Epic Duels

Catherine and I played Star Wars: Epic Duels this evening; first time we've had it out in years*.

Catherine decided to be the good guys, and stuck to Luke and Leia for all three games. I was the dark Side, but tried a different character in each duel. In the first I drew Darth Maul.

Darth Maul is all Attack, Attack, Attack - he has some cards which don't count as attack actions so can really pile on the damage if the opponent can't defend against it. That's how I started, and I had Luke down to half of his hits in no time.

I backed off to replenish my hand.

Leia shot down one of my supporting Battledroids, although to be fair they're really just speed-bumps at the best of times.

With a fresh hand of cards I went up against Luke again ...

... and finished him off.

We switched to a different board for the second game and I ran Jango Fett and Zam Wessel. They are non-Jedi and have lots of shooty abilities.

So I did lots of shooty stuff. Jango has lots of special cards reflecting the various weapons in his armour, and I tried them all.

The wrist-cables finished off Leia, but also cost Luke all of his actions for the following turn.

That gave me chance to replenish my hand and finish Luke off with missiles and an aerial attack which took me from one side of the board to the other.

In the final duel I played Count Dooku, assisted by some Super battledroids.

Luke took on the droids, and damaged one.

Count Dooku duffed up Leia a bit, then he and his droids made a rapid retreat so that he could build up more cards.

Luke went of the offensive and scored a few decent hits on Dooku. But Dooku fought back, seriously injured Luke ...

... and a battledroid finished him off to give me my third victory.

It's a long while since Catherine had played this game, and she didn't really know how to make use if the Luke/Leia deck. To be honest I'm not sure I know either (and I did volunteer to give it a try, but she persisted).

It's a fun game, though, with each character having a style all their own.

*2016 in fact. You can read about it HERE

Another HOTT Knockout - Part Three

We are five seasons into the campaign and no territory has been captured so far. 

Season 6

The rolls were as follows:

Alexander - 4-2=2
Squidmen - 3
Elephantmen - 3
Knights of Simba - 3
Ophidians - 5+2=7

The dice pretty much followed the aggression levels, with the current most aggressive nation - the Ophidians, attacking the lowest aggression one - Alexander's Macedonians.

Alexander set up with a nice defensive ridge. 

I then, of course, realised that this was a plan that can be best described as 'bollocks'. Alexander is a hero general. The Ophidians have three magicians. All they had to do was sit back and hurl magic at him until he was ensorcelled. The Macedonians would have to not only take the fight to the Ophidians, but also keep Alexander back until either magicians were neutralised or the Ophidians had taken enough losses that Alexander's loss wouldn't be fatal.

Naturally the Ophidians pushed forward as quickly as possible, in order to get their magicians into range of the enemy general. Alexander had to position himself carefully - far enough back to avoid the magic, but close enough to command the army. The ridge meant that he had to stay dangerously close. The ridge was a really, really bad idea.

The two armies glare at each other ...

Alexander's light cavalry rode into the Ophidian rear, avoiding the attentions of the Ophidian archers sent to deal with them.

The Macedonians charged.

Unfortunately they were mostly pushed back.

And a quick check showed that one of the magicians was in range and able to zap a spell at Alexander (another was, but was acting as an overlap). The dice were not friendly to the Macedonians. Alexander was ensorcelled.

To add insult to injury the Ophidians destroyed a warband element of the Macedonian left as well.

With Alexander ensorcelled and the Ophidians having taken no losses, the Macedonians lost the battle and were knocked out of the campaign. 

The Ophidians won 6g-0.

This was now the state of the map. The Ophidians were on an unprecedented +3 Aggression.

Season 7

The rolls were as follows (numbers in brackets are rerolls for ties):

Squidmen - 5
Elephantmen - 5
Knights of Simba - 3
Ophidians - 4+3=7

As expected the Ophidians were on the offensive again. This time their target was the Knights of Simba, who had sat the campaign out so far. Would their first battle be their last?

The terrain was densely wooded in parts, with one large ridge. The armies started offset from each other.

