Heroica - Draida

Good evening children of the Plague father, I hope in this time of excess you have grown fat and are cultivating his diseases as we speak. I apologise that I have not posted much of late but the poor weather has stopped me spraying my Necrons so I have been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic and I have to say it is amazing.

Today I offer you my experience with the first in Lego's Heroica games. As part of my Christmas box my wife gave me the four currently available on the sly. Without me playing them before hand or even reading any reviews this was a bit of a gamble ( but who doesn't love Lego and gaming ).

The port city of Draida under vicious Goblin occupation

Heroica - Draida is set in Draida Bay, a port town currently occupied by Goblins in an effort to keep the heroes from aiding the land. Out of the box it was almost exactly what I was expecting with standard Lego pieces and easy to follow instructions on how to set it up. The rule book was similarly easy to get to grips with as it only had 4 pages and a lot of that is illustrations and dice tables.

The Heroes of the day line up against the Goblin horde

When I finished building the board it was smaller than I expected as had assumed the Lego Heroes / Monsters would be the standard sized Lego models. They have been designed to be placed on one stud rather than the traditional two studs. This has been done by making them shorter, thinner and removing the arms. On the upside the board was small enough to put back in the box fully constructed.

It suggests 5-10 minutes per game though I am always wary of these timings as they are normally off by a country mile, however this was pretty much spot on. It took 10 minutes for the first game while I made sure I was using the rules right and 5 minutes for the follow up games. The rules are very simple which allows them to hold up well as there is very little to be manipulated. The goal of the heroes is to kill the area boss or reach a set marker on the board, any other monsters killed on the way is just to help you get there without getting ganged up on in the last section.

The Goblin General stands watch over his mystical Artefact

The monsters on the other hand have to defeat any two heroes or one hero twice though with them being considerably weaker than the heroes this isn't as unfair as it first sounds. After 5 or 6 games it was pretty even between the sides win/lose ratio. It came down to dice rolls a lot of the time as the monsters can kill themselves on a bad dice roll ( even the area boss ), while the heroes only take one point of damage out of the 4 starting wounds for a bad roll.

The game is designed for ages 7+ but with a little patience I'm sure you could teach younger children how to play. It is a wonderful introduction to wargaming with it being quick and simple to learn but is still fun. In the next games it has rules for buying new weapons to take with you through the other dungeons or playing it all as one ( it even suggests making up your own rules and the forums have some nice ideas on this )

Beware the die forged in the ninth circle of hell

My only criticism is the rubber bound die provided, I imagine this is to protect the plastic sections you add when building it but it causes two issues when rolling;

i) The rubber sticks and it doesn't roll it just stays on whatever it landed on immediately
ii) The rubber decides it let us all down with sticking last time and will atone for it by attempting to bounce itself through your roof like it is possessed by the spirit of Icarus.

In the end I would recommend this game for people who remember Lego fondly, people who want an easy way into table top gaming or want to try and bring the next generation into table top games without dropping a four hundred page tome of rules on the them to read by candle light in a gloomy dungeon until they understand the horror that has been unleashed on the land and how they as a halfling bard are the only one who can stop the Dragon Queen's tyrannical rule.

Until next time continue to freely give out his gifts to anyone who is willing to help usher in his latest dire creations.

O'Shashar

Winter is coming...

Welcome back to Papa Nurgle's favored cupboard. This week I wanted to share with you something a little different. I recently picked up my copy of Game of Thrones 2nd Edition board game. After watching the first Season I have to say I am extremely looking forward to having a game of this. I got it from Wayland Games for £43.19 and with free postage and packaging, which I think is pretty good to say its RRP is £47.99 for a game that can be played out of the box for 3 - 6 players.

Last night I decided to unwrap the game and have a look at it and I have to say the quality is very good. The board is pretty big and very clear. The printing quality is excellent and even has some details to make some parts look like worn leather. The Cards are Plastic coated and are similar to Bicycle Cards so they feel very nice. The counters for the units are made of plastic in 6 different colours and are done in a Pearl style so that they look marbled. The colours are bright and they stand out nicely from the darker colour of the board. The tokens are made of about 5mm thick pressed card and feel like they wont fall t obits any time soon.


I'm looking forward having a game of this as it seems you have to forge and break alliances to win the game and be very 'tricksy'. You place order tokens upside down and have a screen to keep all your tokens hidden. I'm impressed that the game manages to pack up in suck a small box for the amount of stuff and the size of the board. I do however have two gripes with this. One is that there are no bags for the tokens, luckily I had some zip bags I used to save me sifting through about 150 different tokens. The other is that they provide two reference sheets. It would be more practical to supply one for each player. To sort this out I am going to get them scanned and possible laminated.

I did take a lot of pictures, but I had think and decided to get hold of the video below as I thought it was better and to be honest today I am just being plain lazy.

And that's it for this week I hope Nurgle Claus brings you something nice for Christmas.

Works in Progress

Salutations fellow followers of the spreader of plagues. As I mentioned last week I have a variety of Projects on the go at the moment. In the last week I have been concentrating on some terrain, which I managed to get finished last night and thought I would share them with you all. I know it's not special, but I thought it was better then nothing.

