one month of Pulp City

The Pulp City kickstarter is done and done, and has inspired a wave of gaming in our group. Four games in the past few weeks! It's positively madness. It's been a while since we've stuck to one system for any length of time. No, it won't last forever, but I am enjoying the ride.

Full disclosure: I may or may not be on the playtesting team, so I will err on the side of caution on revealing new info. Luckily, a lot of the details are now available to kickstarter backers. Check it out! This is also a great excuse for me to half-ass this post just to get it out the door, since I've been working on this one post for like two weeks.

Our warmup game to get back into the swing of things was a simple street brawl between my real defenders of Pulp City (Mysterious Man, Nuke, the Gentleman, and other local villains) versus a loose coalition of tough characters.

Essentially, I took a horde of shooty characters, and my esteemed opponent Maurice brought some fast close combat hitters. (His ARC monkeys did more than their fair share of shooting, though.) I tried out Anansi, one of the new starter villains. She proved to be a solid addition, a sneaky threat that you really can't ignore. She has attacks that use her trump Agility trait, which combined with her Trickster Spider power makes her a real chore to take down. She will be great for harassing the backfield and contesting objectives.

Yes, he kept falling off the back of the cab. I couldn't resist, though.

The Gentleman won the coolness battle by jumping on the hood of the car to fire into the oncoming enemy (and also get the very handy height advantage. More dice is better, every time.) My plans for swarming over with a pile of minions met a quick end when Guerilla let loose with his minigun and just mowed through them. Seriously, it wasn't pretty. He was a lead farmer.

(I will note that Mysterious Man does make the minion horde strategy very attractive, however. There's just a counter to everything, and the counter to that is an angry ape with a minigun.)

Nothing fancy, but again, got us back into the swing of things. Tanks proved very useful on his side. Consequently, anything that lets you move the position of enemy models proved a worthy counterpoint (hellooo, Xenobi.) Much discussion of the new roles and how they could work, in theory. But, a max of four turns for the game? It doesn't sound like a lot, but you will be surprised how much happens in a turn.

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For our next game, we decided to play through all the Plots, one at a time, using the same factions (but with tweaking the teams in between, to work for optimal efficiency.) Maurice is running Coven, and I am going with an all-Nature team, with Dark Solar at the helm. Yes, Nature supremes start at a slight disadvantage to those with Magic origins, but to my credit, I had more Nature figs painted and found them before my other figs. So there's that.

Nothing says 'we're the good guys' like bringing along hired guns in ski masks.

Our Plot for the day was the Time Bomb, requiring us to haul a bomb into the enemy's deployment zone. We added an ad hoc agenda, where we would earn a VP for every level of enemy Supremes eliminated.

My initial thought was to let little Acorn carry the token the long way, while surrounded by a team of blockers. This was... poorly thought out. On turn three, I handed the bomb off to Seabolt, who then got the job done in time.

Dark Solar shows the Coven the power of the Night Sun.

Dark Solar is a real force on the battlefield. In this and subsequent games, I learned more little details and tricks on his card. (Reading the cards proved to be fundamental. Pro tip!) This was also the game where I learned the fully armed and operational capability of Papa Zombie. His aura simply shuts down any Powerhouses that try to come close, and he has a toolbox of ways to ruin the day for a lot of opponents. While I did get the bomb off the board in time, it was Papa chasing down and killing Father Oak (!) that won the day, by putting him over in VPs.

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Game three was the rematch of Coven vs. Nature. A die roll gave us the End Zones plot, control your enemy's deployment zone while keeping them out of yours. We also went with the full regiment of Agendas. One was to impress the local citizens with a display of force, another was to 'tag' the structures on the battlefield.

Back to the alley, more or less.

I did my best in this game to stick to the objectives and missions and not get distracted trying to wipe out the enemy. I even did OK in that regard, and halfway through the game was on top, points-wise. The strategy was to get Dark Solar on the opposite side of the enemy force and lean on them from there, while using Father Oak's pull to whittle away on their troops. The new recruit for this battle was Wildman. The idea was to send him after Papa Zombie, and rely more on his copious dice instead of Power Ups. He proved a worthy selection as well. At least twice I expected him to be dead next turn, only to have him keep on trucking. (He did not, however, take out the target, possibly due to poor planning on my part. Maybe with a little follow-up second attacker next time.)

The full raft of Plots, Agendas, civilians, Minions, and terrain is quite the handful to keep in mind; I dig this, as it adds a real depth to the game. But I am not ashamed in admitting I basically forgot about one of the Agendas. And as you may have guessed by my wording above, Maurice turned the game around on points, re-tagging the buildings and shifting the VPs his way.

