A couple days ago I hit Huzzah to play a couple games against Dan. They had a bunch of stuff I had special ordered in (thanks Chris and Ryan!) so I got to increase both of my miniature loves: three Gunships for Dindrenzi and two sets of the siblings and the Hooded Rider for Neverborn. I glued the Gunships together in preparation for facing down Dan.
Our first game was Uncharted Seas, my Imperial Navy against his Railguard. Once again, the wind started against me and I couldn't really maneuver that much. Our ships shot at each other a bunch with me getting an early advantage until he evened the playing field. Soon he was down to a badly damaged battleship and a couple of damaged cruisers against my barely damaged battleship. We sailed around an island for a couple turns as I tried to fight the wind and get an angle where I could hit him with my broadside but... well, frankly it got a bit boring and rather than play it out, we stopped the game there.
Besides, we both had three new Gunships ready to field in Firestorm.
So we hit the table with 1000 points each, each of us trying to destroy a target on the far side of a moon opposite us. That was really less important. More important was just seeing how many antics we could get in with our ships. He took a strong lead, blasting through five or so of my frigates as I downed only one of his cruisers. Then my Gunships went. Ohmigod. Blasted 10 dice into three different frigates on one side of me, and linked fore guns into one of Dan's Gunships, nearly killing it from full. Next turn, I won initiative (yay Dindrenzi tactics!) and my Gunships went again. Three frigates fell to their barrage, and Dan's Gunship was finally trashed. Good times! His responded in kind, and destroyed one of my Gunships, and the battle kept swinging back and forth. My Heavy Cruisers were putting a pounding in as well, and with my Battleship being the nice center of that attack, I was able to control the middle of the board while Dan took the flanks. A few well-timed boarding assaults, one by him that eliminated one of my Heavy Cruisers, and two by me that eliminated his Battleship, turned the tide. In the end, he had three cruisers left (one damaged, and split into two squads) and I had one Battleship (damaged slightly) with an Escort and a Heavy Cruiser left. We called it there since we were both just going to concentrate on getting our objectives at that point and it would take a while for our fleets to re-engage. I think I would have the advantage if I was able to destroy one of the cruisers from his squad of two - at that point he'd have trouble hurting my battleship, but it would take a while for that to happen.
Overall, good times! Dan's Heavy Cruisers are on their way. We'll have another match up then.
Dan and I agreed that Uncharted Seas is clearly the inferior game of the two. Granted we have more options in FSA, but the gameplay and the style just seems more... fun. We'll be sticking with that one.
Showing posts with label Uncharted Seas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Uncharted Seas. Show all posts
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Friday, October 29, 2010
Uncharted Seas: Initial Thoughts
Last weekend at the Warstore Weekend I picked up the Imperial Humans fleet for Uncharted Seas. I know I swore I'd never buy into this game, but since I got the box for free, I figure I kept my promise. I've only played one game of it so far, so I don't have a complete grasp on it yet, but given my experience with Firestorm Armada, I'd say I have a decent understanding of how the game works.
Unsurprisingly, there are some things this game does better than Firestorm Armada, and some things that FSA does better. Each game, even though it's using the same core system, does feel a bit different in its style and how it plays. I had expected the games to be far more similar, but it's interesting how changing a few things can really change the gameplay.
A few differences:
1. Ships are more effective from range band 1 than from range band 2. This means you'll want to get your ships up close and personal, and won't have to constantly be trying to maneuver to find that "sweet spot" to fire from.
2. Ramming and boarding are incredibly common occurrences in the game, and one of the better ways to take over enemy ships. Ram your ship into theirs and then board them. Also, when you finish killing off an enemy crew, your crew actually comes back to your ship rather than losing them for good.
3. Ships cannot see through each other and cannot move through each other. It's not 3-D space here. Firing through ships is harder, and you have to be a little more careful with your squadrons and positioning.
