A busy 3 months

I have not had any posts since mid-February but it does not mean that I have not been busy. I have been able to get a few games in... mostly Combat Commander: Europe, Uncharted Seas, and a game of Flames of War.

However, in the last 3 months, I have been very busy with work. As most of you know, I am a lawyer by day and only a gamer at night. I have spent the last 3 months in trial on a case I have been working on for years. It was a very high profile case with a lot of pressure. On May 10, 2005, the Defendant shot and killed a police officer in cold blood during a routine traffic stop. The jury found him guilty of First Degree Murder and other charges in early May. For the past couple of weeks, we have been doing the penalty phase of the trial. Justice was finally served when the jury sentenced the Defendant to death.

If anyone is interested, you can see the entire verdict and sentencing at www.kpho.com. If you look today (May 27, 2009), you want to click on the second local video on the right middle part of the screen. The video is 3:40 and you can see the verdict through the sentence. I think it is rather chilling.

Anyhow, on to more fun things.... More posts about games coming soon!

Le Havre

It is has been a while since I have talked about board games but that does not mean I have not had the chance to play. Lately, I have wanted to talk about my miniatures because I was very happy that I sat down and painted minis during the past month. However, I have recently played a boardgame that I want to talk about, Le Havre. Le Havre is a little gem that is not readily available in the United States, although you can find a copy at Funagain Games if you really want one. There is not an official English edition of the game (yet), but the publishing company, Lookout Games, printed a German and Austrailian (what the fuck) edition of the game. Let's just say that the Austrailian Edition is pretty much English...


One of the main design credits for the game goes to Uwe Rosenberg. Now, to you non Euro-gamers, that name really will not mean much to you. Uwe has been around awhile as a designer and received some recognition for his 1997 game Bohnanza ("The Bean Game"). He became really popular in 2008, when his biggest game, Agricola, made it to the United States for its first English/US printing. Agricola became so popular that it shot to the #1 game on Boardgame Geek rather quickly and unseated Puerto Rico, which had been the #1 game for a really long time (actually, for too long of a period of time. It is one of the most overrated games ever). I really do not want to turn this post into a discussion about Agricola, but I will say that it is an ok game, it is very overrated, and now that I have played Le Havre, I have no interest in playing Agricola again.



Le Havre is resource management and worker placement game. The board is made up of 7 port spaces, resource warehouses, buildings that can be used, and buildings that can be purchased or built. Players alternate taking turns. Every player starts their turn by moving their boat to the next unoccupied dock space on the board. Every time a player does this the dock space indicates which two resources are generated for the warehouses. After the player generates resources for the warehouses, the player much decide whether to take all of the resources from any one warehouse or use a building. The pressure part of the game is that this choice alone is critical and stressful as you always need more resources and you always need to use buildings to manipulate your resources.



For instance, on my turn, I can choose to take wood, money, cattle, grain, clay, iron, and other resources for one warehouse or I can use a building which will enable me to convert grain to bread, cattle to meat, or iron to steel, etc. Why is this important? First, at the end of every round (7 turns), you have to provide a certain amount of food to your people. Food consists of fish, bread, or meat (or you can use money but that hurts you in the end game as money counts as victory points). If you do not have enough food, you have to take out a loan which is negative points at the end of the game if they are not paid off. Second, you need to manipulate your resources in order to create resources that you need in order to build other buildings in the city. Buildings cannot be used until they are built (or bought). Furthermore, if you own the building (you built it our bought it), you receive its victory point value at the end of the game. Now, this game sounds a little complicated, but it really is not. The rules themselves are simple. The "stress' factor of this game comes from the agonizing choices you have to make each turn.



I probably have not done Le Havre justice in my description as it is a hard game to discuss when you are trying to keep the word count down. However, I am willing to teach any of my friends how to play this excellent game. I have had the chance to play Le Havre 3 times in the past week and it is already one of my favorite new games. I can see this game being my game of the year even though there is plenty of 2009 gaming left.

I want to play pulp!

I am a big fan of pulp gaming and I do not get to do enough of it. I sat down and painted a pulp guy. I have to say he sucks. He is from the Pulp Figures line. I generally like their pulp minis but this figure is completely uninteresting to me. At least the other minis in the pack were better. The most I can say about it is that at least he is painted. I think I have painted more miniatures this year already than I did for the past two years.

Near Future - Robots

A group of us have been planning on doing Near Future miniatures gaming for years. Unfortunately, we have not found any rules we have liked. Anyhow, here are some Copplestone Castings robots I painted for when we do find some rules to play.

These will match well with my other five minis that my friend Tim painted for me a couple of years ago. His had a little more brown in them but both sets will look good on the table.

The Necromancer

I finally got my Necromancer done. Here is a front and back picture. Not a bad picture but I need to learn how to photograph miniatures a little better. Maybe one of my friends will have some tips.

I am looking forward to trying him in a Dol Guldur list with spiders and orcs. Overall, I think he came out good. There is a little bit of frosting on the model. I am not sure if that is from the dulcote (either not shaking well or it was too cold outside) or if it is from the wash I put on the model. Maybe it is a mixture of both. Luckily, it works with the model. It also is not nearly as pronounced on the table as it looks in the picture.

Uncharted Seas - Elves

Here are some test pictures for my Elven fleet. I painted one cruiser to completion to see how the paint sceme would look. I have several more in various stages. Please offer some feedback. I would appreciate it.

And my Necromancer should be done in the next day or so. I will post that too!

Uncharted Seas Revisited

I've been a little busy lately so I have not gotten as many miniatures games to the table as I would have liked. Friday rolled around and my friend Tim mentioned that he wanted to play Uncharted Seas again. I absolutely love the game so I was definitely up for that.

This time around I wanted to try my new elf fleet and Tim wanted to stick with the dwarves. We decided to play starter pack v. starter pack again but this time we threw some terrain down on the table. It makes a world of difference in the game as you would expect. Maneuvering is key. The elves were interesting to play since their ships are very fragile. To compensate for this weakness, they are very fast and can shoot a little better at longer range than some of the other races in the game.

We decided to roll off to see who deployed the first squadron and then alternated placing squadrons until everyone was on the board. Tim did a good job playing his fleet as usual, but he made one critical mistake in his deployment in that he split his fleet. On one side of his deployment zone was 3 cruisers and on the other side was 6 frigates and a battleship. Since the dwarves are slow, but have high defense and firepower, they really need to stay together. I grouped together and sailed my entire fleet along the board edge with the hopes of eliminating his cruisers and some frigates while avoiding his very dangerous battleship. I was largly successful except everytime I hurt his cruisers he was able to fix them. Eventually I wore them down and knocked them out. By the time the dwarf cruisers were eliminated, I was able to destroy several of Tim' frigates (which is good as they a really good ships for the dwarves - who knew that such a small ship would have as much firepower as my elf cruiser). That left the dwarven battleship and a couple of frigates to face the elven battleship, 2 groups of frigates and a couple of injured cruisers. It was getting late so we called the game, but the writing was on the wall and the elves were going to win.

Sorry for the lack of pictures as I know it would make the battle report much more interesting but we were in the playtest phase and the ships were not painted. The fleets should be painted by next time; however, as the elves were primed today.

I should have some more painting updates soon as I just sprayed a protective polyeurathane coat on my Lord of the Rings Necromancer. After it dries and I get it based, I will post some pictures.