Pictures of your recent tabletop games...

[TheCommandTent]

Great pictures mirth!  It looks like alot of fun.

[Arctic Blast]

It's another mass of recently purchased product! Good grief...

Monsters Menace America, Agents of Smersh, the Conquest of Planet Earth expansion (which is in that base game box), Wilderness, Evo, Noville : Bastogne's Outpost (and Battle Pack Bravo) for Band of Heroes, the 2nd Story expansion board for Flash Point : Fire Rescue, another book of stuff for the Deadlands Reloaded RPG setting, the Beginner Box for the Star Wars Edge of the Empire RPG and the Ambuscade villain pack for Sentinels of the Multiverse.

One of these days I might actually remember to snap a few pics of games actually being played.  ;)

[TheCommandTent]

Nice collection there now we demand pictures of you playing them.   ;D

[MengJiao]

Nice collection there now we demand pictures of you playing them.   ;D

  I'm playing REd Winter.  It is my current candidate for "Best Game of all Time"...It Plays fast and has all kinds of great Chrome
(capturing and using enemy light MGs, people with heart conditions, frozen lakes, bonfires, field kitchens):

[MengJiao]

And the Russians take a hex!  (more important than it looks since it keeps the heavy MGs from suppressing the battalion across the frozen lake).  Losses on both sides have been pretty high.  The Russians will probably build some bonfires to help the infantry companies recover
and the Finns will no doubt do some vicious night raids:

[bayonetbrant]

AB - you gotta crack open Wilderness and give us a look at how it plays.

[TheCommandTent]

AB - you gotta crack open Wilderness and give us a look at how it plays.

+1

[Arctic Blast]

AB - you gotta crack open Wilderness and give us a look at how it plays.

Heh, I read the rules last night. And with the weather, today seems like a good day for it. I'll try it out and and snap a few pics and maybe throw a post together tonight.

[Arctic Blast]

Okay, Wilderness has been played! There are a few pics, but they're horrible. Turns out the flash on the borrowed digital camera works only on rare occasions, and the room wasn't very well lit. Weeeee!

This game is BRUTAL. If you like games like Survive! Escape From Atlantis where you and your friends just pile on and wreck each other, you will love this. At the start, each person gets a player and a player board measuring their Thirst, Level and Exhaustion level. Each person also gets 3 Event cards. Every event card can be played for a positive result for your character OR a negative result for an opponent or all opponents. Then you build the board. There are 2 corner pieces (that contain all the basic rules, so they're quite handy), and you pick 6 of the 8 boards to put between them. Everyone starts in the top left corner and needs to get across the 6 boards aaaalllll the way to the bottom right.



This is the board. The flipped green tiles are still covered by 'fog of war' until someone reaches one of them. Oh boy, we get to cross desert first...instant thirst boost!



And here's a player board. Thirst and Hunger go up one each at the end of each player round, though other factors can contribute to futher boosts. As they move to the right, higher numbers appear in the squares. Exhaustion goes up one at the end of every player round, PLUS the numbers in the Thirst and Hunger tracks that have been reached. If Exhaustion reaches the skull, you die. Also, you'll notice different Energy numbers above the Exhaustion track. That controls how much you can do in a turn, from moving to searching for food and the like.



And here's a weather card. At the end of each player round (each player takes a turn that total one round), that track moves one to the right. Weather cards can allow players to draw more Event cards, but also might require drawing Sickness cards (more on these soon...they're vicious) or have other detrimental effects. The dark squares on that track mean it's night. Movement is more difficult, and hunting for food is impossible, at night.

Okay, so in to the game. Within 2 turns, one of the players (I ran 3 people) was already pretty damn messed up.



This was in large part thanks to being blasted by the other players and forced to draw TWO Sickness cards that knocked their Exhaustion level way down the track.

It got worse. Much worse.



We're on to the second tile now, and that tile unearthed a Snake. The black tombstone (how fitting) is the already fubar'd player. The grey one is a snake. Animals move during the same nature turn when player hunger, thirst and exhaustion increases, and the weather track is advanced. If nobody is close, a spinner is used to determine a random direction of movement. If a player is adjacent, the animal moves in and attacks.

