Assault at Imdaar Alpha

This weekend I'm off visiting a friend, Gaz, in Edinburgh.  As far as we've arranged, the agenda consists of lots of junk food, beers and games.  Looking forward to getting away from the 'Deen for a while and relaxing for a couple days.
  

On Saturday we've both signed up an X-Wing tournament at the Games Hub (which I've been to, but can't remember where it actually is.)  The tournament is part of the Assault at Imdaar Alpha event FFG are running to promote the next wave of releases for the game.  Hopefully we'll get a chance to break out my Tantive IV at some point too.

Tournaments aren't really high on the list of reasons why I game, the last one I went to was over two years ago, but they are a nice distraction and a good opportunity to get some games in against new people.  I've still not decided on what kind of squadron to field there, but I'm leaning towards a Moldy Crow/twin B-Wing list; it looks competitive, not too cheesy and kind of fun.  I'll try and take some pictures, but they'll just be with the phone as I've apparently lost my camera!

Two New Babies

First off, a big congrats to my regular gaming buddy Adam and his wife on the birth of their new baby errr... no name yet, lets just say little baby B!  Very happy for all four of them, their cat counts as a person doesn't she, even if it means less gaming in the next few months (Me? Selfish? Never!)

Speaking of new arrivals, here's my latest addition:

About the same size as and tons more fun than a tiny wee pooping machine (only joking!)

The Rebel CR90 Corvette "Tantive IV" for X-Wing.  Most famous for the opening scene in A New Hope, the Tantive IV is in all three films, most notably getting swarmed by TIE Interceptors in Jedi.

It's an absoutely lovely mode, the paint job is on par with most of the recent X-Wing releases i.e. excellent for a pre-paint.  There's some lovely detailing work and it has a the usual weathered feel to it.  I can't deny being delighted by the fact the gun turrets swivel!  

I haven't even had a chance to look at the rules yet, something about energy and multiple attacks and destroying any other ship whose base you touch.  Nice! There is a mini-campaign booklet in the box, which is a suitable addition.  In Epic Play (the X-Wing rules where you can actually use this ship) the minimum points level is 300, a lot of points, but the scenario book pits you against a relatively small number of enemy ships, decent enough given the RRP of the Tantive IV!

I'm away visiting a friend in Auld Reekie next weekend; a fair bit of gaming should be involved and this guy is certainly the first thing I'll be packing!

Another New X-Wing Ship - The Moldy Crow

A bit of good fortune crossed my path a couple weeks ago, I had a nice little lottery win. Nothing in the quit-work-and-get-some-hookers-and-blow category, but a nice wee three figures.  It was sensible hat time though, so a good chunk went to paying some stuff off and another hefty piece went into my saving account. There was enough leftover to be a little self-indulgent.  I took a mate out for dinner, bought some new togs and, of course, picked up some miniatures for the pile!

I'll keep the first purchase quiet for now, but I'm quite happy with them.  The second was another ship for X-Wing, the HWK-290 Light Freighter.  Similar to the YT-1300/Millennium Falcon and the Firespray-31/Slave-1, the HWK-290 is better know to fans as the Moldy Crow, and for it's pilot Kyle Katarn. Actually, many people won't recognize the HWK at all, as it's the first ship in the X-Wing range not to have been in the movies.  Those of you who played the Dark Forces series on the pc "Do you fear me Jedi?" should be happy at it's release.

Now I think it's fair to say this ship was the least popular of the Wave 3 releases for X-Wing. A lot of people didn't like the model (it's brown after all) and it's stats are hardly that impressive. Still, I thought, it can't be that bad, can it?

Well, no, it's not bad at all, but it's not great either.  Not terribly manoeuvrable, not that resilient,  not even dishing out that much damage.  The HWK-290 is really the first support ship available for the rebel fleet; it's not going to do much on it's own, but with the right options and in with the right mix of ships. . .

