Blogomorph no.4

In which we discover what holidays really are for, I attempt to take over the galaxy, and we observe some dwarven progress.

Holiday Snaps

My hobby time this week has been severely impacted by some very nice family holidays up in Broome, all the way at the north of Western Australia (~1700kms as the crow flies from Perth, 2200 if driving). Broome is a really nice small town which is a somewhat renowned tourist spot, if you go in the right season (May to October).

Beyond providing a great excuse for my lack of progress this week, the reason I bring this up is because, Broome has this amazing red dirt all through it, much darker than the red dirt we get around Perth. If you’re a follower of the blog you know I love a red dirt base (see amongst others: Chaos Guy from last week, my Orcs and Goblins army), and Broome offers some great inspiration for those really saturated red dirt bases.

I personally really like the look of those dark rocks peeking out of the red dirt, and that is what I’m going for with the bases on that chaos model I showed in the last post. Hopefully you can find some basing ideas out of these photos so I can tell myself the weird looks I got from other tourists as I took photos of dirt were worth it.

As a bonus here is some inspiration for those of you that enjoy broken rock bases!

Imperial Ambitions

Barely back from holidays we made use of a long weekend here to play the longest game of them all: Twilight Imperium 4 (I know, there’s plenty of longer games — see this crazed attempt!, but this is as long as I’m willing to go!).

For those of you not in the know, Twilight Imperium 4 is a game of galactic conquest/politics/trade where all the players attempt to become the ones that rule the galaxy. They do this by amassing victory points which can be obtained in a variety of ways, mostly dictated by cards that get revealed as the game goes on. This generally means you can’t really know ahead of time how you’ll need to contort your game plan to fit the objectives. Add to that the limitation that you can generally only score one one of these objectives per turn (you can also score secret objectives but I won’t go into too much detail), and you end up being dragged pillar to post from turn to turn, being forced to shatter alliances or forge new bonds with old enemies as you try to accomplish objectives. This makes the game very political and you need to spend a lot of time discussing options with other players, smoothing over perceived slights, allying against a more powerful opponent, or simply trading commodities to make a bit of money. The game is extremely fun and tense, as you constantly need to be keeping an eye on what is going on around you while formulating your own plan.

As a result of all this, the game is long, we generally finish in 10ish hours so a solid day’s gaming. This was a five-player affair, and it took us close to 13 hours (including a dinner break). Why the extra time? Well in this game we ended up with two players (pink and blue) in a position to win in the next turn, so the rest of us (yellow, red, black) formulated a complex plan to try to stop them. This effectively meant throwing all our forces against these two players to try and drag the game into an extra turn which would see us get into a position to win ourselves.

We succeeded in dragging the galaxy into bloody war (extending the game into roughly two more hours of game time in the process!), and effectively crushed the fleets of both players, but in the end it was too little too late, both players cleverly hanging on to or aiming for objectives they could score even when the table turned against them. The game has an initiative system each turn which dictates the order turns are played and points are scored. The pink player (my lovely wife) managed to both hold on to a safe objective and pick an early turn order so she was able to score out before the blue player could score his. The game is brutal this way, first to score wins.

For three of the five of us it was the first time playing the first expansion of the game, Prophecy of Kings. This adds some more mechanics to the game which I really enjoyed, including amongst other things rewarding exploration and also adding some faction goals that let you unlock some powerful abilities.

On the Painting Table

As you might expect from all this activity, I didn’t get much painting done this week. I did manage to get my batch of Longbeards to the wash stage so I should be able to get them finished soon.