Now when you're reading the rules, you might think: a game only last four turns? That's not enough. But those turns go by very fast, and a lot happens in each one. Try it out and see. Meaty.

And after this battle, I can say: Father Oak is good, but he's not the Powerhouse to take going up against Papa Zombie. (In fact, I don't see any of the Powerhouses going up against him well, considering he instinctively shuts down one of their major advantages.) We're pondering different teams for the rest of the scenarios, just to get more variety in our lives. But first...

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Most recently, I went up against Chris C. (newly arrived in Maryland, home of the Pulp City World Champions) in a rousing battle of King of the Hill. The 'hill' in our King of the Hill layout turned out to be a nice chunky building in the middle of the board. This... may not have been my best choice, squaring off against the all-flying Necroplane air force.

Removing Father Oak made room for Ba-Boom, and man, it was quite a trade-up. A Powerhouse is huge, and by default ends up being one of the focal points of the team.

Tactics!

Right off the bat, the undead villains got to the top of the building lickity-split, meaning I would have to dig them out, after a nice stroll across the board. I had a few tricks planned, but it was truly a mixed bag. (The fire escape leading up the building was even on the opposite side of my deployment. I am smart.)

Early on, Ba-Boom showed his Speedster worth, making quick time around the flank and scaring the Necroplane with some ranging shots. Dr. Tenebrous dispatched Night Fright (who is, in fact, a beast) to handle the situation on the ground floor.

Surveying the battlefield.

Dark Solar followed up on Ba-Boom's advance, and together they were able to fend off Night Fright. However, the effort took crucial time not spent on top of the hill. Solid play, I admit.

Covering the advance of the other portion of my forces was my other new addition to Team Nature: Perun. And dear god, he's good. A bruiser you don't want to get close to, who has the range to hit back at most people close enough to hit him. Good times.

The long walk.

In the second half of the game, I was able to bring my forces to bear and start, you know, trying to dislodge the Necroplane invaders. And it was close! As in, one or two dice rolls going my way instead of his way would have turned that tide. But once I was up there, the fearsome foe started knocking back my heroes, chucking them off the ground! I think we had a total of eight or so different throws off the building. It was kind of hilarious.

And I need to remember for next time: those big area of effect blasts, like, say, Night Sun, could also damage the building, and bring the house down. Which would have been wow. 

Wonder Wight + Supreme Zed is a winning combo that I expect to see play out again. Nothing wrong with combining strength with strength.

So. Here we are, a month later, geared up for more more more. It's a good time to be playing the game.

Pulp City kickstarter draws to a close

Yes, you've probably heard it a bunch of other places recently, but I feel a Great Need to pass it along to my dozens of readers. The Pulp City Kickstarter is in its last couple days, and now is a mighty fine time to sign on for the big win. (They blew past the goal within a day, and have just been raising the bar ever since.) I'm a fan of superhero games, and this is my favorite ruleset for them, easily. Fast and fun, you're in on the city-destroying action within minutes. Heck the first post to this very blog was about the game. So go get some figs, get your friends playing, and make sure to post your painted figs so I can be envious of your paintjobs.

Back to a more regular posting schedule... soon. You know, when I have time to game again. Heh.

And now: Ronin

No apologies for unpainted figs when trying out a new game. None!

Sat down with Maurice a couple weeks back to try out Ronin. After falling in with IHMN, I've been eyeballing the rest of the Osprey line of games, and Ronin seemed to have a nifty take on a historical setting.So I cobbled together a couple small lists to go with some Clan War figs I've had around since, like, forever. (Legend of the Five Rings will always be one of my favorite settings. Always.)

Bandits vs. sword saints

Unfortunately, the emphasis in the above paragraph turned out to be on 'small.' I put together tiny lists, so we didn't get much into either scenario besides a couple combats. This was entirely my fault, as I erred on the side of keeping things easy with a low model count. Were I do plan ahead again, I'd definitely lean closer to 10-15 models per side.

That being said, we got a glance of how things work. The focus is definitely on the melee engagement. Apparently the rules aren't far off from Confrontation, a game which remains one of the holes in my spotted history with miniatures. You have a combat pool, which can be split between attacking and defending. You and your opponent reveal how much you're dedicating to which at the same time, which leads to some clever tactics and second-guessing. Gives real flavor to samurais and ninjas dueling.

