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
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.
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.
We finally met. If he’d sprinted at this point, across into the far cavern, he’d have auto-won.
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!
I moved into the battleground cavern to block his movement and shot up his guys a lot.
Don’t cross the streams!
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.
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!
