A few interesting things have happened over the last few weeks. Firstly, the latest little updates of my Super Dungeon rules are done, and all the rules are printed out ready for the tabletop. I've massively simplified the monster behaviour sheets as they were getting out of hand.

If these rules seem to go down alright, I'll look at a public release to get more opinions. But until then, here's some images of all my Super Dungeon models, just for the hell of it.

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A game we've played a few times recently is Marvel Legendary, which I finally picked up. Me and Scoob played three games and managed to win them all quite easily. But then yesterday, we had a five player game and lost for the first time, finding it much more difficult to build up our decks and combos. However, we went straight back in for game number two and managed a fairly comfortable win.

Last Christmas I received the DC Deck Building game, which we've managed to play a few games of this year and quite enjoyed. The trouble is, both me and Scoob have an issue with the game, which is that it's PvP, which really doesn't make any sense considering you all play as DC heroes who are trying to beat the super villains.

Over the past couple of months, Scoob and I have worked on a couple of little ideas, trying to make the game co-op, and to an extent, we got it to work. However, it makes many of the cards either unusable or makes them require some serious errata to make them fit in to how we want it to play.

Even reading about, and taking some inspiration from, "Crisis Mode", which is an official co-op version of the game, as well as another fan-made co-op mode, didn't really help our cause.

I think, in the end, we have given up on this little venture. Instead, we are looking at picking up the Marvel Legendary game, which does what we want, even if it seems really pricey just for a bunch of cards. Still, the DC Deck Building game will work well on games nights when we want some PvP, and I think it will be very interesting to try it as a team vs team game, which should work with very few rule changes.

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Some house rules that do look like they're going to work are those for my version of Super Dungeon Explore. Just recently, I got Scoob to try them out for the first time. He seemed pretty into it, and throughout the game we managed to iron out a few more wrinkles. It always helps my rules writing when I can get another pair of eyes on them, and I think that once I've done the behaviours for all of the monsters (I've got so many now, gulp), the basic rules will be finished at last.

I can't believe it's taken us 29 months to play 15 games of Blood Bowl, but finally our latest league is finished. Phew. To begin with it was a really hard league for me, but it started to turn around near the end, and I won 3 of my last 4 games, including leading the dwarf team The Grog Guzzlers to the title in the deciding, last match of the league. I'd have preferred to have done better with the Crocoviles, who were my dedicated team in that competition, but I guess third isn't bad after how I started.

To read about all the drama, the pdf is fully updated.

As far as Blood Bowl games going forward, there really doesn't seem to be much desire to play it in my little group right now, so it's unlikely there'll be more games any time soon. Though that might give me the chance to try something I've wanted to do for a while, which is something I'm calling the Blood Bowl ERL, or Experimental Rules League. In this, I just want to try different house rules to see if I can speed up the game and balance the teams a bit better. I'd also like the game to not punish bad dice rolls so much, but instead punish bad play. Because lets face it, if Nuffle is not on your side, there's nothing you can do in that game no matter how good you play, and that's just stupid.
I've already got a whole page of ideas that I want to try, if I can ever get around to it.

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For the past couple of weeks I've put in quite a bit of work on my Super Dungeon rules, after I finally found a copy of 1st edition on ebay and got really motivated again. I'm now on the 5th version of my rules, and most of the changes for this one are in an effort to make the game even faster. The main change is that I've thrown out buffs and debuffs, so their counters are no longer needed, and there are less things to remember. The changes have definitely made it faster and easier, and I feel at last like I'm on the right track.
Of course, if I get these working I'll have to make a full, advanced rule set which adds all these things back in, for when we want to punish ourselves with a much longer game.

In regards to the 1st edition version of the game, I'm actually quite disappointed in a lot of the models. The sculpts are just not as good as those from the Forgotten King set. I don't know how clear it is in the picture here, but the 1st edition model (left) does not have the clear details of the F.K. model, and is also covered in more mold lines.
Still, I really like the boards, even though they're not the same size, as there's just less junk on them to have to move and fight around.

For my playtesting, I've put together some simple wooden counters, in grey and green, for use as terrain. The game doesn't really need them, but sometimes it's easy to miss symbols on the board (especially on games nights when drink is involved) and these just make it easier to see things the heroes are supposed to move around.

Fairly recently, I've been on the hunt for some other interesting games we could try in our games nights. The one I'm concentrating on, called Tiefe Taschen (translates to Deep Pockets), is about corrupt politicians and can support up to 8 players, which should suit us well.
I didn't like the look of the official print and play version, so I've made my own version, which also fits the card sleeves I've got bang on. I just need to laminate the tokens and it will be ready for action.

I'm also going to look at printing my own version of Two Rooms & A Boom, but it looks we will need more than 10 players to get the best out of that one. I'm not sure we can manage that. At least not very often.