January 2024

January 2024 retrospective

Hey everybody,
January is already over! How did that happen? I know most people seem to think January is the longest month in the year, but it doesn’t seem like five minutes since we were in the throes of Christmas and all that.

January has been a very productive month for me, both in terms of painting and gaming. I feel as though I may have been able to strike something of a balance between playing a variety of games, as well as keeping up the hobby side of things. To begin, I have finished painting the Promethium Forge that has been an ongoing project since I first built it in 2016, so that was a bit of an achievement. I’d started to paint it properly twelve months ago, but somehow ran out of steam. Now, however, I have three big pieces of Sector Mechanicus terrain finished, which is wonderful – especially because I was then able to enjoy a game of Necromunda with a fully-painted board!

I’m currently in the midst of a four-player Dominion Campaign, where I have somehow landed the role of the arbitrator. I’m also playing as a Chaos Cultist gang, so it’s been interesting for sure. I keep saying that I’m going to do a proper post about this, but I haven’t yet found the time to get it sorted. Hopefully I’ll be able to write something up in February, because it has been a lot of fun.

I’d started 2024 by finishing the Eldar Farseer on jetbike, and followed him closely with the Dark Reapers that I picked up for my birthday. It’s always nice to get models, then immediately build them and start painting – they haven’t touched the pile of shame as a result!

Due to my ongoing Necromunda campaign, though, I’ve also found the time to finish painting 14 Chaos Cultists, although some of those were almost-finished models from years ago. I’m really pleased to have finished those off, because they’re models that I have had hanging around like this for so long. It’s also inspired me to get more of them finished, so hopefully I’ll get moving with those before too long, as well. I don’t think I need all of them for the campaign, but it can’t hurt to have more painted models, can it?

Finally, I’ve made a glorious return to Warcry. Getting to play a skirmish game with the Unmade and Cypher Lords was just glorious, and it has prompted me to start painting more of that stuff, too. Continuing the trend of finishing off projects that have been languishing for years, I have finally finished the Cypher Lords, who look lovely (even if I say so myself) and then moved on to the Iron Golem, one of the original warbands from the game that I do enjoy, but haven’t wanted to play with since I primed them black a couple of years ago.

I chose a very muted colour palette for these guys, as I had decided I didn’t want that cherry red look, but couldn’t think how else to paint them. Settling on dark metal, with pale skin, they have come together quite nicely, I think. To an extent, they look quite similar to the Unmade, as they’re also pale cultists covered in blood, but hopefully they’re different enough with that golden scale mail and stuff, that it works well! I decided to use less blood on these chaps though, as I think the Unmade probably revel in it, but these guys are just killing machines. At any rate, I’ve gone from one to three fully-painted warbands in the space of a couple of weeks, so I’m hoping to keep that momentum going as I tackle either the Darkoath guys (who are also partially painted), or move on to the Untamed Beasts, who are also just primed black for now.

But that’s not all, because I’ve also painted a test piece of terrain! This is from the Catacombs set, as I wanted to just work out a colour scheme but, having primed it last summer, I haven’t done anything further until last night! I really didn’t know how to paint the bricks in the windows there, so went for a Baneblade Brown / Seraphim Sepia idea that seems to have come out quite well. The whole thing was primed with Mechanicus Standard Grey, and then drybrushed with Administratum Grey. I’m not sure whether I should have used any washes first, but as a terrain piece it seems fine. The wooden platform bit is Dryad Bark and washed with Wyldwood contrast paint, then a bit of Gorthor Brown was dabbled on to bring out the detail. I decided to try a light drybrush of Sybarite Green in places, but I don’t think that has worked too well, so probably won’t be using it again.

The point of terrain, of course, is to give your armies or warbands something to manoeuvre around and over, but not to steal the show. I feel like the sparse colour scheme here, with really just the bricks picked out, will help to provide that sense of fighting over something, but not detracting too much from the models themselves.

Oh, but of course there’s some Blood for the Blood God dabbled on tastefully, as well…

So yeah, all in all it has been quite a productive month for hobby stuff. Four units of infantry models, one hero, and two terrain pieces! I’m quite pleased! It certainly gets the 2024 spreadsheet off to a flying start.

What else has been going on, though?

I said I had been able to get a good balance with gaming and hobby, and I think that’s particularly nice as I have been playing non-GW games while not losing my focus as I did last autumn. I’ve been enjoying the Dune Imperium deckbuilding game, which I had for Christmas. There will be a blog post about that soon – I’ve decided I want to play it more before I write up my thoughts, because all too often my game reviews here on the blog are more akin to first impressions, than a proper review. I’ve also been enjoying Marvel Champions, getting some games in with the Next Evolution box that also arrived with Santa.

Most excitingly, though, I’ve been playing the Star Wars LCG with myself, and it has been an absolute blast. There will be lots of posts coming about this game in 2024, even though I know it’s a dead game. It’s just so much fun, I’m becoming obsessed with it once again. My big news, however, is that I have actually managed to play Legend of the Five Rings LCG! Again, this was with myself, as I tried to make sure the rules were all correct in my head before Tony and I get together sometime in February to give it a proper try. I was using the Lion and Crane decks as described in the learn to play book, and just wanted to see how it all works out in real life. I mean, it’s all well and good reading the rules manual, watching Youtube videos and so on, but actually playing with the cards in real life, and moving the pieces around etc, it really helps to cement the process.

It was also a whole lot of fun!

The prompt for both of these games to come back to the table has been finally being able to pick up some more packs for each. For Star Wars LCG, I have found a German games site that had Aggressive Negotiations in stock (and in English), so snaffled that up and it’s currently somewhere on the way to me. For L5R, I have got hold of The Temptation of the Scorpion, which completes the final cycle for that game. I have just six packs left to get for L5R before I have all the packs I think I will ever get – there’s still the Clan War premium expansion, plus the Lion and Crab clan packs, but all three of those are nowhere to be found, so I guess that’s going to be it for my collection.

