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Month: August 2025

Star Wars Champions!!

For the last few weeks now, I’ve been seeing a lot of custom content for Marvel Champions on the Facebook group. Normally, I’m not a big fan of custom stuff like this, as I’ve found in the past that it’s very rarely as well-balanced and tested as the official content. However, after seeing a lot of it, I decided it might be time to take a look!

A fan creator called SuperMario has created a whole bunch of Star Wars content for the game, with a series of scenarios and about ten heroes to play. In addition, they’ve re-skinned a huge amount of aspect cards to Star Wars as well, keeping the effects but changing the artwork (and, sometimes by necessity, what the cards reference). Some of this stuff is also very recent, including some cards like Maria Hill’s helicarriers and (I think) Bambino from Winter Soldier’s pack, all stuff from the most recent wave this year.

I’m absolutely thrilled to see all this!

I’ve got Mando and Ahsoka that I want to try out as a pairing, and Luke & Leia will be waiting in the wings. Mando has a Justice deck, and Ahsoka is Protection; Luke is also Justice, and Leia is Leadership. However, I’ve got a decent spread of aspect cards that I think I might also try out Luke in Leadership, and maybe Mando in Aggression. I still need to sort out printing more stuff, but hopefully soon I’ll get Han, Chewie and Boba Fett heroes printed as well.

There are a host of scenarios as well, some of which look like they’re still in progress as of a couple of months ago. I’ve printed off a massive Vader scenario, which has a bunch of modular sets as well, and then two shorter looking scenarios based on the Showdown on the Smuggler’s Moon comic. Grakkus the Hutt is a fairly straight re-skin of Collector 1 from the Galaxy’s Most Wanted campaign, which I know a lot of folks don’t like but I quite like it!

It really seems like this is an ongoing project, as there are many cards that I think technically can’t be played at the minute, such as those requiring an identity with certain traits, but also there seems to be massive room for growth in terms of heroes that could be made. Obviously, Star Wars is very hero-based, so there’s always room there! However, even with just a small stable of playable heroes to choose from currently, the volume of re-skinned aspect cards means it’s very easy to play, for instance, Luke in Justice or Leadership, or Chewie in Aggression or Protection.

The artwork on these cards is pulled from a huge variety of comics, and I’ve found myself enjoying how I can recognise where a lot of these things are coming from originally. I imagine this must be similar to how Marvel aficionados feel with the ‘official’ game!

Something that I’m really intrigued by in terms of the aspect re-skins is how a lot of them have EU content, in particular from the Legacy comic run, as you can see above with the Darth Talon ally. It’s a broad mix of old EU and new canon, but it’s all pretty great really!

Back in the day, of course, the Star Wars LCG was going to be a co-op thing, so it’s almost like having that now. Having my favourite fandom re-skinning one of my favourite games is just awesome though. Can’t wait to try it out!!

August 2025 retrospective

Hey everybody,
August has been and gone in something of a blur, and the weather has definitely started to decline here in the UK, which is probably just as well given how hot it has been of late. I’m certainly not built for this kind of heat, so I definitely appreciate the cooler temperatures, although getting soaked in the rain is not exactly my idea of a fun time…

In terms of the blog, things have been a bit all over the place this month. The big thing about August is that Warhammer 40,000 has made a return. It’s been almost two years since I was seriously thinking about the game, and while I had painted a few models here and there, I’d been thinking that 10th edition just wasn’t for me, and so had been sitting things out, with the decision made back in April to kinda get out of the game entirely. However, the grim darkness is clearly in my soul, and after some thinking about things, James and I played a game of Combat Patrol and it was actually pretty good! I won, which always helps, but I think it’s interesting to see how Games Workshop seem to use this as a way to on-board players into big 40k. The rules are exactly the same, you just play a specific list at a low model count, but even after one game, I think it’s clearly meant to work as a first step into a larger universe.

