I know it’s been rather quiet on here lately. Well I am a firm believer of if you haven’t got anything to say then don’t say anything. Which really will surprise friends, family and work colleagues, because I talk a lot of crap. However you already know about the man flu, and life events that took out a couple of weeks of play. Then as everyone knows the weather last week kind of killed things off.

Surprisingly I did play some Magic last week.

As the photo above shows although not perfect we have at least enough room in my classroom to play Magic during breaks.

Sunday saw our party of brave adventurers return once more to the world of Gloomhaven. Oh SPOILER ALERT!!

The plan from our previous time in the Gloomhaven universe was to help out the local law enforcement and bring down a local crime lord. A local crime lord that we had already done the bidding of, by murdering some Inox caravan raiders. Just to teach them a lesson on behalf of the crime lord. Yeah our hands were dirty from that. Reflecting back on it, that mission if you remember didn’t sit well with me. Our mission was to infiltrate a warehouse in Gloomhaven owned by the crime lord. Sadly this mission was denied to us. Between our times in the Gloomhaven universe, Justin had visited his brother and they had started a new campaign, with new characters. Although they hadn’t started off with the intent of doing our planned mission. They ended up doing it anyway. I was a bit salty about this.

I have to admit I’m not a big fan of this mechanic that the designer built in to Gloomhaven. I think almost to a point that it may actually ruin the game for me. Or more specifically this play of the game. I still enjoy the game, and the mechanics. But I don’t like that missions etc can be denied from me. We had decided we were going to do the warehouse mission, but we can’t now. We won’t get to see the end of that story arc, or experience that mission and atone for our acts of murder. I know there is the argument, that “oh, we went along to the warehouse and found that it had been already raided”. But I don’t like that.

After a little debate and ruling out some watery options because we didn’t meet the mission requirement, our party settled on visiting the Windswept Highlands.

This new mission was heavily pushed by Charlie. Possibly because it offered the chance for him to make inroads on his characters objective for the campaign. We were on look out for some ingredients for an alchemist. All we had to do was visit the plateaus of the windswept highlands, fight against strong winds battering us around those plateaus. Oh and the small matter of defeating the indigenous monsters, such as sleeping spitting drakes, and the sun and wind demons. The spitting drakes would wake up if attacked or we were next to them.

There were also 3 treasure tokens we had to get to to open up 3 doors. The third and final treasure token when collected would open the door that would allow us to get to the exit point and victory. Naturally opening a door would not reveal anything good. My suspicion was more monsters.

If that wasn’t hard enough if one of us ended up exhausted then that was it mission over. The only plus point was if we got exhausted on the exit point we were ok.

My mission objective was to be the first person to kill a monster. Sadly this was not going to happen. Because of a road event, and not being able to clear a blocked path of a rock fall we started off this mission with 2 cards in our discard pile. Obviously this was to show how exhausting clearing heavy boulders away was. Not exactly a good way to encourage us to do the right thing in the future, putting us at a disadvantage before we even start killing stuff.

I got separated from the others when I opened the first door and then had a battle with two wind demons. Whilst the others went off to try and open the other 2 doors. Sadly the overwhelming odds of lots of sun and wind demons, plus the sleeping spitting drakes proved too much for the party. Despite the others in the party achieving their individual mission goals, it was all to no avail. Despite being a big bruising brute that likes to rush in and clobber things, Edmunds character took too much damage from the superior numbers. His character became exhausted and that was all she wrote. The mission was over and we had failed. None of the completed personal mission objectives mattered.

The wind mechanic introduced was interesting. At the end of each round our characters if able to would move 1 hex on the board left, up, right and down depending on the turn. It meant you had to think about where you finished your turn, because if you finish in the wrong place you could end up blown into a trap or worse blown into a space next to a sleeping spitting drake. I felt it did capture that being battered by gusts of strong wind.

Our first defeat. I’m sure that we will experience many more throughout the campaign. But still I was hoping we would of had a longer winning streak before suffering our first loss. I know how an Arsenal fan feels now.

Also over the weekend I was looking at some mono red land hate cards to put into this mono red Commander deck I am building. That Boiling Seas is awfully lonely at the moment and needs some friends. The nice thing about this land hate is that it slows and cripples my opponents, while leaving me mana rich. I’m waiting for Blood Moon to hopefully drop a little in price once Masters 25 hits FLGS this month. I’m not sure really who my Commander for the deck will be. I may play it with a different Commander each time to see which one is best.

Right hopefully now all the other events are out of the way and normal service has been resolved.