I don’t have many readers, but many thanks to those who have.  I hope the new blog will prove to be more interesting, and more frequently updated.  If you read this blog via an RSS feed please begin using my new feed.  Please leave me a comment if you decide to subscribe to the new feed.

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DreamBlade Miniatures Official Home Page

Up first was Celtica, a brand new game to me, and one that I was very excited about.  This game has gotten a fair amount of bad press on boardgamegeek.com.  Nevertheless, the theme, 11th century Ireland, and the game play seemed to make for a game that I would enjoy a lot.  We played two games of Celtica on Saturday, one to start the day and one to finish things up.  I was fortunate enough to squeak out victories in both games.  Celtica is a race game, played with cards, where everyone is racing to put together amulets from various components in cities and cloisters across Ireland.  The interesting part of the mechanic is that everyone is using the same five druids to race with.  Unlike most games where players would each be assigned a color, in this game anyone can move any piece…just need the correct cards.  Cards match the colors of the druids, and each card played allows you to move one space.  The spaces can be one of three things, 1) city,cloister: a place where you find amulets, 2)  cult site: a place to get extra cards, 3)  ruin:  a place attacked by Vikings where you lose amulet pieces but gain valuable experience.  The game is mostly about luck, if you get the right cards at the right time it helps a bunch in this game.  That does not make the game any less enjoyable in my mind.  If you are looking for a fast, easy to teach and learn, filler game this one is a good bet.  Especially if you like unique race games.

Our first play of Celtica was Rob, Chris, Melissa and I.  We got started and after the first round of plays everyone had a pretty good idea of what was going on.  I think we all under estimated the damage the second half of the path could cause.  I got a good start, but then lost a part of my completed amulet.  Chris picked up the pace after I fell back, and in the second half of the game nearly had me.  Melissa and Rob managed to get into position to lose more pieces than they captured.  In the end though, I got lucky and ,managed to complete a little more than 2 amulets.  Chris had me beat, but lost 3 vital pieces on his last turn which gave me the win.  The second game was played by Chris, Keri, Melissa and I.  The game actually played pretty similar to the first.  Chris jumped off to a very strong lead, looked like he was unstoppable.  Keri had a string of bad luck early losing pretty much everything she got.  Melissa and I sort of hobbled through the first turn.  Then things changed.  Chris started dropping pieces faster than he could replenish them.  I got lucky with two sets of 3 cards each which gave me 6 pieces and no chance to lose any.   Keri got into a great position and started to assemble pieces.  In the last turn, I got another set of 3 of the same card, and managed to get the red druid into the end point, and start the end game.  Melissa and Chris were stuck losing pieces each turn, but Keri managed to get three druids onto the 4 amulet space.  At the end of the game Keri and I both had 2 complete amulets, but I also have 3 other pieces giving me the win by only a hair.  Both games took about 30ish minutes, and I think everyone liked this game a lot.

Second game up was Cave Troll.  I could have sworn that I had played this game before, but I don’t think I ever did.  We played a four player game of this Fantasy Flight Games/Tom Jolly dungeon romp.  Melissa managed a victory with some nice actions at just the right time, and by ending the game with her pieces in control of some of the best rooms.  Rob enjoyed rampaging through the dungeon with his Orc.  He killed about 5 of my adventurers, and at least 5 of Chris and Melissa’s combined as well.  The game turns out to have a lot of tactical possibilities that I think everyone was surprised to see.   It really is a very clever game, and one that I think would be welcome on the table again.  It played in about 1 hour for us.

The third game we played was Carcassonne Hunters & Gatherers.  I think this one was least well received.  Melissa did well in this game also, nearly lapping all of us.  The game was a bit unusual though, in that we have large forests, at least four that were never completed.  I forgot that in H&G you do not get points for an incomplete forest or river.  Chris and Rob had some nice sized river systems, but no one had any run away hunters.  I thought the game was a little awkward with some unusual tile draws.  The lack of forest completion meant that only about 4 of the bonus tiles were played.  I am sure a Carcassonne variant will hit the game box again…maybe The City next time.

Well thats it.  Another month, another game day.  I will try and do a summary (from memory) of the previous game days, and will make sure to keep up with these going forward.

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Avalon Hill Boards - Axis and Allies Miniatures “War at Sea”

Warhammer 40K RPG Details Announced @ Gaming Report

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Things have gone a little crazy in game design land since I last posted.  My straightfoward plan to make a game so that I could play with my tanks has turned into a rather massive under taking.  To provide some history,you would need to jump back to May of 2004 and look at my post about Skirmished!, a new fantasy miniatures game I was writing.  This post gives just a brief description and asks for some play testers.  I ended up with 3, and the game needed so much work It sort of fell of my radar.

