Painting Last Night on Earth with Nigel

As good as the figures that come with Last Night on Earth are, they are unfortunately unpainted and come as plain grey (for the Heroes ) and green/brown (for the Zombies). Steve had done some attempts at painting his Hero figures and Nigel asked if I was interested in getting together one day over the Christmas Break to paint our own figures; seeing as he had the Growing Hunger and I had the Hero Pack each as well as the base game. Nigel had found a great close picture of the figures painted in lovely detail as we set out with our respect Games Workshop paints to do as good a job. Unfortunately my Skull White had dried up and I had to get one from Andy, this was for undercoating.

Nigel used a white spray for his undercoat, which came out perfectly, whilst mine was very disappointing because the new Skull White was very thin and needed several coats. The paint volume had also gone down and annoyingly, a new lid type is used that is flip type and flips shut almost as soon as you have opened it.

Nigel and I with our lack of practise managed to get some base colours and skin tones done, but we found it very relaxing and enjoyable - I compared it to two guys sitting fishing :-)

Nigel emailed later about looking for another source of paints and said he found some at a company called Wayland Games made by a company that had dealings with Games Workshop in the past to make paints using the same paint mixtures and colours as the GW set. Sounds good.

Last piece of Memoir 44 products bought - Breakthrough maps!

The Breakthrough Maps for Memoir '44 have been on the shelf at Andys Battlequest Games for quite some time now - and each time I have gone into the shop I have picked it up and had a look and put it down again. In this period of Christmas sales and being silly with money, I picked it up and decided to buy it - I spend £50 a week on petrol just to drive back and forth from work yet I fretting for about a year over £28 for the maps. The maps themselves are ENORMOUS and cover a large part of our lounge floor, so a table will be no use. There are two maps in all, with two sides - snow, green fields, desert and beach. Plus it comes with a set of large scale games that make use of the maps. Now I have all of the Memoir '44 items so I had better start putting them to use!

Another game of Ticket to Ride India - beaten hands down!

Anita and I had another go at the amazing India map for Ticket to Ride: India/Swiss - again I was beaten hands down with Anita getting almost double my score!!

More Last Night on Earth and Memoir '44!

Today I picked up two more items for some of our base games - the 2nd Campaign Book for Memoir'44 and the Survival of the Fittest scenario box for Last Night on Earth. These are two great addons that are in no means small fry. The 2nd Campaign book concentrates more on the Far East campaigns, the Japanese invasion of South-East Asia and the subsequent American Campaign in the Pacific. There is also a campaign for the breakout of Normandy and another for the Fall of Poland. There is also an Air Aces campaign too.

The Survival of the Fittest box contains a whole bunch of new missions and punch out tokens for LNOE. It also includes a great sounding mission for barricading up buildings (including barricade tokens) and one for going out for supplies whilst fighting off the zombie horde! New weapons, cards, zombie and hero cards too.

Christmas pressies and Christmas Gaming!

Merry Christmas!! And happy boxing day! Great family Christmas all round with everyone getting something nice that they always wanted - as it is every year; we get one big present each and then lots of little ones. And my big present was Railways of the World! A massive re-imagining of Railroad Tycoon that uses a huge Eastern Seaboard map of the United States and one smaller one of Mexico. The game also contains huge "empty city" markers, lots of plastic trains, millions of hexagonal track markers, oodles of money, game cards and other play pieces. You just get loads of stuff in your huge box.

The basic aim of the game is that dotted around the map are coloured cities marked with a number and the game comes with a large number of little coloured wooden cubes representing different goods, oil, wood, steel etc. Each city has a number of random cubes placed on it as indicated by the number on the city and then the idea of the game is to simply raise money to place track linking cities and delivering a coloured cube from one city to another city of that colour. The game is based on Railroad Tycoon which in turn is based on the computer game of the same name and this is exactly what happens in the computer game.

Players can also upgrade engines to take goods further, score more points and get more money for delivering those goods. We haven't played it yet, but I have been through the very short looking rules (there is a short set for the game and then a short set for each map - there are also other maps you can get, Europe, Western USA, England and Wales etc.) and it does look great and easy to play yet very in-depth.

Looking forward to my first play against Anita!!

Also on Boxing Day we all had a family game of 7 Wonders - our family favourite.

