Hey everybody,
The festive season is well and truly upon us, although it’s a stranger one this year because of all the restrictions that are in place. I’ve got five days off work now, so I’m hoping for a bit of a break from things – mainly because there’s so little that we can do!
Of course, being a huge nerd, I feel almost like I’ve been preparing for lockdown my entire life! I’ve got an almost 15 month old baby to keep me occupied during the day, of course, and during naps and the evenings, I’ve got plenty of hobby-backlog to work through!
In an effort to get more models finished before January, today I put the finishing touches to my Necron Overlord from the Indomitus box. It’s a very nice model, even though all the Necrons from that set have got sculpted damage on them, which I’m not a fan of, but I think I’m slowly getting over that now!
I’ve been working most recently on my Delaque gangers, who are finally coming close to being finished! I’m very excited for that of course, though I do think that I’ve taken my time with them, when you think it’s been around 2 years since I first started to build them! I think they’re looking really great, anyway, and as I’m planning another game of Necromunda against myself in the near future, it’ll be nice to have that much more painted up!
Speaking of games, I’ve started to play The Lost Realm for Lord of the Rings, as well, playing the first scenario, Intruders in Chetwood, earlier this week. That was a great game, albeit really quite involved! I’m sure that I played a couple of things incorrectly, as there were a great deal of moving parts to that quest, but I really enjoyed myself – while it definitely provided a challenge, it never felt completely impossible, which was nice to see. So often in the past with this game I’ll have lost due to location lock, where the threat in the staging area is just too high for me to cope with. The encounter deck seemed to be a decent blend of cards, though, which I think is key here. Too many enemies or locations can lead to the game just beating you down hard. I was also playing with Shadow effects, as I feel I’ve been missing out on this aspect for my playing career so far! It probably helped me more than I realised, having that ability to cycle through the encounter deck and effectively discard some locations and enemies without having to deal with them, so I definitely appreciated that!
I think my decks need looking at fairly urgently, though – a lot of the time I felt as though I had too much of a mix of questers, and fighters, meaning that I probably wasn’t dealing with enemies effectively. Of course, I’m still a bit of a novice when it comes to this aspect of play, but I do feel like the decks need to have their balance addressed, so that they fall down either as ‘the questing deck’ or ‘the fighting deck’. That’s not to say that they will fulfil that role exclusively, but just have a greater emphasis, rather than trying to do both equally.
I can probably make better use of Sentinel cards, also!
Hopefully I’ll be able to get more games played over the next few days – I’m hoping to get some Arkham Horror played, as well as more Lord of the Rings!
Hope you all have a wonderful festive weekend, whatever you end up doing!
spalanz.com 
We picked up the starter set and a couple of campaign packs for LotR after playing some Marvel Champions. Arhmam looks interesting, so that may be something to play later on if we exhaust the Marvel and LotR content and want more LCG co-op gaming without replaying the previous games…
I don’t really know much about Marvel, but imagine it to be a bit like Legendary? Arkham is almost like a board game built out of cards, as you travel around the locations that are (mostly) set up at the start – unlike LotR, where you reveal locations and travel to them as the game goes on. They’re different enough that they can be enjoyed separately, yet similar enough that you don’t have the huge learning curve. I can definitely recommend Arkham if you like LotR though!!
From reviews I’ve watched and read, the Marvel game is built on a lot of the same mechanics from Arkham, which apparently was built on the LotR engine. I still haven’t played either of the other two at this point, and you don’t travel to locations in Marvel, but I’ve found it to be enjoyable and thematic so far, and I never enjoyed CCGs or MTG before, so it must be doing *something* right!