November 2023

November 2023 Retrospective

Hey everybody,
The penultimate month of the year has now been and gone, and there isn’t long left before we’ll see 2024 in all of its glory. In some ways, it’s been a very quiet month for me, mainly taken up once again with “other” games – “other” in the sense that they aren’t my primary focus, Warhammer 40k! That said, I have been tentatively making some progress with painting once more. I haven’t really done much in terms of miniature painting since I had that massive game of 40k in September, almost as if playing a 3000 point game put me off the whole hobby! But I have now finished the Tech Priest Manipulus that I had started painting some time after reading Death of Integrity. He’s a nice model, full of detail as a lot of AdMech models are, but I think I’ve done him justice. It’s also nice to know that I haven’t lost my ability to paint models!

I’ve also taken a bit of a swerve into Age of Sigmar again, building up a couple of Treelords last week after the Stormbringer magazine came out with the model. The Treelord kit is amazing, two sprues with one of them containing the actual body, while the other is basically upgrades to make different poses with the same kit, so buying one sprue means I have the necessary bits to build another one. So I bought two of them.

Somewhat on this note, though, I am still a bit sad that my planned Summer of Sigmar didn’t really come to anything. I suppose the advent of 10th edition for 40k put paid to that, and then I went completely away from the wargames for a bit anyway. I believe the fourth edition of AoS is expected to land next year, so maybe I’ll be able to ride that wave and get my armies ready for that!

I do think that I spread myself too thinly when it comes to these things, though, and while I suppose I can’t help the fact that I love these models so much, I do need to try to rein myself in. Let’s see how well I can do that!

Most of the month has been taken up with other games, though I did get in some Necromunda. Fairly early on in the month, I’d agreed to a game with Paul, the guy I played AoS with over the summer, to introduce him to the game system. Paul does a lot of commission painting, and often gets paid in sprues, from what I can tell. Anyway, he’d been gifted some Delaque and really went hard into Necromunda, but despite owning a variety of things, he hasn’t played yet. So we had a game, and I brought my Goliaths – and was rolling so badly, he basically kerb-stomped me on his first game. A couple of times he asked if I had thrown the game, or something, but I really was rolling that badly! At least three of my injury dice came up out of action, I couldn’t shoot with any of my guns to save my life… it was bad for the Goliath!

But it’s produced a convert to the game, so along with my usual Necromunda buddy James, and a guy Paul knows who has some limited experience with the game called Tom, we have now started a four-player Dominion campaign! We played the Gang Moot multiplayer scenario for our first outing, and it was pretty hilarious! We’ve got Delaque (Paul), Orlock (Tom), Outcasts (James) and Chaos Cultists (me), so it’s a fairly eclectic mix. The Gang Moot scenario requires the four leaders to be set up in the middle of the table, and the rest of the gangers are hanging about around the outside. None of the gangers can activate until either a model takes a double action to yell, or someone within 12” shoots a weapon, whereupon they need to pass an Intelligence check to see if they can receive a ready marker. In the story of the scenario, the gang leaders have agreed to parlay, however once the shots start firing, their gang begins to come to their aid. The hilarity came in when at least one of the Delaque, and I think two Outcasts, just couldn’t pass the Intelligence check, even when they were directly being shot at.

I had deployed my leader near the back, behind a wall, and was basically skulking around for the first turn – as such, I had most of my guys hanging back until at least the second round. While there was all manner of stuff going down with the other gangs, including James’ Outcasts leader being melta shot to the face and taken down in one hit, I had nothing to do. It was a strategy that served me well, though, because ultimately all of the other gangs bottled out but I was somehow able to claim a victory for having the last leader standing!

Definitely didn’t see that one coming…

In terms of the other games, though, I’ve been playing a lot of Marvel Champions, and have also started playing with the Hellboy board game once more. Marvel Champions is a massive favourite for me right now, especially as I have mixed up some of my heroes and have renewed my interest in playing some of the older things. Hulk, Thor, and Spectrum have all seen play, and while for a time over the summer I was trying to play with under-played heroes, I’ve somewhat decided instead I should just play with my favourites, Spider-Man and Black Widow, etc. I’ve been a bit guilty with other games of always playing the same decks, Lord of the Rings immediately springs to mind here, and it always feels like it makes the game a bit stale. However, the amount of heroes I have for this game does mean that it will take an awfully long time before that should happen for Marvel Champions!