4. The decks are faction-specific, so each faction will have a few cards that are different from everyone else. For example, my faction, the Imperial Humans, have very little magic and what they do have is priestly magic.
5. Wind is important in the game. At least for some fleets. If you're sailing into the wind, you move at 1/2 speed. Unfortunately, the wind never helps you, so if you're sailing with the wind, you don't go faster. Too bad - I thought that would make an interesting mechanic. As it is, now the wind is just annoying.
6. Maneuvering is a bit different too. Instead of working with 45 degree turns and needing a certain number of inches before you can turn based on your size, each size of ship has a particular turning template which will show how fast it turns. Ships turn much faster in Uncharted Seas. Also, ships have a minimum move of 2" instead of 1/2 their speed. It means fleets with fast and slow ships can stick together a bit easier.
7. The critical hits table felt more punishing. There were a lot of things that simply could not be repaired except by cards.
8. There are far more special rules for different ships, and unfortunately none of these rules are on the cards themselves. You have to look in the book (or the handy download sheet from the website) to find what each of your ships does. Firestorm may reach that point as it expands the R&D ships, but for the moment, there are not nearly as many special rules in Firestorm.
Overall, the game changes out some good things and some bad things. I dislike the wind, the harsher critical hits table, the closer ranges of all the ships, etc. But I like that ramming and boarding are more prevalent in this game too, and I love the faction-specific decks. In the end, the game's no better than Firestorm Armada (and for me, the theme of Firestorm wins out), so I don't think I'll be expanding my ships beyond the starting box. Still, nice to have a different theme.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Warstore Weekend
Saturday morning I woke up at about 3:15 to get ready for the Warstore weekend. I set out everything the night before so that hopefully I could get ready and out the door with minimal waking of the wife. I think I did pretty well.
Jay came by to pick me up at 4:15. I was already exhausted given that just the previous night, I had been up until 11:00 fighting desperately to save the world from the evil machinations of one of the Great Old Ones. We were too slow to stop him from coming in to the world, so we had to fight to put him back where he belonged. Well, we failed. Bummer. So a total party wipe, and the world ended. Good times – we haven’t lost a game of Arkham Horror in a while.
So anywho, Jay and I get on the road, grab Dan by 5, and start heading north to New Jersey for Warstore Weekend. It was set to be a five hour trip, but favorable traffic and nice driving by Jay (thanks, Wookie!) got us there by nine. We decided we’d leave everything in the car to begin with since we couldn’t check in to the hotel yet and stepped out to head to the convention.
I’m going to pause here a moment to briefly describe how foreign New Jersey is to me:
1. They have roundabouts. Not nearly as many as England, but seeing as I just got back from a trip in the mother country where roundabouts were nearly the death of me, I figured it was worth drawing the parallel.
2. They smell bad. Really bad. Not the people, mind you – they seemed to shower and engage in proper odor control, but the state itself was unpleasant to the nose. There was a faint stench of trash with perhaps some soggy acidic tint to it. Inside the hotel, the smell was less, but it was still there somewhat.
3. Rope and twine are foreign concepts. When fastening something together, evidently it is better in New Jersey to use a plastic bag than twine. And no, the article in question (in this case a bed) was not inside the plastic bag. The bag was pulled into a makeshift string and used to fasten the bed together.
4. Driving politely is seen as a weakness, and those with the heaviest horn-hands should receive the right-of-way in all traffic situations for developing their skills at pounding on an automobile horn.
There are certainly other lessons about New Jersey, but I will satisfy myself with those four major ones I learned on my vacation.
So we arrived at about 9:00 at the convention hall inside the hotel in which we were staying. As I said, we decided to leave our stuff in the car for the moment since we could not check in to the hotel and went to check in to the convention instead. They had taken a bunch of the event rooms for the Warstore weekend. Essentially there were four rooms.
