More Sucker Punch

Evidently, I'm not the only one who thinks this movie looks fun. I got pointed over here to grab some of the posters. Personally, Sweet Pea is my favorite. Chic with a sword. How can you go wrong? Though it's hard to decide... can't wait for the movie. Enjoy!

Sucker Punch

So I found a new trailer for a movie coming out next March that has me pretty interested. It's called Sucker Punch, and I have no idea how it all fits together. But in the trailer, I see...

Samurai
Hot Girls
Mental Institutions
1950s Style Gangster Men
Airplanes with Missiles
Crashing buildings
Fully Automatic Guns
Scantly-clad Dancing
Mecha-type robots
and, of course, a Dragon

Evidently, the main character ends up somehow in a dream world where she can control some stuff, and something happens, and somehow that's good or bad. Clearly I'm not too sure what the movie's about. But with everything above rolled into one, how can it be bad??!?!

Return of Malifaux

GenCon is next week, and the craze for all things new in gaming is ramping up. I had been out of the game for a little while, mostly because my house issues were preventing me from getting to much else. But now that the house is nearly finished back up, I've been able to get a couple of games in this week.

First, I played a game against Josh on Monday. We took 30 stones each and he took the Viktoria list he's hoping to play at GenCon (Vikis, two Ronin, Convict, woman with hammer), and I took a new bend on an Old Hag list (Zoraida, three Tots, three Slurids, and the Convict Gunslinger). I usually favor fewer models in games I play, but I thought it would be a fun try.

Well, I paid for my mistake of a list. Not a single one of my Leaps succeeded the entire game with my Slurids (unless I cheated from my hand), none of my Tots were able to rely on their high defense to keep hidden from attacks, and my Obeys were constantly thwarted by the woman with the hammer. In the end, I killed only one model of Josh's before my faction got wiped out. A pretty pathetic showing.

My second game was yesterday against Dan, and went a little better for me. I brought out Lilith (first time I played her since she was painted up by Chris), and she ran around with two Tots, two Younger Nephilim, a Daddy Nephilim, and the Primordial Magic to keep my hand advantage going. Dan had Seamus, a Belle, two Punk Zombies, the Copycat Killer, the Convict Gunslinger, and Mortimer (or whatever he's called). I was able to take the middle of the board pretty quickly with my speed, and Lilith killed the Copycat Killer before he got a chance to shoot. One of my Tots used that blood to turn into a Younger Nephilim while Seamus summoned another Belle. My three Younger Nephilims swarmed into the middle of his group and started hacking into his models, their black blood taking care of the rest of the damage. When my Mature Nephilim popped in and did a lot of damage, he ended up getting taken down by one of the Punks. A Younger matured and replaced the lost Daddy, and my Tot matured into a Younger. From there, it was cleanup. I concentrated on everything that wasn't a Belle, taking out his major melee hitting power. He had a shot on Lilith, flipping a crow and hitting her, to which I had to ditch two cards, two stones, or die. So I ditched the cards. He hit me again with a crow, my defense not stepping in to save me, so I ditched two of my last three stones. He hit me with his third (and last) attack of the turn with a crow and I used my last stone hoping for a good flip to avoid being killed. I managed to flip an 11 and stepped out of the way of the attack. Lilith then killed Seamus, though the Mature would have finished the job if necessary.

So a big loss and a big win. It was fun to get back into the game again, though. It's been a while. Next step: get my painting back up and finish up the few models I've got sitting on my bench. After all, I'll have a pretty big newbie in a couple weeks that will need some loving.


As a random aside, does anyone know what the big thing Privateer Press is doing this year for GenCon? The Hordes MK2 book was just released (I assume so that Hordes players won't be at as much a disadvantage in the tournaments). What's the next big thing? The Skorne book, I guess? If that's the case, then between Retribution last year and Skorne this year, it's a pretty un-inspiring couple of years.

The Lurker

So there's this awesome board game called Arkham Horror (made by Fantasy Flight Games - check them out!). We tend to play it with great frequency, enjoying all the chaotic and crazy happenings that drive us insane (and occasionally outright kill us) in the town of Arkham. It's a game that can seat up to 8 players, which is good since we usually have at least 6 around the table and not many games reach that level. It's a full co-op game, and filled with all manner of fun, frightening, and hysterical happenings. It's the only game where when your character stumbles into a room filled with brains in jars, his first thought is, "I wonder if I'll get smarter eating these things." (No, seriously, that's exactly what happens).