I’m finding life to be quite interesting for me though, in terms of my gaming and whatnot. For a long, long time, this blog had been almost exclusively concerned with Warhammer 40k and Age of Sigmar, with every other game that I own marginalised as a result. Since September, I have pivoted so hard, to the point where now I have 40k on the sidelines and I’m thoroughly enjoying the rest of my board game collection, and am looking to add to it. Hopefully I can strike a balance somehow, but I really didn’t think this was coming!

I know that some games, like Lord of the Rings LCG and Arkham Horror LCG have pretty much always been there, but the fact that the other stuff has come back to the table as well is definitely not something I thought would happen to this extent!

Anyway, what else has been going on?

I’m still reading 40k novels, and have made it through the fifth book in the Ultramarines series, Courage and Honour. I’ve also had a couple of buddy reads, including Farsight, and currently Dave and I are making our way through Warrior Brood. I think I might be enjoying it more, but it’s a cracking book – look out for a review soon! I’ve been looking through the 40k collection, and there are quite a lot of novels and short stories that I’ve collected over the years, so I’m hoping to get a list of those books I want to get read in the coming months, then I can start to tick them off soon.

I have a lot of 40k books to get through, though…

A Touch of… lethargy?

Hey everybody,
Something interesting happened at the weekend. I played a game of A Touch of Evil, which heretofore had been considered one of my all-time favourite board games, but I found myself almost completely unengaged. It’s interesting, because I’ve noticed a sort of pattern to this lately, where each time I play it, I’m finding it not as good as I remember it.

Set in colonial America, pushing that Sleepy Hollow feel to the limits, I always used to think of the game as one of the best immersive experiences you can have, principally because of the fact that the rules are pretty straightforward, meaning you don’t get bogged down in the rulebook. It’s Ameritrash at its finest, a dice-chucker in the same vein as Arkham Horror, where you’re moving around a board and making skill tests when encountering board spaces or enemies. A 5 or a 6 will always be successful on these tests, unless you have something that tells you otherwise. At its core, that’s it. The object of the game is to find out what is terrorising the town of Smallbrook, one of several classic horror villains such as vampire, spectral horseman, and so on. It’s almost like the rules are kept purposefully light so that the theme can shine forth, and in years gone by, I think this was one of its best points.

I’ve noticed a certain reluctance to play the game in recent months, though – I mean, I had gone years without playing it, until finally getting some games in at the tail end of 2022. I put it on my 10×10 gaming challenge thing because I thought it would be great to get some more games in, but as time has gone on, it really hasn’t inspired me and I think it’s currently the least-played game on that list. The last few times I have played it, I’d noticed a somewhat uninspired feeling coming out, but then at the weekend, I thought I had gotten over that, and was really looking forward to playing the game again. I decided to go for a big experience with my favourite villain, the Unspeakable Horror, and expanded the game with Something Wicked and Hero Pack One.

I was definitely in the mood to play the game, but the first mystery card I drew was The Hour is Late, which puts a 20-turn timer on the game (at most), which I don’t always like. The game round is actually quite quick, I’ve noticed, so a timer mechanism isn’t always needed. True, if you’re dawdling incessantly, then it can be a bit drawn-out, if still nothing has happened and you’re two hours in, but as I said before, it’s the sort of game that I like to experience and immerse myself in, so I don’t usually mind a longer game.

The combination of mystery cards drawn in the first few rounds meant that the game was ultimately over in about 20 minutes, and I had to move quickly towards the end game, or “showdown” with the villain. However, being on this timer really meant that I had lost most of my enthusiasm for the game, and so when the time came for it, while I was able to deal about 6 wounds to the villain, both of my heroes were knocked out, and I just didn’t care.

It’s very sad, really, to have a game experience where the end result is one where “I just didn’t care”. I’m a bit sad that it’s come after a game of A Touch of Evil, as well, because I have so many good memories of playing with this one! I have thought that maybe it’s time to retire it to the loft, and make some room on the shelf for other games, but I might try for one more before the end of the year. There were two print-and-play villains released with a Christmas theme, Krampus and the Nutcracker, so I think I might give it a try with just the base game and one of those, to see if I can’t recapture the magic. It is possible that I had too much going on with the expansion, of course.

