End to Nexus Psi

Last Sunday I got to play Deadzone, and we finished up the Nexus Psi campaign we had started earlier.

Plague had iniative to choose next scenario, but apparently there was no other choice except Intel Run.

This wasn't bad at all, since it was a 50 point game, which meant I could construct a list completely from my own models! Whee.

Game 1: Intel Run

I believe my strike force was something like:

General with 7+ ranged value and 3-2 command.
2x Stage 3A's with various advances (with extra ammo)
Plague Hound (with Brawler)
Stage 3A with HMG
Plague Swarm

This campaign was fought with Rebs, but I don't dare to try to remember the exact army list used.

This time a little more happened during Intel Run than last time around. First of all almost all of the ammo crates (one of which had the intel objective) went to plagued side of the map.

I screwed a bit my deployment when I didn't take into account that neither plague swarm or my plague hound of death, doom and carnage couldn't even check if ammo crates had the required intel.

Plague swarm was tormented by some blast weaponry, but the aforementioned plague hound ran to chew the head off from a sergeant of some kind. After the game this kill get another rank for this little doggie, so in next battle it was a 6 point model! But I'm going too far ahead.

After some heavy gunfighting on the other side of board one of the Stage 3A mutons revealed intel. Since most of the rebels had gone down (either hugging ground or in a bit more permanent way) from the many Blaze-Away attacks game ended quickly when Rebs fell back before my bloodthirsty hound ate them all. Well, there might have been some other reasons, like the intel being in a very hard place right next to escape zone, but I'm sure they were just afraid of the hound.

Slowly I'm starting to realise why plague loves cover so much. Cover actually gives penalties to defender when doing Blaze Away attack option... and plague doesn't really use any other method of attack except melee and Blaze Away. That's a little bit annoying, but hopefully that changes even a little bit when plague enforcer and strider are released.

Game 2: Ambush

Second game was ambush scenario, where Rebs had 100 point strike force and plague had 95.

As I forgot to take any pictures at all during last game, I tried to make up for it in this one. First two pictures are from deployment phase at a different angle. Being fully three dimensional game it can be difficult to get a proper picture that shows both sides, and no, all of the Rebs aren't even showing in these two pictures.

There was a large ruined building at the center, which meant multiple stories for deployment. Funny thing, though - if there had not been such a building, deploying a 95 point force legally could have been problematic.

Anyway, anyway. Do you see the Teraton Brawler in second picture? Well, probably not unless you're familiar with the game, but it's the large based model down on right, showing its back to the camera. That big fellow has a one-use frag grenade.

Now... being a fully three dimensional game, all kinds of explosions affect the target square and any other squares too that are next to it. Even above, and diagonally.

Here, let me show another picture that's showing the situation only after first activation made during whole game! Oh wait, no, it was the second activation, actually. Kraaw warrior had attacked one ethereal earlier. If I remember it right, Teraton's grenade caused four 4+ rolls for all but two of plague models to survive. Both my beautiful 6 point plague hound and a stage 3A muton in target cube exploded into bits, and every other plague model was at least pinned, many were pinned and damaged. Kraaw warrior died, too. What did that Teraton use, really? A mini-nuclear detonator?

Uh, oh. Well, plague started getting up. Two boom stick Stage 3's on top of the building were quite effective, and they did kill something in the north-east corner. Possibly some kind of a commander and/or a human soldier?

HMG specialists one the other hand were much less effective and wasted their extra ammo doing pretty much nothing. Possibly one pinned Rebel Sorak, but I have to say it looks very standing to me in the picture. The other one might have pinned or suppressed Teraton, but that was all for nought when Stage 2A charged the beast and failed to do anything other than to tickle it to stand again.

Other plague hound charged to back up Stage 2A and made much more impressive attack rolls than the mutated monstrosity, but sadly the Survive/Fight rolls for Teraton were rather good, too. Later it doubled plague hound's attack and killed Stage 2A with resulting attack. Thanks, doggy.

In next picture Stage 3A muton with spotter ability ran to engage a rebel yndij that had come to shoot at one of ethereal generals. The yndij is just out of picture, behind the house. The little rebs started to slowly die off to grenade fire from boom sticks and Blaze Away from HMG's, but plague had lost most things that might even scratch the Teraton. Teraton had quite a bit of weight on its shoulders.

Finally Teraton whacks the dog and charges to ethereal in the basement, killing it. After this the battle card deck started to give some blessings for plague to this Teraton-situation. Two "distract" cards would keep the thing down for at least two rounds, and one of the HMG's managed to suppress it. The muton version of HMG had this acid spitting mutation, and, well, after some three-four activations worth of drooling on the Teraton, the monstrosity was killed by a lucky roll.

Last act of the battle was fought in the west side of map. Grogan, who was annoyingly resilient, was the last Reb model to die.

