Chariots At MOAB (Again)

Last year I headed up to MOAB to help Victor playtest a chariot-racing game he is working on. THis year I did it again.

You can read about the game in that link above or, at least, the version of it that we were playing last year. Victor has made a few changes since then, the biggest of which is that a lot of tests are now made on two dice, with adjustments upgrading or downgrading what type of dice you roll.

After sorting out our teams, what skills they'd have and what types of horses, we diced for initial positions off the start line. I'm Red. The ones at the back.

Frank with the Blue team got a good start, but the game does depend on your colour coming out of the initiative bag on the straight sections, and Blue just didn't appear for the first couple of laps.

I got some early moves and used my better chariot to come up and cause trouble. Alistair, with Green, had slipped his fast controllable horse teams into the inside lane and was planning on racing from there.  I rammed him, causing some damage which I hoped would cause him issues later.

I also brought on my Hortator to guide mt chariots through the dust, but he didn't really need to do much. Beside him you can see my Spartator as well. His job was to throw water onto the chariots or teams to cool them down. He risked being run down by other chariots. Mine was.

You can see two Spartators in action here and, in the background, the grid showing what dice have been drawn so far.

Craig brought one of his White team chariots to the fore. My second Red chariot was starting to drop back. I would have to spend some actions to keep it properly in the race.

A view from the rear. You can see Green doggedly holding the inside lane. No chariots had been lost, so it was hard for the rear-markers to find spaces to try and break into.

The grid, showing that we'd completed four of the seven laps.

Green made their run for the front. The middle lane is the best lane when it comes to adjudicating finishes, so getting to the front of it is a good place to be.

With one and a bit laps to go I got a couple of opportunities and used them to bring my second chariot - the one that had been running a safe race in the rear - down the inside track, and to then cut across in front of Blue.

I was then able to cut back to the inside lane, but couldn't get the actions to use that position to push in front of Green. However I was in a  decent finishing position, with a horse team that was fast on the finish.

Craig pulled into the outside lane as we finished the final straight. All three lead positions were occupied, so it would be a photo-finish. This involved a dice-off, with the modifiers to types of dice rolled being based on teh traits of teh horse teams, how blown they were and which lane the chariot was in. Alistair was strong in teh centre rolling 2D12s, I was rolling D10s on teh inside and Craig D6s on teh outside.

And yet it was Craig's 8 that beat my 6 and Alistair's 7 to give the White team and unexpected win. I had to be content with third place. 

There was plenty of discussion afterwards of things that could be changed. We felt that chariots didn't really seem that vulnerable; we expected a a couple of crashes but in fact every chariot finished. We considered some changes to increase the damage chariots took for certain things. The multiple dice types worked OK, but possibly slowed the game down, firstly because we didn't have enough of them so we were passing them around to each other but also because you couldn't roll the dice and then see if you needed to work out the modifiers afterwards (sometimes you know you've passed or failed without having to do the calculations). With varying dice types you need to do the calculations in order to determine what you're actually rolling. We also considered rules for bringing back the Spartator if he got killed on the assumption that a team would probably have a few of them on hand.

Anyway, it was a fun game with an spectacularly close finish.

As ever I hit what was left of the Bring & Buy (Monday at MOAB is pretty quiet) and picked up yet another boardgame.

'On The Origin Of Species' is from the same publisher that does 'First in Flight' - they seem to specialise in games with a science education theme - and is, oddly enough, not about evolution, despite the name. It is, however, about the groundwork of Darwin's magnum opus, with the players taking the part of naturalists discovering and documenting species in the Galapagos Islands. The art-work is lovely, but I haven't had chance to play it through yet. I'm hoping to fit in a game one evening this week.

Ten Years Ago - October 2015

October is MOAB month, probably the second biggest wargames convention in Australia. I usually try to pop up for one or two days, and used to play in the HOTT competition (back when there was one). 

So for this months nostalgic look at what I was up to ten years ago let's head off to MOAB 2015. I spent the day playing two games that used to be mainstays of this blog, but which you don't see any more: Munera Sine Missione and Machinas.

Anyway, let's relive the fun of a Saturday spent at MOAB 2015

Chariots At MOAB

This weekend just gone was the annual MOAB show up in Sydney. I always make an effort to get up there for at least one day. This year I even had a shopping list!

I went up on the Saturday because Victor had invited me to have a go at a chariot-racing game he's developing. Called 'Ludi Circenses' it uses the racing pack/relative positions concept that you see in THW's Charioteer, combined with an action dice system similar to that in 'Song of Blades and Heroes'. I should say that the mechanisms are not lifted wholesale; they are very much their own thing.

