Opening up Aristeia!, Blood Bowl, and Necromunda for the very first time!

Greetings fans of the hobby and welcome back to your lovely afternoon reading time!  It’s been the start of weather changes here and that means priming and painting galore for many!  It also heralds the coming of new games and that’s what we are here today to talk about, new stuff!  Not like a GenCon haul or anything but I’ve been eyeing a couple of games lately and so I decided to not only purchase them but also go over my initial impressions of just opening the box.  I’m sure you’ve seen many of these games and their respective unboxings but this is from the viewpoint a guy who a) hasn’t seen any of those unboxings so I have no idea what’s in them and b) I’ve not done much research on the games in terms of how they are played.  So let’s get to it!

The three games I’ve been eyeing are Aristeia!, Blood Bowl, and Necromunda.  I know what these games are on a surface level and so I’m not completely clueless about these games.  I’ve never played a game of any of the three except for a brief trial on the Blood Bowl PC version.  Since I had no idea what I was doing, however, I quickly moved on. With the recent revamping done by Games Workshop with their respective games and some of the good things, I have heard about Aristeia! I decided that it is time to dive in and just grab the 2 player boxes to check things out.  The first box I opened was Aristeia!

So my initial impression was that the contents were packed in neatly but the first thing I saw was a guide to the rules, a quick How to Play, followed with some large booklet about the game in the Infinity universe.  Next came the board, some weird angular things which ended up being team organizer spaces, followed by the rest of the box contents.  The miniatures came pre-assembled and in their own space along with a couple token sheets.  Overall it was easy to find everything and it is one of the few times where putting everything back was a breeze. 

Miniature quality was also good and even though I heard it was PVC I was still overall impressed.  Only a couple minor quirks like the big panda dude’s staff was bent as was the old man’s revolver.  I felt like I could with minimal effort starting playing this game from the get-go.  Everything was user/new player friendly and neatly organized so there wasn’t a lot of fuss about trying to hunt down what I might need to start playing.

Blood Bowl was opened up next and the first thing I saw was the miniatures and with it some gaming aids I can presume.  Now I have no idea what the tokens/ruler thingy is used for so I had to dig a little bit past the plastic frames to start locating the board and rules.  The models seem pretty easy to put together, I’m not sure if that’s how the whole BB range is but the simple plug-and-play type of models means that for a new player assembly isn’t as intimidating.  If you didn’t want to paint the models up they were in bright green and blue respectively so that there would be little confusion at a glance as to who was part of which team.  Beyond the models, there was a cardboard insert that had some info for Blood Bowl as a community/hobby/game.

Beyond that insert, I found the board and the rulebook, as well as some other cardboard pieces which I guess, is for the team managers?  As well as some cards but right now I have no idea what they are meant for.  The board and rules appear high quality and the dual-sided nature of the board meant some variety for gaming.  Everything was neatly packed albeit without any organizational aids but that meant putting things back meant that I would have to figure out myself how to reorganize it.  I felt like within an hour I could have the models clipped off and start to play at the bare minimum level (i.e. unpainted).  Now for the rules themselves, I have no idea but the rulebook didn’t seem too thick so I figure as a newbie it can’t be that bad to pick up on them and play a game.

Finally, I opened up Necromunda and I was a little overwhelmed if I could be honest.  This is not a new player friendly set I can tell you that much.  I closed the box and asked my wife to take a look inside to see her reaction (she is quite a new player type gamer) and her reaction was a mix of “oh geez” and “yeah I don’t want to touch this.”  The sprues for the models was a true GW model kit and the level of details on the parts are standard quality.  This is not an easy peasy lemon squeezy kind of assembly though, it is full hobbyist level if you ask me.  I’m excited to assemble the gangers but if I was brand new to the hobby I would be a little overwhelmed.  I also see they brought back the templates much to my delight (I miss those templates!) and they included some nice looking wall terrain as well.

Past the kits, the cardboard insert was a giant assembly guide for the models if that is any indication of what kind of models these are.  Beyond that, the rest of the box was neatly assembled like Blood Bowl with a nice quality cardboard board, token sheet, rulebook, dice, and cards.  The rulebook was a big larger than the BB one and a bit thicker but a casual glance through reassured me in that a good chunk of the contents were lore-based instead of rule heavy.  Still, the quality of the game appears to be GW standard in terms of what I paid for, so I am excited to see how it plays.  As far as prep work to get playing it definitely feels like I’ll need some time before it’ll be ready to play.  With all of the options on the sprues, I get the feeling that the gangers will need some forethought in equipment and/or load-outs before putting them together.  So I think they could be ready after a day or so of assembly and planning.

