Frostgrave, Halo Ground Command and other tabletop minis

[IAmBatman]

Yeah, I'm probably priced out at the moment (just dropped $90 on Clix figures last night!).

[Hahma]

I have to catch up with some games played, as I've been busy and added The Walking Dead game played, some primed Fallout guys and Adepticon photos.

Last Saturday, the 23rd, I went over to my buddy Chris's house to play a game called Pulp Alley. He's demoing it at Adepticon today and wanted some practice, and actually had a free day for once, between working and going back to school for electrical engineering.

Pulp Alley has been around for a little while, but they just did a kickstarter with their 2nd edition rules and scenarios and such. This game is based on the old Pulp magazines from long ago with all kinds of different types of adventures, stuff like Indiana Jones, or guys with robots etc. Chris said that with the rules as they are, you can use any genre minis to play.

We only played with 3 characters each. We had a hero, a sidekick and ally. You can have plenty more. There are some premade characters I believe, but Chris used the character creating system to create ours. It's pretty cool actually. There are are like 4 charts with abilities to choose from. The main hero gets to choose 3 abilities from any chart. The sidekick gets to choose 2 abilities from a couple charts and the ally gets 1 ability from 1 chart I believe. So Chris gave them abilities that matched well with the minis they represented. The characters all have attributes for shooting, melee, agility and other stuff you will have to roll for. The Hero will have better dice, like d8's or d10's and even d12's in some cases. The sidekick will have d8's usually and the ally will have d6's. When you are rolling dice for an attack or test or whatever, the success per die is on 4+, so that shows how much easier it is for the hero compared to the ally.

There are also cards in this game that have dual functions. You start out with 3 cards and draw a new one each round. The top function is a one time thing where you can play it to affect your character or an opponent's character. The bottom half is uses for a tests for various things and aren't used out of your hand for the tests. The tests come from dangerous situations, inspecting a Plot Point (objective) or when an opponent plays a card when your character activates it may force that character to do a challenge. The test will be against usually your choice of either of 2 of your attributes, and it will say that you need 1, 2 or 3 successes. So if your attribute is 4, then you roll 4 of the dice types for that attribute and look for 4+ on the required number of success. Otherwise you will generally take damage.

Plot points are objectives. There are minor and major plot points. In our game, we each had to succeed at 2 minor plot points before we can go for the major plot point. The theme of this game is kind of like pulp movies as well, with the characters as actors. Plot points may be thematically a note you find, or some other clue leading to achieving the major plot point. So initially, we each get to place one minor plot point token a certain distance from the board edge and from our starting positions. If you are in base contact with the token, you can use an action to inspect it and then you have to do the danger test, and if you pass that, then you have to do another one to claim the plot point. However, if you fail that one, you can attribute any successes towards it for another try later. After you claim a minor plot point, you can place another one at certain distances away from friendly characters and the board edge. Then again with the major plot point afterwards.

Interestingly, you only get one action pert turn per character, but attacking isn't an action, nor is moving normally. If you only move normal distance, then you can perform an action such as inspect a plot point or do an ability that the character has. But if you run, double normal distance, then you can't do an action. The combat is also reactionary, so if someone is shooting at you, you can choose to shoot back or dodge. You roll dice accordingly and can avoid damage with a dodge or inflict some damage on the attacker if you choose to attack back.

Anyway, it's a really fun little game and the rules are simple. We placed some acrylic tokens in some intersections of the road to signify that if a character moves into that area, they will have to do a danger test to see if they get hit by a passing car or whatever. We also had templates to represent spraying fire with a machinegun or other types of weapons. It's generic enough that you can use any type of genre and call it whatever.

Oh, and the Director megaphone is a cool thing that Chris got and is used by the Pulp Alley designer in his videos. The player holding it at the time is the director and decides which player is going to take a turn. It could be them or any of the other players (as it can play a good amount of players). The way to take the director spot is to win a combat outright, not taking any wounds in a combat they initiate, or by succeeding at a challenge or claiming a plot point (can't remember if it's any challenge or only the plot point). So as long as you hold the director position, you can choose for yourself to go every time with your characters until they are done, or choose one of the other players to go with each character or anything in between. Really unique way of doing that.





https://scontent-dfw5-2.xx.fbcdn.net...f6&oe=5D4DB002

[TREX]

Looks pretty cool @Hahma . Love the buildings, and the mechanics sound pretty neat. Recently my wife has gone back to work and that extra income has allowed me to be able to spend a little bit on unessentials. First thing I was going to do was get the legion core box but its sold out in my normal go to online stores and was also sold out at the gamestore I was at for a Heroscape tourney over the weekend. I got to take a look a whats in the box though and Ill have to say that they arent terribly differnet in scale with the exception of vehicles. Im going to have to get some.