I'd seen some complaints, in reading reviews, that the game won't lead to a lot of future growth, which is possible. But really, every game doesn't have to get multiple editions and codexes and what have you. IMHO, if you like the setting, cough in for the book. It's not expensive, and definitely has some opportunities for gaming in there. Were I to stick with it, I could see myself writing a fan-based Legend of the Five Rings expansion. Or at least talk about it, and hope someone else on the internet handles that.

Elsewhere: when I was looking for tips on trying out the game, I found a great report by Hachiman's Toy Chest, as well as these two threads on LAF and this one on TMP.

Bookkeeping: long-term readers may have noticed that, in addition to being really indecisive about what we play, my posse is also into trying out new games. I've been sticking with the 'and now' tag for these for a while, and I just went back and retagged the older posts on the blog with that, for posterity's sake.

Hey, that's me

As noted here on Dropship Horizon, my crew and I will be writing up our Critical Mass Gencon Project for all to see. 

As you may have guessed by reading my blog for five minutes, I am really not a rules guy. I like rules that are easy to pick up, because we play a lot of different systems, and man it's tough for me to retain how things work in a game I only play once every couple months. That being said, Aaron reports that these rules are a worthy endeavor, despite a lack of a large fan base, or even a lot of support from the company, so I am willing to cough in and see this thing through.

I've had the Kaamados figs for... a little while now. As with most of my toys, I bought them because they looked cool. The good news is, my thumbnail sketch of an army list showed I wasn't far from a complete force with what I already had, so rounding it out wasn't expensive. 

Just gotta lean on myself to get these multifig bases painted and ready to go. The "pressure" is "on"!

holidays and distractions

Hells. Yes.

 
Still sitting on a couple old batreps I need to finish writing up, after I get the pictures cleaned up and refresh my memory as to how everything went down, heh. November and December are just chock full of holidays and traveling, so everything else goes out the window.

It's exactly times like this, when I don't have time to game (or even really work on figs or terrain) that I get distracted. In the past week or so, I have been looking at getting into Bushido, working on a list for Critical Mass, reading up on Flames of War, theorizing a campaign for In Her Majesty's Name, or maybe 7ombieTV, and looking into rulesets for post-apocalypse gaming. Because it's certainly not that I don't have a jillion other projects from this year I haven't finished. Sigh. 

But really, my attention deficit isn't news, and having a wealth of gaming opportunities and a decent play group is good stuff. Add in there the time to work on my toys and the finances to pursue (limited) new opportunities, and it's a fine way to wrap up 2013. And that doesn't even mention all of you out there in internet-land, across the pond or even farther, serving up regular doses of new inspirations or reports of your own games or projects to admire. Well done! Keep doing that.

Hey, 99th post! Happy new year, everyone.

Fall-In, day two (many pics)

My plan to finish up my backlog of posts before the end of the year might not happen. Hmmm.

One quick note before day two coverage. The massive historical game mentioned in day one was, in fact, a ACW game set at Fort DeRussy. For more details and some good pics, head to the Brooklyn Wargaming page here.

Registering for games before the con is always a shuffling game of seeing what I can work around what to maximize the number of things I can get in on. Unfortunately, some things either don't fit, or fill up before I sign up. One thing I didn't get in on was the Mini Mech game, so I made sure to swing by and take some pics Saturday morning. And man, I wasn't disappointed.

The terrain is spray-painted blocks on hexes, simple at first, but all put together and it's very striking, visually. (Could totally do that in a Tron-inspired minimalist deco theme, I note.) And the cute tiny mechs!

For more details on Mini Mech, go to Rothgar's Workbench here. I really, really (really) don't need another minis project, but yeah, it's tempting.

Another game drawing a crowd was the bug hunt game. Based on the classing 50's movies, it involved delving into underground tunnels to hunt giant bugs. They kept each cavern section covered until it was encountered. Pretty keen.

My first actual game of the day was an intro game to Mein Zombie. ODGW always has their own room set aside at the cons, and I am always up for learning new zombie rules.

Based off their universal rules system, Mein Zombie is almost a cross between an RPG and a minis game. You roll up some basics on your character at the beginning of the game. My character ended up being pretty lucky, but not a great shot.

The scenario was nice and basic. We stated as a group of survivors holed up in the house pictured above. We needed to break out of there, and head to two separate locations to recover the radio to call for assistance, and the generator to power it. 

Activation was by cards. I pulled the queen, so I called my character Queenie. I'm easy like that. One character had a flaw that basically meant they were kind of unprepared. He had two cards, so when his first one was drawn for activation, it was tossed. I do like the little touches like that.

