Saturday Night Live

I've always liked the look of the Saturday Night Live scenario in Gaslands, as it's one where each team gets to show off its particular talents and you're chasing Audience Votes rather than position or kills, so there are different ways to win. However it's not a scenario to just select to play since, as with most Gaslands scenarios, it's possible to optimise teams for it.

Anyway, we always randomly determine a scenario, but in the years we've been playing on a Thursday night this one has never come up. Until yesterday.

In Saturday Night Live the cars are in an arena, and score victory points each time they pick up Audience Votes. So obviously each team will be looking to get Audience Votes via their sponsor's special ability, but there are also spot prizes, determined at random. These can be as simple as declaring a smash attack on another vehicle to ones involving other vehicles to wipe out or explode.

Here's the arena and the teams already in play.

Bailey ran his Idris super-car, The Smudge (wrongly called The Shimmer in a previous post)
Caesar ran two Idris vehicles - a buggy and a truck.
I ran two Maxxine cars.

Bailey and Caesar got Audience Votes for choosing the long template in early gear phases, whilst I got them for doing spins and slides in close proximity to another of my vehicles. Caesar quickly latched on to the fact that in order to score votes I needed two vehicles in play, and sent his truck to hunt me down.

Meanwhile Baily found some empty space and fired up the nitro, racking up some early Audience Votes. He also managed to clean up a few spot prizes - the green counter is the centre of the arena, and there's a possible prize for moving near it, for example. It came up, and Bailey got it.

Here is scoring more points - one for going fast, a spot prize for going up to 8 hazards and then a lucky one for selecting a hazardous movement template. Bailey really was scoring a lot of points.

Crashing into the side wall at speed was a mere inconvenience.

I'd had terrible difficulty getting my act together and had only scored a couple of points. This was the last you'll see of my pink car, Woman King. Not long afterwards Caesar rammed and destroyed it.

My other car, Ommadawn, did dump caltrops across the front of Caesar's buggy. That was fun.

Bailey's car wiped out and exploded. He got more Audience Votes for that.

Ommadawn ended up away from the main action, although being shot up by Caesar's truck.

Bailey was currently out of the running, but only a few VP away from the 15 needed to win. He'd pick them up fairly easily after he respawned. In the meantime Caesar started to stack up points, getting close to Bailey's total. Me? I managed very little.

Bailey respawned, and started moving fast again. He also collided with things.

But it was enough; wrecking his vehicle against a wall was enough to pick up the final Audience Vote he needed for victory.

This is a fun scenario that really tests how to play Gaslands. Knowing your team's abilities helps a lot, but working out how to get some of the spot prizes is helped by a knowledge of the rules (and sometimes by dumb luck). Since all teams pick up plenty of Audience Votes the game is also an exercise in knowing when and how to spend them to advantage yourself or disadvantage others.

The final scores were:

Bailey - 16VP

Caesar - 12VP
Me - 5VP

I'd love to do this one again.

Chrononauts

In a previous post I offered bonus brownie points for identifying the source of the post's title. And here's the answer (as posted by Norman Dean) - a card from the excellent Chrononauts game.

Anyway, Chrononauts was in our holiday games pile but we never got around to playing it, so Catherine and I gave it a go yesterday evening. Here's the 'normal' timeline, but both of us are playing time-travellers who come from different timelines and need to mess with history in order to create theirs and get home.

Hmm. Looks like Catherine's timeline depends on JFK not being assassinated.

Towards the end the timeline was looking very unstable; if there are 13 paradoxes in play then the game ends along with the entire universe. My timeline depended on that old favourite, killing Hitler. Thanks to Catherine flipping history back to normal a couple of times, Hitler was killed more than once in this game. John Lennon wasn't, though.

As it was, Catherine created her timeline (the 1929 Stock Market Crash, Woodrow Wilson keeping the US out of WW1 and Martin Luther King becoming president in 1974) and won the game.

Here's my eclectic selection of artifacts. Each player has a secret goal involving the collection of three of a specific set of three of these, which is another way of winning. I was after Mona Lisas (there are three in the game).

I didn't take any pictures of the second game, which was over quite quickly. Catherine failed to turn any of the timeline how she wanted it. I was one of my favourite time-travellers - a super-evolved cockroach from a far-future where humanity was wiped out in a nuclear war prompted by the Cuban Missile Crisis. So I had to start WWIII, amongst other things. I actually had that all set up, but then got lucky and got my three artifacts (I was after the Mona Lisas, yet again), so won via that route instead.

To be honest it's not great as a two-player game. Part of the fun involves chaotic changes to the timeline, and with two players these simply don't happen; it's much easier to simply undo whatever the other player does, which makes for a relatively static game.

Sundiata And The Mother Of Dragons

I've been enjoying giving my Daenerys Targaryen army a good outing over the past couple of weeks, and looking at its strengths and weaknesses. The latest game saw them paired off against the army they share a box with - Sundiata's legendary Malians.

