Tale of Four Gamers: Introductions #3

 

Dave Dickey:
I have been in and out of the hobby since I was in junior high (like 13 years). Mostly a 40k player, but have always had some fantasy. I got into fantasy with Mordhiem actually. The feel of it was so interesting, this dirty burnt out city abandoned and now scavenged by criminals and cults. Tell me it’s not sweet! From there I got lucky and got a huge VC army off eBay for cheap. The problem was it was all over the place. I never got much more for it so my interest waned. A while after ogre kingdoms came out I quit (the first release of course) and I had got a bunch of them and a few beastmen. All the ogres got kilts (with my family tartan) and I put together some of the beastmen. After a few games and one tourney I got too busy and everything began to gather dust. Also moved back to my home area dusted off my 40k, made a table in my basement (gray/black) for cities of death. With this I hope to get back into fantasy as well. So I picked beastmen. I know what you are thinking “No one plays them, and they bad!” They have always been a bit over looked. That is where the allure is for me. To go a road less traveled. While I am in this I will also be working on Blood Angels and terrain for my board, so I might throw in some pictures of those.

October List:

Bray Shaman – General, Level 2, Gnarled Hide

10 Warhounds

15 Gors – Full Command, Extra Hand Weapons

5 Centigors – Full Command, Throwing Axes

500 Points

Idea/Strategy:

I plan on using the Centigors and Warhounds to be the quick flankers, trying to hit any ranged weapons they may have; or hitting the flank of any block the Gors engage. Depending on what the Shaman gets for spells he will be in with the Gors most of the time to buff them with augments. I plan to use Lore of Beasts so if he gets the bolt thrower magic missile I might have him run around on his own with screen from the hounds.  At 500 points its hard to get any more complex with this list.  Also doesn’t help that I haven’t played 8^th edition or the newest Beastman book since it was released.

Tale of Four Gamers: Introductions #2

Ryan Goleman:

My name is Ryan, and I’ve agreed to join Joe in his Tale of Gamers.  I’ve been playing in the hobby for 15+ years with breaks here and there; but most of my Fantasy experience was in 7^th edition and I’ve been enjoying 8^th a lot so far.  My favorite army has and always will be Lizardmen, but I’ve decided to update my Ogre Kingdoms for 8^th so that I can have two armies to play.  Beside, at least one of us had to jump on the Ogre bandwagon, right?  Plus the 500 points a month shouldn’t be hard for me to pull off because of the armies small model count.

OctOgre List:

Bruiser – General, Irontfist, Heavy Armor, Sword of Striking, Dragonhelm

6 Ogres – Full Command, Ironfists, Lookout Gnoblar

3 Leadbelchers – Bellower, Champion

495 Points

 

Idea/Strategy:

To start, I’m not the best painter but not the worst.  That said, I am a firm believe that if you can’t paint the best, paint different so my Ogres are going to be a ‘lost tribe’ with an African Plaines type theme.  I’ve personally never done this before and I thought it would give me an opportunity for neat conversions.  The strategy behind the army is pretty straight forward.  Put the Bruiser in the Ogres and smash my opponents face.  The Leadbelchers are there to ‘hopefully’ handle small quicker things that the Ogres can’t get to grips with.  I have forgone magic at this point level as I don’t feel it will be a game breaker and the Ogres are good at closing ground quickly.  I’m looking forward to this project and hopefully I can make it to Adepticon and show off my hard work.

Tale of Four Gamers: Introductions #1

So being only a few days out from October 1st and thus the start of our Tale of Gamers articles we are going to begin introductions.  Starting with of course myself and then daily moving on to our other participants before we really begin.

 
Joe Flesch:

If you’re reading this then you probably already know who I am and what I’m about.  If for some reason you picked up onto us after the podcast had already ended I’ll throw just a smidge of information up about me.  I’ve been in the hobby for 15+ years and have played nearly every game GW has ever produced.  I ran the podcast for 3 years.  I’ve played 7 different armies for Fantasy and for this set of articles I’ll be working on Skaven.  I once ran an all Goblin Horde army and really miss the feel of it after having sold it a number of years ago.  Sadly this means that 500 points can contain nearly 50 models.  This is going to be rough on me as a painter/hobbyist, but I believe I’m up for the challenge.

