Not long back, Scoob and I tried a couple of different little "test" 40K games, playing out the same scenario as our 2011 Winter Wave. The point of these games was to test out how the Stompas work in the new edition, as we had heard that they are very weak.
These games saw my Marines and Scoob's Orks (with a looted Shadowsword) defend against the Stompas. In game one, the Stompas took a crap kicking, and did very little in return. Two of them were destroyed, and the third badly damaged. In the second game however, they did a lot of damage in their first turn, blowing up my Vindicator and the Shadowsword straight away, ridding us of a lot of our vehicle killing power, though still leaving them a lot to do.

It was hard to tell from just a couple of short games, but they definitely seemed a little weak. We ended up writing a new data sheet that we will try out in our future games, and I just hope I've not shot myself in the foot by giving Scoob's Orks too big of a boost.

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My work on putting together all my other 40K models is also continuing. I have finally managed to glue together all the models that are made from stuff that was festering in my bits boxes. That's 68 new old models I've now got to paint. I am not the smartest.

I am still however trying to plow through all the new stuff I've bought. I've tried a few times to cast some new bodies for my Dark Eldar Wyches, as I want them all to be female, but they only send 6 such torsos in the box. I'm having varied results so far, but each new effort gets closer to my goal. There's also a few other extra little Tau bits I'm thinking of casting, but I don't know if I need them yet.
After picking up Celestine to boost my small Sisters army, I very quickly decided to convert her and her companions. I just hated how all three models were up in the air and trailing ribbons and shit all over the place. So instead, I've trimmed off all the ribbons and have glued them on to some small ruin bits. It will look a hell of a lot better when they are done in my opinion. I just wish it was possible (or a lot easier) to get rid of Celestine's roses as well, but as it is, I've had to leave them.
I've also tried magnetizing for the first time, as I couldn't decide which jump jets to put on my Tau commander. For a change, that little project seems to have worked first time.

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Up until yesterday, I had never played a game of Risk in my life. But that changed when five of us got around the table to play the Game Of Thrones version, using the skirmish rules. I didn't really have any idea what was going on, or get any of the references that I heard (I still haven't watched any of the show - I'm going to binge watch the whole lot when it's all done).
It seemed like I had a good position at the start of the game, and was receiving the most reinforcements for the first couple of turns. But, as in any game where dice are involved, I rolled atrociously, and got slammed throughout the entire game. In fact, I was only successful in two of the attacks I tried, meaning I couldn't get any reinforcements from cards as my territories dwindled.
The images here show the start and end of the game, and the final scores. I was orange, while the greens, led by the mighty Scoob, took control of the north to win the game.
At least I now know how to play, and what the victory conditions are, so I'll be a bit more ready in the future. Now I just need to get some loaded dice...

Just got done with another short puzzle game from a couple of years ago, that goes by a very strange name.

The weird name is because it's named after the game's setting, a huge hotel/casino called The Sexy Brutale. In this casino, the same twelve hours play out over and over in a Groundhog Day-style event, during which all of the guests are murdered by the staff. You play as Lafcadio Boone, someone who up to now had been just like any of the other guests, murdered over and over, but who has now broken free of this cycle of death with help from a strange ghostly woman who is covered in blood and looks like she is missing her skin. Lovely.
As Boone, it's now up to you to travel around the location as the day repeats and do whatever you can to prevent the murders. If that wasn't tricky enough, you have to do all this without being seen by any staff or any of the other guests, instead changing the surroundings and manipulating events to achieve the goal.

I've got to say, for the most part, I really liked this game. It was a very interesting idea to have to follow the NPCs around for a day or two, learning their patterns and who they interact with, and trying to figure out how to save them when the day inevitably resets. I don't think I've ever played a game even remotely like it before.

There were one or two frustrating things in terms of the puzzles, mostly because I didn't have my thinking cap on at the time, and they all seemed so simple when I realised the solution. If there were any real problems with the game it was just with the narrative in general, as when it's all explained at the end, I thought the story was pretty crappy.
There were also some things that didn't make mechanical sense. For example, most of the items you could pick up during the day would be lost when the day reset, and could be found back in their original positions. But some remained with you through the reset, and I didn't understand why.

I also didn't understand the significance of all the masks. See, every character in the game is wearing a mask, and when you save them, they take their mask off and leave it for you to find. Each mask gives you a special ability that was possessed by its owner, such as lockpicking for example, which will then help you progress and save other people. I just didn't get how putting a mask on could give you powers. It was a bit weird.
But then again, the whole game was weird, especially when you find out what the whole thing is all about at the end.

Overall, certainly worth a play through, and hopefully I'll play it again in a few years when I've forgotten it all.

Today we got done with the Dying Light expansion, which is called The Following. We didn't really like this as much as the base game, and so after a while just focused the main story and completely ignored the side missions.

We both felt like it was mostly ruined by the massive map and wide open spaces, all just too different from the city setting of the base game, and we hated having no buildings to jump around on. The map was so large that it required the use of buggies to get around.

Now, we enjoyed some of our time in the buggies, especially when we found a horde of zombies in a field and just plowed them all down.

But relocating from one part of the map to another in the buggy was a pain in the ass, as the game insists on spawning exploding zombies right in front of you, the noise of which then instantly lures hordes of aggressive viral zombies to your position. Just made no sense how they could get to you so fast when you're driving high speed down a road.
And the game constantly forced you to go all over the place to do its missions. It was a ball ache.

Like the base game, the story and characters were kind-of pointless. It has you tracking down a potential cure for the zombie virus, only to throw some weird shit at you like a cult, prophecies and weird revelations at the end that leave you with a choice to make. Like the base game, it does not allow you to play the final mission co-op, so Scoob and I were able to take opposite paths and see how the two different choices play out.
I gotta say, they were both pretty shit, and the story ends (with either choice) making you feel like playing the whole thing was a waste of time. It's just a good thing that the story for this game is really not its selling point.

Just quickly blitzed through a very short puzzle game that I recently picked up from GOG, called Gorogoa. The game's design, and the concept of its puzzles, are all very interesting.

The entire thing is played out on a 2 by 2 grid, with each square acting as a sort of picture frame. Within these squares, you drag around and manipulate the provided images to build a path for a small boy to move through the strange landscape, as he tries to collect five coloured fruits or stars that he has seen on a monster or dragon. Well at least, that's what I think was going on, but to be honest I have no idea.

All in all it was a pleasant, short, brain-bending experience. Though even on sale at £6 it was still quite steep, as it only took about 2 hours or so.

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As I didn't really get into Fleet Ops either time I've tried it, I instead played a couple of games of the base Armada 2, just to see if I still liked it as much as I used to.

At first, I put on a 3v5, thinking I'd do that quite easy as I used to be able to 1v7 the AI back in the day. However, with my lack of practice, and two allies that did absolutely nothing all game, I was soon spanked by some very angry enemies.

Not wanting to be held back by stupid AI allies again, I immediately threw on an 8 player deathmatch. For whatever reason, none of the computer enemies really seemed to get up to speed in that game, and other than a cheeky attack on my base by some Romulans, it was a boring slog to wipe them all out.

Maybe this game is no longer for me, in any of its forms.