Here's the race underway. The game is for four players, each running two chariots. The teams are the classic Reds, Blues, Greens and Whites of antiquity.

The track has three active lanes; an inside lane on the left, a middle lane and an outside lane. There is also an area to the right called the outer lanes, which is where the 'pit crew' lives and where any chariots that drop off the back of the board go until they can be brought back into the main race. You can see one such chariot in this picture.

The race is run over seven laps, with each lap consisting of three straight sections, a corner, three more straights and a final corner. 

On the corners each chariot simply tests against a hazard number to see if they take stress or damage on their chariots. The level of hazard is determined by how many adjacent chariots you have, being in the dust-cloud of a chariot in front of you, whether you are on the inside track (the most dangerous) and how much stress you have put the chariot under.

In each straight section one chariot will act, based on coloured dice drawn from a bag. Each player has eleven dice in the bag, so with 42 straights in the game you can be sure of getting at least 9 actions in the game, maybe 10 and, for at least two players, 11 actions. Charioteers can use crowd support to get bonus actions if they are popular.

When a chariot acts you roll one, two or three dice with roman numerals on them. Each 'I' symbol gives you an action. Two or more 'V' symbols give you an action but also fatigue the horses. So a roll of 'III', 'IV' and 'V' will give you four actions for the I's and one further action for the V's plus a fatigue.

Actions can be used to move (which is easier the closer to the inside you are), change lanes or attack or overtake other chariots. 

I noted earlier that each team has a pit-crew. These are the mounted Hortartors, who can guide a chariot and negate the effects of dust, and the unlucky Sparsors. These latter are slaves whose job it is to throw water on the axles of the chariots or on the horses in order to cool them down. The wooden axles of chariots would get hot during a race, to the level where they would smoke. In the game a chariot accumulates heat each time it acts. A team can use actions to deploy the Sparsor to cool a chariot down. 

You can see both a Sparsor and Hortator in action here.

Using a Sparsor is an action. If the target chariot is in the outer lane then they can do their job unimpeded. But if they have to cross lanes there is chance that they will be run over. In this picture the green Sparsor has got lucky...

... but he was not so lucky a couple of turns later! Splat!

Anyway, the final straight is the key one; a chariot wins if they are in one of the front three paces of the track. That Blue chariot is mine, looking like a dead cert.

But here's a Red chariot coming up on the inside. 

An overview of the finish. We were both using crowd support at this stage. It was very exciting.

Pipped at the post! In the event of multiple chariots being at the front at the end a chariot in the middle lane has priority. However other factors can affect the finish. Red's horse team were better finisher's than mine, which gave them a bonus and made the result a tie. In that case the tie-break is unused skill counters (which are assigned at the start of teh race). I had one. Red's chariot had ... two. So Red won on the narrowest of tie-breaks; I finished well but Red's better horses and more skillful charioteer just squeaked ahead in a 1st century AD photo-finish.

I was gutted.

The also-rans. On the back wall you can see the dice that have been pulled from the bag, neatly grouped by straights and laps.

This game is tremendous fun, with lots of period chrome and things to manage. As a chariot races it slowly degrades, and the game is very much about managing heat, damage and stress, whilst ensuring that your opponents accumulate some. We didn't have any crashes, although one of the white chariots had taken a couple of corners badly and was close to falling apart. Sadly he failed to amuse us by actually doing so.

And what of the shopping? I bought a few bits for a Turnip 28 force I have on my painting table (I have one unit painted and another couple mostly assembled), as well as some more Grim Fantasy figures for use with Palaeo Diet. And I picked up two boardgames. The first is a solitaire WWII game, 'Field Commander: Rommel', which allows you to play the great man in three campaigns (France 1940, Western Desert and D-Day) against a game-controlled Allied force. I've tried the France 1940 campaign a couple of times and it's a tough nut to crack. Those Somuas just keep comin. The other game is 'Evolution: New World' which is an excellent card-based game about adapting animals to environments whilst fending off other player's predators. I got it for $15 and it seems to be a full kickstarter set with not only the basic game but two expansions as well. Quite a bargain. We've played it three or four times already this week, and we love it. It lacks the silly animal builds of Quirks, but does have a charm all of its own*.

*My wife and I both studied life-sciences at university, so as a theme it's very much our thing.