Last night on earth - with Maya and Roshni

Maya asked for another game of Last Night on Earth whilst Roshni wanted to join in too having not played before but had heard lots of good things about the game from her sister. They took the role of the Heroes, two each, whilst I played the Zombies again. This time I thought no holds barred - if I get good anti human cards, I'm going to use them! The scenario was the basic one, the humans had to kill off 15 zombies to win. We all rubbed out hands and set out to win!

First things started going badly for the zombies, the Heroes whacked a couple but then they started charging other zombies and were wondering why they were not winning, only just pushing them off. Quite rightly I've not exposed my kids to the sort of films this game is based upon, but anyone who has seen a zombie film will understand that zombies are pretty hard to kill - head shot and nothing else will do. But if you didn't have this knowledge you'd be wondering why your dice vs the single zombie die results in not many kills. Zombie knowledge is a pre-requisite for playing this game! I tried not to use this to my advantage, but the fact you're charging my zombies I'm not going to give you an easy time!

Things going well (for the Zombies!), Billy bites the dust!

After Billy bit the dust (or the Zombie bit Billy), the Heroes floundered a bit but the new character they got helped out a bit more. Then the girls got the idea to attack en mass and started clobbering more zombies. I fought back but as you can see in the image below, my dice rolling left a lot to be desired!! Three 1's is great in Vegas, but not in the Last Night on Earth!

Gimme a break!

Finally the game started to turn into a slog match of human v zombie, with me getting the upper hand with a lot of draw dice rolls equalling wounds against the humans. 

End game, zombies win!!

The end of the game was triggered with the loss of the humans second Hero, Jake going down under a storm of groans and outstretched zombie arms (why do they walk like that??). Great game!

Pre-Christmas Gaming

 So Christmas is coming and it's time to get some games done and the festivities to begin! Firstly we had a game of 7 Wonders to get back into the swing of gaming. That was won by Kavita with her Hanging Gardens of Babylon wonder. We then had a good game of Apples to Apples - always a great laugh; the current player puts down a card with noun on it and the other players look at their cards with items on and try to match the most appropriate (or funny) card to the noun. Very funny game. Then later in the day we played Agricola - we had a few rounds as Roshni, Kavita and Anita had not played before just so that they can get used to the rules. 

End game - Anita won!

Ticket to Ride: India - I win!! 7 Wonders.... I win again!!

Today we had our first go at Ticket to Ride India - again another map only boxset with tickets, so so all the plastic trains and cards have to come from TtR USA or Europe. We opted for USA today and found the mini versions of the cards slightly easier to hold. Down to the game, we found that the links between cities were as convoluted as the rail system in India itself according to Anita! Lots of 2-score tracks were being made and the score between us stayed very the same, with neither getting the edge over the other. There was also a new score system in that if a ticketed set of cities could be connected in two directions, then there was a bonus score.

Suddenly Anita was asking for three new tickets - from which she can take all three, but must take at least one!! I still had to complete all of my starting three! Luckily she only took one - phew still time to complete that cross India route to the eastern border! Just as I completed my final ticket, Anita asked for another three! Again I was lucky in that she only took one.

Finally, I triggered the End Game - if one player ends up with 3 or less plastic trains, there is one more round and then game over. Nice and simple. Then we counted through my tickets and mine were mostly high numbers or 10's or 13. Poor Anita got only 8's, 5's, 6's etc. So even though she had completed a lot of tickets, she wasn't making a lot of ground - my final count was just over 100 and her ticket count started in the 60's. Unfortunately Anita couldn't make the last ticket and lost points - even though she won the longest continuous route.

Game start

Game end! I win!

The ticket too far - loosing Anita 9 points! 

Then we all had a go at 7 Wonders - the staple family favourite! Anita had the Statue of Zeus, Roshni the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Maya the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, Kavita the Pyramids and I had the Colossus of Rhodes. It was a good, quick game tonight - with quick decisions and card placing. Eventually the scores were Maya - 21, Anita - 36, Roshni - 38, Kavita - 54 and me - 57! Yay double win!

7 Wonders in progress, on my way to my win - helped by the strong military presence! 

Last Night on Earth? No way! Take that zombie!!

