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scenario

Musings & Meta

Star Wars Armada – Solitaire

It has been more than 6 months since I posted anything. I’ve thought about this blog about once a month, but since I haven’t had an urge to paint anything, I haven’t posted anything. I’ve mostly been exercising, doing a little travelling, and trying to weave in seeing the latest nerd movie in between taking my daughter to the pool and circus and making 3 meals a day for the family. It’s a good life, but it doesn’t include any painting.

And the least of the reasons it doesn’t, is because I’ve been playing Star Wars Armada, both in a couple tournaments and on VASSAL. Which does not require any painting. 😛

However, in my regular fashion I had to find a project to build something in the game system, so I found a solo scenario and upon playing it a few times thought it was lacking in some features, and was to easy at 400 points. It had been designed before the game had been released, so of course it needed updating! I playtested it a bunch and wrote some rules and designed some cards, and am now releasing it into the wild.

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Here are some photos.

Mid-playtest, using an MSU list I had been playing against Duke and at a local tournament.

The station’s card, showing shields remaining and any critical hits applied as well as which section on the station it is.

 

One of the stations target priority and effect cards. Each turn the station gets one of these to tell you how to play it.

If you play it, shoot me a message with any ideas you have! Or feel free to fork it on GitHub!

Musings & Meta

Antares @ CHOP!

For the number of people talking about Antares locally, there still isn’t the representation I was expecting at our Sunday gaming club. I arrived late, around 1:30pm (we open at noon) and one guy was sitting with his army set out, and a table set out, waiting for an opponent. I looked around and saw 2 Antares people playing Blood Bowl, and 2 watching another game, one of whom I found out was waiting for his BB game! One issue we have with growing this game is that Blood Bowl is a commitment in our league, so if you fall behind on games you have to prioritize it over other games!

I got asked if I wanted to play BB, but I only brought Antares, so I played 3 games of it! 😀 This post won’t be a battle report, because I kind of hate (reading) them, but read on because it’ll turn into a mini-review of scenario #4 “Tunnels” from the Xilos supplement.

First Game

I played the poor guy sitting with his army out. The trouble is, that he’s a guy that others have been complaining about. Not that he’s a bad guy, but he plays this wicked fast Boromite army that’s in your face turn 2 and it’s quite daunting to have to deal with 2 rock rider units, the rock rider character, 3 units of lavamites and 3 X-launchers. The lavamites are quite good.

We played one of the scenarios I wrote for the scenario competition a while back (still no links, since maybe it’ll be published one day, that’d be nice!). It was the only scenario I didn’t get a chance to play test before I submitted it, mainly because I didn’t have time and I was more confident that it would be good. And oh man, was it ever.

I was trying to write a game that scored more like Malifaux, with VPs accruing at the end of every turn. This allows you to “lock in” points so you can forget about those points and focus on how to get other ones. It has a interesting “flowy” feeling to it, since you don’t have to be focused on the entire board at once. “This one, then this one, then this one” sort of feeling, if that makes any sense at all!

Until you get flanked by lavamites. Rapid sprinting at you, and rolling 1s for their Ag tests so they move 25″. I played a denied flank, leaving a Strike Squad dangling to bait him and trying to push more force up a single side, while he spread out evenly. It was on the verge of working, except that because his entire army is so fast and so strong there’s no flank to deny, it’s just a flank taken. He ran forward, grabbed the points and just kept running. The only thing that saved me from getting completely destroyed was on turn 3 about half his (Co 9) army failed a Command Check, then failed again to remove their Down orders!

I lost this one 6-4, but am super happy with the scenario!

Second Game, Xilos #4

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My dudes, cramped in a tunnel. The scenario description recommends 750, and I heartily agree!

I’ve had it as a goal of mine to play through every scenario in the Xilos book. I usually buy books like these and then read and forget them – “scenarios are hard”, “lets just line them up and smash each other”. After my stint in Malifaux, I’ve learned that scenarios are the best to play a wargame. The Xilos book has been a source of some very excellent ideas, but I’m afraid to say, some less good implementations.

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My opponent “broke through” first, so got to place a unit ahead…and then cramped the rest of his army. The caverns he’s standing on are the ones placed before the game starts.

