The New Merc Contracts are Here, The New Merc Contracts are Here!

Yippe!

Privateer Press has posted a PDF with the new Mercenary Contracts for Warmachine MkII.  They, in general, look pretty cool.

The Four Star Syndicate didn't see any real changes, which is fine, it was pretty straight forward anyways.

The Highborn Covenent got much better, simply by adding a unit Gun Mages or Long Gunners, both of which can take attachments.  You can now paint up those Order of the Rose Lael Gun Mages you always wanted to do.  Sweet!

The Seaforge keeps the same goodies, but instead of advance deploy, they get an extra 4" on the deployment zone.  That should help with the general movement/mobility issues for those stunty legged folks.

Talon Charter - Didn't see any big changes here.

Magnus' Agenda gets moved from a Contract to a 'Theme Army' that has a bunch of bonuses, depending on how thematic you get with your choices.  Neat things like Mag's Jacks can start with upkeep spells running in advance of the game or units getting pathfinder for the first turn.  Pretty nifty stuff.

Makes me miss my merc already since I'm running Khador for the slow grow league.

jp
one if by land, two if by sea

First update of the year

Greetings,

Hope you all had a good and safe New Year.  Last Saturday, Steve and Suzanne invited me over for some boardgames and food.  I got to play a few games during that time and it was in general a good evening.

First up was a non-league game of Formula D.  Suzanne's friend Patrick and his son Jake along with Steve and I ran a two lap Monte Carlo.  Patrick did a solid job of hitting the turns just right and ended up not needing to pit, which allowed him to maintain a sizable lead.  Steve ran his tire heavy car, but it couldn't keep him on the track in the long run as he came in third.  I took second with Jake racking up a 'did not finish'.

The second game of the evening Pandemic.  We played on 'easy' with the core epidemics on the first one.  The team did pretty well as we won with zero cards in the draw pile.  The second game we added the Viral Epidmics from the "On the Brink" expansion, and it did a pretty effective job of killing us all dead.  Very sad.  The players were Steve, Jake, JD, and myself.

The third game was Apples to Apples, a solid party game that had most in attendance playing.  Suzanne's friend Will took the top apples for the prize.

The fourth game was Ninja Burger by Steve Jackson Games.  It was pretty cute, simplistic, but cute.  Surprised they haven't come out with a Pirate Pizza competitor to be honest. It was a pretty cut throat game, but Will came up on top again.

We finished up with Figaro, which is a interesting take on 'crap on your neighbor' style card game.  It is played in three rounds of scoring so if you do bad in one round, you have a chance in the other two.  It was fun and quick and I took the win.

I took off after that through the snow and got home around 1130ish or so.  It was a good plesent evening of gaming.

jp
#1

Dominion Unboxing

The second Game I got myself for Christmas was Dominion from Rio Grande Games... Here is the unboxing video I did for the game.

Two things I found in error... First, I turned the background music down too much and it is almost completly lost, second, I state one of the cards shown is the Thief, when in fact it is a Spy, but I'm to lazy to re-record the whole thing again and I don't have the know-how to cut and splice the audio track. Live and learn!

jp

Master of his Dominion

Elementry My Dear...

The buddy flick set in late 1800 England.

That is the new Sherlock Holmes in 7 words. Not that it is bad, far from it, it is a very entertaining movie that hits all the right wickets for modern pop culture.

Quick Take Aways:

• Robert Downing Jr. - He is still on the rise and does a wonderful performance as Holmes. When first cast I was a bit apprehensive, but he pulled the accent out well and his slightly neurotic (OK, really neurotic) take on Holmes was interesting and entertaining. I really liked the director's approach with the character where he digested a scene, typically fights, but would have liked to have seen that break out with other items.
• Jude Law - As the 'retired' military surgeon, this Doctor Watson was a bit younger then those portrayed in the past, but so was Holmes for that matter. Law is a great actor, with a wide range and he did well in this film. My biggest complaint was the limp. An injury suffered in the line of duty mysteriously disappeared in fight and chase scenes, but reemerged in conversation/dialog intense scenes. Huh?
• The 'Buddy Flick' - Holmes and Watson played off of each other extremely well, and the interjection of Watson's future wife played to the conflict of the buddies being ripped apart.
• The Action - Hey, it is the modern pop world that we live in and if we don't have the prerequisite number of explosions and bloody fight scenes, then it ain't going to cut. Come on! I think some story got left on the floor, I'm not going to spoil, but a few spots could have used an additional scene to help tie things together a bit better, especially at the end.
• The Big Professor M - Professor Moriarty plays a very minor, behind the scenes, wait for the sequel roll. He is there, but he isn't the force to be addressed in this film, but I'll be you my stake in the Baker Street Irregulars that we see him in his full glory next time.
• The 'Tag' - Didn't happen. I sat through the credits, expecting to see a sneak peak of Moriarty or some other thing, but it didn't happen. :( Oh well.

