Another Return To ... The Arena Of Death

Our Gaslands game a couple of weeks ago proved popular enough that we had two new players wanting to give it a go. So last night Caesar and I set up a game for them. We created some teams for them to select from, and did one each for ourselves and rolled for a scenario.

Arena of Death it was, then.

To be fair, along with a race this is a good starting scenario, since it just focuses on destroying things and (unlike a race) doesn't even have respawns.

We played with the full rules, but tried out the new optional Wipeout and Evade rules that the author has on his blog. Both are designed to keep vehicles in the game for longer, which may seem counter-intuitive in a game that has a Rule of Carnage, but are designed to keep players more involved, which is good. In addition we switched to a popular house-rule that the spin at the end of a Wipeout is randomised rather than the (always malicious) choice of another player.

The teams were:

Caesar, running two Mishkin cars. Both had mini-guns and a mobile mechanic, and one had sat-nav.

I ran Rutherford, using a single heavy truck (Siberian Khatru) armed with a tank gun in a turret.

Ed ran an Idris team, both equipped to go fast at all times and steer skillfully. One was armed with crew-weapons and the other with rockets.

Bailey also ran Rutherford; the car Fountain of Lamneth had rockets and Jockey Full of Bourbon was a pickup armed with side-mounted flamethrowers.

This was our arena. Of Death. Or not, since we only generated three gun turrets. The carnage would have to be player-created.

Siberian Khatru started with a gun turret right in front of it, blocking my best route into the main part of the arena. 

I didn't want to waste my limited tank-gun ammunition taking it out, nor did I want to collide with it, so I deftly (really) turned the truck broadside on and used my hull machine-guns to eliminate the annoyance. This took me through some hazard-inducing soft sand.

In the distance you can see Ed's vehicles, running away. He was not keen to face the truck.

Bailey had sent hid car my way, but Jockey Full of Bourbon went head-to-head with Caesar's ram car, setting it on fire.

I got into the main arena, and put a shell into one of Ed's cars, badly damaging it and causing him to wipeout into the kill-zone of a gun turret as well.

A view of the early action.

Caesar put the fire out on his car (stacked up shifts from the other car's satnav meant that he could effectively manage hazards on both of his vehicles), and rammed Jockey Full of Bourbon.

Bailey got The Fountain of Lamneth into action, pumping a volley of rockets into Siberian Khatru.

There's some footage missing here. Jockey Full of Bourbon finished off Caesar's ram car, and encountered Ed's rocket car. Bailey set Ed's car on fire, but received some rockets in return and was damaged. Siberian Khatru was in range and finished off the truck. Sadly the fuel-laded pickup didn't explode.

Bailey made an error of judgment with some templates, and drove The Fountain of Lamneth off the board into disqualification.

(We allowed the new players one turn where they could try out templates before committing, to get them used to how they looked on the table. Then we implemented the Touch It, Use It rule).

I think at some stage I finished off one of Ed's cars with my machine-guns. He had so few hits left that it wasn't worth using the tank-gun on him, something he found terribly insulting.

So we were into the end-game. Ed's rocket-car was on fire and in the middle of the arena. I was down to my last shell for the gun, and somehow not picking up Audience Votes to reload it. And Caesar was driving around the periphery with his mobile mechanic making frantic repairs.

I moved up to Ed, shot at him (with the machine-guns again, I think) and got rammed in return (to be fair I was close enough that he had no choice). Ed's car was destroyed, and exploded.

(I think we forgot that when he collided with me he should have set me on fire, but in fact I think I wiped out off the collision, which would have dropped me to the zero hazards needed to put out the fire anyway.)

Caesar's red Freeway Fighter came back into the fight, looking fairly healthy. But to take me out and win the fight, he had to bring his front-mounted mini-gun to bear.

We duelled for a couple of turns, but my ponderous truck kept wiping out as I turned tightly and got off a last shot with the tank-gun. This meant that I picked up Audience Votes, thanks to my crowd-pleaser trait, which rewards you for wiping out. I was able to use them to load up one last shell that we found down the back of the sofa, and finish off Caesar's car, for an unexpected win.