Anywho, I had asked Dan to pick up the new expansion for the game while he was at GenCon in a few weeks. Somehow, he hit a timewarp this weekend and picked it up for me early (it was, evidently, pretty easy since it happened to be out at the store he was at for a tournament). So, several weeks early, we got to try out the new game! I spent a good deal of time setting it up so we'd use only the base game and new expansion (this marks the seventh expansion to the game, so you can imagine it's getting pretty big now). Boy, it was one of the most fun games we've played in a while! I would have to say this is the best small-box expansion to Arkham Horror.

So what's new? Glad you asked.

First, it has the Lurker, a new Herald. Heralds are the guys who are trying to pave the way for the Old One to arise. They generally add a few more challenging rules to the game and make it harder for you to win. This particular one increases the difficulty of closing and sealing gates (the primary win condition), and also introduces a new element: Pacts. There are three kinds. You can bind an ally to you, you can gain a Soul Pact, or a Blood Pact. All three of them are really good as soon as you get them, and allow you to gain Power which is really useful. But there are also Reckoning cards that pop up fairly regularly. They may be good ("Anyone with a Pact gains a spell!") or they may be bad ("The person with the most Power dies!"). Eep! So you're constantly wanting to take Pacts, but then hope that only good stuff happens to you. A true balance of "do I really want to gain more power if it may kill me"? I ended up being killed by a Reckoning because I was getting to greedy with the Pacts.


Next are the Relationship cards. I read the rules for them and was not very impressed. They offer a lot of good things without the typical balance of "could be good, could be bad" that Arkham Horror usually does. So we house-ruled them to act a little differently.

Basically, everyone picked a partner in the game. We did it by couples. Each partnership got a Relationship card that they could share. But in exchange, if your partner ever lost all of his or her sanity, you lost one sanity. If your partner ever lost all of his or her health, you lost one health. And if your partner died, you lost one of each. Kinda like a karmic tie thing. Things were great with both Ellen and me dying over the course of the game and Laura and Dan getting zapped for it.


Finally, the last major change to the game deals with the gates. There are all new gates for the game. Some of them have two different Other Worlds you can travel to. You get to choose the one you want to go to, and can travel back to that gate from either one. Generally, though, those gates are a little harder to close and seal than the ones that have only one choice.

The gates with only one choice on them now have different icons and abilities to them. Some might say that if you try to close the gate and fail, you lose one Sanity, or a monster might appear. Others do bad things if they open on a space that already occupies a player by adding Doom or outright killing the player. Still others move around the board, swallowing up people as they go. it was always crazy to see what these gates did!

The expansion had all of this in addition to a bunch of new Mythos and Other World cards, a few new Encounter cards for the Arkham locations, and a few new items and spells to collect. Overall, the expansion gets two big thumbs up from me.

New Furniture

Over the weekend, Laura and I went to IKEA with her mother to take a look at picking up a couple new pieces for our house after our flood. Our hope was to find a corner-style bookcase, but we came up empty on that front. Instead, we found a new organization system for our DVDs and an awesome new craft table. Add that to the hutch we picked up from Laura's house and our main room is looking pretty cool now. Take a look at the new things.

First is the hutch. We picked this one up on Thursday from her parents' place. It's quite heavy, but looks really nice. It was her grandmother's back in the day, and soon will be filled with all the china and silver we're inheriting from her grandmother too.

The next thing is the new DVD rack we've got. It's three pieces all lined up next to each other. Over the weekend we went through our collection and cut it down by what we want to keep and what we are willing to part with. There's another set of DVDs this large that we're going to start selling off.


The last piece is a lot of fun. When it's all closed up, it works well as an end table next to our loveseat. But the real excitement is when we want to use it as our craft table. There's a table on each side that folds up, so both Laura and I will have space to work. Add in the fact that there are three drawers down each side of the piece to store all our paints and the like, and you've got a pretty solid table. Whenever we're ready to do crafts, we'll just pull the piece out and set it up, and then when we're done, we'll be able to hide away our supplies and the like, hopefully keeping our house a little cleaner.

All in all, I think we made out pretty well. Now if only we could do something about this crazy heat!

Fun With Graphs

Evidently there's a website out there where the guys just puts up tons of funny graphs about truths we hold self-evident. Here are a few for a laugh. Enjoy!

Egads, it's a Monster!

When I played Warmachine, they never put out the cool "extreme" models for my factions (even though my factions were always the best and everyone else who didn't play my factions sucks!).

Malifaux, on the other hand, is releasing their first "Nightmare" (translation: bigger) style model at GenCon. And it's for my faction, the Neverborn! Here you see the new model for the Dreamer and Lord Chompy Bits, the new master for the Neverborn. Poor little boy goes to sleep each night and has nightmares, this one in particular in the form of a massive and pointy beast.

Dan's gonna pick him up for me at GenCon. I am excited.