Author

SCG

Finnish resident, British born. Writing again for pleasure and sanity.

Photograph of all three Patchwork boards used in a two-player game. The game is heading towards a close!

These days my partner and I play more boardgames than ever, despite our regular gaming group being something we left behind when we moved away from Brighton. (Don’t feel too sorry for us: we still have friends with whom we can play, we just lack the regularity of that old group.) We play more two-player games than we did in the past; fortunately there are no shortage of these.

Here are some first impressions of what we’ve played this month: Cosmic Encounters Duel, Portobello Market, Patchwork, and Curious Cargo.

September 2, 2023 0 comments 1.1K views

Gladius: playing as Tyranids

by SCG August 3, 2023

written by SCG

A quick administrative note: in the interest of stretching my writing muscles a little more frequently, and publishing a little more frequently to this sadly neglected blog, I’m going to try writing small pieces about stuff I’m doing or am interested in. This might mean some posts seem a bit weird or undercooked… more so than usual, anyway.

I’ve again been playing Slitherine Software’s second most recent 40k offering, the not-quite-a-Civ-game and definitely-a-mouthful Warhammer 40,000: Gladius – Relics of War. If you don’t know, the potted description is that it’s a hex-based strategy game that looks a little like Civilization or Warlock or Fallen Enchantress or any number of other civ games, but in practice it’s a great representation of the grimdark setting of 40k, because you will never stop fighting. Want to hang back and fix your economy? Good luck, pal.

The game is brutally tough on higher difficulties but, happily, it works well as a multiplayer title. I’ve been playing multiplayer games with some friends and friends-of-friends against AI teams and sometimes things go well, but other times one of us is stomped into dust before anyone else can help them. It’s luck of the draw where you will start out; if you’re close enough to support an ally, that’s good. If there are other players between you, that’s not so good.

Still, you can only blame random deployment so far: knowing what you’re doing with your faction is also very important. Our most recent starting games left me feeling like there was a lot I had to learn about playing as everyone’s favourite voracious bug swarm, the Tyranids. I’ve started a practice game to experiment with some stuff, and figure out possible build orders for the faction. Here’s what I’ve got so far…

August 3, 2023 0 comments 5.1K views

Tyranid artwork from the official Warhammer 40000 website

10th edition 40k & Leviathan

by SCG July 8, 2023

written by SCG

Games Workshop launched the 10th edition of Warhammer 40,000 just two weeks ago, including a box set dubbed Leviathan. This contained a substantial collection of posthuman Space Marine and chitinous alien Tyranid miniatures; about 75 models. Thanks to a friend I was able to snag a copy of Leviathan, and spent the launch weekend building models and reading the new rules. This post is a round-up of assorted reactions to the new edition, including my thoughts after playing a couple of games, and my feelings about the contents of Leviathan.

Let’s start with the box set, about which I’ll be brief. Since pre-orders sold out rapidly, at this point the only copies available will be via third-party sellers, and so there’s not much reason to dwell on it. So, here you get approximately fifty Tyranid models, approximately twenty-five Space Marine models, a hardback book containing the 10th edition rulebook and Crusade rulebook in one, a pack of Leviathan mission cards, and a transfer sheet. There are no dice, measuring sticks or other ‘starter’ items, as this limited run box set is clearly aimed at existing fans more than new players.

The rulebook including the new Crusade rules is really nice, as this more narratively oriented way of playing the game is something I’m interested in. The book itself is hefty AF, although the core rules are covered in just 40 to 50 pages; just a fraction of the contents. There’s otherwise a lot of lore, artwork and miniature photography, as you’d expect. It’s a nice book, well laid out, and the Core Rules are mostly well explained. I also like the included pack of mission cards; like the Crusade rules, this is something I’d otherwise have bought separately. These cards are a way to easily generate a variety of mission objectives, rules and deployment areas, giving games plenty of variety. I’ll speak of these again later.

I felt the absence of the new style of ‘index cards’ – double-sided cards containing all the status and rules for any given unit – for the models included in the box set. These feel like they’d have been an easy inclusion, and without them you’re left referring to a downloaded PDF or the official app. This isn’t ideal, but more on that later. Reference sheets for the core rules would also have been a nice inclusion, but not including them does make sense for a box set not targeting new players.

July 8, 2023 0 comments 1.9K views

Dark Future wallpaper, showing two armed cars against a dusty desert backdrop. One car is firing laser beams.

