Relic Knights

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.

First Malifaux game and controllable randomness

January 31, 2014 by Adam

I was able to get together with my old friend Josh and him being a huge Malifaux junkie, he walked me through my first game.

I don’t know enough about the game to give much of a battle report but I was quite taken with it. I played Lady Justice, who is as awesome as she seems and Josh played Jakob Lynch

As a brief rundown of what I liked and what I didn’t like.

The fate deck was my favorite part and I want to talk about it more, but it was a really great change.

The schemes are really nice. I love that they can be asymmetrical so that there isn’t just one focus of both sides. You have to balance completing your objectives with stopping your opponents.

I really enjoyed the alternating activation system. I gives a great feel to the game but you don’t generally have that one turn where you take out a chunk of the opposing army with no response possible that sometimes happens in other games.

Much like Warmachine, the game seems like you absolutely have to know what all the other models do or you can be absolutely destroyed because of it. While this gives a great reward to those who invest a lot into the game, it does seem like it could be a barrier to entry.

But the biggest thing I want to talk about is the Fate Deck and cheating. It is really awesome. I like dice as much as the next gamer, but the deck acomplishes a couple of really cool things.

The first thing is that it averages out the randomness. In other games, it is possible to roll 8 6’s in a row. You can’t pull 8 13’s in a row in Malifaux. In a larger game, you can “use up” your good numbers.

I really don’t enjoy Settlers of Catan. I think that a part of it is that it’s really obvious where are the good locations. But there are so few of them but there’s nothing you can do if 8’s don’t get rolled. You can just be stuck. Sure there are things you can do to work around it but you can be locked out of the game with bad rolls. There is a deck you can get that has the same distribution of numbers as the probabilities on rolling 2 dice. I haven’t played with it but I feel like it would be a big improvement despite the fact that it would take away the big unlikely rolls.

That was a little bit of a tangent, but this is what it does for the miniature game. It evens out the randomness, especially with a larger game. Then there is the cheating. You only have a limited hand but it gives you some control over what happens, which your opponent can counter. It adds such a great dynamic. It gives you control over the attacks and spells throughout the game. It makes you invested every time, because you have decisions to make rather than just being at the mercy of the rolls.

Warmachine does the same thing with boosting. You have limited resources and you have to choose how to spend them. There is still a chance that it won’t work but the math becomes easier to put in your favor. This really feels like the direction that modern wargames are going.

This is also one of the things that pushed me over the edge to backing Relic Knights. The fact that while you’re dependent on a draw to use your powers, it will even out from turn to turn and you know exactly what you can do each turn, and you have full control over what happens. I’m excited to see how it plays.

Are there other wargames that give you additional control over the randomness in the game like this? Let me know.

Kickstarters: Rivet Wars, Realm Works and Wild West Exodus

February 15, 2013 by Adam

I feel like I’ve been bombarded by a number of gaming related Kickstarters I’ve been interested in lately. It’s a much different way to get involved with a game, but I’m still having fun with it.

I have purchased a number of games that started off as Kickstarters, Cards Against Humanity, Zombicide, and Evil Baby Orphanage. They all ended up great and we could have gotten more stuff, gotten the game earlier and gotten it cheaper if we had backed. This makes me want to back anything that looks interesting, which may end up poorly.

Skip links

Main navigation

Relic Knights