Game Over, Congrats on your win

switch

Just checking in. It’s been more than a couple of days since the last post. So I thought I’d put up a still here post.

Yesterday I teased folks and my friends I’m actually playing the game with, with a “current state of play” screen shot of my reserve.

I can now reveal one of those blurred out birds from yesterday’s tease. Mainly because I played it this morning. Naturally my other cards are blurred out.

Yep I’ve played a Raven. It was in my starting hand. But I needed to get another bird out before hand so I can start making use of it. I also need ideally some sort of tucking cards thing going on. Round one for me has been about setting this up and some sort of engine around it. The following rounds are all about exploiting this little engine and making it more powerful.

This current game is making good use of the 24 hour time limit to take a turn. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy playing Wingspan with friends when we are all online at the same time and play is more or less real time, and banter etc is happening via a discord channel or messenger.

However that’s not convenient for everyone. So that we could include one of our friends in a game we started one with everyone playing committing to check in and take their turn once a day. I’m usually checking in to see if it’s my turn three times a day. Game play is naturally slower, but it’s inclusive. Although having to wait so long to drop the raven on everyone was excruciating.

I made the mistake yesterday of putting the The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BotW) card into my Switch yesterday. The thinking was I’d get any updates installed so it’s ready when I get round to it.

However no updates were needed! And it went straight into the game. Several hours later.

BotW is a beautiful game. Nay stunning. So easy to get lost in it.

So instead of working on the alien stuff for Last Days or updating the triffids based on further feedback, I was exploring the high plateau on Hyrule.

But I do need to get back to this stuff. I now have some of the Aliens Another Glorious Day in the Corp models on the way. Plus I’m toying with the idea of basing the terrain on Hadley’s Hope. I do have a map of it from the Alien RPG. It’s just working out the best way to recreate it at an affordable cost.

Oh the post title? The later is the message I was expecting Jonathan to post once he saw I’d played a raven.

Arkham Asylum Mother’s Embrace First Impressions

apps, nintendo, switch

Last week Asmodee Digital and FFG (both part of the Asmodee Borg Collective) released Arkham Asylum Mother’s Embrace (AAME) on the Switch and other consoles.

Naturally this post will be looking at the Switch version of the game. So when I discuss things like graphic quality or other platform specific things they will not apply to the other platforms AAME is available on. Oh and I’m playing it on a Switch Lite.

AAME is set within the Lovecraftian Arkham Asylum universe that FFG created with their board games and living card game (lcg). I’ve enjoyed one or two of the board games, like Elder Sign, Eldritch Horror and Mansions of Madness 2. But the co-operative lcg Arkham Horror didn’t appeal to me, so I never bought it or played it. As for the whole Lovecraft Cthulhu theme with the elder gods, cultists and 1920/30’s setting it’s something I can take or leave.

Upon first loading up AAME I’m hit by the loading times. I’ve not timed it, maybe I should, but it does seem slow and take an age.

But as I navigate the menu, select my investigator, and start a new game, the cut scenes and starting in front of a house take me back to the early 1990’s and the “classic” MS-DOS game Alone in the Dark. That vibe just gets stronger as I start to walk around and explore.

If you ask Nathan the graphics aren’t much better than those of Alone in the Dark either. But in reality the 3D models may not be as good as those on other platforms, and feel more PS3 level at best. However they were more than serviceable and didn’t detract me from the game and getting sucked into the story.

You start AAME with the initial investigator that you chose at the start, but you are soon recruiting others into your team as you work through the chapters that make up the story.

During the game as you explore the location that the current chapter is set in, you can investigate certain parts of the room signified by a bright dot when far away, and a magnifying glass when up close.

Sometimes when you investigate an object you have a choice of options you can take. Chose the wrong one and the mythos clock goes up by one. If the mythos clock hits the top it resets, and forces all your current investigators to do a sanity check that if they fail will give them some sort of negative condition. But it’s not always guess work, if you gave a relevant investigator in your current team you get a clue as to the right choice to make.

I like that at the start of each chapter you select the investigators you want to take on that mission. Those left behind get rested and heal back up from any conditions they have from failed sanity checks.

One aspect I dislike about the game, and it’s done in many others too, is having captions on screen at the same time as the voice acting. I’ve read the text before the voice acting has finished. I must look at the options to see if I can switch this off. At list you can advance through it without having to wait.

Combat itself is fine. It’s turn based where you get to spend a number of action points to take one or more of the actions available to the character. The action point cost of actions varies on the action and character. Plus at the start of combat initiative is generated to decide the order of characters and enemies to take their turn. Very TTRPG like.

