The starting line up for my kitbashed orc blood bowl team!
Boardgames
For the second week in a row our popular Wednesday Night Gaming slot resounded to the cheers and jeers of Blood Bowl. We only managed to get in one half’s play due to spending an hour bashing the new Wardex for 40k despite the fact that none of us have seen it yet. Good times!
Once again it was left to Servitob and I to throw down and with the flip of a cardboard token I ended up with the Orcs again, although, in a change from last week, I’d also be kicking off. We used the teams that came with the starter set and at the end of the half Servitob was left with a dugout full of knocked out linemen and blitzers while I had a knocked out thrower, a sent off for fouling Black Orc and a touchdown.
After having spent two weeks now playing with the Orcs I thought I’d offer my insights into the team. If we do get around to running a league the Orcs are what we will see Servitob fielding. In general the Orc lineup isn’t the fastest nor the most agile, however, they have an average strength and above average armour. When you can set up overlapping tackle zones and block assists then they become really good.
Normally Orcs work because they are cheap and you get more of them than your enemy does of his own troops, unfortunately this doesn’t carry over to Blood Bowl as each team can have a max of 11 players on the field at any one time. What will keep you going is that armour, having an average of AV8 across the team means that it will take a roll of 9 or more to get an injury roll and as any of you know, that is greater than the average. In two games I have only had one Lineman get knocked to the dugout through injury and only one Stunned Orc beyond that. In contrast I can almost guarantee at least one stunned result when I block or foul the Humans (my dice seem less cursed too) which takes them out of the game for at least two turns.
You’re not that fast as Orcs although Blitzers are good ball carriers, they have a MA of 6 so are your fastest players and the addition of the Block skill also makes them tough to knock down. If you can get the ball in their hands them can stomp up the field (this is what got me my touchdown last night). In fact, in a league or self-created team you can take up to 4 Blitzers and these would be the first things that I include in a team. They are the most expensive players outside of Trolls and are the same price as Black Orcs. While the Blorcs have better Strength they are slower and have no Skills to start with. While Black Orcs are more likely to hurt their opponent the fact you are missing the Block skill means that you have to settle for push backs when you could get knockdowns and I find this really limits their usefulness when put against the Blitzers. Sure you are pretty much guaranteed to be getting two dice and picking the one you want even on defensive blocks but most teams will just try to dodge out the way and ignore his tackle zone. With a lowly MA of 4 he’s not going to be running players down either. Ideally they’d need some skills before becoming useful at all hence why I’d be more likely going for Blitzers.
Linemen are obviously the bread and butter of any team. They have an average stat line with decent armour, they are best used in pairs to assist blocks against the opponent or as rush protection for a ball carrier. Even if they do get knocked down their AV8 should save them from getting injured more often than not. They are cheap too and will fill out a list after you’ve taken the various positional players you want to start your team with to get the tasty skill rolls. Orc Linemen can do some damage, especially against low Strength or lightly armoured opponents. I’d make sure at least one of them is putting the boot in on a downed opponent on a turn as the loss of one won’t really hurt you all that much and the potential to take an opposing team member out of the game or impact them in a league can be more beneficial in the long run.
Throwers are the last of the team players I will talk about as we’ve not used Goblins nor Trolls as of yet. To be honest, in the two games so far they haven’t really done a lot. On receiving a kick off they can be quite useful as you can grab the ball and then move into a decent position to hopefully get the ball to one of your Blitzers who can charge through the line of your opponent and make a run for the end zone. There are two in the starting teams but I’d be tempted to drop this to one. Generally he’s not going to be holding the ball for that long so if your defence is solid he shouldn’t be taking too many hits. If he doesn’t have the ball then there is no sense blitzing or blocking him as you want to position your own players to receive the football in the half of the field likely to include the thrower. The Pass skill is really what you are paying for here as that re-roll is going to be useful for helping your average AG Blitzers to make the catch (and also saving the team re-roll to make sure you do catch it!).
So, there you have it, a brief rundown about how I feel about the Orc lineup. I’m not a Blood Bowl expert but these are my thoughts after running with them and seeing what they can do.
IN what has now become a firm fixture in the 6 Inch Move gaming calendar we descended upon the Servitob wing of the floating citadel (recently upgraded with a spiffy new conservatory) for some Wednesday night gaming action.
As you can see from the cunningly placed image and post title last night was a foray into the Warhammer Fantasy world with one of GW’s stand out games from the mid nineties. Blood Bowl, for those too young to remember it, was a game encompassing most of the Fantasy races and took the form of a corrupted American Football game. The rules replicate passing, rushing and ferocious, bone-crunching tackles, that, in true Warhammer style, may mean more than a quick exit to the showers, where morticians are in greater demand that physicians.
