Downsizing...
The back end of February has flown by. I've been very busy at work finishing off writing an academic paper that fills me with a sense of trepidation as I finally reach the point where I will have to send it around my colleagues to get their feedback and criticism. I am hoping that it passes muster...
Over the last couple of weeks I've also managed to squeeze in some gaming. I invited my mates, Darren and Clarky, around to play Moonstone one Wednesday evening the other week, which was an enjoyable experience. The game is very tactical and the card based system for attacks and magic is intuitive and a lot of fun. My Commonwelalth team managed to come in second, after ignoring the fairy player and duking it out with the Leshavult over a concentration of moonstones on one side of the board. That really brought home how the fall of the dice at the start of the game, which represent the moonstones you're trying to collection, influences the choices in deployment that you make that then have a knock on effect onto how the game pans out.
Last Saturday, I also managed to get my mate Darren round to try out a number of games I've been encouraging him to try for some time. First up we played through a game of ArcWorlde using the new 2-player starter set that I picked up at Vapnartak. It's a great little narrative skirmish game, with a lot of roleplaying opportunities due to it's "narrative feat" system, which is basically a codified system that allows you to make shit up as you go. This included Darren's vampiric leader drop kicking my undead king prone and one of my skeletons performing a flying elbow drop in retaliation. Hilarious. It was a close run thing, but I narrowly managed to nab a win. Darren was so impressed by ArcWorlde that he's already bought himself two warband starters for the game.
We followed that up with a cooperative run through of Forbidden Psalm, using one of the scenarios in the Regicide campaign. I knocked up a quick list for him and took my own warband out for a spin. We ultimately failed at the scenario objective of taking out all of the enemy models that flooded the board, but only just, making for a satisfying game over all. Not sure that Darren was convinced to create his own Forbidden Psalm warband afterwards and make this a regular thing, but he said he enjoyed it.
After a bite of lunch, we finished off by playing some Frostgrave. We had a bit of a grind of a game, primarily due to me misreading the combat rules for how damage works, which meant that models ended up locked in combat and not killing anything for a large portion of the game. Whoops! That said, we had a lot of fun and overall I think this was the game I enjoyed most. Perhaps it is because of the larger model count for your warband, or the array of tactical options available to you in the form of spells. It's something I want to explore more—perhaps through a solo campaign, or maybe even with friends if I can convince Darren and Clarky to give it some more attention.
On the painting end of things, there hasn't been much hitting the table. My time has mostly been devoted to building the vast swathes of models littering my office in a seemingly insurmountable attempt to see the floor again. That said, I did managed to find the time to paint up some 12mm elf heroes as test models. These are Kallistra models that I bought at Vapnartak and will form a 12mm version of the elf army list in the Midgard rulebook. I've also got the models for the Undead army as well, but they still need to be prepped and based. I can see me painting up a lot of these in March—my eyes are going to love it.
The climb continues...