More Season's Greetings

Forever

What's this all about then?

Find out soon!

FTW

My group has started to play Phoenix: Dawn Command; you can see Stuart's first impressions here. It's a bit of an odd mishmash; the game has a fantasy setting with a vague Greco-Roman feel, but the player-characters are superheroes with special powers and the ability to return from death, and they represent the titular military organisation, a sort of super-special forces. This mixing of genres has led to some interesting tensions in the sessions we've played so far.

I won't go into too much spoilery detail but in the most recent adventure mission, the Phoenixes were faced with a choice: completing their objective and at the same time saving a small group of people, or risking the mission and the lives of that small group by delving into the unknown, with no clear plan,to attempt to rescue even more people, if those people were even still alive. To make matters even more complicated, there was a time limit.

(There were other, significant, choices to be made, but this was the big one.)

The group decided on the former; they escaped, completed their mission, and saved many lives, but many more were lost, and there will be further consequences -- some good, some not so good -- in the wider setting as a result. Their choice was by far not the worst one that could have been made, but even so I think that a couple of players felt a little aggrieved that they couldn't work out how to achieve the optimum resolution based on the information they had.

Perhaps PDC's mission-based structure creates an impression that there is a way to "win" the adventure, or perhaps it's just the way my group thinks; I've written about the latter possibility before.

For me -- and I understand that not everyone will share this opinion -- the key strength of role-playing games is the near-as-infinite possibilities available to players in terms of actions and resolutions, and that means that there won't always be a right answer; if I want to play something in which the victory condition is obvious -- if not always easy to obtain; hello Dead of Winter! -- then I have board games or computer games for that. I know you can play rpgs in a similar fashion and I have enjoyed many adventures in which there was a clear path to triumph, but it's not where my primary interest lies.

(I also wonder if this is why I have never been able to get a successful sandbox campaign up and running with this group, but perhaps that's a post for another day.)

As such, I was pleased with how the adventure mission went. Difficult situations force difficult decisions, and difficult decisions lead to complex consequences, and the game emulated that. The setting will be richer as a result of the Phoenixes' actions, relationships with non-player-characters will be more complex, and there will be a clear impact on ongoing events.

I call that a win.

Looking Past the Wall

This was inevitable.

Watch Out!

Upon Deadly Dinner Time

Another one from Upon Deadly Sands, and another one in which I'm trying to be a bit looser with my linework. This time using a brush pen, because I seem to like making things difficult for myself.

Pig Pirate

I have no idea.

Use Thinner Pens Next Time, Yes?

This is what happens when you only have a chunky marker and ten minutes to draw something and you grew up with Marvel UK.

Thorsday

I am going to see Thor 3 tomorrow.

GOLDLENS

Twelve(ish)

A very wonky Twelfth Doctor. I don't think I've done him justice.

Tackle Zone

Given that it's the best board game ever, I'm shocked that I haven't drawn any Blood Bowl related pictures until now.

Oops

It's possible that I got distracted by computer games and forgot to post this yesterday.

Jeff's Silly Experiment

Here's Jeff's adventuring party.

Cool

Jumper

A quick one today -- and an actual quick one, not a "I tried to draw a quick picture but took ages" -- as everything else I wanted to draw turned out to be too spoilerific.

Richard

There are nice wizards, the ones who entertain children with magic tricks and protect communities from the creatures of the night.

Richard Marsh is not one of those wizards.

Here's another character from the Lamentations of the Flame Princess thing I'm scraping together.

Woodwose

Armada Not Included

This was another attempt at a quick drawing but at just shy of half an hour from blank page to finished inking, it wasn't quick enough.

Anyway, here's Cyclonus, the best Transformer.

Death From Above

I tried something a bit new today. I felt that I was overthinking and overworking some of the previous images, so this one was done in a few minutes using a rubbish biro.

With Many Apologies

Oh dear. I'm sorry.

Inevitable

Andrea

Here's another piece from my upcoming Lamentations of the Flame Princess project. This is Andrea; she's a friend of Desmond, but has different hobbies.

Haptura!