There’s more Star Wars LCG content coming, and there will also be more for L5R in the coming weeks. Something that has surprised me, though, is how much I have become interested in Star Wars Unlimited, the collectible card game that Fantasy Flight will be bringing out on 2 March. Despite my dabblings with Magic over the years, I had pretty much always sworn off collectible card games because of the money-sink aspect to them. However, it’s Star Wars, and there’s the potential for getting in from the ground up, plus the game looks like it might be a very interesting reimplementation of ideas from other Star Wars games, which has really got me intrigued. So I’m probably not going to go all collect-it-all, but I can definitely see myself picking some up when it comes out. Time to save the pennies, then!

Hobby and games have been some of the most productive aspects of the month for me, so I suppose it’s to be expected that something is going to give. I love reading, but I have barely read anything this year. I finished The Infinite and the Divine, and have made it through about three-quarters of Children of Dune, but that has been it! Hopefully the rest of the year won’t see me struggle quite as much when it comes to reaching those book goals on goodreads!

This has turned into a bit of a monster retrospective blog, but at least I’ve had a great start to 2024 here. Let’s hope the other eleven months are equally productive!

Revisiting I’m Not Serious

Hey everybody,
2024 is the birthday year of the blog, as I hit 10 years on wordpress in April. To help mark the occasion, I thought I’d go through ten years’ worth of the archives and revisit some of the blogs from the past – sort of like a year-long series of Throwback Thursday posts, I suppose! My intention is to try to do this monthly, though I don’t really know if I have twelve posts that are maybe worth looking back at like this! For the first, though, I thought I’d go back to a post from 2015 where I talked a little bit about some games I had at the local store, specifically a game with X-Wing.

I can still remember that game nearly nine years later, where my poor luck and poor strategy (coupled with perhaps a little bit of stage-fright as the game was watched by a few other folks there) mounted up to a shocking turn of events, when Baron Soontir Fel was destroyed in the second round. At the time, it made me laugh a bit because I am not the type of serious power-gamer like the other guys there. However, it’s something that I almost constantly think back to, and question what sort of gamer I am. On the one hand, there’s nothing wrong with not being that sort of hyper-focused player who wants to make the optimum plays each time, and who brings “the best” list or deck to each game. There’s certainly something distasteful that I find about people who play things because they are “the best”, and not because they enjoy them, but it’s all about how you get your fun, isn’t it?

Something kinda clicked for me a few years ago, where I realised that there should be more of an effort made by me to engage more fully with the game. I had been approaching games with an attitude along the lines of, “Well, I can’t predict what my opponent will do, so why try to strategize?” and this informed most, if not all of my games for a good chunk of years. But after reflecting on it, I don’t think that was a good approach to playing games, not least because I don’t think it gives your opponent a good time to have such a chaotic experience. There are obviously games that lean into that kind of gameplay, but to stick with the X-Wing example, that was something where you build a list, get the right kind of cards to complement the pilots you’re using, and the expectation is that you’re going to at least try to win. When you’re faced with an opponent who seems to understand the game, but is doing all this crazy stuff and flying all over the place, it can’t be what you signed up for. And it kinda horrifies me to think that I was that opponent!

It all seems to come down to what you want out of a game – how far you want to take it, and that sort of thing. I like to think that I’ve come a long way since that post was written. I still think of myself as something of a casual gamer, but I’m definitely trying to get more out of the games I play, through strategies and stuff. I suppose that’s something that I wasn’t appreciating at the time, though – on one level, I enjoyed being in the world, and moving the pieces around, etc. But as I have tried to get more into the tactics of the thing, and seeing what is possible in the game, it has become so much more enjoyable. Throwing plastic ships around is one thing, but building a list to achieve a goal, and then seeing that goal come to fruition. Or adapting the play to react to what is happening, but making good decisions that let me pull it back (maybe even win). This is the sort of thing that I was perhaps missing out on, when I was thinking “I can’t predict what will happen, so why bother trying?”

Within some bounds, it is entirely possible to begin to anticipate how a game could go. I suppose this is more relevant in card games, in my experience, where there is hidden information that gradually becomes known. Let’s take L5R as an example. When you sit down to a game, you might not know who you’re up against. But then your opponent reveals their stronghold and they’re playing Crane – so you can start to filter out what they definitely won’t be playing, and make some assumptions on what to commonly expect from a Crane player (political battles and so on). There is always the possibility there will be some out-of-clan cards in the conflict deck, but the influence numbers are always low enough that it is barely a splash, and as soon as you see one such splash card, you’ll know what else you can filter out. All of that can be done with a fairly decent understanding of the game, and you don’t need to have studied things to the nth degree to work it all out. Taking it further, though, you can study the current meta and see what is popular in each clan, so you can see what you’re likely to face in each matchup. So when you see that Crane stronghold you can make an educated guess not only for what the clan can do in general terms, but also what kind of cards you can expect to see coming at you.

All of this isn’t to say that you need to do homework before you play a game, but a lot of it will come naturally as you gain more experience. You can absolutely study the meta before your first game, or you can go into games willing to learn what you’re going up against, and you can thereafter build that picture for yourself. The global meta might not have anything to do with what is being played locally, after all – you may have learnt common strategies to beat Scorpion and Lion decks, and then come up against nothing but Crane and Dragon when you go into the local area.

All of this is to say that I think there’s an element of responsibility for players to ensure they are playing a good game, as the ultimate objective for these things is to have fun, but you need to be able to read the room. I thought I was having a good time by flying my ships around and shooting stuff when I could, but that doesn’t really help when my opponent has come into this expecting more. It won’t help me get more games as time goes on, either! But there is definitely something rewarding about making more of an effort – I called myself a casual gamer before, and I think that’s a term that is incredibly loaded within this context. Definitely more to be said on that topic, as well. However, even for the casual gamer, I don’t think it’s outlandish to build up that kind of familiarity as you go.

