Chariots At MOAB

This weekend just gone was the annual MOAB show up in Sydney. I always make an effort to get up there for at least one day. This year I even had a shopping list!

I went up on the Saturday because Victor had invited me to have a go at a chariot-racing game he's developing. Called 'Ludi Circenses' it uses the racing pack/relative positions concept that you see in THW's Charioteer, combined with an action dice system similar to that in 'Song of Blades and Heroes'. I should say that the mechanisms are not lifted wholesale; they are very much their own thing.

Here's the race underway. The game is for four players, each running two chariots. The teams are the classic Reds, Blues, Greens and Whites of antiquity.

The track has three active lanes; an inside lane on the left, a middle lane and an outside lane. There is also an area to the right called the outer lanes, which is where the 'pit crew' lives and where any chariots that drop off the back of the board go until they can be brought back into the main race. You can see one such chariot in this picture.

The race is run over seven laps, with each lap consisting of three straight sections, a corner, three more straights and a final corner. 

On the corners each chariot simply tests against a hazard number to see if they take stress or damage on their chariots. The level of hazard is determined by how many adjacent chariots you have, being in the dust-cloud of a chariot in front of you, whether you are on the inside track (the most dangerous) and how much stress you have put the chariot under.

In each straight section one chariot will act, based on coloured dice drawn from a bag. Each player has eleven dice in the bag, so with 42 straights in the game you can be sure of getting at least 9 actions in the game, maybe 10 and, for at least two players, 11 actions. Charioteers can use crowd support to get bonus actions if they are popular.

When a chariot acts you roll one, two or three dice with roman numerals on them. Each 'I' symbol gives you an action. Two or more 'V' symbols give you an action but also fatigue the horses. So a roll of 'III', 'IV' and 'V' will give you four actions for the I's and one further action for the V's plus a fatigue.

Actions can be used to move (which is easier the closer to the inside you are), change lanes or attack or overtake other chariots. 

I noted earlier that each team has a pit-crew. These are the mounted Hortartors, who can guide a chariot and negate the effects of dust, and the unlucky Sparsors. These latter are slaves whose job it is to throw water on the axles of the chariots or on the horses in order to cool them down. The wooden axles of chariots would get hot during a race, to the level where they would smoke. In the game a chariot accumulates heat each time it acts. A team can use actions to deploy the Sparsor to cool a chariot down. 

You can see both a Sparsor and Hortator in action here.

Using a Sparsor is an action. If the target chariot is in the outer lane then they can do their job unimpeded. But if they have to cross lanes there is chance that they will be run over. In this picture the green Sparsor has got lucky...

... but he was not so lucky a couple of turns later! Splat!

Anyway, the final straight is the key one; a chariot wins if they are in one of the front three paces of the track. That Blue chariot is mine, looking like a dead cert.

But here's a Red chariot coming up on the inside. 

An overview of the finish. We were both using crowd support at this stage. It was very exciting.

Pipped at the post! In the event of multiple chariots being at the front at the end a chariot in the middle lane has priority. However other factors can affect the finish. Red's horse team were better finisher's than mine, which gave them a bonus and made the result a tie. In that case the tie-break is unused skill counters (which are assigned at the start of teh race). I had one. Red's chariot had ... two. So Red won on the narrowest of tie-breaks; I finished well but Red's better horses and more skillful charioteer just squeaked ahead in a 1st century AD photo-finish.

I was gutted.

The also-rans. On the back wall you can see the dice that have been pulled from the bag, neatly grouped by straights and laps.

This game is tremendous fun, with lots of period chrome and things to manage. As a chariot races it slowly degrades, and the game is very much about managing heat, damage and stress, whilst ensuring that your opponents accumulate some. We didn't have any crashes, although one of the white chariots had taken a couple of corners badly and was close to falling apart. Sadly he failed to amuse us by actually doing so.