A few weeks ago I did a map for Mike Evans' Barbarians of the Ruined Earth setting thingie. On the final map the locations are represented by little icons but the initial sketches were a bit more detailed; this is a closer look at one of them, the statue of Haptura, as worshipped by the Winged Mutant People of the Imperceptible Bluffs.

Hello Sweetie

He's back and it's about time!

(Sorry.)

Water Fairy

Here's another concept piece from Upon Deadly Sands.

Civil (Trouser) War

Why are Death's Head II and the Hulk fighting over a pair of trousers?

It's a long story.

Desmond

This is from my upcoming Lamentations of the Flame Princess "mystery project" which was sort of announced a day or so ago. You'll be able to see more -- ahem -- in 2018.

I've Been to the Pub

I've been to the pub and it's late and I'm tired and this is the best I can do before I fall asleep. I am old now.

Tomorrow's will be better, or at least I'll spend longer than fifteen minutes on it.

Upon Deadly Sands

Upon Deadly Sands is an idea for a game setting that I've been kicking around for a while; one day I may even finish it.

This is a version of one of the first images that popped into my head when I started thinking about the project.

Conquerable

She-Hulk versus Orrgo the Unconquerable.

(Neither character is from Doctor Who. Sorry.)

Dr Who and The Master of Evil

Remember the third Peter Cushing Dr Who film, the one with Christopher Lee as The Master?

No?

Just me then.

(I did try to not do another Doctor Who picture, but it just popped in there, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.)

Seven of X

I promise that I'm not just going to draw thirty-one Doctor Who pictures, honest.

This one came about because my brother liked yesterday's one but requested a picture of "the best" Doctor.

The Tenth Planet

I'm going to give Inktober a try for the first time this year. Let's see how I get on.

I wasn't sure what to do for my first entry, but then I watched The Tenth Planet. Sorted.

I think I'm supposed to hashtag this too, so er, #inktober and #inktober2017 I suppose.

MËTÄL SLÜG

Remix of the Snow Witch

Last weekend I again endured the pernicious lottery that is Southern Rail and visited my friends Courtney, James, and Liam in That London. You remember them; they were the ones who strongarmed me into running them through The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh back in April.

Once again they had requested that we play "some D&D" and so in the days running up to my visit I pondered what adventure to run for them. I considered Barrowmaze, inspired by Mike Evans' recent delves, and I almost went with Eyes of the Stone Thief, as I don't know if I'll ever get that to the table otherwise.

(I pondered using the opportunity to run another playtest of CUFFS SHRIEK, but we also played Mansions of Madness and Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu over the weekend, so I think it would have been too much of an eldritch thing. Yes, that is a clue to the subject matter.)

In the end I decided that the most sensible thing to do with a couple of days until Play Day was to rewrite Fighting Fantasy gamebook Caverns of the Snow Witch. Which I did. On the train on the way up.

It didn't turn out too bad for a frenzied bit of last minute scribbling. The original caverns are quite linear, which is perhaps no surprise from a solo gamebook from 1984, so I Jaquaysed them to make exploration more interesting. I switched some of the encounters around, or changed their context, added some new ideas and dropped others. The original SNOW WITCH is quite playful and talkative, at least in comparison to most gamebook villains, so I wrote her to emphasise that aspect and make her less of an End Boss; alas, while I wanted to include the bit where she forces YOU to play a sort of scissors-paper-stone game just for fun, I ran out of time and couldn't work out how to include it. Next time.

Highlights of the adventure included:

• The player-characters discovering the footprints of a YETI and almost deciding to turn around and go home. This would be within ten minutes of starting play.


• The player-characters deciding that a cauldron full of yellow liquid was a potion that turned people into YETIS, because it was impossible that it could be anything else. In fact, it was a potion of cold resistance but their idea is too good for me to not use somewhere.


• The unexpected cheer that went up around the table when I semi-accidentally gave my Baldur's Gate II character John the Bastard a cameo as Generic Dwarf Prisoner #1.


• Liam's thief finding a pair of spiderclimbing boots and using them to run onto the ceiling of caverns to shoot at SNOW CULTISTS, safe from reprisals...