Finished!

It’s been a bit of a torturous road with this chap, but after two months where I hadn’t really painted any models, I have finished the Tech Priest Manipulus. It’s such a goofy model, originally released for the previous iteration of Kill Team, but after reading Death of Integrity, I felt like painting some weird AdMech stuff, and he was perfect for that!

I’m sure there’s more that I could have done to him – there’s a ton of details here, including the hilarious floppy disk – but there comes a point when you need to stop with a mini, I find. He’s going to be a great addition to my slowly-building AdMech force, anyway, so here’s hoping I can keep the momentum going and get some more done before the year’s end!

Treelords! Treelords, everywhere!

I’ve wanted a Durthu model pretty much forever. Last night, I finally achieved that goal with this handsome fella! It’s such a wonderful pose, like he’s just sliced some poor fool in half, and is screeching a challenge across the battlefield.

There’s a classic Duncan painting tutorial that made me fall in love with it, and that was one of the driving reasons for me getting into the Sylvaneth range back when I was heavily into Age of Sigmar in 2015.

I’m not yet sure how I want to paint my Treelords, but I’m very tempted to follow this scheme for the army as it is quite lovely.

I have also built this Treelord this weekend, which I’m very pleased with! He’s a great looking model, shooting vines out of his hand like that. Again, a classic pose, with casual menace. I love it!

So, these two are added to the lineup from the summer, when I originally built up a Treelord Ancient. While Durthu is the model that made me want the kit (want the army, in fact), it was the Ancient that I had first built back in 2015, and I love the savage ferocity in this pose, with the staff outstretched.

The most incredible thing about these things is that the three separate poses are all from the same kit. There are two sprues, one is the Ancient, then the other is split between the Treelord and Durthu. The variation in the poses is largely achieved through shoulder, elbow and knee joints, meaning the arm pieces, torso and leg pieces are all otherwise the same. It’s interesting because it’s almost like some kind of weird articulation for the model – it’s not something that you can move, but these different joints mean you can get quite different-looking poses for all the limbs and, thanks to the different weapons as well, it gives some amazing models!!

I love all of these guys, and I think they’re going to look fantastic once I decide on my colour scheme and get started painting them all!!

Farsight

Hey everybody,
I wrote a blog a while ago talking about Commander Farsight, and my intent to read through the book series by Phil Kelly, and finally have gotten round to getting some thoughts down! The Farsight series begins with a short novella, which I read as part of a buddy-read with Dave and Bookstooge.

Farsight tells the story of O’Shoh of the Vior’la Sept as he is called to the desert world Arkunasha, to assist with an ongoing battle against the Orks there, as they have been terrorising the Tau colonies. O’Shoh leads an initial sortie but the planet’s dust storms prove almost to be the end of him, and certainly the effect of the storms and the Ork Weirdboyz proves the end of his Crisis battlesuit. He is able to escape the battlefield and regroup with his comrades, however the council of elders throws him out as a renegade. O’Shoh kinda goes off the rails a bit, and recovers an Ork corpse for dissection by the Earth Caste scientist El’Vesa, who manages to reanimate it. O’Shoh is able to kill the Ork zombie, but not before it has killed his mentor Oblo’tai. El’Vesa, clearly with no concept of personal boundaries, “downloads” Oblo’tai’s consciousness into a drone before the body is cold, much to O’Shoh’s horror.

O’Shoh leads another expedition into the desert and discovers that all of the Ork bodies left in the aftermath of the battle have no blood in them – all other body fluids remain, but it gives him a clue as to the nature of the world. Theorising that the desert storms are attracted to the bloodlust of warfare, O’Shoh manages to trick the Orks into attacking each other, and so they are eventually able to decimate a good number of their foe thanks to the storms. O’Shoh is given the new name O’Shovah, or Farsight, before he leads a final battle to decapitate the Ork menace once and for all. A deadly battle ensues, where the Ork Boss almost succeeds in taking Farsight down. Oblo’tai comes to his aid, however, with a remote-piloted Broadside battlesuit, with which Farsight is able to win the day.

I really enjoyed this one, I have to say. Phil Kelly definitely gets the Tau, and it was really nice to read a story that had the kind of antiseptic gleam that I’ve come to associate with them. I feel like it might be a little opaque for anybody not familiar with Tau as a faction, because a lot of the dialogue assumes a familiarity with both the caste system and the titles and rankings – if you’re interested, I wrote a blog about this a while back!