Since I wrote that post, then, I think I have developed as a gamer, and hopefully when I play games these days, I’m not causing shudders of disappointment for my opponent! Of course, life has moved on quite a bit from those pick-up style games, and nowadays I’m playing in a small but consistent group of folks. There are still the odd games happening, but I like to think that I have a better understanding of what I’m trying to achieve when I sit down to play. There are always those moments when I have a plan formulated, and it crumbles as Sun Tzu has told us it would. But I have definitely gone more in for tactics and strategy over the years, which I think is definitely an improvement from the attitude of “well, I can’t predict what they’re going to do, so let’s just smash things!”

The Path to Carcosa

Hey everybody,
After finishing up my first run-through with The Scarlet Keys, I’ve been playing through The Path to Carcosa as my first Arkham campaign of 2024, and have been thoroughly enjoying myself! The second full expansion cycle for the game, Carcosa is widely regarded as the best campaign out there. It always surprises me, really, that they don’t seem to have reached the same heights since – I mean, we’re on the cusp of having the ninth campaign expansion for the game, and yet nothing has been able to topple Carcosa from that pedestal.

The campaign begins in Arkham, as the investigators are watching The King in Yellow to see what all the fuss is all about. Dozing off in the interval, we wake up to discover the theatre deserted, save for some corpses in the auditorium, and a strange man wandering the backstage area in the mask of The Stranger. Not being sure what’s going on, we attend the after-party and find out some info from the cast and crew, though there’s definitely something strange going on. Determined to get to the bottom of it, we head to the Historical Society to see what happened after the last performance, decades earlier. Discovering that some cultists are also on this trail, we eventually learn that almost everybody save the director, and a stage hand, vanished or died in mysterious circumstances after that performance. We follow the trail first of the stage hand, who has been residing in Arkham Asylum ever since, and after a bizarre investigation in the sanitorium, we find him and flee.

The stage hand reveals that everyone involved in the production has sworn an oath before the performance, which placed them at the mercy of Hastur. The cultists that have been following us are trying to open a path to Carcosa and bring Hastur into reality. When the stage hand is killed as well, the investigators make the journey across the Atlantic to Paris, in an effort to track down the director. After wandering around Paris on the trail of another mysterious figure from the after-party, we find the director’s house, and he invites us in, however he appears to be losing his grip on reality and when we follow him into his study, it’s to find his decaying corpse.

What on earth is going on? With no other leads, we follow the director’s ravings about the Catacombs of Paris, and head underground. There, we find the mysterious man from the theatre, wearing the pallid mask of The Stranger. The catacombs themselves are suffused with a sickly glow, but we are able to follow the man out to the surface, whereupon we find a skull engraved with a clue as to where the path to Carcosa will open. Following this clue, we arrive at Mont St Michel on the north coast of France. The ritual begins, the waves begin to crash, and the clouds burst above our heads as we’re sucked through a portal into Carcosa. There, we attempt to prevent Hastur from breaking through to our world, however this cannot be done by attacking him directly; investigating the locations we find ourselves in, we gain the knowledge that chips away at Hastur’s health until, eventually, he is defeated.

Or is he? Because almost as soon as the last scenario finishes, we find ourselves back in the Ward Theatre in Arkham, as the audience cheers for the final curtain of The King in Yellow…

Having played this campaign twice before, most recently last summer, I was a bit hesitant to start again, because I don’t like to be overly familiar with the campaigns in Arkham, but I do think the Carcosa cycle can be replayed pretty well, despite knowing the main story beats. I think I will forever be impressed with this after my first blind playthrough, where I was continually surprised by how the story was panning out, and so my second game with it last year felt like a bit of a let-down as a result. But having been through that, I think that I can now play it without expecting it to hit those highs again.

One of the reasons why I think I enjoyed the campaign so much that first time was that I had also been reading the source material at the same time. Having read In the Court of the Dragon, and then playing A Phantom of Truth, which basically replays that story, it was really incredible to see how the story was translated into the game. I was definitely immersed in the whole mythos surrounding Hastur and The Yellow Sign, which really added to the experience overall. After feeling a bit let down last summer when I replayed it, on reflection I think that was always going to happen when I returned to this one – almost like I had to play it a second time to run through it and see how it works on repeat. Knowing now that it isn’t going to massively change this time, I think I was able to sit back a bit more, and enjoy the ride once again.

And I must say, I really enjoyed it! I actually played through four scenarios in a single day, which doesn’t happen very often I have to say! There is an element of fatigue associated with playing this game a lot, though, as it can be quite a heavy-going experience. I was definitely in the zone for the campaign, though, and was constantly going back to the collection and upgrading my decks between scenarios. Very enjoyable!

For all that I’ve been calling it enjoyable, though, it’s also really tough, with some of the nastiest cards around. I don’t know whether you’d say it was famous for it, but this campaign has the treachery cards that go into your hand with a Peril effect, with various impacts such as only being able to move once per turn, not being able to play events etc. I play this solo, so it doesn’t really impact me the same as it would a group, where you’re wondering just what your team mates are doing if they aren’t triggering their free abilities, or not attacking enemies. It does a very good job of making the game overall feel quite uneasy. I still remember my first playthrough of this one, and at the end of the first scenario I was faced with the choice of going to the police or keeping it to myself, and there was talk of Doubt and Conviction. None of it made any sense, and there was no clear path to take – it really set the tone of unease for the campaign, which carried on through the rest of the scenarios.

An absolute standout for me is The Unspeakable Oath, the scenario set in Arkham Asylum. It makes me very uneasy, but is very nicely constructed as you’re trying to find the stage hand. From the start, there is a lingering sense of something not quite right here, and I think it’s clear the staff at the sanitorium think we (the investigators) are self-referring. Institutions of the 1920s are creepy as hell, anyway, and the scenario really plays on this, with some exceptional artwork that really is quite evocative.