Tonight we were around Brians again for another bash at Last Night on Earth. Tonight we had myself, Brian, Steve, Ruth, Tom and Nigel.Therefore we could have two zombie players - Steve and Brian - verses the rest of us with one character each. Ruth had the nurse; Nigel the school jock; Tom the farmers daughter and I had the drifter. The scenario was a different one for us - find the fuel and keys and escape in the car! This involved a made dash around town looking for the keys and fuel whilst fighting off zombies.

Lucky my character had the ability to pick up two cards whilst searching and choose the best, so I went to the garage and almost straight away found the keys!! This just meant finding the fuel; we spread out and zombies started to appear. Luckily Ruth had a pump action shotgun with her but unluckily every shot except one was a miss! But luckily for us, the zombies were having a bad run of dice throws - Brian seemed to be stuck with always getting a 1 to the point where he was stating Here I through my 1 lol.

It didn't all go the Heroes way - Nigels jock went down under a pile of zombies and Ruths nurse ended up being nibbled on! At one point Nigel and I were on the car fighting them off whilst waiting for the other two to get the fuel to us - some hot swapping of cards and tactical playing of event cards was need. Then we had a pile of zombies surrounding us from all sides and after we fought them off, we had to tactically retreat! Nigel then asked for the shotgun from Ruth and proceeded to fire a blast at 8 zombies in our square! Unluckily only a few went down and a card was played by the zombies meaning it was out of ammo!

The Heroes fought back, even if Ruths character and mine were forced to miss a turn in a square surrounded by zombies because apparently we were more interested in a hot bit of passion!! We made it back to the car and whilst fighting off more zombies, fuelled up the car and were off, running and knocking over stumbling and shambling zombies in our way!! Go heroes!!!

With the keys and petrol in hand, the heroes make a mad dash for the car, but are surrounded by zombies! Fighting desperately, they try to make a run for it! 

Yay! With fuel in the car and the keys in the ignition, the heroes win by driving off into the sun rise!

Ticket to Ride India/Switzerland arrives! Just in time to celebrate Anita passing her driving test!

Wow! Unlike real trains, just when you want a new map to turn up, two do almost together! A little unexpectedly the new Ticket to Ride India/Switzerland map turned up on Andys "Released and in store" list! Yay! I asked for him to put one aside to collect later which he dutifully did. Then I got a call from Anita to say she had passed her driving test!!! Yay!! So I thought getting the new map would be a nice present. Different but nice. I collected it from Andy and we've had a look but not played it yet. The India map is fantastic - it even has the major city in Gujurat where Anitas mum is from! The Swiss map is full of mountains and tunnels and connections to surrounding countries - like Germany, Austria, France and Italy. Can't wait to play - and congrats again to Anita for passing!

Ticket to Ride: Asia - trying to win!

Tonight we had our first play of Ticket to Ride: Legendary Asia - with its new routes, layout, stations, locations and mountain rules. These were unusual in that if you had a two red mountain route, you have to have two red cards, then place two plastic trains THEN give up an extra two plastic trains because of the difficulty of trains to get over/around/through mountains. This has the effect of emptying your stash of plastic trains quicker and as usual if you get down to 3 trains then the game ends on the next round. So you have to think carefully about how many mountain routes you will take; except this board covers a lot of countries north and south of the Himalayas! The other side is another Asian map, except it is designed for team play - although I suppose you could still use it for 2 players games. Another nice thing in the box are 4 bamboo slotted ticket holders for team play that can also be used for 2 player. Very nice.

Oh, and Anita won. Again.

First play of Mansions of Madness

This evening at Brians involved us playing a game of Mansions of Madness, a Call of Cthulhu based roleplaying board game. I was a little late turning up which meant I missed the game set up and character selection, although apparently game set up can be quite long, so possibly that was a blessing. Any how, when I arrived, the board pieces were set up for the scanrio that had been selected and everyone had chosen a character. I had been given a Professor character who was pretty good. Each character has a Sanity value as this game is based on not going mad whilst solving the scenario. Or dying either. Dying and/or going mad are pretty bad in this game. 


So the four characters started in the main entrance of the Mansion and we split into two groups of two and started to explore. Tom, the games owner was the game DM as such and controlled the bad guys whilst we stumbled about. The idea behind the game is that there are a number of clues that we have to discover, put into the right order and then solve the mystery. There are also locked doors and items to over come, basements to delve into, mysterious rooms and locations to examine. 


