Bot Players For 'Flamme Rouge: BMX'

Flamme Rouge has a number of rules for bot players/teams, hat allow you to play the game solo, or with higher team counts than the number of players. I thought that Flamme Rouge BMX could do with the same; it means that my wife and I can play with all four riders on the board even when there's just the two of us.

We did try with the bot riders drawing tokens. On the first two track sections they would always pick the second highest one they drew and then the highest on the final two sections. They add exhaustion tokens as normal. This worked, but it was a fiddle having the two extra bags in play and it slowed things down. I decided that something more in keeping with the fast nature of the game was in order.

You Will Need: A single D6

Any players select their speed tokens as normal, and then reveal them. Move the bikes in the usual order. When you come to move a bot bike, roll a D6. If the score is 1-5 then the bike moves that many spaces. If the score is 6 then the bike moves at the speed of the highest token played by any live player.

eg I play a 4 and my wife plays a 2. The bot rolls a 6, so gets to move 4 spaces.

Resolve exhaustion as normal. If a bot gets one or more exhaustion tokens then put them next to the bike on the board. When a bike with an exhaustion token moves it discards one of them and moves one space less than the roll dictates (to a minimum of 1)

eg A bot bike has two exhaustion tokens. It rolls a 4. It discards one token and moves 3 spaces.

eg A bot bike has an exhaustion token. It rolls a 6 and the highest player token is a 3. The bot moves 2 spaces as its normal speed from the roll counts as 3.

On the Downhill board a bot simply gets a +3 to its roll, and then subtracts one if they have exhaustion. If they roll a 6 then they copy the highest player token played and add 3.

eg A bot is on the downhill board. They roll a 6. The highest player token is a 2. The bot moves 5 spaces.

eg A bot is on the downhill board. They roll a 6. A player is also on the downhill board and has played a 3 and a 2. Their 3 is the highest player speed token placed that turn. So the bot moves 3 + 3 = 6 spaces.

I have played multiple solo games with this system against three bot bikes. I consistently come second; one of the bikes always pulls off an epic finish and just pips me at the post.

Christmas Games

I hope you all had a great Christmas! Ours was exhausting; my wife's birthday the day before always makes it hectic and, once again, we hosted my son and his family as well which, whilst nice, is a lot of work for us and makes for a very full and very noisy house.

Our guests had to leave late in the afternoon, though, which left the three of us time to play some games. And a few new games have entered our house this year, mostly through Catherine getting some. We played two of them yesterday.

The first is Nekojima, which is a tricky dexterity game with a peripheral cat theme (always an excuse to buy a game in this house). It can be played co-cooperatively or competitively. On a small island with four districts you are in charge of erecting the power-poles. On each turn you get given one or two districts via a dice roll, and must then place one of the 21 power pole pieces between those districts. Each piece consists of two wooden dowels linked by a piece of string. You can stack them, but the strings can't touch either each other, the poles or the ground. If it falls down, you lose.

The added wrinkle is that sometimes you must also hang cats from the strings.

There's a couple of cats in play here, and you can also see the variety of poles on offer. 

At the bottom of the picture you can see the scoring mechanisms; as you draw coloured cubes from the back (which tell you what coloured string you have to place) you put them on a grid. Four cubes complete a level and there are seven levels. The best we managed in four games was Level Four.

Two seconds after this picture was taken the whole structure collapsed.

Catherine also got an escape room game (we played one a few weeks ago, and really enjoyed it) and Hive, a two-player asbtract game with an insect vibe (it has bees in it, which is why I got it for her).

I got two games. One is 'No Thanks', a family card game I played and enjoyed at our work Christmas party (because who doesn't play games at their work Christmas party?). The other was Flamme Rouge: BMX.

This is a children's version of Flamme Rouge, but has the advantage of being smaller and quicker than the original. Instead of professional tour cyclists you are a bunch of kids racing around a backyard on your BMX bikes. The course is a simple circuit, although the track pieces are double-sided and have a basic track on one side and a variant on the other. There's an optional ramp you can add too to get a movement boost. Instead of cards you draw three numbered tokens from a bag and choose one for the turn (which is then discarded for the rest of the game). 

Slipstreaming in this game is random, with a dice being rolled at the end of the turn. You might get the basic one-space Flamme Rouge slipstream, but there's also the possibility of no slipstreaming that turn (bad) or being able to do it across two spaces (good). For a game aimed at children this is a nice mechanism that helps anyone who has fallen badly behind to catch up.

This game lacks the depth and versatility of the full version but it's a great quick game to take on holiday and play in a pub or whilst camping.

I did get some figures as well, for a club project a couple of us are looking at for next year. We'll see how those go, given my current lack of interest in painting anything.

I hope you Christmas saw lots of gaming goodies added to your pile.

Fight For The Fjords

Ralph put of a WWII naval game for us on Thursday, which was the last club meet of the year. He aimed for something different and mildly spectacular and it looked great. Three tables in an unusual kinked configuration represented a Norwegian fjord, whilst the ships were 1/700th kits covering destroyers and a single light cruiser. The rules were Nimitz.

A force of twelve allied destroyers in three columns are steaming at full speed into the fjord.