• ...until a summoned ICE DEMON flapped its stubby wings just enough to get within claw range of the thief's head...


• ...leaving the other two adventurers -- once the ICE DEMON was killed -- with the interesting problem of how to loot recover their deceased comrade's corpse.

Last time I played with Courtney, Liam, and James, I noted how they seemed to think everything in the adventure was significant and it proved to be the case this time too. They seemed to regard the adventure as a closed system in which every item had a use and every encounter had a purpose; the SNOW WITCH's necklace had to be a key to unlocking something and couldn't be normal jewellery, for example. I don't think there's anything wrong with that approach but it's not how I design or run adventures, so I feel there was a bit of a clash there.

If there was a clash, it wasn't serious enough to ruin the game, and I think everyone enjoyed the adventure, even though the Snow Witch escaped and Liam lost his character just before the end; I am a bit of a wimp when it comes to killing off player-characters and as such I don't believe I'll ever be a true Old-School Gamemaster, but the players seemed to be made of sterner stuff. They were cautious and clever and didn't try to fight everything, and while they also didn't find every treasure or uncover every secret, the player-characters emerged from the caverns with a big pile of gold and other loot. I don't think they gained a level, but they got close.

As comfortable as they are with old-school gameplay, I don't think this group of friends is that fond of old-school rules. Labyrinth Lord is a fine game and I chose it because it was a close match for the type of thing they wanted to play, but during the game they expressed frustration that their characters were rubbish in various ways, or that only the thief could detect traps, or that sometimes they had to roll high and other times they had to roll low, and so on. I've shattered at least one tooth as a result of excessive gritting due to descending armour class, so I understand their discomfort.

As such, next time we play I think we will use a different ruleset, but I'm not sure what that will be. I think it should be something simple, that feels like D&D but maybe isn't D&D itself. D&D5 is a possibility, but it may be too fiddly for this group. I've also got my eye on The Black Hack, but I dislike the roll-low core mechanic so I'm pondering a hack -- The Black Hack² perhaps, or The Hacked Black Hack -- if I can make the maths work.

Any other suggestions -- not Torchbearer -- are welcome; I've got some time to look around as I won't be up in the glittering capital again for a couple of months at least. Also, if there's interest -- and if it's legal -- I may post my remix of Caverns of the Snow Witch, but it needs a bit of a tidy up first.

When Good Games Go Bad

Here's a game design theory question for you: if you can break a game by playing it wrong, is that a fault of the game's design?

Last week I played New Angeles with my group. Pictured is your author -- centre, with the odd-shaped head -- struggling to deal with the intricacies of futuristic mega-corporate tomfoolery.

In New Angeles, players take on the role of mega-corporations in the cyberpunk -- but not Cyberpunk, because that licence expired -- city of, er, New Angeles, and their job is to keep the city running while also making more profit than each other; one of the players may also be working for the government, trying to cause chaos in the city so that the Feds have an excuse to come in and kick the mega-corps out. It plays a bit like an evil neoliberal Pandemic, with various escalating threats, er, threatening the city, and the mega-corps coming up with plans to reduce said threat while also making a bit of cash.

We played it like Pandemic, working together to keep New Angeles out of trouble, which was great for the people of the city but a bit rubbish for the government mole, because there was no way to undermine all that good civic work without unmasking and then being locked out of the game by the other players, who have no reason to support any of the mole's proposals.

(There are a few other problems with the way New Angeles implements its traitor mechanic but this isn't a review of the game.)

We were playing it wrong. We weren't supposed to be so cooperative; we were supposed to be more selfish, allowing the city to suffer for profit, bribing or forcing other players to support our proposals if necessary. With everyone being a bastard to everyone else, the government traitor could work without standing out as a wrong'un.

It made for a rather flat experience, which is I suppose an incentive to not play the game in such a friendly and helpful manner, but that seems a bit passive to me; everything kept ticking along to the end, whereas you'd expect problems to be more apparent earlier on if you're getting a fundamental part of the game wrong. I was the traitor and I did note that I was powerless quite soon, but I assumed I was just being rubbish, because I am rubbish at most games.