As I was working on this WWII miniatures game though, and as I was looking for the right mechanic for combat resolution, I thought back to Skirmished!.  I pulled up the old rule set, and gave it a quick glance.  It struck me that if I adopted the initiative method I am planning to use in this game, similar to what I described in my last post on this topic, to work in Skirmished! that the old game just might work.  It was also obvious that the same dice mechanic for combat resolution could be modified to provide a fairly fast way to resolve the tank battles.

So now I have this miniature miniatures game system.  Basically a single set of task/combat resolution rules, and then specific setting rules.  The original Skirmished! game used what I called, at the time, a river of dice mechanic.  Today, having played more games and read more about them, I would call it a dice pool mechanic.  I see this referred to more when describing roleplaying games, but it fits many miniatures games as well.  Typically, in a roleplaying game at least, a dice pool mechanic has you rolling a number of dice equal to some stat and comparing the results of those dice (or their sums) to a target number.  These rules work in a similar fashion.  You will roll a number of dice based on the tanks characteristics.  Your opponent will roll a number of dice based on his ability to defend the fired upon tank.  Instead to trying to reach a predefined target number, you will compare yours and your opponents rolls.

For example, lets say I get 6 dice on attack, and my opponent is rolling 4 defense dice.  We each roll our dice.  I roll 6, 4, 4, 3, 1, 1 and my opponent rolls 6, 5, 3, 2.  First thing the attacker will do is determine if the majority of dice rolled are one’s.  If they are a critical miss has occured.  In this case, the two one’s are simply discarded.  Next players will line up their dice so that each players highest dice is next to each other, and that continues down the line.  In this case, my six lines up with his, my four to his five, my next four to his three, my three to his two.  With each pair of dice, I am trying to get a higher result than my opponent.  The first pair of dice, the sixes, tie and are discarded.  In the second case my opponents dice is higher than mine, not good for me.  Finally with the next two dice my results are higher.  My opponent takes the four and three dice that were higher, and these count as hits.  The rest of the dice are discarded as misses.  Those two hit dice are then subjected to two more rolls to determine armor penetration and damage.

Anyway, the game(s) are coming along well.  I actually am very nearly finished with the re-write of Skirmished! and plan to begin playtesting at home in the next couple weeks.  I think the tank game is about 2 months away from something I can playtest.  I do have two questions for anyone reading this:

1. Do you know of any resources, first hand accounts preferably, that descibe what happens to a WWII tank and its crew when it is hit by enemy fire?  I would love to find some good stories to try and lend some realism to the damage in the game.
2. Have you ever played a miniatures game with a mechanic like I described above?  Any thoughts on it from this quick over view?

WizKids - HorrorClix

Wallamoppi is similar to Jenga in that you have a stack of wooden objects which you must remove and replace on your turn. Wallamoppi adds a twist on this though using a 2 part game, and a very unique timer. A quick look inside the nice wood box reveals a black draw string bag with 18 dark and 18 lite colored wooden disks and two marbles inside. You also get a very short and concise rulebook, as well as the timer which is built into the box itself. The components of the game are very well done, and certainly worth the price.

The game itself is divided into two phases. This is a tow player game, and players can either be the lite or the dark player. They represent their selection by taking one disk of the correct color from the bag and placing it in front of them. Starting with the dark player you draw a tile out of the bag and begin building a wall. This wall is the stack from which you grab pieces in phase two. You draw disks to play from the bag randomly, so you might play either a lite or a dark disk on your turn. The wall you build will have 8 disks, always in a single line, on the bottom. The next level will have 7, then 6 etc until the lite player caps off the top with the last remaining disk that theypulled out to begin the game. With the wall built, you set the box on end, attach the included chute and move to phase two.

In phase two of the game, players alternate taking turns grabbing a disk from the wall and stacking on top of the single lite disk at the top of the wall. If you played well in the first round it should be fairly easy to pull your pieces from the wall. You can only use one hand to remove pieces, and you can only remove pieces of your own color (unlike the first phase where you played whatever you drew from the bag). Your goal is to be the the player to last successfully stack a disk without knocking over the whole tower. If a few pieces fall out of the wall when you remove your disk that is fine, those pieces are still playable, and the game continues. So what about the timer? The timer adds just a little bit to the game, and really helps to make it fun. In addition to grabbing a disk and placing it at the top of the tower, you must also grab the marble rolling down through the box before it reaches the end. If you fail to grab the marble in time you lose.

Wallamoppi takes about 10 - 20 minutes to play. It is a simple two player game of dexterity that is a great time filler. I recommend this game to anyone interested in dexterity games, and if you like playing Jenga, you will likely like Wallamoppi.

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Fantasy Flight Games

Research into tanks and tank combat is proceeding nicely. I have learned quite a bit about how tanks fought, and about how the strengths and weaknesses of the Axis & Allied tanks effected the outcome of the battles they fought in.