And what of the shopping? I bought a few bits for a Turnip 28 force I have on my painting table (I have one unit painted and another couple mostly assembled), as well as some more Grim Fantasy figures for use with Palaeo Diet. And I picked up two boardgames. The first is a solitaire WWII game, 'Field Commander: Rommel', which allows you to play the great man in three campaigns (France 1940, Western Desert and D-Day) against a game-controlled Allied force. I've tried the France 1940 campaign a couple of times and it's a tough nut to crack. Those Somuas just keep comin. The other game is 'Evolution: New World' which is an excellent card-based game about adapting animals to environments whilst fending off other player's predators. I got it for $15 and it seems to be a full kickstarter set with not only the basic game but two expansions as well. Quite a bargain. We've played it three or four times already this week, and we love it. It lacks the silly animal builds of Quirks, but does have a charm all of its own*.

*My wife and I both studied life-sciences at university, so as a theme it's very much our thing.

Gladiators At MOAB

I made a couple of trips to MOAB this year. On the Sunday I popped in for the afternoon to look around the stalls and games. Picked up a few figures, some more paints and a copy of an out of print sled-racing boardgame called 'Snow Tails'. It was too hot to do much else though.

On the Monday I'd said I'd go up to play and help with a demo of  'Blood On The Sands' gladiator rules, that I've blogged about here a couple of times (most recently last year). When I arrived three games were in full flow:

My first game saw a thraex get beaten up by Victor's murmillo.

My next game was with Damian. By this stage I'd got the hang of what I was doing and we had an epic fight between my secutor and his retiarius. A couple of times we both had our opponent on the ropes, and both of us were sliced up and bleeding by the end. I managed one last desperate attack before I was due to pass out from blood loss and sliced off the retiarius's head.

My final game saw me beaten to a pulp in just under a turn by a very aggressive thraex. The less said about that the better.

Here's a few more pictures. 

A hoplomachus and a murmillo.

Frank (the author) and Paul discussing some finer points of the game.

Frank's fantastic arena. You can read about how he built it HERE, HERE and HERE

I'm really quite taken with 'Blood On The Sands'; it flows really well and is great if you want a crunchy detailed game that's actually not that complicated. Still no word on when it's likely to be published though.

MOAB 2022

I paid a visit to MOAB yesterday. It's the first time it's been held since 2019, so it was nice to be back.

Most of it was competitions. There didn't seem to be as many traders present either, although those that were there were interesting enough including Aetherworks, Olympian Games, Eureka, Slave 2 Gaming and a company which distributes independent games. There was one demo game (it looked like Team Yankee, maybe, but I didn't look that closely), and a couple of participation games as well, both of which were card/boardgames. 

I played one of these; a card-drafting game called Cosmos: Empires.

With an attractive epic sci-fi feel, the players purchase cards from a pool of eight every-changing options in the centre of the table, looking to maximise the revenue of their empire before their opponents do. Some cards act as multipliers based on how many cards you have fulfilling certain conditions, so the game is a balance between picking up expensive multipliers and collecting enough of various other card-types that those expensive cards bear fruit. You can also destroy cards in the centre to deny them to other players. It was a simple enough game, although I failed to grasp exactly what the victory conditions were until near the end of my first game. Despite that I managed to scrape a win, mostly via a lucky draw in the centre on my last move.

Here's the game at the end.

I played a second game later in the day, and was simply lucky not to come last in that.

Cosmos: Empires is a funded kickstarter, and will be available early next year.

I also played a card-game on the independent stall called Viewpoint: Revisioned, which is part of a series called the Viewniverse. It was amusing, but I only played two-player and I'm not sure the cut-throat nature of it worked so well. Maybe because it was my throat getting cut.

Anyway, this year's MOAB also coincided with the start of my Frocktober campaign for this year. Here's a taster:

I'll do proper, regular posts throughout the month, but once again we've set up our usual team: IT HAS POCKETS

Oh! MOAB loot? I bought a can of varnish. I did turn down the chance to buy the Ogre: Ultimate Edition (the one that's the size of a suitcase) for $75 on the bring and buy, but as attractive as that looked I wasn't sure that, for the size, it was a game I was likely to play that much. I like it, but to the level of wanting to store a $75 suitcase. One day I know I will regret this decision.