Hence my question. If a game allows you to play it wrong without it being clear you're playing it wrong, is that bad game design? Or is it players being dense? Both? Neither?

We're going to try New Angeles again, with the benefit of knowing where we went wrong the first time. I'm sure it will be a better game the second time around, but I wonder if it will prompt any more interesting questions?

Comitatus

A filler image for Wormskin#7, coming soon. Again I'm messing around with colour, in an attempt to become a bit more confident with it.

Hashtag and Eggs

Oh okay then, let's have a look.

I'm not going to do one a day; no one wants to see that. Let's bash through the whole lot in one fat hit.

Here we go!

1. What published rpg do you wish you were playing right now?

What, right this moment? I'm okay thanks. I like games but I don't want to be playing every moment of every day, like some sort of...

Oh.

I want to play Mutant Year Zero. It's been sitting in my reading pile for a year or so but I haven't got it to the table yet.

2. What is an rpg you would like to see published?

I may write a longer blog post about this but I think it's fascinating that computer rpg series like Final Fantasy spit out a complete ruleset and setting every couple of years and then move on; would anyone buy or play these games if they were released as tabletop rpgs? I would be interested, at least.

3. How do you find out about new rpgs?

I don't follow any news sites or anything like that, so I tend to pick up on new releases when people get excited about them on Google+.

4. Which rpg have you played the most since August 2016?

I am a sad loser and I have logged everything I've played and because these things are true I can tell you that it was the Frankenstein patchwork d100 game I used to run The Dracula Dossier. Thirteen sessions in all.

5. Which rpg cover best captures the spirit of the game?

That's a great question. I can think of lots of covers I like but do they capture the spirit of the game? Fifth edition Call of Cthulhu has a wonderful cover but I don't think it's indicative of how the game plays, as such.

Of the games I own, I'm going to go with the second edition of Shadowrun; it's not the best image in the world -- the composition is a bit flat and that drain is given so much prominence that you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a main character -- but does a great job of showing what the game is about.

6. You can game every day for a week. Describe what you'd do!

Assuming I've done all the preparation and I'm ready to go, I'd probably try out a bunch of games and play a different one each day. Maybe two a day, one after lunch and one after dinner.

I know. Rock and roll.

7. What was your most impactful rpg session?

"Impactful" is a horrible word. Eurgh. Stop it.

Anyway, probably the most influential -- much better, see? -- session was the first time I played Call of Cthulhu. I'd played other rpgs before that, and it was Shadowrun that probably got me hooked, but that first CoC session was a profound and enlightening experience.

8. What is a good rpg to play for sessions of 2hrs or less?

"2hrs"?

Good gravy.

(Mental note: stop being an arse.)

Anyway, two hours doesn't seem long enough to get going, once you've taken into account making the tea and moaning about what the Tories have done this week, but I'd go for something quick and easy, like Fighting Fantasy. I imagine you could rattle through a lot of content in two hours with that game.

9. What is a good rpg to play for about 10 sessions?

Most campaigns I run last about ten to twelve sessions, so the easy answer is "any of them" but that's not very helpful.

There's a suggestion in 13th Age to run a campaign in which everyone gains a level with each session and characters have ten levels in that, so you get this focussed and neat sort of "zero to hero" thing. I don't know if that means 13th Age is a good rpg to play for about ten sessions, but I'd like to give it a try some time.

10. Where do you go for rpg reviews?

Reviews from R'lyeh is good, as is tenfootpole. Ramanan Sivaranjan knows what he's talking about, and I will always pay attention to what Patrick Stuart or Zak Smithsabbath like, although our tastes can often vary.

11. Which "dead game" would you like to see reborn?

TSR's Saga System -- the one with the cards -- was ahead of its time and had a lot going for it, but died when TSR did. I'd love to see a new version.

12. Which rpg has the most inspiring interior art?

Death is the New Pink or Troika! because Jeremy Duncan is a genius. So are Jez Gordon and Zak Sabbathsmith, but I don't think there's a published rpg out that features their work. Yet.