The most obvious build is using Kyle Katarn, The Moldy Crow itself, a blaster turret and a recon specialist crew member.  This will pump out Focus tokens for the whole game, two per turn, allow you to give one to nearby ships each turn and also make proper use out of the blaster turret.  If you have a couple ships with Advanced Photon Torpedoes along side, then they can really dish out some damage in one or two turns.

A similar, but less obvious, way to use the HWK is by just using the cheapest pilot, the blaster turret and recon specialist.  This doesn't give any fancy benefits to your other ships, but it makes an excellent finishing ship.   As the turret can fire in any direction, swing this ship safely round the sides or behind several enemy ships, wait to see what survives the attacks from your better pilots, then use the HWK to finish them off. Best of all, this build is fairly cheap at 23 points so you could squeeze in three other ships in a 100 point game.

I'm quite happy with my purchase, despite the fact I actually wanted a B-Wing (they didn't have any left.)  It's not a ship I'd want two of, unlike the awesome Tie Bomber, but I'll certainly try it out the next time we manage to get a game in.

Incidentally, for any X-Wing players out there who don't know about it already, the Unofficial X-Wing Squadron Builder is a great tool for messing around with lists (and avoiding uncomfortable mental arithmetic.)

New X-Wing Ship - The Tie Bomber

So what's better than buying yourself a little geeky something (or Mr Visa buying you something?)  Well it's getting something bought for you!

Cheers then for my mate Adam for picking me up a Tie Bomber for X-Wing! Nice.

Fantasy Flight obviously know their audience; the TIE Bomber is easily the least cool ship from the original films, so they've compensated by making the rules for it terrific.  Cheap and loaded with ordnance seems to be the way to go with it.

The usual FFG bundle of cards and cardboard features.

A nice enough pre-painted model, but, like the rest of the X-Wing range, would benefit from some touch ups or insignia markings. It'll get to the table in a couple of weeks hopefully, up against another new model, the B-Wing.

Blood Bowl Team Manager

We didn't have anything definite arranged at the club this week, so I took along Blood Bowl Team Manager for a trial run.  This is one of Fantasy Flight's Games Workshop licensed games, based on the classic fantasy American football tabletop game.

Each player takes control of one of six teams for the course of a season, draws players, drafts star players, recruits coaching and backroom staff and participates in each game week.  It's quite an odd affair, especially considering the original game; players don't complete individual matches.  Instead, each turn consists of the players drawing a highlights reel - a row of cards with different combinations of rewards - representing something like a a sports summary television show like Match of the Day or NFL Gameday.  Individual player cards are placed next to a highlight in an effort to collect the reward on that card.

Essentially, you're getting a snapshot of what happened over a course of series of games, not winning and losing specific matches.  The aim of the game is also a little left of centre; instead of accruing the most points or "winning" most game weeks, the aim is to accumulate the most fans.  Not a problem in the game (in fact, the fan mechanic is handled very well,) but these two factors make Blood Bowl Team Manager a little counter-intuitive.

Still, once you've got your head around the unorthodox set up and premise, quite an entertaining little game unfolds. BBTM plays pretty quickly and, as every player regularly acquires new cards to use, there is very little down time in the game.  There are a nice mix of mechanics in the game; most cards have optional abilities to use, tackling uses dice, cheating needs a risk/reward decision, star players are (unsurprisingly) powerful.  Even the scoring system gives you some interesting choices to make; do you take the fans to get an early lead, or do you forgo fans to try and recruit better players or coaching staff.

Six teams are available to choose from in the base game, all from the Warhamer world; humans, dwarves, wood elves, orcs, skaven and chaos.  FFG have done a great job in differentiating between the different teams, the Skaven for instance, sneaky and underhand, make heavy use the cheating mechanic, the Orcs favour bludgeoning their opponents while the humans, who can do a bit of everything, are simultaneously great at nothing!