At the other end is a German heavy-water storage facility. The destroyers have to shell it. The Germans has three destroyers and a light cruiser to defend it with.

On the middle table was  fifth German ship, a guardship (also a destroyer). So the whole action would be fought with 4" guns and torpedoes, aside from the mighty 6" guns on the light cruiser.

One of the issues that the British had was that there were a lot of ships in a confined space. Movement became an issue of traffic management. Our plan was to send two columns in at high speed to engage the enemy ships, one at a slower speed to act as a mopping-up reserve and a third to head for the target and bombard it.

I was part of the British force. We onto  the central table virtually unmolested; a couple of minor its from the guardship and nothing more. The guardship took a pasting from concentrated fire though. No surprise there!

The rest of the Germans engaged the lead British vessels.

The light cruise Konigsberg ended up far to close to the cliffs of the fjord, cutting down its manuever options and leaving it shooting effectively but unable to turn into the main British force. Amazingly none of teh British destroyers could get a clear torpedo shot at it!

The German destroyers didn't last long. They sank one British ship, but were quickly wiped out.

With the light cruiser too far out of the fight to be useful the British now had a clear run at the target, and we called the game, claiming a British victory.

Thanks to Ralph for a fun, and surprisingly quick, game. Nimitz really rattles along when you know what you are doing.

With some time to spare I played a quick game of 'Blood, Sweat & Cheers' with Daniel, who hadn't played before. He wanted 'one of those guys with a net' so ended up with the retiarius Cupido. I took a classic opponent, the secutor Astinax.

Daniel controlled the game early on as I couldn't find an opening against the speedy retiarius.. I also got lightly wounded, which slowed me down somewhat.

On the plus side, whilst I couldn't get in a decent attack, Daniel found that I had ways of blocking every effective attack he made against me. To be fair several times that involved throwing sand at my foe (much to the crowd's displeasure), but it got me out of a tight fix a couple of times.

At one stage I got knocked down, but Cupido still couldn't finish me off. I even managed some rolling evades and ended up on the other side of the arena before finally being able to stand up.

And from that point on I found my stride. Astinax started to get some decent attacks together and I whittled down Daniel's gladiator, eventually striking him down for a win. The crowd were in my favour by that stage but he rolled well for missio and Cupido was spared.

So two fun games  to finish my club wargaming year!

Eques

I got my gladiators out the other day (for what I think is the first time this year) so that I could try some ideas I had for running the Eques type in 'Blood, Sweat & Cheers'. I first tried them out last year but wasn't entirely satisfied with how they played.

I'm still looking at the exact nature of their setup but I have abandoned the idea of them throwing their spears (indeed one piece I read suggested that they didn't even have spears if, indeed, they even fought on horseback). I have tried to emphasis the speed and mobility of being on horseback for the mounted phase of the combat, and then run with my idea from the previous post of running the foot version as a  lightly armoured secutor.

So here they are ready to go; Habilis in white the red shield and Maternus with the red tunic.

Habilis got in an early attack which missed.

Maternus wheeled and his attack unhorsed Habilis.

I stuck to the rules I'd used before for dealing with the mounted and foot phase of the fight; they would fight on horseback until one was defeated, or until one was knocked down. In the event of a knock down the turn ends, the knocked down gladiator stands up in the space he was in and his opponent can be placed in any adjacent space. In addition the opponent gets one point of Crowd Favour. The fight then continues on foot.

Maternus pushed his advantage and wounded Habilis.

There followed a free-wheeling fight around the arena before Habilis managed to get in a powerful blow that took down Maternus in one go!

The secutor stats felt far better and made for a more mobile fight on foot. The mounted phase didn't really last long enough for me to get a feel for whether I liked the new setup, so I will have to try a few more games. One thing I have realised is that so long as I don't make any of the abilities too overpowered I don't have to worry a great deal about balance, since these gladiators will only fight each other.

Christmas Meet-Up

As is now traditional the Wollongong Wargamers skipped one of our December wargames meets in order to get together at the Woonona Bulli RSL for an evening of food, drink, trivia and chat.

Hawaiian shirts were required. Not everyone got the memo.

Ralph did the quiz this year. It was heavily based on the games that have been played at the club over the past twelve months and was written multiple-choice answers. It's all getting a bit sophisticated these days. Peter and I had the joint top scores, but Peter won the tie-break question an so got to take home a big bag of flock and the coveted Golden KV2 trophy. He also has to set next year's quiz. I got a bag of dice as a consolation prize. 

After the quiz, and after we had reviewed our game-planning policy for the year, we played ... Top Trumps! The last time I did that was some 45 years ago. Caesar had bought a new pack just for the evening. It was based on tanks, but we never got to grips with how the ratings worked. Back when I played it you would have stats like Speed, Weight, Armour and so forth. Actual measurable numbers. This deck had ratings (Protection Rating, Firepower Rating and so forth) which just seem to have been pulled out of the designer's bum. 

So, anyway, this is me complaining about how Top Trumps were better when I were a lad.

And here's a picture of me playing a master-stroke!

Thanks to all who came for a great evening. We have one regular club-meet left in the year.

Pictures by Caesar and Ralph.