October List: 497.5

Warlock Engineer – General, Level 2, Warp Energy Condenser

25 Clanrats – Full Command, Shields, Poison Wind Mortar Weapons Team

5 Gutter Runners – Slings, Poison Attacks

Warp Lightning Cannon

Idea/Strategy:

I know that painting a horde is going to be a rough challenge but it is also a small blessing at low points games.  The versatility given by such a cheap army means I’ve managed to squeeze in a wild a mount of stuff at 500 points.  A level 2 as a general gives me access to magic, not a ton; but enough to do damage, as I can voluntarily take a Magic Missile spell.  A fairly big sized block of Clanrats gives me a nice bunker for the Mage as well as the combat resolution numbers to reliably sit in combat for a round or perhaps 2 depending on what I’m fighting with Steadfast.  The fact that they also get a Mortar is helpful as I can use this to get through high armor saves by simply rolling a 4/5+.  The Gutter Runners should give me exactly what I need to send off other player’s war machines and the Warp Lightning Cannon gives me access not only to a template weapon but the ability however fickle to really slice through armor and do multiple wounds to larger creatures.

Core Competency 2011 Coverages

So Core Competency 2011 has come and gone and with it plenty of little bits of coverage.  As I don't produce a full featured show anymore you can't expect a ton from me; but I did do some video recording and audio while I was there and here it is collected.  Any pictures I took you can find on the Twitter account, although I've taken the two best pictures and put them int his post with everything else.  So I hope you enjoy what I've got here for you.

The first picture here is Joe Rodgers 3 Treeman eating my unit of Dwarf Warriors with Great Weapons and Shields.  They died in a bloody heap, along with most of the rest of my army.  I threw everything I could and as you can see by the wound counters I did some damage; but nay it wasn't enough.

This second picture is of the Best Appearance winner Brian McMillan's Orcs & Goblins Army.  Azhag The Slaughterer which he's using as a Black Orc Warlord and I found to be just so beautifully painted I had to take a picture.  It was a wondeful paint job on a model that costs so much I wouldn't buy it just on the basis that I couldn't do it justice in the painting.

Below here are the two video's which are compilations of many clips I took on my Flip camera throughout the weekend.  Pieces of Battle Reports, some talk with other people and a recording of the Awards being handed out.  Enjoy.

Finally we come to the audio recordings that I compiled over the weekend.  After having sold my equipment I found a great recording program for my iPhone that enables me to jack in a 1/4 3.55mm Microphone into the iPhone and honestly it records almost as well as a XLR Microphone does professionally.  Being thus impressed I decided to use this set up and then promptly forgot the Microphone at home so there is a fair chunk of background noise throughout there recordings as the input was just the phone itself.  Still, it didn't turn out too bad and I hope you all enjoy listening to it.  Please let me know if you enjoyed this type of coverage and anything you'd like to see change a bit in the future!  Thanks again!

Listen Here:

or Download Directly below:
Core Competency 2011 Episode

Tale of Four Gamers

 
So for those who have been around the hobby and White Dwarf for ages, the premise behind this is going to be obvious.  For those who haven’t we’ll take a moment to explain.  The Tale of Gamers was a set of articles that would be occasionally put into a White Dwarf.  Four writers from GW would get together and set themselves a goal of constructing an army over a period of time, building, painting, playing incrementally each month.  They would restrict themselves to a specific budget of some kind be it points or money and a monthly schedule a WD was a monthly publication.  The articles would go over there chunks of armies, why they chose what they did, pictures of the painting, strategy ideas and coverage of a game they’d play every month with what they had painted up to that point.

This is the plan for a series of Blog Posts that me and some friends will be doing here on The Waaagh Cast blog.  Starting on Oct. 1^st a group of me and friends will begin our own Tale of Gamers.  We are giving ourselves a 6 month time limit and building up a 2500 point army.  From the 1^st of each month we will construct a 500 point chunk of our armies and finish that piece of the army to completion.  During this time we will post pictures, and our ideas for what we’re doing to the blog.  We’ll get together once during this period of time as well for a group paint night to bounce ideas and such around as well which we may or may not record for some content.

Between the 26^th and end of each month we will get together again where we will all play some games and post reports, ideas and pictures of what has occurred.  We’ll discuss what we felt was good or bad about the lists, and what we’ll want to for improvements.  For those quick at math you’ll realize that 500 point chunks up to 2500 points is only 5 months.  The 6^th month will be used to get together and build display boards.  The ending goal is that right before Adepticon 2012 we’ll each have a 2500 point completed and tournament ready army.  Not that all of us will be playing in the Adepticon tournament; but it’s still a great goal to work towards.

