Guild Ball (#70): Battle at Lund - Friday Round 1

First game is against HP’s incredible looking Morticians, pictures can’t do it justice. Several of the models have build in green light diodes!


I want Corsair into all these squishy Morticians.

Fishermen

Corsair
Tentacles
Hag
Jac
Sakana
Gutter

Plots: Back in the Game, Stick to the Plan, Keep Your Chin Up, Kick'em When They are Down, Sell it to the Crowd.

Morticians

Obulus
Vileswarm
Brainpan & Memory
Ghast
Graves
Veteran Hemlocke


Obulus kicks off into a nice position for me.

Round 1

I screw up by forgetting Obulus’ Shadow Like dodge, so instead of forcing him to move into me to pull someone he gets to pull and then move. Great start!

Round 2

Corsair pulls in and takes out Graves and Obulus takes out Hag. I then promptly forget Vileswarm’s ability on takeout and pop him right inside my scrum, dealing 3 damage poison to pretty much everyone near the end of the turn. 23 damage on my team for taking out the mascot, this is really stellar play! 3-2 to me.

Round 3

Corsair just scrums better than Morticians. Ghast and Hemlocke go down, bringing the score to 7-2.

Round 4

Morticians take out Hag again. I score with Sakana and take out Vileswarm again, killing Tentacles, for a final result of 12-5.

Plenty of screws-up on my part, but good to get rid of the rust before tomorrow...

Guild Ball: Swedish Nationals 2018

I went to Guild Ball Swedish Nationals 2018 at Battle of Lund this weekend for three days of Guild Ball playing. The winner in the main event will be invited to the World Championship, last chance! I got close to a tournament win in Hungary, so victory here could be within reach, with a bit of luck...

There were visitors from England, Spain, Poland, Chech Republic, several Finns and two Norwegians. The other Norwegian is my WTC team mate Kim.

My luggage was lost by the airline, but of course I had all the important stuff (minis and tools) in the hand luggage. I mean, who needs clean socks and deodorant anyway?

The event started with 2 parallel 3-round warm up tournaments on Friday. I thought this was a very good idea, to get into form to the main event without being totally exhausted, and plenty of time to socialize.

I have slightly changed my lineup to try out Veteran Sakana. My favorite Angel had to go, I really enjoy playing her - but Sakana does the first turn receiving goal almost as well.

Tournament reports will be up soon. In the meantime, enjoy this excellent conversion by HP. Green LEDs! :D

Fishermen

Corsair
Shark
Tentacles
Greyscales
Hag
Jac
Sakana
Veteran Sakana
Siren
Gutter

Battle at Lund - Friday Tournament

Corsair vs Obulus

Twilight Imperium (#2): Muaat's Revenge

We get together for another game, just one week after the previous one!

We give everyone 3 random races to pick from. I get Federation of Sol (Blue), Remi takes the Naalu Collective (Green), Dag-Erling goes for the Nekro Virus (Red), and Leif can not resist the temptation of starting with War Suns and takes Embers of Muaat (Yellow).

The galaxy is split with mostly hazards and empty space dividing it into one area with Sol and Naalu, and one with Nekro and Muaat.

Round 1

I get a pretty perfect start. My Strategy Cards were Leadership and Politics. After grabbing the nearest system, Warfare secondary allows me to build another cruiser at home. Diplomacy gives me two untaps. I tech to Gravity Drive, and then I am able to leapfrog next to Mecatol, and also grab a green tech planet. Six planets after the first turn! Four of them are Hazards so I score Corner the Market, too.

My secret objective is the one to finish off a fleet with a PDS, a really rubbish objective, I have no plans to go PDS route.

Sol: 1, Rest: 0

Round 2

I take Imperial and Trade. I start off by grabbing Mecatol on my first move. This is when it gets pretty weird. Nekro offers an alliance and agrees to divide up the planets with Muaat, even giving a Ceasefire. Instead of moving on Mecatol, as agreed, Muaat breaks the truce and blows up Nekro's fleet with his War Sun. Evidently Leif still remembered being stabbed in the face by Dag-Erling in the previous game, and he is out for blood!

I am quite happy, I was ready to abandon Mecatol after playing Imperial. Now I got to build a PDS there instead... perhaps it will hold...

Due to a misplay Muaat only brings one infantry to land on the Nekro homeworld... which was shot down by the PDS. Nekro survives... barely...

Round 3

We had a fairly uneventful round on my part, but Muaat and Nekro kept fighting.

I am pretty happy with how it's going. I skip a green tech so now I get 4 command tokens per turn. I score Intimidate Council.

Sol: 4, Muaat: 1, Naalu: 1, Nekro: 0

Round 4

I take Imperial again. I score, but get get evicted by Naalu's - he already has the super fighters. Glad to see at least one of my opponents is being responsible, or this will be a short game. I build a lot of fleet and grab some other planets from Naalu, just to keep him busy. Nekro manages to kill the War Sun in a last ditch effort, allowing them to rebuild at home. Muaat builds another War Sun.

Sol: 5, Muaat: 1, Naalu: 1, Nekro: 0

We grab pizza and Dag-Erling's excellent home made pale ale.

Round 5

Naalu moves out of Mecatol. I am not sure why. I move in. I score Develop Weaponry (2 unit techs) and my secret objective Learn Secrets of the Cosmos (fleet near 3 anomalies).

I am at 7 points, and when Manipulate Galactic Law is flipped I am pretty sure I cannot be stopped.

Round 6

I take Imperial to force Naalu to immediately go for Mecatol. The 8 infantry I end up with are not enough to keep away Naalu's flagship and fighter swarm. I get kicked out again.

I then play Imperial to score Manipulate Galactic Law before I can lose too many planets.

