Priest - Film Review

It is difficult to descrive this movie without being negative. The actors are more or less well in their roles, but the story is quite pointless and looks more like a pilot episode of a TV series than a real film, maybe it was a pilot episode, well, not that I was aware of it when I decided to watch it.
The plot summary on IMDB has already a spoiler as at the beginning of the story it is told that the girl who has to be rescued is the daughter of the brother of the priest, later it turns out to be his daughter, but IMDB already tells you that.
This spoils one of the two not so big surprises of the movie. The second is quite obvious after 20 minutes of watching.
However, the combat scenes even if more or less forced into the story are quite fine and the post-apocalipse feeling of the movie is quite well done.
Not so bad, could have been worse but, well, not really a winner....

Battleship Galaxies - Review and Battle Report

You can find some info about this game in Board Game Geek (link) and a nice video review where you can see the components of the game in You Tube from the guys on the Dice Tower (link).
The video is great but there are some minor issues regarding the game. First, it is true that once you assemble the spaceships in the stand and in the base, there is no use for the plastic insert where they came except if you disassemble them after the game. We did so, it does not take so much time, the game stays always as new inside the box and does not seem to be a problem to assemble and disassemble the pieces every time. Maybe in the long term it could be some damage in the join point due to material wearing but I do not know for sure.
Also, the game comes with two board which are basically the same thing, a hexagonal grid over a background of the space. On the video it is suggested that they should have put the two board in one, using both sides of the board. Actually the idea is to allow to play with one or with two board. The game is scenario driven and some scenarios require two boards (and four players).
In the video, also, we can see how a transport ship is deployed, moved and then the ships inside are launched into the board. Actually this is not possible, deployment is the phase previous to movement and also includes launching ships from a transporter, so if you deploy your transporter and move, you are already in a different phase and you can not deploy further ships (including the ones inside the transporter).

The components of the game are great. Each faction comes with two motherships, two medium ships, and two squadrons of three ships each.
The miniatures are prepainted, with a good quality finish on them and they feel right on the hands. They are to be mounted on a stand which goes into a base.
There are two little screens, one for each faction, to hide your fleet from the opponent.
Also each faction has its own deck of cards, called Tactics cards, which include heroes, ship upgrades, additional weapons and maneuvers for the fleet.
For each miniature we have two cards with the statistics, actually there are three set of stats for each ship, one for the standard version, one for the seasoned version and one for the veteran version.
Each version has a different launch cost but also different, better skills as the crew becomes more experienced in combat.

Some of the ISN components used in the game from last Friday

As I already say the game is scenario driven. The rules book comes with several scenarios, and for a starting game they advise to use the scenario called Dead Zone.
In this scenario the initial fleets and the composition of the Tactic Cards decks are given for each player, only one board is used with three discovery tiles on it and the victory condition is to eliminate all the ships of the opponent from the board after the second round. The reason for this victory condition I will comment later.
First I would like to comment on the discovery tiles. The game comes with several tiles, some are called discovery tiles other are obstacle tiles and there is even a "One victory point" token. Those tiles are suppose to be used on the scenario as required by it.
In this basic scenario, the discovery token are shuffled, three are taken and placed face down on three pre-determined spots on the board. If a ship happens to end its movement on the tile, it is move face up and the effect of the tile takes place immediately. The Rules Book explain what each tile does.