The first was a painting room. You could go get someone to teach you the basics (or more advanced techniques) of painting, etc. I had wanted to go to a session they had on conversions, but it was only offered on Friday so I missed it. In retrospect, I probably could have gone in and asked who had done the session and try to get them to offer it again – it was a pretty laid back convention hall – but I didn’t have much time to spare, so I missed out on that.
The second room was a hall with a bunch of tables set up for various demos. They also had a silent auction that I wanted to check out, but nearly everything there was for 40k or Warhammer Fantasy, so I didn’t bother to bid on anything. This room housed pretty much any miniatures game or board game (there were very few of those) that was not Warhammer, Warmachine, or Heavy Gear.
The third room was the Warstore. They brought a bunch of things from their store to sell there, but unfortunately didn’t have anything new I wanted. Both the new Malifaux and the new Firestorm models for my factions don’t start hitting the stores until this week – a week too late for the Warstore Weekend.
The fourth room was down a long hallway and housed a ton of tables for miniatures games. Here is where the Warmachine and Warhammer crowds stuck around, playing pickup games and tournaments. When we arrived, we all headed here first as we were told that there would be a demo available of Heavy Gear.
Dan and I headed up for a demo while Jay went to check out some of the Warhammer stuff. We got paired against each other with two opposing mecha factions. The models looked pretty cool, and the game seemed pretty detailed. And then we got into the interesting parts. Evidently, there are dozens of modifiers (Did you move? What speed? Did he move? Are you in cover? What ammo are you using? What’s your range? Okay, all that comes to 1+1+1-1-2+1-2+1 so you can roll a die against Dan with no modifiers! Dan and I went blind on the modifiers. Then blind on the damage. You hit with four levels between each other? Well, your gun happens to do eight damage per level, which is 32, which compared with his 15 wound threshold means you do… 2 damage to him! Okay, that was your first shot. Your next guy want to shoot?
After remembering high school math (and also learning that guns are no match for a good grenade… He dropped my squad to 4 people and I dropped his to 4 with a lot of shooting, and then we both lobbed a grenade at each other and killed off three people each… why do we even use bullets?) we tried out their gladiator combat game. This was a little more beer and pretzels, they said, though it involved more record keeping and more math. It was just over fewer models, so there wasn’t as much an issue. Fun games, but between all the mental math and the price (the 5-on-5 initial demo Dan and I played would have cost us $90), we decided it wasn’t for us.
The guy gave us each two tickets for playing, and I was a bit confused. I didn’t really want a raffle, but he told me they were for you to collect and trade in later for prizes and goodies at the Warstore. Good deal!
By the time we finished our gladiator combat game, we looked around and realized that we had misplaced a Wookie. No easy feat, so we headed back to the other rooms to see if we could find him. We stopped at the store where Dan found all the ships he wanted to pick up for his Sorylians weren’t available. Someone had evidently bought them out the previous day. I confirmed there were no models I needed, and we headed on to find the Wookie. We found him a little down the hall looking for us. There was a Malifaux tournament about to start, he said, and they needed players.
Now those who know me know I dislike tournaments, but since they needed players and since Dan and Jay were going to play, I figured I might as well. We got our models, tried to argue the merits of playing a 30 stone tournament instead of a 35 stone one, lost that debate, and got paired up. There were six players: Dan and Jay with Ressers, me with Neverborn, and then three other guys – two Archanists and one Guild.
First round I was paired up against one of the Archanists who was playing Rasputina. I had Lilith because the mission was Slaughter. And really, who other than Lilith would romp Slaughter. This game was not all that fun, unfortunately. I had a really hard time hearing or understanding anything my opponent was saying, and even my drawing direct attention to that fact and explaining that I was hearing impaired and having difficulty understanding didn’t change anything. Here’s a sample of the conversations we had:
Him: “Rasputina blasts her spell. Needs an 11.” Flips an 8. He folds his arms and looks at me.
Me: “Are you going to cheat? Or use a stone?”
Him: “No.”
Me: “…Okay.”
