Lots of Updates and a MetaPost

Metaposts are boring. Possibly more boring then no posts. But here's one anything.

I've been extremely slack with my posts of late. Partly that's been due of real life stuff has meant I've had hardly any hobby time and even less time to post about it. Hopefully things will settle down a bit now.

I've gone through and finished off a few draft posts I've had waiting for a while, and written up some of the gaming and hobby things I've done over the last few months. I've back dated everything, so you might want to go back and take a look at the older posts again to make sure you haven't missed anything.

Birthday Shopping: Battles of Westeros

Having a day off today, I hit Milsims to exchange some of my birthday money for games. I had two things on my shopping list - Battles of Westeros and Ex Illis. I decided that I wouldn't bother with Ex Illis just yet, mostly because with the Island of Blood box I've got more than enough little plastic men to make fight for the moment.

So that just left Battle of Westeros. The combination of BattleLore and A Game of Thrones made this one game that I simply had to possess. So I very quickly tracked down the box. I also grabbed a copy of the Wardens of the West, which is the first expansion pack. I wasn't going to get the expansion pack until I decided if I liked the core game or not, but it was such a reasonable deal that I figured what the hell.

Cracking open the box revealed a stack of tokens to punch and models to base. It's like the perfect christmas present - something that you open and get to spend the rest of the day putting together and getting ready.

I'm assuming that one of the ways Fantasy Flight has tried to save some money on the production of the game is to not pre-base the models. I had to push each figure onto it's appropriate base which took me most of the evening. I was happy to do that sort of work, especially if it meant they could produce the figures with the detail they have. But I'm sure it would turn some people off.

I also ended up with one extra Lannister heavy infantry figure, and two spare bases. So that was nice to discover.

One of the very nice things about the BattleLore base set was that the box had dividers to store all of the components. Unfortunately, Battles of Westeros just divided the box into three sections. I sorted all the tokens into snap lock bags to make setup easier, but I'm not quite sure how to store the cards without damaging them.

There was so much going on with the base set that I haven't even had a chance to open the Wardens of the West yet, so I've still got that to look forward to!

Birthday Gaming Night

As part of my turning 30 celebrations, I organised a gaming night. We got through a reasonable number of games, some new and some old favourites.

Agricola

Despite being considered a modern classic (at least by BoardGameGeek, who rate it #2 of all time), I'd never had even had the chance to look at the rules before. It definitely seemed like one of those games where describing the rules was a lot harder than just playing the game. We seemed to get the hang of it fairly quickly, but it also quickly became apparent to me that some early decisions were going to cost me the game.

A couple of times I just managed to avoid not having enough food at harvest time, and a stupid decision about fence placement ended up costing me a few points. But overall it was a pretty fun game. I'd love to have another go at it, now I know a bit more about what I'm trying to do.

We Didn't Playtest This At All

WDPTAA is a card game. The object is to win - if you lose, you haven't won. Each card does something that either helps you to win or helps someone else to lose. Or sometimes the other way around. It's one of those crazy, extremely random games that goes so well with mates and alcohol. Certainly not something you'd want to spend a night playing, but great for in between games.

Last Night on Earth

Two players control the zombies while everyone else controls a human trying to survive/escape the zombie horde. Pretty straight forward - move around the board, get cards, do stuff with the cards, roll some dice to fight.

We (the humans) got thoroughly owned - despite cheating about the number of characters who could die, we lost less than halfway through the game.

I didn't love it, and I'm not sure if it adds much over something like Zombies!!!, but I'd happily give it another go.

StarCraft

We knew it wasn't the best game to start at 10pm when everyone had been drinking and only one person had even read the rules. But we decided to try it anyway. We made it most of the way through the first turn before we gave up.

There was a lot to take in as a first impression. The sheer number of different pieces, different cards and different turn options had some of us groaning before we'd even got everything out of the box. Personally, I was following enough of what was going on that I would have been happy to keep playing, and I'm very keen to give it a proper go. But we're going to save it for next time we can arrange a morning gaming session.

Munchkin

The classic (at least for us) card game of dungeon crawling and back stabbing. It pretty much always ends the same way - you don't so much win as survive until everyone else has run out of ways to stop you. You always have that same let down feeling at the end, unless you won, in which case you feel awesome.

Somehow I managed to get to level 9 extremely quickly and stayed at around 8-9 for the whole game, despite virtually never having any item cards (I got my first level thanks to a potion, but I think that was it). Naturally I didn't win, but I was impressed never the less.

Birthday Loot

For my birthday, some of my very awesome friends got me some very awesome games.

Dominion: Alchemy

K and I love a game of Dominion. It's quick and easy and always different. So getting one of the expansions was awesome. I'm looking forward to trying it.

Pandemic

R has told me a lot about this game, but since he doesn't have a copy, I haven't had a chance to play. So I was pretty excited when I unwrapped the present from him and S. What's more, it's two-four players, so I should be able to convince K to give it a go.

