The good:
- Fast. Really fast. A sober player who was actually paying attention and was at least passingly familiar with the rules could easily get a game done in 30-45 mins.
- Lots of variation in scenario and set up. The card system works very well.
- Interesting mechanics. The initiative dice roll especially is great. Essentially the way this works is: At the start of the turn, you roll 6 dice. Whoever has more single dice (ie unduplicated) gets the initiative for the turn. BUT doubles, triples etc are very useful later in the turn to activate special actions. Thus, a single dice roll has multiple pros/cons, and uses. Very clever. There's also a bit of tactical stuff with a Wild Dice each turn, that you can choose to add to any of the dice you rolled to turn a single into a double, etc. But that's just gravy on a clever basic concept.
- Alternate activation. Amen.
- Critical hit rolls. This really adds spice to every attack. A basic hit tends to do 1 damage (some orcs were doing 2), but a crit can mess you up real bad, especially the witch elf archer snake ladies, who had a nasty special action that could see them plugging some poor orc for 20+ damage in a single shot. Sure, the odds are stacked against it, but when it lands? Beautiful.
- Easy to transport - it's a skirmish game, so...
- Maybe a little too fast? There were a couple of moments where I might've liked to go another turn, but the game said nae.
- I can imagine that occasionally a scenario would just flat out screw a player from the get go. For example, one scenario had me choose a model at the start of turn 2, and Spev had to kill her by the end of turn 4 to win. Buuuut, his guys are move 3. My guys are move 5, 7, or 12, depending. Regardless, if a witch elf dont wanna be caught, no orc is gonna catch her. (it wasnt as though he had overwhelming numbers - we both had 8 in our warbands.)
- Some units seem quite powerful compared to others. The archer snake ladies in particular were bloody lethal, and I only had 2. I can imagine a warband of 5 or 6 of them would be a nightmare to deal with for any warband that wasnt extremely fast or had equally good ranged weapons of their own. (The trouble with the snake ladies was: they had lots of health, reasonable toughness, and could shoot someone to death with a single volley from right across the board, if they got a lucky shot (needing 6s), which mine did. Repeatedly. To be fair, when an orc hit them, they stayed damn well hit.) But, I was deliberately not playing evasively, as that would've been very frustrating for Spev. It may just have been a bad matchup. *shrug*
aforementioned poor bugger about to get pegged in the eyeball...
my leader and his leader having a barney
the bottle caps were objectives...
spev's terrain was, as always, very nice. The table was actually modular, with 8 swapable sections.
a game...
Hmmn. Raging Heroes. Not afraid of a twiddly bit or two...
izzat a bow she's got up there? Naaah, can't be...
*whishthunk*
Nazgob? Oi, Nazgob, stop muckin' abaht and gerrup!
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oh bugger...
mmmmmn. Cheese....
and crackers (two kinds!), and fried chicken, and ham, and salami, and crisps and beer. For once we were not muckin' about with the snacks...
All in all, a great day of gaming. Many thanks to Spev for hosting