We played with all the rules from the Core box, although I do have the Death Zone expansion waiting for later. We also used the plastic teams that came with this set. The usual suspects for the night’s entertainment were myself, our host Servitob and “no longer really qualifies as a gaming noob” nBreaker. I played referee for the first half and let the other two have at it. Servitob took the Humans while nBreaker took the Orcs.
The first half was actually rather tame as the two teams squared off, Servitob kicked off the half and the ball landed deep in the Orcs backfield where it was retrieved by a Lineman. The Humans blitzed, the ball came loose and they ran it into the end zone to open the scoring. The Humans then kicked off, this time the ball was picked up by an Orc Thrower, the Orcs on the line of scrimmage then did an awesome job of beating down their Human opponents to open up a rushing lane and the Thrower basically ran the length of the field and into the end zone. All square at the half!
In the second half nBreaker relinquished control of the Orcs to me. I stacked the line of scrimmage with as many Orcs as I could and left the secondary as purely the two Orc Throwers. Servitob used some nice positional play to open up one of his catchers to receive a throw at max range. Being the flukey bugger that he is he rolled the hard six needed for the pass to be accurate, The catcher grabbed the ball deftly out of the air.
What the poor catcher didn’t count on was a blitzing Orc Thrower that pushed the Human off the field and straight into the dugout. In following turns the Thrower picked up the ball while a Lineman made his way into the opponents half of the field. At this point my Offensive line of Blitzers and Black Orcs was pummeling Humans into the ground with a massive rate of success, this allowed me to get my thrower in position who chucked a pass to the Lineman who ran it into the end zone for the Orcs second touchdown. With only two turns left to go we finished the game as there was no chance for the Humans to get the ball and run it, not even if they’d have tried something similar to an on-side kick.
All in all a fun time was had and the league rules might come out in the future.
What is good about Blood Bowl is that the rules are very simple but leave a lot open to player strategy. You have one of four actions that each player can take in a turn, Move, Block, Pass and Blitz. Only one player per team turn can make a Pass or a Blitz (blitz combines a move and a block) which means you really have to think about what each member of your team is going to do and what impact that will have when the game goes to your opponents turn. Each half is a maximum of 8 turns and while that may seem like a lot there are many actions which cause a turnover so you might find that if you start off the turn with a Block that goes badly all of a sudden your opponent is having his go and you are out of position, so planning your turn is paramount.
Even with the fact we were checking on a lot of the rules (I’d read them through but as anyone knows that’s no substitute for actually playing) the game was pretty swift. It’s great that something that is almost 20 years old still plays so well and with no disputes about how things work. I know it has a huge following online and there are a number of companies who produce models for the same kind of games elsewhere. It’s certainly a solid game and I look forward to getting Gribblin and Carabus into a game soon. For our regular mid-week session this game seems solid to fill those few hours.
It gets a big Two Thumbs Fresh from this undead buccaneer!
Do you suffer from army list writing fatigue? Does game imbalance bother you? Are your wrists tired from rolling bucketloads of dice to shoot, stab and wound your opponent? Are those elves starting to get on your nerves?
Then what you need is Formula D – The game of manly motorsport! What could be more studly than pretending to drive a little plastic car around maps of world famous racetracks? Impress your friends as you manage to stop the required number of times in the corners without making your little car spin out and catch fire! Pick up babes as you hit maximum speed and actually roll an entire D30! Watch the girls swoon as you make a pretend pit stop and move your damage markers about!
Seriously though, Formula D is a good fun little game when you just want to have a non-confrontational, balanced and easy pick up and play gaming session. Strategy and luck both play a part, but the races seem to be pretty close with our experience so far being that the race comes down to the last die roll every time. If you like the sound of it then go check it out!
WARNING: Attempting to drive a real car with dice can be hazardous. The publisher accepts no responsibility for involuntary vroom vroom noises made during play. Buying a sports car and driving fast will not solve your midlife crisis. Always wear a seat belt.
You know, we here at 6 Inch Move don’t just play 40k. Honest. And as if to disprove spurious allegations ZombiePirate attended our last gaming session clutching a brand new box of Dust. Not of the fairy type, but the Fantasy Flight board game type.
Soon enough we had opened the box, perused the instructions then ZombiePirate, nBreaker and servitob got down to some serious cake eating, as is becoming the norm now at all gaming sessions. Wiping away crumbs and chocolate we set up our inaugral game.
Dust is essentially a sci-fi world wide strategy game set around the time of the second world war. You build units and conquer the globe, capturing the all important alien power reserves on the way. For those of you who have played the much venerated Axis & Allies board game this will be familiar territory (except the alien bits), it’s essentially Axis & Allies in an alternate dimension.
Unlike the great Axis & Allies however, Dust does not require that five people sit around a table for two weeks to reach a conclusion. Every game’s startup is different, and points are scored for territory, cities and power sources in your possesion. Score enough points and you win the game. It’s pedal to the metal strategy combat stuff, sitting on your empire’s resources for any length of time is a sure way to invite defeat. Turns are brisk, with cards deciding how many actions you can perform in your turn. You’ve got to build, move and fight fast with vast armies to conquer the resources, or at least knock your opponents into submission to lower their score.
