Good tidings fellow wargamers and welcome to part 2 of the Memorial Day batreps! I hope you all have been doing well and your hobby experiences have been solid and fruitful! We’re continuing from our previous post and moving forward with the other 2 reports. Just as before we’re looking at a table-top game and a board game as we ended up getting in 2 more games before Wells had to leave. For this, we are going to look at our game with Guild Ball and we tried out Aristeia for the first time as well. Let’s hop right on in!
Starting with Guild Ball, Wells wanted to try something a little different. Typically he has been playing with his Fisherman’s Guild but having little success, which he and I have talked about the possibility that there might be a dissonance between his playstyle and the Fish’s. This time he brought down his S2 Hunter’s Guild group while I decided to also experiment with a different guild and went with a blend of models from the Brewer’s Guild. I’ve had the guild for a while now but this would be the first time I’ve played them so suffice to say I had a limited idea of what I was doing.
Here are our lineups:
Hunters
- · Theron
- · Fahad
- · Egret
- · Zarola
- · Hearne
- · Jaecar
Brewers
- · Esters
- · Quaff
- · Pint Pot
- · Spigot (V)
- · Stave
- · Stoker
Wells won the roll off and was the receiving team, I chose to have Spigot go for the kick and off we started! First turn had some action going on in the form of trading ranged attacks. Wells had Theron and Egret pop off a couple of shots including a Flurry from Egret, tossing 2 DMG and Poison all over, while I had Esters subsequently clear off the conditions with her Heroic Play and tossing out some Blasted Earth AoE’s. Little did I know until turn 3ish that most of the Hunters ignore rough terrain anyways so all it was effective for was the 2 DMG. Pint Pot and Spigot went up the right side with Stave and Stoke going to the left. Stave’s primary role this game was tossing out the Lob Barrel to hopefully get enemies into better charging positions. Wells had an early charge with Zarola and Fahad, as he tossed Midnight Offering on Fahad who then charged Spigot for free totaling a nice 16” move this turn, ouch!
Next turn I had Spigot, Pint Pot, Quaff, and Esters buff each other up and took out Fahad for an over-committed series of actions, while Wells had Egret continue her trend of tossing out Flurry to my grouped up brawlers. Esters managed to toss out a Fire Blast, catching a few of the Hunters on fire, which I then attempted to move them into better positioning with Stave’s Explosive Brew (i.e. Lob Barrel with the heroic play for 2 DMG), but failing to move the people I needed. I wanted to try and get Stoker into the fight and take advantage of his Burning Passion character trait, but I had Zarola and Hearne as potential charge targets. Wells had Zarola pick up the ball earlier and so I wanted to get the ball from her but without 2” reach and her Unpredictable Movement I settled on charging into Hearne as a Human Ball of Fire. All this effort and I barely touched Hearne, so it was a moot effort on my part.
So next turn I won the initiative and I had Stave go first so that I could Lob Barrel right in the middle of the Hunter pack, with the hopes of knocking Zarola down to scatter the ball. A successful barrel later and Zarola lost grip of the ball, which I subsequently picked up and through a series of maneuvers I was able to give the ball to Spigot. Wells attempted to slow down Spigot by hitting him with a Snare condition via Jaecar’s pit trap, but with him having the ball and Ester singing a sweet song of “hurry your ass up Speed” I had a solid 10” Jog, with a healthy 8” kick. Combined together and I had that goal threat easily and ended up scoring a goal! Ayyyyyyyy! In this turn, Wells managed to knock out Quaff and in a revenge for scoring the goal Spigot went down as well, with the score now 5 to 3.
Not to be outdone by the Hunters, I ended up taking out Theron and Egret in the following turn with a combination of Pint Pot’s “drunken 6-pack gone anger” and Stave knocking people down left and right. Only needing 1 hit to knock someone down is pretty strong if you ask me, especially when you need that extra -1 to their DEF. Before his fall though Wells had Theron toss up a forest behind my lines, which he subsequently activated Hearne and through Zarola’s Midnight Offering he grabbed the ball from the return kick, teleported into a forest, and then moved within Tap-In range of the goal post for a goal to be made for the Hunter! Goooooooaaaaaaaaal! Now the score was a close 9 to 7 favoring the Brewers, but I didn’t have many players at decent health and so it was looking rather precarious for me. I had the return kick favor my left side as I planned on bringing Spigot into the side the next turn.