In the end I enjoyed the movie and would recommend it for the theater for its full large screen effect. I give it 202 out of 221B Baker Streets.

jp

Watson

And they are off!

On Tuesday, as part of the triple play, we held the third race of the Grand Prix League event. We had three new teams come into the frey and three returning teams. The new teams were:

• Smuggler's Paradise Racing (SPR) with Solo and Chewie (Team Owner: Paul)
• Valkyrie with Titania and David Kidder (Team Owner: Susanne)
• Shadow Racing with LaMont and Margo (Team Owner: Leah)

The starting field for this race was as follows:

1. Kalev for Team Zealot
2. LaMont for Shadow Racing
3. BJ Foyt for JP Racing
4. Titania for Valkyrie
5. Solo for SPR
6. Lugi for Team Ariete

The race was held in Zhuai, China and consisted of two laps. The race looked ominous with the first turn producing our first debris field due to a collision. This same turn had five of the six racers in the turn zone and within three of the end of the turn on the same round. However, Solo took a quick and commanding lead and pulled a good 40+ car lengths ahead of all the competitors.

Coming out of the last turn of the first lap, with Solo having a firm lead and a solid car, he opted to skip the pits and head directly into his second lap. Kalev trying to make up ground also passed up on the pits. BJ Foyt, Titania, Lugi all entered the pits next and LaMont by passed, allowing him to pass Lugi who had a hard exit.

In the first turn of the second lap, Solo misjudged his distance and burnt all his tires to spin out just outside the turn. This allowed Kalev to move ahead with the lead. BJ Foyt coming in quickly attempted to pass the slowed Solo, but couldn't maintain his momentum before Solo had his car running again at speed.

Unfortunately for Solo, on the hairpin turn, he lost control of the car and slammed into the wall. Having received major injuries, will be unable to participate in the next race, but he did make the ESPN highlight reels. This left Kalev in a resounding lead and the rest of the pack clumped together in attempt to win second place.

Kalev crossed the finish line with two turns to spare, hitting the last turn perfectly to accelerate to 6th gear to head across the finish line uncontested. The pack hit the final turn in tight formation, with Titania and Lugi neck and neck, but in fourth gear. BJ Foyt timed his gear shift and entered the final turn in fifth, allowing him to accelerate to 6th and zoom pass both Titania and Lugi to steal second. Titania finished third followed by LaMont making a strong showing at the end and Lugi puttering across on the final roll.

Current Grand Prix Points

Driver Standings:

Great game of racing. We only had five debris fields on the board, but it was still alot of bump and grind between the cars. Looking forward to the next race!

jp

The Comish

Tuesday Night Triple Play

I was able to sneak out for some gaming on Tuesday night and had a real good time playing a wide variety of games.

First up The Other Half and I ran some arrends to the doctors and the kitchen counter stores and got some samples. About three or so I made it to Steve/Rob's and started cooking up some chili.

Once that was started, Steve, Susanne, and I played the new expansion for Agricola, Farmers on the Moors. Moors added in some really nice items, taking an already pleasantly complex board game and cranking it up a notch. I really liked the concept of the fuel and how the executed. It provided motivation for conversion from a wood house early, to help pay for future fuel expenditures. Steve took an early lead using his wood hoarding techniques to build a five room house early, but fell into trouble with his massive birthing campaign and had to take a begging card. In the second to last round, I took both birth tiles that allowed me to push ahead of Steve and the actions needed to replace my wood house directly to stone with the conservator. I give the expansion a pretty high rating for the new stuff it adds to the game.

Second game was the next race in the Grand Prix League. We had three new teams show and a return of three teams for a total of six racers on the field. We raced on the Zhuai track that really limited the 6th gear action. I'll post a complete update in a new posting with all the action an current standings in a blatant attempt to get my blog post count up for the month.

The last game was again Steve, Susanne, and myself. I had opened up Dominion as it will be my next unboxing, but I wanted to at least play the game once so I could talk to it more intelligently during the video. I really liked the game and I can see that it will have a high degree of replayability. The player interaction is not high, in fact it can be pretty random given the cards that come up for the kingdom cards, which are chosen at random prior to the game. Once everyone knows the rules, it actually moves along very quickly. Each game will have a slightly different strategy, based upon the cards that are chosen again, but some key things we noticed was that concentrating solely on victory points (VP), which you need to win, diluted your ability to conduct actions, which you need to get VP. Also, concentrating to much on money development at the experience of actions or VP, and not making the switch to a VP build soon enough, put you in a hole when end game was approaching.

Solid night of gaming, with three very different game styles, all good stuff. Thanks for Steve for hosting on such an odd night and for Suzanne for the corn bread muffins.

jp

Games x3 & yummy, yummy chili

Repo Men...

Wow...

Just Wow...

If you haven't seen the redband trailer for Repo Men, you ought to check it out. Talk about disturbing vision of the future. Jude Law and Forest Whitaker are a pair of great actors that seem to really have a chemstry based on the trailer.

Should be worth the watch.

jp

How's the Pancreas?