Me: (thinking I must have misheard something here) “So you miss?”
Him: “No, I have an 18.”
Me: “Oh, okay. So you’re already hitting me, okay. Do you want to cheat it up or use a stone to make it harder for me to resist.”
Him: “I’m hitting you.”
Me: “Okay, fair enough.” I flip a card 4. “Okay, I have a total of 12 here – I’ll cheat it to a 19. It misses.”
Him: (rolls his eyes frustrated)
Somewhere around turn two I decided I really did not want to play this game anymore and didn’t care whether he was newish to the game or not and wanted to end it as quickly as I could. I spent the next two turns wiping him off the board to a model losing only one of my Younger Nephilims and took full points. I was done in about a half an hour of the hour and a half we had available. I’m glad I finished quick, because if there was another round, I was very close to apologizing and withdrawing from the tournament. As it was, I had enough time to cool down, then we got lunch, and came back for round two.
I was paired off against the second place person at the time, Ed (Guild). He had just beaten Jay, taking 7 points for himself, which put him a half a step behind me. I knew I needed to at least hold even with him this round. I took Lilith again and he took Predita. The table we were offered had a massive open area in the middle with a few fences for a little cover. But against the Ortegas, it was a deathtrap. The mission was something I’d never seen called Get the Stuff or something like that. We each placed two tokens of stuff out there and had to get a model to them to (1) Interact to get some stuff. Each token could only be interacted with twice and then it was gone, and you gained a random amount of stuff when you interacted with it. We each had a token that was impossible for the other person to reach fast and another that was kinda close to the other person too. The basic game would resolve with each person getting their two tokens, and then fighting for schemes. I decided that as fast as Lilith was, I wanted to steal one of his interacts from him. With judicial use of Earthquake, then carrying my Tot, and having him Sprint, I was able to get one of my Tots to his stuff on turn one, but I didn’t interact with it yet. Meanwhile, I nabbed one of my other ones and landed next to the other. I won initiative on turn two and my Tot stole the second interaction on one of his stuffs and proceeded to get blasted apart. With my 5 interactions, I had 11 stuff and with his 3 interactions, he had 4. Knowing if I kept Lilith safe until the end of the game, I would tie him 6-6, that’s what I opted for after my gamble in the beginning resulted in my losing nearly half of my army in the counterattack. I ran around with Lilith, kept safe, and forced a tie on the Strategy. I felt bad doing it, but he shook his head and said it was the smart way to play, and he didn’t take it personally or anything. He was a really good player – outmaneuvered me and killed everything I had but Lilith and the totem, but I was able to play the strategy just a little faster and pulled out some solid points that way.
At the end of the second game, I was in first, Dan and Ed were tied in second one point behind me, and Jay was coming up one point behind them.
I ended up paired against Dan for the last game. Both of us were tired and neither of us wanted to face the other’s killer list. So instead we went to an old standby from our Warmachine days – we made each others’ lists. I gave him Nicodem, two Vultures, two Canine Remains, a Hanged, a Punk Zombie and Killjoy (his only request for the list since he’d never played him). I got Zoraida, Bad Juju, two Slurids, two Waldgeists, and then gave me the option of three more stones or a Tot. I took the Tot. Our mission was to break through to the others’ side with more models. The game was fun on a bun, at least for me. I think Dan got frustrated from the get-go when I Voodoo Doll-ed his Punk Zombie on turn one and had it charge and kill one of his Vultures, then popped out Bad Juju near the second one and killed it. From there, I kept Obeying his models to charge his master and force him to burn through his stones. Finally Killjoy popped out and tore into my Waldgeists, hurting them a bit. I got the Punk Zombie to charge his master once more and force a solid hit. I cheated the Red Joker for damage and flipped a moderate for a total of 9 damage, but he flipped the Red Joker on prevention. Damn! My Slurids jumped into the fight but the Hanged took care of them before they could do more than a couple damage to Nicodem. Finally I got Killjoy to kill off Nicodem. I lost Bad Juju, but at that point he was running out of models and couldn’t replenish them. I booked it to the far side with a Waldgeist and Zoraida while Bad Juju popped back out over there. He had two models, his Hanged and his Killjoy, left at the end. I scraped together full points and he got 4 from me.