I'm not sure what went wrong for Rebs after the first devastating grenade attack? Well, most Shoot actions did pretty much nothing and I remember there was at least one failed command action for them. For the Shoot actions, it really pointed out again why I'm starting to think that plague, as a faction, cares too little about terrain penalties. In the whole 95 point strike force there was exactly one model that suffered from shooting into cover - the HMG with acid spit. Well, sure, generals and Stage 3A troopers take penalties if they use Shoot action, but since you pretty much just enrage all of them at the start of game you're not going to use much 2 dice Shoot action with them anyway - not when you can easily sprint + move into melee with 5 dice against enemy models.

But these thoughts come mostly from facing Rebs. Blaze Away probably isn't going to do so much damage against factions that have a little more armor or toughness, but 5+ ranged skill with 4 dice and no penalty from enraged status really does damage to the little peeps. Much more than honest shooting, anyway.

So. Nexus Psi fell to plague. So, what world is next?

About half way into Nexus Psi

I started to play Deadzone Nexus Psi campaign recently.

Since the host here who took part in Deadzone Kickstarter had early access to Nexus Psi campaign, we started to play that one out.

I played Plague faction, though I had my X-Com alien project with me. So my troops were essentially some kind of mix of Mutons and Ethereals and some unknown plague they had unleashed upon humans, or something.

Rebs were the unfortunate faction that got stranded on Nexus Psi with this alien threat.

Anyway, my initial strike force roster was:

3x Stage 3A generals (two ethereals and one plagued human)

5x Stage 3A troopers (three mutons and two plagued humans)

6x Plague Hounds

4x Stage 3A heavy machine gunners (3x plagued humans and 1 muton)

4x Stage 3A boom sticks (4x plagued humans)

6x extra ammo

I don't have the details about Rebs, but I think the initial clearances were Yndij sergeants, Teratons and Grogans.

We managed to play three games in about four and half hours. In my book that's a really fast pace, especially if you include the fact that I was still quite a beginner when it comes to actual rules, so I had to ask a lot, and most of the campaign mechanics had to be explained to me. Then in between the games there is this updating of strike team roster.

Anyway.

The first game was... well, it was quite uneventful. Really. There were zero casualties on either side, and those damnable agile Yndij's managed to snatch intel marker from the center of board rather easily.

One of the plague hounds got to bite the Yndij a little, but this time the bark was worse than the bite.



Game 2: Shattered Hopes

Next the Rebs were desperate to gain control of the landing pad strategic location.

Dunno where I picked up that one.

I had deployed my leaders very stupidly - grogan with Desolator got an aimed clear shot against one of the ethereals, and Teraton was able to teleport into melee with another ethereal, which were my only leader models. I guess one major factors in how the game played was the fact that Teraton didn't kill or even injure the last remaining ethereal. Grogan on the other hand brutally slaughtered his target.

Once it was my turn, I brought one of the plague hounds (who had AP 2 melee mutation) to help ethereal in melee with Teraton. I had already told about my dream of raising a 10 point plague hound, and the start was promising - it bit an injury to Teraton!

Two Blaze Away actions with extra ammo by two HMG specialists wiped out a human infantry and a rebel sorak. But now I'm getting too far ahead already. First things first. Stage 3A HMG specialist took a Blaze Away attack at the infantry and the sorak, and afterwards he went to adjacent cube to pick up a medikit that was booby-trapped.

The story of this particular HMG specialist didn't stop here. He fell from atop of a building and was pinned or suppressed, but otherwise uninjured.

A random Yndij approaches and throws a frag grenade to the specialist. Again he takes no damage, but the shockwave throws him one cube closer to the Yndij. Enough? No, never! Next Yndij sergeant throws another frag grenade at the very same specialist, and again... no damage, but one cube closer to the first Yndij.

After the games had been played I learned that I was only a certain deviation away from a sure defeat. Well, luckily the grenades pushed my guy to wrong direction, but really... damn it must have sucked to be that HMG specialist.

Thanks to some amazing dice rolls Rebs start to slowly whittle away. At the Teraton side of things I bring a muton (stage 3A trooper) in combat with Teraton, and try to escape with ethereal. Break-off is unsuccesful and on top of that Teraton whacks the ethereal to injured status.

At the start of next turn Teraton finally kills off the ethereal, and plague is left with awesome maximum command of 1-1.

But that seems to be all that's needed and required. The plague hound shreds Teraton in melee, and another plague hound kills a human infantry and possibly Yndij sergeant.

When there was only grogan standing, Rebs finally abort mission. It felt weird to have such a clear victory, but I guess this is one of those situations where ignorance is a bliss - I never saw how close the defeat actually was!