[Hahma]

Are you going to get the regular core box or wait for the Clone Wars one? I saw those minis at Adepticon yesterday and they looked cool, though I don't know anything about that era in the Star Wars world.

You should check out the pictures I posted a few posts above this one, with a lot of cool Legion boards and the new stuff in a display case.

[TREX]

Originally Posted by Hahma

Are you going to get the regular core box or wait for the Clone Wars one? I saw those minis at Adepticon yesterday and they looked cool, though I don't know anything about that era in the Star Wars world.

You should check out the pictures I posted a few posts above this one, with a lot of cool Legion boards and the new stuff in a display case.

I just bought the original Empire vs Rebels core box on amazon. I'll probably end up getting the other one as well. There is a ton of expansions already out, and I'll have to pace myself. I'm going to try to at least get one of each. I love both of those eras of star wars. The only one I'm iffy on is the new one that is force awakens, and the last jedi. The characters aren't very good. If they can pick up the pieces with this last movie I'll be impressed. I really plan on using my other star wars miniatures as extra squads if needed to see what is the most fun to play. After seeing the legion models in person the other day, I don't really think they are too much different as far as scale goes for the human sized ones anyways. The vehicles are definitely larger though. I most likely will not be playing competitively so not to worried about that. I'm stoked though.

[TREX]

@Hahma , so I was browsing around and found something pretty helpful for all the non competitive legion players and guys that have mountains of starwars figures already. I was looking at trying to figure out what cards I'll need to go with what, and what cards come in what packs, etc, when I found this army builder site: https://tabletopadmiral.com/legion/ It has all the cards on there. This will help me see which ones I'd like to buy, while using a bunch of my previously purchased miniatures. I bought amazon prime, so I should have my rulebook in a couple days, but it looks like I'm going to need to visit youtube for some batreps and how to play vids. I'm super excited for this and already have mountains of terrain to use.

[Hahma]

Yeah @TREX , I've used Tabletop Admiral a few times to build armies. I used it to build a few Rebel armies for my friend Brian to choose from last time we played. I messaged him the links to the armies so he could have things to look at in deciding. He'd let me know and I'd have the minis and cards ready when he got to my house.

It's a cool site. You have to input what sets you have and then you will only be able to build armies with the minis and cards you actually have.

[Hahma]

Yeah @TREX , I've used Tabletop Admiral a few times to build armies. I used it to build a few Rebel armies for my friend Brian to choose from last time we played. I messaged him the links to the armies so he could have things to look at in deciding. He'd let me know and I'd have the minis and cards ready when he got to my house.

It's a cool site. You have to input what sets you have and then you will only be able to build armies with the minis and cards you actually have.

[TREX]

Originally Posted by Hahma

Yeah @TREX , I've used Tabletop Admiral a few times to build armies. I used it to build a few Rebel armies for my friend Brian to choose from last time we played. I messaged him the links to the armies so he could have things to look at in deciding. He'd let me know and I'd have the minis and cards ready when he got to my house.

It's a cool site. You have to input what sets you have and then you will only be able to build armies with the minis and cards you actually have.

It looks like a pretty neat tool. I'm pretty excited to get playing. I'm reading the how to play pdf right now. I've been building some pretty awesome under dark terrain right now based off of Wylochs youtube video but without a grid. It will be another cool battlefield in which star wars will fit right in.

[Hahma]

Here's a link to the rules reference that is downloadable from Fantasy Flight Games.

They have pdf of living rules that you download whenever they make changes. Often new releases will have new rules to be added. Or they may update the pdf with updates and clarifications. There's a good bit to it.

https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgame...compressed.pdf

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/e...r-wars-legion/

If those don't work right, go to the Legion page on FFG and down near the bottom will lost the products and rules. Click on the rules and it will have the basic ones and the rules reference to download.

[TREX]

Originally Posted by Hahma

Here's a link to the rules reference that is downloadable from Fantasy Flight Games.

They have pdf of living rules that you download whenever they make changes. Often new releases will have new rules to be added. Or they may update the pdf with updates and clarifications. There's a good bit to it.

https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgame...compressed.pdf

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/e...r-wars-legion/

If those don't work right, go to the Legion page on FFG and down near the bottom will lost the products and rules. Click on the rules and it will have the basic ones and the rules reference to download.

Thanks. I've definitely got a bit of reading to do. So far, what I'm reading isn't too crazy, and it really helps that I already know how to play X Wing, and Imperial Assault, so the special dice and FFG stuff isn't such a new idea.

