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Yesterday we hosted one of the six UK Regionals this year for the Warhammer 40K Conquest LCG. We had a fantastic attendance, with 36 people showing up from all over the country, as well as quite a diverse selection of warlords.
I’d been looking forward to SW:R since it was announced. I’m a big Star Wars fan and the game was generating some serious buzz. I’d deliberately not read too much about it as I wanted to find out for myself how it worked so when I opened my copy at the games club last night most of the game was new to me. It comes in a big box, very big, and as usually with FFG stuff there’s an amount of spare room in the box and an insert to help take up that room. There’s minis (of course!), cards, two player sheets, card counters, two rulebooks and a large, two-part map.
Another Dungeons & Dragons themed board game, but this one looks more like Lords of Waterdeep than Legend of Drizzt, which is great for me because Lords of Waterdeep is one of my favourite board games of all time.
I’ve decided to start a new type of article on our website. It’s basically going to feature upcoming board games that have caught my interest. So to start things off, the upcoming game by Fantasy Flight Games, Android Mainframe, has attracted my attention.
Yesterday we had out Store Championship for A Game of Thrones second edition. Fourteen players attended, so we did four rounds of Swiss followed by a top four cut. Read on for the results!
As the game of Warhammer Conquest develops, new warlords and units lead to new strategies. One thing that has been introduced is the idea that the planet colours are significant. For example Broderick Worr (see below) loves himself some green planets!
What this can mean is that if you’re lucky you can get a significant advantage by the planets coming out in your favour. For example in a game I played last week as Worr, the first four planets were all green. I had a great start and an easy win. But it could have been that only one of the first five were green, then my job would have been much harder. Of the ten planets each colour is represented six times, so the worst you can get is only one out of the first five, but the best you can get is all five of the first shown being of your favoured colour. This is obviously a major random factor in your matchup.
First con of the year for me over at Bucklow Hill, south of Manchester saw me with a game of Prague prearranged, part of the Battles of the Age of Reason (BAR) series from Clash of Arms. I hadn’t played BAR for a while but I’ve always loved the series and having not managed to get much wargaming in over the last few years I was looking forward to a meaty game.
Thursday
By the time I got there Thursday morning I had an absolutely streaming cold but luckily I still felt fairly ok. Although my nose would stop running eventually the cold continued to get worse. How brave am I?
I grabbed the other two that were there, Tom and Richard, and introduced them to a new game, Automobiles. This is a race game, but also a deck building game, without cards. You’re no doubt confused by now but to explain you buy cubes that allow you to move on the track, white grey and black cubes move you on the progressively longer white, grey and black spaces, or take an action of some type, eg remove wear from your discarded cubes, move faster if you’re lower down the track, take wear to move faster etc. The coloured cues actions are shown by cards, and there’s one chosen from a selection for each colour so the game is different each time. Any cubes you don’t use in a turn can be taken as credit towards buying more cubes, hence the deck building aspect. I think this is a very original and exciting variant on the deck building genre. Not only do you have to think about what cubes/cards you wish to put in your bag/deck, but positioning on the track becomes very important. For example in a game I played this week, one of my fellow players ended up stuck when she was only able to reach the white part of the track due to another player blocking her, but she had no white cubes. And this was two spaces before the end of the track on the last lap! Highly recommended.
