Forward Brothers!

I played Spacehulk a lot. I still own the first edition and all expansions but it doesn't get played that much. Mainly due to it being a 2 player game and its with most of my GW games up in the loft.
The new edition of Spacehulk is lovely, I have only played it once but it did look really good and played very well. However the price tag put me off and as I don't play my other copy that much it wasn't going to join my collection.

Death Angel continues the spacehulk genre but is condensed into a couple of decks of cards and scales to 6 players. It's been called spacehulk light and I can see why.

When my copy arrived I opened it up and started reading through the rules. Then put it down again, the rules just seemed to be a mess. Any rulebook that tells you to jump to page 22 then page 21 during setup has not been put together properly in my mind. FFG gets a bit of a bad wrap about there rule books and sometimes its for good reason. I ended up watching a couple of videos on the geek and the picked up the rules again. It didn't seem that bad afterwards and was ready to play.

The game is for 1-6 players and takes about 30-60 minutes. So its got the potential to be a quick solo game which is nice. Our initial game was 5 players. Initial starting location is determined by the number of players and a number of location cards are randomly selected and placed on the table. These represent the areas the marines are going to fight through to make their way towards the mission objective. Other landscape cards are placed on the table to represent corridors and doors. These are where the Genestealers are going to spawn from. Each player chooses a marine team and the cards are collected, shuffled and dealt out to make the marines formation. Marines are facing different ways which can cause challenges in the game.
Lastly a number of Genestealers are but into blip piles on each side of the location card.

Play then commences with each player choosing one of their action cards. These are either move and activate, support or attack. Any card you play stays on the table and cannot be used the following round. This stops you just playing attack cards continually. Each team of marines has different effects on the cards to represent the equipment they are carrying or the abilities of the marine.

All cards are revealed and played in numerical order, the support cards generally go first followed by move then the attacks are dealt with. Attacks are easy, you just roll a dice and hope you get a face with a skull on it. Some cards effect the number of genestealers you remove but generally its only one.

Then its time for the genestealers, and marine engaged with genestealers must roll a dice and get a number higher than the number of genestealers attacking him. If not he dies. This is where support tokens come in. You can place them on marines using support actions and they allow you to re roll an attacking or defending roll. So if you have any you can discard them to roll again. Unfortunately if you are being attacked from behind you can't use them.

An event card is then drawn and resolved, them more genestealers are spawned and then moved depending on the icons on the card. Play continues until one of the 2 blip piles is empty, then the marines get to move to the next location in the deck. This continues until the last location is reached where the marines have to fulfill a final objective to win the game.

We managed to win our first game, although at the end our squad of marines was down to 3 men. So only just, I don't think we could have survived another round. The genestealers were piling up and most of the heavy hitters in the squad were down.
The game felt like spacehulk, slightly claustrophobic with a feeling of dread. Play moved along at a reasonable pace, you had a couple of choices in what to do each round which helped. Although you have to work as a team supporting each other and moving to be in the best spots to attack. I think different teams work better than others but there is enough variety in the box to keep the game interesting. I suspect that there will be an expansion for it which will build up the rules and add new locations and marines. Although I don't think I will need anything extra for a while.

So for under £20 you get a pretty decent co-op game that can be played solo. I need to give it more plays to see how well the solo play works but it looks very good.

This page on the geek lists a number of common mistakes and is worth a read if you already own the game.

Toy Soldiers

I was late to the world of Memoir 44, it always sounded like a great game with lots of support but the price tag put me off. Then along came Battlelore as the new kid on the block and I decided to start with that. I wanted to be at a level field with expansions and experience the C&C game system.

Battlelore was great and I picked up a couple of expansions but then it died. Meanwhile M44 was still getting lots of support and a friend offered to sell me his copy. I was a fool to say no and quickly snatched it up with intentions on trying it out with my eldest.

If you don't know much about M44 its a WWII combat game that uses cards to determine which of your troops are active and dice to determine combat results. It's quite a simple system that has been built on with expansions and extra rules.