Dark Future: Blood Red States

by SCG July 21, 2022

written by SCG

Tactical vehicular highway combat in a satirical and cartoonish post-apocalyptic America! What’s not to like?

I’m familiar with Games Workshop’s Mad Max-inspired Dark Future setting from a bunch of secondhand paperbacks I read as a kid in the 90s; the franchise endured longer as a narrative setting than it did as a tabletop game. I can’t speak to Auroch Digital’s 2019 video game version’s proximity to the original, but given that it was released over thirty years ago there can be few with strong feelings on the matter.

The core mechanics of Blood Red States feel solid. You’re always on the highway and you’re always in or between one of four lanes. Your car has three weapons: front-mounted, rear-mounted, and a 360 degree turret weapon. You can switch into ‘command mode’ at any point, slowing time immensely and allowing you to carefully plan your moves and then click to execute them. Target an enemy with your turret, speed up, slow down, brake or switch into reverse, hit the afterburners, match a target’s speed, and so on. You’re generally going to always be moving forwards, and as you do so enemy or allied vehicles will merge onto the highway or appear up ahead. All this works nicely and is fun, with a few exceptions, which I’ll come to shortly.

Between missions you spend your hard-earned cash. You’re a ‘sanctioned operative’; a mercenary for hire. You’ll need to spend cash on fuel, which isn’t cheap, and the price escalates as a run continues. The campaign structure is a bit like FTL or Convoy – the latter a much closer comparison for Blood Red States – in that you need to complete your overarching objectives and final mission before you literally cannot afford to go on, but it’s otherwise fairly open-ended. Cash you don’t spend on keeping your motor running goes on upgrades: more armour, new weapons, modules that provide buffs, and more powerful engines supporting heavier and better upgrades. A nice dollop of narrative flavour comes in the form of emails, of which you generally get one ‘fluffy’ email after each mission, in addition to any communiques directly related to accomplishing objectives.

A major weakness of the game is repetition. There’s a bunch of randomisation in the enemies you’ll be up against, mission difficulty, the level layout and scenery, but ultimately there are a limited number of mission types that cannot vary too widely. Quota has you straightforwardly killing enemies. Intercept is the same, but after a certain number of kills a ‘boss’ enemy appears. Gang War sees you killing enemies again, but this time there are allied cars on the road too. Escort requires you to protect an unarmed friendly until you’ve gone a certain distance. Blockade Run sees you fending off enemies and swerving through single-lane gaps in a set number of blockades. Data Heist has you driving close to large ‘robotrucks’ whilst a progress bar fills up, and there’s another mission type I forget the name that has you killing robotrucks. On paper it’s quite varied considering the core mechanics; in practice it boils down to whether or not you add an additional consideration alongside exploding enemy cars. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but with similarly-structured games like MechWarrior 5 I’ve found myself getting a bit bored as progress through the economy feels slow compared to my desire for novelty, change or a sense of progression.

Maybe I’m just impatient. I’ve only played four hours of Blood Red States, and I enjoyed them. I found myself getting frustrated by the random and limited selection of upgrades available between missions. I spent an entire campaign seeing the same tier 1 items appearing and sticking with my starting loadout almost the entire way through. It was only after the final mission unlocked that I saw different items appear – predictably, right after I had spent almost all of my money on an engine and extra armour, on the basis that I hadn’t seen anything more interesting appear. It’s random, I guess, but it’s still frustrating.

The game’s not without other problems. If you drop your speed to almost zero the game kinda breaks as the enemy AI doesn’t really know what to do. Hiring a second merc to help you out makes everything much harder and less fun; you may assume as I did that they’d act like an AI car, but nope, you need to issue commands for them. This more than doubles your cognitive load. It could be worse, I guess, because when you do see allied AI cars they are as dumb as bricks and will repeatedly crash into you and drive into your line of fire.

If you’ve got more time on your hands than me and don’t mind a bit of repetition and randomness in your action-tactical games I do recommend giving this a shot. The narrative flavour is great and the core mechanics are mostly solid. But I’m unconvinced that I’d get much more than I already have out of further enduring Dark Future’s foibles.

July 21, 2022 0 comments 1.6K views

Aerial shot of the Tuska main stage, with a circle pit in the crowd.

Tuska 2022

by SCG July 20, 2022

written by SCG

As anyone living in Finland reading this will know, Tuska is one of Finland’s biggest metal festivals and takes place in Helsinki around the height of Summer. That means this year it was hot as balls, but hey, that’s the festival experience. It beats the torrential rain and lakes of mud I’m more accustomed to from my last few UK festivals.

