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

Games Night!

Last night my wife and I had our regular games night with our friends (plus our son who would not go to bed).
The games on tonight were
Zombiecide and Takenoko, we started with Zombicide.
For those who don't know Zombicide is a Co op boardgame where each player chooses a character and you all pick a scenario (There are plenty to choose from). The board is made up of tiles. Each tile has building insides and roads printed on both sides allowing great flexibility. The scenarios tell you which tiles to use and where to put them. The scenario we chose was a small one (4 tiles)  and we had to rescue a survivor who was in 1 of 4 locations. Once we located the survivor we all had to leave the board where we started.
The zombies appear from various spawn points (scenario tells you where to put these). They also appear in a building the first time you open the door. They are spawned by drawing a card for real spawn point and room in a building you've opened. The 4 types of zombie are :
Shambler / normal
Runners
Fatties
Abomination
The bigger zombies require certain weapons to kill them. The number of zombies spawned depends on how many zombie kills you have. There are four levels the higher you go the note zombies you get!  Your character does get bonuses as the levels go up to.
The characters start with the bare minimum of equipment. A crow bar,  fire axe,  pistol and frying pans! All spread out amongst the group. The characters we had were :
Phil (my character)
Doug
Ned
Amy
Wanda is the survive we are out to rescue.
My character Phil is a cop so he starts with a pistol so I had that and a frying pan.
A turn in Zombiecide involves every player getting 3 actions plus any bonuses their character gets (my character's bonus was he started with a pistol. Another example is Amy who gets a free move). Your 3 actions can be move, shoot, reload, search, open doors and check objectives. You can only search one per turn though, you can search vehicles or the room you are in. Once all the characters have gone is the zombies turn. Each action you do could create sound,  this is represented by sound counters with a loud action obviously having more sound counters. The zombies all move one square towards the largest pile of sound counters. (runners can do to actions such as run and attack where as other zombies either move or attack). After all the zombies have moved you spawn more zombies!
Our game began,  we checked the closest building and had to battle a Fattie almost straight away! After Ned took a wound (2 and your zombie meat!) we took him down. A plethora of weapons were found in an abandoned police car in the centre of the map. I ended up with a sawn off shotgun and a machete., Amy had a rifle and a katana. Ned a crowbar and fire axe. Doug has twin sawn off shotguns! The first building was cleared by Ned and while Ned checked the objective Phil Doug and Amy held the crossroads. Ned made his way out and headed over to the next building. With zombie numbers growing out was getting harder to hold the crossroads. Amy's rifle picked zombies off at long range,  Phil took out the fatties with his machete and Doug cut a swathe through the zombies with his twin sawn off shotguns. Need broke the door down cleared the room and found Wanda!!  Now we had to beat a retreat. The group fell back off the board with Doug watching the rear with those trusty shotguns. I racked up 14 kills but Doug took the most with 20+ (notable mention to my son who insisted on rolling some dice and scored 6 zombie kills). It was a great game,  I'm so glad my friends introduced me to this game. The Co op games are excellent fun and much different to the competitive ones.
Next up was Takenoko. I had never heard of this game before, it involves growing bamboo and getting a panda to eat bamboo. Everyone gets a turn where you can do 2 things. The simple aim is to gather as many points as possible so when the game ends the person with the highest scores wins! You get points by doing 3 types of mission. Gardener missions involve trying to grow bamboo of various colours and heights. The Panda missions involve trying to get the panda to eat certain colours or colour combinations of bamboo pieces. The last mission type is terrain,  the game is played on different coloured tiles and the terrain missions involve you trying to get certain patterns and combinations of tiles. This game was so much fun and you need to think a lot about strategies and how to react when someone upsets your plans. My friend took the win while I came last :-(
Overall a cracking night with great friends bring on the next game night!!
If you want to read something different give my friends blog a read (she won Takenoko and was Ned in Zombiecide)
http://lifeinthekawaiilane.blogspot.co.uk/?m=1
Have a good one folks!!

Just a Quick Blog!

Last night I played the  Mars Attacks board game. I got this game for Christmas but have only just got the time to have a sit down with a good fiend and play through a few scenarios.
The box contents everything you need to play. In the rulebook there are around ten scenarios, the first one is more designed to teach you the rules and they slowly add more challenges as you move through the scenarios.
In the box you get around twelve Martians,  ten US soldiers and the civilian heroes. The models are good quality though sometimes the gun barrels seem to get bent a little in transit. You get a mat to play on with depicts a T-junction and sone plastic ruins which clip together fairly easily (I clicking them together looks more complicated than it is)  you also get some nice street furniture to add to the game.
The rules are really easy to grasp with it being based around D8 Rolls. The turn allows each player to 'activate' up to two models,  then the opposition can do the same. I like this as it makes the games more tactical as your opponent can react a lot quicker to things you do. The event cards you get each turn also add a nice twist to each game. (flaming cows running through the middle of the game board anyone?)
Overall really enjoyed this game :-)I like this trend of new games where everything you need is in the box a lot easier than collecting massive armies of models.
You can buy extra bits for the game so if you want to take it to large tabletop level you can.
Right that's me done for today. Have a great day!!

It's Been a While Hello everybody, sorry it's been a while since my last blog it has been a busy month with family and work etc. Today's post is a slightly shotgun approach to give you a rundown on the bits I've been working on since the last entry. First off of fancied making some sandbag positions s these can be used in any game system I'm playing. (Across the Dead Earth, Dystopian legions etc). I looked at a couple of ways of making them and settled on salt dough as this seemed the easiest to attempt plus my wife and son could get involved meaning a nice bit of family craft time. :-) We used a recipe of 2 cups of flour and one cup of salt and cold water. Mixed together to create a dough, we had to add extra for at some points because the dough was very sticky. Once I'd made the dough I would roll it into a sausage and cut sandbag sized chunks off. Some would need a bit of shaping but then you use each "sandbag " to start constructing a wall or gun position. I'm sure they are not technically correct but I think they look the part when painted and will do the job on a game board.