We’ll all begin this shindig by cheating a bit.  We each have an army that is already started; has some stuff assembled and little bits painted, etc…  Still this will likely only see us through that 1^st month and come the 2^nd month we’re going to have to kick ourselves into high gear on the painting runs.  The run up to the start of this will see a couple posts by me introducing the group and armies we’ll be working on.  After which we’ll all be posting onto the Blog at our own leisure.  I will likely be the most prolific poster; but I will do my best to encourage the others to post often as well, forcing them to post at least twice a month.

I hope you enjoy the articles and please let us know your thoughts as we go through this process by posting comments on the blog posts.

The Display Board

So we're going to discuss display boards in this post. Once upon a time these were largely rare, but over the last 5 or 6 years have become a mainstay piece of hobby here in the US at least. When going to a large scale tournament like Adepticon you expect to see some pretty amazing boards and sometimes you do. There are still guys toting their armies around in empty cardboard soda pop trays; without question there probably always will be as long as there are new people getting into the hobby. However it is more common now that when attending tournaments to see fancy display boards. They can range from extremely simple to overly extravagant. Adepticon really shows off both. I've seen massive 40K Team Tournament Displays that costs hundreds to thousands of dollars. Mine have never been so extravagant but they are designed to generally be effective and cost efficient.

I've just recently in the last couple of days re-built a new Display for my Dwarf army. My old one while I liked it for the theme was old and beat up and probably wasn't doing me any favors in the paint scoring department. Generally at tournaments your display board will get you a few points in your painting category for having put in the effort to help your army look all the better. I do not think that a display board will ever be the difference between losing or winning a tournament but I could be wrong. So fro this let's go over materials. Most hobbyists will have the necessary things to start with such as exacto blades, paints and brushes so lets discuss the things you'll need that you may not have.

Housing Insulation Foam:

You can buy this stuff in sheets of 8'x4' from pretty much any building store.  Lowes, Home Depot, Menards, Ace Hardware, etc...  They all carry some kind of it.  You can find it in smaller sheets and varying thicknesses.  The kind I used is pictured.  Blue 2" foam in an 8'x4' sheet.  It costs about $25 when I purchased it.  Keep in mind that was a couple years ago for building terrain so the price may be a bit different now.

Hot Wire Foam Cutter:

Also available in many, MANY shapes, sizes and configurations.  This is not the one I used.  The one that I used has a single copper rod extending from a handle with a plug so that I'm not restricted to the size of foam I can cut.  The on pictured for example would only be able to cut a specific range of thicknesses based on what you could fit into that fork.  These range in prices as well, but my particular one cost about $25 from Jeffery Allens Crafts.

Metal Poster Frame:

This may seem unneccessary at first.  I mean why does a board need a frame right?  Well, you'll figure it out after you don't use it and you kick the board while its under the table your playing at a couple times.  Or run it into door frames, corners of walls, etc...  This stuff is just there to save the edges of your board.  Although it does also add a bit to the aesthetic look of the board and show you went that extra step.  You can buy these things in sectionals from places like Hobby Lobby where the cost tends to be about $10 for 2 sections.  You can buy them anywhere from 6" up to like 40" so you can really customize the size frame/board you want to build based on the sections you purchase.

Spray Paints:

 

Many spray paints contain caustic chemicals that generally melt styrofoam of any kind when sprayed on them.  There are some however that you can get from hobby shops which are safe.  Valspar in the middle is actually a regular spray paint that if you spray it in thin coats will not eat your foam.  The two cans on the sides are Krylon Stone textured spray paint.  This stuff is designed to not eat foam and the reason I chose these is that it eliminates the need to flock the board after painting as this stuff is essentially flock and paint in a can.  It does spray on heavy texture and thin paint though which is why I bought the Valspar paint to use as a base coat before hitting the board with the stone.

Stage 1: Frame and Base

Its a little hard to see in the picture but I started with a 27"x20" poster frame.  I usually try and put a piece of MDF board under the foam in the frame but I ran out on my last project and didn't feel like buying more so I took an extra step in the construction of this board.  I used the foam cutter to cut grooves into the sides of the 2" foam about 1/2" up from the bottom and fit the frame directly into/onto the foam.  This provides less center support for the foam but I don't believe it will break from weight.  I could later of course be proven wrong.  I then took another pieces of foam 10" wide and 27" long and rough cut a big chunk out with a carpenters blade.  I then used my foam cutter to shape it better for what will be cliff faces.

