5/10/11: Thunderstone

OK this was a bit of a strange set-up:

Dave and I have had a few goes at the Thunderstone series now, and since his Resident Evil game is played in much the same way, we decided for the first time to use Randomiser cards, which as the name suggests randomly determine what Heroes will be available, what monsters they will face, and what items will be available in the village. It was a bit of a funny draw, we had Dwarves, Redblades, Amazons and Clerics for our Heroes, and Ooze, Undead: Doom and Dragons for our enemies. Our weapons seemed quite poorly equipped to deal with them…

Taking inspiration from what I’ve been doing (I don’t quite know why as Dave has won the last 2 games of this,) Dave immediately set to work on building up his magic power. As we only had Clerics who could use magic, he had to concentrate mainly on what items he could buy. He bought all of the Lightstone Gems and used the money from these to buy most of the Fireball spells while keeping his deck fairly small; on paper this meant that he could be rocking a lot of magical power at any given time and he wouldn’t even need to use a hero to do it. We’d made things very difficult for ourselves by drawing three very powerful dragons as the first 3 monsters in the dungeon and we needed an equally powerful attack in order to take any of them down; Dave’s combination of spells and light did him well enough to take an early lead, but I wasn’t out of it yet…

My strategy was to use mainly Dwarves. They’re not wonderful fighters in themselves, but they get a huge bonus to their attack if you give them an edged weapon. We only had one edged weapon in the game – the dagger – but having dwarves gain an extra 4 attack points every time you equipped one turned out to be invaluable in some stages. However, my deck grew so large that I couldn’t count on being able to draw daggers and dwarves in the same hand, so I took to recruiting Redblades instead, who have a larger attack bonus that isn’t affected by weapons in quite the same way. This took a long time to pull off, but when I did, I could sometimes bring more pain to the Dungeon using cards that have attack effects than Dave could ever hope to manage by drawing fireball cards.

Unfortunately it was too little too late for me. We reached the end of the night and Dave had to go home; we counted up the victory points and Dave had almost double the points I had. I’d have needed a miracle just to stay in the game to the end…

Reflecting on it, my strategy was a good one – I just went about it the wrong way around. Redblades always get +2 to their attack whatever happens, whereas Dwarves only get +1 unless you equip them with an edged weapon, which since the only one available was a dagger often made them little more use than the Militia that you start the game with. Granted, the effect of adding the weapon to Dwarves is huge and only a fool would fail to take advantage of it, but if I’d have brought Redblades first, then I could have done some moderate damage without it being contingent on buying extra weapons. I could have then got in some early kills, and bought some more daggers – and finally Dwarves.

Of course, the Randomiser cards make it extremely unlikely that we’ll ever play with exactly that combination again, but at least I know what I should be looking for next time. Also, checking back over the game we did misinterpret some rules with regard to what counts as a hero and what doesn’t, so we’ll have to concentrate a bit harder on that next time. Still, all in all a very enjoyable game and one day I will have my revenge on you, Dave. Oh yes. I will have my revenge…

Batman Begins (Xbox version)

I've had this game on the Xbox for some time. I gave it another run through last week since Amy has re-kindled my interest in Batman, and here's what I think of the game:

For a bit of context, I've got all the Batman films since the Tim Burton movie back in the 80s, and I've enjoyed all of them up to a point. However, the Batman Begins film really did put some extra strength into the franchise. The acting was (generally) far stronger; Christian Bale makes a far more believable character out of Bruce Wayne for not having to be nice to absolutely everybody, and for having character flaws that don't necessarily involve his alter-ego. Michael Caine was wonderful as Alfred for his sense of humour and also for the fact that he's not as passive as the versions of him I've seen in the past. The villains were beyond excellent; not much masks and make-up going on in favour of more intricate, urbanised bad guys in the shape of the Ra's Al Ghul and Carmine Falcone. An idea that the film explores briefly at the end is that people like The Joker, The Riddler, The Penguin and Catwoman came about less as an intentional antagonist to The Batman, but rather as a reaction to a vigilante in a costume. Scarecrow is, of course, a law unto himself: He creates his costume and persona for his own reasons. But the overall theme of the film was dark, gritty - and the added element of Batman causing fear came far closer, in my opinion, to what Batman was supposed to be. He might be athletic, but so is Spiderman, any of the X-Men, Green Lantern or anyone you care to mention. He might have gadgets but so does James Bond. But rather than fearing his enemies, he gives his enemies something to fear, and that's what makes Batman unique.

