All posts by Darren

House Keeping

gossip

Yesterday was a punching out cardboard and sleeving day when my Kickstarter copy of Tiny Epic Kingdoms 2nd Edition and Tiny Epic Kingdoms Heroes expansion arrived.

Ok the punching out cardboard was very minimal. A handful of small tokens in both boxes. However having over bought the sleeves previously I had more than enough of the larger clear sleeves to sleeve the larger boards used by the game. But my earlier mistake means my games are fully sleeved. Which makes me happy.

While writing about Tuesday's four player Star Realms game it got me thinking I really should get Colony Wars, and while I'm at it enough sleeves to sleeve them. Plus I thought as an exercise in futility I'd try looking for an official playmat in the UK.

Cheapest I found on the playmat front was £34. These mats should not be more than £17. Why Esdevium the UK distributor doesn't make these easier to get is so puzzling to me.

Luckily my hunting around found a playmat in Germany that with postage worked out at £23. Not ideal but a damn sight more palatable than the UK prices.

With what appears to be such poor support in the UK by Esdevium for the very popular Star Realms, it does make me very concerned for the Epic support.

Wild Speculation Section…

About a couple of months ago now(?) The Dice Tower and Nick of Board Game Brawl parted ways. The official explanation given by Tom Vasel was a “difference in online presence” or words to that affect, and amicable.

It is no secret that there was a feud between Nick and Richard Ham (Rahdo on YouTube). I think it was all over some comment Rahdo made about a video Tom made, and Nick sprung to his defence. You know the usual interweb spat sort of thing.

Now this is pure speculation I have no real evidence for this, I'm just adding two and two together and getting five.

However now that Nick is no longer part of the Dice Tower network, all of a sudden Rahdo is now turning up on the network. Is this just a coincidence? Is this the real reason Nick left? Were their differences from said spat so unsolvable that the Dice Tower network wasn't big enough for both of them? Was a small time delay made before Rahdo started appearing on purpose to try and avoid this sort of crazy talk?

Maybe I am jumping to wild conclusions and seeing conspiracy theories where there are none. But hey it does look fishy when you only know not even half the story.

Battle Royale

chatteris warlords, game night

By now regular readers will know that Tuesday evenings are now a gaming evening with the Chatteris Warlords. Which strangely enough is located in what can only be described as an O2 data network black hole. Yes despite having a signal to make calls, being able to get email, post to social media on your mobile device of choice (why anyone would want anything other than an iPhone I find mystifying) is not possible!

Luckily (or not depending on your point of view) the working mans club the Chatteris Warlords meet up at has free wifi. So I'm able to update social media etc once in the building.

Last night was a first for me playing Star Realms. How so? Well we played a four player game.

While with the core game, the odd promo, and Crisis expansion (minus using the Heroes) was more than enough cards to play with, what I didn't have enough of were the starting cards of explorers and vipers. There were only enough for two players. Once I get my hands on a Colony Wars set this situation will be resolved. However that didn't help last night. So we improvised. What we ended up doing was proxying some of the gambit and hero cards as vipers and explorers by slipping in a bit of paper in the sleeves with viper or explorer written on them. Not ideal, but workable.

Our four player game was being played as a free for all. So anyone could attack anyone else.

Ben and myself and played before. Ok Ben had been playing for a week. The other two players this was their first game.

As the photo above shows I had a great base and outpost setup for the later stages of the game. I was also down to just pure great cards each turn, which included The Ark and The Command Ship (got a turn before before being knocked out of the game). The only way I'd really want to improve the above was by having a Mech World there, but that went early on to the noobs. But everyone did quickly learn how bad ass Fleet HQ was once I got it.

The noob next to me also got a bases and outposts wall up in front of him. I should have destroyed it when I had a thirty point face smash to deal out. But instead I took Ben out of the game because I saw him as the bigger threat.

The noob opposite me I'd already knocked down to nine authority previously. Had no bases/outposts that would pose a problem or effective defense. Plus wasn't comboing big hits.

But the noob next to me, with his bases and outposts, was able to combo up taking out my outposts and having enough authority to smack me out of the game.

That meant the noob opposite had a single shot at taking the noob next to me. He gave it a good shot. Managed to get to twenty odd points to attack with. But not enough to win the game. Next go the noob next to me won.

I enjoyed playing Star Realms like this. There wasn't too much of everyone just ganging up on a single person. It seemed fairly even with everyone attacking everyone else. Although it is possible to have one against many.