Plague had lost two leaders and a plague hound. One of the ethereal makes a full recovery, another loses a point of ranged accuracy and the hound just... dies. Oh, here is probably essential to tell that we were playing with modified system where resurrection roll is free, and you can buy an additional die with 3 reputation.

Considering the casualties that Rebs suffered, I think that's a pretty good house rule, though maybe full recovery should be only on 7-8, with result of 6 giving some kind of penalty... Maybe choose either Slow (-1 point) or Vulnerable (-2 points) and dead if already has both? I don't know. Of course my perception might be skewed by the fact that Plague has access to medical supplies in the campaign.

Two plague hounds were amazing, however. One of them got the skill Brawler, and another one has melee skill of 4+ now. Ten point dog, here I come!


Game 3:

Next scenario is a Dreadball scenario where Rebs have to rescue a star player, and plague has to kill her/him/it. I'm not sure why plague has such hatred against Dreadball, but whatever the reason, I fully support it.

This game was a bit awkward to play. I mean... plague had 95 points and rebs had 70 points. All things considered maybe that wasn't too big of a deal because scenario didn't require actual killing, but still... playing with so many extra points without any real handicap feels just... wrong.

Well, the star player dwarf proved to be in the very first location Rebs ever checked. And of course it was the location that was farthest away from plague.

No problem, though! Stage 3A Ethereal just makes a command action, and plague swarm uses Sprint as a short action. Then it activates, uses move, and uses sprint again as a short action. It kills the Kraaw Warrior, and additional attack injures the dwarf star player. Sweet! Except... that may have been an illegal move?

Clarification: it was indeed an illegal move, Agile doesn't work that way.

Anyway, the end of story is short.

Teraton makes a speedy approach at the star player dwarf and plague swarm, and charges into melee. Despite being Really Tough the plague swarm is splattered all over the arena.

Dwarf takes a speedy run towards rescue zone, but then a plague hound with AP1 melee mutation sprint-move-sprints into him and rolls some funny numbers, and so Dreadball officially ended in Nexus Psi.

A Lovely Sort of Plague (Deadzone)

Last Sunday I played two games of Deadzone.

First game was me playing the Enforcers against Plague.

Last game was me playing the Plague against the Rebs.

I need to start taking the camera with me from now on, since it's suprisingly difficult to remember any important details from a completely different rule system.

What I do remember is that the big plague guy (the 20+ point leader) advanced way too fast for my liking right next to my poor little enforcers. A command action, basic activation and a battle card can move the monster three cubes in a turn, and Plague got to start the game. Well, at least there was an epic scene, where the plague leader was standing on a second story, and melee enforcers were there trying to defy the beast. That was pretty futile, though. Not even two melee enforcers were a match for a plague stage 1A model. That was pretty much the downfall, since after it ate melee enforcers it moved right to support models with a free action. I think I lost four models out of my starting six during one turn?

Well, since we got some time we played another game.

I took Plague now, since that's the faction I'm starting to play eventually.

I had five plague hounds in my list and two stage 3 leaders, plus Doctor Simmonds. I also had two HMG specialists with blaze away ammo and one of the stage 2 monsters. I'm not sure if that was any good list, but the mission I got and Rebs army composition gave my forces a huge advantage - almost all enemy models were 10+ points, and I only needed to kill enemy models, gaining more victory points the more enemy model costs.

Rebs also had Teraton on the board. I guess the biggest turning point was when acid belching Stage 3 HMG specialist scored a lucky spit against the Teraton and killed it in one go. My dogs were dying left and right, but I guess they did their job when they were drawing fire from more important targets, as well as tying up enemy models in melee.

Though I'm not entirely sure which were more important models at that point than the dogs... the melee murder machine Stage 2A died to a combination of frag grenade that threw it out of a window and heavy armor piercing shooting by a Grogan with desolator.

Game could have been way different, though, if we'd have resolved T-Zero weapon team's first (and only) shot with Shockwave rule. Two additional dice with a success on 5+ would've statistically meant at least one more success per affected model. I don't remember what the rolls were, but getting pinned and especially getting suppressed delays engaging in melee (which Plague wants to do).

Eventually Plague won this match thanks to easy scoring from valuable kills. It didn't help Rebs that they got a rather difficult mission going on for them, where they had to survive over 50% of their starting number and scavenge items from board.

These two games went a lot better than the first one, since core mechanics were at least familiar now. There were still, however, plenty of moments where I had absolutely no idea which variables were to be counted in for different tests and how things were going to be resolved.

Though I think we played two games in roughly same time than the one game earlier.

Beware the Angry (and exploding) Dog

Today I had the pleasure of trying out Deadzone, the nearly published kickstarter project by Mantic Games. A friend had taken part in it and had everything needed to play.

We played a 70 point Marauders vs Rebs game. I played Rebs.