There is also a clever sub-game puzzle system; some rooms have a pile of cards to look through to turn over one at a time if we were to search the room - sometimes this would uncover a puzzle that would need to be completed before any more cards can be unturned. These little puzzles were great - they might involve sliding tiles around, rewiring a circuit etc to complete the puzzle. Depending on your characters intelligence depends on how many turns you got to complete the puzzle. Also there were items such as a locked cabinet that needed a key to open, but if you found an axe, like we did, you could bash it open! 


The DM as I thought of him had lots of creatures and Cultists (humans basically) to place on the board and attack the characters. Basically the night progressed by the two groups search around for clues and solving problems and taking out the occasional cultist and creature. Unfortunately each creature comes attached with it a Sanity check - every time we came across a creature we would have to roll a die and have a modifier attached which affects the die roll (the more hideous and scary the creature, the more likely you will fail the sanity check). If you fail the check, your character gains a token and if your limit is reached, you go Insane and can be affected by the DM - come under his control and/or do crazy things. 


After a while, it started to become clear the DM was up to something and we needed to get to the basement. But although we were making a path through the bad guys - Sanity checks and our healthy were taking their toll. Eventually we lost the game - partly down to me miscalculating a Rewiring Test and failing it. 


It was a good game, made better by the great artwork, fantastic miniatures, loads of counters and great mini games - unfortunately it has a really long play time; starting around 8:30, we finished very late. 

The Mansion laid out and the Investigators proceed inside

Hello Professor! Urk, my mind!

Sold some games!

Sold some games! Zombies!!! went to Brian after the 3 hr fiasco the last time we played it; I didn't really like it and didn't think that the game wasn't amazing. Pandemic although good, didn't really work with us as a family; the couple of or so times we played it we found it frustrating and annoying. The thing we love about Euro games is the not knowing who has won until right at the end, right up to the final count. Even then things can change in some games. But Pandemic you can see the end coming like a brick wall at 60 mph. You can see the fact you are going to loose and nothing can be done about it, but you have to keep playing otherwise why play. And the fact no one wins if the game wins makes it a bit frustrating. So, it's going to a better home where it might be loved more.

And bought a new one! Ticket to Ride: Europe 1912 expansion.... should be fun over Christmas!

Guurrrr! Zombies win again!

I'd been bugging Maya to play Last Night on Earth again - and finally we set up again, she wanted to get back at me for losing the last time we played. We swapped sides this time around, I played the Heroes with Johnny the Quarterback, Jenny the Farmers Daughter, Sally and Jake Cartwright the drifter and Maya played the zombies. I had a few ideas how to play with the Kill the zombies scenario - somehow I had to kill 15 zombies! And it almost worked, I had some decent tools and weapons and I was picking off a few, especially with the shotgun, until it ran out of ammo. Urk! It then turned into a slog - unfortunately first down went Johnny under a pile of zombies then Jenny. Jake got trapped in the Hanger and Sally was blasting zombies with a pistol in the hospital; it was a race against time, with only a few turns left, I had to take out 4 zombies. A pistol shot to the head took out one; Jake took out another; but then I ran out of time!! Zombies win again ahgahgah! Great game - next time Roshni wants to join in with the fun so we'll try it next week. 

Smallworld add-ons galore!

Today bought some add-ons for Smallworld - I'd seen then for ages at Battlequest, but never thought about getting them. So I got the ones that were there and waited for Grand Dames to come in because being female characters I thought they would draw the girls in more to the game. The add-ons are Smallworld: Cursed, Grand-dames and Necromancer Island. Can't wait to mix them into game.

Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 1 - Team Asia & Legendary Asia (phew...) arrives!

Since hear about this pre-Essen, we (Especially Anita, the Ticket to Ride Champion Queen!), have been wanting to get our hands on it and today it was ready to collect. I popped into Andy's on the way home and picked it up - finding to my surprise that it was a much smaller box - thinner - than I expected! Apparently, as we haven't opened it yet - planning for a game Friday night, it contains the two two maps (Asia and Grand Asia), the cards and some extra trains - whilst the rest of the trains have to come from the Europe or USA box set. It looks like a great couple of maps so we're looking forward to some good wine, some posh crisps and a good game of Ticket to Ride.

Beaten at Ticket to Ride....again!!!!