My final game of the evening was a quick game of Batman Love Letter that I taught to a couple of people. Which both enjoyed.

A fun evening of gaming. Lots of different games going on, Bolt Action, X-Wing and that WWII airplane game that inspired/influenced X-Wing to name a few.

I Have A Plan!

Fenland Gamers, game night, love letter

We were going to be a man down last night, so with no Matt the remaining Pandemic Legacy crew decided to hold a normal game evening instead.

Our first game of the evening was one of the hot games of 2014 Five Tribes. If you remember I had played this once before nearly a year ago, but the experience was less than enjoyable because of a big baby being a sore loser.

This evenings experience playing Five Tribes was so so much more pleasurable. Jonathan's tactic of getting goods from the trade row won out. Jo was collecting fakirs for some reason, and despite it being pointed out they are worth no points at the end, claimed she had a plan.

Our game ended because there were no more legal moves left to play.

I love the fact you get this nice thick (read lots of pages) score pad for this game. Discoveries are you paying attention? You don't even give a score pad!

After the scores were calculated and added up, Jonathan romped home for the win.

Our second game of the evening was Takenoko. Cute panda, bamboo, frustrated gardener, what more could you want in a game?

This game seemed to be over quickly. It definitely lived up to the predicted forty five minutes playtime on the box. Everyone but myself seemed to be completing their aims quickly. Jonathan took an early lead. Very little irrigation was taking place, or more accurately none except for some I did. There was hardly any bamboo growing either. A lot of tile placement was going on, and they were the cards being completed the most by the others.

Jonathan won, by completing the goal of seven cards and getting the bonus two points. In Doscoveries the wooden die feel light, and I don't really enjoy handling them. However the wooden dice in the Tokenoko feels much better.

Like Jonathan I too thought we were missing something about the game? What was the point of the other cards? More to the fact the gardener. I'm going to have to go on bgg and see if this is a common problem with them game.

It did hit me over night maybe this isn't really a four player game! Maybe it works better as a three player game.

I had a meh feeling after the game. Neither hated it or really loved it. The question I have to ask myself does this now warrant staying in the collection? It might hit the table again to try it with three players. But at the moment it is sitting on a short list of now two with Krosmaster Arena of being on my way out list.

Wrapping up the evening we first played Love Letter Batman. Jonathan just walked away the victory for this game getting four tokens in two games before the rest of us even got a single token. For the record that's two wins, and two eliminations using the Batman card to guess correctly a players card.

The evening concluded with a game of Lost Legacy and our great debate, controversy of the evening.

So what caused the debate? It was the investigation phase. We were all still in at the end of the game. So we started the investigation stage to find the Lost Legacy card. As per game rules, we started at one, and went up in order, for people to take their turn locating the Lost Legacy card. I was first to go on number four. I guessed Jonathan and was wrong. Next was five, which was Debbie and she had it in her hand and won. So Jo and Jonathan didn't get a go guessing. It was the way this ended that was the bit causing the problem. Made worse when it was pointed out that because Jonathan had an X card he wouldn't get to guess at all.

In this game if you had two discarded X cards you are eliminated. Jonthan had drawn one early, and had ended up with a second, so was handicapped unable to get rid of the card to get one to allow him to guess at the end. I did point out there were cards in the deck that could have overcome this situation. I had one I didn't play that would have got him out of the situation. Jo played one that would have by shuffling his discard pile back into the deck, but instead she used it on my discard pile instead.

I didn't see it as an issue. There is a lot of decisions and thought that has to go into playing Lost Legacy. If you have a low number card do you play it for its ability or hold on to it to guess early at the investigation stage? I played the one card The Saint early which stopped me being eliminated. I had also played a card that allowed me to look at two cards off the top of the deck, put one in the ruins and put one in my hand. So I had knowledge of the ruins.

The higher value cards in the game seemed at trying to eliminate players. So for me ones you definitely try and play.

I think the theme didn't help (Jonothan isn't a scifi fan), and a little confusion over the end part of the game with none of us realising until the end when we went through the rules for the investigation phase that low is good at that point. Which is different to Love Letter.

Five Tribes was definitely the big hit of the evening.

 

A Quiet Week

netrunner, new arrivals

Business First th second data pack in the Mumbad Cycle arrived. Well that was a given really.