How the game works? Well, let go with the battle report from the game last Friday.
The game was between two new players and even if I was supposed to explain them the game I must said that I only read the rules and that I never played it before. But the rules are so straight forward that I think that we didn't make too many mistakes :)
Both player get 15 points of energy, 5 tactics cards and their fleet (which goes behind the screen).
They also roll a dice to see who rolls the higher number, the player with the high roll decides who starts. In our game the ISN player won this roll but she decided to let the Wretcheridians start the game.
The starting player gets 5 more energy and 1 tactic card, so before he decided what to do he was having 20 energy and 6 cards. That is always the first phase, collect energy and one card. There is limit of 10 cards in the hand. If at the moment of drawing this one new cards, doing so will make that the limit of 10 is exceed, the player has to discard enough cards so that he can take the new one before drawing this new one. Each discarded card gives the player one energy extra.
If you are getting the idea that energy and no the cards are the critical part of the game, you are right :)
The second phase is deployment or launching ships. Every ship has a launch cost that you pay with energy to deploy it on your border of the battleboard or to launch it from a transporter.
The Wretcheridians decided to put all their fleet inside of the transporter and deploy it on their border of the board.
A transporter ship has a cargo capacity which can not be exceeded and can only transport ships that are smaller than itself. So a Large ship can transport Medium and Small ships, a Medium ship can only transport Small ships and Small ships cannot transport other ships.
The initial fleet of each player for this scenario were a Large transport ship, two Medium ships and one squadron of three Small ships, so all of them fitted inside the Large transport ship :)
The Wretcheridians end the deployment phase.
The final phase is activation, here the player can pay the energy to activate one ship which would be entitled to move and the after paying the charging cost of the weapons to fire with them.
The Wretcheridians activated the transporter ship and moved it towards the center of the board.
Now, the ISN turn started.
The ISN player got 10 energy points and one card. Only on the first round of the first player will the first player get 5 energy on the energy phase, after that each player gets 10 energy in the energy phase.
She also placed all her ships inside of the transport ship and deployed her on one corner of the board.
After paying the activation cost, she moved her along the left flank.
The victory condition activates only after the second round to avoid that a lucky hit from the opponent which destroy the only deployed ship on the board (or the few deployed ships) when you still have more ships behind the screen to be deployed (not the case here as both players put all their ships inside the transporter ships) in the 1st or 2nd round will end the game prematurely. So, you have 2 round to deploy your ships, after that if all the ship on the board get destroy, you loss, even if you still have more ships behind your screen awaiting to be deployed.
Anyway, now it is the second round of the Wretcheridians, they got 10 energy and one card. Instead of launching (deploying) any ships from inside the transporter, he decided to pay the activation energy and to move the ship closer to the centre of the board and onto the discovery tile there, which turned out to be an alien artifact which gave him 7 extra spaces range to the primary weapon of the ship placed over the tile, which was his transport ship. Actually this gave him almost infinite range as the primary weapon was having already a range of 4 hexagons.
With the extra range and a shield siphon card played on the transport ship, he decided to attack the ISN transport ship with pretty good result. The shield siphon gave him one extra shield for his ship from the attack.
How you count damage and shields in the game ? quite easy. The bases of the ships have holes to place counters. Blue counters represent shields, red counters represent damage. Each ship starts with a certain amount of blue shield counters and each damage removes one or more, depending on the strength of the weapon. Once you have no shields, the ship starts taking hull damage, if a certain value is taken, the ship is destroyed. Some weapons or cards can by-pass the shields and damage directly the hull.
How you hit enemy ships in the game?
You roll two dices for each attack. One dice is a d10 with letters instead of numbers the other one is a d8 with numbers and each ship has a matrix on her reference card with the blue print of the ship. If the coordinates of the attack are outside the blue print of the ship, there is no hit; if the coordinates indicate the red dot inside the ship, she will explode if the ship get damaged there (no shield or effect which ignores them); otherwise the ship will take damage as stated before.
Sounds confusing ? my fault. The game is actually simple and with very straightforward rules.
Next round: Due to the damage to her transport ship, the ISN player deployed the squadron of fighters and a medium vessel, attacking also the Wretcheridians transport ship with everything. This also included two nukes which however did nothing as they fail to impact the enemy.
The Wretcheridians kept on attacking the ISN transport ship, which moved away in the next round, approaching a discovery tile on the border of the battlefield and deploying the last medium ship she was carrying. Also one of the ISN figthers was destroyed.

The ISN transport ship took serius damage this round

Just right on time as the Wretcheridians destroyed the ISN transport ship in the next round.
However in a feat of amazing fire power, the remaining two medium ships managed to reduce the Wretcheridians transport ship into small, incandescent pieces, together with the medium ship and the squadron of fighters still inside of her.
Now, it was a dogfight between the remaining Wretcheridians medium ship and the ISN ships which approached a insane final when each site was having only one medium ship at 2 range from each other in a mortal barrage of fire.

This time, the Goddess of War was smiling on the Wretcheridians who remained as only survivors on the space.

Dust, Dust Tactics, Dust Warfare and Paolo Parente

I was reading the Forum about Dust Warfare and there were some fellows asking about the relationships in the Dust universe. I mean who is who and what is what.
I though that maybe a short overview from what it was explained there could be useful for every one with interest in the game.
The whole idea of Dust and the Dust Universe is responsibility or creation of a guy called Paolo Parente.
Parente not only created the Universe but also designs everything (as far as I known) related to the universe, from comics to story line and of course the line of miniatures (soldiers and walkers) which run amok in the world of Dust.
This takes place in the hands of Dust Studios at Dus-models.com, which are the designers of the models set in Paulo Parente's Dust universe.
Dust-models.com is Dust Studios web site, and a great place to scout upcoming models, buy Premium pre-painted versions, and get extra odds & ends like decals and dice.

