Board Game Haul

Christmas day has come and passed, and for myself and Laura, this may well have been the year of the board game. Between the two of us, we pulled in quite a lot of new games to try out.

Larua's brother got my a bunch of Last Night on Earth games and expansions: the game, Growing Hunger, Survival of the Fittest, the first Hero Pack, and the extra zombies with Grave Weapons that are featured in Survival of the Fittest.



Last night we got in a couple of games. We're still getting used to the rules, but at the moment, the zombies seem to hold quite an edge, having both taken over the manor house and having protected their plague carriers. On Christmas night, the heroes managed to find gas and keys and get out of town in their truck a mere hour before the sun set and the zombies took over town.

Laura got Descent, the Well of Darkness expansion, and the Sea of Blood expansion.



I started taking apart the base game yesterday and man, there are a ton of pieces in it! Hoping it will be a fun game for a group of us when we do finally get a chance to try it.

Laura was also given Talisman with three expansions, Highland, the Reaper and Frostmarch.



We've played the game a lot with Ellen's copy, and it has its faults. Mainly in that the game can drag on a bit at the end. Highland is a new end to the game, and hopefully will fix that issue. And it's always more fun with even more heroes to try.

I got a game called Zombie State: Diplomacy of the Dead.



I'm not familiar with this one at all. From what I can tell, it's a world conquest-type game where the world is overrun with zombies. You have to figure out, as the leader of a portion of the world, how best to deal with the zombies and how to create the best options for your people to survive. Do you rely on your scientists to find a cure? Do you rely on your military to hold back the tide of zombies? Looks like it should be an interesting game.

Finally, we also received a number of other smaller card games. Cthulhu Munchiken (with extra packs 2, 3 and 4), Zombie Flux and Chez Cthulhu.

Overall, Laura and I pulled in more board games than I think we know what to do with for the moment. It'll take us a while to digest them all and figure out which ones will become staples.

Merry Christmas to All!

Neverborn and Ressers

Last night I headed out to Huzzah again to get in a couple of Malifaux games. It’s wonderful having a gaming store so close to my house, and being able to work from home on Tuesdays so I don’t have to drive all the way from Tyson’s to Loudoun in rush hour traffic. Plus having all the terrain at Huzzah means I don’t need to worry about trucking mine back and forth. Good deal!

I’ve been playing with the Dreamer a lot recently, so I decided to give the poor kid a day off and try some of my other tricks. My least-used Neverborn master was Pandora, so I decided to give her a try with some of the new models. John and I played each other twice.


Game One
Pandora, Primordial Magic, Stitched Together x2, Alp x3, Doppelganger, 6 stones
Seamus, Copycat Killer, Belle x2, Sybelle, Crooked Man x2, 8 stones

We pulled Shared Contain Power (I think that’s what it’s called – the one where I have to have a master on his side of the board with him not having a master on my side of the board). For schemes, I took Bodyguard and Spread Insanity (or something like that – it’s the one where I cannot kill an opposing model with melee or ranged attacks all game). He took Breakthrough and the one where you have to control a terrain piece at the end.

The board was a city-scape so a lot of open buildings we could run between and a lot of open streets, but no real way to grab LOS early in the game. I led with my Stitched Togethers and had them pop their obscuring smoke down each street blocking him from seeing any of my models, and then moved the rest of my crew in behind them.

He split his forces, sending a Crooked man one way and the rest of his army around the other way. I sent an Alp and Stitched Together to take care of his lone Crooked Man while the rest of my crew went after his main force.

He got a Belle up near my Stitched Together on turn one, and then moved her back into one of the buildings I was in to prevent her from being tagged by one of the Shaft Tokens from the Crooked Man (those things are nasty). An Alp got next to the Belle and dropped her Willpower by one. I moved up a Doppelganger, copied Pandora’s damage from failed Willpower Duels, and Self Loathing. The Doppelganger cast Self Loathing and the Doppelganger hit herself for slight damage, combined with the two damage from failing the Willpower Duel. Pandora came in and Self Loathing-ed her again, and then tagged her with Incite, dropping her. On the other side of the field, I dropped his Crooked Man to one with my Alp and Stitched Together.