The first scenario was so asymmetrical I think I would have been annoyed if it hadn’t been explained in the scenario summary that this was the case. Xilos #4 is one sided, and I don’t think it was intended to be so. It feels like the writer had a really good idea…and then wrote something different down. It’s a game where you place tunnel sections on the board, tunneling out your map as you go. Very cool idea and I was really excited to try it out, but the rules have this terrible conflux:

  • You must always place your first tunnel section at a right angle to the table edge.
  • You must always place subsequent tunnel sections heading directly towards the table center line (used in one part of the rules) or “your target”. (a phrase used in another part of the the rules without explanation of what my target might be?).

When you combine these two, if you both don’t place your first tunnel section directly in line with the initial canerns, you will very likely, never meet. (when you place a tunnel, roll a D10, if you roll a 10 you can place a cavern that can be placed to adjust your tunnel course slightly). If you do place your tunnel section directly inline with your opponent, I think you end up with a very uninteresting game with a long tunnel where only 1 unit from each side can shoot at anything.

This game my opponent placed in line with the existing tunnels and I placed off-center to see what would happen. It wasn’t until turn 6 (out of 8) that I rolled a 10 and managed to place a connecting piece that the game got any sort of interesting. He almost won without interacting with me at all, but we got to turn 8 and he won 3-2.

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We finally met. If he’d sprinted at this point, across into the far cavern, he’d have auto-won.

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The state of the game at this point. We ended up “just moving” most of our armies, without drawing dice because everything at the back couldn’t do anything but keep up. Saved a lot of time!

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I moved into the battleground cavern to block his movement and shot up his guys a lot.

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Don’t cross the streams!

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The end. I couldn’t run into the left-most cavern in this photo to contest it and tie the game up. He won 3-2.

Third Game, Xilos #4

We re-racked and tried again with a small rules variation – you can place a tunnel section at any right angle – so you can choose to change course as you wish.

This was much more interesting. We both placed our initial sections off-center from the middle, but only slightly so that a single tunnel section could be used to break into the main cavern whenever we wanted. I pushed to 2/3s of the way up, and he pushed to half way and that was the winning move for me. I managed to bottleneck him in his single line and he didn’t have time to break in again while I sprinted to the far end of the cavern to win automatically 4-0.

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I broke in at two points, allowing me to Ambush with the left-most squad and keep his army pinned in his tunnel. I sprinted a squad across the biggest cavern to hold 4 at once and auto-win.

Not a Fourth Game

We thought about other variations that could work to make this more interesting. I initially wanted to be able to use Orders dice to place another tunnel section during your turn, but since the game was so cramped and movement-heavy already, I worried that spending any dice not moving would bog the game down.

My opponent suggested that you could put D3 pins on a unit to place another section. This was an interesting idea that I hadn’t considered,  your troops getting tired from digging so much! In my Antares scenario designs I haven’t thought about pins as a “resource”, and I’m super happy that he made me think about them that way!

What I wanted was to be able to build more interesting tunnels – with the current rules it looks like the optimal placement is two off-center lines that could break in at any point, giving you flexibility but also protection. But that you had to break in at the 2/3s mark no matter what, in order to prevent your opponent from stealing the game like I did. If you place additional sections during your turn, you could push hard in one direction and still be able to defend if you needed to.

 

And that’s about it!

Musings & Meta

Playing Malifaux

It’s been a busy summer, and it’s been hard to get time to play games (and when I am playing games, I’m playing Blood Bowl as I’m in a league that has 2 scheduled games a month!). But a good friend is moving across Canada shortly, and he wanted to get some games in before he left forever.

We tend to play 3 player, since there are 3 of us in this group, so I’ve gotten inventive about writing multiplayer scenarios at the end I’ll share the scenario we used.

Arcanists vs Arcanists vs Resurrectionists

Arcanists #1 (me!)

  • Rasputina, with Armor of December and Arcane Reservoir. I originally had her with Imbued Energies, but decided I wanted more cards. Armor of December was an inspired choice, and I think it was the difference between losing miserably and winning.
  • Ice Golem. I’d originally planned to take the new murderspider/Arcane Emissary, but decided to go with the Ice Golem since it was finished and I didn’t want to start painting a new project…
  • December Acolyte. I wanted 2 of them…but again, with the not starting new projects. I took Frame for Murder on this guy because he always dies. And I figured 2 points was good.
  • 2xIce Gamin
  • Silent One. This model was unpainted…because of not …starting new projects!