While we have talked about playing more Combat Patrol missions, we also started talking about a Necromunda campaign again, and eventually moved back to Marvel Crisis Protocol… the circle of life…

I’ve had two games of MCP this month, firstly I was playing Criminal Syndicate against Web Warriors, then I went back to X-Force (again, versus Web Warriors). The Criminal Syndicate idea was primarily because I wanted to play with my Wrecking Crew that I’d finally made a push to paint, and it was a lot of fun, but I kept forgetting Daredevil’s leadership – he also whiffed on so many rolls that he may as well have not been on the table. Carnage has been a lot of fun since the update, though, so even though the game resulted in a loss, it was still a fun match overall. X-Force was a bit different, and I’m pleased to say that I remembered Cable’s leadership throughout – but again, he whiffed on so many of his rolls as well… I’m not sure I was playing him to his full potential, though. X-23 was a real standout when she used her attacks to drive up the board, chipping some damage off She-Hulk, before KOing Ghost Spider, to move up and make a Frenzy attack on Miles Morales to KO him as well. She’d been somewhat unremarkable up to that point, but I think seeing the potential for that has made me want to play her some more.

I was also using Sunspot in this list, but he was completely unremarkable for the whole game. I’ll probably swap him out for Bishop when I next play the roster, anyway. I have the feeling that Sunspot is much better in New Mutants… All that said, though, these two games this month have allowed me to reach my target of 10 games of MCP this year as well, so that’s both Shatterpoint and MCP where I have met the target now!

While there have been some great games this month, the actual number of games played in August has dropped significantly – just 7 games played in the whole month! As we know, though, it’s not all about the numbers, and those seven games have been some really good ones. In addition to 40k and MCP, I’ve finally kicked off the Forgotten Age campaign with Daniela and Trish, which has been a bit rough so far as I’ve found myself almost disinterested in playing. I don’t know if it’s some kind of campaign-remorse, but I felt similarly in January with The Circle Undone – having planned out to play it for weeks, as soon as I started out I almost immediately felt like I should be playing a different one! I have all ten campaign expansions for the game, of course, so I guess that doesn’t help! 

I have also – finally! – got round to playing with the Agents of SHIELD box for Marvel Champions, and had a game with Maria Hill and Nick Fury against the Black Widow scenario. I find it interesting how it feels to break into a new box like this, because there is a lot going on with both heroes, and there’s a lot going on with the villain – almost too much, if I’m honest! This definitely felt like a step up from cracking open the Age of Apocalypse box back in January! However, it was definitely a lot of fun – Nick Fury was great, but Maria Hill clearly has a lot going on as she moves those counters between her helicarriers. Black Widow herself needs a lot of management, too, and ultimately I lost because of threat, but I am looking forward to trying all of these cards out some more. Perhaps just not with each other…!

There are two bits of slightly bigger news for August though. First of all, after talking about it in a Throwback Thursday post, I’ve been printing off “cards” for Call of Cthulhu LCG as I’m thinking it might be fun to play some of that again sometime soon. Last year’s arts and crafts project was Netrunner, but this time I’ve gone for the ancient ones instead! That said, the quality of the card images is not as good as that for Netrunner, so I’ve printed them out myself instead of paying for a professional finish – and I’m glad I’ve done so. The images are from cardgamedb and all have the FFG watermark, which is fine, but the quality just isn’t there for the most part. I’m going to dummy up some decks at some point and will have a run-through, I’m thinking Agency/Syndicate against maybe Shub-Niggurath and, perhaps, Cthulhu? I suppose we’ll see.

Embarking on this project, and seeing all of these cards again, has really brought back some fun memories though. The card art is shared throughout the Arkham-sphere, of course, and it’s quite funny to see how they used an image in each game. Random nobodies in one game will be storied heroes in the other, and such. Characters will have different names where we have the art from an actual investigator re-used in the earlier LCG, as well. I hadn’t realised how much of the artwork from Arkham Horror LCG comes from Call of Cthulhu LCG though – for some reason, I had been under the impression that the later game had much more new artwork.