I like the quick access to the building map, equipment screen, story summary, and the objective summary. I also like the graphic design of these to be like and feel like a notebook.

Another nice touch is the auto saving, with the option to also create your own save point. This save point within the chapter will be where you start from if you need to quit and come back later, die etc.

I’m on the fourth chapter now and I’m enjoying AAME. I love the fact it takes me back to those days of playing Alone in the Dark. And I like that Asmodee Digital and FFG have chosen that style of game play. The story, the investigating a mystery also help in taking me back to those days. It may not have the flashiest of graphics. But they do the job.

MtG Arena App Update

apps, iOS, magic, MtG, MtG Arena

Thought I’d give a little update on the iOS version of Arena.

I raised a support call with WotC over redeeming the codes I had. Which they did respond to. You need to either use the PC/Mac version, or go to your account settings and https://myaccounts.wizards.com/code. Now this bit must be new (as in the last year) as I don’t remember WotC allowing codes to be redeemed via the web before.

Completed Colour Challenges!

So now I have some free packs and decks. Not many but some. It’s a start.

However having ground out the Colour (I refuse to use the American spelling here) Challenge unlocked the rewards as I progressed through each, and unlocked the other game formats. What it does not do is give me the free deck for having completed it, or acknowledge that I’ve completed it!

But Colour Challenge Not Complete!

The WotC twitter support did reply to my query about this with…

WotC Twitter Support Reply

So I visited the link, and created a feedback (that’s all it allows you to do) with the above screen shots attached.

In the meantime, I entered promo codes (happy I can do that now), ate, slept and other stuff.

With time to kill this morning I decided I’d check to see if I had a reply.

I want to say to my surprise there was no reply or even acknowledgement that my “bug” had been seen. But I was disappointed that there had not even been any form of acknowledgement. Which is the minimum you expect, even if it’s automated.

Naturally I voiced that disappointment via social media with the WotC Help account in a fairly civil manor.

I know the cards in this red/green deck aren’t going to be great. But they are cards none the less. Plus the challenge needs to be acknowledged as being completed so it can give me another to attempt (possibly). These challenges are one of the ways to grind out gems/coins and boosters for free. If the aim is to spend as little as possible (my total outlay so far has been a fiver on the intro booster offer) then this needs to be working.

MtG Arena hits iOS

apps, iOS, magic, MtG, MtG Arena, news, online play

Today Magic the Gathering Arena hit the iOS App Store.

Finally! It’s long over due on the platform. It came out on Android as an early access at the end of January.

Mini rant…

In my opinion Arena should have been on mobile from launch, or failing that within the first 6 months of launching. I really do think WotC fumbled the ball on this. By taking so long to reach other platforms other than PC, WotC really failed to make a significant dent into rival games such as Hearthstone. And that’s despite throwing lots of money at advertising, and “buying” streamers.

Initial impressions…

So this morning after downloading Arena onto my iPad, it had to then download even more data before I could do anything but play the tutorial. Then before the majority of game modes are made available I had to complete the Colour Challenge to unlock them. Which is basically play a mono coloured deck against an “AI” opponent playing one of the remaining colours, then the final game would be against a random real opponent. And you have to do that for each colour type, before you can play Standard or Historic for example.

The “AI” opponents are more logic puzzles than playing against an AI, as the cards drawn are the same each time. So it’s basically about playing the cards in the right order.

The real player opponent was fun. However there were some uneven matchups with obviously more powerful decks, they were not mono colour for starters. I think this for a complete novice to the game could be very off putting.

Being a paper player I have collected more than a handful of Arena codes over the last couple of years. These codes unlock decks, boosters, etc within Arena. You have to enter the code within the in app store to unlock them. However it appears that in the version of Arena released today there is no way to redeem those codes. So if like me you don’t have a PC/Mac you can’t use them, hopefully they won’t expire before WotC sort this out. Which would not be cool.

I knew I’d like playing MtG using Arena. It’s MtG with a slick “modern” UI. What’s not to like?

Another rant…

However it’s all the crap around playing the game that WotC have with their nickel and diming players for every penny they can screw out of them I don’t like.

I’ve seen comparisons online, and WotC are one of the meanest, less generous companies for this type of game. The in game economy is very much weighted in their favour.

Which means building up a collection and being able to build decks requires you to spend a lot of time grinding away, or spending lots of money. Neither is ideal.

Will I continue to play Arena? Possibly. Redeeming these codes is a biggie for me. Maybe a deal breaker.