52 Games - Game 57
52 Games - Game 58

MOAB Loot

This year, for the first time since I arrived in Australia, I went to MOAB as a regular punter. I was neither playing in any competitions, nor was I involved in running and demo/participation games.

As it was I managed to fill the day rather nicely, hung out with various friends and associates and, of course, spent some of my hard-earned cash on stuff which will probably sit in cupboards until I die and my children are left to work out what to do with it.

So what did I get?

I always end up buying some Bones. Whether I'll ever get around to painting any of them remains to be seen. These are destined for either Battlesworn or my small collection of 25mm HOTT armies.

I got these 18mm Four Horseman of the Apocalypse from Slave2Gaming.

Also some winged imps, which you can see in an unassembled pile at the bottom of the picture.

My biggest purchase was a pile of Monsterpocalypse stuff from the bring and buy.

I got plenty of kaiju and mechs.

There was also a pile of the smaller 'things' that were part of the game - some vehicles as well as mini-monsters.

My favourites - a lorry transporting an egg, and these giant gorillas, one of which is carrying a field howitzer as a gun.

I've already taken some of the big monsters off their clunky game bases, although few of them stand up unaided like that and will need to be rebased.

Gladiators at MOAB

Victor and I were a bit disorganised getting a game ready for MOAB this year. We had considered running some Gaslands (based on the success of Machinas in previous years) but were preempted on that. And a good thing too, as the Gaslands game that was run at MOAB was outstanding. With Gaslands running on one table, Machinas didn't really seem to be an option either. So we fell back on our faithful standby - Munera Sine Missione.

We're currently putting the finishing touches to v3.0 of the game (in fact it's mostly waiting for me to do the reformatting and page-breaks, which seems to be a harder job than actually developing the rules), so we took the opportunity to try out some of the bits and pieces from it.

We started off with a fight between a whip-armed light gladiator, and a Provocator.

Victor was disappointed to see his Provocactor defeated rather easily, and then granted no mercy by the crowd because he'd resorted to using his special defensive breast-plate (a new feature of this gladiator type).

Victor tried out his Hoplomachus design against a helmetless Thracian.

I can't remember the result of this fight. Rufina the Thracian usually loses her bouts, though, so that's probably what happened.

Victor has a figure called 'The Shadow of Death' (or 'Umbra Mortis' in Latin), and tried him next - he has light armour and two swords. I used the Secutor, Hero. The Shadow of Death died.

Our first interested punter appeared, and played a couple of games. He tried a super-heavy gladiator first, and I opposed him with a spear-armed medium. I was incredibly lucky throughout the fight, twice finding a chink in his armour to badly wound him, and then breaking his sword. Needless to say I won that fight.

Our punter then switched to  light gladiator, and used Rodan, the whip-armed fighter I'd used earlier in the day.

Victor explained some of the finer points of the game.

This game saw an appearance of the referee. I can't remember the result though.

Victor and I played a few more bouts. I used Syalvania, a very light gladiator armed with a spear and lasso. Victor used his Maximus figure in the first fight, and I can't remember who won.

In the second fight he used his Scissor, and lost, although we forgot a couple of key special rules which may have affected the results.

We played a couple more games with passers-by, before we decided to try out the campaign rules and try some skilled gladiators. The campaign didn't go well for Victor. - his school lost three gladiators in quick succession, including some skilled ones, whilst mine racked up prestige.

Moderatus was my star fighter. Armed with a sword and cape, he won a couple of fights ...

... including this one against an armoured Scissor where he lost his sword and ended up subduing his opponent with his bare hands.

Another fight, and eventual victory, for Moderatus.

We fitted in several fights during the course of the day, without feeling too rushed. Victor's small arena looked lovely, and helped set the scene of the game very well. We also fitted in a couple of jousts using the rules I am developing, and they ran pretty smoothly as well.