Last Week's Games: Split/Second, Eternal Crusade, X-Wing, Catan, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Pathfinder

Quite a bit to get through this week…

Get ready to blow stuff up!

My new game for this week was Split/Second, a racing game recommended by Metal Jesus in one of his Hidden Gems videos. It’s an arcade racing game with a TV show-like aesthetic, where you drive in various challenges to compete for enough credits to advance to the elite races – and hopefully the next episode! What I like about this is that this is purely an arcade racing game; there’s no micro-managing your vehicle, no sense of realism in the game. It’s just you against the cars and the environment.

Oh yes, the environment. The main gimmick of the game is that you can, once you’ve drifted enough and been on someone’s tail for long enough to build up your power meter, trigger certain parts of the environment to cause problems for your rivals. More often than not, these come in the form of explosions that throw them off the track, but there’s some fun ones as well. In one of the earlier tracks, triggering a certain point causes a digger to swing its shovel around that creates an obstacle. It works for a couple of reasons: Firstly, you can’t just press the button to ruin someone’s day; it needs precise timing and knowledge of the track in order to make it work effectively. Secondly, certain of these trigger points change the entire layout of the track, so chances are you won’t be racing on the same bit of track on the next lap!

I played Split/Second for a couple of hours and I was really enjoying it so I’ll definitely be playing some more!

I carried on with Eternal Crusade, there’s a live campaign running over the next few days where you have to win five battles for a large reward of Rogue Trader Credits. These are used to buy weapons and armour that affect the character aesthetically. They’re no better or worse than the equipment you can buy; they just look different. This is the Micro-Transaction element of the game; you can pay money for these things but since it wouldn’t increase my level of enjoyment of the gameplay, I certainly won’t be spending money on them! But if I can get enough RTC to get an upgrade for one of my guns, I might do that. Otherwise they’ll just sit there gathering e-dust!

I found myself with a little more time to be out and about than I normally do, and on Wednesday I went in to Warlords and Wizards and had a game of X Wing with my old friend Mason. I’ve known Mason a while and his collection of Imperial ships has grown in that time! I took on his force with my Trenchrunners, and had a run of good luck in the beginning of the game. However, the ferocious abilities of Quickdraw, as well as the support provided by a local shuttle, meant it was a very hard game that I eventually lost. Great fun though, cheers Mase!

Then on Friday I had a game of Catan with a couple of young lads who go to the shop. They’re getting quite in to it now and with that comes a certain amount of skill. I got off to what I thought was a good start by heading straight for the ports, but they managed to break up my Longest Road, and one of the lads won the game on at least three bought victory points. Well done!

All sorts of different roles...

We also had a quick game of One Night Ultimate Werewolf; I had the app on my Kindle Fire and we sat down for a four-player game. I was the Werewolf with one of the other lads, and I tried to bluff it to claim to be the seer; they saw through it eventually but time had run out by then and we all voted for the Troublemaker. Great fun!

Finally on Sunday I continued Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords with Dave, Victor, Morgan and Ian. For the first time, I’ve run a campaign all the way up to level 8, and the lads were happy to level up!

I’m expecting a quieter week next week, so see you then!

Star Wars: X-Wing Tournament at Titan Games Stourbridge

I took part in my first X-Wing Tournament today; it was a day of fierce competition and tense matches! I was running a Rebel squad, and my army list was as follows:

Components	Points	Total Points	Total Army
X-Wing: Rookie Pilot	21	21	100
X-Wing: Rookie Pilot	21	21
X-Wing: Rookie Pilot	21	21
Y-Wing: “Dutch” Vander	23	37
Concussion Missiles	4
Cluster Missiles	4
Ion Cannon Turret	5
R2 Astromech	1

 

So, a lot of my strategy was centred on Dutch’s special ability, which is to allow a friendly ship within range 1 to acquire a target lock as soon as he does the same. I invariably deployed in a square formation, usually on the right corner of the board. Here’s how I got on:

My first opponent was Gareth, who was running the one thing I wasn’t expecting: Swarming rebels. Rebel fighters are usually quite expensive but when the Z-95 Headhunters were released for the Rebels, it became possible to buy ships for twelve points each, and since each has to take four hits to go down, tackling them head on is a messy business indeed. Gareth had six of them and also a Smuggler YT-1300 for some extra clout. I managed to take out one of the Z-95s, but after that they blocked anything that remotely resembled a clever move and I lost the game outright.

My second opponent was another guy called Matt, and he was running an interesting combination: two TIE fighters, a Firespray and a TIE Phantom. I recognised that there was going to be a lot of talent on the field, given that Imperial squads usually run numbers, so I decided to press my advantage by taking out the two TIE fighters first. Here the Y-Wing came into its own, as I managed to Ion Cannon the Firespray into an asteroid so that he couldn’t use his considerable firepower. After destroying that, the focus came onto the TIE Phantom and that proved to be a pain in the bum, since I just didn’t have the manoeuvrability to get a clear shot on it. I did my best with the Ion cannon, but in the end time was called and I won the game on points.