Turn four went even better for me. I led with my Stitched Together near his main force and used Gamble. He had to cheat to make sure it didn’t go off, which was fine by me – that was one large card out of his hand. Then a couple of Gamble Your Life’s went well and took down the other Crooked Man. The Copycat Killer tried to shoot the Stitched Together, but failed. Meanwhile, I finished off his other Crooked Man. The game got very bad for him very quick. Long story short, Pandora was able to move out and tag Seamus with a spell that triggered him to fall back. The Stitched Together was killed and so had one more turn of activations and dropped Seamus by 7 with a couple of Gamble Your Life’s (Seamus had a negative flip to his WP duels from Pandora). With his army fleeing or in tatters, we called it there as Pandora and her Alps had just swarmed in as well, ready to Slow his entire army and just start dishing out damage.


Game Two
Lilith, Primordial Magic, Mature Nephilim, Younger Nephilim, Terror Tot x3, 7 stones
Nicodem, Vulture x2, Canine Remains x4, Nurse, Crooked Man, Mortimer, Belle, 5 stones

I pulled Destroy the Evidence (destroy three tokens on his side of the board) and he pulled Claim Jump. I picked Kidnap and Bodyguard while he took Grudge and Army of the Dead.

This game took a long time to get through. I took a strong lead grabbing the first of the points in the middle of the first turn (Lilith’s speed is just awesome, plus use of Carry, Earthquake, Sprint and Transposition) and the second of the points in the first activation of turn two. But by then he had surrounded the third point, making it tough for me to get there. I took down one of his Vultures with a Younger Nephilim, and then charged in and killed his Nurse before she could make any of the dogs into nuclear missiles. The fight went back and forth, me killing nearly everything that came at me, but Nicodem growing more monsters to fight. I didn’t take the fight to Nicodem this game, which I realize in retrospect was a mistake. He was able to summon two Flesh Constructs, two Belles and a Crooked Man over the course of the game. That nearly doubled the number of points I had to face, and that doesn’t include the mindless zombies he brought to the table.

We got on to turn 4 and he had a clear path to his goal and I was one model shy of taking my Kidnap, and one point shy of taking my full points for Destroy the Evidence. I knew I had to make a push. I had two Mature Nephilims on the table by now, though one was almost dead. The nearly dead one used Wing Buffet to knock all of his models back 4”, putting most of them on the other side of the objective. The second Mature charged one of the models, triggered knock aside to push it back 4” and charged a different one, triggered knock aside again, and then triggered it a third time before finally landing beyond the point in the midst of his models. On the top of turn 5, Lilith companioned my last Terror Tot and then used Transposition to switch the only one of his models in melee range of the last point – a Flesh Construct – with my Terror Tot. Lilith then smacked the Flesh Construct for some damage and the Terror Tot activated, moving in to the token and destroying the last piece of Evidence. The Flesh Construct was now close enough to kill my nearly-dead Mature, but the two VPs were worth it. His Vulture flew past, grabbed a bunch of tokens, and then landed on top of the building.

On turn 6, Lilith used Transposition again, this time switching the Vulture on the roof with the Flesh Construct on the ground, and then cut the Vulture in half, finally getting my Kidnap. Meanwhile, Nicodem and his army were falling back from Lilith’s sword and surrounded the Claim Jump. We flipped and the game did not go on – tallying points, we both tied at 8. Given the sheer amount of blood on the table, that was pretty amazing that we both still scored max points.

So I went one win and one tie last night against John. Not too bad.

The Christmas Spirit

Cracked.com has the most unintentionally disturbing Christmas Ads. I copied a few of my favorites over here.


I don't know what's more disturbing. The nipple-woman or the fact that evidently Santa just hanged himself.



Nothing says "Christmas" like a threesome.



I don't even know where to start with this one. What the hell happened to this woman?



It's not enough that the holidays generally see an increase in suicides - but now we need to provide the means? Looking into this one a bit more, evidently this advertisement came out during the Great Depression. Good timing.



Drunk Santa doesn't care about the cold. Good man.

Fun Christmas Song

A Christmas song performed together by 33 YouTube musicians in 32 different places in the world. Enjoy!

A Weekend of Gaming

This past weekend promised to be a weekend filled with all manner of adventures and delivered. I know this post will probably run long, so I'll break it up into different categories and feel free to skip to whichever one you'd like.