FFG say this game is for 2-4 players, but we realised very quickly that the two player experience is very disappointing.  Simply put, there's only one real tactic for both players in a two player game and once one player gets ahead, it's nigh on impossible for the other player to catch up.  However, I've no doubt that in a three or four player game, neither of these issues would be a problem.

Overall, Blood Bowl Team Manager is a decent enough game, one I really want to like, but would need to play a larger game to make sure.  The game itself is full of Blood Bowl humour and flavour; two commentators appear and have witty banter printed on many of the cards and the artwork overall is excellent.

I picked up the base game and the expansion well below the RRP.  I can't say I would pay full price for them, but if you get a cheap enough copy and enjoy multi-player board or card games, Blood Bowl Team Manager is a pretty good deal.

Still here. . .

. . . Just not been up to posting anything lately.  Apologies for the long absence friends.  Life has been fairly stressful lately and that, coupled by a wee break to Spain, hasn't had me in the frame of mind for blogging or painting lately.

Things haven't actually turned the corner yet, but I'm at the point now where there's not much to actually do, just a case of waiting for things to happen.  Realising that, I'm actively working to get into a settled routine and resume doing the things that make me happy.  That sounds a bit flakey, I know, but hey, that's how I've been feeling lately.

Still a bit of gaming going on.  Had a few games of Netrunner this week; still my favourite game full stop at the moment, just wish I was a bit better at it!  Also had another outing for Dreadball the week before. Still oodles of fun, but I want to try another team for variety; robots, bugs or rats.  Can't decide.

Naturally, some retail therapy has been needed lately and I picked up two boxes from Fantasy Flight Games; the Elder Signs expansion; Unseen Forces and the new Star Wars RPG beginner box.  The RPG looks very entertaining, it's based on the WFB system (which I've never played) and has a ingenious dice pool system.  The artwork and writing are top notch too.

Frustratingly, I've not tried out the Unseen Forces yet.  The box FFG have used for the expansion is slightly too small for the cards Elder Sign uses, meaning that the large cards are all bent out of shape.  They've spent the last two days under a pile of the heaviest books I have, trying to straighten them out.  Still, reading the rule sheet, the expansions seems to add a welcome degree of difficulty to Elder Sign and the new Blessed and Cursed dice seem fun.

After moving house last month, I've managed to create a little space for modelling and painting.  No painting done yet, but I have managed to finish basing my 28mm Viking warband for Saga (wow, reading back I'd planned to have these finished in May.)  Hopefully I'll get these undercoated over the weekend, providing the rain eases up.

Lastly, we're finally getting to try out In Her Majesty's Name at the club next week.  Sholto has been beavering away creating factions for us to use.  Looking forward to it, pics if I can take anything decent.

X-Wing Wave 3

Following on from Star Wars day yesterday, FFG have released some spoilers for the next wave of X-Wing releases.

The B-Wing looks like the pick of the bunch, with decent hull and shields combined with two lots of torpedoes and a heavy cannon option.  Also, is that a new icon on the task bar?

The profile of the Tie Bomber is far better than I thought it would be.  Just as well, as it's my least favourite SW ship. Able to withstand plenty of damage, the fact it can carry five loads of ordinance makes me think we'll see a pilot who is able to use missiles/torps twice per turn.  Just a hunch anyway...

As I said yesterday, I know fuck all about the Hawk, or the HWK-290. In game it has decent hull points, average agility, but the icon bar makes me think we'll see a couple new turret options (which will also be useful on those Y-Wings too.) Can't say I'm 100% on the paint job, but that's easily fixed.

Lastly there's the Lambda Class Shuttle.  Thank goodness it's on a large base, despite what you see in Jedi, it's a big ship, easily the equal of the Falcon or Slave-1.  Decent firepower and plenty of shields mean it should soak up plenty of damage, something the Empire struggle with.  The real juice is in the options available, that new (radar? Sensor?) icon and two co-pilots give it plenty of options.  Despite my dodgy lateral thinking, I can already see some decent combos open up.