Anita wanted a game of Ticket to Ride in prelude to the new Ticket to Ride: Asia coming soon. So I got out the US Ticket to Ride with the 1910 add on that brings new tickets and large format cards.With some good tickets, I set out to try to beat Anita - knowing my track record is against me. In the end, we had completed our tickets and got maximum scores - Anita was on 110 and I was on 113!! Brilliant! I had won. But then we recounted the Longest Track score - and again - and again!! And it came out that if Anita counted another way, she came out two on top!! And won again! No!! Her track record goes unbeaten!

I win (yellow)!!

With a double recount, Anita wins!!

Taking on the undead with nothing more than a couple of out of ammo shotguns and a Cross!!

Maya and I decided to have a game of Last Night on Earth; in a hope that I could learn more of the rules and so that Maya could learn a new game and have some experience of the rules if we played more than two players.

Maya played as the Heroes whilst I played was the Zombies. Things went well initially for Maya, but then her Heroes started to get caught in one fight after another; and I unfortunately missed one crucial rule...that if a Hero fights off a Zombie, which they normally do, they can then run off next turn. Oops.  I thought it was a little hard for the Heroes to win, especially as more and more zombies ended up in a square; seeing as you need to throw a double to kill a zombie. Hmmm. And I wasn't even using the zombie cards against her!! One hero then went down. So did another. Then a 3rd. This left the vicar. Who went on a mad dash, occasionally bashing a zombie. But eventually she ran out of turns and it was game over!

Mayas opinion of the game so far - before I realised Heros can run away from combat  - oops

Run Vicar! Run!

Thursday night at Battlequest - nice bit of 7 Wonders

Thursday night was another quick visit to Battlequestgames - I got home fairly late, so I didn't want to spend too long there. I intended for a quick visit but I ended up having a good natter to Andy then saw Julian, Simon and Brian were going to play 7 Wonders; Andy said he'd play too, so I couldn't resist! Although Brian had only played once before, he won with a crushing military strength AND the Military Loss Guild, which meant he gained 1 Victory Point for every -1 military point on either side of him - which was -6 from me and -6 from Julian = an extra 12 to add to his 18 military points!! He won in the end with 60!

Batavia Arrives!

Several months ago, the Works, the discount book shop, started selling several Queens games and Rio Grande at rock bottom (£7.99) prices... unfortunately I couldn't find all of the games I was after; but I managed to find three for Nigel Wood - and Nigel Heathers found a copy of Utopia for me - but the main one I was after was Batavia. And luckily someone on 'geek was nice enough to contact me to say they had a spare copy and would sell it to me at cost price plus postage. As the game was out of stock on line forever and trying to find it in a shop was costing a lot in petrol and parking fees, I said yes. It turned up yesterday and I'm just about to open the box to see how good it is!

Some family gaming at last yay!

Finally we managed to get down to some family gaming today - everybody has been very busy with homework and everything, so it was good to sit down on the rug in front of the fire and and get some good games done - but which to play in our limited time together! We opted for 7 Wonders - fantastic as ever with Roshni winning by far with her Statue of Zeus Wonder. I tried to hedge my bets with a military win right at the end of the 3rd Age but to now avail! 

Maya gives 7 Wonders a "Thumbs up" endorsement!

After we packed 7 Wonders away, we went on to play Battlestar Galactica - yay! It was our first 5 player game and Kavitas first play as Roshni had had a quick go before. Maya was very excited about choosing her character Starbuck and wanted to dive in but I needed to overview the rules and game actions before we started - also Galactica has a reasonably long set up time that has to be done in a particular order, so as I did this with Mayas help I ran over the rules quickly mainly for Kavitas benefit. 

Play got under way, although we knew we really only had time for one jump, so we made the most of it. Within a two rounds, Galactica had taken a heavy pounding from the basestar near by and several Vipers were battling it out with Cylon raiders. Crisis after crisis was being dealt with and a Cylon Heavy Raider appeared so we knew we had to hustle to get out of there. Luckily we managed to Auto Jump before any more serious damage was done (we'd taken hits to the main guns and the body work). And that was it, we were 1 jump closer to Kobol! The family like the game once they get into it - Anita says it is very tense once it gets going but the set up did take a little time - perhaps the best course would be to set up the game before calling people to play - as Brian has done in the past! 

Oh, and at the end we revealed our Loyalty cards to find out everyone was human! 

Just about to start play - prior to character selection