Gladiators At MOAB

I made a couple of trips to MOAB this year. On the Sunday I popped in for the afternoon to look around the stalls and games. Picked up a few figures, some more paints and a copy of an out of print sled-racing boardgame called 'Snow Tails'. It was too hot to do much else though.

On the Monday I'd said I'd go up to play and help with a demo of  'Blood On The Sands' gladiator rules, that I've blogged about here a couple of times (most recently last year). When I arrived three games were in full flow:

My first game saw a thraex get beaten up by Victor's murmillo.

My next game was with Damian. By this stage I'd got the hang of what I was doing and we had an epic fight between my secutor and his retiarius. A couple of times we both had our opponent on the ropes, and both of us were sliced up and bleeding by the end. I managed one last desperate attack before I was due to pass out from blood loss and sliced off the retiarius's head.

My final game saw me beaten to a pulp in just under a turn by a very aggressive thraex. The less said about that the better.

Here's a few more pictures. 

A hoplomachus and a murmillo.

Frank (the author) and Paul discussing some finer points of the game.

Frank's fantastic arena. You can read about how he built it HERE, HERE and HERE

I'm really quite taken with 'Blood On The Sands'; it flows really well and is great if you want a crunchy detailed game that's actually not that complicated. Still no word on when it's likely to be published though.

MOAB 2022

I paid a visit to MOAB yesterday. It's the first time it's been held since 2019, so it was nice to be back.

Most of it was competitions. There didn't seem to be as many traders present either, although those that were there were interesting enough including Aetherworks, Olympian Games, Eureka, Slave 2 Gaming and a company which distributes independent games. There was one demo game (it looked like Team Yankee, maybe, but I didn't look that closely), and a couple of participation games as well, both of which were card/boardgames. 

I played one of these; a card-drafting game called Cosmos: Empires.

With an attractive epic sci-fi feel, the players purchase cards from a pool of eight every-changing options in the centre of the table, looking to maximise the revenue of their empire before their opponents do. Some cards act as multipliers based on how many cards you have fulfilling certain conditions, so the game is a balance between picking up expensive multipliers and collecting enough of various other card-types that those expensive cards bear fruit. You can also destroy cards in the centre to deny them to other players. It was a simple enough game, although I failed to grasp exactly what the victory conditions were until near the end of my first game. Despite that I managed to scrape a win, mostly via a lucky draw in the centre on my last move.

Here's the game at the end.

I played a second game later in the day, and was simply lucky not to come last in that.

Cosmos: Empires is a funded kickstarter, and will be available early next year.

I also played a card-game on the independent stall called Viewpoint: Revisioned, which is part of a series called the Viewniverse. It was amusing, but I only played two-player and I'm not sure the cut-throat nature of it worked so well. Maybe because it was my throat getting cut.

Anyway, this year's MOAB also coincided with the start of my Frocktober campaign for this year. Here's a taster:

I'll do proper, regular posts throughout the month, but once again we've set up our usual team: IT HAS POCKETS

Oh! MOAB loot? I bought a can of varnish. I did turn down the chance to buy the Ogre: Ultimate Edition (the one that's the size of a suitcase) for $75 on the bring and buy, but as attractive as that looked I wasn't sure that, for the size, it was a game I was likely to play that much. I like it, but to the level of wanting to store a $75 suitcase. One day I know I will regret this decision.

52 Games - Game 57
52 Games - Game 58

MOAB Loot

This year, for the first time since I arrived in Australia, I went to MOAB as a regular punter. I was neither playing in any competitions, nor was I involved in running and demo/participation games.

As it was I managed to fill the day rather nicely, hung out with various friends and associates and, of course, spent some of my hard-earned cash on stuff which will probably sit in cupboards until I die and my children are left to work out what to do with it.

So what did I get?

I always end up buying some Bones. Whether I'll ever get around to painting any of them remains to be seen. These are destined for either Battlesworn or my small collection of 25mm HOTT armies.

I got these 18mm Four Horseman of the Apocalypse from Slave2Gaming.

Also some winged imps, which you can see in an unassembled pile at the bottom of the picture.

My biggest purchase was a pile of Monsterpocalypse stuff from the bring and buy.

I got plenty of kaiju and mechs.

There was also a pile of the smaller 'things' that were part of the game - some vehicles as well as mini-monsters.

My favourites - a lorry transporting an egg, and these giant gorillas, one of which is carrying a field howitzer as a gun.

I've already taken some of the big monsters off their clunky game bases, although few of them stand up unaided like that and will need to be rebased.