My wife and I just got done playing “A Complex Web”, the sixth scenario for BattleLore. My wife took the side with the dwarves and the giant spider, while I played the side with the goblins. I led with my goblins early, trying to capitalize on their speed advantage, and aimed them primarily at non-dwarf units as much as I could while bolstering them with Mass Might. My wife, on the other hand, marched forward with her dwarven infantry and charged her giant spider forward to take its place on a hill near my front lines. My goblins, unfortunately, got routed pretty quickly, and my wife’s spider didn’t really do much throughout the entire fight. Despite this, I did manage to kill the spider toward the end of the game, after at least three failed attacks. A couple of other highlights: I managed to entirely destroy a red cavalry unit with a fireball, while my wife used Greater Portal to very good effect, swapping the places of a blue dwarven infantry with only one figure left and a fully-manned red cavalry unit right at the end of the game. In the end, my wife won the battle, with six victory flags to my four.

Last night my friends Tad and Chris came over and we played some games. Namely, we played BattleLore and Carcassonne.

My friend Chris came over first, and we played the Agincourt scenario of BattleLore. Last time, when I played with my wife, I played the pennant side, with lots of archers and no cavalry. This time I played the standard side, with three cavalry and only one archer. Both times I lost. This time, I can trace my loss to a big mistake on my part. See, Chris was doing the smart thing, hanging back and pumping me full of arrows from a distance and forcing me to come to him on his terms. In my hurry to meet him in melee, I charged forward with my cavalry and didn’t pay enough attention to my infantry or my lone archer. As a result, the first three casualties in the game were–you guessed it–my three cavalry units. I managed to kill one of his archers (if I remember correctly), but he had played the patient game while I had rushed forward to engage too fast. As a result, when our infantry finally met in the middle of the battlefield, none of my units were supported while most of his were. Between his normal attacks and his battle-backs, he wiped out one of my infantry and ended the game. Of course, it didn’t help things that he had gotten a Darken the Skies card early in the game, and had managed to severely cripple two of my three cavalry with that card alone.

Around midnight, Tad came over and we broke out the Carcassonne. This was my first (and second) time playing, and I’ve been curious about this game for quite a while. I must admit, I liked it. The first game we played was the core game (which Chris refers to as the “introduction game”); it lasted about 30 minutes and ended with my victory. Beginner’s luck, I guess. The second added in one of the expansion packs (I forget which), and Chris won that one. For those who haven’t played yet, Carcassonne involves randomly drawing and then playing tiles such that they both match up with tiles already on the table and are advantageous to you and not to your opponents. In addition, you get seven meeples, and you can place them in cities, on roads, in monasteries, or on fields to score points. If you place a meeple in a city or monastery, or on a road, you get it back when the feature is completed and immediately score points for it; otherwise, they remain there until the end of the game and are worth fewer points. If you place a meeple in a field, it stays there until the end of the game, but has the potential to score pretty big.

The expansion pack that we played with added two new terrain features: inns and cathedrals. Inns increase the value of completed roads that they are on (or decrease the value to zero, if the road is incomplete), while cathedrals do the same thing for cities. The expansion pack also gave each of us a “giant meeple”, worth two meeples for breaking ties (this comes into play when you wind up with two players’ meeples on a single feature; if there’s a tie, both players score equally, but if one player dominates, the other player gets nothing).

After the second game of Carcassonne, Tad left to go home and play Dead Rising on his 360, and Chris and I played a second game of BattleLore. We played the second scenario, First Chevauchee, and this time I won (barely). I tried to correct for my mistakes in the previous game this time, advancing with my infantry and making use of my archers (this time I got Darken the Skies) while holding my cavalry back for mop-up battles. There were two main clashes: one on my right wing and one straddling the center and left wing. For a while, it looked like I was going to lose again. Chris had 4 victory flags to my 2, and none of my command cards were really all that useful. However, I drew some section cards that allowed me to use the right units at the right times, and it made a pretty big difference. I wound up scoring two flags in one turn thanks to a well-placed Forward card, and after that Chris was on the retreat to some extent due to the fact that we were tied and his units were somewhat more beat up than mine. In the end, he wound up pulling a blue infantry back (it only had one figure left), and I charged forward with my blue cavalry, using a Leadership card for +1 die to my attack on his heavily damaged unit. I rolled two hits–more than enough–and ended the game with my victory.

At this point it was about 5am, so it was time for me to go to sleep. It was a really good night of gaming, though.

Played the fifth scenario last night, and I thought I’d give a quick report. Lore is awesome. A well-placed fireball or magic missile can really turn the tide of a battle, and it actually softens the blow of a missed die when you roll a lore symbol. It’s good stuff. There’s not a lot to say so far that I haven’t already said before, and I haven’t actually gotten enough experience with lore to really say much more about it. I’ll talk more about lore and other things after I’ve played with it some more.

