All posts by Darren

Empire at War is nearly here 

Destiny, star wars

It’s nearly here the third set for Star Wars: Destiny Empire at War (EaW). 

This set brings an emphasis on supports apparently. Plus it features characters from the Star Wars: Rebels cartoon.


There are one or two new characters I’m excited to play with(see collage below). Plus there are a load that we haven’t seen. If I remember correctly Lucas (the designer) in an interview on YouTube said there are 25 new characters in this set! But if I pull these ones to start with I’m going to be really happy.

There are definitely some supports you will not like seeing your opponents play. And absolutely hate to be on the receiving end of. Vader’s Tie Advance is the one I really want to pull here. It’s special is insane.

With the addition of EaW and the newly released 2 player set and the new cards it added, there are going to be some really hard choices to make when deck building. 30 cards is already too small to fit in everything you would like with the current 2 sets.

I’m looking forward to Dale and I cracking open boosters, and building our new decks and dueling away.

Hour of Devastation Prerelease Pack – My First Prerelease Pack Ever

magic, MtG

You have to give credit where credit is due WotC know how to manage a collectable card game. They make the release of new sets an event. It starts weeks in advance with spoilers of cards in the upcoming set, videos about the Lore/story etc. But a week before the actual release they hold a prerelease event. This prerelease event gives players a chance to get their grubby mitts on cards from the new set a week early. Then on the actually release of the new set there are usually lots of events held by stores for this new set. A lot of money is made in those two weeks for the lgs and WotC. Shooting fish in a barrel comes to mind.

To facilitate the prerelease event WotC produce a prerelease pack for players to purchase. These prerelease packs contain everything that the player needs for that prerelease event. Which is basically a sealed format where players build a 40 card deck to play with from the booster packs in the prerelease kit they got.

Sadly these prerelease events usually fall at the wrong time of month for me or clash with a Fenland Gamers meet up. So I’ve not been to one. However thanks to the power of the internet and that marvellous use of it of online shopping. I was able to get hold of the current (for another couple of weeks) set Hour of Devastation prerelease pack. 

So for the approximate price of £20 what does a MtG player get for their hard earned money?

  • A rather attractive cardboard box! Which has some fantastic artwork of the planeswalker Nicol Bolas. 
  • A spindown d20 die.
  • A challenge card – complete these and there is a prize for doing so. I’m not sure what. 
  • 6 booster packs. In mine I got 4 Hour of Devastation packs and 2 Amonkhet.
  • 1 foil date stamped promo card
  • A sheet of Deck building tips

Taking the street value of a spindown die is approximately £2, and boosters cost £3.50 each (although I think £3 might also be a price point some lgs or online traders sell them for), I make that a value of between £20 – £23.

Below is the promo card I got.


I got 2 foil cards from the 6 booster packs.

As a relatively newish player (a couple of years now) and mainly casual play, I have no idea what value cards have. A good pull for me is a full art basic land (I love these, the art is stunning), a legendary creature (potential commander in the EDH/Commander) or a foil. 

At an actual prerelease event these packs give great value. Everything (except the basic lands) you need to build a deck to play with, and an evenings entertainment playing MtG. Plus early access to the cards for the new set, promo. I think it’s a cheap night out. 

Is it worth purchasing afterwards? I think that it is how much value you place on the foil promo, and themed countdown die? If you were going to buy 6 boosters anyway, this way gets you a little bit more value for you money. But not an amazing amount.

Well that’s my first ever prerelease pack. It was fun cracking open the boosters. The promo card is nice. Could be really powerful in a commander deck (possibly, maybe). I must try and get to the Ixalan prerelease.

Oh WotC have a great post about sealed deckbuilding at a prerelease event here.

Married Couple Fight Over Iron Throne

Fenland Gamers, Game day, game of thrones

It’s funny how things work out. I hadn’t planned it this way but we played A Game of Thrones the board game the opening weekend of season 7.  And now we were playing the game once more straight after (well the Saturday after) the season 7 finale. 

Those gathered to compete for the Iron Throne, or with delusions that they had a claim to the throne were myself, Jeff, Diego and Monia (aka Mrs Toaster – I do hope Monia doesn’t mind the nickname because I’m bad at pronouncing some names, so I do almost everything possible to avoid struggling to say them and embarrassing myself).