Stage 2: Additional Layers

Irresponsibaly I smashed forward without taking enough in between pictures.  This however has had 2 extra layers and some other things added to it.  The 2nd layer was additional cliff height on the left and right.  This is also the point at which I took the 1st layer and in conjunction with the 2nd layer cut open the large cave entrance.  I carved larger holes for some cake pillars I had on my previous display board so I could re-use them.  They aren't anything exceptional looking; but I feel they add just that little bit to it.  Then there is a 3rd layer on top of that.  I also sat my movement trays onto the board to figure out how I would generally arrange the army and make sure that it would all fit well.

Step 3: Flock It

Again with irresponsible picture taking.  In retrospect I wish I would've taken multiple pictures of the paint process.  I know it was only spray paints but hey, it came out really well I thought. First I cut out a angled piece in the front center for a nameplate which adds that little extra bit and I think is especially important in helping to get those players choice points having your name right up front.  Then of course I had to masking tape the frame and I masking taped some thick paper around the hills so as not to get the green spray flock on the mountain.  Sprayed the sections separately and then sprayed the road when it was all done.  Of course I then had to immediately get my army out of its case and set it up to see the finished product.  Well close to finished...  I still have some final touches to do such as the nameplate and some small embelishments I plan on putting in, but otherwise its essentially complete.

List:
Foam - $25-30 for a massive sheet (use on other projects later)
Hot Wire Cutter - $25+
Poster Frame - $20 and that's really as big as you want a display base to be
Spray Paints - $10 for each of the Stone Paints, $5 for the Valspar
Total: $80 and up depending on what you get

This appears extremely high, however when you consider that you'll probably use the rest of that foam and paint for hills, towers, other scenery pieces you'll get your moneys worth of all of these things.

A display board doesn't really take that long, and I built this one over the course of 2 days.  If you've spent as much time on your army as I have and if your a better painter than me likely more time then it behooves you to go this little bit further in the creative process.  Hopefully you've gotten some ideas and useful bits from this.  Thanks for reading!

Board Game Review: Railroad Tycoon (Railways of The World)

So, today I'll throw a little discussion about one of my favorite games, although probably one of the least played at only about 5 or 6 plays and that is... Railroad Tycoon! A much heavier game than those I've reviewed thus far, but definitely one of great interest to me.




Railroad Tycoon is a very heavy Euro-game that is designed around route building, economic engine building and pick up and deliver mechanics. I say that this game is one of my favorites for a reason. It is large, beautiful and thought provoking. It takes a lot of thinking and while I"m not a huge fan of super deep euro's somehow this one took my hook line and sinker from the 1st play. When I say large and beautiful I mean it. With a board that measures in at about 36x45 inches it is BIG! To give an exmple:




And since that doesn't quite give you the full impression here is a picture for reference with people in it playing...




That's a big damned board! The game takes place on the east coast of the United States at the beginning of the railroad era. You take the place of a railroad baron starting up a company to make your fortune and be famous. There are a number of railroad baron cards dealt randomly at the beginning that give specific bonuses of you complete there objectives by games end. One of the most thought smashing bits of this game is the economic engine. Everybody starts out with $0 in the bank. The only way to get money to build things and start is to sell shares in your company; each share being worth $5,000 dollars. The problem being that you can never buy these shares out and at the end of each turn you must pay dividends of $1,000 for each share issued. That means that if you for some reason haven't earned enough money over the course of a turn to pay your shareholders their dividends you must sell more shares taking on more in-house debt and pay more dividends later to cover your dividends now!

Its a rough world starting a business... Each turn consists of 3 phases during which you can build, deliver or grab a card. The cards that are placed in play vary in their goodness. Some are super awesome like getting to build 4 tracks for free (a track costing $2,000 on open ground means that if you spend an action to take that card you've essentially earned $8,000 dollars. Super cool! After you've connected some cities via routes that you build you can then deliver goods cubes from one city to another city that matches the color of the cube you are moving. This is the winning mechanic of the game. Every delivery is worth a victory point on the track, and the higher the victory points, the more money you earn at the end of each turn. There is a point as in any real life business of diminishing returns. When you hit 50 VP's you actually start earning less income. It's crazy awesome! You want the points, but at some point you are almost forced to slow yourself down. Like I said. Heavily thought provoking.