Overall, Dust is a good game. Risk for speed freaks. Axis & Allies for people with short attention spans.
Thursday evening saw the 6InchMove team head to their latest addition of the floating citadel to talk more smack, throw more dice and drink more DPZ. Fortunately, the Co-op had a buy one get one free offer on DPZ. Unfortunately that meant that they had sold out, so we were reduced to drinking Pepsi of the Max variety.
The gaming commenced with War Of The Ring, the much mocked yet well dressed elvish handbag collectors of Gribblin taking on the might of ZombiePirate’s Fallen Realms.
Cunning use of mobile fortifications
Start Of The Final Turn
Death Angel
Following War Of The Ring, we all settled down for a game of Death Angel, the card game based on Space Hulk. Personally, I really enjoy this game, almost to the extent that I enjoy Space Hulk. Honestly! Yes, they are two different beasts but Death Angel is far more straightforward at least from a logistical point of view and still retains the edge of tension and the much cliched “a moment to learn, a lifetime to master” type feeling of the original.
So ZombiePirate has already alluded to this in his recent post *here*. He is normally on the lookout for new games systems, and I think this time he may be on to a winner.
From a personal perspective, I spent many years playing Warhammer Fantasy Battles fifth and sixth editions and enjoyed it greatly. However I eventually got frustrated by the fact that everything seemed to always be in the favour of Chaos. They had ridiculous numbers of troop choices (I know this is no longer the case), most of which were superior to the normal troops of the other races. Forgivingly however, they lacked any real ranged ability. That is until some bright spark decided that they should have Hellcannons.
Slowly, the old fashioned GW imbalances and codex creeps were setting in. I always felt the magic item and spell system was completely random and made up on the back of an envelope anyway. It seemed that most of the time items and spells were included with a complete disregard for their actual game impact and associated points cost. So eventually, my frustrations grew to the point whereby I really couldn’t be bothered to play WHFB anymore.
So now I have been introduced to War Of The Ring. It looks intriguing! It seems like what I always wanted WHFB to be. Magic is limited, expensive and doesn’t appear game breaking. All the army lists are included in the rulebook, eliminating the possibility of codex creep. The heroes are tough but not one man armies. The mechanics seem simple and intuitive. The number of models required is of a manageable size, and for some bizarre unknown reason GW are selling them at what seems to be a bargain price compared to what us regular GW shoppers are used to.
So there you have it. I am looking forward to trying this game in future. I have my rulebook ready. I just made this daft commitment not to dive in until ZombiePirate’s force is ready! Arrrrgggghhhh the suspense!
I could have posted a lot more stuff yesterday than I did, however, in a rare case of good blogging sense I decided to hold back on some goodies so as not to overwhelm the soft-fleshy sensibilities of our readership.
Today’s post is about a product that has, like some kind of ninja assassin, snook up and then rammed a katana through my rib cage. Only less messy and not as violently. I get email newsletters from various establishments throughout the week and when I saw one particular thing I was amazed at what my eyes beheld. To try to give that same shock factor I’ll just paste the image below;
I know! Where the hell did that come from? I have not yet had the time to be able to go and check out the contents of the box, it does look pretty beefy and as the product page says the price is a little over £70 I expect it to be chockfull or “something”. Maybe even some pieces of power armour because Servitob really does like to dress-up.
As I do most of my posting from work (shhhhh!) I can’t get to the Fantasy Flight games until lunchtime rolls around, so as I said, the contents are currently a mystery, but this is a game that is set around the time Horus got narked with his Dad and decided to get some payback….. teenage angst much? Although to be fair to Horus he was probably the most bad ass emo ever to have graced the human race. I’ll probably update this post once I know some more but even though it’s obviously an expensive release and IGUK are sold out through pre-orders alone this is something I’d like to take a serious look at. Space Hulk has sat on shelves recently as we’ve been playing Malifaux but that is a game we all enjoy and although this is no doubt different side games like this help to bulk out the universe and give us nerds something else to chuck cash at.
So following my recent painting exploration I hit upon an idea. Don’t know if it’s any good or not but here it is anyway…
Remember Space Crusade?
The thing with Space Crusade is that all of the models were made from coloured plastic. Wouldn’t it be good if you could buy your miniatures like this? For example, yellow space marines, green ork body parts, purple tyranids. Obviously the colours could be varied, for example you could buy black tyranids if you prefer. All you would have to do is assemble the model, add shading, highlights and detail and kerblamm, its on the tabletop!
Invariably this would appeal to those guys at Games Workshop because they could charge us more, but heck, I’d stump up the green if it meant I could get things to tabletop standard even faster than I already do!
…so sayeth the irreverent Servitob…
(Trust me, that’s not a bad thing!)