I had drawn House Arryn, Jeff was the Starks, Monia was the Lannisters and that leaves Diego with Baratheon. Yep we once again were playing with the A Feast for Crows expansion. 

Monia hadn’t played AGoT before, so we didn’t use the Tides of Battle cards. Mind you I haven’t used them yet. And I think I’m about ready to try them. Next time. Jeff also acted as a “consultant” to Monia when choosing a card to play in battles against Diego.

With Diego being Baratheon, and Monia controlling the Lannister forces, husband and wife were pitted against each other right from the start. Kingslanding is critical to both of their house objectives.

I was playing House Arryn for the first time. My house objective needed me to have more power tokens than the other houses at the end of each round along with control of the Eyrie. The special abilities on the combat cards for Arryn are slanted in aiding this. I managed to pull this off once, the first round, along with completing one other objective. That was it my total points for the whole game. 

While I was waiting for the opportune moment (which in the end never came) to snatch Kingslanding off the warring couple to gain another objective and two points. I was trading blows with Jeff and his Stark forces.

Jeff did query his house objective. But we couldn’t remember how we ruled it. So he did a quick search on bgg and couldn’t find an answer. So we went with he had to hold Winterfell and five castles/strongholds.

The Westeros cards only came up once with the opportunity to bid on the influence tracks. But I did get to steal the sword off Jeff after we successfully defended the only wildlings attack. I could move to the top of the influence track of my choice after bidding the most. It’s as if I knew what would happen before hand if we defeated them, and to put lots in. So I took the sword.

I had three crappy objectives that I wouldn’t achieve. I wasn’t triggering my house objective. I needed to be churning my house combat cards more than I was to do that. I cycled the deck once during the game. It wasn’t good enough. The others were chalking up victory points left right and centre. There was no hope in hell I’d catch them up. But despite that I was having a blast.

In the end Diego made it across the finish line to grab the Iron Throne.

All hail King Diego. Who we hope survives the many assassination attempts we are sure his Queen will be making to grab the throne for herself. 

Epilogue:

Many many hours later, minutes before midnight Jeff finally mastered Google and found out he could have won! We decided wrongly on his house objective. It was five Castles/strongholds including Winterfell. So potentially Jeff could have claimed the Iron Throne if his Google skills had been better. But I suppose it’s hard using smart phones stuck up in the cold north. Cell reception must be a nightmare!

Dueling decks

Destiny, FEG@WL, Fenland Gamers, game night, star wars

Americans do like their special shopping days like Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. Now for the second year running Disney give the world Force Friday. A day when all the new Star Wars related toys and merchandise are released to the world.

A couple of days before Force Friday hit I did see a rumour that FFG would be announcing a mystery Star Wars related game. Which the poster of the rumour said would be Star Wars: Destiny duel decks.

Come Friday morning or Force Friday morning if you will, FFG announce what is basically a box with two starter sets in it. There is a mix of new cards exclusive to this two-player set and existing cards from the two current Destiny sets.

Like the first two starter sets the decks are only 20 cards each. Plus two characters and a battlefield for each deck. Once again great for learning with, but not tournament legal. So a new player couldn’t buy this, pick the deck they wanted to play, and started playing in a store game night. Unlike the original starter sets, because there are two decks here, it might be possible to take some cards from the other deck to make a match legal deck. I’ve not seen the full card list yet.

From what I’ve seen for existing players of Destiny to get a play set (2 of each card and dice) you will need to buy two copies of the two-player set. Why? Because there is only one copy of each card and die. Which puts the cost for players that way inclined at $60 instead of a casual players $30 for one copy of the two-player game.

Still there are some interesting new cards in this new release. Enough to justify laying out $60? Now that’s a big question.

You can read the full announcement HERE.

Last night while Jonathan is off playing boardgames in a field somewhere up North, and living under canvas for the weekend, Chris and I met up to play games at the usual Friday night spot.

So I introduced Chris to The 7th Continent. Our first game ended pretty quickly. We were playing once again the suggested curse for a first play. However we’d only explored our second map tile when we met our untimely demise having failed to out swim a shark!