However, this isn’t the only arts & crafts project that I have going on right now. Come back later for something that has really fired up my imagination over the past couple of days…

Finally, I have discovered that the game Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn can be played solo, so have been gobbling up packs of cards for this to finally experience the game! First launched in 2015, Ashes was discontinued shortly before the pandemic when Plaid Hat Games was bought up by Asmodee. The CEO, Colby Dauch, wasn’t happy with that so actually bought back his company and the rights to some of the games they made, including Ashes, which was relaunched in 2020 as Ashes Reborn. In 2025, a kickstarter was launched for a new version, Ashes Ascendancy, and the future is looking particularly bright, it seems! I’ve been able to pick up Ashes Reborn and a few packs of Phoenixborn – the game is an LCG-style expandable game similar to Marvel Champions in that the card packs are playable decks of new hero characters. In 2023 they launched the Red Rains, a solo/co-op mode where players go up against a Chimera in a boss battle. I’ve bought two of these Chimera packs (there are seven in total, reflecting the seven magic types in the game), and fellow blogger Dave has kindly sourced the main Chimera across the seas for me, so I’m looking forward to getting more Ashes games in with this mode once that box arrives on these shores!

There’s certainly a lot on the gaming horizon, at any rate!

Thursday Unlimited: Secrets of Power trailer!

I can remember, years ago, FFG would do these high-end trailers for their games, but without much coming out these days, it feels a bit like they’ve stopped that kind of thing. And yet…

The trailer for the sixth set, Secrets of Power, is here!! Coming out in November, we’ve got new mechanics that will sprinkle through the set as a capstone for this first tranche of the game – next year, we’ll get rotation that sees the first three sets leave the premier environment… but for now, I guess we’re going back into spoiler season!

Star Wars: The High Republic: Convergence

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Last night I finished reading Convergence, the first book in the second phase of the High Republic book series. This book came out in 2022, and the whole phase acts as a prequel to the first phase of the High Republic, which generally I was quite favourable towards. It takes place during a tenuous cease fire in the Forever War between Eiram and E’ronoh, where the Jedi have been dispatched as a relief mission to Eiram, but there’s a lot of mistrust and emotional baggage for everyone to work through as a peace treaty is negotiated. There are two Chancellors of the Republic at this time, and while Chancellor Mollo is in the thick of things, Chancellor Greylark dispatches her wayward son Axel to the proceedings in order to keep an eye on things. The Monarch of E’ronoh is egged on by his viceroy to keep the war going, but everyone is blindsided when his daughter Xiri proposes an alliance by marrying the prince of Eiram, Phan-tu Zenn.

The two of them then lead a joint relief effort across both planets, but it soon transpires there are outside influences meddling, seemingly in order to keep the war going. The Path of the Open Hand perform various acts of sabotage, and it is soon revealed that Axel Greylark is actually one of the saboteurs. All hell breaks loose during the wedding ceremony, but the saboteurs are eventually defeated and everything seems to end happily enough.

This book took the best part of the entire month for me to wade through. I don’t normally like to rate books as one star, but this one really earned that in my view. There are a couple of things that really bothered me about the book, and some stuff that was merely cause for eyerolls that all mounted up to generally result in a book that I was ultimately just not interested in, and pretty much had to force myself to read. To start with, this book is set 350 years before the prequels, but as with a lot of these sorts of books, it doesn’t actually feel that far removed from them. Indeed, a lot of the Coruscant stuff felt very much like it could be happening a year or two before The Phantom Menace. Having two Chancellors felt a lot like a gimmick to make it feel like “another time”; it was never explained as to why this was a thing, so I’m left wondering what is going on there.

A lot of effort seemed to be made during phase one to give a sense of distance, especially with anything outside of the Core being a bit of a wild west situation. But here, it doesn’t really seem like that, and folks are hopping about the galaxy like it’s nothing. The whole point of Starlight Beacon in phase one was supposed to bring the “light of the Republic” to these wider-flung sectors, yet they don’t really feel that out of it in this book.