While I continue to research, I have started to make decisions about the games mechanics. One area that I think is critical to a good game of miniatures is the method used to determine initiative and turn order. Having played Warhammer for many years I knew that I did not want a I go you go sort of battle. I also think that the use of dice or even cards to determine initiative is a bit over done.

I want a method to simulate command, communication and supply options in the game, and I have decided to use the initiative phase to simulate that. I have thought of a couple of different ways of doing this, but am currently leaning towards the following approach. At the start of the game, each player will receive a number of Command & Supply (C&S) points. These points are used during the game to determine the order of play in each turn. The game will likely be driven by scenarios as opposed to deathmatch style play, and the number of points each player gets should be determined by those scenarios. The specifics remain to be decided.

I decided to borrow a mechanic from many board games I have played and make the initiative phase of the game an auction. Players will use the C&S points they have to bid for turn order. This bidding represents the planning, communications, and general readiness commanders have before this phase of the battle. Beginning with the player who went last in the previous round players can bid any number of there C&S points. Players alternate either out bidding the other player or passing. Once a player passes, the other player pays the number of C&S points bid and takes the first turn.

Turns will likely be made up of a number of action points, determined either by a roll of the dice or by spending additional C&S points. Actions will fall into the move or shoot categories. Actions will come in a later post.

I don’t know of another miniatures game that uses an auction as a means to determine initiative. The nuber of C&S points in the game will be finite, perhaps the game will end after both players have used there supply of C&S points. I think it will add a nice element ot the game requiring you to plan both your moves as well as your initiative phase.

I decided the other day that what I really wanted to do was use my 15mm terrain, use my 15mm A&A tanks, grab a 3×3 piece of felt and play a tank battle game. I looked for rule sets, and not finding exactly what I wanted I decided I would just give a go at designing a game myself. I thought that it might be fun to detail my thought process, and design and development of the game here. I sat down last night and decided what my goals were for this project, and I think I have a good place to start.

I am not a military history, WWII, or even war game aficionado. I have played Axis & Allies, Memoir 44, seen Band of Brothers about 5 times, and have a few other bits of exposure to the period. I was never in the military, don’t know much about tanks and how they fight. Still, I think this project will be fun, and I am sure I will learn a bunch along the way. With this is mind I set out the following goals for this game design project:

• Goal 1: Base the game on real data. I want the game to at least have a basis in the real facts about the tanks from WWII. I have started to compile some statistics on a few Axis and a few Allied tanks (Shermans, Panzers, and Tigers). My goal is to extract from this data a simple mechanic for combat resolution.
• Goal 2: Make use of miniatures available for the A&A miniatures game. I have quite a few minis for the game. I want to make use of them, it as after all the inspiration for the project. The rules will be based around the tanks currently available for the A&A miniatures game.
• Goal 3: Keep the playing surface small. The reason I love DBA and HOTT is that I can play on pretty much any table at 15mm. I think this game needs to be played on a 3′x3′ surface max. I will design with that size playing surface in mind.
• Goal 4: Provide a dice based and diceless system. I have been leaning towards a d10 based system in my initial writings. But the more I think about it the more I would like to see a CRT used for the game as well. I would like to design a system that uses similar rules for everything but combat resolution. Allowing you to pick a game with dice or a game with a CRT.
• Goal 5: Start simple and expand. I would like to write a core set of rules and mechanics that allow for easy play, but also leave room to add other game elements in the future. I have decided a few things in this regard:
1. Multiple hit locations are possible.
2. The game will use each tanks primary weapon as a basis for determining effectiveness. Other weapons will not be used initially.
3. The game will have a limited number of tanks available at first. Less than what is available currently from the A&A game. I will focus on US and German tanks to start.

So there you have it, the 5 goals I have out for my game. As I work on the game I will post updates here, and provide some details of the game mechanics.

It is safe to say I was spoiled this year when it came to the games I received. Not counting a few purchase made for myself, I received 3 games. I purchased for Melissa 4 games, and you can tack on 3 more from the self purchase category. This years haul includes:

• Oltremare
• Dragon Delta
• Railroad Tycoon
• Bootleggers
• Beowulf
• Industria
• Gloom: UnHappy Homes Expansion
• IceTowers
• Gold Digger
• Fjords

So far Dragon Delta has become a hit with the lunch crowd. It is fairly fast to teach and play, and has a good potential for backstabbing. Melissa and I played a quick game of Fjords, we ended with a tie, that we enjoyed very much. A picture of the final outcome is below.

Melissa, my sister Danielle, and I also played a game of Bootleggers on Christmas day. Neither of them had played before, but I think everyone caught on quickly and had fun. Danielle, the person with the least gaming experience, won the game on turn 8. I am really looking forward to Railroad Tycoon and Beowulf - The Legend. Melissa and I should play at least one of the this weekend. Look for a review/session report for Fjords, plus which ever game we play this weekend next week.

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