First C&C:Ancients Imperial Rome game…

Wednesday night saw the first outing for the fourth installment of C&C:Ancients, as we played the Nisibis battle from the Imperial Rome expansion.

We also gave the ‘campaign’ game a try, and played the scenario over 3 days, although we managed to get only two of the three battles fought on the night. The result? Honours even going into the last day.

I was playing the Parthians – and I must admit that the rules handled them really well. The hordes of Light Bow Cavalry are a two-edged sword, as they can speedily harass the enemy, but are easy pickings if caught out on their own. The Cataphract Cavalry and Camels also work really well, finally giving you a cavalry unit that can (almost) go toe-to-toe with a Roman Legionary unit, but who are still very vulnerable to counter attack if their initial charge doesn’t devastate the opposition – and Cataphract Camels are ideal for anti-cavalry tasks.

I’m not sure how well the campaign system works in practice. A 2-in-6 chance on 3 dice means that most units come back into the fray – one would think that even if they did this, they might be penalised by losing a block to show their previous morale failure. Also, we thought that if a General is killed in battle, shouldn’t he stay dead?

So, the jury is still out on these – I can see several adaptions being made in future (though I’m usually not a fan of house rules)

Playing the game confirms my recent review – another excellent addition to the C&C:A range – long hours of fun are on the horizon.

New game for the pub – Wazabi

Well, it came too late for this week’s game night, but I’ve just picked up a very interesting looking dice game from Gigamic (the people behind the gorgeous wooden abstract games like Quarto and Pylos) called Wazabi.

The idea of the game almost couldn’t be simpler – you have to be the first player to get rid of all your dice.

Each player starts with 4 dice and 3 action cards – these action cards let you do certain things (get rid of one of your dice, take more cards, reverse the direction of play, get a player to miss a go etc)

You roll your dice, and dependent upon the result, you get to pass a dice to an opponent, draw more cards or play a card from your hand. It looks like a fun game, with a heavy ’screw your neighbour’ factor – which is the ideal sort of game that we want for playing down the pub after club on a Wednesday night.

If you’re interested, you can play it online at the official Wazabi Online website.

On opening the packaging, the thing that really struck me was the production quality of the game – it’s gorgeous!

You get a heavy cube-shaped box (really nice, if somewhat impractical in shape) which eases open to show off the rest of the components – 24 custom black and white etched dice, a drawstring dice bag to put them in and a pack of large cards. The cards are fantastic – big, colourful, and of a quality that is stunning…probably the highest quality cards I’ve ever come across in a game – I kid you not!

This hasn’t had a great reception on BGG so far, but having seen the components and played the game online, I think this is a title that will see a lot of play in our group.

Certainly worth the money, IMO.

Sticking in my sleep…

I’m now the proud owner of all six boxes of Commands & Colors: Ancients (original plus 5 expansions) – something I’ve been on the edge of doing for quite some time now.

If you’ve read this blog or listened to the podcast before, you know that I love this game. However, there was one aspect of getting all these expansions that I really didn’t appreciate  – despite hearing about it from several friends who have already been through the experience.

Stickers.

C&C: Ancients uses blocks to represent units. Each unit is made up of between 2 and 4 blocks, and to differentiate the units, each block has a sticker on either side. These have to be applied by hand, as when the game arrives it contains a large bag of wooden blocks, and several sheets of self-adhesive stickers.

Not a problem, I thought…

But in the base game plus 5 expansions, that means 1459 blocks, which is about 2850 stickers (not all the blocks are double-sided). That’s a lot of stickers!

I’m about 4 hours in, and have only completed 2 1/2 armies (both from the base game, plus all the Eastern Infantry from Expansion #1) so I’m about 1/4 of the way through. I can see that it’s going to be a while before I’m finished…

Richard III: The War of the Roses

Wednesday night at Scimitar Wargames Group saw my first play of the much anticipated follow-up to Columbia Games Hammer of the Scots, Richard III: The War of the Roses.

There has been a lot of buzz about this game, and I was very keen to try it.

My Reaction? To be perfectly honest, somewhat mixed.

