Galaxy Defenders

After spending an eternity painting up GD, I'm now in a position to play the game!

I actually managed to get it to the table last night.  I wasn't able to finish the game but did get enough playtime in to start getting more familiar with the rules!  Had a lot of fun so it was a real shame that I didn't have enough time to finish.

This picture was taken at the start of the game as my agents arrived in the desert to check out reported alien activity.  From those figures in the distance, this is now confirmed as ET activity!

Game Night! - 30 September 2016

Game Night!

We had a group of 6 again so continue with our current zombie craze.

Zombie game
We went for one of the downloadable custom missions this time around.  Basically, we had to go and find the key to the local weapon store before stocking up on weapons and escaping from the map.  Things went fairly well but we did have an issue midway through when the one door out of the building got blocked off by an abomination.

Frantic searching, aided by a flashlight, did get us the molotov cocktail in time which allowed us to deal with it.  Overall, we did well this mission as we had zero deaths!

Methinks its time to up the difficulty.

Get Bit!
We were late starting so it was fairly late by the time we finished up the zombie game.  We did have time to get in one game though.  We had an extra player for this last game so there were 7 of us.  As you can imagine, absolute chaos reigned before the latecomer ended up winning.

Castle Ravenloft - The hunt for Strahd

After picking up the SunSword in my last quest, it was time.  Time to hunt down Strahd and end his threat to Barovia once and for all!.

Anyone familiar with the game knows that things start slowly.  Although things start slowly though, they can go south quickly if you roll badly.

Despite that, we managed to get things back on track quickly enough.  At the end of the day, mooks aren't a real threat.

Speaking of real threats - Strahd is guarded by Klak, the Kobold Sorcerer.

Relatively speaking, Klak is one of the weaker bosses so we really lucked out in pulling him as the guard.  It didn't take long to put him down.

Which left the Count himself.  Time to go kick his undead booty back down the secret stairway!

Unfortunately, the dice had other ideas.  With his AC of 19, our party had difficulty hitting him.  In fact, my fighter never even managed to touch him despite 4 attempts to do so with his brute strike.  The rest of my party didn't fare much better and it wasn't long before Strahd was able to saunter back to his secret lair with 3 additional vampires for his army.

Castle Ravenloft - Quest for the Sunsword

After numerous adventures in and around Castle Ravenloft, it was time to take care of the Count - once and for all.  However, before doing so, we would need the legendary Sunsword.  One of our party had the blade - an heirloom handed down over the generations.  All we needed was the hilt which was rumored to be in the Crypt of Sergei Von Zarovich.

Setting off into Castle Ravenloft and immediately under attack

Fighting our way through the Castle, we eventually came across two corridors.  Unsure of which was the correct way, we decided to explore both.

Left or right?

In any event, both corridors met up at the end before we found the Crypt.  Inside was the famed hilt and we made our way back out.

All roads lead to ... a crypt?

Final thoughts
This was one of the missions designed by WoTC and made available to download.  The mission itself is ridiculously easy as we didn't even come close to needing a healing surge which also meant that the big bad of the mission never came out.  Granted, I had great rolls as all of my attacks and quite a few of the enemies missed.  Even so, I suspect the mission was designed to be relatively easy.

Lord of the Rings LCG - Conflict at the Carrock

While searching for Gollum in the Anduin valley, you recieve word that a group of Trolls have come to the Carrock.  As this area is under the watch of the Beornings, you seek out their leader, Grimbeorn the Old, and discover he has already set out in a rage. You follow, hoping to find him before he confronts the Trolls.

This quest starts off with deceptive simplicity as the focus of Mission 1B is simply to travel to the Carrock in order to find Grimbeorn.  The Carrock location card itself starts off in the questing area but you can't actually travel to it until you complete Mission 1B.  Once you do complete Mission 1B, by collecting 7 progress tokens, you automatically travel to the Carrock.

Thematically, this simply represents you travelling to The Carrock.  Easy enough right?

Well, not quite.  This wouldn't be LoTR LCG if the quest was that easy!  However, I'll save my specific comments on that for later!

You approach the Carrock, and find that the Trolls have been watching you from the top of the rocky river landmark. As you approach, the Trolls close in and attack!

The quest only has 2 missions so is relatively short in that sense (compared to many other quests I've played which often have 3 missions).  Mission 2B only requires 1 progress token to complete.  However, the mission cannot be completed if there are any Troll cards in play.  As you can probably guess from the mission intro, you actually get ambushed by four Trolls so in essence, Mission 2B revolves around you surviving that ambush and fighting off the four Trolls.

Which is no easy feat!  Even just one Troll in this game has been enough to give players nightmares and there are a ton of blog posts out there around how to defeat the Hill Troll in Journey Down the Anduin.  And here you find yourself facing off against four trolls at the same time - all of whom boost each others stats!

Assuming you manage to defeat the trolls, the Quest basically ends and you win.