I think Black Stars Rise, the penultimate scenario, is also worthy of mention. There is some complicated set-up required, but it really rewards you as you play through the game. There is no Act deck, but instead two Agenda decks, and you decide where to put the doom each mythos phase. There are also a number of effects which allow you to place doom, which you might be wondering, “how is that good?!” However, by this point in the campaign, we’re pretty much on the edge of insanity anyway, and the fact that the scenario wants us to advance the Agenda deck shows this quite well. As it happens, we end up opening the Path to Carcosa above Mont St Michel, and get sucked through the portal for our troubles. It’s a fantastic lead-in to the finale, where we follow the now-expected path of being in an Other World (if you’re familiar with the board game).

Carcosa is represented by 7 locations, many of which have multiple copies of them in the set, but you only set up with one. They’re double-sided, with story text on the back, so they are in play on their revealed side from the off. Dunwich already did weird things with locations in the final scenario, of course, but this is the first time we see this in the game as well. Of course, we’re going up against Hastur, but the version of him that is in play depends on how the campaign overall has been going. There’s also no way to directly damage him, instead we have to investigate the locations, and the stories on their reverse might be able to deal direct damage to him. I say might, because only one of the versions of those locations will be of help.

We also take a massive horror hit as soon as we land in Carcosa, and going insane is no longer an elimination condition. Hastur will attack our sanity each round, naturally, and there are cards in the encounter deck that will trigger worse effects if we have exceeded our horror threshold. It all works really quite beautifully, but even knowing how this works it is still quite wonderful to see it play out.

Overall, I think the Path to Carcosa campaign is more than deserving of its position as the prime example of what a campaign can be in Arkham Horror LCG. Dunwich Legacy is a little tame by comparison, though I do retain a soft-spot for that one as well, being a big fan of Dunwich stuff in general. Other campaigns always seem to be trying to achieve different things by being more complex, although I do like The Forgotten Age, despite the common opinion being it falls short. The problem, I think, with TFA is how arbitrary the punishments can be, based on your choice of supplies, which you made not knowing how important they could be. In my opinion, that’s not enough to call a campaign bad. The Dream-Eaters has its waking world and dreamlands split, while The Innsmouth Conspiracy plays with the timeline, has the flood stuff, and bless/curse to complicate things. The Edge of the Earth is mainly disliked for the reading, which carries over into The Scarlet Keys, although I think the latter has sacrificed something in its attempt to keep replayability high.

For me, then, the one campaign that comes close to Carcosa is The Circle Undone, which has that classic Arkham vibe thanks to the fact it takes place in the town, and we get to visit the classic locations, while dealing with the Silver Twilight Lodge, and all the rest of it. I love it, as it stays close to Lovecraft and the mythos without relying too heavily on that stuff, so that it ends up as a re-telling like Dunwich or Edge of the Earth.

But Carcosa is just so tightly-done, and so incredibly flavourful, that it leads to the most satisfying campaign the game has given us yet. The story that it tells is also brilliant, quite frankly, which is just wonderful, but when you start to think of it more as a game, it’s actually quite incredible to think of how much work must have gone into this to make sure it all lines up. All of the campaigns are done well in this respect, for sure, but somehow Carcosa seems to be incredibly intricate, it’s beautiful.

Blood Bowl: Team Manager

Blood Bowl: Team Manager was released in 2011 and was, I think, a bit of a disappointment at the time. Blood Bowl itself had been out of print since the 90s, and this card game implementation wasn’t aiming to recreate the tabletop game. Instead, we have a game that gives us a sort of highlight reel of games from the week of league play, leading up to the main competition, the Blood Bowl itself. The main gameplay consists of the trials of being the team manager, including hiring star players, keeping the fans happy, and getting away with your team cheating their way to the top.

It’s a bit bonkers, the whole Blood Bowl thing, but the fact this game takes the route that it does, looking at the highlights of various games from throughout the week and presenting the most newsworthy moments, is its own special kind of weird.

Players are competing for the title of Spike! Manager of the Year – measured by how many fans they have accumulated. To gain fans, you commit players to a highlight, and attempt to win that highlight card. It seems odd, because even though these are highlights of games from the week, you’re fighting over them to see who won the match… but it’s not too strange, I suppose, given everything else that goes on in the game. Winning these highlights will give you access to upgrades and so on, and by the end of the fifth week, the manager of the team with the most fans wins.

I think what makes it even more bizarre is how enjoyable it all is, though! I bought this game back in 2011 really because of the Warhammer name, but hadn’t really expected it to be as much fun as it turned out to be!!

The game did not attempt to recreate the rugby/American football hybrid game that was so popular before it, though you did get to draft players and stuff, but I think this disconnect is maybe what led to some of the negativity early on. It took a while to garner a following, but eventually it did manage to get two expansions, so did succeed to a point. Of course, it co-existed with the LCGs, which perhaps served as a further disadvantage. I mean, it was a card game, but it was more along the lines of a board game, so wasn’t technically an expandable card game like Game of Thrones or similar. In retrospect, I used to really enjoy FFG’s lines of games like these – the so-called “silver line” – that followed the more traditional board game expansion model. Easier to keep up with, in that there were maybe expansions coming once a year rather than once a month, but were a ton of fun regardless.

Anyway. With Blood Bowl firmly back on my radar as I start to get into the tabletop game, it’s been very interesting to look back at this one. You can check out my full review of the game, from 2014, right here!!

Star Wars Unlimited

Hey everybody,
I’ve been aware that a game called Star Wars Unlimited has been on the cards for FFG for quite some time now, but upon learning it would be a collectible game, my interest initially shrivelled to zero, and I moved on with my life. But as the hype machine seems to be ramping up as launch day approaches, earlier this week I decided to take a look into it to see whether it might be worth a second chance, after all.