Plus the replacement card I needed for Lost Legacy arrived. If you remember I bought Lost Legacy off of the Facebook Trading and Selling page. Now I knew it didn't come with the nice little bags, which AEG kindly sent me for free. However I did discover a card that had a tear on the back of it. Which meant the card is useless unless I bought sleeves to use with the game that are opaque. This was a fault the seller hadn't declared and I was not happy with.

But once more AEG stepped up to the mark and sent me a replacement card.

How flipping cool are they. This is how customer support should be. The Fun Forge support is sooo slow and bad compared to AEG. AEG respond quickly (within 24 hours), and have the call resolved and replacements sent out within that time also. The replacement figure from Fun Forge is being shipped from China and won't be with me until sometime in April!!!! That's nearly two months to resolve.

Next week there is one item for sure, I might be lucky with Tiny Epic Kingdoms Second Edition and Heroes expansion arriving. Disappointingly The Others is being delayed until July, who knows I may see the expansions for Thunderbirds soon. It's nice to see some of the kickstarters coming to completion. But I can't help feeling disappointment with Cool Mini Or Not, because I feel that their delivery estimate was deliberately optimistic at best and misleading at worst. There is a big debate on the Kickstarter page on this at the moment.

 

Use the force Luke

chatteris warlords, game night, magic, X-Wing Miniatures

Yesterday was the Hobbit Hole's X-Wing Store Championships. Which because of the required playing space (each game play area is a 3' X 3' space) and number of players was being held at the local working men's club hall (also home of the Chatteris Warlords).

I wasn't taking part, I dropped out of buying the X-Wing expansions and keeping up with the meta just before the Scum and Villiany expansions hit. Which was the around the same time Imperial Assault came out. I wasn't getting to play X-Wing, still not selling my collection as the models are amazing, plus I can only afford to follow one of these type of games, and I thought I'd stand more chance getting Imperial Assault to the table.

The new Ghost model from the Star Wars Rebels cartoon is beautiful. And what surprised me the ship is bigger than the Falcon. I may be tempted to get this one, for its model factor.

So why was I there then if I wasn't going to take part in the tournament? Well rumour before hand was there might be some other games being played as well on the fringes. So with some games and decks in a bag I had turned up in hope of playing some games.

My first game was against March Jamie (and yes I do give him some banter about being from March) and a friendly game of Magic the Gathering. This time my green/black deck worked! The two previous times I played this deck I struggled to get the lands needed to play cards. This time I got after a couple of mulligans I got a starting hand I was happy with, and was getting cards I could play, and the lands I wanted. The game ended up being very close. I was left with one point of health, as I delivered a finishing blow to get a win!

The second game I got to play was a three player game of Colt Express, once more with March Jamie and a third anonymous party. The third party was very keen to play this game, because they wanted to play with the time machine promo, and I knew the rules for it. Maybe a little too late we discovered the anonymous third party may or may not have been influencing the cards that appeared in their hand of cards to play! Not surprisingly that anonymous third party won! This was a casual game, and played for fun.

After that March Jamie and I continued the earlier Magic the Gathering theme by getting Arena of the Planeswalkers to the table.

At last!

I didn't win a single game of this out of the three we played. But I had a blast playing it. After each game we swapped to a Planeswalkers that hadn't been played yet.

There were some great moments, like when I was playing Jace and using his spells and enchantments to frustrate Jamie by sending his squads back to his reserves. Or when March Jamie found out about Ob Nixilis and his ability to simply destroy an adjacent enemy once a turn. That was funny, because he had moved a single unit strong water based creature next to him to attack.

Ok that last game there was a little bit of time pressure because the it was getting dangerously close to the end of the time the hall had been booked for. So I did a mad rush in with Ob Nixilis to take on the opposing forces when I should have moved everything up together.

But still as I said there were many fun moments that made the game very enjoyable. It's is such a shame that Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro are not getting more behind this game. This game needs more expansions fast. Such as a landscape expansion adding more landscape to the game, the 3D element makes the game much more interesting, not just visually but game play wise. It affects line of sight, bonuses when attacking and defending, and also movement.

A major element of this game is also the squad building, or would be if there were more squads. That's the other expansion this game needs, more so than landscape. Not being able to build squads or tailor your spells deck is really limiting the game.

The models are really quite impressive in their detail considering the cost of this game. Not the best quality, but surprisingly good. The play area is quick to setup, but you do need a large table to play.