Last Days: Xenomorphs Part 1

Alien, Last Days, Skirmish

The Alien movies, especially Alien and Aliens hold a special place in my fandom heart. I loved the late 80’s, early 90’s Dark Horse comics. Even some of the books are pretty good.

So with the introduction of the Evolutions and Timelines rules in the Blaster magazine (available on DriveThruRPG) it was only a matter of time really before I tried to add xenomorphs using these additional rules.

But aren’t there miniature based games already for this franchise? And yes indeed there are, like the official Galeforce 9 Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps and it’s expansions (link at the end of the post). However I think Last Days has a much more flexible rule set that will allow for a great cinematic xenomorph experience.

Getting miniatures for us to use is pretty easy. And doesn’t require us to buy a game that we are only interested in it’s miniatures for. Galeforce 9 actually sell the miniatures for their game separately! It is these miniatures that will determine the various evolutions that I will spec out for use with Last Days.

How many miniatures will you need? 24 alien warrior miniatures (3x the number of tokens we’ll be using), 1 alien queen, 5 eggs (closed) and 5 open eggs, finally ideally we should have 5 face huggers. I appreciate that this will require buying multiple copies of figure packs. But at the moment these are the cheapest way to get the figures.

As you have probably guessed from the posts title this isn’t everything needed to play Last Days using Xenomorphs. There is a lot of work going into this (more than triffids). Which means it will take me much much longer to get these initial thoughts down. Despite not having finished the updated triffid stats I had to get this post written. The spawning stuff just hit me one morning and I needed it written down so I didn’t forget it.

But first my disclaimer.

Please note: These stats/rules have not been play tested. I repeat have not been play tested. They are my initial thoughts, and a work in progress. They are likely to change once I get a chance to play test them.

Setup:

During the game setup after the supply token deployment we are adding an eggs deployment stage.

The player that chose the deployment zone first will go first in deploying the eggs.

A Last Days Xenomorphs game will have at least five eggs deployed on the table.

The rules for deploying the eggs will be the same as those for deploying supply tokens with one exception. Eggs can be deployed next/near to other eggs.

“The first will always be deployed on ground level as close to the center of the board as possible. The other four will be deployed, two per player, anywhere on the table but not within 6” of a table edge, deployment zone,…”

Spawning:

For this I’m going to be using the alien tokens that you can get for the Alien role playing game (photo below). On one side you have a motion tracker symbol, and on the reverse side an image of an alien.

First we need to build a pool of tokens. To do this we will need one token with an alien queen on, and eight tokens with a regular alien on (token k in the image below). Turn them motion tracker symbol face up, and shuffle/mix up.

When an alien spawns instead of placing a miniature, a token gets placed instead, motion tracker symbol facing up. Until a character miniature has line of sight (LOS) on that token it remains a token and gets moved according to the rules.

Once a character has LOS the token gets flipped revealing the alien type to be added to the board. But this is aliens, life isn’t that simple or easy. You now roll 1d6, and half the value, rounding down. So you should get a value between 0-3. This is the number of xenomorphs that will be spawning at that tokens position. Unless it is an alien queen being spawned. There will only ever be one of them. By having a chance of zero aliens spawning we’re simulating a false motion tracker reading.

If a character is within 5ft (1 inch) of an egg it will open and spawn a face hugger. That egg can no longer spawn a face hugger. Replace the closed egg with an open egg, and place a face hugger between the egg and character.

That’s my thoughts so far. As the following to do list shows still a lot to do. I’ll try and get the triffids finished first though.

To do:

  • Add a table for spawning for those without Alien RPG tokens.
  • Stats for the Xenomorphs
  • Timelines rules
  • Play test

References:

Spicy content!

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Ok bit of a sensationalist blog title. And this blog post and it’s embedded video has absolutely nothing to do with board gaming!

But it is me trying some chilli noodles that were given to me by my brother.

Apparently these noodles are too hot for his wife so he wanted me to try them.

Forgot to say in the video I really liked the noodle itself.

Plus I think my brother is a little disappointed I didn’t find them too hot.

It’s MtG Time Spiral Remastered Release Weekend

Commander, magic, MtG

It’s that time once again for a new release of MtG cards. This time WotC have gone back in time to 2006 and the Time Spiral block, and created basically a curated set of cards from that block, and released it as Time Spiral Remastered.

If you purchase a booster box or a ticket to the play online event this weekend (which gets you 4 booster packs to build a deck from and play online with using spelltable) you get a promo foil Lotus Bloom.

I’m not going to go through all my pulls but one pack had the following two cards in it. A foil Path to Exile and old style Etali! I was very chuffed to say the least.