So even with my 12-1 loss:win ratio with X-Wing, I still had a tiny wee nerdgasm over some of the spoilers (read the proton bomb text at the bottom of the page.)  Bring on Q3, can someone remind me to keep £100 aside from my June pay?

May The Fourth...

Be with you... Always

Happy Star Wars day everyone.  

In honour of the films (and the huge commercial empire they spawned,) I set out today to get rid of some disposable cash on something SW.  Despite hanging around the local Forbidden Planet for twenty minutes I didn't end up with anything, although the Lego Snow Speeder Hoth set was really tempting.

Instead I downloaded a few of the older fiction books, namely the Thrawn trilogy, starting with Heir to the Empire.  I'm pretty sure I read these years ago and remember them for being pretty decent, but am not 100%.  Hey, I'm a fan boy so they could be terrible, but I'll still read them regardless and call them great!

I wouldn't be surprised if I put a couple of the movies on later tonight too.

Also on the Star Wars front are rumours of the next wave of X-Wing minis for the FFG game.  Tie Bomber, B-Wing, Lambda Shuttle and the HWK-290.  Tie Bomber is a bit meh, but the B-Wing should be full of win (as long as it's big!) The Lambda Shuttle sounds interesting as in the background fluff, it can carry some heavy weaponry.  There's also plenty of scope for using it in the rebel fleet (with Chewie piloting of course.)  The Hawk is apparently featured in a number of SW computer games, Empire at War being the only one I clearly remember.  Apart from that, don't know much about it.

Basically, FFG could release anything in this release and everyone, me included, would buy them all.  X-Wing is just a licence to print money.

Mobile Blogger App and X-Wing Pics

Yesterday's first post from my Android phone using the Blogger App wasn't without teething problems.  Firstly, it failed to publish the post first time AND deleted the draft in the process. Secondly, I notice it didn't publish any of the pics I'd taken, but neither did it save them on the phone either?  Anyone know what I was doing wrong? Still functional enough to use when I'm out and about.

So what pics didn't appear yesterday?  The new X-Wing releases, that's what!  Oooo, shiny.

First up, piloted by everyone's favourite scum, is Slave 1. It's an impressively large bit of kit, although still dwarfed by the Millennium Falcon.

The coolest Tie variant (at least from the original three movies) is next.  I bought two Tie Interceptors mainly because the game store only had two left, but I'm sure I would have picked up another one at some point in the future anyway.

Lastly, my least favorite Rebel ship (again from the original movies,) the A-Wing.  Meh, nothing wrong with it really, and it's rules look deadly, but it doesn't really do it for me.

For those of you who already have X-Wing, I'd like to point out that the quality of the models and, in particular, the paintwork is a vast improvement on the initial release.  All the weapons point in the correct way and the coloured panels on the A-Wing and Slave 1 have a nice thick colour to them. Compare the first X-Wing model I received where I had to cut all the engines off and reattach them, bend the weapon barrels back into shape and basically have cream paint splashed over black.

Not sure when we'll get our next game in though, next week looks pretty busy.  Maybe I'll have to kick the Mrs out shopping for a while and get some folk round to the house!

Black Crusade - Tome of Blood

40K haters look away now.

The latest Black Crusade sourcebook, Tome of Blood, arrived a wee while ago and, during our week under the covers, I've had a good thorough read.  Billed as a sourcebook for followers of Khorne, it actually has lots of content for all players and GMs.

Like the previous book, Tome of Fate, there are four new character types to chose from and, again like Tome of Fate, it's the human choices that really catch the eye.  The Chaos Marine archetypes are just as you'd expect with a Berzerker (melee) and a Night Lord (fear) on offer.  The human archetypes let the reader explore some frontier worlds of the 40K universe, Messia being my favourite with it's Dune/Arrakis feel.  Other than characters, there's a lot of background material here, rules for legacy weapons, massed combat, more rituals and investigations.  Lastly, there's another complete campaign using the newer rules.

