Battlefleet Gothic August 23rd

 

Back on the 23rd of August a bunch of us got together for a four player game of Battlefleet Gothic. It was Orks against the Imperium in a 1500 point game. It was the first time a battleship had been used by us for quite some time. It also marked the first appearance of an Ork big ship.

Both fleets lined up along the long edge of the table facing opposite short edges. As a result they both had to maneuver their fleets to bring their weapons to bear. This was a challenge for the Orks with their lesser turns and especially a challenge for their Rok.

All Quiet on the Martian Front Saturday August 30th

 

The battlefield, American deployment zone in the lower left

Martian deployment zones, top left and lower right

Martian forces

American forces

We played the breakout scenario from the rulebook, with around 295 points a side. The Americans started in one corner and had to somehow make it to the opposite corner of the table. The game had a 3 turn minimum with a die roll after the third turn to see if the game comes to an abrupt end. It was a tight fit for the American forces but they needed to force a breakout and had to do it quickly so keeping troops in reserve was counter intuitive.

It was a close game with much carnage on both sides, the Martians lost 5 of 12 tripods while the Americans saw many of their tanks destroyed. The game did end after three turns, which were not nearly enough turns to have given the Americans a chance of winning. Ultimately the forces seemed to be fairly evenly weakened. As the Martian player said if this was a Martian victory, a few more like this and the invasion would be over.

More pictures follow...

A lucky find

 

So, I walked into a hobby store not expecting to find anything and instead I found a treasure trove of Plasticville buildings! Now I view thus as a bit of a mixed blessing, you see I already have plenty of buildings for my Pulp Alley games, but I also believe one should buy things like this when you see them as you are not likely to see them again. 

Now these are very nice models, well built, very clean and in good shape. They also are building that I have not seen before, how could I say no? 

Something old, very old; Some GW Man O War ships

 

Actually, a mix of Man O War and some of the ships from Mighty Empires.

I was inspired to dig these out of storage after watching a game of Galleys & Galleons run by a fellow named Morgan at a recent OMG meeting. The game looked fun enough(more interesting than I thought it would be) and digging these out was no problem. 

The game is by Nic Wright author of many, many games, most notably (to me at least) Fantastic Battles. GG does look to be more versatile than most other naval/fantasy naval games that I have encountered before. Like Fantastic Battles, GG allows you to customize your ships any way you se fit, but it does include sample ships to help you to understand what you are designing. Anyways more talk about the game after I have tried it out. 

The picture above shows nine pirate ships from Mighty Empires and some Empire ships from MoW. I am missing one of the Wolf ship hulls, but I do have the aft deck should it show up.

Boardgame night, not a good time for our cooperative efforts!

  

This was one of the two games that we played the other boardgame night. We played three games of Sentinels of the Multiverse and one game of Eldritch Horror. We only won one game, the third Sentinels game that we played that night. The first two game the villain was Warlord Voss who beat us soundly. In the second game my second hero got to finish her first turn before we lost. Our fourth hero never got  a chance to play.

Our third game had us go up against Akash Bhuta. She gave us quite a struggle until Fanatic got her 'special' cards. Akash had a lot of limbs in play when Fanatic managed to set up one of her ongoing cards that wiped out every non character card in play, inflicting 148 points of damage to Akash Bhuta 200 HTK. Then Fanatic followed up with 25 points of damage due to her reduced hit points vs her starting points. After that, the rest was easy.

Battlefleet Gothic Game day Saturday August 2nd

 

So, this was the first kick at the can for a couple of players while for others it had been years since last played (Including myself as ref) Essentially it was a cruiser lash with escorts thrown into the mix. It was Chaos vs Orks with both sides had roughly 1250 points, but no commanders or any other special items, it was a test game.

The Chaos forces were: A Murder cruiser, Archeron cruiser, Styx heavy cruiser, a squadron each of Idolators [5], Infidel [5] and Iconoclasts [6].

The Orks fielded two Kill Kroozers, two Terror ships, a squadron of Savage gun ships [5] a squadron of Ravager ships [6] and a squadron of Ram ships [4] 

The Orks did what Orks do, they charged ahead, but so did Chaos along the flanks. Chaos launched fighters & bombers.

OMG; The Warrant officers & Sergeants Mess meeting: Terminator Genisys (lots of pics)

   

The Terminators deploy

On Saturday July 19th I ran a game of Terminator Genisys for three player, all of them new to the game. The two sides placed a total of 6 objective markers on the table. To be victorious the winner must control more objectives than their opponent. 

Well that was quickly ignored right after the game started, instead it became a gritty battle to the death.  

 

Humans cautiously advance, while the robots rush forward.

 

 

Boardgame night August 24th

 

Two cooperative game played the other night (well actually 3 as we played Sentinels twice) The first game, Atlantis Rising went the way I expected, we lost, spectacularly! We have only played this game twice but neither of the games made me think that there was ever a chance for us to win. 

Twilight Imperium the original version

 

So, I left the room for a few minutes and when I returned this game was sitting on the table. But I decided to call the bluff and agreed to play the game. Now to be fair have has decided to try and select games that we have not played before, or at very least that we have not played for quite some time. I think this is the first edition and includes 3 expansions. 

Exceeded the 100K visitor count!

Well, after nine years I have finally reached 100,000+ visitors. 

I first need to thank all my friends in Russia, Ukraine and Singapore without whom it would have taken many more years to have had that many visitors. In the early years Russia and Ukraine were major 'supporters' of the site but have in recent years dropped off. They now sit at 5% and 1% respectively. Now Singapore is the number one all time visitor to the site at about 24% of the total hits. By comparison, Canada is 17%, the US 19% and the United Kingdom is at 4% (so roughly 40%). Rounding out the top seven is Hong Kong at 10%

It would be nice to think that all these visitors to the site are actually gamers and not just robots, but it seems unlikely that they are. 

On the other hand maybe 40-50% are truly gamers interested in some of the stuff that I have posted. So 50K hits by actual humans is not so bad a thing.

Thank you

Boardgame night

 

Well, the monsters beat us, first time this year. We went up against 4 of them, well 5 as the Monster and his Bride were 'one' of them. Dracula, The Mummy and The Creature from the Black Lagoon rounded out the group. We dealt with Drac quick enough, and the Monster and the Bride became more human, but the last two defied our efforts to defeat them. The Mummy was especially tough this time around.

The other game we played was Imperial Stars II. It is a fairly quick play 4X game. Some issues with the rules at first but got the hang of it quick enough. We did not have that much time, but we did get to have a big space battle that pretty much devastated both empires.