Once we recovered from the shock of our sudden death we reset the game and started again. We did better than our first game. But we have hit a brick wall on progressing any further. Luckily it happened at an appropriate point in time that we were going to have to stop playing anyway. I think it’s a good sign that Chris suggested we used the games save feature to save where we were. So next time we play we can pick up exactly where we left off. In fact with the way the game has been designed other players can join in the fun whenever they want. It’s nice that the designers have thought of this sort of thing.

Ok thanks it for this post. I’ll be back tomorrow with news of who sits on the Iron Throne.

BTN August 2017

by the numbers, gaming stats

OMG! What a month of gaming. Despite Jonathan being tied up with his new life event, who I would normally be playing more games with over the Summer, but was not able to. I still managed to play more games than last month, and get more plays in (that’s Star Wars:Destiny mainly). Some of those games were even big “epic” games. Games that take more than a couple of hours to play.

I had my son Nathan visiting for a few days and managed to get to play some games with him. Two club members birthdays also meant opportunities to play great games, with some amazing people in celebration of those birthdays.

Seven new games hit the table. That was pretty good. Plus I got a play of a game that although shown as new (I had played it before, but that was long before I started recording my game plays, but if you search back far enough on here you will see I talked about the plays at the time) kinda was! Well I hadn’t played Memoir ’44 as a multiplayer Overlord game. It really was great fun.

Yeah the Summer hols have been really great this year.

Without further ado, here are the nicely presented gaming stats for the month.

Let’s now look at these different measurement of averages for the month. The number of played games this month is a cats whisker under the average (which ever one you choose apart from the mode). While the number of plays smashes the ball out of the park.


The final section as usual presents the data graphically so we can try and see trends. What it tells me is I need to play more games!

My Game of the Month…

This month there was a field of seven potential candidates to choose from for my game of the month. But in reality that field was only four of them. Those four being Tiny Epic Quest (TEQ), Mansions of Madness Second Edition (MoM:SE), Battlestar Galactica (BSG), and The 7th Continent.

As I’m writing this post, and looking back at these games, I’m thinking this is really a hard decision to make. Which one has me chomping at the bit to play it again? Which one stood out above the others? MoM:SE certainly impressed me. So much so it inspired a new section. But was that enough to grab this prestigious award? BSG was fun. TEQ was The Legend of Zelda on the tabletop.

But I think The 7th Continent is edging it. I think the share scope of the game, the fact it has captured those “choose your own adventure” books from my childhood/teenage years, the replay-ability, the innovative save system. Plus I have to admit sadly that when I see the box I think “I must get this to the table again”. But it doesn’t stop there. Even though I have the game, I can’t wait for the Kickstarter that reprints the game! They are are promising new expansions. Which I want. There is a shit load of content in this game already. But I want more. Plus I want to buy the sleeves for the none standard cards. But mainly I want the new expansions.

This really does deserve to be my game of the month for August.

My gaming moment of the month…

This will be the first of an “as and when” addition to this monthly retrospective. The winner of this inaugural adhoc award can only be Mansions of Madness Second Edition, and the ultimate betrayal and screw job that got me a solo win for this co-operative game (you can read a badly written account of it here). It was hilarious when it happened. We were still talking about it a couple of days later. I’ve been boring colleagues at work with it all week. But then the looks on their faces of “do I look like I give a feck?” or as if I had just shown a card trick to my dogs was worth it.

Worst Game of the Month…

Once again this infamous award has no game to hang itself around.

Hopefully hitting the table in September…

Wow, I managed to get three out of the five to the table from last months list. I really thought I was going to struggle to get any to the table. My track record isn’t great. September is a busy month for us academics. We are expected to work! New students etc. So I am going to keep this a short list this month, and add just one new game.

  •  Zombicide – I want to get this to the table with the Big Bang Theory characters and see how they do in the zombie apocalypse.
  • Hero Realms with the character expansions.
  • Magic the Gathering Commander

As usual we have our regular events for the club, which are:

  • The weekly Friday Evening Gaming at The White Lion (or FEG@WL as I call it)
  • Every second Wednesday of the month we have our monthly meet up. This month that second Wednesday is 13th September, and will once again be at The White Lion.

Below are a sample of the current events/meet ups that we have planned for September.

If you are in the area and want to attend one of the events, please visit the Fenland Gamers Facebook page for further details about the event. Hope to see you there

Who needs cake?

Fenland Gamers, Game day

It’s been an awesome bank holiday weekend for gaming. Three days of playing games that culminated with the second birthday celebration of the long weekend (this time Edmunds birthday) and a game of Scythe.

