Well I haven’t had the chance to get a playtest of the new version of Nobel Intentions yet, but I have been playing some new games. Last night I played the intro scenario of Incursion, a Space Hulk type game with an evil-science-Nazis vs. Giant Robot Americans theme.
In the Box
Although Grindhouse games do a miniatures range for the game, you get everything you need to play in the box. Mine was a limited edition one so it came with 3 minis, 1 for a nazi character and 2 of her sturmzombie minions. Nice sculpting and I look forward to painting them.
The rest of the box consists of a nice thick 2 sided board, a rulebook, rules summary sheet, cards and a bunch of punch out counters. Everything was nice quality but the tokens could have done with being a little easier to get out of their sheets.
The rulebook itself I found to be poorly laid out, with some flipping back and forth to reference rules. That said my opponent and I were set up and playing within about 20 mins so that is not bad. I understand their may be some translation issues with the game as well, as I believe Grindhouse are based in Sweden. All in all its not hard to understand, but some better layout would just make things flow a bit better.
Their are two factions in the game the American Lucky Seventh, who are essentially dudes in big armour with big guns, and the German SWD who are evil nazi scientists, think Hellboy and you wont be far wrong. You get loads of plastic stands, and nice thick cardboard standees to represent your troops. We did notice some printing errors on some of the American tokens, they would say troop 1 on the front, but 2 on the back, but this is a minor niggle.
Play
To get going you choose a scenario, in this case a simple ‘Get the Americans across the board safely’ mission. You then get a number of points to buy troops, but in the case of the intro scenario there is no choice what to pick with the troops in the basic set: there is an expansion available called Snafu. So I had 2 guys in big suits of armour and my opponent started with 2 sturmzombies. That may not sound like a lot of zombies but they have a special rule where more of them appear each turn, it soon becomes a LOT of zombies! To keep track of the troops and their abilities their are faction cards that summarise all the relevant information.
At the start of each turn, the maintenance phase, you get a number of command points (CP) based on the size of the forces for the scenario. These CP are used to bid for who goes first, give more actions to your troops and also cancel battle cards. Battle cards are also drawn during the maintenance phase, and they can be one off events or permanent effects, which are mostly played on troops.
Once the maintenance phase is out of the way, you get to the action. When a player takes their turn they activate each of their troops in turn spending the Action Points(AP) that the model has. AP is used to move, shoot, hand to hand etc. In addition troops can have CP spent on them to perform extra actions. Combat is a very simple matter of rolling a number of d6 and comparing each one to a number on the target. Each dice that equals or exceeds the target number scores a hit and each model can only take a certain number of hits.
One last rule thing which I found very interesting. If a troop with a ranged weapon ends its turn without being able to make Line of Sight to an enemy it automatically enters reactive fire. This made for some very interesting play as you balance shooting the last zombie you can see so you can shoot the rest you know are coming, with moving forward to try and complete the scenario. Very nice rule.
Conclusion
We found the game to move fast and play well. There are some interesting tactical choices to make without bogging the game down in them and the ability to alter the troop selection for each mission will give the game a high level of replayability. The fact that the game is complete out of the box is absolutely fantastic, though I think I will be picking up some of the miniatures as I rather like them.
Thoroughly recommended.
Happy gaming
Iain