I’ve never been interested in Farsight as a character, though I have often heard him referred to as the only good guy in the 40k setting, so to some extent I was curious as to why that would be the case. Pretty much all I knew of him was this pervasive idea that he was a renegade, in some kind of rebellion against the Ethereals. It had been a while since I had done anything with 40k, and especially with my Tau, so when Dave suggested a buddy read of Farsight, I leapt at the chance to find out more, and I think it has definitely helped to revitalise my hobby interest!

While this is the first in a series, I think it works best if you have some prior knowledge of who the main players are, and their story arcs. O’Shoh is not referred to as Farsight until about 2/3 of the way through, for example, so you might be wondering what that’s all about. Similarly, Brightsword, El’Vesa and Oblo’tai are all part of Farsight’s hunter cadre, The Eight, but we have an almost prequel-vibe here, because you wouldn’t know these guys come back later to form a key part of the lore like this.

Reddit tells me that the story is something of a re-telling of The Arkunasha War, a short story by Andy Chambers (the man responsible for a lot of the early rulebooks and codexes for 40k). Obviously I decided to hunt that story down, but I wasn’t very impressed. I mean, I enjoyed Farsight, so I suppose it had that to live up to, but really I don’t think it was very inspiring anyway. We have similar story beats – O’Shoh comes to train the fire warriors on Arkunasha, the Orks crash-land on the planet, but otherwise we have a similar story where Farsight is able to hold out against the green tide with just a small band of warriors. It felt a bit like it limped along, and the actual titular war was only half of this 30-page short story, so it wasn’t that great.

Anyway, according to the man himself, Blades of Damocles is up next, so I’m looking forward to seeing what that is all about!

Sylvaneth

It’s a bit of a throwback post this Thursday, as I reflect on my Sylvaneth ambitions that had begun to form over the summer. Sadly, they didn’t really amount to anything at the time – indeed, my Summer of Sigmar just petered out as 10th edition seemed to take over the world, until suddenly it all fell by the wayside as I moved away from Games Workshop for a bit.

However, I’ve picked up two Treelords today, as part of the Stormbringer magazine. £8.99 for half of a £45 kit, but the way that the kit is split, you can build the main body from the first sprue. I have two of the second sprue lying around from past adventures in the Wildwoods, so I think that’s been an absolute winner!

I’ve previously picked up Druanti the Arch-Revenant, from the same magazine: again, £8.99 for a model that costs £25. It’s been so good, and I think we still have some Spite-Revenants to come later on, as well. My forest of Sylvaneth will be coming along nicely, soon enough! Which is lovely, really, because it’s starting to slowly get me back into the hobby. There’s more to say on that, of course, but I’m currently just taking it all as it comes. Picking up those models, though, has got me thinking a bit about what I want to do with my trees, which brings me on to the throwback.

Back when Age of Sigmar was new, I picked up a few kits from the Sylvaneth range, but only got so far as painting them in the then-official Winter scheme:

I’d actually bought the Tree-Revenants with the idea of using them as Mandrakes for my Dark Eldar, and painted them up as such, but never got round to using them.

Kurnoth Hunters were a later addition to the collection, as I began my second attempt at the army back in 2019. But then kids came along and I sold the whole lot.

I do still like AoS, though, and I’d like to play it a lot more. I had one game this year, and it was a right laugh – hopefully I can somehow manage my time effectively to get some trees painted, and maybe I’ll have another force to try out on the table in 2024?

8 years of heresy

8 years ago, I started reading the Horus Heresy series. 8 years! I remember not being particularly into it until speaking with a super fan at my local GW, whose enthusiasm got me into it and once I’d passed that hump, I thoroughly enjoyed it! Over the next few months, I read the first few books, but the enthusiasm waned until I was barely able to read one book per year!

I’ve now read 35 books, which averages to just over 4 books a year. It does mean, though, that I have 19 books still to get through!