This was going to have to play a huge part in the game in order to pull it off, and as a system, it works quite well. Try rushing in to a fight and you are reminded that Batman is, after all, just a man, as you get your proverbials handed to you by five very angry thugs, probably with guns. Take the time to look around the area, however, and you'll soon come up with different ways of tipping the odds in your favour; dodgy scaffolding you can collapse with a batarang, a pipe you can hang from to pick off your enemies without them knowing, or setting off some explosive barrels. Once they're suitably terrified, drop a Flashbang on them, and you can take the vast majority of the enemies out without having to resort to fighting. It's satisfying to do, especially if you like things with a little more depth than 'Let's find something and kill it,' but don't want such a challenge that it is hard to work out what to do. It is a little simplistic, and the auto-target tool means it will rarely take you long to work out what to do, but you have to remember that the only game before this that came even close to having fear as its main mechanic was The Thing. It was a brave move, and really did push the PS2 version of the game to the limits of it's machine.

Get up from that one and you're a braver man than me...

The game has sometimes been criticised for its length (it's not long by comparison of some other games,) but actually it's as long as it needs to be. The 'Fear' mechanic would probably get old if the game were to last any longer; it's just about the right length so that you can do pretty much everything there is to do in the game without getting bored before you reach the end. And there is a lot of fun to be had from what the game gets you to do; it's never taxing to work out what you have to do to beat the level, but the look on the bad guy's faces when they know you're there but can't see you is worth it. When the time finally comes where you have to have a straight fight and kick ass, there are combos for the avid gamers, but button-mashing works just as well. The targeting system is a bit clunky - you'll be tearing one guy a new one, and suddenly start running across to his mate on the other side of the room, and you won't be able to help but blame it for some untimely deaths.

The graphics and settings are brilliant and compliment the film setting; it has the dirty, gritty vibe that makes Gotham City so special and it is suitably bleak; far from Adam West running around in broad daylight carrying bombs. The music is tied in with the film and works well, and the voice acting is for the most part good. One very careless blunder of using the same sound patch for different types of enemy spoiled it a little - Ninjas from the League of Shadows have their own voices, but scaring them with a dropped scaffolding triggers the same fear reaction you heard from Dr Crane's thugs earlier on in the game. But for the most part, the game is presented very well indeed; exactly the level of detail you'd expect from a film tie-in.

So, a game that looks and feels great, if not executed terribly well. It's worth a look though, and 5 years after buying the game I still went back for another go, so it's not without staying power.

I'm a bit busy for games at the moment but I've had a go with Buffy the Vampire Slayer so you might be hearing from that quite soon...

19/9/2011: Thunderstone

I got the original Thunderstone game for my Birthday, and we gave it a go tonight. Actually it was a dice roll between that, Resident Evil, or talking about a novel that Dave wants to write about Tau and Orks. But I'm glad we gave this one a go. It's been far too long...

OK so there are some differences between this and Thunderstone Dragonspire that I played with Dave a few months ago, but they're mostly aesthetic differences and the general flow of the game remains the same. It's been a while, though, so for the uninitiated: You take a party of heroes into a dungeon to take out as many monsters as you can. You need to find the Thunderstone - shuffled into the last few cards - which stops the game immediately, and you gain a number of points based on the amount of monsters you kill and how many points they are worth; the one with the most points at the end of the game is the winner. Instead of going in to the dungeon you can spend some time in 'the village,' where you buy upgrades and more powerful heroes to aid you in your quest, and is literally the only way to deal with some of the game's tougher monsters.

I should mention that we started off with the basic starter set of cards. Normally they would be randomised but the starter set gives you a fairly balanced set of heroes with enough nasties to provide enough of a challenge. We started off with a basic party which would, as ever, needed to be added to. My tactics centred around building up my magic abilities, so I bought a lot of Elf Wizard and Clerics. Neither of their effects are all that much good until they get levelled up; the Cleric's effect of swapping a Disease card for another card is useful but a bit of a gamble because you don't know what the next card will be, and by the time you work it out your already committed into walking into the dungeon; you have to fight something, regardless of whether or not you can win. The attack power of the magic cards are fairly low at first and there are no magic cards in your starting hand, so it was a long time before I could venture into the dungeon to kill any monsters. The upshot of all of this is by the time I finally did, Dave had already got a lot of kills and levelled his heroes up quite a bit.