Anyone coming to Tuska from outside the country will have a few things they’ll need to acclimatise to. First off, even by the standards of festivals it’s fucking expensive to get a drink. Twelve Euros for a can of beer. You’ll get one Euro refunded if you return the can (a pretty smart initiative) but that’s still crazy expensive, and officially you can’t bring your own booze in. Somehow you still see a few people who break themselves on the first night, but getting drunk here takes serious cash and commitment. (It’s possible. My first Tuska experience was going for a single day, and ending up drunk enough that I saw Slayer and only remember about thirty seconds of Reign in Blood.) Second… this is a super chill place. It’s busy but not crowded in any sense I’m used to from festivals elsewhere. People queue without fuss. I’ve never experienced or even seen anyone kicking off. Every single random person I’ve spoken to has been cool and friendly. It’s all very Finnish, except for the whole thing about lots of people being in the same place and talking to strangers. Third, and this probably relates to the second point in ways I’ll let your imagination work out, about an hour after the headliners finish it’s a “you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here” situation. The festival happens on a former gasworks site within the city limits; there’s no camping. It’s close to public transport links so it’s easy to head home or to whatever accommodation you’ve rented.

I’ll be forty this year and to be honest, I like Tuska’s vibe. I’d be a lot happier to drink without spending a small fortune but it’s nice to not have to put up with absolutely wrecked twenty-somethings stumbling everywhere and shitting up the walls of the portaloos (Tuska has the cleanest toilets I’ve ever encountered at a festival, incidentally – one time I saw a bit of poo on a toilet seat and it was A Big Deal to everyone who was queuing with me at the time). On a side note about my increasing age, my feet are absolutely fucked and standing about on tarmac is actively painful. So yeah. Feeling my damn age.

But, the music! I saw a lot of good shit this year. A couple of the headliners were nu metal-adjacent stalwarts of the 90s, Korn and Deftones, and I’d never seen either live before. My past opinion on 90-120 minute sets is that it’s way too long to listen to just one band, but as with so many of my youthful opinions that’s a load of shit. I don’t actually know too many Korn songs but I dug seeing them live, including the stupid and funny songs like Shoots and Ladders and A.D.I.D.A.S. They finished with Blind and played the other classics as we went. Deftones seemed a bit low-energy, but Chino Moreno kept restating how happy he was to be there and how awesome we all were, and I think it was the end of their tour so they were probably winding down, as it were. They played material throughout their back catalogue, including a bunch of tracks from White Pony and Diamond Eyes, my personal favourites, and finished with some a few really old songs including Seven Words, which I never thought I’d see performed.

The other headliner was Mercyful Fate. They were fun, not my vibe but good to see. Otherwise the best thing I’ve seen said about their performance was from my friend Michael:

https://twitter.com/MichaelHalila/status/1543534222090043393

Other personal highlights were Baroness, Red Fang, Gloryhammer and Heilung. The first three are all personal favourites. Gloryhammer played early on the final day in the baking hot sun to a lot of sober people, but did a bang-up job showing off their schtick: cheesy power metal but super self-aware and funny. A bunch of people were waving inflatable swords and axes, we got the full gamut of Gloryhammer-universe character work, a goblin got smashed with the goblin smasher, and they did a great job getting the crowd going.

Baroness I really enjoyed as they’re one of my favourite bands these days and I’ve not seen them play before, but it feels like they had a harder time working a crowd much smaller than the tent they played. Maybe I was just feeling bad because in my peripheral vision I could see the empty space at the edge of the crowd and people trickling out. I was happy, though. As for Red Fang, I mostly watched them sitting down on a kerb because my feet were killing me, but I was close enough to enjoy some stoner rock riffs, and I got up and closer in for Prehistoric Dog. I bought the last Red Fang tshirt at the merch stand but it was too small. God damn it.

Heilung I didn’t know going into the festival and even from the back of the tent their live performance was something else. They’ve a ton of live performances on YouTube so if you don’t know them, just go spend twenty minutes watching a couple of songs.

