Monthly Archives: February 2016

Coming out next week 8th Feb 2016

news, tabletop

I think it's obvious from previous posts I like the game Zombicide. I love the setting being present day, and recreating the Romero zombie movies. However some like Sam Heeley from The Dice Tower never jelled with the theme or the game.

Jump forward after last years release of Season Three of Zombicide, CMoN hit Kickstarter again with a variant of Zombicide setting it this time in a fantasy setting. Well backers have had their copy with all their exclusives, and now it's time for the rest of the world to get a chance to buy the game.

Finally for next week the rather excellent Pixel Tactics gets a fifth expansion and a storage box to house all the expansions and the game.

Well that's the releases for next week that caught my eye.

 

Betrayal at work

tabletop

Yesterday I tasted defeat from the jaws of victory.

During a break yesterday I introduced three students to the best of the Tiny Epic range so far Tiny Epic Galaxies.

After a couple of turns they had picked the game up and were colonising planets to push them closer to the victory.

Funnily enough students love getting one over their tutor in a game. It comes with the territory of the job. So it was no big surprise having planets I was trying to colonise being stolen from underneath me.

But still I managed to hit the 21 victory points to trigger the end game. My nearest rival who had been in the lead upto that point was on 17 victory points. He took his last turn unable to do anything to increase his points. I shouldn't have done it but I took that top left picture of him in despair and being comforted by a classmate. It was tempting fate.

The student after him then turned Kingmaker, and took two actions that gave my nearest rival 5 more victory points and the win!! The douche had done the ultimate betrayal!!! The left middle photo is of said king making douche.

Naturally I took having the win stolen from me badly. The shock of betrayal just added salt to the wound. Which for the students made the victory even sweeter.

I like playing tabletops with my students. It's going to be something I miss from the job. For a few it's the first exposure to games that are not mainstream fair. It's nice to show them that the world as they know it is in fact a pretty big place.

 

Warlords Running Tuesday!

chatteris warlords, game night, netrunner

Last night I was back over to Chatteris for the Tuesday night meet up of the Chatteris Warlords. This being my second visit meant I had to fork out moolah and join the working men's club that the meet is held in (£10.50 yearly membership fee once two brave souls nominated/seconded me as a member, then £1 for joining the Gaming group for the year, and finally £1 for attending the meet).

My evening started off putting the current iteration of my Noise deck together. Then testing it against if I remember correctly an NBN deck.

I hit the corp running, using a few of the tricks I had in hand like DDOS, and Streetpeddler. The deck was working as I had intended, except in the area of economy, which needs a little tinkering.

The game came down to one run, if I didn't get past the two ice and steal the agenda, then the corp would score it on their go and get the win. If I steal it I'm victorious. My only ice breaker is Faust. I break through the first ice, the second ice is rezed and I can't use Faust with it! Foiled at the last hurdle. Well we know how this story ends. I should have run on that server earlier in the game, I had solutions, particularly the anarch favourite Parasite.

We swapped alliagiances and I played my NBN Making News deck against the Shaper Kate. My NBN deck needs a lot of work. It's an initial idea. I haven't even looked into if any of the Data and Destiny Deluxe Expanasion with its new NBN cards would make an improvement.

Somehow I managed to get a win. I think if my opponent had been a bit more aggressive on running we may have been looking at a different outcome.

It's great to see a meta taking root. There is even talk of getting a store kit for a tournament! That would be cool.

Other games going on last night were X-Wing (with some of the new Force Awakens ships), and a game of X-Com.

X-Com is one of those games that has the app as an integral part of the game. Meaning it can't be played without it. Which as I have stated before is why I won't personally buy the game. I'd like to have a play of the game though. Apparently in a discussion about the game and its reliance on the app, it appears there may be rules on line from the publisher that allow the game to be played without the app. So yes I'd like to try the game without the app also. This could be the compromise that sees me buying the game (assuming the results of both plays are favourable).

If you are wondering still why go read the Golem Arcana Final Expansion post HERE. I've never played the game so I'm not aware just how integral to the game the app is. Can it be played still with out the app? The next release of Android or iOS could completely nerf the app. It has been known for an OS update to do that to apps until the have been rebuilt with the new libraries.

I'd love to hear Ignacy's response/view to this.

But I've digressed, time to look at my NBN deck.

 

Pandemic Legacy February

pandemic legacy season 1

Ok so here is the warning if the above image isn't enough of a clue for you, this post may or may not contain spoilers for the rather excellent boardgame Pandemic Legacy. So if you want to avoid spoilers I'll see you in the next post.

Last night saw the bruised from defeat team of Matt, Jonathan, Debbie and myself once more take on Pandemic Legacy for the month of February.

For those following our journey through the game, the game beat us twice for the month of January. If you lose the first attempt, you try again and then that's it.

We were starting the month of February with the full compliment of eight funded events in the players deck, plus the three unfunded events.

Once again for the month of February our objective was to find cures for the three viruses that could be cured. The scenario for February saw COdA-403b take a turn for the worst, it had gotten stronger and now couldn't be treated or cured!

Luckily we could now quarantine cities, and also had a new member of the team to select if we wanted to. We decided that we were comfortable with our current roles and would stick with them.

