Grim Fantasy

I had a chance to play Grim Fantasy last night. Grim Fantasy is a skirmish game with a kind or European fairy-tale/horror setting. So Brave woodsmen, townsfolk or even mysterious warriors in red hoods battle creatures of the night like werewolves and animated scarecrows. It's produced by Slave2Gaming and, whilst technically miniatures agnostic, does have an associated range of 15mm figures.

Drew, the designer, set up a terrain consisting of a traditional olde worlde village, with a well at the centre. He took a group of villager types, led by a witch-hunter. I had a mob of wolves and werewolves, supported by a bear. The aim was to control the well at the centre of the village for two turns.

My beasties made a run for the village. The wolves went for the well, whilst the werewolves moved around the side to intercept the decent figures in Drew's band.

Drew's hunters face off my lead werewolf.

My wolves controlled the well, but were approached by a villager with a spear, plus a priest and the town drunk. 

Now one would assume that would ensure the well was mine, but in fact the priest cast a spell which turned one wolf into a pillar of salt, then the spearman and drunk closed in and took out the other two wolves.

On the whole my combat rolls in this game were truly awful.

The werewolves, led by a alpha wolf, attacked Drew's witch-hunter.

Combat in this game is opposed D10 rolls, with a combat factor added and other modifiers for various special abilities. The highest roll wins, and the damage is the difference between the scores. The damage can be adjusted for weapon strength and the target's armour or other protection. Figures take between three and six hits. Close combat is simply opposed rolls using the combat factors of both figures. A ranged attack uses the attacker's combat factor and the defender's movement rate as modifiers.

The bear was all I had left near the well, so I moved to maul the preacher. And did so.

A shot of the whole game. I hadn't lost the wolves at this point. On the left there was a fierce fight developing between the witch-hunter and the alpha wolf. I'd got a good hit on the hunter, but he'd returned the favour, killing one of my werewolves.

A Red Hood joined the fight, and took down the alpha wolf. She then finished off the last werewolf.

Did I say my combat rolls were terrible? They were terrible even with the Grim reroll mechanism. This allows you do do all kinds of sneaky things - reroll dice, block an opponent's move and so forth - but at a cost. Each time you do something you get a point. And when you use it you roll a dice and add your current points. If that exceeds 10 then you forfeit the game. So the more you use it the more you risk losing.

So, anyway, I was basically left with my bear, who finished off not only the preacher, but the spearmen and the drunk as well. Then I tried using a reroll to stave off an attack by an archer, and the Grim failed me. I lost the game.

But, to be fair, with just one figure left I was on to a loser anyway.

Despite my terrible rolls I enjoyed the game. Drew did all the number-crunching for me (mostly because he didn't have a QRS for me to use), but I followed what was happening OK. I did like the critical hit mechanism, where you score a critical if your D10 roll is twice that of the opponent's causing the damage - the difference between the rolls - to be doubled. I lost a few figures to that mechanism.

 52 Games - Game 40

Carcassonne

Catherine and I played Carcassonne last night - the first time we've had it out for a while. As ever we played the basic game with the Inns & Cathedrals and King & Scout expansions.

The opening stages - I am blue and Catherine is yellow. I had a nice big city on the go top right.

And the mid-game. I messed up my big city by inadvertently making the last tile a difficult one to place. Tiles that could be used to complete it came up during the latter stages of the game, but it was always Catherine that drew them. Catherine built a bunch of cities at the bottom of the map, and plonked down some farmers.

The end (with all the pieces take off, post-scoring). I'd sneaked in a few extra farmers in key positions to negate most of Catherine's efforts, and picked up a ton of points for it. Although I failed to complete my big city I still had plenty of points for other things, and picked up a victory margin of nearly 50 points.

Always a fun, and attractive game.

52 Games - Game 39

52 Games - Update 2

At the end of April my 52 Games project stands at 37 distinct games, and increase of 15 games from my last report at the end of February. I had thought that March and April would see a fair bit of a slow-down from the first two months of the year, but I was pleasantly surprised. Two public holiday weekends in April saw a lot of games being got out and really racked up my score, and I also added eight new sets of miniatures rules to the project; some games that were new to me and a couple of old favourites.

So with eight months to go, I have to come up with another 15 games - just under two new games a month on average. There's still a couple of my 'standards' I haven't had out yet this year, and now that I'm back into regular club gaming I'm sure other games I don't normally play will appear on the list too. There's also several favourite board and card-games that haven't been out yet. I think that, at the moment, this project is looking doable.

Death Race

I played a game of Gaslands with Catherine yesterday. In the past I've shied away from two-player games after a bad experience with one a few years ago, but they seem to be popular on the Gaslands Facebook group, so I thought it would be worth trying again.

I had some teams set up from Thursday's game, so gave Catherine a choice of one of them. She went for a two vehicle Idris team. I went for a team of three Maxxine buggies. Interestingly neither team was particularly combat-orientated; the most powerful weapons were a couple of heavy machine-guns on my buggies and an SMG in one of Catherine's cars. 

We rolled for a scenario and got a Death Race. I set up this course, the structure of which can be seen in THIS POST. It allows you to go through some gates in either direction, and with some flexibility on the order as well. To be honest it was probably a bit too complicated, and I should have rotated the centre gate by 90 degrees and had the vehicles run straight at it from the start.

The start itself was messy, with my lead buggy doing a slide straight off the grid.

This just made life difficult for everyone.

However we soon got ourselves in to some semblance of order, and picked a route to the first gate.

My buggies did some deft dancing, and with three of them in action I soon picked up a stack of audience votes. However as we turned towards the gate I found they were getting in each other's way, and things got unpleasant. One buggy bounced off a wall, but fortunately didn't take any damage.

Catherine's car was first to cross Gate One and start firing; her SMG inflicted a few hits on my lead buggy. And a buggy can't take much more than a few hits.

We mostly negotiated Gate One with little difficulty, aside from Catherine's red performance car which had found its approach blocked by my team. She decided to take it the long way around and come in from the other side. At the top of the picture her black car Black Dog, was approaching Gate Two.

I'm not sure what stage we were at here; I was so involved in the game that I stopped taking photos, and with vehicles travelling in all directions I know things got very confusing. One of my cars - Tom Joad - tangled with Black Dog and I think both cars wiped out. My blue buggy, Blues Breaker, was set to cross Gate Four (which is just Gate One again) but got entangled with Catherine's performance car, Perfect Day, and had to about face. In the end I decided to drive right round and approach the gate from the other side, but this would leave me with a bit of ground to make up.

And here we are at the climax of the race. Black Dog had taken the lead and was moving fast, but I pushed my buggy up to top gear as well. 

But Black Dog is limited to Gear 5. I took Blues Breaker up to Gear 6 and was lucky enough to get the spin I needed to make a run for the finish-line.

The winner!

This was unique for a Gaslands game in that not a single vehicle was wrecked. Blues Breaker was down to its last couple of hits, and the final head-to-head with Black Dog had been hair-raising as I tried to stay in contention but not in a position where Catherine could end with me in range of her guns. But I managed it, and crossed the line with the vehicle just holding together.

The Maxxine buggies were fun to use, and a picked up a ridiculous number of Audience Votes from their antics, which I used to burn off my own hazards and to dump hazards on Catherine's cars. The tight track didn't really favour an Idris team, but they were designed around maneuver as much as speed, and did OK, as the close finish shows.

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.