While scouring eBay for wargames stuff (a regular time waster of mine) I came across a few miniatures I liked the look off. One gang of suit wearing gangers but I missed out on those but I won this group of miniatures for £5!! Which I thought was quite a bargain. I plan on using them as a second gang for Across the Dead Earth. As an added bonus they are already painted!!

Next up is my main gang for Across the Dead Earth.The gang is called the 78th Smethwick Irregulars. I'll do another blog with a bit more fluff about the hang and is members. Please excuse the painting skill level as I'm years out of practice and want great to start with! The models are mostly necromunda gang models with a wood elf thrown in as a forest kin (more on that on the gangs blog post soon)

Last of my rambling now. I've read about foam board being used to make buildings for game boards so on my last trip to hobbycraft I picked up two A1 sheets of foam board for £7. I've found some templates for buildings online but I've also made some of my own up. In the pic below are my works in progress ruins. One I'm hoping looks like a row of three storey terraced houses. I wanted to add a bit of height to a battlefield and be able to have a nice built up area to scrap over. The other one is a smaller two storey ruins. I've kept the templates so hopefully I will have a nice collection of buildings to grace the game board.

Right that's it for now. Hopefully I will do some more blogs soon. This Friday I've got my first game of mars attacks so no doubt I will write about that!

More Terrain! While working on my last piece of terrain (in my last blog) I've been working on a bigger bit of terrain where models can fight indoors as it were. I chose a bunker as my first attempt having come across some quite thick cardboard over Christmas. I measured up and cut the wall sections out and some interior walls to break up the interior. (good opportunity to hide round corners) these were all stuck down to a cardboard base. I didn't want the interior to be spartan so I started thinking of what to put inside but due to resources it would have to be home made or home sourced. I wanted the bunker to look overgrown and partly buried so I added filler around the sides and on the top edges (as the cardboard had holes at the edges). The hope was to sand the filler down so it would be smoother. Unfortunately this failed (mostly down to me being an amateur) I ploughed on anyway as this is one of my early attempts it would never be perfect.

For the interior I settled on a table with some maps on and sone old maps and posters on the walls. The table was made from lollipop socks and matches (very fiddly!!). The maps were doodled by me and aged by squashing used tea bags onto them (cue some strange looks by my wife). I surrounded two of the maps with cardboard and mounted them on the walls of the bunker. A couple of posters were put on some of the other walls then two maps left on the table.

The bunker was undercoated in black then painted grey, the filler green and the base dark green. Sand was added to base then painted over with dark green this was then dry brushed. (learnt from doing the car in my previous post) Railway flock was then added to the filler to make it look like the bunker was dug in and flock added to roof as well.

Things I learnt from this process are. 1) plan more don't go at it haphazard. 2) choose the materials you use well. The cardboard I used was Ok but the holes in the edges just added extra problems. 3) use of flock? I'm not sold on this and have yet to find a use for it where I'm totally happy with end result. I think the problem is you have to match the colour of the flock to the colour of your scenery. The base green was quite different to the flock green. Well that's all for now. Up next is the gang for the game Across the Dead Earth. The models are assembled and awaiting my clumsy hand to paint.

Terrain!! The last few days I have been working on terrain. I'm currently doing two pieces. I'll do a separate entry for the one as it was a bit ambitious for a beginner like myself. I want to keep all my terrain non game specific so I can use it in all the games I play. I decided to make an abandoned car, I been inspired the guys on the Across the Dead Earth facebook group https://m.facebook.com/acrossthedeadearth I'll say more about this tabletop game later when I've got the hang of this blogging malarkey as I want to do them justice as it's an awesome game and they are ultra helpful. I pilfered one of the son's old toy cars and grabbed a CD to base it First thibgs first,the tyres were pulled off(thankfully very easy to do on this car) and several washes of brown acrylic paint mixed with water. The CD was painted with a mix of green acrylic paint and pva glue. Next up was sand added to base and then another layer of pva/green paint.A few more washes on the car and I ended up with pic below.

The next stage was to dry brush the base. I've never done dry brushing before. So after some advice from the Across the Dead Earth group I gave it a go. The results are below

As you can see it did not go well. I was told I had not dried the brush enough. I was all ready to paint over and start again but was advised try a dry brush with yellow first to bring out the definition on the base. So I stepped once more into the breach! The results are below

I hope the photo shows the definition and makes it look more 'ground' like. Then I smashed the windows of the vehicle and attached it to the base. Some flocking around the wheels and here it is!

For a first ever go I'm quite happy with the results. I might add some bushes around the wheels. Thank you all for reading

A New Frontier

Hey out there,
I've been reading a few blogs recently and thought I would give it a go. I've just started getting back into war gaming (after an absence of about 12 years....god I'm old) and some board games. I'm hopefully going to start regular games up a lot more than I have been.
Now I'm quite an amateur at this so please bear with me (as a blogger) and as a painter. I'm hoping you (and me!) will see an improvement as we go.
Myself I'm just a regular 30 something, used to play Games Workshop when I was younger. Now rediscovering the world of war games and the amount of options that are out there. Currently on the go I have
Small Space Wolves force
A Necromunda gang (Goliaths)
A Kingdom of Britannia starter set force
The newest is a gang for a game called Across the Dead Earth which has just started up recently. I'll put more up about that in fourth coming blogs.
Any way thanks for reading!