I thought it was interesting that the order in which I opened the boxes is the same order I would place the games in order of new player friendliness.  Aristeia! was definitely the easiest of the three to get started but I also feel like it’s less of a wargame/hobby than a board game so there is probably that element to consider.  Blood Bowl certainly has the hobby element to it but the impression I got overall was that it is in that spot of being a board-game and a hobby and so it had elements from both sides of the coin.  Necromunda was on the other side of the spectrum and despite the board that it came with, this is definitely not a board game but part of a bigger hobby.  I’ve heard that in the first expansion book the rules provide a means to play Necromunda without a board and into the 3D, so that reinforces my opinion.

So there we have it!  I enjoyed letting myself get an initial impression from these games since I had the opportunity to open three new games where I have NO experience with them outside of acknowledging their existence.  I’m looking forward to trying these games out and putting together the models, or in Aristeia!’s case painting them, and I’m already thinking of color schemes and backstories for the gangs.  Maybe I’ll do a Slaaneshi Escher cult gang…  Anyways until next time folks enjoy yourselves in the hobby and may your dice favor your armor saves!

A Time for Batreps Part 2

All righty folks and welcome back to another post by yours truly, I certainly hope your day is going well and you are enjoying yourselves.  We’re following up on last batrep post with another one, except this time we are going to try and cover 3 games all in this post!  Truthfully it’s because I sort of…maybe…didn’t take as many pictures as I had before?  Woops.  Anyways here we go with the next game we played, Guild Ball!  Sadly I took fewer pictures as we played, a bad habit of mine, and so the picture quantity and content is limited.  My apologies.

So starting the game off Wells wanted to try a different guild this time around and settled on the Mortician’s Guild versus me playing as the Alchemists.  Our rosters were:

1.       Obulus

2.       Dirge

3.       Cosset

4.       Ghast

5.       Mist

6.       Silence

1.       Smoke

2.       Flask

3.       Katalyst1

4.       Compound

5.       Vitriol

6.       Calculus

I felt bad for Wells because my friend here plays 40k a lot, but doesn’t get much exposure to other games and so I could tell he was having a hard time.  Throw on top of that a new team, especially one as nuanced as the Mortician’s, and it was just hard for the guy.  I can’t say for certain if he felt this way but the way he was playing suggested that he initially went defensive because he wasn’t sure of what his team could do.  Also, the terrain was randomly generated (by tossing the 2D terrain like pancakes from like a foot away lol) and so it was hard for him to maneuver around without taking penalties.  I’d say about mid-game the gears were turning again for Wells mechanically (also he had an overnight break to read about his team) and he started to work on making plays but at this point, it was too late.  The Alchemists had strong board control, kept slowly ticking away at his health with condition damage, and the scoring potential was too strong.

Right at the start of turn 2-3

In the end, the game was 13 to 3, with the Alchemists scoring 2 goals and 3 KO’s (one was the mascot).  Smoke is a fun captain I have to say with her Cloud Jumper ability and AoE manipulation.  Wells and I talked about the game afterward and his early game hesitancy really hurt his chances in the later phases.  The lack of team knowledge definitely hurt him as well and coming from a Fisherman’s coach straight into Mortician’s with no pre-knowledge was not going to be easy.  We also talked a bit about how some of his player use was sub-optimal and if he decided to try Mortician’s again what he could have done differently, for example, he rarely used Ghast except to shuffle around the board a bit when his playbook is pretty solid for damage and some board control.  I think next time I’ll see either the Fish back on the field or perhaps this new Falconer’s minor guild that might be interesting to Wells (dude loves birds).

Vitriol on the right went and scored while the middle was jammed up

Our next game was Infinity and I’m not going to lie I was really excited about this game.  I’ve been feeling the Infinity itch lately with some of the new models being published (the new JSA force is so goooood) and so Wells agreed to try it out.  We had a beginner style game at GenCon last year and he enjoyed it and so we decided to do “intermediate rules.”  This was like a style that had more than the basics but wasn’t full blown Infinity either, for example TO camouflage was the -6 to hit a penalty but didn’t have the marker/deployment shenanigans.  Our lists were 300 points and made up of the models from Operation Icestorm and Beyond OIS.  Wells went with PanO and I went with Nomads.  We settled on the scenario Supremacy from the core rulebook and because we were using starter box models/lists we decided everyone would be a “specialist troop” but in a generalized sense so they didn’t get any special abilities apart from if they were an actual specialist.  Also, we didn’t play with Command Tokens because we’re still acclimating to this game.