The best way I could describe the last 2 turns was good-natured frustration at Wells blocking all of my plans. Theron countered Spigot by moving into the forest and Pinned him, preventing him from being able to pick up the ball. Stoker was too far out to go snag the ball and run it to the goal in the same turn, so he just held on and ran as close as possible. Stave was busy fighting Fahad but was able to get a Lob Barrel off pushing Egret closer to Pint Pot and Esters, who was working on getting in better position for a hearty scrap. Wells tried to get some damage out and knockout potential players but the dice were not with him this time around and so nothing lasting happened. On the last turn I won initiative, a critical moment in my opinion, and I activated Esters who sang her song of “Oi let’s hit them hard lads Strength” song, and loaded with Influence she went to both knocked down Egret and Jaecar. With a wicked gleam in her eye, she flat out stomped on Egret and then walked over to Jaecar and slapped him out of the field, scoring me the last 4 points I needed and closing the game out 13 to 7. Victory to the Brewers!
So I originally thought of Aristeia as a small skirmish style wargame but in truth, it’s probably best described as a tactical board game. Regardless we decided to give this game a try since neither of us had played before and it promised to be relatively quick. The game came with a “Learn to Play” booklet and a Rules Reference (i.e. the full rule description) and after reading through briefly we went with the guided tour of the first turn. Normally I would have scoffed at such things being a veteran gamer, “foolish game! I do not need your guidance, I am a Gaming King!” However, given the format and layout of these rules, it seemed prudent at best to go ahead and just do the tutorial first turn. In truth, I don’t think I can really give a play by play of this game per se so let me just give a batrep from the stance of “hey this is how this game rolls, here’s an example of how that worked.”
So the premise of the game is that in the Infinity universe there is this “sport” called Aristeia where these combatants compete and fight in an arena, where the fear of permanent death/injury is not there due to the wonders of medical technology. The goal is that these combatants fight each other to control changing points in the arena, dominating each zone to score points over 5 rounds. First to 8 points wins, failing that whoever is in the lead at the end of 5 rounds wins, and should there be a tie then whoever killed the most wins. Combatants are never permanently removed from the game, instead of coming back to the arena the next round but with fewer action points than usual and they can arrive in any of the 6 areas on the board except for the current scoring zone. The game uses a series of colored dice and specific icons to determine the results of whatever action you’re trying to do. Sort of like FFG’s Star Wars game system, except it’s all d6 format. Once you get the hang of the symbols and flow of the game it’s not a hard game to get into, but the tutorial round definitely helps.
So pre-game you not only select your team of 4 combatants but you then build a tactics deck out of the generic cards first and then adding 2 of 4 cards that belong to your specific combatants. The tactics deck is used to add certain effects in the game such as extra dice before an attack or gain some kind of bonus/effect, and each card will state when it can be used. After deployment, you determine the initiative order of how you will activate your characters, with each character having an initiative stat to determine who goes first. In case of a tie the Underdog, Aristeia’s way of breaking ties it seems, gets to choose who goes first. When Maximus and 8-Ball went at the same time, both of them having an Initiative stat of 4 meant that whoever has Underdog gets to decide who went first. There’s a bit of pre-planning here but also you can get the drop on someone if your person is faster than the other team’s personnel. When you activate you get 5 actions points, which seems the standard but maybe, later on, there might be someone with less/more, which you use to do all of the various actions. However, if you’re knocked out then you start off with a -2 AP token, so when Gata came back on the field after getting shot at by Major Lunah (Haqqislam sniper extraordinaire) she came back with only 3 points. When you move you get a pool of movement points that you can spend throughout the action, so you can move > attack > whatever > move again as long as you have points left. While everyone seemed to get the same number of action points, not everyone got the same number of movement points. For example, Maximus on Wells’ team had only 3 movement points per use of the Move action, whereas Gata on my team had a solid 5 every time she moved.