The main confusion point arrives from the fact that there are more games than one based on the Dust Universe. like also happens to other Universes, such as Star Wars, where more than one game is based on them (also books, comics, etc.)

There is borad game called Dust, a kind of Risk game, which takes place in the Dust Universe. Obviously is thematically related to Dust Tactics and Dust Warfare but it is a different game and a game on its own. You buy the box, you play it, you do not need anything else.

The relationship between Dust Tactics and Dust Warfare is a bit stronger than mere thema or Universe.

We said that Dust Studios produces the miniatures.
Well, those miniatures are sold in boxes for a BOARD game called Dust Tactics, you have also a started set which contains the boards for the board game, the rules, the cards with the stats of the units for the board game, some terrain elements (antitanks and craters) and the miniatures for the board game (some soldiers and some walkers).
Dust Tactics is a Boardgame using the Dust miniatures.

FFG took over the Dust Tactics game from AEG, iirc, and is the official supplier of Dust and Dust Tactics.

Then, a wise guy called Andy Chambers and his sidekick Mack Martin of FFG wrote a miniature WARGAME set of rules in the same Universe which uses the same miniatures from Dust Tactics.

So, one guy (Parente) designs the miniatures and the universe, together with some other guys take care of board game which uses the miniatures of Parente and another group of guys create a wargame using the same miniatures (think about it a a form of game-recycling :D )

The main difference between then is the set of rules which even if somehow similar have a totally different principle in mind, the board game uses a square grid, you have boards with maps to play the mission and so on; the other one is a wargame, so no board, only a table, a lot of terrain elements, people measuring inches here and there, some arguments about which miniature "sees" which miniature, etc.

But, remember everything in the same Universe :)

One universe, One set of miniatures, but Two games using them.

Zombies !!! - Painting experiment

For sure you will remember or know the game Zombies!!! (Wiki) which cames with a lot of plastic zombies in grey (male),  the dog zombies, the soldier super zombies and the female green zombies from the expansions.

Well, I am listening now to a podcast called d6generation (Web) wherein one of the authors (Russ Rant) was talking about his video "how to paint a miniature in 10 min the 20 min video) (Russ's Blog) so that I decided to try something similar with one of my zombies.

It was not so easy and the final effect not so nice. Here some pictures.

Apart from the mastering of the skill of painting miniatures which Russ shows in his video, I did a lot of thing in the wrong way but I wanted to try to paint quick.

Frist thing that did not went as planned was the adherence of the paint to the miniature. The Dust Tactics miniatures which Russ was using are pre-primer, the ones in the Zombies game are not. You can see how the paint "slips" over the plastic surface and do not adheres to it so clearly and neatly as in the video.

Second I use a different paint, more viscose, actually it is normal hobby paint, barely undiluted, which makes the paint more thick.

Anyway, I started with a quick coat of blue on the body of the miniature to cover and paint the suit of the guy avoiding the spots where the body of the zombie or at least what remains of it is visible. I intended to paint those part with a brown red combination to suggest the insides of the body and the rotten flesh.

After the blue I wanted to give a bit of dry brush of grey to make the miniature look covered by dust and dervis. Well, as you can see I did not exactly achieved it. Parts of the arm are pure blue and the rest of the body is covered in grey with the blue almost invisible.

Not the best painting job in the universe and clearly not even table suitable.

But it was a beginning :)

Next time I will put a primer and mount the miniature on a stick to manipulate it a bit better. I only have grey primer in spray but also a black spray, so my intention is to apply the primer layer, the black paint layer and then play a bit with the blue and the grey and a bit of red.

But that is for the future :)

La Manga - Spain

I have never been before in this part of Spain (Wiki), but last two weeks of June we managed to get there and enjoy some fabulous time.
The weather is pleasant on that time of the year and by far not so hot as it will became in July and specially in August. Actually it was already quite warm and the sun was getting more agressive every day.
The place is a refugee for families with kids and people with a lot of time to spend doing nothing as due to it peculiar geography everything is far away. So, basically either you go nowhere or you use the car all the time.
There are some small shopping malls along La Manga and several supermarkets, so you will never run out of supplies. The idea is to go there to a rented apartment or to a hotel for a shorter stay and enjoy the beach and the sun.
Close by is the city of Cartagena (Wiki) which is a nice place to visit, full of history and naval tradition including the original submarine build by Isaac Peral y Caballero (Wiki), probably the first modern submarine.
However, one of the best discoveries for us was an Italian Ice Cream shop, owned by an Argentinian couple called New Bo (Web), which probably has one of the best Ice Creams in the area as the owner has been in Italy and has learned the traditional Ice Cream making there. Really worth a visit :)