Warhammer: The Island of Blood

I'd been tempted by the new starter box for Warhammer Fantasy, but with W's help, I'd successfully managed to talk myself out of it. Now I understand why he was doing such a good job of telling me not to buy it.

My initial impressions are that the box is full of amazingly detailed figures. I was impressed by the Assault on Black Reach box set, but I think this has gone above and beyond even that. I'm really looking forward to building and painting it all up

Weekend Gaming with a New Group

While I was in Canberra over the weekend, R arranged a board game night with some of his friends and kindly invited me along to try a couple of the games I haven't had a chance to play before.

Race for the Galaxy

After playing the solitaire PC version, I finally got a chance to play the actual card game against real humans. It all made a bit more sense, and was a lot easier to follow in real life.

I didn't win, but I was reasonably pleased with how I played. Ultimately I didn't end up with enough production cards (as always), so I wasn't able to get enough victory points happening.

Battlestar Galacitca

I was so excited to finally get a chance to play this! I decided to play as Apollo, mostly because I thought being able to get out in a viper and do something useful would be lots of fun. We had R and Adama, S as Roslin (mostly because S wanted to know what it would be like to play Roslin), E as Chief Tyroll and D as Boomer. My first loyalty card had me as a human.

Things progressed reasonably well. We even managed to go above our starting fuel fairly early on. The only problem was that we weren't jumping very far.

We managed to fend off a couple of cylon attacks - D wiped out a stupid number of raiders, and I even managed to take out a Basestar with my viper. And then slowly things started to get worse and worse. S started to suspect various people as being the cyclon, which made me suspect that it was actually her. We kept jumping very small distances, and the damage to Galactica was starting to build up while our resources were quickly failing.

Eventually R revealed himself to be the cylon, and escaped to the resurrection ship. Soon after, we discovered that D was also a cylon, having changed sides in the sleeper phase. A couple more setbacks, and me ending up in the brigg meant that there really wasn't any hope for us. But we did manage to put up an excelled fight

I really enjoyed the game, and can't wait to try it again. I thought it captured the feel of the show amazingly well, with the impending doom and not knowing who to trust. Lots of fun!

Elves: Nearly Finished

I managed to do some more work on my elves over the weekend, and finally got around to taking some photos. Here you go!

Father's Day

For Father's Day, B gave me a wooden model plane kit. It's a bunch of pre-cut pieces with some paints, brushes, glue and sandpaper. In other words, everything you need to build a wooden plane.

So we sat down to build it together.

First step was obviously getting all the bits sanded down. So I did that bit, then B helped me paint it up. We followed the paint scheme on the box, which was a pretty red and yellow colouring. Most of the pieces are a single colour, so it was the perfect sort of stuff for B to help with. He sat on my lap and help the brush while I helped make sure we didn't get paint everywhere.

After B's nap, we sat down to do the actual assembly. The biggest problem was that some of the pieces didn't line up properly. I think the main body section hadn't been cut correctly. Naturally, I didn't realise this until it was too late to do anything about it. So the wings aren't attached to the body correctly. We were also missing the piece that holds the propeller onto the plane, but that's not a huge deal.

Now B has a plane to play with that he built with his daddy! Awesome Father's day present!

Ex Illis

My latest discovery is Ex Illis. Ex Illis describes itself as the next generation in table top gaming. It seems to be a traditional miniatures game - two players sit down with their own little plastic men and make them fight. But the game is accompanied by an app (run on a laptop or iPhone) that takes care of all the hard stuff (combat, keeping track of in-game effects, etc).

There is a starter set for the game (two version - one with a fold-out paper game mat, and another with a modular plastic game board), but you can also increase your army with other miniature packs. Apparently the individual miniatures can level up and advance through out their lives (or through a campaign or something), so even just getting the starter pack gives you a living, evolving experience.

The app also keeps track of your previous battles, and there seems to be some online component.

Apparently it's been around since last year, and I think I may have noticed it in various banner ads around the place. But what caught my eye was a post on TableTopGamingNews about a free trial. This free trial seems to give you access to everything except the miniatures for 30 days. So basically you can play the whole game with proxies to see if you like it.

All of this has piqued my interest enough to want to look into it further. I've been thinking about the idea of merging physical games with various tech for a little while now, and from what I've read today, this seems like the most integration approach I've seen.

My research has been a little limited so far. Despite having a chunk of free time this lunch time, I'm currently stuck behind a filter that will let me get to BoardGameGeek and MaelstromGames (not to mention Facebook), but won't let me get to www.ex-illis.com or http://gameralone.blogspot.com because they're about "Games".

I know the starter set is available from Milsims for about $80, which from what I've seen of the models sounds like a pretty reasonable deal.

It's been a while since I did an update - real life hasn't left a lot of time for gaming/hobby stuff. Or writing about gaming/hobby stuff. But I do have a bunch of posts in the works, so I'm aiming to put them up over the weekend.