We are getting real close people to release day for the new Necromunda. I picked up the November White Dwarf (and it’s a heavy fuckin mag) and I’m pretty pumped about the game. There’s a long interview with the developers about how they started out using 40K 8th (a good ruleset mind you) but it just didn’t quite fit so they made changes, the largest one being model to model turns rather than IGOYO that 40K and WFB have.
Now, I think that the 40K 2nd edition rules that power Necromunda1 and Gorkamorka are some of the best skirmish rules there are, and many have tried their hand at making something better with mixed results (Mordheim: no, LotR SBG: in some ways yes), so I have some hesitation about changing from 2E 40K… but I will certainly pick up the box set and go from there.
Needless to say, the models this time around are superlative. While the old models from 1995 were OK in most cases, some of the gangs looked pretty stupid in retrospect (the Van Saar). Yes, the Eschers (by Jes Goodwin) were excellent and I have a bunch of them. Getting a good look at the new ones I am quite impressed. The meatbag Goliaths are a massive improvement over the old models.
Where do I have some trepidation? First, this is going to be an expensive buy in to start with the core set and gang war– probably close to 200$ all told. Second, I haven’t been painting all that much in the last few years. My eyes (as predicted by my eye doctor) have gone to SHIT. While I have glasses to handle the mid and long distances, my close range is not too good. Yet, 10-15 models won’t be all that bad. Lastly, the 3d terrain is going to be pricy, however, if you’ve seen my other posts on necromunda, I’ve got the old sets and the HULK (plus some AT-43 terrain) that should work just fine.
I saw the box for the upcoming CMON game HATE last year (or maybe the year before) at GENCON and I thought it looked like some sort of Scandinavian Motor Cycle gang war game– but it’s most certainly not that. The core issue is that from the box alone you can’t tell what it’s based on. This year, they had the miniatures and oh man they are awesome. It looked like some sort of vikings vs giants type of game to me, but then I went ahead an looked up Adrian Smith/ HATE and it turns out it’s based on an absolutely gorgeous graphic novel by Adrian Smith— some sort of viking madness that looks very much like his work on Chaos Marauders from back in the day. There are now two volumes and I have the first one coming Thursday to peruse that sweet viking art.
Who knows if the game is going to be good or not, but check out those minis!
It’s Sunday night and I’m beat. We were up until 3am playing a cracking game of A Study In Emerald wherein MOUTH failed to disclose via his actions in game which faction he was on due to rather erratic play. I was in the lead after destroying a couple royals but the Loyalists could have pulled out a win if they crushed my partner in restoration who was down to a single agent on the board. Mouth, shockingly, played a card to push the Loyalist War Track up to 10, ending the game, at which time he revealed himself to be a Loyalist. This after murdering another Loyalist player’s agents with the Vampire (Matt’s). Madness.
ASIE is a fantastic game, every time I play I get better at it and it gets more fun!
I spent some cash at the con, needless to say. Notable stuff I picked up: Decision at Elst, a Squad Leader starter kit campaign, SECRETS by Eric Lang, Ethnos, 1914 Quartermaster General and I went ahead and spent the 30$ to get the board game geek exclusive Blood Rage miniature (Hili).
I got to see CMON’s Rising Sun played, and saw someone walking around with a copy (they won it in a charity auction) so I think Rising Sun may be closer to shipping than we have info on from Kickstarter. I also got to see Massive Darkness played, which, while I kickstarted it, I’m not totally sold on the co-operative gameplay yet. Nice minis though right?
One odd game we got to play was Mr. MeeSeeks (from Rick and Morty) which is pretty great if you can play with girls and are drunk. It is not an all-guys game WHATSOEVER. I saw, but did not get to play Anatomy Park, also from Rick and Morty.
RPG’s were fun but a bit scarce this year. I played in an excellent game of Mythras based on the 80’s sci fi world Luther Arkwright. I’m going to pick up that book and see if it will work well for a BPRD style game. We played as Luther, Rose, another sex-addict character from the graphic novel, the Avengers (emma peel, johnathan steed) and Dr. Who (8th) in a sort of murder mystery, find the bomb game with dueling psychics and science! It was great fun.
My Mythras game was set in 1648 during the battle of Roicroi and the characters were Walloon deserters from a defeated tercio who fled into the town only to find it very strange indeed. Everything ended with a double hendersen and I feel I did a good job for only two hours of play.
The following day I ran Sailors on the Starless Sea, a DCC funnel adventure) for a big and rotating group of people who got exceedingly drunk during the affair. It was a lot of fun for me to try to manage the chaos, but it became too loud with the yelling for anyone to hear, so we didn’t get the adventure done on account of gin and the like. Someday I will finish running that all the way through: it is a pivotal module for DCC fans.