I think that the Path of the Open Hand is some kind of precursor to the Nihil threat, but I don’t honestly know if that’s the case. Certainly, they use the Gaze Electric as a sort of mobile base, which is later used by the Nihil, so it’ll be vaguely interesting to see how this religious cult turns into a pirate gang that eventually rises up to challenge the Republic and the Jedi.

Ultimately, though, I found that I just didn’t care about anyone that I was reading about, and each time I picked the book up I had to force myself to try to just get through it, with the eventual goal of finally finishing it. Fortunately, that came sooner rather than later, as there’s a sizeable chunk of preview for another book in the back, which I had thought was part of this one, so the ending came about 50 pages before I was expecting it.

It’s possible that reading the other stuff in phase two (there’s an audiobook and a second novel, if we ignore all of the comics and YA books etc) will make this one make a little more sense, but to be honest, if a book needs other books to let you make sense of what you’ve just read, that’s a failure in my eyes. I honestly don’t think it really stands by itself, but thank goodness it’s over now.

Warhammer 40,000: Combat Patrol

Hey everybody,
Last week, I had my first game of Warhammer 40k in almost two years, getting to play my Genestealer Cult in a game of combat patrol. This is the somewhat pared-back version of the game, where you play with a set roster that has very slightly different rules to the regular units in big 40k, and you’re playing on a smaller board and all the rest of it. I was playing against James and his Astra Militarum, although there were some model swaps on his side of the table as he still needed to get a lot built, so subbed in his Krieg models for the Cadians. On my part, because I have so many Cultists, I was able to get things really accurate, which I always find very helpful because trying to remember what counts as what is just too complex to my mind.

We played the initial combat patrol mission, Clash of Patrols, which involves the forces investigating a crash site and controlling vital areas of the wreckage. There are four objective tokens on the battlefield, and you score 5 points for holding each (to a max of 15 each round), though scoring only takes place from round two onwards. In addition, each force has a choice of two secondary objectives they can take, which is something personal for the army – James had to “hold the line”, keeping me away from his deployment zone, while I had to end the battle with my Magus near the centre of the battlefield.

Scoring was pretty tight for the majority of the game, with me only 2 points in the lead for the most part. However, I was able to use my aberrants to take out his command squad, which is how he was issuing orders across the battlefield and stuff, so the Imperial Guard gameplan went a bit south after that, and I was finally able to win with my Magus where I wanted him. Final score was 46-60 to the Cult!

There are definite criticisms that can be made about Combat Patrol as a system, for one the fact that you’re essentially playing someone else’s idea of what a list should be. For people who like to net-list, either to play what’s good or because they don’t like list-building, then I’m sure this is a non-issue. However, I really like list-building (see my many thousands of posts over the years where I do just that!) and it’s one of the downsides of 10th edition that you don’t pay for wargear, so you’re no longer able to really fine-tune a list. 

However, the smaller scale really worked in our favour, I think, as it was around two years since either of us had played 40k, and I don’t think we were really super clear on the rules and stuff. Having just a handful of units to worry about greatly simplified things – ultimately, you are actually playing the main rules, there’s nothing stripped back in that sense for Combat Patrol as a system. It’s mainly the fact that the board is smaller, and the units are pre-selected.

In terms of getting two 40-year-olds with jobs and kids back into playing 40k, I think it worked really well. While we have made some noise about trying out some of the other scenarios on offer (there are six in the rules document), we’ve equally been talking about levelling up to 1000 point games just as quickly. Not a problem for me, as I have just over 2000 points of Genestealer Cult models anyway, but I think it’s interesting to see that it is in fact a good way to onboard players into the main game. This is something I didn’t quite appreciate when I was talking about Combat Patrol last time, but clearly I was wrong about it!

I wonder, though, how successful it is on its own. Age of Sigmar has Spearhead, which seems to have a very big following, while Combat Patrol seems mainly to be discussed online in terms of how much value the boxes give you. It seems superficially a different game, but in reality it feels very much like a means to an end, which is big 40k. The fact that James in particular almost straightaway started to talk about 1000 point games is perhaps telling here…

However, all of this is for another day, as there are plenty more games on the roster, just waiting to be played!