We played again today, this time the fourth scenario: Deeper in Castile. I, once again, took the side with the goblins, while my wife had the dwarves on her side. I’ve got to say, those dwarves are really something. You get four units of dwarves in that scenario (three blue infantry and one unit of green crossbowmen), and they can really hold that line. I focused most of my attention on knocking those dwarves off of their hills, and I didn’t manage to get a single one to retreat a single step (though I did kill the crossbowmen and two of the units of infantry). I got to use my goblins a little bit more. It’s nice to have blue units that can both move two spaces and battle in the same turn, but their morale problems make them something of a liability. Having them retreat is almost as bad, if not just as bad, as taking a hit, so you’re going to want to make sure they’re supported by allies as often as possible. In the end I won, six flags to four, and all four of my wife’s victory flags were goblin units: both of my hobgoblin cavalry and both of my blue goblin infantry. They’re very tempting targets, apparently.

The battle made me think of how best to use the different mercenary troops. Goblins are at their best as skirmishers; they run in and attack a lone unit, they stick to forests and hills, and you try like hell not to send them up against bold troops. Dwarves, on the other hand, are the ultimate defensive units. Since they’re always bold, they always get to battle back. That makes them very tough nuts to crack, even more so when they’re supported. As such, you probably want to utilize your goblins as much as you can, and get as much mileage out of them as you can before they get killed off or run away. If you have dwarves, on the other hand, your best bet is probably to focus your energies on commanding your other troops and bringing them to bear offensively, while your dwarves just sit in defensible positions and hold off the attackers for as long as they can. A dwarf is really at his best when he’s surrounded by enemies, because (provided he survives), he’ll get to battle each one of them back as they attack him. Really, it doesn’t get much better than a blue dwarven infantry unit sitting on top of a hill; those guys are going to hold out for most of the game, chances are. I think that, if my wife had focused more on bringing her heavy infantry and cavalry into the fray and attacked with them, just leaving the dwarves to ward off attacks from my units, she might have won. Toward the end there, it really could have gone either way; I think I just got lucky.

Well, my wife and I played the second and third scenarios in BattleLore yesterday, and this time I won both battles. Some brief impressions follow:

First Chevauchee: I don’t know if it was the command cards we got or how we played them, but this scenario turned into a massive brawl pretty quickly. After the third or fourth round, seventy percent of the units on the battlefield were involved in an all-consuming melee in the center of the board. Seriously, it was like a meat grinder. Virtually every unit involved was supported by allies, meaning that every time anyone attacked, the opponent got to battle back, and nobody was running away. The scenario only lasted about half an hour before I got enough flags to win.

Burgos, Castile: Goblins. I had the side with the goblins, and I didn’t really get to use them as much as I wanted to. Mainly it was because they were on my right wing, and I had all left wing and center cards. In fact, I think it was on the fifth or sixth round that I actually got to use them for the first time, with a Green Banners card. My goblin light infantry got deflected pretty handily by my wife’s regular infantry and archers (all supported), though my hobgoblin cavalry did take out a few opponents. My regular goblin infantry, on the other hand, sat and watched the whole time, since I never got a card that really allowed me to utilize them. Meanwhile, though, the mass of cavalry and infantry in the center were being made liberal use of, and to good effect. I had managed to pull both of my hobgoblin cavalry into the center, giving me a grand total of three cavalry units in the center (two green and one red). After a while, I had whittled my wife’s troops down to one and two figures each, and my cavalry did a good job of mopping up.

All in all, good scenarios. I wish I had gotten a chance to really fully utilize my goblins, but I don’t see that as a failing of the system, just a quirk of luck.

I went out and spent some of my Christmas gift certificate money on BattleLore the other day, and I got to play it with my wife for the first time today. The game is just too massive for me to do a review of it yet, especially since the Agincourt scenario doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what’s available (no goblins or dwarves, no creatures, no loremasters). At any rate, I’ll probably post session reports from time to time, giving a sort of mini-review on a scenario-by-scenario basis until I can review the whole game. My session report on the Agincourt scenario follows:

My wife and I played the scenario, both of us beginners. She was the French, with their heavy cavalry and well-trained foot soldiers, and I was the English, my side brimming with archers. I opened with a volley from my bowmen, and for quite a few turns it looked like things were going my way. I kept on peppering her soldiers with arrows, picking off figures one at a time, while my side remained relatively unmolested. I even managed to eliminate one of her heavy cavalry before it was able to do any damage, scoring the first victory flag of the battle in the process.

We danced around each other for a while, me lining up my foot soldiers and hitting her with volley after volley, she packing her footmen into tight formations and bringing her cavalry around to outflank me. I attacked with a Foot Onslaught, but her units were well supported and devastated mine with their counter-attacks. The real damage came when she was able to bring her cavalry to bear on my foot soldiers: one blue regular cavalry and her remaining red heavy cavalry. Between the two of them, they must have wiped out three of my units by themselves.

The game seemed fairly close toward the end; we each had three of the four victory flags that we needed. However, her side was made up mostly of blue footmen and her aforementioned cavalry, while I was the proud owner of a number of heavily damaged infantry units and four sets of archers, who were really only picking figures off one at a time, not doing any serious damage.

In the end, her heavy cavalry (now down to a single figure) hammered one of my blue infantry units and sent it running, then hammered it again with a follow-up attack, rolling three (!) bonus strikes, one for each figure left in the unit. And that was game.