My 21 infantry at Sol get hit by the plague. Net result? I lose 2 troops after rolling 5+ on 7 of 9 kills.

In the status phase I score Lead from the Front, for 10 points!

Final Standings

Sol 10
Naalu 5
Muaat 3
Nekro 2

Another sweet victory, helped by the never-ending revenge of Muaat! Naalu did what he could, but my lead was too much.

This game is just too much fun!

Edit: One round was missing in there, I think it's correct now.

First Impressions: Dark Souls

Fredrik here at Megapop just got Dark Souls, all models painted by a friend of his. So, after work last Friday we went depressing dungeon crawling! The art design is bleak, which seems right and proper.

Dark Souls must be the first board game I have ever seen that actually copies the concept of grinding from the computer game. When you are defeated, or just think you cannot clear the next room, you go back to the first tile, get all your resources returned - and the monsters respawn! While very thematic, since Dark Souls the computer game is a game where you just die and die and die, I am not sure whether it was a wise move to keep it... once you have gotten a few upgrades the low level rooms are pretty easy to do, so basically you just waste time playing them again.

A Level I Encounter

After clearing a few rooms, our somewhat under-powered party get to the boss. Most of the stuff we had found was magic weapons, but the boss higher magic defense. So they did not really help a lot.

The mechanic here is that the boss has a sequence of moves that will be repeated, so when you know what the boss is doing, you can place your adventurers so that attacks will not hit your entire party.

We enter the boss room

The boss fight also took a while! We got it down to about half hit points, and then I got killed. We were not good at computing what the boss was doing, that is for sure.

Attack! Block! Dodge! Splat!

Yep. They have that in the box, as well.

We had fun, the game is decent, and the boss fight was quite challenging. The miniatures are quite nice, not quite the same as miniature games, but way better than most board games.

I have just played the dungeon crawler Gloomhaven all summer, and it's pretty hard not to compare games here. The combat and levels in Dark Souls are quite repetitive and simplistic, nowhere as challenging and varied as Gloomhaven. The Dark Souls campaign seems pretty much identical to just playing the base game more times, keeping your gear between levels.

Since players in Dark Souls only have the objective of winning as a group, all decisions are made as a group. This removes one of the most fun things in cooperative games - the option to sometimes be selfish and not cooperate.

Verdict: 3/6. An OK game, no huge flaws, and nothing that really stood out either. The game did feel a little bit repetitive, even on the first playthrough. I did like that the boss fight was really difficult. We definitely had a fun time, so I'd be happy to give it another go.

First Impressions: Founders of Gloomhaven

Founders of Gloomhaven is a euro game where the players score points by building Gloomhaven. I was pretty excited to try the game, since I absolutely love the Gloomhaven legacy game.

The basic game is to build resource buildings that use resources from other resource buildings (for example, People + Stone are required to build Bricks. Scoring buildings are placed as the game goes on, and if one is connected to your resources of the correct type, then you get points.

It was not that bad in the beginning when options were rather limited, but the complexity soon explodes. You need influence on resources to be able to build the more advanced resource buildings, and then you need to build roads, and you need to time everything so that another player does not grab things before you. This can be pretty hard to control since other players also decide what order actions happen in and what those actions are.

As the game progresses it gets pretty crazy. I found myself having to think and check and think and check all the time in order to figure out what was actually connected where, and who could do what. Add in a lot of restrictions on where buildings can be placed, voting, special action cards, special connections only one player can use, workers, special building abilities, special racial abilities, and it just becomes way too much stuff to keep track of.

I played Twilight Imperium for the first time last weekend and even that monster of a game was way easier to get into than Founders of Gloomhaven.

Maybe there is some fun to be had if you play it a lot of times and start learning the strategies... but there is no way I will bother to put in all those play sessions when there are a bunch of more accessible and fun games to pick from.

Verdict: This game is not very good. Three of the four players seemed fairly confident they would never play it again. I'll generously give it 2 out of 6 for being pretty and with good quality components.

Twilight Imperium!

My first ever game of Twilight Imperium! I got a demo of this game on Arcon this year. My son thought it looked awesome, and I was pretty impressed too... so when a used copy appeared in the Cardboard Cræck group I snapped it up - after some bidding, even, which seemed appropriate.

We took the 6 suggested starting races and default galaxy, and everyone got dealt a random race. Going around the table, I got Empirates of Hacan, Leif got the Sardakk N'orr, Dag-Erling got the Universities of Jol-Nar, and Lars got Barony of Letnev.

The game started with me sprinting for Mecatol Rex and getting there first, also playing an Imperial. Looking nice! Everyone got worried. I did throw up a PDS at Mecatol, and a fairly big fleet.

There was a lot of fun with the agendas. My ambassador even got shot at an inopportune moment! Nothing really gummed up my plans, though.

It took some time before I got evicted by the Sardakk N'orr, who got duly stabbed in the face by Jol-Nar. Never trust a fish!

I had 7 points at that time. I turtled up as well as I could and scored the last 3 points right after. Jol-Nar thought they would win on the next turn... but there was no next turn!

The final score

Hacan 10
Jol-Nar 7
Letnev 4
Sardakk N'orr 3

We did a couple of rule mistakes (everyone was new to 4th edition). Everyone got 1 command instead of 2 each turn (yeah, that misprinted tech card tricked us). Also, we started with commodities. I discovered only after the game that you don't get them at the beginning.

This game is great fun! Epic, the rules are good, and the game flows well. Randomized objectives are great in games like this, continually forcing people to do stuff they rather maybe not do.

I especially like the excellent rules for trade and diplomacy. The trade good system forces players to interact all the time to get their extra resources, and all that silly crap and backstabbing going on at the Galactic Council is just hilarious.