Acolyte Hybrids WIP! 🚧

Hey everybody,
I’ve been back on the painting train recently, and having done so well with getting the Aberrants finished for my Genestealer Cult, I thought I’d try to keep that going and have started work on some more Acolyte Hybrids!

These guys are not my favourite models from the range, I have to say. I can’t really say why, I think it’s just the fact that the legs make them look a bit goofy – I’ve seen people model them bursting out of the munitorum barrels (perhaps because you get more torsos, arms and heads in the box than you do legs) and they look great, but the legs seem a little spindly, somehow. But I do have a lot of them, as they tend to come in a lot of the bundle boxes, plus my collection is based on the original launch in Deathwatch Overkill, which came with 8 of these lads. Having only painted up one lot of five so far, I think that leaves me with the grand total of ten more to do, so getting these five painted will be great to bring this down!

I’ve been painting all of my models in the colour scheme of the Cult of the Bladed Cog, a subfaction that has mostly broken out on Forge Worlds and so has a sort of strong link with the Adeptus Mechanicus. There are some amazing works out there, where folks have kitbashed the AdMech stuff onto these guys, and we have bizarre versions of the Primus that is built out of a Tech Priest, for instance. I haven’t really wanted to go down that route, though, as part of the reason why I love the Cult so much is for how they look as they are, if that makes sense. 

I’m going to try not to put any kind of timeline on this, but in the back of my mind I’m thinking that I would like to get a few more units painted up before the end of the year, and next on my list is potentially the Atalan Jackals, as I was hoping to paint those up last year (before my Neophyte Hybrid rescue project ended up taking almost three months to complete!) I’m really excited about those models, though, so I’m hopeful that will keep me going through getting these guys finished, at any rate!

Ashes Reborn: first impressions

Hey everybody,
I had a small game of Ashes Reborn the other day, just to try to get a feel for how it all works before I go diving too deeply into the whole thing! There’s always a danger when a shiny new game comes on the scene, and you play a game or two and think it’s good, so end up buying everything else with wild abandon! After having done all of my research over the last couple of weeks, including now getting cards (and dice) in hand and actually playing things out, I think it’s quite clear to me that this is actually a really interesting game, and I absolutely would want to play more of it. 

Ashes Reborn

In games of Ashes, you play as a powerful spellcaster called a Phoenixborn. You have a card that represents said Phoenixborn, which has the life total in the centre, then a number to determine how many cards you can have in your battlefield, and how many in your spellboard. The deck you draw cards from is primarily spells of one type or another, and you either play them and discard them, or play them into your spellboard, where they can be used round after round. These spells are mainly where you summon your fighters – which come from a separate deck and go back there, to be summoned time after time. The limitations on the Phoenixborn card, however, mean that the board state never gets out of hand, as you only have a set number of slots for each area. 

Ashes Reborn

Resources come in the form of ten dice, which fall into seven magic types, and are largely determined by the signature cards of your Phoenixborn. For example, Maeoni Viper has a signature card called Summon Silver Snake, which requires you to spend a main action, exhaust the card, and then spend one nature dice and one charm dice to do the effect (of summoning the Silver Snake conjuration to the battlefield). Maeoni is therefore a nature/charm Phoenixborn, but when building a deck you can actually include spells from any other form of magic, as long as you build your dice pool accordingly. You always have your ten dice on the table when you start a round, and there are so many ways available to fix the dice to faces you need, that it’s far easier to build a multi-magical Phoenixborn than to build, say, a five-colour Magic deck.

Ashes Reborn

I love the fact that this game has so many “fixes” to a game that represents powerful sorcerers duelling, so that you actually feel like a powerful magic user and you’re not digging through your deck to find the pieces that you need. How many games of Magic have been a blow out because you didn’t get enough land before your opponent? Or didn’t draw the right spells at the right time? Well in Ashes, that’s not a concern because you always have 10 dice to use, and if they’re not the right faces then you can always meditate – discard a card and change it to a face you need. 