I played my copy a couple of times, but getting 2 player games to the table is a rarity and knowing that a mate near Warwick was a heavy player asked him for advice on playing online. Vassal was used along with Skype and numerous battle were played out recreating the Normandy landings, the push to Paris and the siege of Stalingrad on the Eastern Front. It all worked quite well in a heath Robinson kind of way.

Now Days of Wonder have released their own Memoir 44 online system. It's still in Beta but its been put together very well. It looks exactly like the board game which is great. The board and pieces make the real game in my mind. You can either play solo against the AI or against another online player. Games cost "gold bars", but you get 130 bars when you sign up. Additional bars can be bought online for real money, but the initial shipment of precious metal is doing fine at the moment.
I am not sure when its going to come out of Beta, I can't image its going to be long. I am also hopeful that more scenarios are going to be released. The main Western Front scenarios are suffering from being over played.

If you like Memoir 44 and don't get enough time to play it give it a go. a typical game takes around 15-20 mins so its perfect for when you have a little down time. If you haven't played it before the rules are available on the web site, give them a read and jump right in. You can't do anything wrong.

client and instructions can be found here.

If anyone wants a game, drop me a mail or add a comment.

7 Questions

The last month has been busy, busy at work and pretty busy with gaming. Lots of games have been played both new and old with some surprises. Zombie Dice was well recieved for a push your luck filler game. I think I prefer Can't Stop but it fills a hole and doesn't take up much room.

7 Wonders continues to be played and now the core players know the game it doesn't take longer than 30 mins to get a game in. My copy is now sleaved using the mayfair cards from www.boardgameextras.com especially as they looked as though they were going to start showing some wear.

Santa brought a few games, my Secret Santa sent me a copy of Small World. I have played it and enjoyed it but never bought a copy for myself. I think that my boys could probably get into the game so it was a good choice. Other Christmas games included a copy of Scotland yard and some Small World and Memoir 44 expansions.

Memoir 44 has become my favorite C&C based game. The fact that you can now play it online with the very good DOW client has helped. I am now looking for someone to work through the Eastern Front and Ardennes scenarios.

Gaming for the year finished with a game of Gambit 7 on New Years Eve. I have often brought a game or 2 to try and last night there was a bit of interest. I came last, terrible at this game and it went down well. So there is a glimmer of hope that other party style games could be well received in the future.

So for this year I am going to make an effort to stop buying so many new games and play the ones I have more. Also to play more games with the kids. They are at the age now where they should be able to understand some more games and their reading skills have improved. So I am going to try the family version of Agricola and maybe Memoir 44 and Small World this month. Also I am determined to get Apples to Apples and Dixit out and see if the wife enjoys them.

So here's to a new year of gaming.

More Wonders

7 Wonders is my hot game at the moment. We had a mini meet again last week and managed to fit in 3 plays of it. This time around I tried a few different strategies.

I always made sure I would be able to make the third part of my wonder. A mistake that caught us out the first time we played.
In the first game I tried to build every military card I could, and if not use it to build my wonder. This managed to score me the full 18 military points.
On the second game I tried to build as many green science cards as I could. This worked well, but I had no access to paper so couldn't build any of the tablet cards. This hindered my final scoring.
The third game I screwed up by not building enough resource cards. I managed to finish my wonder off very quickly but didn't manage much after that other than a few blue cards.

It was interesting that in each of the 3 games different people won with different strategies. I really think you need to score the highest in a minimum of 2 categories to win the game. Keeping an eye on resources available and what other people are doing is also very important. This gets a bit tricky with more players, don't ignore the people you can't trade with.
Coins seem to produce the least vistory points, but nobody has really played a coin producing strategy yet. Maybe something I will try next week.
Military is very good, getting 18 points is definately a good strategy but winning a fight in the third age can wipe out any negative score you have picked up earlier in the game.

Score wise, the winner of every game we have played so far always had around 50 points, with everyone else scoring low to mid 40's. So the games have always been quite close.

Hopefully this will get a few more plays in next week.

