Games Night Time!!

Last Friday was games night, so the son was packed off to his nan and grandads (no zombie killing for him tonight) and off we went to our friends house.

Tonight's game was called super dungeon explorer. It's based loosely around old school computer games so you fight 8-bit, 16-bit and super baddies.

You select your hero,  I chose a paladin knight packing a good old sword and shield. The wife picked a druid who can shapeshift into a rather large bear! Our one friend selected Nyan Nyan, an angry cat with steel claws. The other friend was the evil dungeon master in charge of all the evil dungeon monsters.

We were playing the forgotten Kingdom expansion so the evil characters were based around forest dwellers. There were walking plants, duck billed pike men, frogs riding giant chickens and plants that look like the plant from the little shop of horrors. There were also 3 ' supers ' who appeared one you'd destroyed a spawn point. The three were a troll called Boris, a tree man type creature we dubbed Angry Groot and the last was the evil dungeon master himself. The game is played on tiles (much like zombiecide). These rules are really well made and high quality plus the models are stunning.

The aim of the game is to clear out a dungeon of evil things and swipe the treasure!! The game mechanics revolve around blue, red and green dice. Each side has a number of stars on. Blue has one to two stars on , red had one to three stars on and green has one to four stars. Blue is the most common dice and green is the rarest. Everything you do (fight, magic etc) uses certain numbers of dice depending on what your characters stats are. These can be augmented with treasure.

You get a certain amount of lives and action points. Most things cost one action point to do. However your characters abilities usually cost two. ( my character has a smite move which sets the enemy on fire). Killing enemies earns you loot and opening treasure chests gains you treasure. You use these to upgrade your character. Each character has for coloured slots and every treasure has a colour so you can only have four bits of  treasure on your character. So you have to consider carefully what equipment you want.

Drinks and snacks ready we dived in! We had three tiles to explore so we started with the middle one. We piled into the fight,  it was a close battle with us coming close to losing all our lives as we were getting used to what our characters can and can't do (plus no loot to upgrade us) we took out the spawn point and Boris appeared!

Boris was a huge club wielding troll type creature luckily though we had an angry bear on our side!  The bear and Boris went toe to toe for a few rounds while the paladin and Nyan Nyan finished off the other monsters. Boris fell to the bear and we collected the loot. All the loot goes in the group backpack and you spread it out amongst the group. We seemed to have quite different characters so we all got a good mix of equipment. Tooled up with a few treasures we headed into the next tile. Once more into battle!  We found my wife's druid had a good ranged magical attack so she blasted away. A monster that looked like the plant from little shop of horrors was on this tile and though it could not move out had long branches that grabbed you and pulled you to it. We cleared the tile, gathered up the loot and headed back through the middle tile. We all had a nice equipment set up now,  my paladin had a blessed spear (adding a nice rare green dice to my attacks) a new sword and some bits of armour to help take the hits. Nyan Nyan had acquired a good mix of armour and weapons meaning she could dodge attacks and then pounce! Our druid had got a magic amulet and some holy pope type robes which give him 2! green dice to add to his magic attack so he became our archer.

As we almost made out to the last tile we realised we had forgot to spawn the second super!! Our mischievous dungeon master spawned the angry Groot behind us!! And plenty of enemies in front. My paladin turned to face the tree monster while Nyan Nyan and the druid got stuck into enemies at the front. After a few rounds of fighting the paladin took down angry Groot and went on to help dispatch the few remaining bad guys (Nyan Nyan was an angry cat!). One all these had been dispatched the evil dungeon master appeared!! After a vicious battle the dungeon master was vanquished and the forest saved! I really enjoyed this game. Once you've got the rules and your characters abilities down the game flows really well. There is also an ' arcade ' mode where you don't need a DM. Cracking fun and would happily play it again.

Games Expo

Last Saturday, me and two friends went to the games expo at the Hilton hotel on the NEC complex Birmingham. This place is a board gamers dream! I saw loads of games is like but I settled on the firefly board game and one expansion pack for it. Looks a hefty game, all the game pieces look well made so can't wait to play it.

The expo itself was really busy. We all felt it could have easily fit in one of the NEC halls as it was difficult to get around the stalls due to the crowds. My friends picked up a game and two more characters for super dungeon explorer then we headed back home with our spoils!

That's all for today folks. Next up should be either a post about my across the Dead Earth engineers being painted or a game of across the Dead Earth. See ya soon