The new optional rules worked nicely. The evade rules did reduce the damage inflicted a little, so it took more than a single decent hit to finish off a player's vehicle. They reward driving at a reasonable speed as well, which keeps things suitably hair-raising.

The Wipeout rules made a real difference; the change is that vehicles in Gear 3 or lower can choose to maintain that speed even after the wipeout, which keeps them active in the game-sequence if they wipeout in an early gear-phase. Faster vehicles must reduce to Gear 3 or less. The randomised spin was quicker to adjudicate as well.

My truck did well out of the new wipeout rules. My maximum Gear is only 3, so even if I wiped out at top speed, I didn't have to slow down. A damaging flip was unlikely at my low speed as well. It's true that I would spin to face a random direction, but the arena was open enough that I could always turn out of trouble. And with a turret-mounted weapon it didn't matter how I faced; I could bring my gun to bear on anything within range.

Here's the design for Siberian Khatru:

Rutherford - Heavy Truck - 50 Cans

125mm Tank Gun (Turret), 2 x Machine-guns (Sides), Crowd-Pleaser, Road Warrior

I assumed I'd wipeout a lot, so the Crowd-Pleaser trait meant that I got a reward for doing it. Road Warrior meant that I could take off a hazard if I damaged something, so helped minimise the hazards caused by firing the tank-gun.

We all had a good time, and I think everyone's keen for another game. Maybe not an Arena of Death this time though.

Sunda To Sahul

Sunda To Sahul is a game published in Australia around 2002. I played it once at a friend's house when I came here on a visit, and was quite taken with it, but couldn't get hold of it in the UK. And it's been long out of print; even the publisher's website is long gone.

Last week I found a pristine copy in a charity shop for $4.

It's a tile-laying game loosely based around the stone-age colonisation of the islands along the Indonesian archipelago to New Guinea and Australia. What makes it a bit different is that the tiles are wooden jigsaw pieces, so unlike hexes or squares there are limited ways that some can connect with others.

Each turn you lay two pieces. If you create a node - a place where a complete set of land pieces connect at a point - you get to place a tribe token. You can place this on the node, or on an existing token or stack of tokens on the same island.

Here's the early stages of a game. The masks and shells are competing for the island. The masks have claimed water rights on a small lake. The axes have a small presence, but have also claimed territory on a second island forming to the top of the picture.

There is a combat mechanism, where a stack can enter into conflict with another stack. The resolution is a simple highest die roll comparison, with the outnumbering side getting to roll more dice and picking the best. The loser gets a token in their stack replaced by one of winner's. Stacks can have tokens of more than one player in them.

At the end of the game - when one player runs out of tokens - you score for each token you have on the board. Those in stacks are worth more than singletons, and anything on a completed island is worth double. There are bonus points for controlling lakes and resource tokens as well.

Anyway, Catherine (axes), Maya (shells) and I (masks) played a game yesterday afternoon. I think we  picked up some of the strategies fairly quickly. Maya and I competed for a large island which, halfway through the game we realised couldn't be completed. Catherine opted out and made her own island instead, although we muscled in on it obviously.

Catherine completed her more modest island, so anything on it was now worth double points. 

The finished game. Having realised that the big island would never be completed, Maya and I branched out onto smaller ones. Because of the way nodes work, you can't have as many tokens on the islands (there can never be more than one token per node), but it's easier to get the completion bonus.

Anyway, Maya came a distant third. I thought I had a clear victory, but in fact Catherine ran me fairly close. She had fewer tokens on the board, but her decently-sized complete island meant that some of her stacks scored big points. So I won, but not by a huge margin.

It was a fairly entertaining game, a gorgeous to look at and use. Its biggest flaw is, unfortunately, the tile-laying. All pieces are placed face-up and available to all players, so a turn can take a long time, as a player searches for the perfect tile, or simply one that will fit in the space they want to expand into. Early on, finding tiles isn't too bad, but by halfway a lot of the useful ones are gone. If you're OK at rotating shapes in your head, you can scan the pieces quite quickly, but it's not everyone's forte. Posts on BGG suggest that people have tried simply drawing tiles, or limiting each turn's selection, but this apparently makes nodes much harder to complete, so slows the game down because the players don't get to place tokens as often. 