Arcanists #2 (Derrick)

  • Marcus, with Trail of the Gods and Feral Instinct.
  • Myranda with Imbued Energies. Derrick ended up tossing this card for Fast, instead of sac’ing Myranda and getting 4 cards!
  • Rogue Necro
  • Slate Ridge Mauler. Derrick knows this is a sub-optimal model, but he took it because he’d been told to handicap himself a bit.
  • Canine Remains. For Frame for Murder…

Resurrectionists (Duke)

  • Seamus, with Red Chapel Killer
  • Sybelle
  • Copycat Killer
  • 3x Belle

Duke pretty much takes the same list every time. It worked out well for him this time! Here’s a photo to break up this text. 🙂

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Marcus ran at me in the first turn and Raspy and the Ice Golem tanked him for 3 turns.

Scenario

The scenario was Mistaken Identity, which I wrote originally for Breaching the Faux. I was pretty happy with how it looked, but I hadn’t had time to playtest it.

There is a 30mm marker in the middle of the table. Any player gets 2VP if they end the game with the marker on one of their models stat cards, and they gain it by taking (1) Interact Actions. If the model dies, it’s placed into base contact before removing the model. If you have 2 models within 3″ of the model with the marker at the end of the game, gain 1VP.

Randomly deal each player an Ace, making sure the Tome is in the pile. The Tome player gets 2VP at the end of the game if no one has seen their Ace. The other players get 1VP if they’ve seen the Tome players card. Whenever you kill a model, flip a card and on a 10+ you get to see the card of the owner of the model.

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The necro has just killed Bette Noire, and the Bear is about to pick up the Arcane Heart marker.

The Game

Marcus ran at me quickly, I think assuming that he could take me out and deal with Seamus later. Seamus spread out to get Line in the Sand. I…tanked Marcus and tried to kill him while Myranda healed him. I took Frame for Murder (successfully getting the Acolyte killed by Sybelle) and Make Them Suffer. Suffer was harder – I kept killing Minions without Raspy killing them! Marcus lost most of his models around Turn 4. He forced me to put most of my forces into him, then split up a bit and when Seamus came in with his models he lost almost everything.

The Bear picked up the Marker, then died and dropped it, allowing Seamus to pop in and pick it up and then Back Alley out to the far side of the board where he’d be safe with his 2VPs and preventing others from getting 1VP from being close to him.

In the end, I won with 6VP, Duke got second with 5VP and Derrick got 3VPs.

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A sweet photo of the Breaching the Faux deck made this year. I bought about 20 of these to give away at a future tournament. If only I had time to organize such a thing…

Scenario?

After playing it, I felt that the Tomes player 2VP were too swingy, either getting 2VP easily or requiring them to play defensively to keep it. I also thought that the “end the game within” 1VP was too difficult.

I changed:

  • “May” flip. Forcing someone to flip after they’d already seen the players card was weird.
  • 10+ -> 9+. Just making it a little easier to get. I also considered allowing people to cheat the flip to give it a little less randomness. I think if you can cheat it, I’d put it back at 10+ or even 11+.
  • 1VP for the Tomes player if your card is unrevealed to at least 1 other player. This maintains the “secrets from other players” aspect I really like, but makes it a little less swingy. I imagined a 4 player game being difficult to lose this point.
  • I moved that 1VP so that everyone is trying to stand near the Arcane Heart model. It’s just nice to bring people together. 🙂

Here’s the updated version.

 

Musings & Meta

Space Hulk Scenario

Not actually a painting-related post, but it’s art of a kind, so I post it.

Cleaning up my desktop this morning in preparation for downloading Heart of the Swarm (yay!) (there’s a lot of movies on my desktop…) and I came across a Space Hulk scenario that I’d designed for a GW contest back in the day. I put a damned lot of effort into this scenario, from counting tiles to ensure that each movement was possible, but only barely out of reach from the Genestealers, to taking photos of the desired setup and cropping them onto a grid-like background.

The GW in question gave me a Blood Angels book for my effort, and I was the only person who entered. >.>

This is particularly amusing, since I just sold my copy of Space Hulk 2 weeks ago. It’s not a great game, with very little tactical depth and the only redeeming feature it had was that it was absolutely gorgeous.

Here’s a link to the scenario if you want to check it out!