The Tabletop Tour de France - Part 8

Catherine and I continued our Tour de France last week, so I thought I'd better write it up before I forgot what happened.

We ran two stages, the first flat and the second mountainous.

The Stage 16 runs from Gruissan to Nimes, and there's little in it to trouble the riders.

Saying that we had a fair bit of weather - a tailwind early on, then a headwind  then a crosswind. To be honest this didn't really affect the race too much. I put my sprinteur into the breakaway. I'm still pondering how to do the bots in a breakaway; I still feel that they overbid a little and I also like the idea of one of the players getting into the breakaway despite a low bid because a bot decided to massively underbid.

Anyway, here we are, ready to go.

There was a tight pack at the start, although being out in front my sprinteur picked up a bit of fatigue.

Blue got well out in front, whilst my sprinteur got absorbed into the pack. My riders were just ahead of Catherine's at this stage.

The run for the finish. Both Catherine and I were out in front and it was an exciting sprint. Once again my Rouleur was pipped into second place by Catherine's, but my sprinteur finished third, a couple of places ahead of Catherine's. Blue got a fourth place, and red and white finished poorly.

This left Catherine and I neck and neck at the top of the table, along with white (who is consistent if nothing else). Blue's sprinteur let the team down and dropped their score a little relative to ours.

Stage 17 runs from St-Paul-Trois-Chateaux to Supedevolouy and, after a flat start, is a steady climb to the finish.

An early headwind slowed everybody down.

The pack stayed tight going up the first ascent, but Catherine was slightly ahead of me at this stage.

Disaster. Towards the finish was a long ascent with rain on it. And as Catherine broke away one of my riders crashed on the wet road, costing me a couple of places.

This dragged my sprinteur back (although Catherine's wasn't do well either), and my rouleur wasn't doing brilliantly either. Despite everyone running out of cards, Catherine dragged herself over the line in first place, with white and red finishing well too. I managed a poor 6th place with my rouleur and Catherine's sprinteur finished ahead of mine for once.

There are four stages to go and Catherine now has a decent lead. The team scores are now:

Green (Catherine) - 248
Pink (Me) - 240
White (Peloton) - 239
Blue (Bot) - 227
Red (Bot) - 206
Black (Gruppetto) - 88

I think red and blue are out of the running now - I may need to review the various rules changes I made there - but white could still be a danger. However if Catherine doesn't make any mistakes I think her lead is possibly enough to give her a win. I've got a lot of work to do in teh next couple of races.

Snow Tails Solo

First off I must apologise for the lack of miniatures games on this blog recently. I'm just enjoying boardgames more at the moment so I'm not getting my toy soldiers out at home as much.

Anyway yesterday afternoon, whilst my wife was doing some cake decorating for my son and grandson's birthdays, I fancied running a race game. However my copy of Flamme Rouge is currently tied up with our Tour de France (we keep exhaustion cards from previous races in the decks for a quick setup), so I wasn't keen on getting that out and messing it up. Instead I opted for Snow Tails, which I blogged about HERE last year. I'd printed off some dice-based solo rules for running bot sleds and wanted to give them a proper try.

I played one sled (the red one) and let the bot system run the others. Their movement is more unpredictable (although not completely so, thanks to a clever catchup mechanism), but they don't take any damage so drive more recklessly. I have to steer my sled and can lose it if I take too many risks.

Here we are at the start. I moved last.

I included all of the possible obstacles, as I wanted to try them all out. First up were the sapling. If you hit them then you take damage, but they sapling is then removed. I followed other sleds and let them do the impromptu horticulture.

My sled display, as a reminder of what they look like. The two cards at the front are added up to show the sleds base speed. The number at the back is how much braking is being applied. The difference between the two cards is how much the sled must drift. It drifts towards the higher of the two cards.

So in this case my base speed in 4+5=9. With 3 on the brakes I actually for 6 spaces. With a difference of 1 between the cards one space of my movement must be a drift to the right (the side with the 5).

