Monthly Archives: December 2015

Some Suggestions For The Star Wars Fan

imperial assault, star wars, tabletop

Tomorrow sees the release of the new Star Wars movie, and yes I'm going to see it.

We in the “hobby” gaming world are a bit luckier than those that get their games from mainstream outlets. How? Well we have been over the last three or more years been lucky enough to have some really great Star Wars games to play.

Fantasy Flight Games have done a really great job of releasing great games, that look amazing, and give a really enjoyable experience.

Capture the feel of dogfights between squadrons of rebel and imperial ships from the Star Wars universe. The base set gives you the two fan favourites of an X-Wing and two Tie Fighters to battle it out. The base set gives you everything for two players to fight it out. Currently there are two versions of the base set. The newest version gives you versions of the X-Wing and Tie Fighter based on the new movie.

There are a lot of expansions for this game, that give you more ships from the Star Wars universe like Tie Bombers, Y-Wings, A-Wings, the Millenium Falcon, Slave 1 to name a few.

I will warn you this game is like crack, once you play you get hooked and start buying more and more ships.

The models look stunning in this game, and when played on a playmat (usually of some awesome star field/space image on) this game takes your breathe away.

Based on the Descent system, Imperial Assault moves its mechanics to the Star Wars universe.

The amazing thing about this game is that you get two games in one! You have the campaign mode, where one player plays as the Empire while the other players play as the rebels. Plus you also get a two player skirmish mode, where two players go head to head with their teams fighting it out.

The miniatures are super amazing in this game. But then so do all the components for the game.

There are expansions for this game, introducing fan favourite characters like Han and Chewy.

So they are the two I have played. I still have the Carcassonne Star Wars edition to get to the table. But I'm a fan of Carcassonne so I'm hoping this is a match up that works.

Also from FFG you can get the following Star Wars games, which I don't own and haven't played. So I'll apologise now for the rubbish coverage of them. However these have had some good reviews. And if I had the budget I'd definitely be buying Armada.

  • Star Wars Armada – this is gives you the big ships from the Star Wars universe like the Imperial Star Destroyer and allows you to recreate epic space battles between the Empire and Rebels.
  • Star Wars LCG – a two player card game using the FFG living card game model.
  • Star Wars rpg – if you like Star Wars and role playing games, nuff said.

From the mainstream market there is the new Star Wars Risk, which apparently not being as good as the fabled expensive out of print Queens Gambit, is still from reviews I've seen a decent game, that is similar to Queens Gambit and not actually Risk.

So I hope that's given you some ideas for games to play with the Star Wars fan in your life. Or even buy (although some of these are not cheap) for that special Star Wars fan.

 

End of week goodies

new arrivals

So after the Amazon fiasco of losing my order in transit, I ordered another that made it through to me (was sent via a different courier), so I'm the proud owner of Neuroshima Hex. Also the game Room 25 came.

The nice thing about the army expansions for Neuroshima Hex is that they are relatively cheap. By that I mean less than a tenner. You could argue that they should be considering they are basically only cardboard tokens.
This gives me eight armies to play with (a ninth promo army from Portal Games is on its way). Now to find folks to play with. Luckily both new games have solo modes.

Finally through the international postal system the two playmats ordered a couple months back have arrived.

The rather nice and large playmat for Tiny Epic Galaxies. Which looks lovely. Then a nice little action mat to replace the cardboard one in Tiny Epic Kingdoms.

Sadly no sign of the card sleeves to sleeve the cards in Tiny Epic Galaxies.

In A Galaxy Far Far Away A New Love Letter

love letter, news

Hobby World and AEG have just announced one of the least surprising licences for Love Letter yet. In fact the only surprise is it's taken them this long, and that it is country exclusive.

If you haven't guessed from the above photo, there is going to be a Star Wars: Love Letter. Apparently according to the announcement Seiji Kanai (creator of Love Letter I believe) has created an exclusive Bobba Fett card for this version.

The sad thing is at the moment it is a Russian exclusive. I so hope that the licensing can be sorted so that we can get this beautiful looking version here.

Here is the announcement. Images taken from the Hobby World website.

 

A Tale of Woe and Joy

lego minifigs, new arrivals, promo

While gaming last night I was expecting to get home to find that Neuroshima Hex 3.0 had been delivered.

Amazon had told me it was due for delivery yesterday, and was out and about, on its way to me. The courier doing the delivery was Amazon itself. So my expectations of it having been delivered were not unreasonable.

However Amazons own delivery service seems to be totally incompetent. Not only do they make the slow myHermes courier look speedy, they also make the Royal Mail look competent.