Apparently Edmund and Charlie haven’t gotten over the “betrayal” Friday night.

Whilst Edmund and I were both playing one of the “new” factions from Invaders from Afar (I was Clan Albion, Edmund was Togawa Shogunate). Charlie was playing one of the original five factions Polania.

Which meant Charlie and I were next to each other on the board, and Edmund was all on his lonesome on the opposite side of the map.

 
With Charlie so close he was able to block me off from getting an early factory card. Starting with zero combat cards made breaking out hard. Which allowed Edmund to get to the factory for first pick and plant an annnoying trap on that space.

By the time Charlie realised the threat of Edmund it was too late. Edmund had his engine all in place and sprinted to the finish line.

After the scoring was done Edmund had thrashed us both. But justice was done with Charlie coming last. 

A great afternoons gaming celebrating Edmunds birthday. Thank you Edmund for inviting me. I had a great time. 

Oh btw if you ever hear me say the words used for the title of this post or “I’ll have a decaf coffee” these are my code phrases for “I’m being held against my will and need rescuing”.

Dungeon Madness

coffee shop gaming, Game day

Yesterday was a good day. Gaming and Liverpool decimated Arsenal. Hard to top that for a Sunday. Jonathan has been rather busy with life stuff recently. This work thing just gets in the way of everything. So it was good to get a chance to meet up and play a couple of games at the local coffee emporium Costa.

Our first game while enjoying our beverages was Dairyman (owned by Jonathan). 

What can I say about the game? It’s a pleasant, light, push your luck dice game. I think between this and Go Nuts for Donuts (also Jonathan’s game) that I’ve played recently, this would be my preference. However this is the opposite point of view to Jonathan.

Dairyman for me would have to compete against Age of War and Zombie Dice. And I think I prefer both of these over Diaryman. Age of War noses it because of that little take that element of being able to steal cards from other players. Zombie Dice plays more players.

We then played my recent aquasition One Deck Dungeon. Sometimes a learning game  from the rule book isn’t the best thing to do.   

Our first playthrough was a bit muddled, and we died. But we were finding the rule book not the easiest thing to navigate to find the information we needed. I have to admit I was feeling a bit deflated by the game. Or more the confusion from the rules. Jonathan was much more positive and found elements he liked.

The second attempt at the dungeon was better. However we still couldn’t work out how the dungeon card worked. For the life of us we couldn’t find the information we needed. Subsequently I have found the information we needed in the rule book and on YouTube. How it was missed I don’t know. 

I was feeling much better about the game after our second play. Much more positive.

But despite our games being like train wrecks there was enough there to like. I’m still not a fan of the rule book. Once I’ve played it correctly I’ll talk about the stuff I like about it.

I have other games that are aimed at the solo player, The 7th Continent, Hostage  Negotiator, and D-Day Dice. I also have others that have solo modes. So how does One Deck Dungeon stack up against them? Not badly for sure. The advantage it has for most people over The 7th Continent and D-Day Dice is that it’s easier to get. D-Day Dice is out of print and not likely to be reprinted. While The 7th Continent if you didn’t back the original Kickstarter then you will have to wait until the next Kickstarter for it to get a copy. Another advantage it has over all three is portability. The box is easily small enough to throw in a bag. Although if you use the original Hostage Negotiator box  (assuming you have both the original and the Crime Wave expansion) you could take the game out with you easily. I think that would be the deciding factor, is this a Costa Gaming session or a game night session or at home. The Costa session, One Deck Dungeon wins, the later I’m going 7th Continent, or one of the others. Unless I want something quick. One Deck Dungeon is quick to setup and play. Much more so than the others. 

It was great catching up with Jonathan and play some games with him. Hopefully life will be kinder to him soon so he can play more games.

Kill them all

Game day

Yesterday Jeff celebrated his mid week birthday in great style by hosting a gaming session of Memoir 44 for friends and family.

The plan for the day. Turn up play Memoir 44, eat and drink, have a great time.

We were playing Memoir 44 using the multiplayer Overlord rules and maps. On a basic level Overlord is two teams of players where one player on the team is the commander, while the rest of the team are generals. The commander issues his orders to his generals who then execute those orders on the section of the battlefield they are responsible for. Naturally there is a little more to it than that, but not much.

