July - Boardgame Night

 I made it out to the Boardgame Lounge the other night. I sat with a couple of people and got playing. The first thing we did was play L.L.A.M.A. which is a hilarious little game.

We also played Lucky Numbers which I really enjoyed. The point is to get rows and columns of ascending numbers. Simple, quick, but fun. Not fluff, no faff. A game after my own heart. 

Cubitos was an interesting game. It consists of rolling dice to create resources in order to buy further dice. The dice provide abilities that help your character move further in order to cross the finish line first/furthest. The entire thing was hilariously fun. It gave me flashbacks of Marvel Dice Masters, drawing, rolling, actions. There is a push your luck element, which screwed me at the very end, but there are also interesting catch up mechanisms. I liked it, it was fun, but losing on my final turn due to pushing my luck too far left a bad taste in my mouth.

Flamme Rouge is a cycling game. A race using cards with numbers on them for movement. But you need to judge correctly. If you speed out too fast, then you are penalised - the cyclists at the front have to draw a 2 movement penalty card that goes into their deck. It combines a bit of deck drawing and planning, which I like. Thoroughly enjoyed it to be honest. Coming second helped. 

I also played Zombie Dice - fun for a few minutes to fill the gap between games.

Activities Day 2023

 Hello all. It has been very quiet on the miniature painting and gaming front this month. I have been playing more board games, and preparing to host a couple of hours of intro wargaming at school. There is an existing Warhammer club on Fridays, but I can't stay on Friday, and feel weird about starting a second wargaming club at school, so I don't really know what to do here. Hosting a few kids wargaming was great. 

I had a few guys doing some WW2 gaming with my single sheet home brew rules. They enjoyed it and stayed for about an hour before wondering off to get chips and mess around outside. 

I forgot my roads...no idea where they are as they weren't in the tub with the bocage. However, that didn't stop them having a good time. It was nice to hear them talk about Panzer IVs and be able to play with essentially zero input from myself. 

I also spent hours preparing a few 100pt squads of Star Wars Miniatures - the Wizards of the Coast OOP game. I started by keeping them pure WOTC squads, as I don't own all of the V-Set cards, but then I realised that literally no-one cares about that, and I ended up screen clipping from Bloomilk onto a Word document. Thus they had their entire squad on a piece of A4 paper, which they could make notes on. I found it useful. Two guys, big Star Wars fans came and played a Captain Rex + clones vs. commando droids battle. They got a bit bored of it after a little while, but I feel I could have explained it better. Another student appeared and played a quick game with me. I had a bunch of jedi vs. General Grievous and some droids. I found it interesting that they all rathered play Clone Wars as opposed to Empire vs. Rebels. 

I home brewed some fantasy rules that were based loosely on Song of Blades and Heroes in terms of measuring sticks, but then dice rolls were different. They were more like Starport Scum. I took a hoard of skeletons who were fighting six adventurers. It was very basic, quick, but lots of annoying bad rolls. For a one-page set of rules pulled out of my bum for this though, I was happy. He had a laugh and may be more willing to come and try some more complex rules at some point.

I also brought: Zombies!!! but no-one was interested in that game. I will continue to bring it though as it is fun. Two other game that didn't see play: Star Wars Pocket Models, and Pirates of the Spanish Main. I just didn't set them up as I was more interested in playing Star Wars Miniatures to be honest. 

The Activities Day was a wild success and I will look to host this again next year. I might be able to start a club this time for reals? Not sure.

Take care all. It was great to be getting going.