I also appreciate how pulled-back this game feels. I’m constantly referring to Magic the Gathering, I know – it’s the closest analogue to this game, but it’s also probably one that most folks will have an understanding of. In Magic, you usually draw a card, play a land, use the land you have to play some combination of spells or creatures, you have an attack phase, then you can do more stuff with spells or whatever, then it’s the end of the turn. It’s nothing like 40k, but your opponent is still just sat waiting for you to do stuff on your turn. With Ashes, you have a main action and a side action, and that’s it. So you are usually playing a card or attacking, then triggering an ability on a card already in play. And then play passes back to your opponent. When you both pass consecutively, that triggers the end of the round and you refresh the board and reroll your dice to go again. There’s a much faster back-and-forth that feels very dynamic, and it definitely plays into this idea of being two powerful wizards trading blows back and forth, but at the same time, it feels like it almost encourages you to set up and take some time over it. In my experience so far, there isn’t any kind of huge turn because you’re only managing two actions each time you go, so there’s no “do 10 damage here, do 12 damage there, remove this card, play that card” style of turns going on. It’s more like “I deal 2 damage to you then I change this dice to a different face – you go”. 

Ashes Reborn

I think the most important factor in my enjoyment of this game was just how excited I felt to try it out, and just how much I enjoyed it while I was playing. This has continued as I’ve been thinking about deckbuilding for it, and how I’m excited to try out different cards in these decks. It’s always a bit tricky to work out whether your excitement for a game is based simply on the fact that it’s new, or whether it is genuinely exciting. In this case, though, I think it’s a mix of both, which is probably the best kind anyway!

Ashes Reborn

Hey everybody,
Back in 2015, Plaid Hat Games released a new expandable card game (can’t call it an LCG, of course!) at GenCon called Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn. It looked absolutely beautiful, and for the time made several innovations when it comes to a card game, notably the card templating included full-art from the start. I know Plaid Hat Games from Summoner Wars, so was definitely interested. The game was popular, but as is often the case with these things, interest soon waned and when Plaid Hat was bought up by Asmodee, they cancelled it.

However, in one of the most interesting stories in tabletop gaming, the former CEO Colby Dauch bought the company back in 2020 and set to work re-asserting its independence, with Ashes as a key part of this. Partnered with Team Covenant, who instigated a Player-Driven Production (PDP), the game returned as Ashes Reborn, with the Covenant system providing a subscription for ensuring the game would continue to be made. This is kinda fascinating, and obviously I don’t know the real ins-and-outs to what has happened here, but it’s almost like a print on demand service where the subscription provides a guaranteed audience for Plaid Hat to then make the game and continue supporting it.

Ashes Reborn released in 2021 with a new core set, and re-issue of several decks from the earlier set. The release model for this game is somewhat similar to Marvel Champions, in that you have a prebuilt deck of cards headlined by a Phoenixborn character. These decks provide you with cards that can be used to build other decks, and you can mix and match as you like. However, unlike Marvel Champions, Ashes Reborn is a duelling card game for 2 players, and so the release model is only really centred on providing more decks for players, and not necessarily simply packs of cards like the LCGs from Fantasy Flight.

However, in 2023 a new game mode was launched, Red Rains, which features a Chimera boss that you go up against, and so it turns a 1v1 game into a solo/co-op adventure. There have been several new Chimeras released since then, each with two “aspects” with which a deck can be built for them, providing a lot of replayability. That said, I understand that the main appeal of the game is that replayability comes from the Phoenixborn that you play as, so having more Chimeras is just icing on the cake, really. 

This all sounds wonderful, right? Ashes is a game that I had had my eye on right back in 2015, though the 1v1 gave me pause at the time. I recently saw the game being talked about in solo gaming circles, and decided to take a look. I was aware of the Ashes Reborn thing because I do follow Team Covenant to some extent, but I hadn’t realised the Red Rains thing was, well, a thing. After reading up on several different places about how it all works, and seeing various opinions about it, I decided to take a bit of a gamble and picked up the core box. 