The game seems fairly fast-paced and looks like it could be fun. You play as one of the iconic heroes of Star Wars, and have a leader card and a base card. The object of the game is to destroy your opponent’s base, which seems to have roughly 30 hit points. Leaders aren’t units per se, but can be turned into units as part of a once-per-game epic action, though if they’re defeated they don’t disappear, you just can’t use them as a unit again. Deckbuilding seems to be interesting in that it’s colour-based, and so it seems to get around the era problem most Star Wars games have come up against. It actually seems possible to have Imperials and Rebels fighting on the same side, but I don’t think I would ever do something quite so bizarre.

Something I think it great to see is the arena style of play once again – the old Star Wars TCG from Wizards did this, and it helps to prevent the sort of situation where C-3PO might be attacking a Star Destroyer (though it’s always been easy enough to imagine he might be disabling the ship internally).

Something that had put me off this game when I first saw it was the art style, which leans heavily towards the cartoony/comic book style, rather than the much more realistic art style employed in the LCG that I love so much. However, while it’s not growing on me as such, I think I’m not really finding it to be so much of a problem anymore.

The main issue, of course, is that it’s a collectible game, which means it’s got all the problems inherent in that. I’ve been burnt in the past, of course, though I keep coming back for more, it seems! The game will be sold in 16-card booster packs, with all that rare/common ranking to enable sealed and draft, though I’m more interested in constructed play personally.

However. As with the TCG, and as with Destiny, I can see myself buying a couple of packs, throwing some decks together with what I have, and seeing how the whole thing plays. It does seem like a fast and fun game, but from what I have seen so far, I’m not entirely sure there is a lot of depth here that would make it as enjoyable as the LCG that I love so much. I suppose up to now we’ve only seen the flashy stuff that is intended to show off the game, so I’d be interested to see what other kinds of gameplay options there are. It seems like it’s analogous to a large Magic set, with 252 cards, but the way resources work, there’s no land cards here – you just put cards face down to act as resources, so anything can be a resource like that. The scope is correspondingly bigger then, which means there’s a massive amount of stuff. Does seem very interesting, at least, and I do wonder how it will all work.

My curiosity is piqued, at any rate, despite the collectible element (and despite the art).

NeXt Evolution – (very) early thoughts

Hey everybody,
It’s time for some very early thoughts on the latest Marvel Champions expansion! Well, it came out last summer, but as I only got it for Christmas, it’s still new to me. I’ve had a couple of games with it so far, blind runs with the heroes against the first two scenarios, and thought I’d come here and ramble a bit about the box. I can’t seem to help myself when I get excited about these things, but hopefully this will be an interesting read, all the same!

Cable is the Leadership hero of the box, and due to the way the X-Force wave has been structured with Deadpool, he’s the Leadership hero of the wave, as well. I think he was the showcase hero for the new card type, player side schemes, as he can include side schemes from any aspect in his deck (so gets his own, a Leadership one, then one for Aggression, Protection, and Neutral – Domino, as the Justice hero, gets the Justice side scheme). However, because of this, he only actually gets 12 Leadership cards in the deck. His hero kit is quite good, and has a fair focus for thwart and attack, but alongside some protection-style cards that help with the “team-buff” style of thing we often see from Leadership.

In terms of his Leadership cards, he has a very interesting ally in the shape of Fantomex, who I think is the first card that comes with a second card for your deck. It’s also a nice pairing, in that Fantomex can do anything, then EVA can heal one damage from him, so he’ll hang about for the whole game if you play it right.

For the Neutral cards, he has The Power of the Mind, which generates a mental resource but will generate double when you play a Psionic card. Cable himself gets the trait when he defeats his own player side scheme. There are a couple of Psionic cards in the deck, though, which gives him a different sort of feel to the usual Leadership hero. He also includes Deadpool as a neutral ally, and a neutral team-up card for the two of them. I’ve swapped these two out for two copies of Psychic Kicker which came out all the way back in the Phoenix hero pack in the last wave.

Domino is an interesting hero. Her ability lets her count the wild resource icon on cards discarded from the top of her deck – so naturally, she has a bunch of effects that discard cards, and that care about the number of resources discarded in this way. It’s a great way to symbolise her luck abilities, and so far she’s been one of those heroes that I find interesting to play, in that I’m trying to work out the best way to make her tick. I definitely enjoy seeing glimmers of everything coming together, but she was eliminated in my second game, so I haven’t really seen the extent of her deck yet.

That said, I have also made a brief swap for her, getting Predictable Ploy in place of Team Investigation. It was a card I just didn’t seem to have any use for – 4 resources to clear 6 threat is great for a two-player game, of course, but nobody seemed to have the resources available; or they did, but there wasn’t enough threat out to make it worthwhile. Predictable Ploy, however, cancels the “when revealed” effects of a treachery card, meaning you can cancel Shadows of the Past or something equally awful. Definitely worth putting this in the deck, I think!

Justice is the only aspect that has comes in two decks this cycle, the other Justice hero being Psylocke. I do like her cards, as well, though there wasn’t anything immediately tickling my fancy without playing her. That said, I have exchanged each of the player side schemes – Domino has a fair amount of thwarting ability, and I liked the idea of being able to dish out 10 damage to the villain for clearing the scheme.

That’s the heroes, but what about the villains?

The first two scenarios in the box feature the Marauders. In the first game, Morlock Siege, we have all seven Marauder villains, and we have to defeat three of them to win. Each time a villain is defeated, though, they go under the Routed environment card, and there are a number of cards that feed off the number of villains there. This is the fourth (I think) scenario with multiple villains that we have seen now, and I do like how they have gotten into the swing of things now with getting these types of scenarios to work. The next scenario, On the Run, sees us going up against a random Marauder villain, so it uses the same villains stack as the first scenario, but we have to defeat that villain twice. The main scheme can defeat us on side 1B, which I thought was weird, but there is an attachment on the villain that represents the villain’s demeanour. I think the idea here is that they have abducted Hope Summers, and in the first stage they are confident – once we’ve defeated that villain once, they’re not, so it turns over and they get more health, but it also advances us to the next scheme stage.

It’s a lot less complicated than I’m making it sound, anyway!