Sundiata defended. I used a few die-rolls to determine the makeup of the Targaryen army - the dragons were fielded as a pair of fliers, whilst the two heroes were the general. The rest of the army was the usual mix of riders, spears and hordes.

Daenerys found her army deployed between two woods, so would have to move it out quickly to give it some frontage.

Some of the hordes were deployed partially in a wood, and fell foul of Sundiata's hunter lurkers. Still, a lost horde this early in the battle is hardly devastating.

The two armies closed. 

A large cavalry fight shaped up on the far flank. Both sides shuffled their lines to bring their best troop to bear and to cover flanks.

Sundiata's army charged with riders facing riders and teh African king having an overlap.

They lost - one element destroyed and one recoiled.

The infantry met in the centre.

A disaster for Sundiata as he lost an element of spears and also his griot cleric. There was now a huge hole in the Malian line. The Dothraki and a supporting dragon finished off the Malian riders.

Sundiata was now in trouble; 8AP down and badly out of position. However a hero never gives up and he swiftly dispatched one of the dragons.

He was surrounded by Dothraki and the other dragons ...

... but saw them off. One of the Dothraki recoiled off the board and was lost.

There now commenced a period where both sides only rolled 1 or 2 PIPs each bound, so big moves stopped. This favoured Sundiata's archers on the other flank that could pepper the hordes and Unsullied there with arrows and force them back.

On the other flank it was a series of moves by individual elements for a while and relatively inconclusive fights. But Sundiata was able to ignore dragons on his flank to attack some Dothraki that had no retreat.

And his heavy cavalry surrounded Daenerys's heroes and beat them. That was enough to defeat the Targaryen army.

From 1-8 down, Sundiata came back to win the battle 11g-8 - quite a turnaround!

His Name Is Steggy

I painted my 15mm stegosaurus. In fact it doesn't look a lot different from the original, but that's because I stuck to the original colour-scheme.

Here's a nice view of the thagomizer.

Bonus brownie points if you can recognise the source of this post's title.

Dinosaur Hunt

I was out a a local botanic garden the other day and in the gift-shop I found a couple of plastic dinosaurs that not only looked nice but were, based on measurements and a quick Google on my phone, in scale with 15mm figures. So I bought them.

Now I fully intend to give them a repaint (or at least touch up the original job) but this afternoon I gave one an outing in a game of Palaeo Diet. Here's the lovely Stegosaurus I got.

I don't have any pulp adventurers/hunters yet for that proper Lost World hunting experience, so I simply went for a good old One Million years BC cavemen vs dinosaurs game. I reckoned six hunters would be needed for such a mighty beast - it has 6 Bulk and is very difficult to wound, so would be a tough prospect. I did add a small pack of raptors to the table though (four MY Miniatures walking vultures).

I went with one bow-armed hunter, three with spears and two with clubs/axes. With hindsight this was a mistake; the spears only have the same chance of wounding the Stegosaur as a bow, but require the hunters to get in a lot closer. A mix of bows and clubs would be the optimum way of hunting this beastie.

(In case you're wondering, dinosaurs are covered in the pulp supplement, and are classed as Raptors, Great Herbivores or King Carnivores. They have a couple of reactions not in the base game - a Rush is a long-move attack, with a penalty, whilst a Lunge is a short-move attack with a bonus. The Stegosaur can opt to use the Flail attack instead of a Lunge; this has a penalty on the attack but allows the beast to attack all opponents within short range.)

The hunters stalk the Stegosaur.

Unfortunately a series of bad activation rolls saw the raptors rush in ...

... and attack the hunters. Fortunately the hunters were still in a mostly in a tight group 

The hunters fought back, with spears. The axe-armed hunters were elsewhere.

The bow-armed hunter shot one raptor down, and the spear-armed hunters accounted for the rest. One hunter was injured.

The Stegosaur had simply watched the fight. The axe-armed hunters crept up on it and attacked.

Between them they inflicted a couple of wounds on the dinosaur, which roared, causing the hunters to back off.

The hunters moved in again and inflicted another wound.

At this point I brought up the spear-armed hunters and realised that they weren't going to be that effective. One of them was wounded by the Stegosaur's thagomizer.

The stegosaur did a flail attack, but missed all of the hunters within range.

I pulled the spear-armed hunters out of the action, deciding that they would be better employed throwing stones and shouting to try and keep the creature from escaping off a board-edge. The axe hunters and the single bow-armed hunter would the the ones to bring the creature down.

The Stegosaur backed off towards a board edge and the hunters had to carefully draw it back into the centre of the hunting ground.

One of the axe-hunters (wounded, I can't remember when), made another attack, scoring a critical and leaving the Stegosaur on its last hit.

The Stegosaur retaliated, eliminating the hunter.

A lucky '6' saw the bow-armed hunter finish the dinosaur off,.

The victor and the vanquished.

The dinosaur was a tough opponent; hard to kill and with dangerous attacks, especially the flail. It'll be fun working out strategies to take them on. It's also an excuse to do some pulp adventurers/hunters.