My Fuel Dump/Command Post is currently on hold as I am contemplating building it so it can be duplicated in resin or some other light weight material. This is because over the last month I've considered getting some bases done in the same way. I have yet to research how easy and costly this will be yet.

In the meantime I have a few small bits and pieces of scenery that I go cheaply of eBay and I thought as a change I would get these out of the way. I have assembled and painted 10 barrels, 4 barricades, 3 tank traps and an ammo dump. I was going to mount the ammo dump itself onto some MDF board, but I thought the way that I did would mean it could be used on any type of board.

Now that I have this bits out of the way I am going to paint my command for my Orcs and Night Gobbos. Until then farewell and may Nurgle's blessings fall upon you.

Tale of Three Gamers update (Orcs and Goblins)

Hello and welcome back again this week to the Plague Father's blessed Cupboard of Nurgle. As some of you may know I promised a much better update this week in regards to what I have been up to, a kind of mystery project so to speak. I will apologise as this mystery project hasn't progressed as quickly as I would like due to miniature side projects including an update on my Orc and Goblin horde. I have started this project, but I thought I would turn to our faithful followers for input on what should happen with this project.

As you can see I haven't gotten very far at all, but this is because I am torn between two idea's for this piece of board. Originally I wanted to create a fuel station to accompany my ammo dump I am currently painting, but then I thought that I could make a kind of command post so to speak. I want it look a little something like the one Forgeworld used to sell. If you don't know what I'm on about a picture can be found here. OK so my question to you guys is would you prefer me to make an fuel station or a command post?

On a side note I used my Black and Decker multi tool to sand the edges I bought for £40 a while back and I have to say it is totally worth it as I now longer have to deal with cramp in my hands from sanding the edges!

OK and now onto my Orcs and Goblins. As you can see I have managed to finish another five Night Gobbos and 5 Orc Boyz. As you may be able to tell with my Orc Boyz they do not seem to rank up very well which is starting to concern me. This is because 10 of them are converted Orks from the Assault on Black Reach box set and there arms stick out a bit. If the worst happens I will just have to paint more Orc Boyz with shields until I have 20 that rank up as I am at some point going to increase the squad size to 40. This will be the same for the Night Gobbos, but because they actually rank up I am not to concerned with them at this time.

So at the moment I have assembled and base coated quite a bit ready for painting. I am hoping to have some this done for a post next week for you. I have got the command squads for both my Orc Boyz mob and Night Gobbos mob as well as 10 40k barrels, my ammo dump and some tank barricades. I am hoping to have the barrels, barricades and the ammo dump for next week.

Until then fellow worshipers of the Lord of Flies spread his glorious corruption to everything you meet.

Thar's Gold in them thar Dungeons!

Hello our fellow plague bearers and welcome back to Nurgle's favoured cupboard of putrid delights. Now admittedly we have been a little slack of late with updates to the blog and there are a variety of reasons for this. For myself I have currently been busy with a number of things such as sorting out a new PC, playing Space Marine and Gears of War 3 and looking for a house.

I haven't completely slacked off in project work though, I just simply wasn't doing enough for a weekly update. I have a post for you guys next week that I hope you will enjoy, I don't want to give anything away you will just have to tune in next week. I have including a few pictures from two of the weeks we was gaming, one was with my phone as I forgot my camera.

If I can stop my babbling I can get on with this weeks post. Now some of you may be aware that myself and O'Shashar have got together with some guys at work for spot of Warhammer Quest. An absolutely fantastic game, that before now have only played once about 16 years ago! I have to say I have thoroughly enjoyed our Questing. Our DM isn't using the standard rules and has gone for the more complex rules from the Role play expansion.

What this does is add an extra dimension to the rules and more or less means you can do what you want in the dungeon and it of course helps with a spot of role play during the game which adds to the enjoyment of the game. If you don't have Warhammer Quest then I would strongly suggest you go an seek it out either by buying the board game and rulebooks on Ebay or acquiring them by other means.

So far we have only done three dungeons, but one being turned into a two part dungeon so you could say four dungeons. Our Party consists on a Wizard, using the Dark Elf Sorceress from Games Workshop, a Dwarf, using the Dwarf Lord from Avatars of War, a Bretonnian Knight, using Finari from Reaper Miniatures and lastly the Elf from the original boxed game.

This seems to be a very strong party. Admittedly a party should always have a wizard for healing and other various spells. The Dwarf and Bretonnian knight do a lot of the combat and the dwarf I am playing I am starting to buff up as a Tank as he a lot of wounds and I have managed to get a ring of protection and some armour so he has a toughness of 7. This is more or less true for the Bretonnian Knight except they managed to get their hand on a very nice magic sword that add 3 attacks onto the base attack of the Knight. The wizard has a variety of healing, buffing and destruction spells that help in a variety of situations. Lastly the elf is an all rounder having managed to get his paws on a decent bow that increases his ballistic skill and two types of special arrows to help against certain foes.

I could go on in more detail, but I think I have probably bored you guys to death as it is. As I have previously mentioned I have a bit of a treat for you next week, so I am hoping that makes up for my latest slackness. Until next time out may the Plague Father bless everything that you do.