I began to pull it back when it transpired that because I was so dependent on magic, I no longer needed my militia or any of their associated effects; dropping those cards gave me a more efficient deck and there were a lot more options open to me for attack. I maxed out one Elf Archmage, which certainly helped but I can't quite figure out their effect; you get to put a monster from your hand back in to the dungeon. You don't get to fight it again because the Thunderstone will come up long before you see it, so all you're doing is throwing away victory points. The only reason I can think of for doing it is removing some low-reward monsters to speed up your deck, and in a game with more people that might be a reasonable tactic but it wasn't really going to help against Dave; if I didn't kill something, he would. So, I kept blasting the monsters with magic and whittling down the dungeon, until the Thunderstone was revealed...

Between the Thunderstone and the two of us there were two Nixies, who considering how proficient our decks were by then were very easy to kill. I killed one, and then Dave drew a bad hand so I killed the other, claiming the Thunderstone and ending the game. But did I win? We counted up the victory points, Dave had 39, I had 36. It was a close run, but in the end the game went to Dave.

So what went wrong? Well, Dave spent the earlier part of the game building up an attack force of Squires and Knights, even managed to get a Lord at one point. However, their effects relate to Militia and he'd thrown most of those cards away, making their effects next to useless. He was building up some magic in order to tackle some of the better monsters in the game I was nonetheless making a meal of, he did get an Archmage in the end and it was helping. His fighters, however, were of far more use when it came to dealing with the only monster in the game that halved the magic damage and couldn't be hit by weapons. Worth a whopping 6 victory points, the game was going to go to whoever had that one, and it was only really Dave who could have done it.

So, tactics for next time? Well if I play with that particular combination of cards again I'll think about building up some fighting skill as well as magic. It might be an idea to start off collecting some fighting cards and build up the magic power later in the game. It all depends on what gets drawn in the next go... but it will be interesting to find out.

Well done Dave, it was a close one but you won fair and square.

4/9/2011: Pool

Just a quick one...

This one was at Ye Olde Foundry in Dudley, where I was doing a gig on the same night. I was there with Dave, and though he always insisted he plays his best pool when he's drunk, he still gave it a good go...

I almost feel compelled, when there are blue balls, to try and go for them given my football team. Tonight was no exception but my good fortune ended there. I wasn't exactly concentrating very hard but I could not hit a ball accurately from then on, and ended up losing to Dave still having the majority of the balls left on the table. Not one of my better efforts. But then again, I never said I was any good at this...

New Goblin Spider Riders/Orc Warboss!

 This has been on the cards for quite a while...

I got the Goblin Spider Riders out of the Orc and Goblin Battalion; I've worked out a 500 point army based on the contents of that box and the Orc Warboss I brought on the same day. I used the experimental way of painting the Goblin skin that I did in my previous blog some months ago, however one problem I have always had with Orcs and Goblins is that I find painting the same model over and over again quite dull. I soldiered through it but to be honest these sometimes feel more like work than actual fun. Still, for me painting is a means to an end anyway, and I wouldn't do it if I didn't think I was going to get a game out of it at the end. An odd sentiment, given that I've only played 2 games in Games Workshop so far this year, and they've both been Lord of the Rings games...

Wouldn't want one of these in your bath...

So with these, I stuck to the colour scheme used before, as I said. However, this time it didn't work quite so well; I suffered from the curse of the white undercoat. When you miss a part with the black undercoat, what you're left with is a part of the model that's, well, black. This usually happens in what would probably be a shaded part of the model anyway so you can get away with it to a certain extent. Not so easy with the white undercoat, where you're left with a white splodge that looks like you can't paint properly. You can't tell from the photo because of the lighting (you try it at 1am!) and also because it most often occurred around the back of the model, but the mistakes are there. I also think I was a bit heavy-handed with the red; the colour is only really supposed to be used for decorative purposes in this army, and the abundance of feathers made the use of it a lot more frequent than it probably should have been. Still, they do look like an army, though I have yet to see what the effect will be like when I put the whole thing together. Stay tuned...

Are you talking to ME???