In the end, I took first, Ed took second, and Jay claimed third. I won a metal storage case for 200 models, but I have no idea what to do with it. Maybe modify it for my paints and the like. We also got a ton of tickets – one for each hour we played, plus 5 extra for me (first) and 1 for Jay (third). That took our total to 26 as a group.
We hit dinner and then came back for a mega game of Firestorm. Nobody other than the three of us showed up, so we each put out 1000 points, split them into two roughly equal fleets each, and spread them out over the massive table. There were a few planets along the middle strip that we could get points for controlling. I decided not to bother with that and just shoot a lot. The game was a lot of fun, and took us nearly 5 hours to finish. By the end, Dan had taken first, Jay second and me third. We claimed our additional 24 tickets, Dan got his $30 gift certificate for winning (to a store local to New Jersey) and we passed out.
The next morning at breakfast (which had some of the best buffet-style French toast and bacon I’ve ever tasted) we decided to give Dan our tickets because he really wanted to get one of the Uncharted Seas boxes and they were 40 tickets. We finished eating and found one of the guys willing to do a demo of Uncharted Seas. He was a really funny guy, and with the addition of one of his friends who wanted to learn, we had ourselves a nice four player match.
Dan came in with his new box fleet (which was reduced to 30 tickets, so he gave me the rest of them) and we started playing. Dan took an early lead, but Jay ended up outlasting us with his ironclads, I came in strong with the Cruisers and a Battleship near the end with one Frigate trying to outlast them. Jay rammed one of my Frigates and ignited the powder room, blowing up it and my other two Cruisers, plus two of his Frigates and damaging his battleship. Finally, he rammed me and we fought hard, but soon I was overtaken. His battleship sailed away and shot down Dan’s last cruiser. Game over, Jay won. So over the course of the tournament, we each took first in one of the three games. All in all, a good showing. We got our tickets and had enough for me to go and pick up an Uncharted Seas fleet too. I picked the Imperial Navy, the human ships. I liked the way they looked, so went with that as my reason for taking them.
I picked up a few terrain pieces to try to put together a new feature. No idea how it will turn out, but it should be fun. Dan picked up a Sodapop miniature he liked, and Jay got another couple ships for his Uncharted Seas fleet, as well as a few terrain pieces of his own. On the way home, we stopped at the gaming store Dan had the $30 for and he picked up the rules to Uncharted Seas.
We drove home, tired, and celebrated when we heard the Redskins win their game. All in all, a capital weekend.
Jay came by to pick me up at 4:15. I was already exhausted given that just the previous night, I had been up until 11:00 fighting desperately to save the world from the evil machinations of one of the Great Old Ones. We were too slow to stop him from coming in to the world, so we had to fight to put him back where he belonged. Well, we failed. Bummer. So a total party wipe, and the world ended. Good times – we haven’t lost a game of Arkham Horror in a while.
So anywho, Jay and I get on the road, grab Dan by 5, and start heading north to New Jersey for Warstore Weekend. It was set to be a five hour trip, but favorable traffic and nice driving by Jay (thanks, Wookie!) got us there by nine. We decided we’d leave everything in the car to begin with since we couldn’t check in to the hotel yet and stepped out to head to the convention.
I’m going to pause here a moment to briefly describe how foreign New Jersey is to me:
1. They have roundabouts. Not nearly as many as England, but seeing as I just got back from a trip in the mother country where roundabouts were nearly the death of me, I figured it was worth drawing the parallel.
