A Quiet Week

Hey everybody,
It’s been a bit of a quiet week for me this last week, despite having had such high hopes for playing lots of games! I was under the weather for most of the week too (I lost my voice entirely on Thursday), but fortunately that seems to be receding into the background now. I had three evenings to myself this week, and so had planned for some serious gaming, but in the end I only managed to play a couple of things at the start of the week! Of course, it’s always exciting when you can play a big game like Arkham Horror, but still, I had hoped for more!

My love of Marvel Champions has continued unabated recently, as I picked up some more packs from the most recent X-Men wave. I have no idea who this Mojo is, but I’ve been reading some good things about the scenario pack, so decided almost on a whim to pick it up. I’d wanted Phoenix for a while as well, so finally added her to the collection too. I’ve now got Phoenix and Colossus sleeved up, as well as Quicksilver, so I have quite a few more mutant heroes to try out in due course. I’m very tempted to pick up Wolverine next time I’m at the games shop as well, although I really should be a bit more circumspect as there is just so much of this game that I still haven’t played yet!

I think in my last post, I mentioned playing Lord of the Rings LCG once again, and have started on the Ringmaker cycle. The first pack in that cycle, The Dunland Trap, is where the wheels really came off for me when I was buying and playing this game way back in 2014, and I was so disenchanted by the game at that point that I stopped playing it anywhere near so regularly (although of course I continued to buy it all). Consequently, this cycle feels really new to me. Well, I did actually play The Dunland Trap again yesterday, and my goodness me, it was dull. I can see where it is just brutal, and demoralising, but playing two-handed I was able to deal with most of the encounter deck well enough, until we got to the final stage. The Dunlending chief came out and engaged me, and I was able to throw enough spare allies under that bus that my heroes were safe. (In the final stage, if a hero leaves play, we lose). However, the chief cannot leave play, but the quest has no quest points – you’re basically forced to wait out a 10-turn timer to see if you win. In the meantime, my heroes had killed the chief at least four times over, and I just grew bored with it and decided to abandon the game. The first time I’ve ever done this, and I can’t say I feel that great about it! But whereas the game had, up to that point, been quite exciting, the tension was just wiped away entirely by the boredom of this mechanical situation I was in. Such a disappointment.

I’ve read that the next pack, The Three Trials, is as difficult, then the quests become easier, so I am interested to see how that all plays out!

Anyway. What else has been going on?

I’ve started to watch Andor again, picking up from where I left off last October or November. I had watched up to episode 6 at the time, but life just overtook me, and I was just not in the mood, really, to pick it up again. Well, I watched episode 7 and was pleasantly on the hook once more, so I’m looking forward to getting through this season soon! I have lots more to say about this, for sure, but I think what appeals to me the most here is how much like Star Wars it feels, from back in the 90s almost. Indeed, I think there’s almost the tone of a West End Games supplement to part of the adventure, and I really love it!

While watching, I finally started to build up the terrain from Into the Dark. I’ve actually come to really like this stuff, too. It doesn’t always go together smoothly, but then I don’t really think I’ve bought it to play Kill Team with, after all. I haven’t glued everything together, of course, but I have found it really enjoyable to put together various “structures” that will serve to make a board, if that makes sense? I’m keeping it modular, though, so I can change things up if need be. I had initially decided to buy the box because of the Boarding Actions thing for regular 40k, planning to get another one and then I should theoretically have enough terrain for that. However, both the subsequent boxes have sold out well before I was in a position to buy them, so I have soured a little on this idea now. Of course, there’s still the fourth box on the horizon, so I might yet pick that up in the fullness of time. It’s a shame, though, as I did like the look of the Arbites box!

I’ll hopefully have a blog on Boarding Actions coming up soon, because I’ve been looking into that side of things lately and it has definitely appealed to me!

In terms of checking-in on my goals for the month, I have actually been hard at work on the Promethium Forge terrain kit, trying to get a good start there. I hadn’t expected to finish this in February, of course, but I am nevertheless pleased with how it’s been going so far! I have had a lot of back-and-forth with myself on how to actually have it set up: the “official” kit is the tank and chimney piece with a central surround, very similar to the “official” Galvanic Magnavent, however I went for the “alternate” build from the back of the box, which shows the piece as being much wider, as I thought it would be more imposing that way. However, when built in this way, the legs are positioned differently to allow for the skull crane to sit on one end of the gantry; when I built it, I put the legs on the ends thinking it would provide more support. Bah! So I’ve been working on a solution but I’m not very happy with it at the moment. Never mind – I just need to progress with the painting now, and hope for the best!

I’ve also been through my terrain box and have sorted all of the panels out for the kit, so I have the right number of ladders, panels and hanging bits for it. In doing so, I realised that I’d not actually painted any of them for the Ferratonic Incinerator back in the day, so I now have those to get through as well! Ah well, at least when this is all finished, I’ll have three good-looking terrain pieces to play games over!