Sunday Round-up

Another relatively productive week for the blog...though there are some who may disagree...

The last of the Malifaux unboxings in the form of 'Miss Anne Thrope' I had to do got done which pretty much bought me up to date...well...up to date until I popped into my FLGS Titan Games and some new releases had arrived at least. So those will probably appear over the next week or so.

I also did an initial unboxing of the Steampunk Rally board game that will hopefully get a review when I get a week off work in a fortnight or so.

Those of you patiently waiting for part two of our last RPG session in Privateer Press's Iron Kingdoms will be happy to know that it can be found right here. The four Malifaux items that will be getting unboxing features over the next week are the following.

There have also been quite a few newsletters appearing over the last week that can handily be found in the blogs sidebar on the right. Links to older newsletters can be found in the archive here. In honour of Halloween my partner painted up my original metal and new plastic Wyrd Games 'Carver' models. Some extra pictures of those can be found right about here.

Thoughts and comments are (as usual) most welcome.

Steampunk Rally - Unboxing and Review

One of my many Kickstarter pledges over the last year or so was the board game 'Steampunk Rally'. It had 'Steampunk' in the name and this was obviously a mark in it's favour plus I've been given a lot more consideration to board games recently as generally they take a lot less setting up than a tabletop wargaming session and time is something I'm sadly lacking in lately...anyway...lets have a look...

Box Cover

The game comes in a box...

Instructions

The game comes with an instruction booklet containing a helpful list of the box contents, a quick start guide and the necessary instructions to play the game along with helpful illustrations and diagrams.

Here's a few sample pictures.

The Track

While your busy building your machine you'll also need a track to race it around. These tiles are double sided in order to give you a second bonus track 'The Hoverdrome'. They're made of nice thick card and seem to be built to last.

Tokens and Game Aids

A number of tokens, gauges, stands for your character icon and dice are necessary to play the game and are all provided in the box. the quality of these is more than adequate and the damage gauges and cog tokens are particularly nice. The tokens are double sided. The box also contains several seal-able plastic bags to put your tokens and the like in when you remove them which is a nice touch that I wish more game manufacturers would consider...

The Cards

These are what makes up your machine creation and range from simple mechanical parts, through engine types both exotic and mundane, different types of locomotion and a number of nasty weapons. There's also a card to represent your machines creator.

I hadn't bothered with board game reviews on this blog and generally keep to reviewing such games from a quality point of view as there are many sites that do game reviews and at least one of them was ran by a friend of mine, lol. As he now seems to have abandoned blogging I'm going to attempt to do some game-play reviews of these games myself. Therefore at some point in the near future I hope to add links to such reviews along with these 'unboxing' features. It's not going to happen immediately as such things need a bit of organisation but they will be happening at some point...

Thoughts and comments are (as usual) most welcome.

Sunday Round-up

Not quite as productive as I was the week before but you can't expect miracles every week...

I did however get a few more Malifaux unboxings done including Mr Coopers 'Dark Carnival', the Coryphee and some lamps from Wyrd Games Accessory range. I also added a couple of minor features on some fate decks. They can be found here should the pictures below interest you.

As well as those I also did the write up of part one of our last Privateer Press Iron Kingdoms RPG session. Occasionally I have to split those write-ups into two when a lot goes on in the session and this was one such session. Part one can be found here and previous instalments are located here.

I've also finally got around to updating the hobby newsletter tab which has now been renamed the Newsletter Archive as well as the other galleries one which I've renamed to the far more accurate Wednesday Galleries.

Next week is a somewhat difficult one as I have many real world commitments which may well eat into my blogging time. I will however get the recently promised 'Miss Anne Thrope' unboxing complete some time early on in the week. I also have an unboxing and review planned for a board game I recently acquired via a Kickstarter called 'Steampunk Rally' which will appear next week some time as well.

I also have the horrendous upcoming task of tidying up my hobby room which will no doubt reveal dozens of boxes of things I promised to do features on and never did, lol.

Thoughts and comments are (as usual) most welcome.

Kickstarters...

I know I said I wasn't going to pledge to any-more Kickstarters but these all appealed to me (though for different reasons). An RPG, a board game and a miniatures game (well two as there's also the inevitable Mantic Games one but we'll leave that one till last as if your a Mantic fan I'm guessing you backed this straight away anyway, lol) so it's a nice cross-section of hobby to be fair.

Hopefully I'll have some spare time when these arrive and they'll be spared the 'Limbo' fate of my Deadzone Wave 2, Toughest Girls of the Galaxy and Myth Kickstarters as they sit in my hobby room awaiting some care and attention, lol.

I'll do these in order of completion date...

Steampunk Rally.
First is this rather interesting Steampunk themed 'building' board game. The basic game concept has been done in similar ways before but with this one I think the Steampunk theme and graphic style elevate it above the others by a good margin.

It's Kickstarter page can be found here.

Paranoia RPG.
This is an RPG system that was around a while ago that is getting what I believe the cool kids call a 're-boot'. It's more on the fun side than the serious but I liked the overall 'Vibe' and theme and to be fair even if you don't play the RPG the books from various RPG systems usually make good reading (I have several RPG systems that I've never used but thoroughly enjoyed reading through.). The original had a lot of fans so at least I know there's a player base for this.

The Kickstarter page can be found here.

Fallen Frontiers - Reboot.
I know nothing about the original version of this game but I was attracted to this purely by the quality of the miniatures. I've heard a few people be reticent about this one due to the cost but to be honest it's not really any more expensive than other companies equivalent quality miniatures and you're getting a game system as well. They've also recently added the ability to customise the configuration of your starter box so you can pick the races you like which (to be honest) is what convinced me to pledge.

The Kickstarter page can be found here.

There's also a certain miniature in one of the above systems ranges that may be sidestepped into one of my Malifaux crews as a female proxy for another model...Namely as a Von Schill replacement...

Go give them a look as these sort of projects are the kind of things that Kickstarter was made for.

There's the Mantic Games Kings of War 'version 2' one as well but I'm only pledged to this one for the book and a couple of models as I'll buy any armies I require through my FLGS Titan Games as I think we as hobbyists should support our hobby stores as much as we can as they (along with our gaming clubs) are the heart of our hobby (in my opinion at least).

The Kings of War Kickstarter page can be found here.

There are also links to these Kickstarter projects in the blog sidebar and these also show you the relative progress of them. These are all funded so there's no risk in that area at least.....

Thoughts and comments are (as usual) most welcome.