Darktide With More 3D

 

Darktide comes with nice, sturdy chipboard tokens and markers. Including some two sided ones that represent the blocking terrain and barricades. 

I understand why they didn't include plastic terrain: the cost increase would have been ridiculous. But still, the game would be so much more immersive if the terrain was 3D. Luckily, some nice folk on the internets made made some STL files ready to print and paint! The files were inexpensive, and printed well in our plastic filament machine (Mrs. Blackheart used the Prusa Mk.3S and XL).

The addition of the 3D elements really do improve the look and feel of the game. So much so, we shall talk a lot about this side of the hobby in upcoming posts.

Go Make Something

The Robots Are Here to Help!

For Now...

 

Darktide Quick Review

 

Darktide is Game Workshop's latest board-game-with-miniatures offering. It is inspired by the video game of the same name; where four hardy imperial types are brought out of prison by an Inquisitor to deal with a Chaos uprising. Fast and violent, it's a fun if shallow game.  

Darktide he board game is a stripped down version of Kill Team, modified to be co-op/solo. The game rules determine the actions of the forces of Chaos across a nice campaign. Your player characters can get new equipment and abilities along the way. 

The game is played on four double sided modular boards, and has a small footprint on your table. The hex-based gameplay does make for quick play and clarity. An Activation deck is built before the battle starts, and then it is just a matter of drawing the cards and seeing whos turn it is. Fast and clean.

All the stats you need are on the cards, both for players and enemies.

Overall, we have really enjoyed it. It is light, fast, and fun. No great tactical depth, but some days you just want to roll dice and have fun wiping out the forces of Chaos.

Go Roll Some Dice

With a Board Game Based on a Video Game Based on a Miniatures Game

Old West Zombies

 

YeeHaa pardner! It's zombie killin' time, cowboy style. In typical CMON fashion in response to nobody, a new Zombicide game has been released. At least they went with a fun theme. I'm afraid they will go with Zombicide: Victorian Peril soon.

CMON has gotten a lot of flak recently over their alleged deceptive Kickstarter shipping practices, and that may well be deserved, but we are talking about the game right here.

Zombicide: Undead or Alive is up to the typical CMON standards of excellent quality components. Nice sculpts, good art, and authentic wooden dice!

They continue to make slight refinements to the well done player trays. The simulated wood texture is a nice touch.

I just started to read the rules, and we will get a few plays in soon. I have said that the Sci-fi version, Invader, is the most fun, but we will see if the Old West can compete. Time to see where this newest version falls in the slightly overdone system!

Go Roll Some Dice

With Authentic Frontier Gibberish

Horrified

 

Horrified by Ravensburger was released last year. It flew under my radar until I saw it at a Target a few months ago, on a whim I bought it, and am glad I did!

At its core, Horrified is a Pandemic-style game. Four player characters (played by 1-4 real players) race across the map to solve the issues before Something Bad happens. In this case, the Classic Monsters are rampaging around the unluckiest village. 

Included are: Dracula, Gilman, Invisible Man, Werewolf, Mummy, and Mr. & Mrs. Monster.

The player(s) have a nice selection of seven characters to choose from.

The monsters each have a distinct personality, abilities, and specific way to stop them. We have found all the player characters are useful, but none really overpowered as to be an auto-pick.

The goal is the wrangle the Monsters before the Doom Track reaches the end.

The nice townsfolk just doing townsfolk stuff. If too many get picked off you lose!

The games is not complex and easily taught in a few minutes. It is fast moving with good decisions to be made. There is a fair bit of randomness, just enough to keep you on your toes, so always have a backup plan or two ready.

We have played it many times and enjoy it quite a bit. It's a good but not overly long game.

It is fun hunting down the Monsters from those old (mostly) Black & White films.

Recommended! 

Go Roll Some Dice

In Glorious Color

Rise of the Orks Gameplay

I got a few plays of GW's Rise of the Orks in, and I like it. It's a easy to play solo/co-op Tower Defense game. The player(s) get five Terminators and must kill all the oncoming Orks before they destroy the shield generator. 

The board is a little bland, but it clearly conveys all that is needed: The Ork entry points, the Terminator's starting bunker (where they can go back to to heal), the shield generator control panels, and the special supply card pick-up points. The Terminator figures are very nice, and push together with ease. They are molded in their respective Chapter colors, and in good poses.

The Orks arrive in waves, all coming randomly from the draw pool, and are placed randomly at one of the six entry points. There are several different types of Orks: Boyz, Nobz, Kommandos, Burnas, and Meganobz. Some characters as well: Mek, Big Mek, Painboy, Weirdboy, and the Warboss. The type and numbers of Orks in the draw pool is determined by your difficulty level.  

Each of the Terminators have a unique weapons loadout and special ability. If the Orks destroy all the Shield control station, they win. If the Terminators get knocked down too many times, the orks win. 

If all the Ork tokens are removed from the board, and the draw pool is empty, the Terminators win.

