The Giant Brain

Happy New Year everyone and I hope Santa was good to you.

I managed to get a few days off over Christmas and hosted the family for the usual food, booze and entertainments. It was lovely to see my brother as he is off in sunny Norway these days and I don’t get to spend time with him as often as I would like.

I picked up a few things in preperation for christmas, as well as getting a couple of new games under the tree:

Dixit (Bought)

Bought and played over christmas, and it seemed to go down well. A beautifully illustrated game of guessing how people round the table will interpret different words and sentences. A very elegant design accompanied by a fairy tale look. Wonderful.

King of Tokyo (Bought)

I am planning some more regular reviews, possibly with accompanying pictures, and this will be my first as it is my current favourite amongst my collection. For now let me give you a quick overview: you are a big monster, you want to be King of Tokyo, the end. That was easy. A push your luck dice mechanic accompanied by a wonderful design aesthetic makes this one of my go to games at the moment.

Nightfall: Martial Law (Present)

A present under the tree from the in-laws, and one I hope to get to the table soon. For those of you unfamiliar with this sub-genre of our hobby, Nightfall is one of the better Deck-building games out there with a distinctly ‘World of Darkness’ feel to it. Martial Law adds a bunch of new options, and I really would like to get some more of the tasty looking promo cards out there. Once I give it a spin I’ll do a longer review.

Summoner Wars (Present)

I have been itching to add a good two player game to my collection and this could be it. Basically you play as a powerful summoner in a given faction, using defeated enemies to summon new units and take out the opposing summoner. I have only played once but the two factions we played with felt very different making me think it will take a little while to get my head round this one. The Master Set is what I received from my brother, and it is a fine looking product with space for other faction decks should you want to collect them. I’m looking forward to trying out the deck building aspect of the game.

Blood Bowl Team Manager (Bought)

Only gotten this to the table twice so far but it has been a blast to play. FFG have done a good job of capturing the feel of the Blood Bowl board game whilst creating a unique experience all of its own. Not too sure how tactically deep it is as yet but it is a hell of a lot of fun. More indepth review of this one on the way as well.

Hope Santa was good to everyone, and hopefully next year I’ll have a few new games released to help you out with presents under the tree.

Happy gaming

Iain

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

 

Well Games Expo was as good fun as ever and it was great to meet some B-Movie fans and general indie games enthusiasts over the course of the con.

For the majority of the con I was on the Indie games booth but I also managed to get in a game of Reel Adventures.  It was called ‘On her Majesty’s shrunken service’ and was a James Bond style story where one of the protagonists was only a few inches tall. It was a really fun game and I’ll try to write it up soon.

Of course no con is complete without a few purchases and I picked up Survive: Escape from Atlantis, Ascending Empires and some old school gaming in the form of Swords and Wizadry and Vornheim. Vornheim especially is worth a look, a beautifully produced handbook for running city adventures. The one other product I saw that I really want is Operation:Fallen Reich. An exquisite production with a crazy board game attached to it that is used for character creation. May see about picking this up later in the year.

It was really nice to be back at Games Expo this year and to meet Eero and Mark from Arkenstone. Also good to catch up with Andrew and Matt, whose imprints you can find links to under our Spotlight tab.

The expo reignited my enthusiasm for roleplaying which had been waning a bit recently, and I am hoping to back next year with a few new products including Action Movie, Reel Adventures and Nobel Intentions, which I think I fixed on the way back up from Birmingham.

All the best

Iain

So I thought I would start of this spotlight section by pointing you towards the games made by a few friends of mine.

Contested Ground Studios

Home of the incredibly talented Malcom Craig and his equally creative friend Paul Bourne, who was nice enough to help me out with the art for my games as well. Their games include a|state, Hot War, Cold City and my own early effort Mob Justice.

Steampower Publishing

Andrew Kenrick’s site that offers up the insanely good ‘Dead of Night’, a roleplaying  game of recreating any horror genre you care to imagine, with some terrifying posters done by Paul Bourne. Andrew is working away on some other projects at the moment and posts regularly about his progress.

Realms

Matt Machell’s site is where you can pick up the game ‘Covenant’, a game about the fallout of a failed conspiracy. He is also working on ‘Enlightment and Entropy’ which sounds interesting and you can read more about over at the Collective Endeavour.

Omnihedron Games

If Sharpe and Hornblower are your thing then I recommend you head over to the website of Neil Gow and buy his games. Seriously go and do it now then come back. ‘Duty and Honour’ and its naval counterpart ‘Beat to Quarters’ are fantastic pieces of design and allow you to tell individual stories easily but keep the context of larger battles and campaigns. Great stuff.

Prince of Darkness

Home of the fantastic Contenders, a personal favourite, amongst numerous other RPG and card game projects the site of Joe Prince is bursting with content and innovative ideas. Check it out for some freebies and support material for all Joe’s games.