Let's see how far we've come...

 I just saw the final version for the cover of Open Game Table which is the soon-to-be-released anthology in which one of my essays will be appearing and, wow, it looks impressive.  Take a look.

 

Spiel 2008 is this weekend and a few friends and I are going on Sunday.  What is Spiel? It's one of the biggest gaming conventions in the world and the biggest in terms of board games. It's a really great place to see and try out new stuff, see old friends, and buy stuff I probably don't really need but want. The only down side are the crowds tend to make it a challenge to move around and the food costs a small fortune.

We've been trying out playing hardcore rules (7 minute turns, kill the caster) with our Sunday WM games and it's been interesting: You can finish an entire 750 point game in 90 minutes and it's really intense. The down side is that I can foresee that the lists are going to get pretty stale after a few months of this because a lot of stuff isn't really suitable for the hardcore format.

In our first match-up I took the original Haley and a list involving the Thunderhead, a lancer, and some sword knights with UA (some other solos too) against a Menoth army lead by Amon and creamed my opponent.  Temporal Barrier completely nerfed his army's ability to reach me and made it easy for me to hit almost anything I wanted. The game ended with the lancer skewering his warcaster.

What did I learn from the game?

1. Post Remix TB is still evil - it just shuts down a melee oriented opponent.
2. Even with a barebones army (1 unit), I had way too many attacks to deal with, especially on Haley's feat turn.  Epic Haley is a lot more interesting for HC because of the nature of Temporal Acceleration - it automatically creates a situation where certain units won't activate in a given turn which speeds up play quite a bit.
3. Hardcore is pretty stressful but fun.

We're going to keep trying out the hardcore format for the next couple months because it does make for more games in an evening and that's always a good thing. Next time though I'm going to try Epic Haley...

We got a chance to play Last Night on Earth last night and it was a lot of fun: The game was very easy to learn (all 3 of us were brand new to it and had the hang of the rules within 20 minutes) and had some interesting mechanics.  I was the zombies and so spent half the game saying things like "Hmmmmm.......brains" which is always a good thing in my book. I can't recommend the game enough if you like zombie movies or just like cooperative games in general (one side (1-2 players) play the zombies, the rest are the town's residents).