😕

I’ve come too far to give up now, of course, so will definitely be trying to conclude the series by 2025. I don’t want to take more than 10 years to get through them all!! I remember hearing that they pick up and get better once you pass the mid-30s, and I do have The Path of Heaven as the next one, written by the vastly underrated Chris Wraight, so maybe I’ll burst into 2024 with that, and we’ll start the year off in style? Here’s hoping…

Mostly Hellboy (board game thoughts)

Hey everybody,
As we all know, Tuesdays can be incredibly boring. That’s why Tuesdays are Game Days here on my blog! I used to post quite religiously here every single Tuesday, which was quite the feat when I look back, though I suppose my board game collection was significantly bigger back in the day than it is now. However, I still try to get gaming related posts up on a Tuesday, whenever I can. After a number of years where my attention was quite firmly on Warhammer, I have begun to rebalance myself a little, so that I am once more playing with the other games that I own, and have had some really fun times this year so far, playing a lot of stuff for my 10×10 gaming challenge – some of those games have barely seen the light of day until now, so that’s been great!

One of the games that almost made it onto the list was Hellboy. The kickstarter from 2019 is quite the beast, with two massive boxes that are full of trays of miniatures with which to populate a classic dungeon crawler game. I have only ever scratched the surface with this game, and it’s almost a constant surprise to me how little I have actually played it. Well, I played a game at the weekend, and while I don’t know if I got all of the rules right, I did have a good time. I say “good” and not “great”, because it’s a curious beast, this one.

The game system is pretty good, I think. The classic dungeon-crawl experience is here, as you have agents with multiple actions who can act whenever you decide, you don’t have to take your whole turn in one go. You have room exploration, which turns up minions or clues, or scenery that can be thrown. The combat system is interesting, making use of custom dice along with an “event” die that introduces more random effects. The damage system is also interesting, and feels a bit like a holdover from the designer’s former work on Warhammer Quest. Replay value is high because of the case files system, where you may never see some cards from the case file deck when playing, so the next time you play the same case file, it may be completely different. Expansions and additional Kickstarter content have brought a host of new enemies, new agents, new requisition cards, all of which mingle in new ways to make a fairly modular game experience. Indeed, one of the expansions, the BPRD Files, is based around this idea of modularity, giving cards to allow you to construct your own games in any number of different ways.

However, there is very little opportunity for respite, and I find it interesting just how punishing the game can be, especially for two players. It does feel very reactionary, and I think that might be why I don’t always feel like I’m in the mood for it. There’s no explicit timer, although there are several elements that can coalesce into bringing about the final showdown – which is on-theme, because in the world of Hellboy, the enemies are always plotting in the shadows to bring about the end of days, after all!

There are a lot of miniatures in this one, which seems to be the thing a lot of companies rely on when it comes to their Kickstarter games. I’m not trying to suggest that the number of miniatures in Hellboy is used to prop up a poor game design, but there are a lot, and I find it interesting from the standpoint of watching the evolution of board game design. Going back ten years or so, these things would have been cardboard tokens, or cheaply-produced PVC miniatures. Nowadays, it seems like everybody wants 28mm or 32mm hobby-scale plastic miniatures to represent every last thing, all in the name of immersion or something.

I think my biggest issue with this game comes down to my own lack of plays with it – in that respect, I think it would have been the perfect candidate for the 10×10 challenge! Before the game at the weekend, I had last played it in 2021. I had no idea it was so long ago! I seem to have some degree of interest in the game, and I get to play it a couple of times, but then it goes back to gathering dust, and this lack of experience with it almost always leads to me needing to replay the tutorial, which I think sells the game a bit short in terms of what it’s all about. Forgetting about the kickstarter juicy stuff, there is so much even within the base game that I have little to no experience with, such as the requisition stuff, scenery, even the other case files – I feel very much like I have only begun to lift the lid on it, really.

However, isn’t this almost always the case with these sorts of games? I’ve talked a bit about Kickstarter before, and the problems with having so many glamorous games on there that look amazing. My buddy Tony is a total nut for collecting Kickstarter games, and has hundreds of them that he has barely, if ever, played.

The resurgence of my interest in board games has been really fun, though, and I have already mentioned my desire to add another to the collection with Dune Imperium this Christmas. Hellboy has got me thinking about other board games with a heavy count of miniatures, though, and I have begun to look at one of the juggernauts of the genre, Zombicide. This was first launched via Kickstarter as well, by Cool Mini Or Not, who have had huge success with the crowd funding platform. Zombicide dates all the way back to 2012, with a second edition coming out back in 2021. There are an absolute ton of expansions and ancillary products for this game, which I think is testament to the Kickstarter lineage. I’ve been trying to make sense of everything, with some varying degrees of success, but looking at the core gameplay for it, I think it sounds like it could be a lot of fun.