I say “a bit of a gamble”, because there is so much for this game that is currently out of stock, not just here in the UK, but seemingly everywhere. However, I’d seen a post that talked about expected reprints following a recent Kickstarter, so decided it was hopefully going to be worth it. 

It was only after I had the core set delivered that I read up on what this Kickstarter actually is. Ashes Ascendancy is a new core set that is expected to ship at the end of the year, and is something of a new edition, from what I can see. The campaign page does take pains to say how it will be backwards-compatible with Ashes Reborn, but it does come with new Phoenixborn, as opposed to re-doing the original Phoenixborn as Ashes Reborn had done. Ascendancy also includes a solo/co-op mode from the off, where you have the option to battle a new Dragonborn. So this is all very exciting, to say the least! However, I’ve just dropped £50 on the Reborn core set, so I don’t think I’m ready yet to throw more money at a Kickstarter without really getting an idea for whether the game is for me. 

So, I’m in a bit of a pickle…

Right now, I am very impressed with Ashes Reborn. The cards are absolutely beautiful and from watching a few videos on YouTube, I think the gameplay looks a lot of fun. The mechanics are quite ingenious, as well. See, there’s a lot of comparisons to Magic the Gathering, and there is that kind of feel you sometimes can get in that game. In Magic, you as the player are termed “a planeswalker” and you’re summoning creatures and casting spells to fight in battles, using the power of the land (mana) to do all of this. However, you are reliant on drawing the right cards; while deck construction is important here, you still have a 60-card deck that you shuffle before a game, so it’s entirely possible that all of your land is on the bottom.

In Ashes, you have a Phoenixborn card that headlines the deck, but there are several tweaks on the basic premise of trying to whittle down your opponent’s life total, which make the game much more exciting to my mind. The resource mechanic is dice, coloured after one of four types of magic (in the core set – further expansions introduced three more magic types) which you roll at the start of the round, and then spend during that round to pay for your effects. Each Phoenixborn has a set amount of spells and creatures they can have in play, so board states never get out of control. There are certain spells that summon creatures, and once you’ve cast that spell, you can use it to keep summoning that creature back into play, time after time. There are no huge blasts of damage, from what I can see, either, but instead it’s something akin to death by a thousand cuts. (This is also possibly the only game where milling your opponent makes sense, as once you’re out of cards you take damage for each card you can’t draw – so it’s not like you’re just instantly out of ideas, or anything). Most crucial of all, however, you get to actually go through your deck at the start of the game, and pick your opening hand of cards.

Taken together, this all makes it feel like you are actually playing as a powerful wizard. You always have 10 dice to use, you have a spellboard that contains your powerful stuff, and you pick your opening hand – I mean, what’s not to like?

The game looks beautiful and it seems very much to be a fun and enjoyable game, with a lot of replayability. While it’s still “a bit of a gamble” in terms of being able to get everything, Plaid Hat are going to make everything available via print on demand so they don’t need to constantly keep everything in stock. There are downsides to this, as the POD cards appear slightly different, but overall I have to applaud them for doing it, rather than just starting over and retiring the old product.

More than anything, though, I’m just really excited to play some beautiful games with these really gorgeous cards. I mean, look at that jaguar! 😍

Thinking about Combat Patrol

Hey everybody,
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been slowly coming back to the world of Warhammer 40,000, despite having thought I was done with the game after almost two years of not playing it. Specifically, I’ve been brought back into the fold through the smaller scale Combat Patrol system. Looking back in previous editions, Combat Patrol has always been the smallest-scale way to play 40k, from memory it’s something like a 500-point force with the objective of having a quicker game overall. It’s not something that I really delved into, mainly because I had so many models that playing at smaller points counts never seemed to appeal to me. However, given that one of the main concerns I’ve been having with 40k of late is that the game runs too long, and is pretty boring for it when compared with other games I’ve been into, I’ve started to look at things much more differently.