A lot of new artwork is on show, most of it very atmospheric, some of my favourites are on this page.  And I'd also say the standard of writing here is pretty impressive, much more so than the early Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader games. FFG have pulled in a few new authors in their recent books and they have seem to have picked up the freshness of the writing (if that even makes sense?)

To be honest, ToB was the book I was least looking forward to, as just how much depth is there on offer to roleplay an uncontrollable frenzied killer.  Overall though, the rage/frenzy aspect isn't all that prevalent for the players (NPCs are another story) and the book is much more about new options and scales for combat.

I haven't managed to get a RPG session in for a few months now; we were running them over skype and, when my broadband went, that wasn't possible any more.  I think I'm going to try and find a group locally (it would be the first time since my uni days,) but not until later in the year; not feeling terribly sociable at the moment and can't see that changing in the near future!

X-Wing - New Year, Same Old Luck

After a break for the holidays, it was back to the club this week for a game of X-Wing.  Since we played last, Adam has picked up a copy of the game for himself, which now gives us the opportunity to run some different lists.  I decided I wanted to try the "Tie-Swarm," fitting in as many Tie Fighters as possible, in this case, seven.

Opposite, Adam opted for three tooled up Rebel ships, two X-Wings and one Y-Wing.  Luke Skywalker was one of the pilots and his ability is to regenerate shields, while the other X-Wing had an Astromech that let him repair damage.  Two abilities that would prove decisive.

Still, at the end of the first turn, above, I was feeling pretty confident, those seven Tie Fighters can put out a lot of shots!

Turn two and the Imperial squadron focused all their attacks on the Y-Wing which was destroyed, but only just.  I saw this a triumph in itself (it takes eight hits to destroy a Y-Wing) as I've barely put a scratch on the Rebel Battle Bus before!   There were still two X-Wings on the table though, time to deal with them.

Or not.  Turn four and I'm down to five Tie fighters.  At very close range, X-Wing is a very brutal game as everyone gets bonus attack dice.

Turn six and I'm starting to get a bit pissed off.  Another two of my ships have gone.  To make matters worse, Luke Skywalker has managed to restore both his shields and the other X-Wing, which was almost destroyed, has repaired all the damage.  Still, if I could isolate each and focus my attacks I could still turn this around...

I'm not even going to bother telling you how the game ended!

So, a new year, but my luck (or skill) at X-Wing hasn't changed.  I can't think of anything worse in wargaming, than having your opponent point out your obvious mistakes, not only to you, but to everyone standing around the table watching!  Despite my horrendous run of losses, I'm still enjoying X-Wing.  We're both looking forward to the new wave of releases and seeing what FFG have planned after that (fingers crossed for the B-Wing next!)

Only War 40K Rpg

Well I trust everyone's recovered from whatever trials you put your bodies through yesterday. Everyone one got what they wanted from under the tree?  The Mrs and I decided to go halves on one of these tablet computers (sharing hasn't caused any arguments, yet) so I thought I'd put it through it's paces on the 'ol blog.

 

My copy of Only War turned up on Christmas Eve and I've had a couple hours to flick through. The latest in the line of 40K role playing games, Only War sees you inducted into the ranks of the Imperial Guard, fighting in one of the Imperium's countless wars.

Are these guys from the Gaunts Ghosts series?

Setting aside initial concerns about how much fun playing a nameless grunt would be, FFG seem to have made a number of interesting additions to the 40K RPG system, most notably the squad mechanic and a dedicated set of vehicle rules (about time!)

The book itself is mostly up to the standards expected from FFG, the only criticism I have is that there is less artwork than in previous books and a lot of what is there is recycled from GW's back catalogue.

Proper vehicle rules.  Finally.

Only War is by far the best 40K RPG to be played with miniatures, but I still need to be convinced just how much role playing there is on offer here.  Still the book was a nice distraction over the last couple days and is a goldmine of background material for Imperial Guard fans.