The game itself is actually very good. A simple and elegant card-based system, which gives a lot of freedom for tactical play. The combat system is quick, easy whilst still leaving you with several considerations.

And more to the point, it fun – I really enjoyed myself.

However, this is offset by the poor production quality of the game – any game that costs in excess of £40 and doesn’t even have a mounted board, let alone a ‘proper’ box, is seriously lacking, IMO.

There wil be a full review of this game in the next Meeples & Miniatures Podcast episode.

The above picture shows the ‘Battle of Coventry’ – 2 major field armies clash in turn 5 of the game. The Lancastrians (Red) are bested on the field, partly due to the treachery of Buckingham, but manage to withdraw in good order.

Ghost Stories – Oh, the horror!

Last night was another meeting of Scimitar Wargames Group. Since this is the Wednesday closest to Halloween, we traditionally play games  with a ‘horror’ focus.

I got to play Ghost Stories, which is a co-operative game which was released last year to rave reviews – and after playing it I can see why.

The players are a group of Taoist monks, defending a village from an invasion of ghosts – led by the dreaded Wu-Feng, Lord of the Nine Hells, who has come to the village to reclaim his ashes, rise from the dead and plunge the world into eternal darkness – you know the sort of thing.

This game (even played a the easiest level, which we did) had all the classic elements of co-op. Everything appeared fine, we commented on how easy things seemed (although I was somewhat suspicious, given the games’ reputation)…and then we all died very quickly!

A post-mortem discussed revealed several ‘lightbulb’ moments – the classic one being that when we started the game, we didn’t ‘click’ about ghost placement…always put the weak ghosts on the corners so you get the chance to defeat two at once. And other things…like actually using the Buddha tokens early in the game, when you’re not overrun and too busy rushing from one ghost to the next to think about them.

In short, a really good game, and I can’t wait to play this again. It’s theme and gameplay appeals to me much more than something like Pandemic, and it has all the classic co-op issues – things get worse every turn, and you always have a really hard choice of what to do from several different options. The variation of player powers, plus the different manifestations of Wu-Feng lead to some great replayability, and that’s before you up-the-ante to Nightmare and Hell levels.

Another one on the shopping list!

Race for the Galaxy – a new lease of life…

I’ve been a big fan of Race for the Galaxy ever since it came out, and I’ve bought both expansions – however, it has been somewhat difficult in the past to find opponents.

All this has now changed, thanks to listening to the last episode of The Dice Tower podcast.

On this show, they were talking about Race for the Galaxy, and playing it solo against ‘robot’ opponents.

I followed this up on BoardGameGeek and came across the following site:

http://keldon.net/rftg/

This is a full version of Race for the Galaxy (approved by Rio Grande) that allows you to play the game solo on your PC against up to 5 AI opponents, and includes the original game and both expansions.

It does the job for me, and allows me to scratch my RftG itch. A game plays in about 10-15 minutes, and this program would also be good for teaching others how to play (without all the hassle of card drawing and shuffling).

Check it out.

Conflict of Heroes – first outing

Last night saw the first play of Conflict of Heroes – Awakening the Bear!

Bob & I played quite a leisurely game – chatting through the rules as we went and discussing various aspects of the game.

We played the first scenario – Partisans – and started to play the second – The Gap – when we ran out of time for the evening.

Bob is a veteran Squad Leader and Combat Commander player – the idea was to play the game to see how the mechanics worked, and how well it compared to these other systems.

This was my first experience of this sort of game – let’s just say it was a learning process!

The game ready for play - even with a single board we managed to take up quite a bit of room!

The starting position for Scenario 1 - the Russians lie in wait...

The first thing to note is the artwork of the boards and the chits – the boards are simply beautiful, and very high quality. The chits are nice and big – all the information is clear and does not look cluttered, even with the unit artwork.

The only downside was the turn/victory sheet – having counters of the same colour as the background did cause some issues (especially as Bob is colour blind)

The end of scenario 1 - it's not looking good for the Russians...