So it's a decent game at heart, but with a flaw in the way tiles are selected that makes it less attractive to play than, say Carcassonne. Worth $4 though.

52 Games - Game 38

Bolt Action On The Volga

The Bolt Action fans in our group are trying out various Stalingrad scenarios at the moment. On Thursday I played in one of them.

The premise is that a group of Soviets are defending a section of the table, and twice their number of Germans are attacking. Meanwhile a blocking force of Germans is attempting to hold off twice their numbers of a Soviet force trying to break through to the defenders.

I played one of the German attacking forces.

We took a fair time to set up and get organised, and it was clear that we wouldn't finish the game before the end of the evening. But we plugged away as best we could.

Here's the view down the table, with the German attackers deployed on the right. The Soviets have yet to deploy.

A better view of the layout. The bottom left of the picture was the objective area; both Germans and Russians got points for having units in this area at the end of the game.

A view from behind the Germans towards the objective.

The German blocking force

Opening moves saw the Germans advancing cautiously. Our mortars, artillery and snipers did a good job pinning down some of teh Soviet defenders, but we quickly took casualties from those not cowed by high explosives.

The relief force arrived, centered around a T34 and a KV2 disguised as a KV1 (someone brought the wrong turret).

The objective area. The orange markers are pins, showing that a lot of fighting was going on. After this photo was taken it boiled down to close assaults, which did not go well for the Germans.

The breakthrough force advanced. They too launched close assaults, and a unit of factory-worker conscripts actually swept away one of the German infantry squads.

At my end of the table I had a PzIII engaged in a duel with an SU76.

At the end of the evening we were only a few turns in and the Germans had lost a significant chunk of their infantry. The Russian breakthrough force was set to do what it's name suggested with little difficulty, and we called the game.

We agreed that it's an interesting scenario setup, but that we need to rethink the terrain to provide more covered approaches for each side and force the action into a series of localised fights with limited visibility. Also with six commands on the table it plays slowly, but we have some ways of speeding that up. We hope.

52 Games - Game 37

Citadels

A quick post for another entry in my 52 Games project - on Wednesday evening Catherine selected Citadels as the game we were going to play after tea. And it's a new one for this year, so it counts!

For those who don't know it's a game about building medieval/fantasy cities. There are eight/nine character roles in play, but instead of the player adopting a role or roles for the whole game, they adopt different ones each turn, accessing the character's special ability for the turn as required. You collect gold, draw cards to access new regions to add to your city and use your abilities for the turn to collect more resources, build your city better or hinder other players.

I didn't record the game we played in any detail, but Catherine and I ended up in a close finish, but I clinched a win by stealing a city component from Maya using the power of the Diplomat.

And that's it.

52 Games - Game 36

Easter Weekend Games

We've had two days of socialising and games this weekend. It's been hard work.

On Saturday we went over to our friends' place. We started off with several games of Secret Hitler. 

For once I was a Liberal. In fact I was a Liberal in all three games. I still got to shoot someone, though. And that someone turned out to be Hitler.

Anyway, the Liberals won all three games. The Fascists just didn't seem to have what it took; too busy concentrating on getting re-elected in Australia I guess.

Anyway, we switched to Mysterium after that; a strange supernatural murder-mystery game that I'm sure I've written abut here before.

My medium, who would receive mysterious visions to guide her to a perpetrator, weapon and location plus, in this expanded version, a motive.

It's a cooperative ha,me, so everyone has to solve their mystery for a win. I did OK with mine. Others less well.

Although here we can see that people were not convinced about my choice of location - lots of negative votes. They were correct as well.

Anyway, we failed the first game.

We set up a second game, but I opted to take a break. However one of the other players had to go early, so I came back to the table and took over their position. 

We lost again.

After that we were all gamed out, and simply socialised for the rest of the evening.

On Sunday our son, daughter-in-law and grandson were supposed to visit, but illness meant that they had to cancel. So Maya in invited a couple of their friends over at the last minute (we had food needed eating). That gave us a chance to play more games.

We started with Quacks of Quedlinburg, which looks like a delicious and tasty treat if you set it out like this. Tastes like cardboard though.

Pandora had a look, but wasn't interested.

