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.

Axis & Allies a surprise game to be played

 

A blast from the past, we pulled out a copy of A&A Europe the other night, pretty much on a dare. We had already played two games of Sentinels of the Multiverse and were casting about for another game to play when we settled on this one. Now, we have played a lot of games of the original version over the years, but not recently. We somehow went with this game thinking it might not be quite so long and as we were starting to play at around 10pm short is what we needed. 

Well it did move fast enough and strangely it was fun to play. It has different challenges than the original game and different features such as the Eastern oil fields and convoy spaces. Both of these were fine additions and shook up the regular flow of the game rather nicely. The Germans made one error at the start of the game that wound up having ramifications later on and made it very difficult to win the game. In the end we called it a night at around 1AM without a clear winner, but withe the understanding that is was going to be nigh impossible for the Germans to win.

Our game play of A&A the other night inspired me to pull out my copy of A&A and zombies. I set this up and played it solo to learn the rules. It is to say the least an odd entry into the A&A family of games. As I write this I am only a couple of turns into it and already there are a lot of zombies on the board and they are having an impact on the living nations.

Yellow zombie figures

Zombies can appear from special card draws, but the majority appear from dead infantry. If you have ever played the regular A&A game then you know that there are a lot of infantry in Russia and Germany.

Yes that is 7 zombies in West Russia. At the start of a players turn they draw a card and place zombies as indicated by the card, then they must roll 'zombie dice' for each zombie in a territory that contains their troops. There is only a 1 in 6 chance of killing something, but enough zombies in a space, say 7, may well disrupt your plans. As the living defender you do not get to fight back in this opening phase and should they kill any infantry those dead infantry will become zombies. 

When you attack a territory that has zombies in it, the defender will roll 1 'zombie die' per zombie in that space. Again there is a 1 in 6 chance that the attacker or defender will be bitten(killed). The dice in the game have replaced the 6 with a skull. Should you roll a skull in normal combat a zombie has been killed.

So the game is still being played and I have yet to decide if it is any good, but it does look to be much faster play than any other version that I have played. We shall see...

Cangames finds

 

So found some stuff from various vendors at Cangames. Apparently I am going to be working on a centaur themed Fantastic Battles army. I found these at Crossed Swords. Seventeen centaurs and 1 big monster/Minotaur/centaur thing. While I did not go looking for them, they were a fair price and I figure I do something with them. Apparently they are Bob Murch sculpts from the early 2000s. I already had some very old chaos centaurs painted a few years back. Combined this will be a force of 27 centaurs, roughly 12-13 companies and a couple of leaders. The big guy will be built as a dragon. The winded figure in the picture will be used for another project. 

Recent boardgame nights

 

So I have not been doing nothing but I admit I have not been posting nearly enough. I have been playing board games on a weekly basis, usually 1 or 2 per session. However we did manage to get  4 games done in one night. Three of the four games were quite fun, the fourth, Red Shirts has been relegated to my get rid of pile. Could have/should have been fun but was really, really not at all fun. Badly written rules did not help.

Just the other night we got in a second  playing of Eldritch Horror (and of Zeppelin attack!) Of the Call of Cthulhu games I do rather like this game. It is fast play which is a shock for a Cthulhu game, has a nice thematic play to it and was actually fun. 

The beast that did us both in, in our first game. Not a really tough beast but it hit us both at the wrong time!
 

Zeppelin Attack! is another fun, very quick play game. A deck building game focused on fleets of zeppelins dueling it out. While I lost both games it was still entertaining!