Honorary mention to this fellow, who will be leading the army. I actually painted them at the same time as the goblins I painted before... but I completely forgot to paint the Snotling on his shoulder! That was a part of my motivation for doing the Spider Rider Goblins next; I use the same mix of Snakebite Leather for the skin of the Goblins as the Snotling so I could tie the two together here. The overall effect of the paint scheme works well for this Orc Big Boss I think; it's mean, it's gritty, he's got this huge f**koff axe that even the best of us should know to keep away from (in actual fact, it's the Tormentor Sw- er, axe, which on the off chance you take a wound from it and survive, gives you Stupidity for the rest of the game. Not much use in low points games because it's rare you come across anything with more than one wound, but that doesn't mean I won't come across any ethereals that I'll need a magic weapon to deal with...) and I really like the mask because it's impossible to tell what he's thinking, though his posture suggests that it won't be anything good.

So what's next for the army? Actually, nothing at all just yet. I have this sort of rule: For every 250 points of army I collect, I have to collect 1 piece of scenery. That way, by the time I have a sizeable force, I might actually have a collection of scenery to play with it on! Fences and walls will therefore be next, very boring, but I've never painted them before so it'll be worth giving it a go. After that, the Orcs for the army maybe, though I have Space Marines and Lord of the Rings stuff to paint as well so we'll have to see.

See you soon!

17/8/2011: Resident Evil

I'm actually thinking of writing to Bandai and asking them to rename their Resident Evil Card Game like this:

RESIDENT EVIL: NEW AND EVER-MORE INVENTIVE WAYS FOR MATT TO GET HIMSELF KILLED.


Not hard to see how this one went, but it's worth noting that Dave had decided to play the hard version of the game - where all the monsters do 10 more damage than they're supposed to, and any effects are applied twice. This - plus my overconfident stupidity - is what cost me in the end...

At least it won't take so long to set up now that we've got it - there's 6 core items that are included in every game, and the remaining 12 can either be a pre-set that the game suggests, or 12 of whatever the hell you like. I think Dave was all for the latter but I think that could lead to a very unbalanced game if you don't know what you're doing so I insisted that we follow the 'Classic Horror' pre-set, at least for now.

Because we knew how ferociously hard the enemies in the mansion could become, we didn't venture in there for about an hour, instead using our turns to build up our collection of weapons in to something we could actually use. My character was Claire Redfield, and her effect is making her ammunition count as 10 more than what it actually is - invaluable, as I then don't need to draw so many ammo cards in order to fire the big guns. I had to make sure I got my hands on the full-bore machine gun - you need a lot of ammo to use it, but I had the character that would have made it all the more easy.

I have a peculiar gaming mantra: while I tend to play defensively, I'm also aware of the benefits of taking risks - after all, as I'll happily tell anyone who'll listen, not taking risks is how Napoleon cost himself Russia. So after building up a sizeable collection of weapons I was the first to enter the mansion, and I was building up a good set of kills and commendations. I never got so far ahead of Dave that he wouldn't have been able to catch up if he'd killed the Uroboros plant - that monster is worth 8 commendations and as soon as it dies, the game ends. The fact that it can kill most of the female characters and a significant number of the males in one fell swoop usually decides the matter without the need to count up your commendations, and I only avoided this because I'd come across some herbs earlier in the mansion that boosted Claire's health from 70 to 90. Nonetheless, for a while it all seemed to be going my way.

This was never going to end well for Claire...

And then it happened - I went into the mansion with 45 attack points and came across a Hunter. In the normal game, that would have been fine. In the Hard game, I fell just short of being able to kill it, and it wasted me for 50 points. In a moment of intense stupidity I decided to go back to the mansion without healing myself, with about the same amount of attack points, and came across a Licker. And again, had this been the normal game, I'd have gotten away with it. But no. There was the licker with 50 attack points, and me with 45 and about half my health. The ensuing battle was very short.

So, another game handed to Dave via my reckless abandon. To be fair, going in to the mansion again without healing myself was the worst idea I'd had in a long long time, and it cost me, but in all other respects I think I played quite well. Always looking forward to the next one, which won't be for a while because I'm extremely busy in the evenings and probably most of the days next week.

Painting blog coming up next, see you soon...

New Space Marine Scouts

Hello! It’s been a while since I’ve posted on here for a number of different reasons, namely holidays, band and work, but I’m back now and I’ve got t-shirts or pictures, hopefully, if I can get it to work, for everybody.

Firstly, a quick note about the role-play: The regular readers, if any, will have noticed I’m not posting any more blogs that relate to things that went on at Role Play club. Just so we’re all clear on this, I’m still in the club, and the only session I’ve missed since I joined was the week I was on holiday. And I still play the games and I really enjoy them. But the obligation to blog them up every single time I did it was, I have to be honest, more work than fun, so I won’t necessarily be doing it again. Or at least, not any that relate to the club; if I do some home games I might think about it but I’m a long way away from that yet.