It plays very quickly, requires some strategy, and a bit of luck. Definitely falls into the fun filler game category. A good choice if you want to play something 40K themed, but don't want a large time/effort commitment.
 

Go Roll Some Dice

And Purge Some Xenos

Rise of the Orks Quick Look

 

Orks have invaded the Imperial world of Vertex. Five Terminators from different chapters have come to defend the planetary shield generator Gamma-9. Mostly by killing all the attacking Orks.

I finally got my hands on the boxed game, Rise of the Orks, which is only available at Barnes & Noble. It was nice to take a stroll through a bookstore, been a while.

Rise of the Orks is a co-op/solo tower-defense style of game. Waves of various flavors of Orks surge forward to destroy the shield's power generators. The played gets five Terminators, armed to the teeth to try and stop them. 

The game has a good sized board, two sheets of very nice tokens, cards, and five plastic push-fit Terminators. I do believe they are from the Japanese Space Marine Heroes line. Each molded in their chapter's colors. They are good looking figs. 

I will put them together tonight and try to have a battle report in a day or so.

Go Roll Some Dice

The Grimdark Has Many Forms

Danger: Sticky Cthulhu

 

This Halloween we played Iello's new release, Sticky Cthulhu!

No. It's not a Japanese tentacle-porn thing.

Mostly not, but it does have sticky tentacles. Oh yes. 

(Sorry for the lack of pictures, but my camera has given up, and I haven't gotten a new one yet.) 

Two to Six Players compete for Mighty Cthulhu's favor by eliminating various creatures that are bothering the Big C. This is done in a fun and very chaotic way: Flinging your sticky tentacle at the target and pulling it back to your clutches without nabbing a pesky Investor.

The target is determined by rolling two dice, one picks the target, the other its color. Then everyone is cleared to fling. You may try and steal from another player, but you may only use the tentacle to do so.

 Herein lays the danger: In our game we had six people flinging wildly at the little cardboard pieces, causing them to fly off the table if not hit squarely. 

And by flying I mean across the room. One made it into the kitchen. Some are still missing.

When two tentacles meet...the players naturally pull back, putting great tension on said tentacles.

One will pull off and snap back at the player with great force. Seriously, someone almost did lose an eye.

The other problem with the game is the target die has the kind of monster on it, but not the shape of piece. Which makes ID'ing the target troublesome. 

So, personal danger, parts that will be lost, kinda confusing gameplay. But it does have sticky tentacles!

Yes, it's fun, but it is a play a few times and done type of game. I can't even sell it on eBay because of the now missing parts...

 

Go Roll Some Dice

With Eye Protection

Doomsday Countdown Unbox

 

Foul Chaos Cultists have set an ancient Doomsday device in the center of city hive Vanitine. Three Space Marines must save millions from certain doom!

I found this at a local Barnes & Noble bookstore as I was wandering through it. I vaguely remembered that this game was coming out, but I thought wasn't for a while yet. Happy to be wrong.

Doomsday Countdown is the third in the line of Space Marine Adventures game. Easy and fast playing co-op board games. This is the first one that has miniatures for the bad guys, the other two used counters to good effect. This is just a quick unboxing, I will do a gameplay review in a few days.

Inside the box you will find three Space Marines, seven Cultists, a few stacks of cards, some six-sided and one twenty-sided dice, markers, and the modular map pieces.

The mins are of the push fit type, and assemble very quickly. Production value is very good overall.

The cards and the map sections art work is well done.

The three Primaris Intercessors include a Sergeant, and dude with auspex, and a bolter Joe.

Hailing from the Blackstone Fortress expansion, there are seven Chaos Cultists. Four flunkies with autoguns, one with a grenade launcher, a heavy stubber gunner, and a champion with pistol and chainsword. Really nice figs. 

The plastic tray is cleverly designed to hold all the game components snugly. 

I enjoyed the first game, Labyrinth of the Necrons. I haven't picked up the second game, Rise of the Orks, yet but I will correct that soon.

Go Roll Some Dice

Purge All the Cultists While You are At It.

Painted ALIENS Mission Pics

 

Time for some quick pics of GF9's ALIENS (AGDITC) This was our second go at the first mission.

Sure, it starts out nice and quiet. 

You find and contain Newt, which can be hard, she is quite squirmy.

Then some unpleasant folk come to talk to you about your APC's extended warranty...

It gets real tense, real fast.

With some solid planning and lucky execution we escape with no losses. A nice improvement over the first time, where we lost Frost, Vasquez, Ripley, and Newt. Bad day all around.

It is a fun, game that is not without its quirks. We will go through all the missions before I give a verdict on the game system.

They Mostly Come Out at Night

Mostly

Another Glorious Day in the Corps

 

Aliens. One of the most iconic and beloved sci-fi films. I must have seen it a dozen times when it was in came out in the theatres. There have been a few attempts at board/minis games, the first one, Aliens: This Time it's War (Leading Edge 1989) was the best. Simple(not easy) and fast playing, it really captured the action of the film. The less we speak of Prodos AVP: The Hunt Begins, the better.