I don't think the Amazon service is capable of next day delivery. They seem to take longer so long to transport a package.

But they exceeded themselves this time.

When I got home, no package. So I logged in and saw that my game had been lost in transport!!!!

WTF! I was not happy.

Yep I was straight onto their customer support people. They apologised, gave me an extra month on my Prime account as compensation, refunded me the money, so I could reorder the game. But guess what the same company had upped the cost by a fiver, so I complained and was given a fiver promo code on my account to make up the difference.

The customer service of Amazon is brilliant, just a shame they are let down by a subpar service on the delivery front.

But lost in transit smacks of it was knicked by their staff.

This morning through my letter box a joyous surprise dropped through it.

There was no warning it was on its way, I had no idea. When I saw the package I thought who is this from and what is it?

I ripped open the packaging, to be greeted by the City Lego box, and an envelop. I opened the envelop to reveal a Christmas card from Duncan. Inside Duncan had written when he saw this he couldn't resist buying it because it reminded him of me! I'm assuming Duncan is referring to the bearded minifigs and in particular the one with the neck beard!

Wow! Duncan this is so amazingly generous, and kind of you. Thank you so much not just for your generosity, but for being such a great friend. Thank you.

Finally a couple of promos from the bgg store arrived…

Let's talk about the elephant in the room of the Police Precint promos. Yeah I don't own the game. It is on my wish list. So why buy them? I don't know, habit?

Somehow I thought the Alien Frontiers expansion would be bigger. So I was a little taken aback to see how small it is. I mainly got this one for the player reference cards. Once again this raises the question why aren't these in the base game?

 

Villas and Trains

Fenland Gamers, game night, tabletop
With such a bounty of games (photo below) all in one place it can only mean one thing. Yes another Fenland Gamers meetup.
After renewing friendships and making new ones, we got down to some gaming.
Our first game of the evening was the “classic” Alhambra. I was glad Gavin had bought this. The game has been in my collection for a long time, but sadly has been sitting in my pile of shame. I have played the game using the app a couple of times, but I find the interface of the app a hindrance, and a barrier to playing it regularly.
So having this chance to play the game was really welcomed.
I like Alhambra, it's a simply game! Collect the different coloured and valued money until you have enough of a particular colour to buy hopefully the tile you want to add to your Alhambra. Naturally there are one or two more rules than that, for example about how you place your tile in your Alhambra. But that gives you the basic gist of the game.
During the game there are three point scoring opportunities. The first two occur at random points, while the third happens at the end when the tiles run out. At these point scoring breaks points are score based on who has the most of a particular colour of building. The two early scoring opportunities can give a false sense of security, that person seemingly not scoring or building can suddenly in the last third of the game close that gap and jump ahead.
This is what exactly happened with card hoarder Jonathan. Boy did he have a lot of cards in his hand. But that final third he built and built, getting a large share of the points in the final scoring. Taking him from hardly any points to challenging for first place.
I liked playing Alhambra a lot. With six players you aren't going to be building massive alhambras, the competition for cards and tiles is fierce, and by the time it comes round to you there is a very good chance of the cards or tile you wanted having been taken. However I thought it played well with this number of players.
Oh and for the record Simon won, I came last! Good job I enjoy the journey! However even though I lost, I still felt in the running right upto the end. And that is the mark of a good game.

After a little chat, and an opportunity for Debbie to make hot beverages for those that wanted one. Well she did volunteer by saying she wanted a cuppa. I just took advantage of it when she voiced that fact.

Our final game of the evening was a return to the table for Colt Express. What more can be said about this game than I have previously said? Colt Express is a visually impressive game sitting there on the table in its 3D glory.

The first round of the game saw me getting shot twice thanks to the special power of Jonathan's character, which meant he couldn't be shot if others were in the same carriage as him. My hand of cards for the next two rounds were watered down by those bullet cards I had been given. Forcing me to at one point skip a turn to draw three new cards so I could have an action to move as my final turn that round.

There was a mini race to the engine to get the briefcase, which I won, beating Jonathan to it. Then a similar mini race happened to get the gems in the next carriage, that also saw Jonathan coming up empty handed.

The final round card we used was from the expansion (not intentionally, but does add a bit more variety), which meant that all those in the same carriage and level got to split the spoils of a briefcase I had looted. This cost me 750 points in the final tally up of our spoils!

Gavin was the run away winner, and although having had to share the points of a briefcase I got a healthy 1500 points, and didn't end up losing.

This sounds so corny and cliched, and gets said after every session. But it's true, this was another great gaming session with great company. The embers of new friendships started, others grew brighter.