As a rule, I’m not a big fan of Zombie games, but the more I’ve been looking into this, I don’t think that’s a massive barrier for me. I have played quite a few, many years ago, as an ex-girlfriend was a big fan of Last Night on Earth and similar. However, I think this game has the co-op aspect going for it, first of all, and the second edition appears to be a campaign-driven system, which could be very interesting indeed. While I don’t particularly go in for the zombie theme, I do like post-apocalyptic themes, and of course I do enjoy co-op games, so there is definitely something here for me.

Movie Night: The Incredible Hulk

https://flic.kr/p/2pgphMu

2008 not only gave us Iron Man, but also The Incredible Hulk movie. Urgh. I think it calls itself a reboot of the 2003 version, and deals with Bruce Banner trying to deal with the after effects of his gamma poisoning – the ‘origin’ is told in the first few minutes over the opening credits, then we relocate to Brazil and Bruce trying to control his anger.

General “Thunderbolt” Ross is determined to recover Bruce, though, as he considers him the property of the US Army. He sends a team led by Russian/English operative Emil Blonsky to Brazil, and after an exciting chase sequence, Bruce Hulks-out and escapes, via Guatemala and Mexico, to his old university in Virginia.

He recovers his research, while Blonsky asks Ross to give him a bit of what Bruce has had. Bruce reunites with Betty Ross, his old love interest and the two go on the run to New York, where they meet up with another scientist, Samuel Sterns, who has been working remotely with Bruce to try to cure him. Ross and Blonsky track them there, and capture Bruce, while Blonsky demands Sterns give him more gamma-poisoned blood. Blonsky turns into The Abomination, while in the scuffle, Sterns also receives some irradiated blood…

The film ends with a Hulk vs Abomination showdown on the streets of Harlem, and while it looks like Hulk is about to be defeated, of course he wins the day.

What a wild ride! I have to say, this isn’t my favourite Marvel movie. I’d only seen it once before, and didn’t remember it all that well, except the beginning in Brazil, and the very end in Canada. There are some fairly decent action sequences here, particularly the running chase and also the fight in the university. But I think this film suffers a lot from the Hulk problem of trying to make some point about the beast within, and whatnot. It’s interesting, to me, to see how the tone in this one is far more serious than other MCU movies, even these early ones. I think Iron Man succeeds because it knows what it is, whereas this film still tries to be something more.

In the last year or so, we’ve seen elements of this film come back into the MCU, such as Tim Roth’s Emil Blonsky, and it’s interesting to discover that Mark Ruffalo was actually the first choice for Bruce after all. It’s interesting, because this film could have been so much more if they had kept with that direction.

My week with Marvel Champions

Hey everybody,
It’s been another week of Marvel Champions, and I’m once more giving some garbled thoughts on my various plays! I’ve had some more card sleeves delivered this week, so have been able to sleeve up some more heroes, which is always a great way to reinvigorate the game. I’ve now got Ms Marvel and Hulk sleeved, the latter is the original precon whereas Ms Marvel has a more varied build. I’ve also been re-thinking Spectrum, as she is a hero I’ve tried a couple of times but never seem to get much out of her.

Ms Marvel was one of the first decks that I bought after the core set, as I had heard how important her Protection cards are for the game, particularly for the Protection aspect in the immediate aftermath of the core set. Well, I had no interest in her as a character, but with the recent hubbub around the new The Marvels movie, I thought I would try her out. It’s not a strict rebuild of her deck, as I said before. However, she has the Champion keyword, which is interesting, so I was able to use some of those cards for a bit of synergy.

On the whole, I don’t dislike the deck, but I don’t think I’ve found the best build for her yet. There are a couple of cards in here that I can see would be very good and useful, but I just haven’t seen them come into their own yet. I have thrown a lot of neutral allies in the deck, which I think could be pared-back a bit more. The trouble is, I have so many decks permanently set-up now that my card pool for building new ones is quite sparse! I might have another fiddle around with it and try it out again, of course, but so far, she’s merely fine.