Now it is Gale Force Nine's turn. They have done a couple of good games based on licensed properties to their credit. We really enjoyed Firefly The Game (clever title...).  Aliens Another Glorious Day in the Corps was announced a few years ago, and has popped off and on the radar since. Release day got pushed back several times...but it is finally here. Today let's have a look inside the box.

The base game (I'll talk about the expansions in a latter post) comes with rules, counters, dice, lots of cards, and four very nice doubled sided game boards. And of course what I will be focusing on, the miniatures. Inside the box are seven Marine characters and sixteen Alien Warriors all in multi-part hard plastic. The Hero types in green, the Xenos in black.

The Queen is not in the base game, just here for color example.

These miniature come on a sprue, so you must clip, clean and assemble with glue. The Heroes go together very well, a couple of the heads were a bit fiddly, but no real issue if you are a little careful. The Heroes are all mono pose, but they are all are doing something different and look purposeful. 

The Alien Warriors can be made to have some small variations in their poses. They also go together well...until you put the tails on. Oh, the tails are a bad design. Very small contact point, and not a good connection point at that. Be prepared for a bit of frustration.

The detail on the figs are good, if a little on the soft side. I really like that the Heroes have their names in raised letter on the bases.  

I assembled and primed the minis, and we had a stumble through of the first mission.

The rulebook is fairly straightforward, but some of the rules are in weird places, and could have used a better reference section. I was expecting something along the lines of Space Hulk, but the gameplay is a little deeper than that, which I will get into on my next post. 

How many drops is this for you, Lieutenant?

If we count the Role Playing Games, Six

Blackstone Traitors

As we near the end of the Hidden Vault in Blackstone Fortress, it's time to think about what comes next. My Ambull is all set to go, but I had two other expansions just sitting on the shelf. I did some quick building and then it was painting time.

First up, is Traitor Command. A small expansion that includes just two miniatures. But what nice minis they are. A fallen commissar, and his huge and now chaos-y Ogryn buddy.

As is the standard with board game miniatures they are mono-pose, although the Ogryn does come with an alternate head. Both have nice detail, and assembled with total ease.

The expansion also comes with The Heart of Corruption quest, and all the necessary cards and tokens for it.

With the madness of the holidays behind us, it's time to get some more game time in.

Next: Blackstone Fortress Escalation

Go Roll Some Dice

May They Roll Well Indeed

Kill Team Knights

Playing a game of just Knights against each other in 40K is a great deal of fun.
Except when it isn't. Like when one side goes first and smokes half of your forces. Which is not that hard when you only brought four or five models.

Kill Team (and many other games) deals with this by alternating player turns. This is a game mechanic I think offers better results, and more enjoyable games. So like a olde tyme TV commercial about chocolate and peanut butter, lets see what happen when Knights are mixed with Kill team.

To be fair, this experiment is 40K with a Kill Team turn structure. So you still build your force, pick a Warlord plus traits, and use Stratagems, all from the Codex.

We picked a 100 PL list of Knights (I used 102...the Knights list isn't really granular..) and then played just like Kill Team (KT). It worked surprisingly well, and gave that tactical flavor that is missing from smaller games of 40K.

We did run into a few situations, which are addressed by some house rules:

Command Points. I like the way KT  generates Command Points (CP) every turn, but the 40K Stratagems are made expecting you to start with a few CP. So we decided that both sides start with 3 CP and generate 1 per turn, and a bonus 1 if your Warlord is still alive.

Morale. For our cinematic purposes we decided Vehicles auto-pass Morale Checks.

Long Range Modifiers. Vehicle mounted weapons (not pintle mounts) do not suffer from Long Range mods.

Splitting Fire: Vehicles may split fire freely, but must declare all targets before any weapons fire.

It's fun, easy, and makes for a more enjoyable robot fighting time!

    Go Roll Some Dice

With a More Even Distribution of Killing

Blackstone Fortress Explorers

Let's get to the mighty heroes(?) of Blackstone Fortress! Starting with the man who puts Rogue in Rogue Trader, Janus Draik the Stylish.

Always hungry for knowledge and tasty raw flesh it's Dahyak Grekh the Kroot Warrior.

With a warp-blasting third eye and a thing for fancy headgear, please welcome Guild Navigator Espern Locarno!

They go together like fire and jelly, Holy Space Cleric Taddeus and everyone's favorite firebug and chainsaw murderer, Pious Vorne.

Deadly, enigmatic, and alluring, Eldar Ranger Amallyn Shadowguide has it all.

Twin little tea pots of death and larceny, Rein & Raus the ratling brothers.

Voted mostly likely to kill all humans, it's UR-025. Just don't call him a toaster.

The nine character figures were a lot of fun to paint with lots of little details. I decided to paint the mins close to the way they are in the game. UR-025 being the notable exception. I just really disliked the pastel paint job he is shown with. I figured a more traditional Adeptus Mechanicus paint scheme would do a better job at reinforcing his cover story.

Next week, Blackstone gameplay.

Go Throw Some Paint

In a Controlled Fashion, of Course