Arena of the Planeswalkers is a blast, but let down by poor support. Which is a shame, it deserves to be better supported, FFG would have done so much more with this. Actually I'd love to see PlaidHat licence this to make an Ashes version.

So glad this got to the table, will definitely be playing again.

 

Choo Choo

Fenland Gamers, game night

Last night saw Jonathan and I visiting the pad of Debbie and Jo to play a “marathon” play session of Ticket to Ride. Ok not so much a marathon because Debbie was catching a bus to Kings Lynn at 10:30 to sign fans autographs.

In the meantime our evening of trains geekery kicked off with a game of Ticket to Ride Europe.

Once more I was faced with an upside down map of Europe. My tickets seemed to fit together okish.

During our game play there was plenty of banter and laughter. And somehow I was completing tickets! What was funnier not until I was nearly out of trains did anyone notice I was getting to that point!

Finally scoring and I had won! My first physical game win in a long time.

Our next Ticket to Ride map was the latest one released the UK. None of us had played this map before.

For the UK map they introduced technology cards. Cards that you had to buy so that you could do things like create ferry routes, or create routes in Scotland (or Wales, Ireland and France), or create routes that required three and four cards to build.

I liked this addition to the game. Remembering you needed them before making a turn did slow one or two of the others.

My initial starting tickets were interesting, I don't think I had one worth more than five points. Plus I had a one point route I could complete straight away!

With lucky draws I was able to get the technology cards I needed to be able to complete my tickets. Then I started holding the cards needed to get the technology that would make each completed ticket worth two extra points.

After getting that I was trailing on the score board. But there was a way to catch up and go into the lead. Sitting on the board was a massive forty points in the form of a ten card route to New York. So I went for that. No one else was going for it.

I think it came as a surprise when I played that route and jumped massively into the lead. I was waiting for the “that's over powerful” comment.

By the time I had scored that massive route, I was within striking distance of triggering the end game. The others still had lots of trains in front of them. So that's what I did, I went for routes that would allow me to trigger the end game as quick as possible.

After the final counting I had won again.

As I said I loved the technology cards. At the start of the game with such short routes I was wondering how anyone could get to one hundred points. Were the designers being optimistic? But at the final count I ended up with ninety nine points. I was even pleasantly surprised that there were route cards worth over ten points.

We finished up our evening playing a couple of games of Codenames. Our teams were split up as boys against girls. Both games were won by the boys. I think this was the first time I've played where I also got to guess from the clue.

Another great evening of gaming, and I had a clean sweep of wins ^___^

 

Hulk Smash

star realms

There you are sitting there on sixty authority, your opponent (me) is there sitting on fifty three authority.

Then I start playing cards. The attack starts to mount up. I’m scraping cards, buying cards with abilities for free, removing outposts with card abilities. All of a sudden forty four points of damage go flying across.

Sixteen authority left, oh wait if I scrap some cards for their attack value I can hit nineteen points and finish them off.

The killing blow taking them to -3 authority.

Ô

 

Here I’m hoping this is a video of this most epic of turns.

At sixty authority you really do think there are at least a few more turns left in the game. I’ve been on the receiving end of something similar. Usually this happens at around the forty authority mark.

These turns are few and far apart. But boy when they happen, they are something special. I’m just so glad I was the one dishing out the punishment and not on the receiving end. Far, far too many times this is usually happening to me.

You have to love Star Realms.

 

Epic Evening

chatteris warlords, epic, game night, netrunner

Yesterday was Tuesday, and that means only one thing. Yep Tuesday night gaming at the Chatteris Warlords.

The evening started off with Ben beating me at Android Netrunner when my first ever shaper deck Jesminder Sareen went up against his Jinteki Personal Evolution deck.

I could make excuses like I don't play shaper, it's an unfamiliar deck, and they would all be valid in this case. However this deck needs a few more plays for its full short comings are known, and I start tweaking. Although for starters I don't think I'm making enough of her ability of avoiding the first tag each turn.

We followed that defeat up with a game of Epic using the demigod cards from the Kickstarter year one promos to construct a deck. On the back of the demigod id there are suggested deck lists. I played Tarken, the wise, while Ben played Valentia, Justice Bringer.

Unlike Friday I did some damage to Ben before the inevitable crushing defeat happened.

With the Kickstarter exclusive playmats the play area for Epic is nothing but an explosion of colour.