(I also have some pictures in DitNP but if you're looking at my stuff instead of JD's then You Are Doing It Wrong.)

13. Describe a game experience that changed how you play.

I was going to blog about this. Maybe I did. I'm old and can't remember everything. Hrm. It was when I was running The Enemy Within II: The Enemy Within and the Temple of Doom and I noticed that WFRP2 sort of expects you to build non-player-characters according to the same rules as player-characters and I remember thinking "no, I'm just going to do what I like" and made up the statistics.

It's sort of obvious and everyone else has probably been doing it for years but it had never occurred to me before and now I do it all the time.

14. Which rpg do you prefer for open-ended campaign play?

I'm not sure how to answer this one because every open-ended game I've played has fallen apart at some point. I would imagine that the best sort of rpg for this kind of campaign would be something where characters don't change much in terms of power level; perhaps something like basic D&D, the Chaosium d100 rules, or Traveller.

15. Which rpg do you enjoy adapting the most?

I don't understand the question. Is this asking if I enjoy hacking games? If so, then I don't do it often because if I have to change a ruleset in order to run something then there's a good chance that there's already a different ruleset that's better suited to what I want to do.

That said, I am a big fan of the Chaosium d100 rules and I find them easy to tweak and modify, so maybe that's my answer.

16. Which rpg do you enjoy using as is?

See above. I'll drop rules if they make no sense or slow things down but for the most part I'm not much of a hacker. Fighting Fantasy and WFRP2 are both games that I run without changing much, if anything.

17. Which rpg have you owned the longest but not played?

Probably Lacuna Part 1: The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City. I've had it since 2009 and I've never got around to playing it. I find it interesting and I'm excited to play it but I also find it a bit intimidating and all I can imagine is making a right mess of running it.

18. Which rpg have you played most in your life?

Ooh, crikey. I've played a lot of Pathfinder in recent years, and I played a stupid amount of Shadowrun when I was but a wee sprogling, but I reckon it's probably Call of Cthulhu. I've run three big-ish campaigns and have played double figure one-shots.

It may be Pathfinder because that takes ages to play, but I don't like it nearly as much as I like adore Call of Cthulhu and I would be sad if I have played it more often.

19. Which rpg features the best writing?

Small but Vicious Dog.

20. What is the best source for out of print rpgs?

I get mine from eBay because all the shops that used to sell ancient rpg books have closed down around here.

In the brief time during which I lived in Minnesota, the local Half Price Books was like a treasure trove of old rpg stuff, but I wasn't gaming at the time so I didn't pick anything up. Tsk.

21. Which rpg does the most with the least words?

Probably one of these twenty-four hour games or two-hundred word rpgs but I don't think I've read any of them.

Troika! is quite lean but also good. Let's go with that.

22. Which rpgs are the easiest for you to run?

I have no patience for fiddly games any more so I only run games that are easy to run. This is one reason I like 13th Age; for the players it's like AD&D in terms of complexity and options but for the GM it's more like Basic D&D.

The easiest for me is probably Call of Cthulhu because the d100 system is super simple to use, and almost everything is on the character sheet.

Then they ruined it by Pathfindering the seventh edition but I've already moaned about that.

23. Which rpg has the most jaw-dropping layout?

Rifts.

Oh, did you mean jaw-dropping in a good way?

24. Share a PWYW publisher that should be charging more.

I don't know of any PWYW publishers off the top of my head. Lamentations of the Flame Princess sometimes does it but it seems to work for James, so what do I know?

25. What is the best way to thank your GM?

I think it depends on the GM. I always appreciate it when the players tell me they enjoyed the game and would like to play more.

Alas, they tend to tell me this either (a) after the final session of the campaign, or (b) years after the game dribbled away into nothing because of -- I thought -- a lack of interest.

Fist-shaking bitterness and tearful self-doubt aside, it never hurts to just say "thank you, I had fun".

26. Which rpg provides the most useful resources?

What?

Does this mean the core rules, or anything published for it?

I use the d1000 mutation tables from Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness whenever I can, but that's not an rpg.

27. What are your essential tools for good gaming?

Whahuh? These are getting vague and weird now.