I’ve continued to play Spider-Woman, who most players seem to agree is one of the most powerful heroes in the game, and I can kinda see why! Her ability to build a deck with two aspects is very good, of course, and the bonuses she can get from playing each colour only serve to make her stronger. I think I’ve played 3 or 4 games with her now, and I have had some explosive turns with her in each game. In fact, I think in each game she’s been pretty pivotal to the overall victory.

The biggest news, though, is my game with the Hulk pre-con. Hulk has been decried as one of the worst preconstructed decks in the entire game, principally due to his hand size of 4, and most of his cards either being too expensive, or overly-relying on the red physical resource. While I did buy the deck in the summer and have kept it without stripping it for parts, I hadn’t really been thinking much about it until the last few days.

Now, let’s not beat around the bush here. Hulk is a beast. Even with a hand size of 4, I was able to do something like 18 points of damage to Crossbones in a single turn, which was amazing, but as the game went on, I could definitely see how he doesn’t really work very well with doing anything else. There are some amazing cards in the deck, of course, and any card that lets you do +10 damage needs to be taken notice of! However, it’s the hand size that is a constant disappointment, I feel!

There is a lot of negativity around his deck though, and from what I have been able to glean, it comes from the fact he was altered after the playtesting period had closed, with some pretty big nerfs being applied. As such, he does feel quite difficult to play – in comparison to other heroes, where you might be doing two or three things on your turn, Hulk seems pretty much only able to do one thing on his turn. Now, dealing 18 points of damage to a villain is a big deal, don’t get me wrong, and it seems like FFG wanted him to be about one huge turn. But if you draw poorly, you’re kinda stuck with mostly having a mediocre turn. Especially because of his hero ability which forces you to discard your hand. I get that they were going for a “no forward planning” feel to him with this, but later heroes have implemented bonuses for similar effects, such as dealing damage for cards discarded, or whatever.

Playing Hulk can be weird. The combination of expensive cards, small hand size, and forced discard of hand all mounts up to what can sometimes be a disappointing experience. If you draw well, you can actually win in two turns when playing solo – Limitless Strength & Hulk Smash for 13 damage, (anything) and Toe to Toe for an additional 5 damage, rinse and repeat. If you don’t draw those things, of course, that’s where it can become an uphill struggle. There are some interesting cards in his deck, I particularly like “You’ll Pay For That!” for allowing you to thwart equal to the damage you have taken from an attack, because otherwise Hulk is not removing any threat thanks to his 0 THW value.

I still like his deck, of course, and I’ve made a couple of swaps, putting in Brute Force and Combat Training to increase his base attack stat, so even without the trick cards like Hulk Smash, I should still be making a significant impact each game. So I’m definitely going to look at playing him some more, I don’t think he deserves all of the hate, but I don’t know how long I’m willing to play without house rules – a lot of people seem to agree the easiest to implement is to give him a hand size of 5 rather than 4, or even have Bruce with a hand of 6 rather than 5, which is definitely the easiest to do. There are some interviews out there that suggest Michael Boggs, the lead designer, has said some of his cards are overcosted, but I don’t really want to play with a list next to me of all the changes I’d need to make.

I’ve also been re-discovering Ghost Spider, who I’d only played with once previously. She’s a really powerful hero, as well – she has some strong attack and defense cards, but I think what makes her strong as a hero is the ability to ready whenever a response or interrupt effect triggers on an event. She also has tech to allow her to draw cards off these triggers, but all in all, she’s a surprisingly strong hero that I hadn’t really considered very much.

However, this should probably be no real surprise, as I have so many heroes for this game now. Even after rotating a few for some variety, there are still 20+ heroes sleeved up and ready to go. I’ve come to realise, though, that forcing myself to play with under-played heroes and/or villains isn’t necessarily the way to go, as it’s meant to be a game that is played to be enjoyed. If I’m not enjoying it, then why bother? I can sit through a game with Adam Warlock or Valkyrie, just because I haven’t played those heroes very often, or I can be actively engaged in a game with Spider-Man or Captain America. So I’m trying to focus less on playing those forgotten heroes simply to get their numbers up, and instead I’m looking for interesting match-ups and stuff. So far, it’s definitely working to reinvigorate my interest in the game, as I have been playing it almost to the exclusion of everything else this month!