Tuesday 18 August 2015

Frostgrave Bits


Some more prices to use for Frostgrave ( or any other fantasy skirmish really).

Some nice scatter terrains from Thormarillion.   I'm  going more for a damp and mossy look for my ruins, so that they can be used in more settings.  

More Forestgrave than Frostgrave, if you like as that way we can make use of the existing terrain and trees that we have at the club, rather than making a whole bunmch of specific terrain that can only be used for one setting..  I may purchase some of the GW trees as they have a nice twisted fantasy feel to them.  









Tuesday 11 August 2015

Chilly Wizards



We gave Frostgrave a try tonight.  No campaign, just a game to try out the rules to see how they play.   We had four players, so opted for a 4x4 board, covered with as many buildings as we could muster. 

The wizards were from the following schools:
John brought a Necromancer
Rory brought an Enchanter
Douglas brought a Soothsayer
I opted for a Sigilist.

We played a basic treasure grab, with each player putting 3 tokens down on the board, so there was lots of treasure to grab.



Early game saw everyone running for the easy tokens, and a few potshots from archers and ranged spells.  I tried to cast a few spells to enhance my warband but was not very successful, mostly failing to cast them. In Frostgrave if you fail to cast a spell you can also take damage, with how much depending on how badly you fumble the spell. There were a few people who started doing some serious self-harm from bad spellcasting. 

The Necromancer and Enchanter got stuck in fairly quickly, with the Enchanter throwing some grenades at John’s band, and John throwing some nasty spells back in his direction.  Douglas and I were on the other side of the table and had a slightly more cautious approach, trying to get as much treasure as possible without exposing our bands to any unnecessary conflict.
John eventually managed to kill Rory’s wizard with a Bone Dart, while suffering some casualties in return.  Douglas and I started to come to blows, with Douglas generally getting the better of me, thanks to some lousy die rolls. I had sent my Wizard into the standing stones in the middle of the table, as there was a treasure token there. As soon as she picked up she cast a teleport, moving to my table edge, ready to exit the board as soon as the rest of my band could get there.  Douglas in the meantime has taken control of my ranger, who was fighting my knight, while his warhound killed my warhound and there did not seem to be much I could do about it. Even my archer firing from his advantageous position kept missing his mark.
On the other side of the table Rory had managed to get away with a few tokens but paid a heavy price with most of his warband down.  John did quite well, taking out a large number of Rory’s band and making of with some treasure. 





Douglas was clear winner, taking out several members of my group, while getting a good haul of treasure and managing to stay largely intact thanks to my inability to roll above 10 on a D20.  I managed to get three treasure tokens, but lost my apprentice, ranger and warhound in the process.

Our first outing at Frostgrave went fairly smoothly, with everyone getting the hang of the rules quite quickly.  There is a lot of potential in the game, but a few points were raised as a result of last night’s game:

The terrain needs to be a bit more densely placed. We played with a fairly open table and everyone could pretty much see across the boards, which gave some wizard and absolute filed day (the ones with direct damage spells)

Direct damage spells are the most effective.  While the selection of spells are great, some of them are very situational, whereas a direct damage spell is always useful and will have an instant effect on the game.  This may change as people get a bit more practice and become smarter but at the moment, Elementalist for the win!

This is a game that is heavily biased towards narrative play.   Get together, come up with an interesting background for your band and play an interesting campaign with an end goal. I think just using the campaign rules and scenarios for an open ended campaign would end up unbalance pretty quickly (as would happen in pretty much any campaign).

Forward Base

My forward base pledge from Antenociti's Workshop arrived today.  Lovely looking stuff and will make a very nice detailed base for Sci-fi games.   

Looks a bit daunting when laid out on the table though!

 

Tuesday 4 August 2015

Stepping Through the Breach



I finally managed to get me recently completed Pandora Crew for Malifaux on the table.  I finished them a few weeks ago but have been playing other things, but finally had a free Monday to try them out.  I only have the basic No Shelter Here box so Alistair and I sat down and worked out a game based around that. In the end the full box plus a couple of upgrades came to 40 soulstones so we settled for that.

My force consisted of:

Pandora with The Box Opens
Candy
Poltergeist
3 Sorrows
Baby Kade.

Alistair brought the Dreamer along with Teddy, a large number of Alps and Daydreams and Copelius.

For schemes and strategies I ended up with:
Flank Attack
Defend the territory
Reconnoitre

Alistair then realized that most of his crew were insignificant and peons, meaning that he only had three scoring units in his force.   The table was a collection of ruins, with lots of cover, not that it was really needed as there were very few shooting attacks in either force.

I deployed Pandora, the Poltergeist and a sorrow on my left, Baby Kade in the centre and Candy with one Sorrow on my right.  Alistair deployed most of his forces in the centre, with Copelius on my extreme right to do a scheme run into the corner for “The Ritual.”



We were off to a slow start with lots of running about, with both sides heading towards the centre of the board.    Candy and Kade ended up in combat with the Teddy fairly quickly, and I nearly managed to polish it off in turn two but didn’t quite manage it.  In return Teddy ate Candy in turn three, but baby Kade managed to polish it off in return. 

While this was going on Copelius had managed to get two scheme markers down in a couple of corners and I had managed to converge my sorrows on the bunched up Alps and Daydreams in the middle of the board.  I walked into the middle of the enemy crew and cast Inflict.  This managed to kill off most of the Dreamers smaller models, leaving Alistair with just the Dreamer himself and Copelius.  In return Alistair woke up the Dreamer and replaced him with “Lord Chompy Bits.” 
I spend turn four seeing to my strategies and schemes, and spread out to score points for reconnoitre while getting in position for the schemes, in the expectation that the game would end on turn 5.  IN addition to this I used the box opens and lots of soul stones to paralyze Lord Chompy, meaning Alistair could only activate Copelius.
Turn 5 saw the Dreamer wake up but it was too late in the game for him to achieve anything. I continued to move into scoring positions and the game thankfully ended at turn 5.






Not a bad start for Pandora, although Alistair was using a Master he had never used before and his crew was a bit lacking in non-peon models. As we were both using Neverborn masters there was a lot of Willpower debuffs floating about as well, which made for a lot of adding and subtracting all the various modifiers.

 I was starting to get the hang of what each model can do by the end of it as well. Malifaux is a game of micromanagement and special rules, neither of which I am particularly adept at so I don’t expect to be any good at it really, but the models are nice and it is very different from what I normally play as well.  Also there are a few people in the club also getting into it so I should not be short of players.  I also managed pick up Lilith at Claymore on Saturday so that should give me a few more options.

Next week, Frostgrave!