Review - Lost Patrol

Published by Games Workshop
For 2 players, aged 12 to adult

When did the world become so bitter?

When did we start finding it so much easier to mock than to admire? When did we start seeing the bad in every good, and making sure no good deed went unpunished?

I blame the Internet.

I blame the medium that gave everyone a voice while taking away their face.

It's About Time

I got an e-mail from eBay the other week.

Nothing particularly unusual about that. I get e-mails from eBay pretty much everyday: "You've been outbid," "That seller you like has listed something you didn't realise you needed until right now," "We know where you live," "We're coming for your soul."

But on this occasion, the e-mail was something rather unexpected: A £15 money-off voucher for any purchase over £30.

That's nice, but I couldn't really think of anything I wanted or needed.

After reading the e-mail, I returned to my latest game of Betrayal at Calth, and I moved my unit of Blood Angel terminators, repurposed from Space Hulk. You see, regular readers (if such mythic entities truly exist) may remember that when Betrayal at Calth came out last year, I really couldn't justify the £95 price tag, so I ended up purchasing only the cardboard components from a seller on eBay, and then proxying the miniatures.

Perhaps you can see where this article is going.

Review - Gorechosen

Published by Games Workshop
For 2-4 players, aged 12 to adult

"I'm a big fan."

I say that a lot.

I probably shouldn't.

I used to say, "I'm a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft." I've read a huge amount of the man's work, and I do occasionally get a bit sniffy about the way Fantasy Flight Games handles Cthulhu and the extended mythos.

But a while back (by which I mean a long time ago), I went to Florida to see Mickey Mouse. One day, I decided to wear my Miskatonic University tee, which (at the time) I thought was pretty funny. (Hint: It's not funny.) As I was walking around the park, I was suddenly beset by an elderly gentleman talking in a foreign language. He gabbled away for a few seconds, and then stopped, as if waiting for me to respond.

Review - Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower - Hero Cards

Games Workshop is really trying.

I honestly, truly believe it's trying.

It's still making mistakes, and every step it takes is met by dogged resistance from the people who decided years ago that Games Workshop is the actual Devil.

But it keeps trying, just the same.

When Games Workshop released the Mighty Heroes "expansion" for Silver Tower, there was a lot of noise. The use of that word - "expansion" - was the main problem. For some people, four plastic miniatures, with no cards for actually using them in the game seemed like a bit too much of a stretch in terms of what an expansion should actually be. The counter-argument was, the rules for those four miniatures are already in the Silver Tower rules book, and are also in the app.

Ah yes, the app... The Silver Tower app contains rules for over 40 additional heroes for use in the game (at a small charge to unlock each one, or a slightly bigger charge to unlock them all). But there is no way I'm using that. It's ugly, and poorly laid out. And besides, I don't use apps when I'm playing board games.

While I was... content... to print out the hero cards from the rules book, and resigned to not using any extra characters from the app, I was one of the people crying out for physical cards. I contacted Games Workshop and told them real, physical cards would sell. Lots of other people did the same.

Fast forward just a few short months, and a pack of cards with rules for 43 heroes (almost all of the heroes from the app, plus the extra heroes from the Silver Tower rules book) has just landed on my door mat.

Review - Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game

Designed by Brady Sadler and Adam Sadler
Published by Fantasy Flight Games
For 1-4 players, aged 14 to adult

Well, that escalated quickly.

I am, of course, talking about the split of Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) and Games Workshop (GW). You must have heard about it. It's the most news-worthy thing to have happened in the gaming world since that last Kickstarter campaign that everybody backed, which delivered slightly late and with slightly lower quality components than expected.

For the last few years, FFG has been using GW's intellectual property to pump out living card games (Conquest), strategy games (Forbidden Stars), adventure games (Talisman, Relic), and more. But recently, it has become increasingly apparent that the relationship couldn't last. FFG has been moving more into miniatures-based games, and GW has returned to producing board games for the first time since the '90s.