I’ve heard a lot about the general difficulty level of this campaign box being quite low, but the second scenario quite easily defeated me, when Domino was eliminated and the scheme threated-out while Cable was desperately trying to heal himself, so I tend to disagree with that!

All the same, it’s been a pretty enjoyable box to play through so far, and even though I don’t know a great deal about X-Force, the Marauders, and so on, I’m looking forward to getting some more games in with it soon! I’m also looking forward to trying out different X-Men heroes with this box, and generally mixing it all up!

Arkham Horror LCG in 2024

I played Arkham Horror LCG a total of 36 times last year, and made my way through almost five complete campaigns. That’s quite a lot of Arkham Horror, of course, especially when you consider that a few times, I played 3-4 times in a day. I had one of the most enjoyable campaign experiences to date, as well, when I played the Dunwich Legacy with Rex Murphy and William Yorick. It was an investigator pairing that just seemed to click, and I really enjoyed the overall experience with it.

So far in 2024, I have almost made it to the end of the Carcosa cycle once more, after another one of those days where I played 4 games one after another. My third time in this cycle, it’s been going a lot better than the last time I ran through, but I am now thinking about where I can go next. I’ve already got my investigator decks built, and that’s really what I thought I’d chat about today.

Ordinarily, I play Arkham two-handed solo. I’ve tried a few times to play with other folks, but I seem to prefer playing this one by myself. However, at the weekend I started to build a deck for Amanda Sharpe, then decided I wanted to re-build the Jaqueline Fine precon, but then just kept going, and also built a deck for Tommy Muldoon. And now I have three investigators to try out!

Three-handed solo players are out there, and seem like a dedicated bunch, so I’m going to attempt a fun-through of the Night of the Zealot campaign with all three, tacking on one of the standalone games as well. I don’t want to commit to a full 8-part campaign with three investigators, though I had considered potentially playing a full campaign but mixing the heroes each time, so choosing two of the three for game one, then a different two for game two, etc. I could still come back to that idea, but for now, I’m going to go with three, but just for the core set.

Looking further ahead, I want to play both The Forgotten Age and The Circle Undone again this year, and I’m thinking I want to use some combination of Dexter Drake, Daisy Walker and Agnes Baker. I’m thinking Daisy and Dexter for the Circle Undone, but don’t know yet who I’d like to bring along with Agnes to Central America.

Getting even further ahead, I’d like to give Preston Fairmont a try, but given the fact he’s one of these weird investigators, I would probably go with a net-deck for him. He starts with base skills of 1, but has weird rules about gaining money, and I think he can basically pay money to succeed at any test, so it’s a very unconventional build. A bit like Calvin Wright, whose base stats are all 0, but increase proportional to the amount of horror he’s taken. I did try to build a deck for him a while ago, but I wasn’t confident and dismantled it. I’d like to take Preston to Antarctica, possibly with someone like Leo Anderson.

All of this is to say that I’m trying to keep going, playing investigators I’ve not tried before. Some of these that I’ve mentioned in this post have been with me before, but I do want to try to give everyone at least one chance!

Yesterday, I picked up the investigator expansion for the Scarlet Keys, so at least I can say once again that I’m up to date with everything. There are bound to be some fun cards in here, though I’m quite keen to try out Amina (the mystic) with a doom-manipulating deck, as there seems to be quite a bit to support the archetype and it’s something I’ve not played before. So that should be interesting!

So there’s my plans for playing Arkham Horror LCG in 2024. Obviously, this doesn’t account for Hemlock Vale, which is due for release soon, so things could change, but given that we’re not even at the end of January and I’ve almost played a full campaign, I’m thinking it’s not beyond the realms of possibility to get three or four other campaigns in before the year is out!

Warrior Brood

“The ground convulsed and shuddered, as though retching at some violation”. I mean, what an opening to a book! Today I’m getting round to Warrior Brood, a novel I read along with my fellow Black Library enthusiast Dave, and one for which we had Jenn pop along for before the three of us tackle the follow-on Warrior Coven.

The Tyranids have invaded Herodian IV, and the space marines of the Mantis Warriors are fighting a losing battle in their attempt to repel the insects. In swoop the Deathwatch, led by Inquisitor Kalypsia, who manages to rub everybody up the wrong way as she explains Herodian IV cannot fall, and due to the Warp gate there, they cannot simply declare exterminates against the planet in case the whole segmentum becomes lost. Kalypsia is acting on the authority of Inquisitor Lord Parthon, who has a strange interest in the planet, one that intrigues his fellow Inquisitor Lord Agustius, who sends some acolytes to ferret out the truth.

We soon learn that Parthon had established a secret weapons facility on Herodian IV, funnelling xenos tech into the requisitioned Mechanicus facility on-world, seemingly to create a weapon for the Ordo Xenos. He had been paying particular attention to the Tyranids who were known to be following the Eldar Craftworld Iyanden, as the amount of Eldar biomass ingested by those Tyranids had made them potent psykers. The resulting weapon seems to be a cross between a Tyranid beacon and a Tyranid killer, the only problem being that it leeches the life from the person operating it. The Deathwatch kill team recover the artifact, only to be forced to eject it into space and plasma-bomb it when Kalypsia tries to use it again.

First of all, I really enjoyed this book. I’ve read some negative reviews about it, where the general feeling is that the rules of the game were not reflected in the writing. I mean, that’s all well and good when it comes to writing for 40k fans, but if you come to this book as a general sci-fi fan, then I don’t think you’re going to have much issue with it. One of the problems seems to be how devastator marines are not only firing hellfire shells (the special issue ammo only used by the Deathwatch, but in the hands of the Mantis Warriors), but also there’s at least one guy firing a multilaser (a tank-mounted weapon). There’s the problem of marines using lascannons (tank killers) to shoot gargoyles out of the sky, and so on. All of this is only a problem if you play 40k, and you have an idea of what these weapons and units are supposed to do, though.