The zombies had two cards of their own in the stack. Zombie activation was neat. When their card comes up, zombies within a certain radius of a living character would move closer, and lunge to attack when close enough. If your character made noise that turn (mostly firing off guns) that radius was larger, based on how much noise was made. This was easy to manage, and also lead organically to zombie herds forming, as the survivors kept moving, but attracting more attention as they went. Again, the little touches.

Myself and two survivors made a beeline for the first objective, basically never firing off a shot. (The other half of the party was nice and loud.) A couple of the rolls on hitting and damage are a little counter-intuitive, but you pick up on them straight away after a few tries.

Oh, hey, in there ODGW gallery, there's a pic of yours truly, standing on the left of the table.

Our posse makes it to the door and is working on breaking in before company arrives. Figs are 20mm plastic from the Zombies! board game. Survivors have their bases painted green. I admit, the game is pretty decent. I will likely pick up the rules at some point, even if just to incorporate some of their ideas elsewhere.

Second game of the day was "Mother Russia Rain Down." Shortly after World War III, which was set off by the Able Archer incident in 1983 going a different way, my team of Russians is converging on a gas station to liberate the fuel before the American survivors on patrol can do the same.

Rules were Iron Ivan's "Disposable Heroes: Point Blank." I was vaguely familiar with them, as I've read through their "No More Room in Hell" zombie rules.

The terrain was sparse and bleak, highly evocative.

 

The Soviet team consisted of myself and a father-son team. First few turns I advanced on the gas station over a hill, getting hammered by the Americans on the opposite corner. My teammates were slowly moving into the middle down the road, weaving between the burned-out cars. I felt a little left out in the cold, as they didn't seem to be getting anywhere, and the other half of the American team had sprinted up to the gas station.

Now, when we sat down to the game, the father on Team Russia had said that his son was really lucky with dice rolls. I pretty much dismissed this; it's the kind of thing a lot of parents say, and dice are dice, right? So when they finally get in position, the kid takes the Russian soldier with an RPG, pops out of cover, shoots at the American tank that was keeping me pinned down... perfect hit. Roll for damage, boom, it's gone. Huh. He proceeds to do it two more times, pops out, rolls a perfect hit, eliminated target. It was uncanny, and after that first one I was watching those rolls. Clearly the MVP.

As noted before, the other half of the Americans (skillfully played by the other half of Team Kent, Maurice's brother Shaun) had taken the objective. By now, though, they were flanked by my crew coming off the hill and the rest of the Russians dug into the road. It was a good defensive position, but they couldn't withstand the incoming barrage. Excellent game.

 

Maurice's fifteen minutes of fame, helping with the mic test.

The finale is the WWPD podcast. No need to wrap that up, it's all available to hear online right here. Always fun getting to see those gents ham it up in person. (If I take one thing away from this podcast, it was the tale of the Burrito Prophecy.)

Due to technical difficulties during the recording of the podcast, you don't get to hear when I sneezed really loudly. Sorry everyone! I do get a shout-out when they're recapping the board games from the night before. Team Baratheon!

And some links to other coverage, if that's your thing. First up is the inimitable Mister Nizz, covering the games he ran and the games he played. The former of those includes pics of the fantastic gnome boxing-glove boat, which is a phrase I don't get to type enough. If eye candy is your thing, Lord Ashram has more than a few pics of the tables at his blog here.

[When I first wrote this up, I had a section about an annoying little kid that vexed me a couple times during the con, but after re-reading it, I just sacked that bit. Yes, the kid was a pain. But really, bitching about annoying kids during a con report made me feel positively poisonous. Annoying kids happen. It's fine.]

Number of compliments received for my Captain Marvel t-shirt: 4.

Fall-In, day one (many pics)

Last month, took the weekend to hit Fall-In up in Lancaster, PA.Good times were had. My posse opted out of having a table at Wally's (think flea market) for a change of pace, which lead to a little more gaming time, and a little less stress preparing for the con. Turned out to be a good call, IMHO. But I am getting ahead of myself.

We jetted out at early o'clock Friday morning from the DC area and headed north. No traffic situations, until we got into the building. Pre-reg was a ten-second affair, but one of our crew had to register at the show, and dear heavens, that was a mess. I was told it was a new system, or something like that, but the lines were atrocious and slow.

Once through that, we headed down to their first game of the Flames of War doubles tourney. The Kent brothers were rolling Americans, and did pretty well for themselves. Maurice wrote up the whole event for WWPD, and you can find the report here. Good reading! I took a few pics.

