We're not dead... ok, ok I died but it was just a game!

Ok, it has been a while… but the Finely Diced Gamers are still here and attempting to get a few additional blogs written. As primarily a games group, it’s been pretty great to see a few new faces join our gaming evenings, perhaps we’ll see a few new writers and articles presented for reading on here too.

As well as being pretty open to new gamers, we’re also pretty open to all types of board games, war games, digital games and even the occasional miniatures game. I’ll be honest I’ve had a huge push to miniature game again and I’m using the momentum to paint some of my old 40K miniatures. The reason for this re-interest in modelling is because, well I recently turned 40 and as a present from my fabulous wife (Becca), I’ve been provided with a permanent space where I can model, paint and even play (solitaire) games if I so choose…

Now, primarily the miniatures that I’ve collected have been Games Workshop (a long time ago), and as such are pretty much all Out of Production (OOP) now. In fact, further back on the blog you can find an after action report (AAR) from when a few of us played Necromunda – my Van Saars are still unpainted but the plan is to get them ready for action and possibly get a rematch against Matt’s house Cawdor and Rebecca’s house Goliath gang.

However, I no longer feel obliged to purchase and collect GW, perhaps it’s the prices or perhaps I just want to try something else. Regardless, I now have two modelling projects that I’ve undertaken and neither of them are GW, but they look super cool and I’ve actually started painting some of them. Allow me to explain.

So… literally just arrived, opened but yet to be readied for use is Super Dungeon Explore (SDE).

SDE is a dungeon crawler inspired by old Japanese console RPGs. The 52 included miniatures are done in a cute / chibi / super-deformed style, which means the head is roughly the same size as the rest of the body. I’ve had my eye on these miniatures (and specifically this game) for a while – they just look super detailed and the game being a dungeon crawl sounds pretty good too. I shall not go into too much detail since my plan is to update with a blog following my attempts to get this game modelled, painted and brought out to the table – watch this space.

Now the other project is a fairly new war game called Dropzone Commander.

Now this is a joint project between Jay and myself. Both of us wanted to get into a miniatures war game system but wanted to actively avoid GW – a few systems looked interesting but this was ultimately the game that we both wanted to play. Part of the appeal is that the game comes as a starter set, which means that there’s enough in the box to get an idea of the game and then allow you to make a decision whether to indulge and buy more… sorry, increase the size of your chosen army, or not.

Jay has taken the part of the alien scourge (skimmers), whereas I have got the fabulous UCM (lots of tanks). Now this is also a work in progress since Jay has still to complete painting his arm. At the last look I’ve got about 50% of my starter army ready (all my tanks and APC’s are painted awaiting fine details) although my ground soldiers and drop-ships still need further prep work. I’ve not painted anything in a very long time but what I’ve done so far I’ve enjoyed – it’s certainly a challenge painting models that are at a 10mm scale. Once we get this to the table there will most certainly be another AAR.

Talking of getting Games to the Table, we have still been having the occasional game too. The most recent game played has been Tales of the Arabian Nights.

This game was played at our last evening of gaming, there were five of us playing. Simply put, each person decides what their own win condition is, which is done by choosing a score that can be split between story and destiny points – adding up to a total of 20. You then have to take your character around the map completing quests, scoring (story & destiny) points and ultimately experiencing a story as you would an old Steve Jackson “choose your own adventure” book. For those not old enough to remember, these books all started in a similar way, but as you read you would be asked to make decisions… decide to try and kill the monster, goto p75, slip past the monster, goto p99. 

This took the entirety of the evening with some very peculiar story’s being told, some of us got married, some were being pursued by ner’do wells and I died… no-one told me that death was even a possibility (fortunately my brother? Was able to take up my quest), unfortunately I didn’t win. A good game and it made for a very enjoyable evening… but you do need to play with individuals who don‘t mind making a fool of themselves or reading a lot (there’s a lot of reading).

Finally, The Resistance – I got given this for my birthday and managed to play this with 7 people soon after.

 
Everyone seemed to have a good time, although we all got called a spy at one point or another. Essentially this is a game spread over 5 missions, with a team selected from everyone playing by a team leader (which is continuously moving from one person to the next) being tasked to complete at least three of five missions successfully… but you don’t know who are the spies or if they have been selected for the mission –and it only takes one spy for a mission to fail.

As each mission completes, successfully or not, you start to deduce who the spies may be and those loyal to the Resistance (the spies know the other spies). To add further pressure – everybody gets to vote on who goes on each mission – it is possible to fail a mission if you’re not satisfied with the team leader or their team choice – just decide quickly whose going – five no votes and it becomes an automatic fail and the spies win the game.

Note to self – it’s not a good thing when everyone agrees with a team being sent on a mission, it typically means there is a spy on the mission.

Right, I’m off to take photos of the unboxing of Super Dungeon Explore for the next piece which will hopefully be up shortly.