Quest thoughts
I mentioned before that Mission 1B is deceptively simple.  My first time through, I had no idea of what was waiting for me so pushed through to Mission 2B quickly.  I promptly got my rear end handed to me by the four Trolls.

The key to winning this quest is to use the time during Mission 1B to get ready for the trolls.  Realistically, your deck is probably going to struggle to deal with four trolls unless you specifically prepared for it and the game helps you by providing Grimbeorn as an ally - provided you can find him.  And finding Grimbeorn in the Encounter Deck is actually the real main focus of Mission 1B.

Grimbeorn, in addition to his amazing stats, also has a massively useful ability in that he doesn't exhaust when defending against a troll.  This allows you to use him to defend against the trolls attack and then use him again, together with some of your other characters, to kill off the trolls one by one.

There are two ways to find Grimbeorn.  You can get lucky and draw him directly from the deck.  Alternatively, there are three Bee Pasture location cards in the deck which, if you can clear, allow you to pull Grimbeorn from the deck directly.  Even after you pull him from the deck, you still need to put 8 leadership tokens on him so you need a lot of leadership resource generation as well!  As you can see - getting Grimbeorn isn't easy but he is so good that he is totally worth the trouble.

All in all, this was a massively fun quest with some really nasty encounter cards which really force you to change your tactics (and hope for luck!) in order to win.

Game Night! - 4 March 2016

Game Night!

Just 2 people this time so we started with one of our favourite 2 player games.

Battle Line
We actually wanted to start with Battle Line as my friend struggles to beat me at this game.  Granted, that makes me sound really horrible but hopefully, a little context will make things clearer!

I played the first game with an open hand and talked through my thought process as I played through the game.  Primarily, this was to let my friend see how I played the game so he could try and pick up some tips to try and beat me.  Unf, I don't think it helped him much as after winning that game, we played 2 more with closed hands (ie normally) and I promptly beat him twice.
:D

Aliens: This Time its War
After the despair of defeat, my friend wanted to revisit one of his favourites.  Primarily as he believes the Aliens player has the advantage in this game as he has managed to win using the Aliens several times.  The reality is that, while the game isn't perfectly balanced, it is balanced much better than my friend realises.  In case that statement isn't obvious - I won.  Twice.
:D

Star Realms
I don't actually have this game in a physical format but only have the app.  I recently introduced it to my friend and we took this opportunity for me to teach him the basic strategy to playing the game.

After introducing the concepts to him, I showed him a game against the AI.  After this - we naturally had a game one on one.  I naturally won as it was effectively his first game.  Either way, hopefully, he picked up enough of the basic strategy to get started and we can have a more challenging game at some point in the future.

Game Night! - 26 February 2016

Game Night!

We had 5 people turn up so did a repeat of the games that we played in the last Game Night!

Get Bit!
To get ourselves warmed up, we played 3 games of Get Bit!

As always, we had a ton of fun and at one point, were told by "The Man" that we were too noisy.  Oops!  If nothing else, I guess this proves how much fun we were having!

Also - I managed to win one of the games!  Woot!

Castle Ravenloft
As with before, Castle Ravenloft was the main event of the evening.

I actually had some reservations as I'm not convinced that 5 player Castle Ravenloft works - my main concern being that with 5 players, there is too much downtime.  This is actually based on a previous experience with playing Castle Ravenloft with 5 players.  This time around, things seemed to go a bit better in that the players didn't seem bored during the game.  With that said, I'm still not 100% convinced that the game works with 5 (yet).

We took on the Flesh Golem again as four of the players were involved last time when we lost that mission.  As such, we were eager for revenge.

We initially tried to calm down the golem but halfway through, we realised that we likely wouldn't have enough time to do so and switched to trying to kill it instead.  It was a close thing which ultimately came down to a final dice roll.  Our fighter needed to roll a 9 to kill the golem.  This was our last chance as, if he failed to do so, we would lose as we were out of healing surges and we had PCs down and out.

Our fighter rolled an 8.
>:(

Game Night! - 29 January 2015

Another game night so soon?  Be still, my beating heart!!

Making up for a shortage of game nights in recent months, we decided to have a double in January.  Good thing too as last week only had a turnout of 2 people.  We originally had 5 people scheduled for this weeks game night but only 4 showed up.

Get Bit!
We started off with a simple game of Get Bit!  Or rather, 3 games of Get Bit!

As always, the game went down extremely well and was really popular with the group.  It's actually been a while since I played and I have to admit that this is a pretty great filler game.  It's quick, fun while having just a little bit of brainpower needed and at the same time, it's always amusing to pull arms and legs off the little toy pirates!

I lost the first game but did manage to pull out a win in the next two (as usual, we played with my house rules where the game ends as soon as 1 person is eliminated).  To be honest, I'm still not sure how I managed to win twice!

Castle Ravenloft
We then moved onto the main event of the evening - Castle Ravenloft.