My favorite new game of the Con is probably Ethnos, but I really like Quartermaster General 1914 as well. We played about half a game of that and it clicked for all the players (too late at night though!). We’ll see which of those get more play. Ethnos with 6 players is really difficult to manage as a euro.
My favorite non-gaming thing was the Museum. I hope they do that every year. We get a mini one every Gary Con, but this was gencon big and had a ton of really cool stuff.
One thing my brother said on the way home was that Gencon is an anomaly from normal life because everyone is NICE. Packed in to a dealer hall, destroyed bathrooms and feeding areas you’d thing there would be dickheads and fights and yelling (remember, a LOT of people are drunk and high at gencon, like any other convention) but I never saw a single thing that wasn’t nice. That is really saying something, especially sitting in the Trump era where people seem to be going out of their way sometimes to be total cunts.
Been a long time since we’ve heard anything about Necromunda out of GW. This was posted today to the Warhammer Community. Not a lot of details on the game itself, but you can see the minis. Much bigger, on bigger bases. Sort of like going from 25mm to 28mm heroic to 32mm. Most of the original Necromunda line was good, but not great with the exception of the Eschers which appear to have been sculpted by Jes Goodwin himself. I’m looking forward to seeing the rules. Hopefully they don’t oversimplify (AOS) the game and leave it close to the original. Like I’ve mentioned many times, I think the W40k 2nd edition close combat system absolutely rules and should have been used for Mordheim as well instead of what they came up with. Let’s hope enough of 2E lives on in the new version. In any case, we will get new minis and terrain!
Updated rumors: Will have eshers and goliaths in the box, will not be IGOYG (i go you go) but will have IMPULSE move/act like AT-43. Will have skill trees, etc. Again this is just announced today.
Eight editions and I’m still rocking the 1986 beakies. Anyway, I’ve never been a serious player, but dan and I gave the new edition a spin last weekend.
8th ed. is very streamlined with very simple mechanics where once there was a lot of fiddly stuff. Gone are templates for flamers, explosions and the like and they are replaced with a flat or rolled number of hits to the unit in question. You can premeasure ANYTHING which is one of the things that made 8th Edition Warhammer Fantasy better than all previous versions. All this simplification was likely to improve speed of play and allow for very large battles. At just over 1000 points for the game, it was plenty large for my tastes.
Command points are a new thing to 40K 8th edition, something borrowed from AT-43 and I believe they are now in Bolt Action as well. In the new 40K, they allow a reroll of a die when expended at certain points, pretty much like Blood Bowl.
One very interesting thing we used were the new “Open War” cards that lay out a scenario’s objectives, special rules, terrain and the like without rolling on various charts. These were pretty neat and would work for any edition of the game.
So how did the game go? It was a ‘grab the objective’ game except that the objective didn’t show up until turn 3. While I was able to get some casualties on the Eldar, the main thing for me was holding off teleporting on my Terminators until after the objective dropped. It’s unlikely anyone will get Terminators off an objective in a couple turns. Dan’s rolling was TERRIBLE so there wasn’t much he could do in the end.
Close combat, which is a big thing in 40K despite all the guns, is similar to the old games (chargers attack first, then defenders attack back) except that failing morale checks means removing more casualties as if everything was like the undead from WFB. This is a pretty elegant solution to remove ALL instances of units running away, rallying and then coming back into the game. That said we had two close combats that went on and on round after round for awhile, with no clear winner.
I do not like that small arms fire can damage heavy vehicles (i.e.: non open topped or light transport vehicles) so that’s really odd to have someone shooting a bolt pistol at a Land Raider and have it do damage, but that’s my only real beef with the game.
Overall while I like 2nd Edition 40K the best (which fuels Necromunda and Gorkamorka), 8th is very sweet in it’s simplicity without devolving into the Age of Sigmar level.
This was a busy ass week, but I got a game in of Gloomhaven which is… interesting. It’s definitely not a game I would want to own or try to get people to play (or read the rules) but it was pretty fun. Gloomhaven is a mash up of Kingdom Death and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition with all the cards-as-actions and tons of counters for everything; except instead of an RPG, all adventures are pre-codefied in maps that unlock as you play. Classes unlock as you play as well which is interesting. While I don’t think it’s especially good after the first play, it’s still worth giving a good college try.
Comparing it to another similar, recent game: The Others, it’s the opposite in that the basic Gloomhaven gameplay is clunky and card driven, while the Others is very smooth and streamlined. However, the Others has zero as a campaign mode and is replayable only in that you can play through different missions with different hero teams. The lack of a Campaign mode in The Others really hurts the game, while the campaign mode in Gloomhaven makes a rather lackluster miniatures combat game much more exciting to play.
Anyway, here’s some other interesting stuff from the interweb tubes this week:
New 8th ed 40K FAQ. I love some of the questions (and answers): basically people are asking if they are planning on AOS’ing 40k. Seems not.
