Weekend Recap

Good Monday all!

I don't know where in the world you are reading this, or what time it is, but here, this morning it was dark...

The kind of dark that shuts off your alarm for a snoozing 30 more minutes, pulls the duvet over your head and says "Eff off! I'm going back to sleep!"

Anyway, I promised a recap on my weekend demo day:

So I ran two demos on Saturday, one full game against a store regular and his Raspy crew, and a advanced-basic demo against a repeat new player. By that I mean he came to my last demo but didn't buy into the game at the time. Apparently he went away and had it playing on his mind, so came back on Saturday and had another game with the same models but full rules.

Now in order to explain this I need to take a step back and explain how I play my demos:

You see, virtually all my demos are played as "Gunslingers vs Nephilim". That's Niño and Francisco Ortega vs 2 Terror Tots and 1 Mature Nephilim. On top of this I also remove triggers and a lot of the spells/abilities.

So the Nephilim retain Black Blood, the Tots keep Grow, and the Young keeps Melee Expert.

Niño keeps In My Sights and Francisco keeps Flurry while they both retain Companion.

This is based around understanding the Fate card mechanics, and in a lot of cases, how the models are moved around the table, and how Actions and Interacts are played out.

The game is played without Schemes and a modified version of Shared Treasure Hunt. Rather than a (2) Interact to pick up the counter, it's only (1) and at the end of every turn whichever side has the counter gets 1VP, the side at the end with the most VP wins.

In this guy's case, he had already played that and went away, come back and was looking for more.

So out came the same models, but this time full Stat Card rules including Triggers (he loved Flay on the Nephs).

As the game was a pure demo game, I further modified the rules. The Young's Mature was replaced with Grow (so it only took 1 blood to grow into a Mature) and we allowed all models to use Soul Stones - with a strict explanation that under normal circumstances only Masters and those with Use Soulstones can do so.

He played it and loved it, I think that having understood how the mechanics worked from last time, these added rules allowed to fill the gaps rather than blow his mind.

After this we had our usual 'post game discussion' where we discuss the game, it's theme and setting and what sort of factions and crews there are.

He said to me that he was really into the Showgirls, but had been told they were hard to learn with and asked for a recommendation on a starter crew.

I asked what he liked for game play and style, and he said that more than anything he likes board manipulation, moving his models around in unusual ways and having sneaky tricks, rather than smacking the opponent with a sword or similar.

I told him how I started, that i really wanted to play The Dreamer because I loved the fluff but because he was supposed to be hard to learn with I went for Book1 Masters instead. I went on to explain that while I enjoyed those games, I spent my time wishing I was playing the Dreamer and what model conversions I would try for the crew.

With this in mind, what he wanted from a crew was provided with the Showgirls. He can get another crew if he wants, but he'll spend his time wishing he invested his money where he wanted with his girls.

And I don't care who you are, when you first look at how the Girls play, you feel your head implode. So really he should just get that over and done with.

After this we had the game vs Raspy. This guy wanted to play against my Dark Debts crew, and I encountered something that I'm still not 100% sure is a legal move:

So to set the scene: Lynch is just out of Melee with his Ice Golem (about 3.5") it's Raspy's turn to activate, she can't see Lynch but can see her Golem.

She casts December's Curse 3 times, each time on the Golem, cheating her cast up and his resist down, giving her a positive cheat able damage flip. Regardless of the result if its not Severe damage he cheats it up making it 5 damage with 2 blasts.

This means that the blast hits Lynch, each time for 4 damage a go (12 in total) that can not be resisted and because of unlucky stone flips, only took it down to 9, so still killed Lynch with absolutely nothing I could do about it.

At the same time, the Golem with Armour 3 knocks the damage down to 2 a time, so he only takes a total of 6 damage and still has 3 wounds left.

Please I need to know, is that a legal move? It seems incredibly powerful to me and with no way to resist other than throwing Stones at it (If the target was a minion, he wouldn't be able to do that) made the game extremely 'un fun' for me.

I'd appreciate your thoughts.

Anyway, time for me to get moving!

See you all Breachside!

- Your friendly neighbourhood Doctor Loxley