Not Infinity, but Smoke on the top left scored the last goal of the game

So I won the initial roll and chose deployment zones and order and let me tell you this was my crucial mistake.  I chose a bad zone and I paid for it dearly.  This game was in Wells’ hands from the beginning and it was like shooting fish in a barrel for him.  My active turn 1 had my Spekter, Intruder, and my Kriza Borac all go unconscious because of his sniper Nisse.  Oh man, this was going to be rough.  Then my Reverend Healer acted as if she was a bad anime trope as an MMO healer and ended up killing off the Kriza with a natural 20 on her Doctor roll.  At this point, I lost a significant chunk of my firepower and it just went downhill from there.  My Mobile Brigada Lt. was able to move up along a building edge and take out the Nisse before being able to move in and secure a computer for 1 point.  On Wells’ active turn it was just a slaughterfest.  He jumped his Akhali out of LoS from anyone, moved him up, and took computers for his ever-increasing score.  He moved his Father-Knight up from out of cover and was able to take out my Lt. and hold the zone.  Turn 2 and 3 there wasn’t a whole lot of interesting action, as Wells bagged the game early on with his sniper.  So the score ended up being 9 to 1 with PanO walking away from this fight with barely a scratch.  Rough game but it taught me many lessons about Infinity in general and it’s still a game I very much enjoy, even when I am dying by the droves.

Do you see the Spekter and Intruder down for the count?  The peeking Kriza in the bottom left was down too!

Our final game of his trip was a match of Dark Age and we played a 1000 point match where I made a couple lists I had been using (not that they are super-efficient or anything since I’m still newish to the game also) and we played Kukulkani versus Horde Skaard, Wells and myself respectively.  The scenario was Ancient and Bloody Wasteland where the goal was to kill each other dead.  You gained a VP per 100 points (rounded up by to the nearest 50) killed off and whatever Secondary Objective VPs gained.  Think Secondary Objectives like the Tactical Objectives from 40k, randomly drawn objectives but with the caveat that you can tailor the deck (as long as you have at least 16 cards) with whichever cards you think you can get that game.

I’d like to spend a lot of time on this game as Dark Age is a pretty solid game overall.  I only took one picture however and Wells having only played 2 games before was not prepared with knowledge to know how to best use his guys.  As a result it was a pretty harsh game for him as he struggled with a lot of the nuanced rules that K3 have and as much as I tried to help remember which rules he had, there was only so much that could be done.  The other part was not knowing how to use the models to the best of their abilities.  I give Wells credit it though he started to piece some things together pretty quickly and started using squad-links and combos here and there.  The nature of Dark Age is that it’s a brutal game and by the time the gears were turning, the sand was stained deeply with Kukulkani blood and littered with crystal skulls.  The game ended with a big advantage to the Skaard with a total of 13 to 3 VPs.  The Warhead gave a lot of damage out that, at times, was absolutely terrifying.  When down to only 1 hp that lummox hits with a PW of 14, and if you happen to be prone that’s x2!  For those unfamiliar with Dark Age mechanics when you hit someone they then make an armor check where you take your armor value and subtract the attack’s PW.  In a game where you are rolling low that means even if you had the highest armor value of 20 you’d still only be able to avoid a hit like that on a 6 or lower, and if there’s a damage multiplier then you roll that many dice and need to save on ALL of them to not take a wound.  Oh yeah, he was nasty.

How to ensure that no one else plays with you

So overall despite the beatdown Wells seemed to have enjoyed Dark Age and my impression was that with more games for experience and perhaps a different force then it would have definitely been a different game.  I think the big difference was that K3 is a wonky force in my opinion and the learning curve, while not too steep, does require some practice games in before it starts to click.  There were a lot of little rules here and there that ended up making a big difference and I think once taken into consideration I think our future games will be vastly different. 

Well, that’s it for gaming my fellow wargamers and I hope you enjoyed the batreps despite the lack of pictures and further details.  We pretty much played a game a day and so the details started to get hazy at times and the longer I play the more likely it is I forget to take some snaps.  Anyways I hope you’re enjoying your hobby and time and until next time have a fun game and may your dice be kind!

A Time for Batreps Part 1

Good morning fellow wargamers and welcome to today’s post, hopefully for your reading enjoyment!  It was relatively quiet for the hobby lately and then my good friend Wells came down to visit.  Next thing I know I’m playing a game daily with the guy and having to flex some game muscles I haven’t in a while.  It was a great time and I was able to catch up on some games and relax during a rough work week.  So I wanted to share my battle reports with you all on the 4 games we played!  Just like last time I can’t recall all the details because of old man brain but I will share my impressions and some cool moments, and with that let’s begin with part one of a two-part post!