Anyway, newcomer Freya won the game.

We switched to Sushi Go party after that, which everyone enjoyed so much that we played three games.

And after we ate, it was time for The Cat Game, our perennial family-favourite, despite the fact that it's a terrible, terrible game.

It's Pictionary. with little cut-out cats that have to be included in the drawings. These are the only things I got pictures of.

My take on 'An American Werewolf In London' (or, as Maya guessed 'A Fantastic Werewolf In Paris')

And Catherine's take on 'Highlander'.

Sadly my awesome, full-colour take on the final scene from "Planet of the Apes' was lost to posterity. As was Freya's depiction of Kennedy being assassinated whilst riding on a giant roller-blade.

We played that game for hours. It was silly. And loud.

Anyway, this busy weekend has added three more games to my 52 Games project.

Game 33 - Secret Hitler

Game 34 - Mysterium

Game 35 - The Cat Game

Arena Of Death

A change of plans at wargaming on Thursday meant that the planned Bolt Action game had to be cancelled at the last minute. So Caesar, John and I decided to do Gaslands instead. This entailed me spending my lunchbreak scrabbling around the house trying to find rules, dice, templates, terrain and vehicles, plus putting together a team, but it was all worth it.

We did 50 can teams and rolled the scenario when we got there (and after I set up the terrain). We ended up with, as you may have guessed from the title, Arena of Death. In this one the vehicles fight until only one team is left running, and there's no respawns. In addition there are gun-turrets scattered around which shoot at everyone.

It's a scenario which favours combat-orientated teams.. None of us selected one.

Caesar went for two Idris buggies, built for speed. I mean they were both armed with rockets, but mostly with nitro. John and I both chose to go with the vehicular ballet of Maxxine; John had three fairly vanilla cars (Maxxine scores audience votes for doing spins and slides close to friendly vehicles, so more vehicles are good), whilst I went for two cars, choosing to load them with perks.

Here we are, ready to roll. John's vehicles are top-left, mine are at the bottom and Caesar's towards the top-right.

Here's my team - Mr Apollo on the left and Bad Blood on the right. I started things off with some crowd-pleasing ballet, performing tight turns and spins to the delight of the audience.

Caesar's vehicles roared up and down, also delighting the crowd. He spent his time away from the other vehicles wisely as well, using rockets to take out any gun turrets in his part of the board.

John's vehicles advanced menacingly around the perimeter. He couldn't roll spins and slides to save his life, so did little to excite the audience.

First blood was Bad Blood, rammed by a car with a chainsaw on the front and badly damaged.

John's team celebrated with some ballet.

Then finished off Bad Blood.

Mr Apollo was next, although I managed to avoid teh chainsaw there, and the two cars danced around each other, with the crews blazing away with handguns.

Pink Bats took the interesting decision to deal with terrain by driving through it

I took the opportunity to use Mr Apollo's minigun to shoot up Pink Bats.

An overview. Caesar was still roaring around on the left, staying out of what was now a fierce fight between the two Maxxine teams. And in the middle John's chainsaw car had decided to drive through the water feature ...

... and ram a gun-turret.

Both turret and car were eliminated.

Mr Apollo was eliminated soon after, forced into a collision with John's silver car (sorry John. I can't remember most of their names). I dealt out a fair bit of damage back to it, though.

At that point we called the game for Caesar, whose vehicles were undamaged, and full of ammo. I had been eliminated and John's vehicles were badly shot up. A win for John was possible, but unlikely.

We had to spend a fair bit of time looking things up again; it's been over a year since any of us played, and even that was just one game. It's been a couple of years or more since any of us played regularly. Even so, we actually rattled through what we did fairly quickly, although none of us was running anything too complicated and time-consuming.

I'm keen to play again, and am keen to try out some new optional rules for evading damage and wipeouts that the author has put out on the 'net. One thing we tried in this game was to randomise the direction a vehicle faced when it wiped out, instead of another player choosing. The later is kind of fun, but can add a little bit of time as some players carefully reposition an opponent's car for maximum inconvenience. a simple directional die roll really speeded this up, and I don't think the game lost anything by it.

My first Gaslands of 2022 gets me another 52 Games entry.

52 Games - Game 32