7 Wonders

Lot's of gaming has happened recently but the best was last night. My copy of 7 wonders arrived after being bought at Essen last week. It's got a lot of buzz at the moment and for good reason. It's a cracking game.
I had read the rules last week so we would be ready to give it a go and they seemed very simple. The rules themselves seemed to jump about a bit, but the basics seemed easy enough.

the game was punched explained and cards were sorted and dealt. The first age went very smoothly except for the fact I had no red military cards. I was trounced in combat on both sides but I had built a few civic building to generate VP's.

Age 2 started and more resources were available. Wonders started taking place but again I had a very poor military force.

Age 3 arrived and it all clicked. Well, we all realised that we couldn't build the third stage of our wonder. We had all passed up resource cards thinking we could trade them or already had them. I had 1 paper resource but needed 2 in order to complete my wonder. The only other paper was on the other side of the table! resources had been spread around the table. Guild cards were played to good effect in the final rounds and it was a close finish.

We all scored around 46 with the winner winning with 49. It was a very enjoyable game and I am now desperate to give it another go. I am sure this game will win a couple of awards this year and I expect an expansion sometime next year.

The other game we played was another new Essen release. Diver, Die, Deep (?) a push your luck diving game. It was quite fun but I was useless. Either diving too deep or staying under too long and running out of oxygen. It plays as a group push your luck that lasts several rounds. As a group you determine how much oxygen is in the tanks with hidden cards and each round you roll a dice for oxygen consumption. It gets a bit tense at times but sometimes you know you have made the wrong decision. A fun game that I would play again.

I also picked up a copy of Gosu, loving the look of the cards and box but need to read teh rules and give it a try.

A spot of Painting

A week has passed and Thunderstone hasn't hit the table. Instead Fresco got its first outing and it's a pretty good game.
When I first heard about Fresco the idea of mixing paints and keeping your workers happy sounded like a good theme. It was the strong "euro" in this years SdJ and I was on the lookout for something else to try with the kids.

At its heart its a worker placement game with a few twists. You decide the playing order each round by deciding how early your going to wake up your workers. First up gets to do things first but paints from the market cost more and your workers happiness drops. If your last out of bed you don't have much to choose from at the market but its cheap. Your workers are happy and you may even recruit a new one.

So after you have bought paints its then time to use them to complete tiles on the Fresco part of the board. You have to use up your workers and paints to complete these tiles. followed by the ability to earn money by painting portraits, mixing your base colour paints to make different colours and finally sending your workers to the theatre to increase their happiness.

so each round you have a few things to think about, mainly what time to get up, whether you are buying paints, painting the fresco or mixing new colours. All while trying to keep your workers happy.

The board and components are really nicely put together. All the tiles are good heavy card stock and the graphic design is beautiful. Layout of the board is well put together, visually it helps resolve each round. Queen games always seem to do well on their pesentation and design so I wouldn't expect anything less.

The first play went very well, its a smooth game to play with no real rules questions. It just seems to make sense. It's not very difficult to grasp, so I think its going to become my first gateway game to introduce new players.

The game also comes with 3 expansions. These add extra rules and things to think about to increase the complexity of the game. I haven't tried these yet but its nice that they added them into the base game instead of releasing them as a seperate expansion.

A bit more Thunderstone

The Thunderstone expansion has been delivered, unboxed, sleeved and collated. This expansion is brilliant, not only for the extra cards but for the built in filing system you get. Having a way to sort through the cards from both boxes now is a great bonus.

I have tried the expansion twice now and both games have been very good. We mixed up cards from the base set and expansion and they worked well. I did tweak the cards on the second play as we had no magic attack cards available and some of the elemental monsters needed magic attacks. both games played out well, although there was the inevitable stall point where a big monster blocks the dungeon and the players are busy trying to get cards into their deck to defeat it.
This is my only sticking point with the game. Whether its a creature only defeatable by magical attacks, or another that has such a terrible penalty if you don't have particular cards can hinder the game. It's not insurmountable, you just carry on grabbing cards until someone manages to get a good hand. It just sometimes stalls the game for 10 minutes when things were running smoothly.

My Dwarf promo cards haven't turned up yet which is annoying. I seem to be having problems with my post recently. Halo Reach is 3 days late and that's more annoying than the lack of Dwarves!
Hopefully I will have some packages to open soon.