When you play cards from your hand you can add up to three (one for each dog and one for the brake). But they must all be the same value. so you have to think ahead when planning turns and safe speeds for corners.

Anyway, after that digression you can see that we're all pretty much dealt with the first hairpin turn. Yellow and Black are in the lead and I am in a distant third. Blue got into a mess on the corner.

Through the trees and I'm still third, but still undamaged. Black and Yellow were taking the corner wide.

That cost them. Blue, Green and, of course, myself, slipped round on the inside and got ahead. We were able to get ahead of black through the chasm.

There's one last gentle curve before the finish and then a snowdrift to avoid. The option here is go wide n the corner but be set up to avoid the drift, of go round faster on the inside and then have to drift the other way to get past it. We all kind of went down the middle. I was in fourth place now.

Blue got stuck on the corner and Green and Yellow slowed. I caught up!

I had a clear line to the finish and managed to balance my sled for a fast run. A win!

My sled at the end. If both of your dogs are pulling at the same speed your sled is balanced. This means that you are allowed to apply a bonus move at the end of your turn; you get to move forward a number of spaces equal to your position in the race at the start of the turn. I was third, so I got to move 8 for the sled (5+5-2 (brake)), plus an extra 3 for being balanced. Eleven spaces was enough for the win.

Catherine and I might need to try a series of linked races of this once we have finished Flamme Rouge.

Alpha Strike - Clans

I ended up playing Alpha Strike at the club yesterday after the game I had arranged to play was cancelled. Darren had set up a fight between some Inner Sphere defenders and an attacking force of Clan mechs. Clan mechs are apparently nastier than the regular Inner Sphere ones we've used up until now, so they had fewer mechs the defenders.

I played some of the red Inner Sphere mechs. Darren took the advance force of lighter Inner Sphere mechs, who quickly got overwhelmed by the Clan force.

The heavier mechs (mine and, when he got in later, Caesar's) advanced on the flanks, laying down plenty of long-range fire with varying effects.

The Clan broke through and we found ourselves with a lot of targets, all of which seemed tough to kill. Saying that we did take out one with an ammunition critical that saw it blow up.

The heavier Inner Sphere mechs put up a good fight, but their Clan opponents were tough and fast.

They quickly occupied the two objectives, and were still holding them as we got onto the last turn.

But we hadn't realised how much damage Darren's light mechs had done at the start. The Clan mechs holding teh objectives weren't as tough as they looked and between us Caesar and I laid down some long-range fire and destroyed both of them, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.

A very close game on Darren's lovely hex-based terrain.

The Tabletop Tour de France - Part 7

 Catherine and I played two more stages of our Tour de France over the weekend. They were both mountainous and very challenging. 

Stage 14 runs from Pau to St-Lary-Soulan and takes our riders up into the Pyrenees.

You know the drill; red and blue were in the breakaway (although I did try for it myself).

The remainder of the course. There's some long ascents in there, although they are alleviated by some useful descents.

I'm not sure how my pink rouleur ended up at the back, but he did. He never really got into the race. Catherine, however, got her rouleur near the front.

Red and blue dominated, and were out in front and unstoppable from the start.

This was pretty much how it went towards the finish. Red and blue came first and second, whilst Catherine picked up a third place. This helped her rouleur's individual score, but her sprinteur finished behind mine so the actual difference in points was low on a team basis (we both finished on 14 points, in fact).

Oddly enough we ended up burning all of our cards which actually meant we got rid of most of our exhaustion. A good job, since Stage 15, from Loudenvielle to Plateau de Beille was also a tough one.

It also took up a lot of space on the table.

This time the white peloton team was the one that got out in front. I got both of my riders up with them.

The finish. Catherine came second, and I came fourth. The gruppetto managed to finish before a lot of the other riders! Once again both Catherine and I picked up 14 points, but I think her rouleur, 15 points ahead of any other rider on 146 points, is going to be the individual winner.

