Thinking Outside the Box

Just a quick follow-up to my post earlier this week after playing in my second OP3 event of the "Dominion War." With my Klingon fleet not performing as well as I'd hoped I decided to make some modifications for my second event by shuffling captains around to get access to another action. I replaced the 9-skill Martok with the 8-skill one, and swapped Nu'Daq out for Gowron. Not a surprise to anyone who plays Klingons, and also fairly reminiscent of the fleet I used in OP2. The first game was against our resident Romulan player with two Valdores and two science vessels packing cloaked mines. I was much more careful about my ships flying in formation in this event and was largely able to avoid the mines he dropped on either side of the planet. We fought over the planet but I was again hampered by my dice, although it was much closer. Martok's barrage of fire damaged Donatra's Valdore down to no shields and one hull, but her return volley punched through his...

The Plan So far in most of my games of Star Trek: Attack Wing I've stuck to in-faction builds wherever possible because I find that to be more fun than min-maxing across factions. So far I'd have to say that it's working out fairly well, as I've been able to come in second and take home a prize ship in the three organized play events; even giving away my second Ch'tang to a fellow player. Admittedly I have mixed Dominion and Ferengi  ships just so I could use my month 1 prize Krayton in a game, but it didn't prove very successful in my first test attempt. I haven't given up on the Ferengi yet though! Otherwise I've played faction-pure squads in all my other games. Ok, ok you caught me. I did sneak one Federation talent into my Romulan build last time, but in my defence I didn't use it in any of my games. I really enjoyed playing my Klingon list from last month. Cloaking ships with high attack values were very useful in the Month 2 event of th...

Jeremiah over at  Front Toward Enemy has a ton of great content for Tannhauser . If you've ever had any interest in the game itself, check out the extensive video collection he's put together. If you're looking for custom content for the game the most notable creation of theirs is, in my opinion, the excellent Mercenaries team and accompanying mummies put together using the figures from The Adventurers: Pyramid of Horus  board game. However, I noticed that he used all of the Adventurers figures except for Rasputin! So I set about trying to create some statistics, objects and a scenario. Thanks to Jeremiah for the help and feedback. Please feel free to give the profile and scenario a try and let me know if you have any feedback. I'll be putting together proper tokens and card images for download as soon as I paint my figure. Aleksandr Rasputin Aleksandr is the disgraced son of the Matriarch and her husband Grigory Rasputin. When it was found out that the young m...

Since the release of Star Trek: Attack Wing , any regular visitors to my blog has probably noticed a rather high frequency of posts by me about the game. If anything, that should tell you simply that I think it's a good game. A very good game in fact. There are several things that I think it has going for it: 1. The universe - Star Trek has been around for decades and has a rich history to pull from, which makes it extremely good for gaming. With new releases every two months, it would still take YEARS to cover off all the ships we've seen on screen, let alone ships like Riker's USS Titan . 2. The engine - WizKids decision to license a proven system for the game was a good one. I feel that this has allowed them to concentrate on building on a good system by truly embracing the subject matter when making changes. 3. The factions - Directly linked to the universe, Star Trek offers numerous factions to explore. Mixing and matching factions is allowable (which I thin...

I already wrote this article once and lost it due to some very odd incident where an article I had edited just before coming back to this one overwrote all my text with its own and then saved itself. Hitting undo did...nothing. So here I am writing it again, in a much briefer form. Here's the brief painting step-by-step: First I primed the figure with Vallejo airbrush grey primer, then the faces were painted with GW Elf Flesh. The rest of the figures painted grey with a mix of 6:6:2:1 of GW Skull White, water, AP Ash Grey and AP Deep Blue. I then added AP Dark Tone ink to the above paint until it was a slightly darker colour than the ash grey and used it as a wash on all of the grey base coat. The metallic pink base colour is a 2:2:3:3:4 mix of GW Skull White, AP Alien Purple, Vallejo Metal Medium, water and AP Pure Red. Not only was this team an experiment with white, but also creating metallics out of regular colours and some more aggressive mixes to obtain unique colours...

With this squad I'm thinking about a few changes. First being that I'm looking at taking two ships instead of the normal three. The second change is actually trying to load up most of the available ship slots without wasting too many actions. That's much easier to do at 100 points with three ships because the load outs are much more minimalistic. With the release of the Defiant, I've only played against it once and it didn't fare so well. I came up with the following 100 point TNG/DS9-era Federation squad to see if I could do better: - Enterprise D w/ Picard and Engage, Photon Torpedoes, Data, Geordi and Worf (core set) - Defiant w/ Sisko and Attack Pattern Omega, Cloaking Device, Quantum Torpedoes and O'Brien (core set) - Elite Attack Die Not having to be concerned about those evil orbital weapons platforms from month two's event, high defence values (such as those provided by cloaking) aren't nearly as important. That's not to say good d...

