Paints from Wayland Games arrive

Following on from our painting day, Nigel said that he had found a company selling paints that were very similar to Games Workshop paints except a) they are cheaper and b) you get more paint - plus also they are stored in a bottle with an easy-to-use dropper. I found my most dinged up Games Workshop paints - mostly the ones with screw top lids - and asked Nigel to add on these colours to his order. They arrived in a matter of days and from what I have seen so far they look pretty good - just need to try them out; maybe at our next painting day!

History repeats itself! Canadians and Germans square off D-Day +1

Brian asked me over for a game of Memoir '44 - he said he'd had an intro game but wanted a more fuller experience. So I took over the huge especially designed M44 backpack complete with everything I had got so far, plus a few other bits like a book on WW2 infantry tactics. I showed off the enormous Breakthrough maps plus the British and Japanese sets plus the campaign books. We had a look through the available missions that were not too light yet not heavily endowed with rules. We came across a fairly good one - Battle of the Bridgehead (Operation Neptune) - June 7-9, 1944 - involving Canadians moving across fields and hedgerows towards a German held town and airfield (Carpiquet). In the meantime the Germans, using a mixture of elite Panzers and Panzer Grenadiers and Hitler Youth prepared to repel the Allied advance.

The Canadians had to cross a lot of open ground to engage the dug in Germans who were also preparing tanks to strike out if any of the Allied tanks got too close. And this they did with lightning efficiency - as my Shermans of the Sherbrooke Fusiliers rolled across the open ground towards Cairon and Authie when two grounds of Panzers rounded the trees and opened fire, followed by small arms fire from the villages. Within moments, I'd taken heavy causalities and only within a few turns of the game, I'd lost three Medals to Brian out of a total five needed to win! I could see this being a very short game indeed!

Game start - the Canadians contemplate their move - that Armour Assault
card on the left proved to be a poisoned chalice as the armour on the left was
knocked for six by the experienced German tanks

Pausing to reconsider my position, I moved up infantry and tanks to the right, stopping in Norrey-en-Bressin to stop any sort of counter attack from Brians left. The German units in and around Carpiquet then took to the trees and hills producing a stalemate compounded with a tank unit providing covering fire. I moved up more tanks on the right and left - Brian moved in another Panzer unit and tried to conduct a pincer move on two of my tank units. Unfortunately his attack failed and one tank unit that had retreated to woods returned fire and knocked out several German tanks. The green Canadians were quickly turning out into experienced war veterans.

A German pincer move fails as the tank in the trees open fire against
the left side and the three Shermans force the Panzers on the right to retreat.
The left Panzer units were taken out!

Eventually the battle fought to a stand-still, the German infantry in good positions but their tanks had taken a beating, as had the Allied tanks so forcing the Germans to stop their counterattack and the Canadians to pause their advance; as happened in real life. Still I won enough medals to make this a win for me! But just - so a great game.

First family play of Smallworld - great game!

We've had Smallworld for some time now and now we have several add-ons I thought it a good time to invite everyone for a game. A couple of us had played before so we kind of knew what to do - everyone got their Races and Race Trait cards and we set off, conquering territory from all corners! The idea of the game is to use your race to conquer as many of the maps territories - using a basic idea that a normal, enemy free, flat land costs two of your own units to invade, a location such as mountains or 1 enemy unit, makes this go up to three, two enemy units and this goes up to four etc etc. For each piece of land the player owns, they gain 1 coin at the end of the turn.

A race is selected from a line of Races plus Traits. At game start you get 5 coins. If you don't want the first race or 2nd race, you place a coin on the 1st race and one on the 2nd and select the 3rd. All the others are moved up and the next player makes their selection.

As the player expands of territory, at the end of their turn, they can freely redistribute their units to defend their land against other players. Each race has its own traits for attack and defence. Also, when the player has found that they have over expanded and no longer able to take land or attack, they can go into Decline; all spare counters are removed leaving one in each conquered land, flipped to the Declined side - these still gain 1 coin for their player until conquered by other players. In the meantime, the player can select another race to begin conquering again. If this race goes into decline, the 1st race is removed completely.

For us, Anita played a race of Giants and conquered a reasonable area in the bottom right of the map; Roshni had firstly a race of Dwarves that ended up being put into decline quickly and she restarted with Halflings; Maya started with Amazon Warriors and had to decline to Ratmen; Kavita started with Sorcerers and didn't need to go into decline; I started with Elves on the bottom left and had to decline to Skeletons, attacking in earnest from the far right hand side of the map. In the end Anita won the game. An excellent family game all round that Anita wanted to replay with just 2 players to get used to the rules.

End game - Anita is counting up her score on the right

First game of 2012 - Ticket to Ride: Switzerland - and I win!

Happy New Year!!! After the previous nights festivities, we decided to mark the start of 2012 by playing a game of Ticket to Ride: Switzerland. This latest incarnation of this great game is printed on the back of the India map in the 2nd of the recent map packs released. Representing Switzerland and the surrounding countries of Germany, France, Austria and Italy, the map is chock FULL of tunnels - no surprise in that Switzerland is nestled in the Alps. The rules are fairly standard except that Train wild cards can ONLY be used in tunnels and that means that you can pick up two train cards from the pile of 5 instead of the normal 1 in other versions of the game.

Also the tickets sometimes point from a specific country to a city instead of a a city to a city. The ticket will display a starting point (Germany) and will indicate three destinations - a close, medium and long distance location, each winning successfully more points depending on the distance of the destination.

This version of this classic game was a lot more tricky to handle, with links to countries limited and so winning routes could be easily snapped shut by the other player. Ticket to Ride Switzerland turned out to be a high stakes and high scoring game - with me winning by 1 point, even though I had lost 7 points by making a new fatal mistake by not completing a ticket when I thought I had!!

End of the Game, but as the tickets are counted up, who will win?

I did by 1 point!!