A game and some people to play it. Anything else is optional. I mean, it doesn't even have to be a good game as long as you have good people.

I keep thinking of when I played Mutant Chronicles when I was seventeen and it was terrible so we drank whisky as we played and I was sick in a bush.

28. What film/series is the biggest source of quotes for your group?

We don't do quotes. Stupid comedy accents, on the other hand, we do a lot. Comedy German is a popular one.

(Sorry, Germany.)

29. What has been the best-run rpg Kickstarter that you have backed?

The standard for rpg Kickstarters seems to be set so low that "deliver what was promised and on time" is considered some sort of achievement, rather than basic competence. That said, the Mutant Year Zero people know what they are doing and the Hubris Kickstarter was run well.

30. What is an rpg genre-mashup you would most like to see?

I'm not a singer as I lack both the ability and the confidence, and it would probably be insufferable torture to watch in action, like a thousand Frozen Youtube videos in one, but I reckon there's potential in an rpg in which singing is used as some sort of resolution mechanic.

31. What do you anticipate most for gaming in 2018?

That's a bit odd. Why not "the next twelve months" so it ties in with the next time everyone does this?

(Mental note: remember the first mental note.)

Anyway, the thing I'm most excited about is that there will be not one but two new editions of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay coming out soon. One will be based on the first and second editions and the other will be based on the absurd high fantasy of Age of Sigmar; I'm keen to see both. I have no idea if they will be out in 2018 but let's say they will be just to end this on a positive note.

Knows How to Party

I drew this pointcrawl map for Mike Evans' Barbarians of the Ruined Earth role-playing game project.

I am trying not to hate it, as I tend to hate everything I create about five seconds after I finish it. I don't work in colour often, but I don't think this turned out too bad.

Killing Each Other Over Shrubbery

Up until last week, the last time I played Warhammer 40,000 was in 1997ish. I had a Genestealer Cult army and when the third edition of the game came out Genestealer Cults weren't supported, and I didn't have enough money to start a whole new army, so that was that.

(It didn't occur to me that I could just keep playing second edition. I was, in many ways, an idiot.)

I kept up with developments in the game and over the past couple of years I've been collecting and painting classic Eldar miniatures in order to build the army I always wanted but could never afford at the time.

Then a couple of months ago Games Workshop announced a new edition of 40K, one that applied some of the lessons learned from the Warhammer Fantasy Battle reboot. The rules seemed to be simpler, discarding much of the fiddly cruft that had built up, and then GW released five low cost army books that covered the entire range of miniatures.

I decided to give it a go -- it didn't hurt that the rules are free -- and roped Stuart in, because I was getting the Eldar book anyway and I knew it also included one of Stuart's armies; there's no point playing 40K if you don't have an opponent, after all.

Stuart's son Sebastian also wanted to get involved and so we ended up playing a three-way battle. I brought my vintage Eldar, while Stuart dusted off his Necrons, and Sebastian fielded a Dark Angels-Imperial Guard alliance.

It was a bit choppy, because even though the new rules are streamlined, the first play of a new game is always a bit wonky. We were all a bit rusty too; Stuart hadn't played 40K in a couple of years, I hadn't played in twenty, and Sebastian had never played at all!

Sebastian set up a nice desert village with a ruined Imperial factory complex on the western edge of the board; Stuart's Necrons deployed in the south-west corner, my Eldar took the south-east-ish corner, while the Imperial forces came in from the north-north-west-ish.

(I'm getting Metal Gear Solid V flashbacks looking at these pictures.)

We'd each chosen sixty power levels of troops, but I was worried from the start as both opposing armies outnumbered mine. I wasn't too concerned about the Imperial Guard because while they do travel in large numbers they are squishy and easy to kill -- apart from the tanks, but we'll get to that! -- but there also seemed to be an awful lot of Necrons and they didn't exist last time I played so I wasn't sure what to expect.

Power levels are one of the new ideas introduced with the eighth edition; while you can still select armies the old way, tinkering with details to get an exact points value, power levels are an off-the-shelf abstract approach that gives you a general idea of a unit's, er, power level, more suited for casual games like this one. It's quick and easy and I like it a lot.