So we have six stages to go and four teams (White, Blue, Green and Pink) within five points of each other at the top of the table. Catherine is in the lead but I am only one point behind her. There's everything to play for in the final stages.

First In Flight

My adult children never know what to get me for Father's Day, so these days I tend to buy something for myself and that counts. This year I bought a newish baordgame I'd seen a few good reviews of - First In Flight.

In this game you take the role of an early aviation pioneer, and try and set the longest flight record. Everyone starts off with a deck of cards representing their aircraft, containing some basic flight distance and several flaws. The aim of the game is to improve and expand your deck, then use it to do a spectacular record-breaking flight.

Here's the game set up for a solo run-through. The ten playable aviators, who each have unique abilities, are actual people of the time, some famous and some more obscure. In this game I gave Loius Bleriot a try. 

There's some nice wooden pieces, based on aircraft of the time, to mark your flight record.

A plyer-mat gives you  place to put your character, has a quick-reference guide to some of the key moves and (just out of shot to the right) a garage in which you put any flaws you discover so that you can try to fix them.

A lucky early flight with the basic deck. Flying is run via a push your luck mechanism; your shuffle your flight deck and then deal one card at a time in a line. Cards have a distance number on them and the total is how long your flight is. At any point you can choose to Descent, which ends your flight. At that point you draw two more cards and then add the special Descend card to the end of your flight. This gives you a bonus of 5 if you don't crash.

Crash? Yes. In your deck you have at least four flaws with red crash markers on them. Each ne also causes an additional problem; one forces you to discard a card from your flight, for example, whilst another forces you to descend whether you want to or not. In this flight you can see that I drew three of them. If you get four such cards then you crash. You still count your score, but if you haven't played your Descend card then you get no bonus and if you have the bonus is reduced. In this flight I picked up three flaws, so didn't crash and scored 14. 

After a flight you can put up to two flaws in your garage. If you can fix them then they are replaced with basic flight problems, which still have a crash mark on them, but no additional issues. So there are always at least four crashes waiting in your deck.

And how do you fix things or, indeed, improve your deck in other ways? Well, you move around the board, landing on action spaces as you do so. Each circuit of the board represents one year, and the game plays until you reach the end of Year 4 or until a player does a flight of at least 40. The different spaces allow you to fly, repair and buy additional cards that either go in your flight deck or act as modifiers. You can see some of these just to the right of my player mat. There are four types; Upgrades add extra flight cards to your deck (but sometimes come with additional flaws attached), Friends give you access to various people who have helpful skills or contacts, Tech gives you things to add to your plane (such as a hinged rudder, or proper landing-gear) which make it easier to fly further or stave off disaster and finally Skills are clever things you can do during flight, many of which allow you to look at your deck and sometimes modify the order in which you play cards.

Movement around the board is quite clever. When it is your turn you can move as many spaces forward as you like, except that you can't land on an action that's already occupied. But only the player who is furthest to teh rear can move, so if you leapfrog the pieces of other player they will get to acti before you do again, and if you go far enough around they may be able to land on several actions before you get another go. The game becomes a balance between doing what you want  to do and jumping ahead to grab key actions when you need them before someone blocks them.

I did very badly as Louis Bleriot. I played a second game as Samuel Langley. He gets bonuses when picking up Upgrade cards, and can also leverage any Tech cards for extra flight distance. And I won that game with a flight of 51.

Here's my record-breaking flight. As you can see there are Upgrade cards in there with distances of 2 or more. There's also more than four crash symbols; my plane is fitted with Tech that means I crash on six cards instead of four.

My Skills, Tech and Friend (Alexander Graham Bell, no less). Some of these add extra flight distance, which is why the cards above don't add up to 51.

This is a fun game with a lot of flavour. The game comes with bios of each of the ten playable aviators, plus the friends and even the special two-player dummy third aviator, Gustave Whitehead (who, it is claimed, flew a manned heavier than air plane before the Wright Brothers). It's a nice jumping-off point for reading about this fascinating subject as well.