The Knights of Simba had to be careful. Half of their army is knights, which are destroyed if they lose when attacking shooters and magicians - troops that make up two-thirds of the Ophidian army. On the plus side they can ride down the Ophidian warband, but the Ophidians would be deploying second and keeping their warband out of harm's reach. So The Knights of Simba elected to put their ape-man allies to the fore, and leave the lion-centaur knights as a second line to exploit any opening.

One thing the Simba army does do though, is move swiftly.

They quickly fell upon the Ophidian line.

Things broke up as the ape-man warband pursued their foes.

Meanwhile the Ophidian warriors were working their way around Simba's left, through the cover of some woods.

The Ophidian archers were quickly overwhelmed, collapsing the army's left flank.

It would be up to the magicians to hold the line now, until the warband were able to charge.

And charge they did, destroying some ape-men.

The Ophidians gambled and their warband charged some of the Knights, pushing them back into their own line and destroying them. The battle was looking very even so far with both sides having a weak left flank.

Both armies reorganised, and the fight began to shift through ninety degrees.

Ape-men overwhelmed one of the Ophidian magicians.

They then pressed their attack as the Ophidian warband emerged from the woods to find an element of knights waiting for them

The ape-men fell back from the Ophidian general, leaving her free to use magic. The two surviving magicians attacked Simba's general, who had a blocked recoil, and destroyed him. Would this positional mistake cost the Knights of Simba the battle and therefore their territory?

The Ophidians had taken more casualties, so The Knights of Simba kept fighting, But with their general gone the momentum was going out of their attack. The ape-men kept fighting, looking to create an opening.

The Ophidians lost an element of warband, but the so did the Knights of Simba.

The Ophidians even managed to attack Simba's stronghold. The odds were very much against them, but they had had luckier rolls in other battle. This time, though, the attack was repulsed.

The Knights of Simba finally managed to ride down some other Ophidian warriors to win the battle 12-8g.

This was a close-fought battle that could have gone either way, but the Knights of Simba held on to their territory, and took some of the aggression out of the Ophidians. But going into the next round they are still strong favourites to be on the offensive.

Gaslands Overdrive

So we have a current club policy of a scheduled game each week now. Other games can be organised, but week on week you always know that there will be a game of ... whatever that week's game is. They were taken from a list of the most played games of last year, and one of them was Gaslands.

This week was the first scheduled Gaslands game of the year. Something else was scheduled to run alongside it. The person running that phoned in sick at the last minute. So nearly everyone who turned up that evening wanted to play Gaslands.

Anyway, that's how we ended up with a six-player game, including one person who had never played it before, and a complex team sponsor we'd never had used before.

We ended up rolling the obligatory Death race. Here are the fourteen (yes, fourteen!) cars on the start-line. We had three Idris teams, two Rutherfords and one Beverley (a team that has one actual vehicle and a number of subsidiary ghost vehicles). There were four teams of two vehicles and two with three vehicles.

The course was a figure-of-eight, of sorts.

Given the number of vehicles the start was surprisingly orderly, with no collisions (accidental or otherwise). Bryan's police bike quickly hit the first gate.

A couple of gear phases in and it all started to get a bit messy.

A few more vehicles made the first gate, but some had wiped out and were partially blocking it. It would be a few phases before they moved, meaning anything not through the gate already was going to have a lot of problems.

Bryan's bike forged ahead. Declan (first-time player) got a car through, but it wiped out. Still. at least it was through.

I got one of my cars through as well, and chased Bryan's bike through the second gate, ramming him. I did very little damage and, afterwards, I worked out that I could have rolled just as many dice shooting him.

So at the top of the picture you can see the vehicles that got through the first gate - Bryan's bike, one of my cars and both of Declan's. Although both of Declan's had wiped out, so weren't going anywhere for a bit.

Meanwhile the run to the first gate was still an absolute mess.

Here's Caesar explaining to someone how they might get out of the mess.

It took us 2 1/2 hours to get that far, so we called it a night. It was a fun game as far as it went, but far too unwieldy for an evening's play. We may need to consider our options for future scheduled Gaslands games if they attract this many players - four is really the maximum for a game you know will play to the finish. One possible option is for people to bring a regular 50 Can sponsored team, but also a 20 or 25 can single vehicle, as we have shown that races with one vehicle built on a few points with no sponsors can be a surprising amount of fun.