But I hear you asking, “Was it fun?” Yes. Yes it was. Despite the fact that there seems to be a lot that I haven’t gotten to use yet, I really enjoyed my first game of BattleLore. Even more impressive, though, was the fact that my wife enjoyed it and expressed her interest in playing again (in the same day, even), and she’s not usually a big board game player. The game seems simple enough that you can pick it up quickly (and the huge number of reference cards that come with the game certainly help), but deep enough that there’s a lot of room for nuance and strategy. I, for one, can’t wait to start playing with goblins, dwarves, giant spiders, and all the various loremasters and their associated powers. Thus far, I can find quite a bit to recommend this game.

Ok, in the last post I mentioned a plastic polar bear that craps candy. Well, we’ve uploaded a video to YouTube, and here it is for your viewing pleasure. Hopefully it’s finished being uploaded by the time you read this.

Also of note is the sheer volume of RPG products I got this year. Allow me to demonstrate.

I’ve included a can of coke (standard sized, full caffeine) on the left to give a sense off scale. On the right, you’ll see that my haul clocks in at just under five inches of role-playing games. All told, it’s just shy of 1600 pages of gaming goodness, and that’s not even including the bonus content that comes with Ptolus (another 400 or so), or even Deliria for that matter. It’s going to keep me busy for a long, long time.

[Edit: I bought Dragonmarked, another Eberron supplement, with some gift card money. I think that adds about another half-inch to that stack. Just in case you were curious.]

So, cheesy movie jokes aside, I had a pretty good Christmas. Tonight we went to my parents’ house, and I got a bunch more geeky goodness. I got 3 more (!) RPG books: the Player’s Guide to Eberron, Secrets of Xen’drik, and Deliria: Faerie Tales for a New Millenium. The first two are, of course, Eberron supplements, which I will put to good use in my upcoming campaign. The third is something I’ve been curious about for a while, partly because of my general fascination with fairy lore, but also because of what I’ve heard about the game on All Games Considered.

I also got a new stereo and an FM transmitter. These were both very well-intentioned gifts, but they were both just to the left of the mark. I did, in fact, want a new stereo, but one with slightly different functionality than the one I got. And I already have an FM transmitter, but I will be needing a special adapter for the stereo I want, so I can hook my iPod up to it. I’ll be exchanging this stuff for the other stuff when I go to get the stereo installed later this week, and I’m very happy with the intent and thought behind both gifts, even if they weren’t exactly what I was looking for. At any rate, they will enable me to get exactly what I’m looking for at a later date.

A couple of other things worth mentioning:

• a book entitled The 2548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said. It’s a great book to just open up randomly and read a few quotes from. Good conversation-starter.
• The Stolen Child, by Keith Donohue. It’s a novel about, as I understand it, a boy running away to live with the changelings, and it sounds right up my ally.
• A CD by a band (or artist, I’m not really sure) called Sigur Rós. I haven’t listened to it yet, and I really have no idea what to expect, other than it’s not in English (some sort of Scandinavian language, I think).
• A plastic polar bear that poops jelly beans. No, I’m not kidding.
• Various gift cards.

  Once again, Merry Christmas.

My wife and I exchanged gifts today. I got Firefly, which I’ve wanted for a while. I also got some other cool stuff: some nice clothes, A Dangerous Man by Charlie Huston, a hard case for my iPod, some Christmas coffee, new pajamas, and a heated car windshield scraper. All in all, I’ve had a good haul this year. I got my wife an iPod Nano and some skins, as well as the Scrubs soundtrack and the Sims 2: Pets expansion. Part 3 is going to come either sometime tonight or tomorrow morning, because we’re going over to my parents’ house later today for another gift exchange. Merry Christmas, everybody!

Last night we had a sort of pre-Christmas Eve party, complete with gift exchange. I got some really cool stuff, some of it very, very geeky.

1. I got a wine corkscrew set, which looks startlingly like a spaceship of some sort. A wine-opening spaceship. Very cool.
2. Apples to Apples. This is, quite possibly, the most fun you can have while you’re drinking. It’s pretty darn fun while you’re sober, too. Score.
3. Werewolf: The Forsaken. I liked the WoD rulebook, and I liked Vampire: The Requiem a lot. It stands to reason that I’ll like the new Werewolf game just as much. Expect a review of this at some point.
4. Russian Imperial Stout. I got a bottle of this, a full pint, and drank the whole thing last night. It’s dark, dark stuff, like drinking chocolate. I managed to get two full glasses out of this bottle, and after the first one I was pretty tipsy. I found out why a little while later, when I discovered that this stuff was 9.5% alcohol, almost as potent as wine (except that I was drinking a whole bottle by myself). Good stuff.
5. Ptolus. That’s right, Ptolus. Monte Cook’s ginormous, 700-page magnum opus of D&D goodness is now in my possession, and it’s mighty impressive. Expect a review, but not for a while; it’ll take me a long time to read this magnificent tome.

And that’s just pre-Christmas Eve. I’ve still got tonight and tomorrow to get through!

Happy Holidays, everyone.