My third game was fun and extremely tense. Andy was running a peculiar set-up of Soontir Fel, Howlrunner, Backstabber, a Black Squadron and an Academy Pilot. This struck me as odd as it was the first time I’d fought a squadron with no duplicate pilots, which meant that for once it mattered which one I should take out first. Andy suffered from trying to fly the four TIE fighters in close formation; a powerful move if you can pull it off but if not you end up crashing into each other. This gave me some more time to get into position, and while my first Rookie Pilot didn’t last very long, I was fortunate enough to be able to take out Howlrunner quite quickly. Backstabber was the next to go, but the rest of the match was a deadly game of Cat and Mouse as we tried to outmanoeuvre each other. I wasn’t able to destroy anything else but neither was Andy, giving me a win on points.

My final game was against Russ, who was running two B-wings and an A-wing, rather cleverly deployed. I thought I was doing OK to begin with; I lost a Rookie but manage to take the lesser of the two B-wings with me. However, by this point I was exhausted and my concentration was slipping; I managed to make the mistake of flying my Y-wing the wrong way. I ended up off the board, which meant I had one Rookie left to take on two Named Pilots. He never had a chance, but I made Russ work for it!

So, two wins, two losses, and out of fourteen people I came ninth. I’m quite pleased with that, since as it was my first tournament I thought I was going to get absolutely destroyed. There’ll be time enough later to think about how I could improve my squad, though. I might get an A-wing next, and see where that takes me!

1/3/2014: X-Wing: A Massacre

Ado guys, it's been a while since I've played this...

I had a game of X-Wing today in Titan Games with Rich Bloomer and it was basically a massacre; I took three fighters to his five and was destroyed piecemeal. But as ever, I'm willing to learn from my mistakes.

My squadron was:

Components	Points	Total Points	Total Army
X-Wing: Biggs Darklighter	25	28	100
R2-F2	3
X-Wing: Wedge Antilles	29	33
R2 Astromech	1
Marksmanship	3
Y-Wing: Horton Salm	25	39
Proton Torpedoes (2)	8
Ion Cannon Turret	5
R5 Astromech	1

The idea behind the squadron was that Biggs and Wedge - both in X-Wings - would fly in close formation. Wedge would use his offensive capabilities of reducing the defender's agility to do some damage, and Biggs' effect that forces the enemy to fire at him rather than another fighter would keep the heat off Wedge. It kind of worked, but I mis-interpreted Biggs' effect. I thought that if the target was within range 1 of the shooter then the effect would kick in, but in fact the target had to be within range 1 of Biggs. I'll have to be a bit more careful if I'm going to run that tactic again!

The Y-Wing was to provide long-range support and hopefully score a couple of kills early on to keep the heat off the X-Wings. Sadly this didn't happen, though it was astonishing how difficult it was to kill; Rich spent around 3 or 4 turns with that being the only model left! The Ion cannon proved surprisingly effective as well, though perhaps this is because I misread the rules. I thought if one of my attacks hit then it cancelled out all other dice, so Rich wouldn't have had to roll his - but I've read the relevant section on the Fantasy Flight Forums and apparently he would still have been able to roll his dice, but I wouldn't have done more than 1 damage no matter how well I rolled. The effect of forcing the enemy to do nothing but fly slowly in one direction for a turn can take someone out of the fight for a turn though, and it ignores the normal rules for arc of fire so it is not to be taken lightly.

Also, did you see the mistake in the army list? Yes, I put the R2 unit with Wedge and the R5 unit with Horton; it should have been the other way around.

The R2 unit allows all movements of 1-2 speed as green manoeuvres. This would have been invaluable for the Y-Wing, because it has more than the usual number of red manoeuvers to give it stress tokens, and very few greens. The R2 unit would have been great for counteracting this.

The R5 unit on the other hand allows you to turn over a Critical Hit card at the end phase so that it only counts as a hit rather than a Critical. Honestly, I only took this one to fill out the points, but it proved useful in the end so it's worth hanging on to until I find something better.

So what happened in the battle?

I deployed my fighters in a 'step' formation; Wedge, Biggs and Horton. The first turn was basically spent moving towards each other on a diagonal slant across the board. I had hoped to take the flank of the TIE squadron, but instead I ended up flinging Wedge headfirst in to Darth Vader. He lasted two turns. Biggs was next to go; after flipping around to face the other way, he fired off a couple of shots only to be shot down by the entire squadron facing him. Horton lasted a little longer, as his craft was a little more hard-wearing, but he just didn't have the firepower to hold his own against 5 TIEs and went down after a few turns.

What would I do differently? Well, apart from the aforementioned changes to the army list, I would consider using the Ion cannon a lot more as it was surprisingly useful and did a good job of taking at least some of the enemy out of the fight. I've got another game coming up tomorrow so we'll see...