On Tuesday I arrived home to find two parcel cards in my mailbox. Having forgotten that I'd received tracking numbers from Cool Mini Or Not  a little over a week earlier, I wasn't expecting these massive things. I missed out on the first Zombicide  campaign on Kickstarter, so for their second one I went all in, not realizing quite what I was getting into. "What did you order THIS time?" "Ok, let's see what's in box number one..." "Cool artwork. Gross, but cool." "Wow, that's a LOT of zombies." "So that's everything in box 1. What's in the other one?" Oddly enough, the second package was exactly the same as the first. Even down to the zombie dogs and dog companions boxes being slightly squashed. As far as I can tell I was only charged for one set... Double the zombies double the fun? Not sure what happened, but I'll not complain too loudly about it.

If you stopped by yesterday you read my plans to try out a Romulan build in my second month 2 Dominion War  event. We played that tonight so here's the quick run down. Round 1 was against another Romulan build, two Valdore-class and an Apnex. He had cloaked mines which really did a number on me. I took out the Apnex and the named Valdore in turn 4, but was utterly unable to avoid the combined firepower of the weapons platforms, mines and the lone enemy ship and be able to maneuver myself into decent position after the initial fly-by. I lost this game due to those damned mines! Round 2 pitted me against a two-ship Enterprise build of the Defiant and the Reliant. My opponent's rolls were not good, and we both suffered from loss of action due to poor planning. I was able to take out the Reliant quickly. The Defiant was destroyed the next turn with a well-placed Muon token but Cheat Death, O'Brien and Scotty kept it alive a little longer. My three ships gave chase and moppe...

Tomorrow is another Star Trek: Attack Wing   Dominion War  Month 2 event at one of the local shops. In OP2 event a few weeks ago I played a pure Klingon build. For this event I wanted to use something different. Here we have a pretty bare-bones 100pt Romulan squad with one  out-of-faction upgrade: - IRW Valdore w/ Toreth, Counter Attack and Tactical Officer - IRW Khazara w/ Donatra, Attack Pattern Delta and Polarized Hull Plating - RIS Apnex w/ Mirok and Muon Feedback Wave The Valdore will always be firing 4 or 5 attack dice (sometime even 6!) and Toreth can convert one normal damage into a critical hit. Her tactical officer will be allowing extra re-rolls when spending a target lock, so the strategy for the Valdore is essentially: cloak, target lock, fire...repeat. I expect this ship to be my opponent's primary target if they want to take out my heaviest hitter. If I'm in a position where I feel the Valdore is going to come under fire, opting to use Counter At...

Part 1: More New Sh...er Stuff Two more packages showed up last week. Both unassuming little parcels shipping via Royal Mail. With all the  Kickstarter  campaigns I've supported lately they could have been any number of things. It turns out these are the shipments for season 3 of  Dreadball  and the one and only package for  Empire of the Dead: Requiem . I've had a chance to go through the  Dreadball  stuff in detail and everything I ordered was included minus a few extras. The packing manifest and included note explained why they were missing and I'm fine with it. I know they'll be sent out to me as soon as possible. Besides, I have so much Dreadball stuff to work on now the extra few missing bits won't even be noticed for a few months at the very least! The very next day another box was waiting. Once again I was stumped as to what it could be...there didn't seem to be a return address on it anywhere. I did find the little sticker on the side af...

I'll keep this one pretty brief. On Saturday we played a day-long tournament of Strange Aeons at Imaginary Wars  hosted by Uncle Mike. It was a three-round custom Black Dossier set up. Each player started a new Threshold list at the standard 15BP. Each round was composed of two games where you played once as Lurkers and once as Threshold. Due to the random pairings I only played one game against a new opponent. It would have been nice to play against some new people. I was not one of the folks who took home a prize. I'll blame it on the dice for at least one game, but I really wasn't fully engaged in the games. Snowy Saturday weather, not a great night sleep etc etc. All that said, it was pretty good fun and very nice to see so many players come out for the event. We did finish early which was a nice bonus. I generally don't do well playing the same game for a full day, but with a break for lunch after the first two rounds I managed to survive. I forgot to take...