This is a game which I always enjoy playing even though it's a relatively simple dungeon crawl.  We decided to take on the Flesh Golem which the others hadn't faced before (but which I had in a previous solo game).  The Flesh Golem is a really good mission and can end in a really exciting manner as you end up in a running fight through the dungeon.

Unfortunately, due to the way the cards played out, we drew the Flesh Golem only 2 squares away from the Start tile.  This didn't give quite the running battle I had initially hoped for.

It was a close battle but we did end up losing.  :(

Game Night! - 22 January 2015

Another game night!  Just two players again but we do have more players scheduled for our next game night.

Aliens: This Time its War
My friend wanted to start off with one of his favourites - a game which he has been able to win several times recently.  ;)

We played two games and as before, I went with the marines while he went with the Aliens.  Given his recent success, I was determined to get some wins.  My friend, on the other hand, was looking to get the night off to a good start.  Unfortunately for him, luck was not on his side and I managed to get 2 wins.

What was most hilarious though was when I killed the Alien Queen and my friend tried to get revenge by destroying my Power Loader.  I informed him that the Power Loader can't be destroyed by the Alien player at which point he expressed shock at how unfair the game was.  Coming from someone who previously claimed that the game was unfairly balanced in favour of the Alien player, this was music to my ears!

Battle Line
We followed up with one of our combined favourite games.  Battle Line is a great game which is simple to learn and play but has massive depth.  And as per usual, I won all 3 games.
:)

Talking with my friend, I did realise why.  Primarily, he isn't good at risk assessment.  There was one situation where he started off with two 1's and then split them up into separate war zones.  This was a bad idea as he could potentially have had three 1's which, while not the best hand, would have at least forced me to potentially commit something better to that battlefield.  Instead, he split up his hand and allowed me to defeat the other two battlefields more easily.

Red7
A new game.  This was actually a game my friend had purchased and I was looking forward to playing it as I had heard good things about it.  Unfortunately, my friend didn't really understand the rules so the first game we played was a complete farce as the rules, as he understood them, were clearly broken - a fact which I promptly proved to him by exploiting the flaw to get an easy win.

At this point, it was pretty obvious that we didn't understand the rules so I jumped onto BGG and downloaded the rules to read myself.  I only skimmed the rules but got enough to let us play almost correctly.  We played 2 more games with the new rules and we both ended with 1 win each.

I have since reread the rules properly (taking my time so that I didn't miss anything!) and we did miss a pretty important rule about card draw.  This was a shame as the rule would have changed the game significantly and added a lot more skill to the game.  As it was, I didn't really enjoy the two games we played as the game felt so random.  Hopefully, I'll get a chance to replay the game again at a later date using the proper rules.

The Long War

Welp - kinda disappeared from the blogosphere for a while.  Hopefully, I'm back to normal now and can start up my blogging again.

Part of the reason for the delay is due to XCOM - specifically The Long War mod.

Over Christmas, I purchased the XCOM enemy within DLC which was on sale at Steam.  Fair warning - Steam sales are dangerous!  I didn't get very far in the game before I got bored.  To be fair, part of the reason I got bored was because I was itching to try out The Long War mod.

If you've never heard of it, The Long War mod is pretty much considered THE essential mod for XCOM.  It changes up the game massively - so massively that I'll leave the detail to the link above.  However, in brief, you have new classes, more soldiers, new equipment, a new tech tree and tons of voicepacks and maps added to the game (strictly speaking, the maps weren't added but recycled from the special missions which in the past, weren't used for normal missions).  Naturally, to take into account all the new toys and skills you have - the difficulty in the game has been ramped up massively.

What is really impressive about the mod though is the way it forces you to change how you play.

Soldiers now suffer from fatigue after a mission and need a rest before going back out into the field.  And the missions come thick and fast so you really don't get much chance to rest!  This means that you are constantly cycling through soldiers so you have to focus on building up a great squad rather than relying on just a couple of super soldiers.  The fatigue mechanic also makes SHIVs (robots) useful again - in the base game, they were just a waste of time and its great to now actually use them regularly.  This is combined with an increase in the base squad size from 4 to 6 soldiers so that you don't feel punished by including the SHIV in your squad (bearing in mind that SHIVs don't gain experience).

This design philosophy permeates through the whole of the mod.  Another example is that fighter kills are now tracked and fighter pilots gain experience and get better as a result of this.  Suddenly, choosing which fighter to send out on an intercept has much more meaning.

The one big problem that I can currently see is that The Long War really is a long war.  You have so many tactical battles that progress in the game slows to a crawl (which is further exacerbated by a slowed research speed).  To be fair, this isn't a problem if you love the tactical game and are willing to spend lots and lots (and lots) of time on it.

In my case, with the lack of time I have to game, I can see me taking months to play through this mod.  Hopefully, it doesn't impact my blogging schedule too much!!