Video still from Heilung's performance. A drummer wearing a mask and horns beats a skin drum. — Photo credit: Tuska 2022

A quick run-down of the rest of the bands I saw: Elder were the first act I saw on day one and they were cool; I need to listen to some of their records as I came to them cold. Perturbator was intense and put on a good light show, though personally there’s other synthwave metal type stuff that I get more from. My friends loved ’em though. Carcass is another band I don’t really know – yeah, I’m historically more of a punk/hardcore guy than a metal guy, I won’t hide it, and I’ve never gotten much from grindcore or goregrind or powerviolence or any of that – but it was cool to watch a bunch of this fairly legendary band. Devin Townsend was fucking awesome; since the festival I’ve listened to a few of his records and really enjoyed them. I loved Strapping Young Lad back in the mid-2000s but hadn’t listened to much else from him, but I was really impressed by the range his songs drew from. High On Fire were intense, albeit another band I watched from the sidelines, resting my feet. Jinjer got probably the most rapturous reception I saw the entire festival and the tent was rammed for their set. Part of this might be driven by sympathy for this Ukrainian band but the majority will be powered by the stage presence and staggering vocals of frontwoman Tatiana. As metal goes it’s mostly not my cup of tea but this was undeniably good.

July 20, 2022 0 comments 1.2K views

Dragon Age: Inquisition

by SCG July 19, 2022

written by SCG

There’s a bunch I like about Inquisition. Some of the storytelling offers impactful and emotive moments. A lot of the character work and dialogue is good – very good for a game – as you’d expect from Bioware. There’s even a coda to a side story that was genuinely funny (it involved a goat/wall interaction). I liked the ‘war room’ sections and the feeling it provides of being a real leader, despatching agents, diplomats and troops across the world map to rally support for your cause.

And, um… I mostly enjoyed my time with the game? I’m actually struggling to share many other specific positives, here. I admit most of my time playing the game was when I had covid. It’s a great game for occupying your brain between waves of feverish discomfort and pain rippling across your skin!

Whilst the combat can click, oftentimes it felt like an uncomfortable hybrid of action and tactical RPG. Most of the time I controlled only my own character and let the others do their thing. You can flip between your characters to control them directly, and the AI will take over anyone you’re not controlling. So you could conceivably pull off some combos here, if the AI hasn’t got something you want to use on cooldown. It would be easier to pull that stuff off in the tactical view, but you only set up orders there, and on console it’s pretty clunky and slow to use. I can’t imagine playing the game and using it a lot. Inquisition is already paced like a marathon. That combat mode would make it positively glacial.

There’s an anecdote in Jason Schreier’s book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels about Witcher 3‘s reception and BioWare. “…what was remarkable about The Witcher 3 was that very few of the quests felt like padding. Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz’s edict to avoid FedEx quests had been successful. Every quest in The Witcher 3 had some sort of complication or twist, as Tomaszkiewicz had requested, which was a design tenet that BioWare’s developers would later tell me they were hoping to use in their own games after Dragon Age: Inquisition.”

Well, without wanting to be too unkind, you can certainly tell they didn’t come across that idea before creating Inquisition. There’s a ton of filler and shit in here. A lot of really, really tedious shit. Kill obscurely spawning enemies until random drops happen. Move from A to B to C and read a little box of text at each location to complete quest. Gather resources as you run about the maps and watch the same two second animation every damn time. A lot of this filler could be ignored, yet I found myself grinding out this crap because (1) covid brain, and (2) you level up abysmally slowly and the story quests have level range recommendations, so I felt I needed the pittance of XP on offer from minor quests. The flipside is that I spent hours and hours doing what in gameplay terms is filler and in narrative terms is shit I absolutely should not have been doing.

I wanted to see out the main story, as I found myself invested in the overarching plot and some of the characters. But after sixty or seventy hours I felt I wasn’t even halfway through, whereas I was fully recovered from covid. I could tell that the game’s pace and core loops and quest structures weren’t going to change: I’d still be the mighty hero saving the world but also collecting herbs and animal skins and pressing the left thumbstick every two seconds to locate nearby items. So I ended my time with Inquisition carrying both good and bad memories, but more than either a sense of tedium and missed opportunity.

Dragon Age Inquisition's core cast standing behind the war table.

July 19, 2022 0 comments 1.3K views

Three DND miniatures painted with AP Speed Paints.

AP Speed Paints tests

by SCG March 15, 2022

written by SCG

I’ve had an eye on The Army Painter’s new range of ‘Speed Paints’ since last December, and last week I found the starter set containing ten paints in my friendly local game store. I also had a lot of cheap Wizkids DND miniatures sitting around, and what better use for these than testing out speed painting with Speed Paints?