There are 2 types of actions: face to face and standard. Face to face (F2F) is a term used similarly in Infinity, both players roll their respective dice pool and apply the results together. Often this means negating hits with blocks, as unmitigated hits result in equal amounts of damage and should damage reach your health stat you’re off the board. Most attacks are F2F rolls, so your player can take damage in return if their dice results are unlucky. For example, when Wells had Pavarti try to gun down Wild Bill, I ended up dealing 6 damage to her 1 damage to him which resulted in Pavarti being removed from the field. Standard rolls only require a single hit to go off. There’s a concept in this game called ‘Switches’ which are like triggered effects from when you roll dice. Essentially you use certain icon combinations (which cannot be used for other results) to trigger an effect, whatever it may be, and during F2F roll both players can activate their respective switches. Switches are not once-per-action exclusive and you can activate multiple switches if you have enough icons. For example, when 8-Ball attacked Maximus I ended up using 2 of my switches to displace (read: move 1 hex) not only Maximus but 8-Ball as well for better positioning. Taking an opponent out of the match doesn’t grant you any victory points but it gives you a “frag” token which is used to help break ties at the end game, and you can draw a card from your tactics deck. Holding an objective zone gives you points depending on the scenario rules, so in the introduction scenario you gained the most points for completely dominating the zone, some if you had more people than the other player, and the least for an equal number of combatants.
The game ended up being called a draw due to some player error in the die being used and an agreement of a draw, but I can tell you this game is pretty quick once you start getting the hang of things. The flow of the game is aggressive and fast as you don’t have many turns to fulfill the objective but also the zone changing all the time made it fluid and adaptable. I would keep a couple people near the middle as I had to anticipate where the zone would go, but at the same time play to get to the zone in that turn. Major Lunah on Wells’ team was nasty to combat as she had the range and damage to take out people easily. Her big counter was Gata, who while she had no attacks herself was fast enough and had a Line of Sight debuff to put on her, but I couldn’t get to her until the last round due to being taken out all the time. Initiative order mattered as Wells had Pavarti’s activation go last, which could have countered the debuff (she’s like a medic-robot yo) but alas Lunah had to go first and fumble around into the zone. Wild Bill was taken out the turn before so I had him go last to try and snipe Pavarti off of the zone which would have ended in a point draw, but I would have had more frag tokens and thus take the game. Meanwhile most of the 5 rounds Maximus and 8-Ball fumbled around in the middle wrestling until the last round where Maximus tried to stop Miyamoto from being a samurai death-dealer and 8-Ball moved up to try and displace people off of the last scoring zone. It was a bloody, fast, and fun game and I’m looking forward to getting more players for the roster in the future!
So that settles it for this weekend of gaming! All of them were great games and I really encourage you all to consider not only the wargames but the board games as well. The Guild Ball match went a lot better for Wells than historically with his Fish, so I think he’ll be using the Hunters more often here on out. Aristeia was a lot of fun and though the rulebook had some translation issues imo it was overall an easy game to pick up once you got the rules down and it did deliver on a quick experience. I think our game took…45-60 minutes after the tutorial round? Right now there are 12 potential players for the game, 8 from the core and 4 from the latest expansion, so I think from a roster perspective there will be options. If you're feeling competitive I believe I saw on their main site (right here) that they're doing some tournaments somewhere? You'll have to look into that yourself if you're interested. I still wouldn’t think of it as a wargame but a really good tactical board game with a low enough price-point to where it should be worthy of consideration. I think I saw a copy going for like 45 bucks on Google somewhere, so it's not too bad if you ask me.
Anyways I hope you all have been enjoying the posts and I hope that you have been doing well with your hobbying, however, and whatever it may be! Tune in next time for whatever may come this way, whether it’s a batrep, a paint job, or something else! Until then happy gaming folks!