Grimm
We started out on Friday night with Grimm, the roleplaying game I've been starting up since the Halloween one-shot was so well received. The characters, all junior high kids, found themselves in a mix of several fairy tales including well known ones like Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty, as well as some lesser known ones like The King of Golden Mountain. After a long grueling series of tasks, they set free the Prince of the Kingdom Over Yonder and he set forth to rescue his Princess, Sleeping Beauty. The kids, meanwhile, headed back home, and were surprised to find that they actually got back to the real world. Only things were not as they seemed - small changes had crept in to their world. Instead of winning their last football game, they lost. All because Dan, their star QB, had quit the team months earlier. Brian and Ellen found that their characters, who were ambivalent towards each other before, were dating. And Mary had been relegated to the ensemble in the school play while Laura was given the star role. Only Jay seemed untouched by the changes. Now the characters have to figure out what happened to change their reality, and how to change it back.

All in all, a really good session, and caps the introduction to the story. Looking forward to picking it up again and seeing how the characters deal with their newfound situation.


Monsterpocalypse

After a long break from the game, Dan and I pulled out our MonPoc for another game. It was a fun game to play, but due to the way it was marketed and produced, we lost interest in it (check out this post if you're curious). I brought out one of my Martians that I'd never played, and Dan hit the table with one of his infrequently-used dinosaurs (it shows how long it's been since we played that I don't remember what they're called).

The game took about an hour on Saturday morning, and we had a blast. We crushed nearly the entire city under our monsters' throws and slams, and in the end, I had brought Dan's monster down to two life when he finished me off. As we were packing up, Dan realized that he could not have done as much damage to my monster as he had, and I should have had somewhere around 3-4 life left, not 1, and would have been able to smash his monster the next turn. We'll call it a mulligan - things may have gone differently, or may not. Point is, we had fun smashing buildings again.

I don't think the game will come out frequently, but it was a nice start to Saturday, which promised to be a huge day of gaming.


Malifaux

After MonPoc, I got in a couple of games with the Dreamer. First I faced off against Dan and his McMourning crew. I was pulling off a really good rout of his models, but in the end, he was able to distract me from my main goals while achieving his, and when I finally finished slaughtering everything I could, I was about a turn shy of reaching my goal. I lost the my first match-up with the Dreamer.

The second game I played against Convy's Marcus army. The game could not have gone better for me or worse for him, and I ended up pulling off an incredibly one-sided victory. It was Convy's first time seeing the Dreamer's antics and just what the little boy could do. Next time I'm sure he'll come in stronger.


Touch of Evil

After a quick break for a late lunch, we came back and got in a game of A Touch of Evil. John, Ellen, Dan, Convy, Chris and I all faced off against a Warewolf that was terrorizing the town. We decided, as it was all of our first game other than John, that we should try to play this one cooperatively. We had a few missteps along the way, but Convy was able to root out the Warewolf's lair, John called the hunt, and we all rushed in to fight the beast. The fight was bloody and brutal and John, Convy and Chris all got knocked down and had to leap off the covered bridge into the cold river and swim to safety, but I was able to put the finishing blow on the Warewolf and we saved the town.

Overall, a really fun game. I was hesitant when I first heard about it, mostly because I wasn't sure how it would stand against Arkham, but in the end, I was pleasantly surprised. It's a much faster game (and much less involved), yet still holds a lot of theme. Dan has asked for it for Christmas - hopefully he'll get it and we'll be able to get some more tries with it.


Football

Finally, on Sunday, the first week of the playoffs hit for us. I faced Ryan, and despite outscoring him by an average of 20 points each game of the season, I lost to him for the second time this season, 80-88. To make matters worse, my pick'em was so bad this week that I slipped from tied for first to third place, only getting 6 of the 16 games picked correctly. Now I'm out of the fantasy running, and I've got to catch up with only two weeks remaining in the season on pick'em. Not a great showing for football this week.

Ah well, there's always next season. If I lose this weekend against Ellen (likely - she was the number one ranked team during the regular season, and rightfully so with her team), it will be the third season (out of three we've had this league) where I've made the playoffs and then dropped both games, ending in fourth place.

One day I'll crack the top three.


Anywho, so that was my weekend. Lots of gaming and hit all the major types for me - roleplaying, miniatures, board games and football. Only thing missing were computer games.

Speaking of which, Dragon Age Two should be coming out sometime next year...

More Painted Goodness

I got another couple models finished up last week.



Coppelius is finally finished and ready to go. I had most of him done earlier last week, but finally got the heads put on the bases for him. Only things left to paint for the Dreamer are three more Alps.



Once Coppelius was finished, I decided to paint up this guy I picked up not too long ago. He doesn't really fit in any game that I currently run, but I thought it would be a cool model to have. Reminded me a bit of an evil Halloween monster, kinda like something out of Grimm.