For me, I think I just enjoyed the absolute bedlam of the opening fight with the Tyranids, with the various depictions of marines going up against different types of bugs. There’s a great moment, near the start of the book, where Sgt Magnir is facing down a hormagaunt and it kinda surprised me, because even the basic Tyranid bioform here is presented as really dangerous – which of course, they are. I’m sure there are other stories that talk about these things being over 8ft tall and so on, and I really liked the fact that hormagaunts weren’t treated entirely as bolter fodder here. There is a disgusting description of a spore mine being launched (via muscle spasm) onto the top of the bunker, then the fleshy obscenity trying to find purchase before detonating. I really liked reading the descriptions of the Tyranid weapons – I don’t think it’s been explored enough, really, but what exactly does a ‘barbed strangler’ do? What about all the disgusting ammunition they fire at their enemies? It’s all described here, and in glorious detail!

Something else I really liked, although it is a bit grisly, is the effect of the Shadow in the Warp, as it is more than just a “buzzing” or similar, at the corner of a person’s mind. It makes the space marines’ eyes bleed, and Kalypsia fares no better. It’s such immense pressure as the will of the hive mind bears down on the planet, it has a paralysing effect that, I suppose, would make the planet’s populace easier to defeat. It’s really good to have these sorts of descriptions, I think, because it really helps to inform the experience when you’re playing a game.

It’s not all bugs though, as we have a surprising amount of Inquisition action here, as well. I really enjoyed the mystery around the motives of the Inquisitors, and reading about the history of them. Always nice to have some of the internal politics there, although I do wish that once in a while we could have a somewhat “good” inquisitor. Ravenor is probably the only one who could be said to act purely in the best interests of the Imperium. Now, I know the point is probably that contact with the xenos is corrupting, or the heretic or mutant, and so any high-ranking member of the Inquisition who has the clearance to know about daemons and the Warp, or access to xenos artifacts and the like, is running the risk of being corrupted. But surely these guys are able to climb that corporate ladder because they’re decent beings? If anybody knows of a story where there is a good Inquisitor who treats the marines well and isn’t a heavy-handed dimwit, please let me know!

On the subject of the Inquisition though, something that is almost a throwaway is the link to Craftworld Iyanden and how they were decimated by the Tyranids. I think it was something initially mentioned in a codex, and thrown in here too, before being taken up again as a major theme for the novel Valedor almost a decade later.

Anyway, finally we have the Mantis Warriors, in a wonderful call-back to the Badab War event that Forge World were massively involved with before the Horus Heresy became their big thing. The Mantis Warriors and the Astral Claws were both tempted by Chaos, as I understand it, and while the Claws went full-on renegade, and became the Red Corsairs (led by none other than Huron Blackheart), the Mantis Warriors came through that crucible and are now on a penitent crusade for a thousand years, or something. It’s a tremendous story, and I really enjoyed seeing how the other Imperium folks treated them with suspicion, while they were desperate to atone for their failure.

There is a lot crammed into this book, and I think that’s one of the reasons why I enjoyed it so much. We even have a space battle – something that I usually associate far more with Star Wars than 40k. It’s interesting to read how some of these older books worked to include a lot more than we seem to get nowadays.

Las Vegas Open 2024 reveals

Hey everybody,
The LVO has once again brought a round of reveals from GW, and while I am trying to not buy more plastic, they always manage to have something that really grabs my attention! In all, they have shown off stuff for Kill Team, Age of Sigmar, the Horus Heresy, Underworlds, Warcry, and 40k. And it’s all quite exciting, if I’m honest!

The thing that has my attention the most is the new Kill Team stuff. I am quite surprised, in a good way, how they seem to be using this platform more and more to revitalise the model range for 40k, as they have really begun to lean into that side of things with the third season. We’ve gone from getting totally new stuff, to stuff with upgrades, to getting revamped units from the regular game line that are as old as the ark. This third season has given us updated Striking Scorpions and Space Marine Scouts, and now we’re getting updated Mandrakes. They’re coming with Night Lords, which seems to be an upgrade sprue for the Chaos Space Marines, and has begged the question as to whether all of the traitor legions will be getting this treatment. I hope they don’t give us an Emperor’s Children upgrade when the III Legion need a full model range, though I suppose we shouldn’t be too picky!

They have separated out the teams from the terrain, by and large, for this third season, though there is some stuff being included. What I find interesting here is that the terrain piece is a massive chunky thing, which reminds me a lot of those vacuum-moulded Lego bases you used to get back in the day for castles or whatever. It looks like it might be a nice centrepiece thing, as weird as it is to have. I suppose the closest 40k thing we’ve had would be the landing pad from the Sector Fronteris set – just a big chunk of plastic.

Anyway, it’s the first thing in a long time that has made me interested in buying. I seemed to cool quite a bit towards GW when they were having all the supply problems last year, and while I don’t know if those have truly ended, I could see myself trying to get hold of this stuff.

The Age of Sigmar stuff is the next in the Dawnbringers series, a Daughters of Khaine character this time, which is continuing the narrative into fourth edition. There’s a new warband for Underworlds, which seems to be zombie/ghoul themed, and there are two warbands for Warcry, one for Lumineth and one for Nighthaunt. The Lumineth guys are quite agile and remind me a lot of some of the wood elves from back in the day.

The Horus Heresy has got their plastic Solar Auxilia, something that has been demanded by a lot of people for a long time. I’m intrigued by how much the range is expanding for them, and I’m kinda thinking I might actually pick up some bits. I do mean literal bits – I think the bodies could be really useful for making bounty hunters or similar for Necromunda, so I don’t plan to make a Solar Auxilia army!

Finally, 40k is seeing a big injection for the Kroot! I doubt we’re going to be getting new Tau models when their codex comes out, in this case, because the Kroot is getting a full refresh in plastic, including krootox, which is quite magnificent! I was a big fan of the kill team when it came out, and I would love to see more along those lines – those weird heavy weapons need more exploring, for sure! Whether we actually get enough to field a proper all-Kroot army will remain to be seen, though, but it’s quite exciting to see these things.