The verdict? This looks to be a really good game. I think it will take a few plays for me to get my head around all the game concepts (group movement caused some issues) but I’m certainly looking forward to playing again. The first scenario poses some challenge, but you can immediately see as soon as you start the second what a difference the cards make to the game – so I think we will be concentrating on those scenarios in future.

Will it convert to a miniatures game? Most certainly!

Grind – Warmachine meets Blood Bowl

OK, I know I’m slow on the uptake sometimes, but whilst I was browsing through the ‘Coming Soon’ pages on the IGUK website, I saw the above cover and thought ‘that looks like a Warjack’, which was quickly followed by feeling along the lines of ‘I want it…’

OK, so whilst I used to play Warmachine, I never came across this rules variant – and now it looks like Privateer Press are producing a full board game of Grind using some new plastic Warjacks.

The initial impression is that Privateer Press are producing their own version of Blood Bowl – but basing the game on 5-a-side football, rather than American Football.

Though the £48 price tag is certainly not cheap, if the models are of the same production quality as their metal versions (or even close) then this is certainly worth a look.

It’s slated for a 30th October release, and I must admit that this is yet another game that has my fingers twitching…

Talking of Blood Bowl, I’ve still got my 3rd Edition of that game (the one with the Astrogranite pitch) along with Dungeon Bowl, around somewhere (I think they are in the shed) I will have to fish them out, as I did like that game – and I’m sure Josh would be interested.

Shadows Over Camelot – how many ways to lose?

Last night saw another meeting of Scimitar Wargames Group, and it was good to see a healthy number there this week – 15 as opposed to the 4 of us from the week before!

Whilst several people took part in an epic scale Commands & Colors battle to celebrate the 2000th anniversary of the battle of Teutoburg Forest, the rest of us were left playing board games.

So, for the second week running, Shadows Over Camelot hit the table (along with the Merlin’s Company expansion). After a win with 4 of us last week, this week we were feeling pretty confident – even with only 3…how wrong we were!

Two dead knights, 7 black swords and 10 catapults later…

This is a good game – obviously better with more people playing (we are still to play a really big game – 7 or 8 players with 2 traitors must be a real blast) but enjoyable all the same.

Highly recommended!

BTW – next week it’s Battlestar Galactica with the Pegasus expansion and a full 7 players – should be a good one.

Pot / Kettle

I have been quite vocal about my dislike of ‘hex & chit’ board wargames in the past. As primarily a miniatures gamer, this was something that I simply couldn’t get my head around at all. Who would want to play a tactical level World War II game with card chits on a board when you could play it with minis?
Now, to a certain extent, this is still my standpoint. However, I’ve been playing more and more boardgames over the past year or so, and less and less miniatures games. Why? Well, there has been no particular agenda about it, but it has to be said that boardgames are much less hassle. If you want to play a game, you just open the box and it’s all there. And especially with some good board wargames/miniature games around (C&C Ancients, Battlelore, Waterloo etc) sometimes it’s just been the path of least resistance.

The latest step down this path has been the purchase of my first true ‘hex & chit’ wargame. I’ve resisted the urge to buy any of the Combat Commander sereis, but my resolve finally broke with Conflict of Heroes. This game has had a lot of very good feedback since it was launched and I decided that if I was going to give one of these style games ‘a go’, then this would be a good place to start.

So, I have bought the first in the series of games – Awakening the Bear – which deals with the Eastern Front 1941-42. I don’t have any miniatures that cover this period (with the exception of the Memoir ‘44 expansion) and so I thought this was a sufficient excuse to have a look at this game. I also bought the expansion map board.

Initial impressions of the game are very good. The first thing of note is that the box is heavy. It’s crammed full of stuff – 5 beautiful full colour mounted boards, excellent thick cardstock playing pieces – each about 25mm square – plus a pack of cards and a couple of dice.

This, complete with a large, full colour eurogame-style rulebook really gives a fantastic first impression – it looks easy to understand with lots of examples of gameplay.

I punched the counters last night and I’ve had a quick look through the rules – hopefully I can give you a full review of this game in a future podcast.

As an additional note, Storms of Steel -  the second game in the series which looks at the Eastern Front 1943 – 45 – is due out at the end of September. I’m keeping my eyes open for this one too…