Next up Ben recruited four more players interested in playing Epic. So two packs of Epic got shuffled together and did a pack draft. Which is basically each player getting three piles of ten cards in front of them acting as the packs. Then each player selects one as a pack, and the drafting begins, and continues until each player has thirty cards in front of them, which is their deck to play with.

We then split up into pairs to face off across the battle field letting our champions knock seven shades of a brown smelly substance out of each other.

My first game was an easy victory, and a steep learning curve for my opponent. It certainly helps having a knowledge of Magic when learning to play. It's then a matter of mapping the relevant terminology from Epic to Magic. The one page reference sheet that White Wizard provide on the website is a great aid for learning to play, and also while playing to remind yourself what words like tribute, blitz, loyalty 2 mean.

Although there is this learning curve of the terminology I do find that it is easier to get and learn that the iconography of Cthulhu Realms.

Turn one of our second game my opponent drew and fielded an Elder Greatwurm.

If there was no deploying then this would be a turn one win card. Luckily there is, but this beast of a card had me worried. It just needed to get through once to end me. I needed to make sure I had a sacrificial champion to block it with at the end of each turn.

While I was worrying about the Elder Greatwurm, my opponent was chipping away my health with direct damage, and adding wolf tokens to their playing field.

I used an event to deal five damage to all attacking champions. It helped clear the field. Then a solution to the Elder Greatwurm arrived in my hand. Although the solution had one attack and no defense, as long as it landed a hit, it allowed you to banish the other champion.

While navigating the Elder Greatwurm I was landing damage on my opponent, until eventually I was able to deliver a killing blow to get the victory.

Why can't I play like this against Ben?

We have a growing Android Netrunner meta, and now Epic is starting to take root. At the end of May we will be having our first store tournament for Netrunner. Hopefully we will get the Tyrants expansion for Epic and also the store kits being done.

I just need to introduce folks to Ashes now…

 

He’s Dead Jim!

Fenland Gamers, game night, pandemic, pandemic legacy season 1

So one more time with feeling…

This post is about my play through of the game Pandemic Legacy Season 1 with my friends. So the following may or may not contain spoilers for the game. If you don't want to read possible spoilers for the game then stop reading now and join me in my next post.

Right if you are still reading this post let's begin…

Last night Debbie was back from her award winning performance of third tree from the left in the local amdram performance of Annie. Apparently the reviews were amazing. How good was Debbie's performance? Several dogs mistook her for a real tree, that's how good.

Before our game started with the agreement of Jonathan, Debbie and Matt, I swapped my character from Token Sexy Scientist to Wanda (I think that was her name) the quarantine specialist. I could now travel using the army bases, place one quarantine token anywhere on the board once per turn, and if a quarantine token was on the same city as me it stayed put if there was an infection there.

Before we got underway with the month of June, the legacy deck introduced equipment to the game. We then carried out the initial infection once more, decided our starting spot, along with our starting funded events (because of previous failures we were back upto six for this attempt at June).

I think this play through of June can best be described as close, but not close enough.

We had two cured diseases, about to eradicate one, nearly had army bases in all zones, and close to having seven quarantine markers out. But despite all that hard work, we got our butts handed to us and were overrun by outbreaks.

Our third loss. One more and we get to open the 'box'. The one you open after four losses in a row.

Time to reset the board and try again with eight funded events.

The faded are starting to get established on the West Coast of America. But we in reply are starting each game now with four army bases already in place. A great start of achieving one of the objectives very quickly. We got a few quarantine markers out on the board. Once more we cured C-ThatCam-Major.

If you are in a city with a faded in it at the start of your go, you take a scar. A scar is something negative, like you can hold one less card in your hand, or you get one less action a turn. I made the mistake of being in an occupied faded city at the start of one of my turns and had to take a scar.

Matt also made the same mistake, and took a scar. He then had to take another scar later. One more and his Zardoz would be dead. Guess what? An outbreak of a faded happened on the city he was safely sitting in. Zardoz was dead.

Below Matt gets all emotional at the death of Zardoz.

Matt had to take over one of the civilian ids to finish off the game. Which luckily was a couple of turns later.

We had army bases in all the zones, more than seven quarantine markers and was just about to eradicate C-ThatCam-Major for the win.

The fourth defeat had been avoided, but at what cost?

Before the start of July we get a bonus for completing June. Matt will get to choose a new character to play, which I believe he has already decided on. And we will be down to six funded events.

That's 50% of the game played. Wow, what an experience so far.