fall. If you lose the Librarian, you fail the mission, but if you lose anything else you won’t achieve your secondary objectives. Maybe I’m doing something wrong but I’ve run in to a few missions like this where the only hope I have of achieving those objectives is to wait for the A.I. to make a mistake, and take the win from there. I’ve said in the past that games need to have a solid process and a satisfying outcome; you rarely get either when you rely on luck!

See you all again next week.

Last Week's Games: Mordheim, Regicide and the Witness

I started this week with a game that might by now be considered an old favourite: Mordheim, City of the Damned. I think what inspired me to do that was that at some point I had a look at the achievement list on Steam, and found that there’s a lot of achievements that only a very small number of folks have achieved. Wanting to be one of them, I’m aiming high this time, wanting to get some heroes to level 10! It’s not an excellent game – the bugs can get in the way sometimes, and it tanks the power on my laptop, and that’s even before we get into the somewhat limited map design and ferociously tough objectives. But as you’ve probably gathered from the tone of some of my more recent posts, I love the Games Workshop licensed games, and Mordheim has been my favourite of them so far.

Witch Hunters. They hunt Witches, I've heard.

By “ferociously tough objectives,” I’m talking specifically about the Crush their Will missions, which is Mordheim’s version of Capture the Flag – you have to steal the enemy’s idol at their cart and return it to your own. The problem that it runs in to is that the battle system works on Morale – the war bands need to take a morale check once their morale falls below a certain point, and if they fail, which they almost always do, the battle is over. The trouble is that there’s rarely enough time to get from one side of the map to the other to get the idol and bring it back to your own, except for certain maps that are generated randomly so there’s no way of strategizing this. And even if there were, you would have to use one of your heroes to do this, as your henchmen don’t have the same kind of mobility. Then again, I tend to play either Mercenaries or Possessed, I don’t very often play Skaven so the position might be different there, we shall see! I played for a long time until I ran into a game-breaking bug that stops you from beating one of the campaign missions, and while I did get some advice on beating it, I ended up starting again as the Witch Hunters.

I also had another go at Regicide, 40K’s version of Chess, where I’ve got stuck on a mission where you have to stop three Ork Stormboyz (knights) from getting into two squares on your side of the board with four Tactical Marines (pawns) and two Devastators (bishops.) The problem I’m running in to is that the secondary objective is to capture the three Stormboyz, (i.e. the conventional way you’d do it in Chess,) not kill them. It’s a tricky thing to do because of course it doesn’t stop the Stormboyz trying to kill you, so even though you make the right moves, your pieces could very well be killed by the enemy shooting at them before they have a chance to capture! So ultimately I’m relying on a mistake by the AI, which isn’t a particularly rewarding way of dealing with things.

I tried Eternal Crusade again after being away from it for about a week, during which the competition seemed to have ramped up in difficulty! I found myself not enjoying it quite as much as I used to, it might just be getting a little old now.

This bit's a beauty...

My new game for this week was The Witness, a puzzle game in which you travel round an island solving maze-like puzzles. This sounds like the most boring thing in the world but I actually quite like things like that and I’m enjoying my time with it, even if I had to look at IGN to find out what to do with one of the Tetris puzzles. It’s a beautifully-presented game, and the ambience does a lot to keep my mind focussed on a couple of different things at the same time. My only complaint so far is about the puzzles that you only appear to have one chance to complete; if you don’t, that puzzle is shut down. It seems a little harsh not to get a second go at it, especially if the puzzle rules have changed!

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!