The game uses a hidden mission system, where you and your opponent probably have entirely different missions, and you can only guess what your opponent is trying to achieve. That is a lovely touch to almost any game, I think.

Anyway, my mission was Break Through, which now, looking back, was a bad mission for my team. Objectives are to pass through enemy deployment zone and kill as many enemy models as possible. Marauders are quite tough, and the deployment zones happened to be corners, so it'd be difficult to rush through the space orcs.

Of course it didn't really help that I sacrificed my medic rather stupidly. I could have probably placed it a lot better to gain some cover from incoming fire, but no, I placed the medic almost dancing macarena right in almost open.

I guess it's a bit difficult to wrap your head around in a boardgame/miniature game hybrid that uses squares (or cubes) and not a ruler for movement, but the actual position and placement of your model within the cube is pretty important. But maybe next time I remember such things, because that slight mistake made the medic suffer rather a miserable last fifteen minutes of its life. First medic suffered horrible injuries from some kind of machine gun, after which a flame thrower set the Judwan on fire and it was pinned down, and next turn an enraged orc charged the burning pacifist who was lying on the ground and ended the medic's sorry life. I guess it matters a lot when and where you dance macarena. If you choose your place badly, you might get shot at, burned and stabbed. Well, anyone who does dance macarena probably deserves all that, so in the end justice was served.

Another rather brutal thing was the Mawbeast Bomber. Oh gods, that was horrible. The little doggy ran to a building, where two (2) of my rebel yndij troopers attempted to shoot it down with the help from battle tactic cards. The Mawbeast isn't very well protected, so shooting the dog should've been rather easy especially when both yndijs managed to get a clear shot against it. Only thing they ever did, however, was to just get one wound to it.

Next turn the dog engaged the yndijs in melee and killed them both, and due to some shenanigans it entered the same floor with my rebel sorak (a crowd control model).

Sorak attempts to break off from the beast with help from a tactic card again, but fails to do so and Mawbeast bites off sorak's head just as it jumps down the building.

I really, really wanted to get rid of that nasty lil' doggie now, and used Head Shot card with a human rebel to shoot the puppy. That card was a bit wasted since I wasn't aware that the dog had no armor, but anyway the end result was that it finally died.

The chances that the explosion would do much to neighboring squares was quite low, but still it pinned down my leader and KILLED the trooper that shot it. That 7 point model managed to kill four of my models and pin one of them down. Casualties in points were 22, almost one thirds of point allowance.

Game was over already on round 2. Rebels had scored a whooping 2 points, where one point came from the dog that exploded and one was the stranded mercenary who started the game in a square right next to my heavy firepower. None managed to infiltrate.


Well, it was a first game of something of an entirely different rule set than I've used to. The rules are more complex than in most boardgames, but even from my newbieish point of view they seemed quite solid when you finally have learned how the game "plays". I'm definitely giving Deadzone a few extra tries. Biggest disappointing things were the game universe and the lack of interesting factions (to my subjective opinion, of course)

Now this thing seems to be going into a review of sorts, so maybe I'll put down the pros and cons of Deadzone, but again I want to underline that they are based on one gameplay and strong, personal preferences in games.

Pros:
- Possibility of interactive campaign play. How I miss Mordheim for this...
- Despite being a board game at its core, still play field is three dimensional. So game area isn't 8x8 squares, it's actually 8x8x8, though I'm not sure if there is actually a limit to the height.
- Use of d8's instead of d6's. Well, not much else here except that it makes the game feel a bit different. Actual use of dice was pretty straightforward, roll above this or that number and it's a success.
- Different goals for players during play.
- Very manageable sized playing board. Heck, this one takes a lot less space than some actual board games. If I compare to my own collection, even unexpanded Talisman takes a lot more space and unexpanded Touch of Evil takes about the same, though during play Touch of Evil probably needs more space thanks to tons of different discard piles.
- There aren't very long waiting times in between the turns built-in to the system. When all players know the rules quite well I believe the waiting times between getting to play are even less. And unless there is a mechanic I'm unaware of, this doesn't even change with game size, since you're activating only a few models in one go.

Neutrals:
- Good enough rules overall, but they did (at least for just one game) seem to lack "oh wow I wanna play more!" effect. On the other hand, they didn't tick any nerves bad way either so that the rule set would be a deciding matter if I want to start the game or not.

Cons:
- Game universe isn't very original. But that's just a design choice, so this opinion is probably most subjective of all thing listed here.
- Conjoined with the above: first four factions didn't sport much interest in me, and two that come next (space elves and dwarves) aren't that awesome either. Starting to play would be a matter of "what I think I can play" rather than "what I want to play".
- Wow... I can't think of anything else?


Hmm.

Now when I write those things down in a list like that it seems that the only reasons that keep me away from starting Deadzone are purely aesthetic. That's probably a good thing, right?