2. They smell bad. Really bad. Not the people, mind you – they seemed to shower and engage in proper odor control, but the state itself was unpleasant to the nose. There was a faint stench of trash with perhaps some soggy acidic tint to it. Inside the hotel, the smell was less, but it was still there somewhat.
3. Rope and twine are foreign concepts. When fastening something together, evidently it is better in New Jersey to use a plastic bag than twine. And no, the article in question (in this case a bed) was not inside the plastic bag. The bag was pulled into a makeshift string and used to fasten the bed together.
4. Driving politely is seen as a weakness, and those with the heaviest horn-hands should receive the right-of-way in all traffic situations for developing their skills at pounding on an automobile horn.
There are certainly other lessons about New Jersey, but I will satisfy myself with those four major ones I learned on my vacation.
So we arrived at about 9:00 at the convention hall inside the hotel in which we were staying. As I said, we decided to leave our stuff in the car for the moment since we could not check in to the hotel and went to check in to the convention instead. They had taken a bunch of the event rooms for the Warstore weekend. Essentially there were four rooms.
The first was a painting room. You could go get someone to teach you the basics (or more advanced techniques) of painting, etc. I had wanted to go to a session they had on conversions, but it was only offered on Friday so I missed it. In retrospect, I probably could have gone in and asked who had done the session and try to get them to offer it again – it was a pretty laid back convention hall – but I didn’t have much time to spare, so I missed out on that.
The second room was a hall with a bunch of tables set up for various demos. They also had a silent auction that I wanted to check out, but nearly everything there was for 40k or Warhammer Fantasy, so I didn’t bother to bid on anything. This room housed pretty much any miniatures game or board game (there were very few of those) that was not Warhammer, Warmachine, or Heavy Gear.
The third room was the Warstore. They brought a bunch of things from their store to sell there, but unfortunately didn’t have anything new I wanted. Both the new Malifaux and the new Firestorm models for my factions don’t start hitting the stores until this week – a week too late for the Warstore Weekend.
The fourth room was down a long hallway and housed a ton of tables for miniatures games. Here is where the Warmachine and Warhammer crowds stuck around, playing pickup games and tournaments. When we arrived, we all headed here first as we were told that there would be a demo available of Heavy Gear.
Dan and I headed up for a demo while Jay went to check out some of the Warhammer stuff. We got paired against each other with two opposing mecha factions. The models looked pretty cool, and the game seemed pretty detailed. And then we got into the interesting parts. Evidently, there are dozens of modifiers (Did you move? What speed? Did he move? Are you in cover? What ammo are you using? What’s your range? Okay, all that comes to 1+1+1-1-2+1-2+1 so you can roll a die against Dan with no modifiers! Dan and I went blind on the modifiers. Then blind on the damage. You hit with four levels between each other? Well, your gun happens to do eight damage per level, which is 32, which compared with his 15 wound threshold means you do… 2 damage to him! Okay, that was your first shot. Your next guy want to shoot?
After remembering high school math (and also learning that guns are no match for a good grenade… He dropped my squad to 4 people and I dropped his to 4 with a lot of shooting, and then we both lobbed a grenade at each other and killed off three people each… why do we even use bullets?) we tried out their gladiator combat game. This was a little more beer and pretzels, they said, though it involved more record keeping and more math. It was just over fewer models, so there wasn’t as much an issue. Fun games, but between all the mental math and the price (the 5-on-5 initial demo Dan and I played would have cost us $90), we decided it wasn’t for us.
The guy gave us each two tickets for playing, and I was a bit confused. I didn’t really want a raffle, but he told me they were for you to collect and trade in later for prizes and goodies at the Warstore. Good deal!
By the time we finished our gladiator combat game, we looked around and realized that we had misplaced a Wookie. No easy feat, so we headed back to the other rooms to see if we could find him. We stopped at the store where Dan found all the ships he wanted to pick up for his Sorylians weren’t available. Someone had evidently bought them out the previous day. I confirmed there were no models I needed, and we headed on to find the Wookie. We found him a little down the hall looking for us. There was a Malifaux tournament about to start, he said, and they needed players.