During setup we allowed to define relationships between our characters, which meant we would need to name our characters. I named mine the token sexy scientist! While Matts dispatcher was named Zardoz (after the Sean Connery movie he had gotten recently), Debbie named her researcher B after her nickname. Finally Jonathan named his medic Hawkeye after the character from that long running hit black comedy series set in the Korean War M.A.S.H.

I can't remember all the relationships, they will be revealed at the end when I put up all the characters we played during the game. My Token Sexy Scientist was rivals with Hawkeye, and co-workers with Zardoz.

The relationships were important because they bestowed extra abilities on the player if they were in the same city together, like getting an extra action.

After doing the initial infection and placing one quarantine marker on a city, we decided to start at the Atlanta research station. We stood good chance of getting an early win on finding a cure for C-Thatcam Major, and eradicating it. Which we did.

The game was very tense but we were able to manipulate our use of event cards so that the rivalry between myself and Hawkeye worked in our favour, so that we were able to get multiple uses out of some of the event cards.

Soon with not only curing the black virus but eradicating it, we were looking hopefully at trying to cure the yellow one to get a win.

But COdA-403b was proving a headache, we had team members permantly camped in the region moving and quarantining cities to prevent outbreaks when an infection happened.

While we were trying to get the dispatcher to a research station with enough yellow cards to find the cure, we were fire fighting COdA-403b trying to block a pandemic because that would lose us the game with only four red cubes left in the supply, and watching the player deck getting dangerously low, things were getting nail biting nervous.

We were on a knives edge, victory on one side, another defeat the other. It could easily have gone either way. But we did it, we WON! Matt's dispatcher got to a research lab and found a cure!!!!

The black virus was named Sithite from now on.

For our end of game bonuses we chose to turn our third research lab into a third possible starting lab, and for C-Thatcam Major we no longer need to be in a research station to make a cure for it.

There are also two new funded event cards to choose from, plus for the March game our funding drops to six because we did such a good job in February.

As a bonus we also get to place an extra quarantine marker at the start of March. However memories of our failures for January came back to haunt us as we had to tear up the mystery bonus for winning January, which we will never know what it was.

Onto March…

 

While I was sleeping…

news

You go away for a weekend, spend quality time with your son and everyone sees that as an opportunity to make announcements about up and coming expansions or eagerly awaited games.

First up is Pandemic Reign of Cthulhu.

This came straight out of nowhere. I mean why? Ok Pandemic was probably one of the handful of remaining game franchises that didn't have a Cthulhu version. And from what I've seen comment wise about this came it has already been described as Eldrich Horror Lite! How accurate that will be we really won't know until the game hits the shelves of the local FLGS, which will be just after GenCon 2016 where it is being launched hopefully.

The game is based on Pandemic with input from Matt Leacock, but the credit for designer of this version of Pandemic goes to Chuck D. Yager (not sure what he's done before off the top of my head, and I can't be bothered to use my ninja Google skills).

I always think that when an existing IP is given a Cthulhu make over that the company has run out of ideas, and are just trying to milk the cash cow. I bit like doing a Zombie/Munchkin version.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I think the word I'd chose at the moment is indifferent. We briefly discussed this last night before our play of February in Pandemic Legacy. I know Matt and Jonathan were more excited about this than I am. However they were right that I would still be buying it!

Next up is news that the first expansion for Dead of Winter (which I still haven't got to the table to my deep shame) Long Night will be released by Plaid Hat Games at Origins 2016. Yes I will get this when it comes out, and I hope to have played the game once or twice before then!

Plaid Hat also announced that the very anticipated legacy style game Seafall will see release at GenCon. There is a lot of buzz about this game, and based on how much I'm enjoying a Pandemic Legacy will most definitely be getting this game.

One thing to look out for both of these games is pre-ordering them from Plaid Hat directly, it maybe slightly cheaper, or who knows have an exclusive promo. Plaid Hat like playing that game. Give them their dues, they do eventually make the promos available on their website to buy. So if you get your copy from your local FLGS but want the promo, don't pay the silly ebay scalper prices, wait. Yes they are not the fastest at putting these promos up for sale as the slowness to put the Ashes promo Phoenixborn up shows. But… Eventually they will.

Finally White Wizard Games are starting to promote the first expansion for Epic called Tyrants. The first teaser we get is of the card Draka, Dragon Tyrant. For card games this sort of teaser is typical. Give players a sneak peak of some of the new cards, build up anticipation and demand.

Based on no other fact that from previous experience of White Wizard releases, I'm expecting this expansion to be in a similar price point as the Star Realms Crisis expansions of around a fiver in real money.

I'd like to thank bgg for the excellent work of breaking these stories, and getting the images above (except the Epic one which I got from the Epic Facebook page). I'm not taking any credit for their hard work. I'm just taking credit for my editorial comment.

 

Gaming Stats for Jan 2016

gaming stats

Since just before the New Year kicked in I came across an app for tracking the plays of boardgames. What was extra cool with this app was that it links with the bgg website and updates your play sessions on there also. Hence the embedded last game played widget on the right of the blog.

With me recording all my game plays on this app, it gives me some nice stats. Those stats I have put below. Remember that the anon player is used by me to record one off game plays against people I usually play against, and most likely won't for a long time.

I expect next month Pandmic Legacy will be my most played game of the month.