Moon Colony Bloodbath solo play

 

So, we played three games of this last night, lasted until around 1 AM (we started late) so naturally I had a go at it this morning solo. Last night of the three games I played I won, tied and lost, so you know pretty even competition. In the solo game you are striving to get the 13th event card or as close as you can get to it. So far in our two player games we have yet to make it to that card, but we have been close. In today's solo play I made it to the 9th, 10th and in the last game the 11th event card. 

While there is of course a lot of randomness to the game, I feel I also made a few critical mistakes. I failed to restock my blood banks that would have staved off some colonist casualties. There were other errors, but they were mostly in hindsight. It is a game of choices and while they may seem sensible at the time sometimes, well, they just don't work out, and maybe some colonist suffer that might not have suffered had you chosen a different path.

A nice touch for solo playing is the extra starting card the you add to the deck.

It is a fine example of the sense of humour of the game creators.

Again this is a great game whether played solo or with others. There is humour in the 'frustration' of watching your plans, and colonists, sucked into the void, crushed by robots, irradiated by reactor leaks, starve to death etc etc.

New arrivals

 

So a few things arrived this week and one item was found at a flea market.

First arrival is this new paint shaker. This is a new device that is hands free, which is the main appeal. Saw it on Painting Panzers and it looked good. The big question is, is it actually any good? I have not yet tested it as I am going through funk phase and not interested in painting (also my painting table is a mess) 

It is an adjustable hands free unit.

I have been looking at Moon Colony Bloodbath for a while now. The art work drew me in first then the concept. Intrigued I watch a review by Shut Up & Sit Down and that was it, I needed the game. So here it is all ready to play.

We gave it a proper test and after the first try, played two more games right away. It is more fun than it should be, all your plans and attempts to settle the moon are all for nought as disasters and robots will inevitably destroy your colony. Great fun!

Dragons Down board game

 

So, Dragons Down is a really long game to play. We started around 8pm and finished up some time after 1 AM. Yet in its way it was a fun enough game. We played scenario 4 which saw us declare at the start of the game what we hoped to achieve, gold, fame, spells and or epic treasures. It reminded me of the old careers board game. 

So we dealt out the tiles and took turns laying them out to create our board. My opponent wound up with all three of the civilization tiles, which I thought was something of an advantage, but in the end it was only sort of an advantage. Take a look at the board, note how we managed to divide the board making it difficult to move east west. I started the game in the lower left tile, where the monster is in the picture. It might be tough to see, but if you can expand the image you will see that I can only advance on the six tiles to the left, then I hit a dead end in the caves to the far left. I could not reach the actual civilization in the civilization tiles even though I could at least touch the Sanctuary tile. To go north or east I would have to go south and slowly trudge through the mountain tiles! I chose not to do that. My opponent had far more tles that he could travel through and explore, many options. Thankfully I had luck on my side.

My hero

My opponent

So, while I did not have any easily accessible civilization tiles I did get lucky with sites.  At one point my opponent revealed a site, but because of the board layout he was unable to explore it, but I was able to and did. I also got lucky by finding two sites in one tile, with another right next door. This led to a lot of looting, which helped with my pregame victory conditions, as did the fame in actually locating these sites.

He did manage to get close to my hero, but this also meant that he was too far away to get back to civilization before the end of the game

I ran into some challenges, in this case 13 enemies ganged up on me, eight Orcs and 5 juvenile dragons!

For maybe half of the game I had two curses on me courtesy of two epic treasures.. One prevented me from sneaking or going on alert, this made it harder to hide from monsters.  The other curse was a monster magnet, that meant if any monsters were rolled for any surrounding tile, I would see those monster show up in my tile. What a revolting development that was.

In the end I was able to dodge (hide) from most of the encounters, but I did fight two epic battles that drained me a lot. Thankfully I had enough wounds/cubes to absorb most of the damage, but it was close. Fortunately I was able to retreat from the enemies to lick my wounds, and spent three turns just healing and hoping for no wandering monsters to find me, they did not.

So in the end, while my opponent suffered a penalty I was able to touch part of a civilization tile and not take any penalty when I retired. In the end it was all the treasure sites that gave me the victory. Out of the four points that we had to spend before the start of the  game I had put two in fame and two in epic treasures. I never did get any more money nor spend any money than what I started with. As for spells I found three near the end and never had a chance o learn any of them. 

Final Girl, finally played!

 

So, I have had this game for a few months now, even had it all set up, but just never got around to playing it, until now...

Final Girl Camp Happy Trails!

This works out to be a fine solitaire game with plenty of potential variety, be it within the scenario or due to there being many add on scenarios. Camp happy trails is a riff on the Friday the 13th movies, you are the hero trying to defeat the homicidal villain and safe some campers.

Well into the game, many campers have been killed by Hans, but I have saved 5 of them! Hans is the red meeple, I am the purple one.

The game presents you with many decisions to make. You can perform actions based on cards in hand, but fail to many actions and you will run out of time, if you run out of time you will be hampered in getting actions for your next turn. Also what do you do in a turn, do you save campers, gather equipment and weapons to counter the villain do you combat Hans or try to elude him? However you can rarely if ever do all the things that you want to. meanwhile Hans may move and or attack the campers or, gasp, you!

It took me some time before I actively attacked Hans.

After I took the fight to Hans.

Horror level low, well armed but outclassed by Hans. I was reduced to 9 health and when flipped the token indicated no extra life, I was dead, but Hans was reduced to 2 health!

It was a tough but fair game. I had my chances but also dealt a tough blow at the start of the game. The initial event forced me to only be able to rescue one camper at a time, this put quite the crimp in my plans.

I plan to try this adventure out again real soon before trying out some of the other movies.

Midgard Heroic battles, Undead vs Lizardmen August 23rd

 

I played host to two mighty armies, Jeff's Undead vs Braden Lizards. It was a 300 point game with four players. We had some challenges in the first game, an error by the undead player saw his forces slaughtered due to a mistake about how much damage they could take.

So, a reset and a second game...