There are a ton of cubes all over the board, but as you start emptying cities the game draws closer to the end. The game plays 2-6 players and the end condition (cities emptied of goods) is less for the fewer players and scales up for more; 6 players having to empty 16-18 I believe, I can't remember 100% right now. Players as one of their actions can for $10,000 improve a gray city that doesn't have a color assigned yet though thus giving it more cubes and extending the game to try and help them garner the points needed to compete. Its a good mechanic I think. I say that this game even though it is great and everyone I've played it with has loved it makes it to the table rarely is for a reason. Out of the 5 or 6 plays I've played, its always been with 6 players and those games generally take 2-1/2 to 3 hours to complete. When your playing with 5 new people who must learn the game you can bet pretty heavily on the 3+ mark. That said, I still love it and try desperately to get it to the table at every chance.

My wife has no opinion on the game as her back is in pretty pore shape and she wouldn't be able to sit for 3 hours at a table to play it. I think she'd be cool with it, but I don't think this would be on her top 10 for sure. Especially because of length. The copy titled Railroad Tycoon is actually out of print as well; and has been for I think 6 or so years. A year ago it was re-printed by Eagle games titled "Railways of The World".

The reprint is just as beautiful, but some definite improvements have been made. The board has been trimmed down; not a lot, but some. The victory points track which in Railroad Tycoon is part of the main board has been removed and given a board of its own to help keep track better. Some new cards were printed and some changed and the colors are generally more vibrant. A downfall of this game is the price tag. MSRP is around $75 which is pretty damned expensive for a game. Still, I think its amazing and worth every penny. That said I traded a $50 board game for it on the geek. Woohoo! If you can get a play of this game in I highly recommend it. Its not for everyone, but damned its good.

The links for the geek!
Railroad Tycoon (The out of print one)
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17133/railroad-tycoon
Railways of The World (In print)
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/5641/railways-of-the-world-series

Empire Spear Musings

So I haven't written anything about Warhammer in a bit and I thought it due time. So today I'll be musing on that Empire army I've been working or a so long and how I maybe intend to make the Spearman unit work.





So if you don't know the Empire army that I've been working on was one of my old friends who moved far from here (IL to NY) and left his armies behind with the invite to play them. Well, I couldn't just play it... See he bought a lot off of eBay and the stuff he didn't, well... he wasn't the greatest painter on the planet which is nothing you can really fault anyone for. However, since I do plan on playing it in tournaments I decided it needed some work. You've (if you've been reading the blog that is) seen my post about working on the Spearman unit.

See at one time he owned 20 Swordsmen, 20 Spearmen and 20 Halberds. Unfortunately 20 men is not enough for 8th edition in most games and his Halberds and Spearmen literally had 90% of the tips broken from their weapons when I got hold of them. Since I couldn't find a place on the net to get replacement Halberds I decided to turn the 2 units of 20 into one giant unit of 40 Spears. If you read any internet wisdom Spears are near total garbage in 8th edition. At least when compared to Halberds because of the higher Strength attack.

There is a solution to this however. MINDRAZOR! Yeah, I know, I don't like the sound either, but you have to admit that it does solve the low Strength issue. See a unit of 40 Spears ranked into Horde formation can put out a lot of attacks. Assuming full command and you charge your receiving 31 attacks. If you get charged you get that 4th rank so the full 40 attacks. That's quite a few attacks at (if you get Mindrazor cast on them) strength 7. Needless to say that's a pretty heinous round of attacks.

Of course, the problem here is banking on not only getting that spell but on successfully casting it. So you'll be leaving a lot on this unit to chance. There is at least 2 other tacitcal options that you can choose to make this unit useful.

The first is still relying on magic but a significantly less powerful spell. Taking a Wizard with Lore of Beasts. The Signature Spell for Beasts is Wyssan's Wildform. This is great in two ways; you not only get +1 Strength so that your mass of attacks is at Strength 4 which causes a significant bit more damage then 3 as on average you'll be wounding on a 50% chance as opposed to a roughly 32% chance per hit. The other thing is the unit becomes Toughness 4 meaning that the odds they'll survive those attacks back increases quite a bit as well thus leaving the unit alive and in place longer.

The other way to increase the units effectiveness is by placing a Warrior Priest in the unit. This has multiple benefits as well. First is that the unit will gain the Hatred special rule allowing them to re-roll all of their missed hits in the 1st round of combat. This at the Spearman's puny Weapon Skill of 3 can be a big difference. The other is the prayers that the priest can cast. Well, one prayer really and that is Unbending Righteousness which makes the Priest and the unit he has joined Unbreakable ensuring that they will sit in combat until the day is done. Of course again this is relying on a casting roll, but at the lowest power level to get off of any of the things thus far mentioned.