Our first conflict was between the Japanese and Russians in the battle The Khalkin-Gol Encirclement. This was a battle just before the official start of WWII.

Sides were decided randomly by drawing a playing card. Draw red you were Russian, black Japanese. The cards had decided that the least experienced players of Memoir should be together and play the Russians. While the more experienced players were deemed by the cards to be more suited to gather round the flag of the rising sun.

Which meant that Jeff was commander of the emporers forces, facing off against his son who was commanding the people’s army. On the ground I was commanding the Japanese forces on the right flank, defending a hill, and one victory point on that hill. While Diego was leading the waves of Russian forces trying to take that hill from me.

For the majority of the battle my forces held the hill. By the time Diego took the hill it was too late. It had been costly for Diego. I had scored my share of victory points while defending my positions. Which was helped by the fact the Japanese troops were not allowed to retreat! Yep we got to ignore the first retreat flag rolled. It also helped that Diego was rolling as bad as Jonathan normally does playing Memoir.

Within a turn of Diego taking the hill, our forces had won the game.

It was time to set up the next scenario and eat.

Our second game after a lunch break of BBQ food was the Capture of Tobruk. Sides were once more decided by drawing cards. This time I was the commander of the Axis forces. My generals were Jeff, Diego and Jeff’s son.

To start with I hardly had any command cards that would allow me to activate Diego and my left flank. So I had a slower start on that side than I wanted. Jeff on the right flank, and his son commanding the centre were able to do great work on their fronts. The British called in a spitfire, which couldn’t go unanswered. We called in our own air support in the form of a 109, skilfully piloted by Jeff.

After the third turn the cards were kinder to me and allowed me to bring in Diego more. We were trailing on the victory point front. But I wasn’t worried I knew we would pull it back. Which we did. We were putting pressure on both flanks, and breaking through the middle. The allies were dropping like flies. By the end the allied commanders were demoralised, impending defeat, poor card draw, and our forces over running theirs. Who wouldn’t be? The inevitable happened and we won.

I loved playing the Overlord format. Having the chance to play as both the commander and as a general, great fun. And different experiences. These weren’t short games. About 2 – 3 hours each. In fact the second game might have been longer. This really is a great way to play Memoir with a few friends.

What a great day. Great company, great food, great game. I know lots of greats. But it’s true.

He’s back (the man behind the mask)

FEG@WL, Fenland Gamers, game night

Come back later (this evening later, about to go off and play Memoir 44 Overlord) to read this post when I will have added some words about last nights game of Mansions of Madness Second Edition. 

In the meantime here is the collage of us playing the game as a teaser, and an embedded video of the classic Alice Cooper song I’ve used for this posts title.


Welcome back. I’ve had a great playing Memoir 44, but you can read about that tomorrow. What you really want to know about now is last nights game of Mansions of Madness.

Long story short I liked it. I had a blast playing the game. Especially from how I won the game. More on that in a bit.

Naturally with the game being app driven, and only playable with the app, the likely hood of it being added to my collection is very slim. However the game plays really well with the app. I’d go as far to say it’s a better experience than playing Descent with its app.

We certainly had our talk about moment. Early in the game I found a machete in a pile of gardening junk. At the the time I joked how I was a fan of the Friday the Thirteenth films and Jason. Two or three turns later in the power cut that hit the mansion I found a gun. I was happy with my character and his ability to fend off any monsters. I even had a couple of spells. 

The mission we played was more like a who done it, or mini cluedo. We were not fighting any monsters. It was more investigating, looking for clues/evidence. After our “employer” had been murdered we had to find his killer. Thanks to my “oh she is guilty” and wrongly accusing some-one we angered the ghost of the dead person. Which after he attacked myself and Charlie’s characters left us both insane. Which gave us both secret objectives to do. Mine was to be with one other investigator at the start of my turn with a bladed weapon to win, and everyone else would lose. I thought I’d got it. Next round I go first, I win. But Charlie beat me to it, he ran away from the ghost and me! Luckily with the help of the others Edmund was persuaded to join me in the same space on his turn. Then all attention was on me for my turn. I revealed my card. Surprise I win!!! There was some disbelief around the table about what had just happened. I had won a co-op game!!!

I’d definitely play the game again.