All in all, then, it was an interesting reveal. Solar Auxilia is probably the one to take away from this, though I suppose equally the Kroot range refresh is a big deal. I am finding GW in quite a curious place at the minute, where we’re seeing them re-doing a lot of stuff, rather than bringing out huge ranges of new stuff all the time. It probably makes most sense, of course, as it means they don’t have to continually invent new stuff, but giving updated and improved sculpts of the older classics instead. I wonder if it might be in response to how well the Sisters of Battle range refresh has done, and they are putting more resource into this sort of thing as it is a fairly safe bet. There’s still a lot of Eldar stuff that needs to be updated, of course, and I really hadn’t thought we’d get stuff like Mandrakes and Kroot before all of the Aspect Warriors had been finished. But what do I know?!

I am definitely excited to see what else we’re going to see refreshed as the year moves on. Warp Spiders, Fire Dragons and Swooping Hawks would be lovely when the Eldar codex comes out, though something tells me we won’t get all of those in one hit. I would still like to see the Vespid re-done for the Tau codex, but it looks like perhaps it’ll be all-Kroot coming there. But this is perhaps where Kill Team can come into play, and I suppose they could use that system to update the odd units, and then codex releases (as we’ve seen with the Dark Angels) to bring out an event-style box.

Anyway, all of that is pretty much useless conjecture for now! As it stands, there have been some very interesting reveals, and I am very impressed with the way GW are revamping their model lines.

Browsing the Necrons codex

Hey everybody,
Last week I finally picked up a copy of the Necrons codex for Warhammer 40k 10th edition, and while I’ve hardly been poring over the details for the whole time, I have been trying to take some time to digest the book, and see how my favourite soulless space robots are going to work in the new edition. I’ve mentioned in passing a few times that I have been uninspired by 10th edition so far, but I’m hoping that by picking up the book, I’ll be able to dive into the faction and, at the very least, I can start to play my favourite faction!

The upgrade from free index cards to the codex sees the army gain a number of different detachments, which are the thing for this edition. We had the original Awakened Dynasty, then four more detachments that lean heavily into different aspects of the army. So there’s one for the destroyer cult, for instance, and one that emphasizes the elite stuff like Praetorians and Lychguard. As I am a massive fan of the Lychguard as models, I was naturally drawn to this one, the Obeisance Phalanx. This lets you select an enemy unit in the command phase, then Overlords, Triarch units and Lychguard get +1 to wound when they go up against that unit. It’s not bad, but it’s only one enemy unit, so it’s not great, either. If you destroy that unit in the shooting phase, for instance, then your melee Lychguard will have nothing else to do.

Necron Lychguard — Aw, some of my very first Necrons!

But still. Detachments come with enhancements, of course, and six new stratagems, so that’s always good. The stratagems in the Obeisance Phalanx are quite nice, including some defensive stuff as well as a fights-on-death thing. There’s an enhancement that forces your opponent to lose command points when you destroy their characters, which could be useful. Nothing really stands out, but I suppose I’ve not been playing, and so not really in the zone for this edition to really see the nuances just yet.

The Army Rule is still Reanimation Protocols, of course, and I am overjoyed that it still works as it used to back in 7th edition, or whenever it was, with units being able to continually reanimate, and not just reanimate models lost in the previous round. Necrons are not very often a strong army, unfortunately, so having this ability is what keeps them going, in my mind!

In terms of the army list, whenever I get to play with the Necrons next, this is the list I shall be intending to run with…

The Command Barge is a nice centrepiece, of course, and it gives Necrons within 6” +1 to their objective control characteristic. So I think having that among a blob of Immortals who are camping an objective can be useful, although with a 10” move, I suppose there’s nothing to stop it zipping off to help out wherever it’s needed!

The Plasmancer is definitely an interesting model, one that I hadn’t really looked at before 10th edition. He lets the unit he is leading score critical hits on 5s, so he lets Immortals with tesla carbines get their 2 additional hits on 5s, rather than 6s. He can also dish out up to 4 mortal wounds on a unit within 18” thanks to living lightning, and his plasmic lance is nothing to sniff at, either! Adding in the cryptothralls means the Plasmancer gets a 4+ feel no pain, so he should be hanging around for a while yet!

The Chronomancer is one of my favourite new models for the army, and now that I have the model, I want to include it where I can! He’s also quite useful, allowing his unit to move-shoot-move, and his unit gets some extra defence as he makes them -1 to hit.

The Lychguard have suffered a little bit, as they’re quite expensive for a unit of ten. The warscythe makes 2 attacks, though it’s back to S8 AP-3 D2, and it hits on 3s so they should be quite decent in close combat. The trick, as always, is getting them there, because a 5” move just paints a target on them. It’s the strongest argument in favour of sticking with the original Awakened Dynasty detachment, because that has the Veil of Darkness enhancement that lets you pick up a unit and pop it back down somewhere. Although the Command Protocols rule from that detachment, which adds one to the hit roll, is also useful – Lychguard effectively hitting on 2s?!

There isn’t a great deal to say about things, though, that hasn’t already been said. I feel like this would be a good starting list to try out the army, and see how it performs at the 1250 points mark. Seven distinct blobs, once the characters have been allocated, with my usual suspects of three units of Immortals, the Command and the Annihilation Barges, then some Lychguard sprinkled on top. I do love the Lychguard!

While 10th edition hasn’t really got me excited so far, I think I have been slowly coming back round to it as the Christmas and New Year break brought things back round, and I am cautiously looking forward to getting some games in soon.

I do have a lot of Necrons-related content planned for the blog in the coming weeks and months, though. My first army, and my first love, I’ve been feeling a bit of nostalgia for them as we count down to my tenth anniversary, both in the wargaming hobby and here on wordpress, so I want to do something to mark the occasion! That might include actually getting the rest of my models painted…