So our first game was the venerable and well known Warhammer 40k and Wells brought his Daemons of the great sorcerer himself, Tzeentch (mono-god build)!  This time he faced the growing legions of the new Death Guard, the mortal vessels of his arch-nemesis Nurgle.  We played 2000 points and after rolling for the mission and deployment we played Contact Lost and deployed in corners (one of my favorite deployments to be honest).  If you’re not familiar with Contact Lost the gist of the mission was that you gained your Tactical Objectives by holding the objectives and could have up to 6 at any time, so the game was like double objective focused.  Objective squared. 

End of my turn 1

Let me tell you about this game.  Daemons of Tzeentch were rough to handle at first.  I forgot a couple key points about them such as not caring about your AP at all and they shoot…A LOT.  A host of 30 Daemons was cheaper than my 7 Plague Marines.  The first turn didn’t have a lot of happenings going on other than some movement towards the objectives and hopefully better positioning for the next turn.  Once Wells explained how his Pink Horrors could fire 90 shots at full strength at S4 with +1 to wound it was pretty clear that I needed to get stuck in and fast.  However, since I play Death Guard fast was not really my strength so casualties were expected even with my unholy resilience.  I split my force to try and cover two sides of the board and capture as many objectives as I can, and Wells equally split his force but had the upper hand in mobility, numbers, and firepower.  It became quickly apparent just how difficult it would be to budge his daemons from any point on the field and suitably for the Death Guard it became a war of attrition.

The (in)famous Death Guard Champion

Long story short (I have 3 more games to cover!) I barely won 12 to 11 and that was due to Wells having some poor luck with his d3 objectives and never being able to score more than 1 point for those.  We had some good moments though.  Wells managed to Treason of Tzeentch my daemon prince and subsequently charged one of my Helbrutes taking it from a healthy untouched to nearly exploding with 2 wounds left.  Wells took out one of my Rhinos near his Lord of Change causing it to explode for a nice 5 mortal wounds.  The Noxious Blightbringer, a model I previously held little care for, was instrumental in my Plague Marines being able to cut through 30 Pink Horrors with relative ease (I gave him the Dolorous Knell for that sweet 2 dice on LD checks and pick the highest, with a nice -2 LD penalty as well).  Wells was able to pick apart my backline units like the Predator and Helbrutes with his Burning Chariots and he was able to secure objectives easily as he needed to, as his blobs kept my line troopers busy by sheer numbers.  My MVP of the game, however, was a Plague Marine champion who single-handedly charged into a blob of 23+ Pink Horrors, and managed to survive the overwatch fire to go on survive 8 rounds of melee combat ALONE before Typhus waddled in to help.  Then he rolled up on an objective to score the last point I needed to win the game, what a trooper! Wells was kind enough to give me a spare model he had so I gave him a little trophy, some battle damage, and will be giving him a name for his honorable service to Nurgle.

Still holding strong for Nurgle!

Survived and took an objective, mah man!

Like I said it was a rough game for me as I took models that eventually did very little than what I expected or their gear wasn’t that great against daemons.  Instead of Blight Launchers, I should have gone with the Plaguespewers for the auto-hit d6’s to spread the wounds on his units, as the higher AP didn’t matter squat to his models.  I also lacked a lot of multi-wound damage dealers so when faced with his bigger stuff (i.e. Burning Chariots, Soul Grinder, and the Lord of Change) my options were limited and scarce.  Late game I had nothing that could threaten his Lord of Change and if Wells had better dice rolls for his psychic powers overall (he still had some solid rolls don’t get me wrong) things might have been very different when those mortal wounds start flowing in.  As a side note, I still do not like using Poxwalkers as a unit and I am still not a fan of their models so I think for future games I will forgo them in favor of Plaguebearers.  I’ve heard on some sites about the Poxwalker infinity circuit or whatever, but truthfully screw that noise and stay on the shelf.  I mean the Plaguebearers are comparatively T4 with ++5 and Disgustingly Resilient with better attacks, and only at a slightly higher cost, it makes it kind of hard to NOT take them over the zambos.  Also I wouldn’t have put forth points into power fists unless I knew that squad was going to try and tackle these bigger targets, but with the prolific number of ++4 saves rolling around it was hard to land some of that much needed damage and so maybe they had a place and I just didn’t use them correctly. 

With a new Tzeentch trophy

Overall it was a good game and we both had a lot of fun but I felt that Wells should have won by all rights.  If he had some better VP dice rolls he would have definitely come out of this victorious.  As for me, I think I’ve learned a lesson about making sure you have the right tools for the job in this edition.  I know I’ve said that before and I truly believe it, but for some reason this game I went potato and didn’t consider it more carefully.  I’d like to think I am usually decent at doing that but perhaps I need more exposure to different armies to be better at that skill.  Ah well!  There is always a next time, and speaking of next times we’ll go over part 2 of the batrep summaries.  Until then happy gaming and hobbying folks!