In comes snakey. Combat is simple and brutal. Another player rolls 2 dice for the animal. The player being attacked rolls 1. If the player manages to roll a higher number on his one die than the animal gets on his 2 combines, the animal is removed and the player's hunger is moved all the way to the left. If they tie, nothing happens. If the animal rolls higher, the player's Exhaustion moves along the track a number of spaces equal to the difference between the animal roll and the player roll.

The snake rolled 11.

The player rolled 1.



THREE TURNS IN, one of the players is already dead. Showing what a sick bastard I am, I freaking love this.  ;D

It didn't take too long for one of the other players to succumb. They got stuck away from a body of water, so their Thirst was contributing 3 points of Exhaustion every turn. Then they tried hunting for food. You roll 2 dice and drop your Hunger the total number that you rolled...UNLESS you roll a one. Then you get nothing. You're lost. Not only is your turn over, but you use the animal movement spinner to shift in a random direction. Dude ended up back in the mountains. He was down to 3 points of Energy per turn. He tried to advance back in to the forest, but it was night. At night, you have to roll a die every single time you move. A 4-6 means everything is fine. A 1-3 means you're lost again.

He rolled a 2.

He ended up moving backwards, further in to the mountain range. The only way out was through more mountains...they take 4 points to move in to. He pretty much starved to death on a barren rock.

That made the 3rd player the winner, and he was down to an Exhaustion of 3 thanks to an unfortunate run in with a wolf and crossing A LOT of desert (entering a desert space during daytime immediately adds 1 to your Thirst track.

This game is brutal. It pretty much hates anyone playing it. You can and will nail each other to the wall.

I can't recommend it enough.

One quick component complaint : the markers supplied for the player tracks and weather track is the tiniest little cardboard tokens I've ever seen, so I subbed in gaming stones. Seriously, the originals are each about 1/6 the size of one of those stones. They're begging to get lost.

[TheCommandTent]

^That sounds like fun AB, I might have to look into getting that one.

[Arctic Blast]

^That sounds like fun AB, I might have to look into getting that one.

I'm quite pleased with it. The rules are about 10 pages total, and that's with a pretty big font being used and images. Very simple once you get going with it. Very minimal rules look up since the energy costs for everything, including entering different terrain, is right there on the board.

This is definitely coming out at the next game night. My friends are every bit the merciless bastard types that I am. I won't be surprised if half the players (it can support up to 8, and turns are quick enough that play time really shouldn't be an issue at that number) are dead by turn 4.  ;D

[TheCommandTent]

^That sounds like fun AB, I might have to look into getting that one.

I'm quite pleased with it. The rules are about 10 pages total, and that's with a pretty big font being used and images. Very simple once you get going with it. Very minimal rules look up since the energy costs for everything, including entering different terrain, is right there on the board.

This is definitely coming out at the next game night. My friends are every bit the merciless bastard types that I am. I won't be surprised if half the players (it can support up to 8, and turns are quick enough that play time really shouldn't be an issue at that number) are dead by turn 4.  ;D

Good to know.  A few friends of my wife and I play boardgames and this looks like something we would all enjoy.   We tend to get very competitive.

[MengJiao]

And the Russians take a hex!  (more important than it looks since it keeps the heavy MGs from suppressing the battalion across the frozen lake).  Losses on both sides have been pretty high.  The Russians will probably build some bonfires to help the infantry companies recover
and the Finns will no doubt do some vicious night raids:

Yep.  Morning comes.  There are still plenty of Russians, but I really have to replay this with a better grasp of the rules that help the Russians get going on the first day:

[MengJiao]

Yep.  Morning comes.  There are still plenty of Russians, but I really have to replay this with a better grasp of the rules that help the Russians get going on the first day:

Okay, different game, roughly the same scale, kutiest kampfgruppe ever!

[TheCommandTent]

No pictures, but I finally got in my first game of Twilight Struggle.  It was alot to take in and learn but as we started to figure it out it was alot of fun!