Week of Gaming

After the house move and a fairly stressful time at work I decided I needed a week off.  After discussing it with Lenin, who had been having a worse time at work, we decided to use the week as our next meet up.

We scheduled things to allow us to go to the SELWG show at Crystal Palace as well as having a relaxed week with plenty of gaming both tabletop and board and card games.

SELWG was worth a visit as I managed to pick up the next batch of Perry Sudan figures to finish phase 1 of that project.  It was good meeting up with a few people but overall the show was a little disappointing.  The range of traders seemed a little reduced and the revised layout didn't quite work for me (although that could just be me getting old and not liking change!).  I had seen quite a few of the games before; however, a couple were worth seeing again and there were some nice ideas on show.  Unfortunately due to a bit of a senior moment I forgot to take my camera and so haven't got any photos to post.

Over the rest of the week we played a mix of games.  I'll be writing separate posts around the individual miniatures games but we also managed to give some of our new board and card game purchases a go.

World at War: Blood and Bridges is one of Lenin's latest acquisitions.  It's a hex and counter game from Lock 'n' Load covering a Soviet invasion of West Germany.  The system is pretty easy to grasp and the scenario was fun to play.  We tried out the first scenario with me as the Soviets and Lenin taking the West Germans with our forces rather mixed up which mad things very interesting!

We have found it difficult to find a set of miniature rules which we both like for this period and so Lenin is seriously thinking of converting this to use his 3mm and/or 6mm micro armour.

Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of Ashardalon is the second in a series of D&D boardgames which Wizards of the Coast are releasing.  I thought this might allow me to recapture a little of the feel of the D&D games I used to play all that time ago.  Unlike some of the other games of this genre this one is fully co-operative with the game running the dungeon rather than needing a separate DM.  The dungeon itself is built using interlocking tiles and the characters and monsters are represented by some nice plastic miniatures.  Our first adventure proved to be a disaster, probably because we chose to split up!  But it was an enjoyable experience overall.

Sentinels of the Multiverse is a super hero card game from newcomers Greater than Games.  They have created 10 hero characters, 4 villains and 4 locations which can all be mixed to create quite a variety of different games.  You can see some of the inspiration for the heros and villains but they are a lot more than slavish copies of well known comic book characters.  The artwork is great and combined with the rule booklet and flavour text creates just the right atmosphere.  The game system is simple enough for my daughter to play with some appropriate advice on card choices but is really challenging.  With each hero and villain having their own separate deck and playing quite differently, this is a game which needs quite a few plays in order to learn how best to work them.  Unfortunately there isn't any balancing mechanism for 2 player games and so these are extremely challenging and the correct selection of character combinations is crucial in any game.  We played both 2 and 3 player games and had a lot of fun - so I can see this one getting a few more outings!

Imperial is another in the rondel series from designer Mac Gerdts (I also have Antike).  In this game you play the financiers behind the major european powers at the start of the 20th Century.  The player with the largest investment in a particular country gets to determine its actions.  Despite using the rondel mechanism like Antike, this game has a very different feel (as I had hoped it would).  We only played a two player game, and thought it would be a quite different experience with more players, but had plenty of fun with it.

We also managed to get in a game of Marvel Heroscape and quite a few two player card games too finishing off the week with a visit to Dover castle.