Freemium ios games are the worst of the worst trash mobile gaming has to offer, but there are exceptions.
And another GW-based post about 1989. That was when I was totally into the Warhammer stuff full bore (as full bore as a highschool kid could be) and it lasted until 1993 or so when we started playing too much Jyhad and MTG (and still a lot of talisman).
I got to play a 3-player Frostgrave game over the holiday and it was pretty good. It’s a game ALL about your wizard and needs very few dice types (mostly a D20 is all you need). Each player makes a warband that consists of a wizard, wizard apprentice and ‘soldiers’ which could be anything really.
Wizards have a spell school that is their primary school, and a secondary and teriary that they can draw spells from. Each spell has a casting value (like WFB or Mordheim) and wizards have to hit that on a D20+level to case the spells. If you ever play, remember this part and that you are LOW LEVEL wizard. Take spell you can cast often, and don’t pick ones that have high casting numbers!
The play unfolds in initiative order but with phases for each type of character. Wizards go first (all player’s wizards), then apprentices, then soldiers and finally monsters. Once all four groups have gone, the turn is over.
Combat is simple and while similar to the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle game which is a D6 roll off between fighters, with ties going to the higher fight value, Frostgrave uses a D20! What’s more the fight bonus differences between different fighters is not very high. Even in a fight where someone has a +2 over another fighter really is not too good– it’s essentially just a roll off between the fighters.
Once a hit is scored, if the original die roll is over the character’s armor value they take some damage in hit points, like D&D. It’s a very swingy system and you can lose by lots even if you have superior fighters, which can be frustrating for some.
Overall the game is all about the spells and the magic. Since it was our first play, we chose spells that were far too high level for our wizards, and suffered for it with not a ton of spells hitting the table.
So after one play, I would put Frostgrave as better than Mordheim due to Mordheim’s bollocks combat system but it’s not as good as Necromunda. It’s a tough call with Lord of the Rings but I think Frostgrave wins out because it has the campaign setting.
Overall the book is cheap and you can use whatever mini’s you have lying around. The system is simple enough where you won’t have to totally start from scratch with the rules if there is a long time between plays. Likely worth buying.
we are at the last real day of the con, Sunday being mop up and all that. It’s crowded as fuck, with long lines and smells and bumping into huge backpacks. We are staying at the Alexander which is a hike from the con, but real shi shi and has tons of room for gaming. I made the mistake of getting new shoes before the con and my feet are fucked with blisters– so bad I have to wear flip flops for likely a week!
We got in a great Runequest game with a Roman legion in pre colonization North America. I got to play the Others for a bit (should be at my house today!) and picked up Bloodborne the card game which plays ok. Otherwise I haven’t bought much stuff, instead we’ve been eating like kings of the earth.
I ran my Lamentations of the flame princess event yesterday and it was good. I had only one player who was pretty much half asleep the whole time who did manage to wake up and free Calcidus the bad wizard from his salt circle. He then left the game shortly after as the other players then had to clean up that mess which nearly ended in a TPK.
We played LotFP later that day with steve, but that deserves its own write up.
After a pretty long wait, backers got an email from CMON about the OTHERS, which is a game by the design team that brought you such games as BLOOD RAGE (my pick for 2015’s best board game by FAR). It’s a big game with a lot of miniatures as is CMON’s purview. It’s been a bit late, but like Blood Rage, not terribly so. The game is apparently on the boats from the China manufacturers as we sit here. With Blood Rage, I actually TRACKED the boats coming in as I was peeved that I did not pick up a second copy at GENCON and had to wait months to actually play it. I was overly excited and Blood Rage, as many of you know because I’ve made nearly everyone play it, was worth the wait.
The Others I just can’t tell yet how great it will be, but fuck…while I was amazed at the Blood Rage kickstarter and vast amount of stuff you get– the OTHERS is ridiculous. I couldn’t afford to get all the add ons either. And where would I put them? The boxes do look great though…
The (addon) good guys.
I’m a huge sucker for Adrian Smith’s art. Look at that shit!
Got in a good shooting yesterday with the Scavengers scenario. Matt had a brand new Eschers gang vs my dead-hard Cawdor (with 4 games under their belt) and it was a bit of a slaughter, though in the end, both gangs had to start taking bottle tests which was surprising. The core issue was that the Eschers were full on close combat, and they had to move across some areas where they got shot up bad. Also, I had some crazy lucky rolling throughout the whole game.
Matt had the idea to use the Talisman cones (which are USELESS in Talisman) for the status of Overwatch, Running, etc. in Necromunda. I’m going to pull those things out and throw them in next game.
The new weapon from the community rules I hadn’t experienced before was the heavy flamer. That thing is super beast.