My tests were hardly scientific or comprehensive – you might check out Goobertown or Dana Howl on YouTube for that – and I wanted to try using them both with a brush and with my airbrush. The main difference in result between these two tools is that with a brush you benefit from the way these low viscosity paints will flow into recesses, producing easy shading and contrast, whereas with an airbrush the paints’ low opacity makes for colour filters that look great over, say, zenithal priming or other forms of underpainting.

March 15, 2022 0 comments 1.4K views

Quitting smoking

by SCG March 14, 2022

written by SCG

Listen, now, it’s early days yet but I’m on my fifth day since quitting smoking, and it’s going rather well.

This isn’t the first time I’ve quit. I can remember at least three occasions in the last few decades where I’ve stopped for 3-9 months. Obviously, the change did not stick.

The main difference this time around is one of mindset. If you’re a smoker or former smoker yourself, you may be familiar with a book titled Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking. In the past month I’ve read this book, which was first recommended to me well over fifteen years ago, and have taken its approach into practice.

I’m not here to shill for someone else’s book or clinics. Rather, I’m sharing this update because I’ve been genuinely surprised at just how easy the experience has been. This feels worthy of being open about.

March 14, 2022 0 comments 1.1K views

Key art for the game Age of Darkness: Final Stand.

Nightmares invade in Age of Darkness: Final Stand

by SCG February 27, 2022

written by SCG

The bell tolls, and an indicator appears: the nightmares are coming from the south.

I’ve been aggressively fortifying new expansions, anticipating that the enemy’s next wave will come from somewhere they’ve not previously struck. Now, it seems, they will be poised to attack along two possible paths. One route leads north and east, winding through the unexplored darkness to emerge near a new iron mine, beside a new line of my strongest walls and towers. The towers are each manned by an arbalest and a trio of archers, and nearby stands a large ballista.

The second route goes north and west, this time emerging by a very narrow path through a forest that leads into an area of farmland, and also the previous walls the nightmare horde attacked. The narrow passage is protected by a single tower and a few layers of walls. The more fortified area only has two archer towers, albeit behind two rows of solid walls.

This will be tough. They could strike at any of these three locations. Each is protected to varying degrees, though neither will hold against the numbers I expect. So I add ballistae and more towers for arbalests and archers at each location, and throw up outer lines of staggered low-quality walls. Thanks to a boon earned from surviving a previous nightmare assault, it’s more likely than not that any destroyed building will explode, damaging nearby foes. I move my melee army, lead by our mighty fire-wielding hero unit, into a position midway between the locations, and train more forces to man the new towers and bolster the ground support.

Behind these defences lie unprotected farmlands, resource gatherers and utility buildings. Behind those are incomplete walls of earlier eras, and those are all that stand between invaders and the Keep I must protect. The nightmares will make a beeline towards the Keep, moving like a single hungry swarm. Elsewhere my lands are protected by more solid second layers of defences, but not here. There is no time, and more pressingly there are no more resources, to deal with this problem. The nightmares are here.

February 27, 2022 0 comments 1.5K views

40K 9E: ‘Filthy Casual’ Blood Angels vs. Chaos Space Marines

by SCG February 14, 2022

written by SCG

In the weekend just gone, a friend and I played a game of Warhammer 40,000 9th edition, using the community ‘Filthy Casual Play’ ruleset for open play.

If you’re interested in a write-up of the match including photos of the major developments, check out my opponent’s blog Freodom: Warhammer 40,000: Let’s Play Filthy Casual – 500 pts Word Bearers vs Blood Angels. I don’t have a great detail to add, though I do have a few opinions and reactions of my own!

I was surprised how quickly one of my Assault Intercessor troops squads disappeared in a single round of melee. This was an unfortunate combination with my Justiciar’s subsequent charge: he successfully killed my opponent’s warlord, who was largely responsible for the Intercessors’ demise, and also tagged his huge cultist squad solely to stop them charging my Eradicator fire support. Unfortunately, the dice saw my plan coming and gave me five out of five failed 3+ saving throws. That is exactly how many wounds the Justiciar had. Of course, this setback didn’t sting me, because I can’t imagine a more perfectly 40k moment than this. Wild dice throws that mock your plans, and heroes buried beneath endless waves of the enemy!

I feared the Vindicator and Mutilators rather more than I needed to. I think the Mutilators were a little unlucky as they failed their only opportunity to charge, but they killed only a single Intercessor in the entire game. The Vindicator, meanwhile, failed to live up to its high damage potential in the first few turns, although as soon as it did get some hits through it slaughtered two thirds of my Eradicators in one volley. A highly swingy unit.

February 14, 2022 1 comment 2.8K views

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