RogerBW's Blog

Back to this small quarterly boardgames convention in Watford, the first one I've got to for a while as it's usually announced at fairly short notice. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.

Wings of Glory is the traditional opener here, and this time we had four British fighters (two Camels and two Snipes) against a giant Zeppelin-Staaken Riesenflugzeug R.VI plus single fighter escort.

Even the "miniature" is about a foot in wingspan.

The British approached in formation.

And took some early hits, though knocking out the bomber's single nose gun and one of its four side- and aft-facing guns was a good start.

This wasn't enough to stop the bomber dropping its payload; that wasn't really a realistic goal for us.

It turned round, and began to lumber for home, harried by the British fighters.

In the end, I got in the finishing shots, though lost my own plane at the same time. This put the British ahead on points, and the German escort engaged in another mutual kill with another British aircraft.

A tough scenario for either side, and good fun.

After lunch we tried out my variant scoring rules for Welcome to the Dungeon, which try to remove player elimination. This does mean that a player can win without ever beating the dungeon, though, and he did. I think this needs a bit more work, possibly just by allowing infinite negative "life", which offsets trophies if there's a tie-breaker.

On through sweltering heat to Steampunk Rally, where I ended up with a rather neat machine built round Ferdinand von Zeppelin's special powers.

The pack quickly spread out, though the order still varied quite a bit.

I came a solid third, I think because I had too much movement and repair and not enough die-clearing powers. Still, I had a good time and if I played this more often I'd probably learn it better. I really must work up a better way of explaining it, though.

Alas, as with the last of these I got to last summer, it was just too hot for me, and I came away. Thanks to Lawrence for organising things again. The next one will be on 22 October; see boardgamegeek for more.