Board Games

Note, the above image is an entrant in the Crystal Brush Painting Competition from Adepticon, not mine.

I wanted to start a new recurring feature on the site, covering my weekly exploits in gaming. Hopefully this will give you an idea of how my eclectic gaming tastes change week over week and show how some games stay popular or how some games enter in.

This was a big week as it included Adepticon. Adepticon is a mainly miniature convention in Lombard IL. It started as a solely Games Workshop event but has expanded gradually over the years. This year it happened to coincide with International Tabletop Day, so Saturday included it’s share of board games.

Let’s break it down by category:

Board Games

Not a lot during the week but at Adepticon I got to play a good amount.

I demoed Aetherium, a cool mini/board game hybrid currently launching it’s Kickstarter. I’ll make another post about it later, but it was pretty cool.

I also got to demo Deadzone. Cool scenery but I was underwhelmed by the models and the gameplay. Basically there are other things I’d rather play.

At the Tabletop Day event I got to show everyone Superfight and tried Space Cadets: Dice Duel, Bang the Dice Game, Perudo and Dungeon Roll for the first time.

Space Cadets: Dice Duel is designed by a family, some of whom I played Warmachine in my former gaming group but I never ended up playing it. It’s a great fit for when you have a large group. A little hectic, but it was a blast. Already bought it.

Bang the Dice Game was as described, Bang but better. A lot of people like Bang, but the potential slowness and player elimination do it in for me. The dice game keeps all the goodness and secrecy of Bang but forces the action to move faster. Perfect

Perudo was a fun time filler. Also called “Liar’s Dice” it’s the game they played in Pirates of the Caribbean 2. Dungeon Roll was also a filler but didn’t have quiet enough there to be interesting. With 4 people it had a lot of down time.

Miniature Games:

I got to demo Relic Knights, which I Kickstarted already. I also got to play a game of Warmachine. And of course, I got to see a lot of cool minis at Adepticon.

I literally spent hours just wandering around Adepticon checking out people’s armies. Adepticon, being a miniature focused convention and one that started out as a Games Workshop focused convention makes ogling armies an event.

I tried out Relic Knights in order to get a hands on feel for the game. I cam away with a feeling similar to how I went in. Man are the rules fast, cool and innovative but I really wish so many of the models weren’t so pervy. I still hope that there are enough acceptable models for me to use that I can play it. But as to the rules, they ran really smoothly. There is a lot of vertical movement potential so it will make for some interesting terrain building. The deck mechanic allows for a lot of pre-planning. The system of rolling alternating activations is both cool and innovative.

Finally, I got to play a game of Warmachine with Russ from The D6 Generation. I busted out my Retribution since I’m much more interested in them than my Cryx at this point. I played with the models I had painted against his Convergence, whom I had never seen before. They’re pretty interesting and I’d like to see how they play at a larger point count. I lost but playing with Russ is always fun. I am super rusty.

Playing Warmachine again and seeing all the different models got me really excited to get back into modeling again. I started building some of my Malifaux models when I got home on Sunday. I am going to have to prioritize my painting projects, more on that soon. Inspired by Painting with Menoth John(who I also saw at Adepticon) and since I stream a lot of other stuff anyway, I’m probably going to stream some painting sessions as well, keep an eye out.

RPGs

This week at The Gnome Game Live! we started a new system. By new system, I mean a really old system. We put our Pathfinder game on hiatus and started in on Deadlands: Classic. Pathfinder was good, but Rise of the Runelords had its issues and D20 is still a little boring. Back in the day when we got our D&D game from level 1 to 20 and stuff started breaking beyond that, we started looking for a new system. We tried a handful of stuff but Deadlands really grabbed us, probably partially because of how different it was from D&D. I’ll have to go into it more specifically but it’s pretty cool.

I’m playing an Agent, which are the Men in Black…Dusters. You can watch the sessions live on Twitch on Monday nights.

Video Games

Video games fell by the wayside a little this week. Factset was on a bye for the AHGL.

We got in a little SWTOR, leveling up our Trooper and Smuggler and got into Deus Ex: Human Revolution a little farther. I really suck at the combat in that game, but it is pretty cool.