So, on to the main event: Space Marine Scouts!

So what’s brought this on? Well, judging by the fact that a great many – if not all – hobbyists paint or play Space Marines at some point, I found the temptation too hard to ignore. It will be a nice change to play with a ‘good guy’ army, and having Space Marines as the heroes of the universe lends a nice protagonist nature. What I didn’t want to do was get a Space Marine army by getting a Battleforce, or Assault on Black Reach; no standardised forces for me thank you. I much prefer the idea of a bitter struggle, a desperate fight for survival and really developing the characters in my army. Enter the Black Consuls…

All the Space Marine Codex has to say about the Black Consuls is this: “Recorded as annihilated at the Siege of Goddeth Hive, 455.M41. Current status unknown.” Deliberately vauge, but I think that’s the whole point: To a certain kind of hobbyist, it’s nice to fill in the gaps for yourself, and I’m one of them. The codex doesn’t say where Goddeth Hive was, who wiped the Consuls out, or why, and I’m not going to assume responsibility for this. What I am going to do is create the chapter again, after a desperate attempt to rebuild its former glory. What I will say is this: Though the chapter is now active, its master knows not to make a show of it just yet. They are nowhere near the strength they need to operate in anything other than the utmost secrecy…

Inspired by an article in a recent edition of White Dwarf, I decided to gear the army around Cities of Death, which so far has lended itself to how I’m doing the paint job but there you are. It fits in with the idea of remaining in the hive to rebuild the chapter. All Space Marines start out as Scouts, everybody knows that, so Scouts was the best option for me to go with. I gave them a Heavy Bolter because I’m picturing having to deal with more infantry than vehicles, and besides with the reduced ballistic skill of the Scouts I feel they would appreciate the ability to fire 3 shots per turn rather than 1. With Scouts, Hellfire rounds is an option that I fully intend to employ, but I need to be careful when and where; just because they can do something doesn’t mean that they should.

Sergeant Collatinus leads his brothers into yet another conflict...

For the painting, this is the colour scheme described in the codex, black and gold. I don’t know how I’m going to reconcile the shoulder trims should I decide to include regular Space Marines in the army – the colour scheme changes with each company – but I’m a long way from that at this point, and Scouts don’t have shoulder trims, so problem solved. I’ve done some battle damage on them as well; I wouldn’t usually be inclined to do this with Space Marines because they do make an effort to look after their armour and equipment so battle damage on Space Marines is not as common as you might think. However, the idea I wanted to get across here was of seasoned campaigners; they may be out on missions for weeks or months before they get a chance to come back and maintain their equipment, and would doubtless get in to a few fights along the way, so most of these models are going to be damaged to a certain extent. One thing that worked out very well I think was the appalling damage to Sergeant Collatinus' right eye, done by being a bit clever with a modelling knife, red paint and a purple wash, giving him the look of a man who's just lost an eye in a fight and still wants to come back for more. I am pleased with the way the skin tone and fatigues work with the armour; colour selection was actually quite important for this. One thing I wasn’t too happy about was the freehand; you can’t see it on the photos but I was trying to paint their squad number on their shoulder pads. The insignia on the left shoulder didn’t work out too badly, but the Roman numerals on the right shoulder looks like they were done by a 6 year old with a white chalk. I might have to re-do those at a later time; it’s not something I make a habit of because I don’t like going over old ground but I do want this army to look quite good so it will probably become necessary.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Where did I come up with the name? Actually I didn’t come up with it at all. As they are the Black Consuls, I thought I’d name them after, well… consuls. So I dragged up a list of consuls off Wikipedia and named Brother Sergeant Tarquinius Collatinus after one of the names I found. With my usual approach to things I will probably name them all in order. Now, if you know anything about the Roman approach to names, you’ll know that there was usually a ‘praenomina,’ which would be the equivalent of your first name. The consuls were no exception but the choice of first names was very limited and in a formal setting you’d usually be called by your family name anyway. So I decided to leave them out of my army, reasoning that 2 names were quite enough for a Space Marine to be getting on with!

So what’s next for the army? I’ve brought a captain for them, and I’m quite excited about this one because it’s not a model you would typically see leading a Space Marine army. However I’m tied up in some other projects at the moment, not least of which the Goblin Spider Riders I’ve been painting on and off for a couple of months now. Who knows what will come next? See you then…