Now those who know me know I dislike tournaments, but since they needed players and since Dan and Jay were going to play, I figured I might as well. We got our models, tried to argue the merits of playing a 30 stone tournament instead of a 35 stone one, lost that debate, and got paired up. There were six players: Dan and Jay with Ressers, me with Neverborn, and then three other guys – two Archanists and one Guild.
First round I was paired up against one of the Archanists who was playing Rasputina. I had Lilith because the mission was Slaughter. And really, who other than Lilith would romp Slaughter. This game was not all that fun, unfortunately. I had a really hard time hearing or understanding anything my opponent was saying, and even my drawing direct attention to that fact and explaining that I was hearing impaired and having difficulty understanding didn’t change anything. Here’s a sample of the conversations we had:
Him: “Rasputina blasts her spell. Needs an 11.” Flips an 8. He folds his arms and looks at me.
Me: “Are you going to cheat? Or use a stone?”
Him: “No.”
Me: “…Okay.”
Me: (thinking I must have misheard something here) “So you miss?”
Him: “No, I have an 18.”
Me: “Oh, okay. So you’re already hitting me, okay. Do you want to cheat it up or use a stone to make it harder for me to resist.”
Him: “I’m hitting you.”
Me: “Okay, fair enough.” I flip a card 4. “Okay, I have a total of 12 here – I’ll cheat it to a 19. It misses.”
Him: (rolls his eyes frustrated)
Somewhere around turn two I decided I really did not want to play this game anymore and didn’t care whether he was newish to the game or not and wanted to end it as quickly as I could. I spent the next two turns wiping him off the board to a model losing only one of my Younger Nephilims and took full points. I was done in about a half an hour of the hour and a half we had available. I’m glad I finished quick, because if there was another round, I was very close to apologizing and withdrawing from the tournament. As it was, I had enough time to cool down, then we got lunch, and came back for round two.
I was paired off against the second place person at the time, Ed (Guild). He had just beaten Jay, taking 7 points for himself, which put him a half a step behind me. I knew I needed to at least hold even with him this round. I took Lilith again and he took Predita. The table we were offered had a massive open area in the middle with a few fences for a little cover. But against the Ortegas, it was a deathtrap. The mission was something I’d never seen called Get the Stuff or something like that. We each placed two tokens of stuff out there and had to get a model to them to (1) Interact to get some stuff. Each token could only be interacted with twice and then it was gone, and you gained a random amount of stuff when you interacted with it. We each had a token that was impossible for the other person to reach fast and another that was kinda close to the other person too. The basic game would resolve with each person getting their two tokens, and then fighting for schemes. I decided that as fast as Lilith was, I wanted to steal one of his interacts from him. With judicial use of Earthquake, then carrying my Tot, and having him Sprint, I was able to get one of my Tots to his stuff on turn one, but I didn’t interact with it yet. Meanwhile, I nabbed one of my other ones and landed next to the other. I won initiative on turn two and my Tot stole the second interaction on one of his stuffs and proceeded to get blasted apart. With my 5 interactions, I had 11 stuff and with his 3 interactions, he had 4. Knowing if I kept Lilith safe until the end of the game, I would tie him 6-6, that’s what I opted for after my gamble in the beginning resulted in my losing nearly half of my army in the counterattack. I ran around with Lilith, kept safe, and forced a tie on the Strategy. I felt bad doing it, but he shook his head and said it was the smart way to play, and he didn’t take it personally or anything. He was a really good player – outmaneuvered me and killed everything I had but Lilith and the totem, but I was able to play the strategy just a little faster and pulled out some solid points that way.
At the end of the second game, I was in first, Dan and Ed were tied in second one point behind me, and Jay was coming up one point behind them.