[Hahma]

A week and half ago, Tuesday, March 26th, a fellow I met via The Drowned Earth Facebook page stopped over to play some Drowned Earth. He is basically the North American rep, though not employee for The Drowned Earth miniatures game, which is based in London. The reason he wanted to come down (almost 2 hours from north of Chicago) on a weeknight is two-fold, he was running demos and a small tournament of The Drowned Earth at Adepticon that following weekend, so he asked if he could borrow some of my terrain pieces that he'd seen in posts I made to that FB page, and he also wanted some extra practice before demoing and running the tournament. I was like heck yeah! Gave me a chance to play against someone else, and I was going to go to Adepticon on Saturday anyway, so he would have been done with the pieces I lent him and just use his stuff, so I could pick mine up there.

So the scenario we played was called Scavenger Hunt. I had made 6 plain objective tokens out of wooden discs I got from Hobby Lobby. I painted them black and numbered them 1-6 underneath. Before placing our minis, we had rolled for initiative. We each had 3 randomly chosen objective markers and initiative determined who would place them first, one at a time and alternating. They needed to be at least 5 inches from a board edge and 5 inches from each other, but they could be at any height vertically. Then initiative winner chooses if they want to deploy their forces first or second. But in this scenario, we deploy half of our force in a 4in x 4 in square in a corner, then the next player does the same in one of the other corners not opposite the first chosen corner and so on. Then you get to deploy any characters with the Infiltrate ability, but not within 6 inches of an objective marker or enemy. Finally, we each roll a d6 to see which numbered objective marker we are looking for, if we roll the same then we reroll.

So essentially, we are trying to find our numbered marker. You need to move into base contact with the marker and use an action to interact with it to look under for the number. If it's your number, then you much show your opponent and place that marker on that character's card. If it wasn't your number, you just keep that number secret and in memory for later. Once you do claim your numbered objective marker, you reroll to find out what new number you need, but now it can be the one that your opponent rolled for initially. The game goes for 6 rounds but ends earlier if any one player has all of their forces killed, or if one player has 3 or more objectives at the end of a round and the other player doesn't have 3. Each objective is worth a point, but if you take out an enemy character holding an objective, then it's worth extra points.

This game is so awesome in how you can jump, climb, leap etc, and also have an action where your character freezes so to speak and doesn't do a dynamic movement, or gets a feat on the 2 d10's and not only gets to do the dynamic movement, but does so at the max distance and gets an action point back, thus allowing for quite the memorable turn.

It was ironic that Shawn had placed one of the objective markers on top of one of the Easter Island statues, and that was the corner I had Alaya (crouching ponytail female) and Fancagne (Berengi (intelligent gorilla) with a shock axe). Alaya was able to climb the terrain piece with the stairs and feated to get an extra action, and was able to move to the rail, then final action let her leap successfully to the statue. She couldn't check the marker their yet as she was out of actions, but checked it the following round and discovered that it was the number that Shawn was looking for. So she sat there and while she took damage from Shawn's sniper, she happened to be the healer of the Bondsmen (my crew), and used an action to heal a little bit.

Our other characters had moved and searched and fought. Shawn was too aggressive with Kaneda, the leader of the Firm, and got him too close to Fancagne. Kaneda was a decent distance away and put a wound on Fancagne with his twin uzi's, but that made it worse, because Fancagne has an ability that lets him move an extra inch and do more damage in melee when he is wounded. So he normally gets to move 7 inches on flat ground, or a dynamic move when rolling right on 2d10's, but being wounded, he gets to move 8 inches. So he used his first action to move 8 inches in a normal move toward Kaneda, but then his second action was a charge, which is a move that must bring you into base contact with the enemy and you get +1 to your melee attribute. So he did and crushed Kaneda.

Other than that, my leader, Limossk (lizard guy with flaming sword overhead), was a beast in melee as well. He blundered with his first shooting attack (rolled doubles higher than his marksmanship attribute), and a shooting blunder means your weapon is jammed. The Bondsmen mechanic could spend an action to unjam it, but she wasn't close to him. So he ended up having to move and charge and such to kill in melee. He also sets enemies on fire with his sword.

So others in my group would hunt down objectives and fight. Eventually I found my first objective marker, then found my next one after defeating an enemy near the colored shipping crates to the right of the oil tank. Then my 3rd after defeating an enemy near it on a tiled floor building. It was a fun game and it was tough for Shawn, as his first objective marker was in a real tough spot to get to and you still have to check others that you are nearer too. Fun game.