In 10th edition, though, things are a little bit different because Combat Patrol is a whole game system, which importantly doesn’t have a points value attached to it. Instead, there are fixed rosters of units that are sold in boxes that essentially replace the old Start Collecting boxes for the factions. Each faction in 40k seems to have at least one, most cases at least two combat patrols available to them, with pdfs that you can download for free from the WarCom website. Free rules are of course always a good thing, and so it makes getting into the system a lot easier because you only need to buy the combat patrol box itself (which is £100, so more expensive than the Start Collecting boxes used to be) as well as all of the hobby accoutrements that companies seem to take for granted you’ll already have. 

I just want to take a second to talk about the way GW have scaffolded players into 40k. Back in the days of 7th edition, there was Kill Team, which was 200 points (and this would literally be a character model and a box of basic troops), then you could pick your points limit that goes up to 2000 points from there. 8th edition introduced us to Patrol detachments, which were most often seen as the way to bring in models from another faction without causing problems for how the army was built, giving access to powerful out-of-faction stratagems or similar. In theory, it was possible to play a game with a patrol detachment and have a smaller-scale game, but I don’t know if anyone actually considered this a Thing.

In 9th edition, though, Kill Team was re-launched with the Octarius box that gave a whole new game system to work with (the infamous shapes of measurement, and so on). You could buy a single box of miniatures for under £40 and have everything you need for that kill team. But then, Kill Team no longer led into big 40k. Now we have Combat Patrol as its own thing as well, albeit much closer to 40k than Kill Team is, there isn’t really that through-line from the smallest game system into the biggest. It feels a bit strange, but never mind. 

Combat Patrol is played on a 44” x 30” board, which is the equivalent of two of the Kill Team game boards placed side by side on the long edge (another reason why it’s weird Kill Team no longer scaffolds into 40k). Pretty much all of the regular 40k rules are still in effect, though, but the fact that you’re only playing with a set roster of a handful of units means that turns are pretty fast, as you’re not waiting around for someone to move then shoot with 12 or 15 units, then charge them in before you have the opportunity to do anything else. To my mind, this is a huge difference, because I do remember earlier editions having over an hour of a shooting phase as Tau. When I played Grey Knights in editions that still had a psychic phase, things were even worse.

From what I can see, Combat Patrol for 10th edition has removed a lot of this, by giving set rosters so that folks can’t min-max the game to squeeze every last drop of potential. However, this is a bit of a double-edged thing in my view, because by the same token, it has made me less interested in playing because I prefer to write my own army lists, you know? The Genestealer Cult Hand of the Magus patrol is bang on 500 points, and brings a Magus, two squads of 10 Neophyte Hybrids, 5 Acolyte Hybrids, 5 Aberrants, and a Goliath Rockgrinder. This is a fine looking force, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a part of me that kinda wishes I could fiddle around a bit with this, and maybe swap out the Acolytes for some variety in characters, for example. The Primus is one of my favourite looking models in the game, but I’ll not be able to play him in Combat Patrol, which makes me a bit sad.

I suppose there are some ways around this. The Hand of the Magus is bang-on 500 points after the most recent update, so part of me thinks you could just use 500 points as a limit and then play somewhere within that frame? But you’d need to be using the datasheets for big 40k, which can be a problem. That said, I don’t think it would really bother me too much to have a casual game at 500 points and use the full rules…

I think it’s a bit unfortunate that GW have published their suggested points limits for games, which have in turn become standardised as “the correct way”. I think we’ve got Combat Patrol, then 1000 and 2000 points as the standard size for games, so nobody is interested if you suggest playing at 750 points, or 1250.

But anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself here! For the time being, I’m working towards getting my Genestealer Cult combat patrol fully painted. I think James is keen to get his Imperial Guard miniatures to the table, so hopefully it won’t be too long before we’ll be trying all of this stuff out!

C’tan Shard of the Nightbringer!

Oh wow!

Today, some very interesting leaks have emerged in various Kill Team places, including Night Lords specific Raptors, a new Sisters of Battle kill team, and a new Nightbringer!

This model looks phenomenal. I still have the old finecast version that has been in the box for a couple of years, but seeing this – which has a release date of 2026 – I don’t think I’m gonna bother building the old one!

I love Necrons…