I ended up paired against Dan for the last game. Both of us were tired and neither of us wanted to face the other’s killer list. So instead we went to an old standby from our Warmachine days – we made each others’ lists. I gave him Nicodem, two Vultures, two Canine Remains, a Hanged, a Punk Zombie and Killjoy (his only request for the list since he’d never played him). I got Zoraida, Bad Juju, two Slurids, two Waldgeists, and then gave me the option of three more stones or a Tot. I took the Tot. Our mission was to break through to the others’ side with more models. The game was fun on a bun, at least for me. I think Dan got frustrated from the get-go when I Voodoo Doll-ed his Punk Zombie on turn one and had it charge and kill one of his Vultures, then popped out Bad Juju near the second one and killed it. From there, I kept Obeying his models to charge his master and force him to burn through his stones. Finally Killjoy popped out and tore into my Waldgeists, hurting them a bit. I got the Punk Zombie to charge his master once more and force a solid hit. I cheated the Red Joker for damage and flipped a moderate for a total of 9 damage, but he flipped the Red Joker on prevention. Damn! My Slurids jumped into the fight but the Hanged took care of them before they could do more than a couple damage to Nicodem. Finally I got Killjoy to kill off Nicodem. I lost Bad Juju, but at that point he was running out of models and couldn’t replenish them. I booked it to the far side with a Waldgeist and Zoraida while Bad Juju popped back out over there. He had two models, his Hanged and his Killjoy, left at the end. I scraped together full points and he got 4 from me.
In the end, I took first, Ed took second, and Jay claimed third. I won a metal storage case for 200 models, but I have no idea what to do with it. Maybe modify it for my paints and the like. We also got a ton of tickets – one for each hour we played, plus 5 extra for me (first) and 1 for Jay (third). That took our total to 26 as a group.
We hit dinner and then came back for a mega game of Firestorm. Nobody other than the three of us showed up, so we each put out 1000 points, split them into two roughly equal fleets each, and spread them out over the massive table. There were a few planets along the middle strip that we could get points for controlling. I decided not to bother with that and just shoot a lot. The game was a lot of fun, and took us nearly 5 hours to finish. By the end, Dan had taken first, Jay second and me third. We claimed our additional 24 tickets, Dan got his $30 gift certificate for winning (to a store local to New Jersey) and we passed out.
The next morning at breakfast (which had some of the best buffet-style French toast and bacon I’ve ever tasted) we decided to give Dan our tickets because he really wanted to get one of the Uncharted Seas boxes and they were 40 tickets. We finished eating and found one of the guys willing to do a demo of Uncharted Seas. He was a really funny guy, and with the addition of one of his friends who wanted to learn, we had ourselves a nice four player match.
Dan came in with his new box fleet (which was reduced to 30 tickets, so he gave me the rest of them) and we started playing. Dan took an early lead, but Jay ended up outlasting us with his ironclads, I came in strong with the Cruisers and a Battleship near the end with one Frigate trying to outlast them. Jay rammed one of my Frigates and ignited the powder room, blowing up it and my other two Cruisers, plus two of his Frigates and damaging his battleship. Finally, he rammed me and we fought hard, but soon I was overtaken. His battleship sailed away and shot down Dan’s last cruiser. Game over, Jay won. So over the course of the tournament, we each took first in one of the three games. All in all, a good showing. We got our tickets and had enough for me to go and pick up an Uncharted Seas fleet too. I picked the Imperial Navy, the human ships. I liked the way they looked, so went with that as my reason for taking them.
I picked up a few terrain pieces to try to put together a new feature. No idea how it will turn out, but it should be fun. Dan picked up a Sodapop miniature he liked, and Jay got another couple ships for his Uncharted Seas fleet, as well as a few terrain pieces of his own. On the way home, we stopped at the gaming store Dan had the $30 for and he picked up the rules to Uncharted Seas.
We drove home, tired, and celebrated when we heard the Redskins win their game. All in all, a capital weekend.
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