My current plan is to use a grouping of these bonuses. I plan on putting the Warrior Priest in the unit and then either fielding a Shadows Wizard or Beasts Wizard. I know I could do both, but that just seems overkill. I will probably go Shadows as a test first as the other spells in that lore seem more useful to me than Beasts. Along with the Priest this means in a squabble the unit will be swinging if charged 31 attacks with re-rolls to hit at Strength 7 if I get the spells off. And even if that mass of heavy attacks doesn't kill enough to win you the combat they should be Unbreakable anyway.

I'm well aware that this is a lot of faith on numbers but I don't plan on the army being super competitive, just fun. Plus if things start to go south or you believe they will you can always reform the unit into a long block instead of wide losing your Horde formation but gaining Steadfast for another round or two of combat.

There are numbers of other things that are possible with this unit, such as giving the Priest the Stubborn Crown or getting items that auto pass break checks and unit banners that give bonuses, but we'll leave those for now. Hopefully you found this of interest and it gives you readers something to think about.

You Magnificent Bastards!

A blog worth noticing. This group of guys consists of many of the Illinois/Wisconsin guys from the area. Created by the boys from Pointhammered. They are all excellent converters, painters and hobbyists and this is a grouping of their thoughts/blogs and other such things.

It's definitely worth taking a long look at. There are rules highlights, explanations, tutorials, ideas, and just a ton of stuff worth looking at. Go check it out.


You Magnificent Bastards!

Board Game Review: Roadkill Rally

Not an outrageous thinking mans game; but just good solid ameri-trash fun. You take the role of a driver in a road rally race who is not only attempting to get to the finish line 1st; but kill as many pedestrians along the way and shoot your opponents all the while. It is very reminiscent of the old 70's flick Death Race 2000 which had Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine in it. If you haven't seen that go check it out. It's a bad flick, but in a good way.



So as I said, you drive around this crazy track full of obstacles and tight turns trying to hit pedestrians and shoot each other. Now this game runs afoul of all the things you'd expect. For 1 it's kind of campy. It has to be. I mean you can't create a game about killing old people and children and try to be serious about it; nobody would buy it. 2 is the backlash that the game has gotten for the exact reason stated in 1. Killing old people and children. Now the game is satire and a lot of people don't get that; but it is what it is. I can ignore the social implications for the entertainment value that the game can provide. Playing this game doesn't mean I'm going to go run down kids and granny's nor does it mean I agree with those who in their jacked up minds would. It means that I enjoy games and this is a game.


The game is heavily ameri-trash style using dice and cards to determine outcomes. Every player is given a dashboard to keep track of their statistics. On this card you keep track of your speed, how many people you've killed and how many opponents you've shot. You also have your three primary pieces of equipment placed above the card which will generally consist of a gun, some armor and then some other little gadget to help you along the way.


You use the dice in the game to decide whether you've run someone over or whether you are successful at shooting your opponents. It's a very basic system. The damage caused to opponents is taken from their hand of cards. Each player starts with 7 cards and at the beginning of each turn can draw up to 3 cards if they have less than 5. Cards are VERY important.


When you shoot an opponent they must give you cards equal to the amount of damage your weapon did thus increasing your hand. However there are a lot of ways to lose cards from your hand as well. You can of course play cards to activate the effect on them, you can discard them to speed up or slow down an extra 20mph past the regular limits, you can lose them going through obstacles, and you could lose them to other card effects. Beyond this you must also discard cards to power your weapons up so that you can shoot other players. There is a LOT of card cycling in this game. Once you've lost so many cards that you can no longer discard you Wipeout. Basically you lose one of your attached gadgets, cease movement, drop to 20mpg (lowest speed possible) and you take a -20 points at the end of the game.

Wipeout 3 times and you can, depending on the variant your playing, no longer make pit stops to fix your car or are eliminated from the race. The components for the game are really nice. The tracks are made of heavy duty card stock as are the tokens. The plastic playing pieces are good, but a little silly looking. You definitely get what you pay for in this game which is good considering the MSRP of $60.00 USD. I'm still going to have to call this worth the price.

The game seems like a lot of fun and with the right crowd I can imagine it would be. Check out the Board Game Geek page and see what it looks like. Keep in mind it's a game, but if someone you know picks it up or you get a chance I think it's definitely worth trying out whether you decide to pick it up yourself or not. I have to also state that I have at this point traded the game away. Not because it was bad, but because there are assuredly better. Still if it sounds like something you might like go give it a drive.

The Board Game Geek Page for Road Kill Rally