The mission was to seize objectives -- the bushy green plants -- and hold them for as long as possible; we'd get a point for each objective we held at the end of a turn. I was lucky as three of the objectives had been placed almost in my deployment zone, and as a result I didn't need to advance much to get into a good position.

Not that I had an easy time of it, as Stuart sent his heavy floaty laser cannon dudes in on my left flank early on -- pictured above -- and this tussle lasted almost the entire game.

In the centre, my Guardian squad shuffled forward to claim an objective, but not too close, as Sebastian teleported a Terminator squad right in the middle of the table and I didn't fancy tangling with them.

I felt most exposed over on the right with a single Dreadnought holding the flank and two squads of Imperial Guard -- plus tank -- rolling forward. On the plus side, most of the Space Marines were over on Stuart's side of the table, well away from me and my space elves.

There was a brief wobble on the right as Sebastian sent both Guard units into hand-to-hand combat with my Dreadnought, but the war machine barbecued most of its opponents with its twin flamethrowers before they could get close.

A Space Marine character accompanying the Guardsmen made a nuisance of himself so I pulled the Dreadnought back and then mashed the Marine with concentrated missile launcher fire from my Dark Reapers. After that, Sebastian pulled away from his left flank -- my right -- and decided to concentrate on the battles in the centre and the Imperial factory in the west, where most of his Marines were deployed.

This is where the fighting was most brutal, as Stuart threw everything he could at the Guard tanks, to no effect; as it turned out we had made a mistake while writing down the tanks' statistics, and they weren't nearly as tough as we all thought. The Necrons were held up for so long trying to destroy the vehicles that it gave the Dark Angels enough time to get stuck in, including the heavy-weapon-toting Devastators who had up until then been jogging towards the fight instead of shooting.

With the Necrons fighting both Space Marines and indestructible tanks, and the Eldar being left alone to hoover up objectives on the other half of the table, we decided to halt the game on the fourth turn, rather than let it go on to the fifth.

The game ended with a narrow victory for the Eldar on nine objective points, with the Imperial alliance on eight, and the Necrons on seven. I think the placement of the objectives favoured me, as did Sebastian's decision to abandon his left flank and focus on the Necrons. Getting the tank rules wrong also had an effect, I'm sure!

Everyone had a great time, and all three of us want to play again. Stuart is thinking of rejigging his army and Sebastian is painting -- or rather is encouraging his father to paint -- more Terminators. I'm going to have a think about my army too; this time, I brought everything I had painted but I have lots of miniatures either gathering dust or soaking in Dettol so I have some options. My War Walker got blasted into bits early on and I don't think it fired a single shot, so I'm thinking of swapping it for a unit of troops to bulk up my numbers a bit, and I'm not sure about the Avatar; he's a bit of a beast but only killed one Necron in the entire battle, instead hanging back to provide a morale boost to the Guardians in the middle. It wasn't the best use of a fiery god of bloodshed.

On the other hand I'm happy with how the Guardians performed and with the Eldar being so light on numbers I liked having a big unit to anchor the middle of my line. I also enjoyed having the psychic phase to myself -- the Necrons don't have psykers and the Imperium didn't bring any -- so I'll field Warlocks again next time. The Wraithguard are brilliant and saw off Stuart's heavy floaty laser cannon dudes, so I'll be bringing them back, and I'll try to get more if I can find the miniatures for a decent price. The Dreadnought also did well and I have two more of them in the painting pile, so it's tempting to bring more for the next battle.

The game itself is not bad. It's a bit abstract and I did like the detail of second edition, but I suspect the game would have taken two days if we'd played using those rules! That said, I do like how the core rules are nice and simple with any complexity or exceptions -- and even then there aren't many -- restricted to the individual unit descriptions. It took us most of an afternoon to play four turns but we were learning the game and there were three of us, so I imagine both added to the time; the game itself seemed to run quite fast once we got going.

All in all, I think GW has done a good job with 40K8 and I'm keen to give it another try, but I need to get painting!

Update: Stuart has blogged about the battle here.