Etali is my commander in the mono red aggro Commander deck I have. So I’ll be replacing the Ixalan card with this very cool retro looking one for sure.

I hope you got some cool pulls.

Got a virtual ticket to ride

apps, Fenland Gamers, game night, iOS, online play, virtual game night

Last night our game club Fenland Gamers held another virtual game night.

We had a new (not new to the club) member join us for the virtual game night, so I added their Asmodee username to my Asmodee friends list. I do this through the Asmodee web page. It’s easier and quicker that way. It does make sending game invites a lot simpler if folks are in your friends list. Once that was done, it was deciding what to play based on the overlap between the apps everyone owned. Which was either Carcassonne or Ticket to Ride (TTR). There were other overlaps but not for everyone.

Our game for the evening was Asmodee digitals TTR. I’ve not played the TTR app in years, and even then it was just me against the AI. So it was a first for me to be playing it online. I definitely needed to remind myself of the interface. The last time I had played any version of the physical TTR was the New York version in 2018. The original TTR I last played in 2017, and the TTR UK was 2016 on 18th March. Literally a day short of being a full on 5 years to the day!

We started off playing the original base game of TTR because I didn’t know what expansions everyone had. Which I needn’t have taken into account. It was pointed out over discord during play that only one person (the one starting the game) needed to have the expansion.

I wasn’t doing amazing in the first game, I put that down to getting back into the swing of things. Even though I didn’t win, I wasn’t last, and scored more points than Jonathan.

The second game was using the TTR UK map. I think out of the versions of TTR that I have played so far over the years, this is one of my favourite maps to play. I like the having to purchase technology to open up various parts of the map, get extra points for competing routes etc.

One annoying thing did happen right at the end when I was going to share the detailed results for the TTR UK map. It crashed! And every attempt since to go back into the game (not the app) to get those results sees the app crash. So Jonathan kindly sent me the images you see above. Sadly the UK map does not show the completed routes at the end of the game. It’s the board state just as before I trigger the end of the game and the final round. But it does show that I got the New York route that was worth a massive 40 points plus the bonus points I had from the technology cards.

Despite that app crash at the end I think that the combination of using official app versions of a game along with discord for voice/text chat works really well, especially if using a tablet device. My experience with the virtual tabletop apps hasn’t been great. Especially their iOS versions. Nope for me official app version on the iPad, and use my iPhone with headset plugged running the discord app for the chat. Works a treat.

Anyway we all had a good time. That’s the important part.

Cool mystery tee gift!

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This morning I had a delivery that I had no clue was coming.

Why?

I never ordered it!

Some-one sent me the rather cool tee pictured below.

So just like the 16 odd one-shot adventures in the just released D&D book Candlekeep Mysteries, I have a mystery to solve.

I have no idea who the very kind and generous sender is. There was no invoice/receipt inside. Which would be possible if they ticked a box to say it’s a gift. The return address is to an industrial estate in Peterborough.

There are a couple of suspects but until life events allow it, a more aggressive investigation approach can not take place. Unless extraction teams are hired and rendition to another state with dubious questioning techniques is used. But that might by some seem to be on the extreme side of things.

But seriously whoever sent the tee I’m deeply grateful for their generosity and kindness. It made my day.

Discard 8!

apps, iOS, star realms

I’ve not done one of these Star Realms posts in ages. Mind you I haven’t had a great deal to shout about. Although a 4 game winning streak against one of the games top players was pretty cool, and should warrant a post normally. However it didn’t as that player is still winning 2 games to every 1 of my wins!

Today I finished a game against one of my regular opponents, and achieved a first for me in Star Realms. Yep after nearly 9800 games of Star Realms it’s still possible to do things for the first time.

In the past I have had it so that an opponent has to discard 5 cards on their turn. Which basically means they have no next turn, as they are discarding their whole hand of cards (although with the new docking mechanic in the Frontiers Promo expansion they could have a 6th card, or the right event card they may have drawn an extra 2 cards). I’ve been on the receiving end of this once (yep only once in that many games, plenty of times had to discard 3 or 4 cards though) and it’s not fun. Unless you are dishing it out, then it’s funny!

But as the screen shot below shows in this game if my opponent had gotten to taken their next turn, they would have had to discard 8 cards! Naturally that is not possible under normal circumstances. And these were normal circumstances. No event card or docking mechanic shenanigans going on.

I’ve never ever before today forced a player to discard more than 5 cards. This is most definitely a record for me.

So for those interested here is the video of the game just finished.

What’s the maximum number of cards you have made some-one discard in Star Realms?