A wall of Russian steel, literally stretching across the board.

Later in the game, things were breaking down for the Russians. Love the windmill.

The building on the left is patterned on an actual French Foreign Legion outpost.

I had some free time before my afternoon game, so the next stop was naturally the dealers hall. One of the first tables that caught my eye was this nifty setup for a new company called The Tactical Retreat. They've working on laser-cut terrain for both 15mm and 28mm, and even mentioned 1/300th. The modular setups and the built-in streets pictured above look like they will offer a lot of opportunities for both modern and scifi gamers to put together some decent terrain for a song.

Pictured above you can see some of the different cut-out windows you'll be able to choose from. I picked up a couple small 15mm buildings to show off, and hope to get them up on the blog, uh, soonish? Gaming and hobby time has been at a premium these days. The company is too new for even a website, but definitely keep your eyes out for them. There's more than a couple lasercut terrain producers now, but I feel these guys have a good angle at a great price.

Alien Dungeon had a lovely table full of make-your-own armies for Fanticide, and this rhino covered in shields was certainly a winner, as are the zebra centaurs above.

My first game of the con was Orbital Guns of Galantros VI, run by the fine folks at WNGA. The above picture, with the spaceships? Actually at the table next to us: Bombardment of Galantros VI. See, their table was the giant spaceship fight, which included both sides dropping orbital bombardments onto our table. We were playing the ground forces trying to seize the orbital guns, and yes, occasionally firing blasts up into their space fight. I've seen this format done before, and the guys running it today did a good job, keeping the games light and moving along briskly.

The figs used on our side were repurposed 40k models, and I was specifically running the Orks. Lot of nice old-school models in there.

Here we are a couple turns in. I've run both trukks up to either bunker, and am already pouring out my boyz to take the facilities. And already taking casualties. The pieplate of a template above represents one of the shots from my friends upstairs. They scattered far and wide, but definitely kept things lively over there.

The turn or so after this, I get off a shot that apparently decimated a flank of ships, turning the tide for the space battle in our favor. I didn't know this until the end of the game.

So my basic strategy was to run up both vehicles,  dumping our a pile of orks, then using the vehicles to sit there and block shots as terrain. Worked pretty well on both sides! I got shot up badly (very badly) but they had to move around my blasted wrecks to dig me out, and that let me get off extra shots into space. At the end of the battle, I was all but wiped out, but as noted above, the shots I did get led to an ork victory in orbit. Fun times! Afterwards, the players chatted with the game runners, discussing how to make the games more fair and more fun. They were open to criticism and very communicative about their designs and thoughts, and I would gladly play with those gents again any con.

After the game, more shopping. Picked up stuff ordered before the con (Eureka, Old Glory.) Finally snagged that Otherworld Hook Horror I have had my eye on since forever. Everyone has an attachment to some ridiculous D&D creature from when they started playing dungeoncrawls, and the Hook Horror is one of mine. I even had the plastic toy from the action figure line. Man. The 80's were weird.

Other game tables spotted while wandering around (one of my favorite con activities):

Pennsylvania Pete & The Heart of Ra - GASLIGHT pulp action

A Day at the Racez - WNGA's 40k-style racing game

I have no idea what this historical game was, but it had a massive setup, covering like 18 folding tables. Lovely.

Finally it was time for my evening, game, a rollicking Doctor Who skirmish. Except I get to the room... and no game. No sign up, no nothing. Well heck. I check the game cancellation list, no luck. Sigh.

So I head over to the other game I was considering playing, the Zombie Cardio con staple. And it's also not there. OK? Maybe it was moved? Maybe I wasn't meant to play an evening game.

While looking for the second game, however, I ran across a tragically-full zombie game, "Rescue Me." Look at that setup!

Seriously, very jealous over that setup.

The end of the night, I reconvened with my crew, and we headed down to board games with the WWPD gents. First, Maurice schooled his brother and myself in Spartacus, and the less said about that, the better. I dig the game, but the beating was savage and swift. Afterwards, we got into the thick of things with Game of Thrones. I pulled team Baratheon, and true to character, I decided to start drinking. Unfortunately, the bar wasn't as close to the gaming area as I'd thought, and I inadvertently was holding up the game in my sojourns to get more cider. Ugh. I hate being a jerk and not even noticing. Will be better behaved next time.

Tune in next time for zombies, Commies, and more!


Number of compliments received for my Supernatural t-shirt: 4.