Its hard to believe another week passed by, particularly when I look at what I worked on and what I have left to do. I had to get up earlier than usual for a couple of things this week, which meant I was more tired than usual so I decided to play it safe and keep working on the Arkham Organizer. I got a decent amount of pieces finished for it including the Neighborhood Connecter piece holder.
The Anomaly holder, which has a decent glow effect that I added.
The clue holder which has some nice engraving on it that you mostly can’t see when all the clues are placed inside.
And finally, the most creative piece I worked on is the investigator/scenario holder which has some nice engravings on it.
Here they are together on my hobby desk which looks like a Jackson Pollack painting because I’ve been so messy hobbying on it!
As much as that looks like, I’m still about halfway or maybe one third of the way done at this point. So this project is going to continue on for quite some time. There is part of me that wants to just keep working until its done. However, as I discussed, I really need to get moving on Lokaris and my plan is to pick that back up this week and see if I can’t move forward with it.
This week was somewhat exciting because I made a couple of acquisitions. I bought some more Monsterpocalypse minis for the diorama. I’ll share those down the road when I paint them. They’re small and won’t take long to crank out. I also spent a little bit of the money I made selling the Goblin Town army to get this big boy.
It is limited to 299 copies so I really wanted to grab a copy before it sells out. I opened and inspected it and everything looks nice on the sculpt so I’m very happy with the purchase and look forward to painting it in five years or so as I get caught up on my display painting backlog. I’ve got three display projects to start and two that I’ve started and need to finish at this point, which is a bit more than I would like, truthfully.
And finally, I have the long promised “report” from playing Hellboy again. I was in an experimental mood when playing Hellboy this time because I tried two different things with somewhat interesting results. In the first game, I tried using only human investigators, because I’d never done so before and because I’ve more recently painted enough that I can finally field a team of them. For this attempt, I selected Professor Broom, Kate Corrigan, and Bud Waller. Two of three have decent shooting ability and as a group they’re strong at obtaining clues so I had some hope that it might work on an easier scenario.
Unfortunately, the one area they are weak in, melee combat, proved to be a problem. The game started off okay and I was able to handle the first room or two but then I got a nasty Doom card, Unseen Assailant which spawns a stealthy minion, in this case a frog that can only be killed in melee. I had to burn an expensive item, best used on a boss, to deal with it.
The real problem though was jamming weapons. Both Bud and Kate had their pistols jam/run out of ammo which caused the damage on them to start piling up. If you haven’t played Hellboy before, there is a blue die which has all but one side with positive effects, if you roll a skull while shooting, you almost always fail to hit anything and if you are firing a ranged weapon, you then have to then spend two action cubes to reload. It is always costly but when you’re dealing with fragile characters, it means life or death. Ultimately, this was the undoing of Bud and then Kate. I conceded at that point because Professor Broom can’t damage enemies almost at all and he was the only one still standing.
After a very quick defeat, I decided I’d experiment a bit more but in a different manner. For the second game, I decided to try using two agents for the first time in a long time. In the rules, it says this is how you play solo. Since it was already setup, I did the same case and I decided to use Roger and Abe Sapien. Abe is a great all around character. He can pretty much do everything, except defend against enemies well. Roger is a tank and has great melee and defense. The problem is that Roger expends energy with each attack and so his attacks become weaker and weaker over time, until you rest and recharge him. Rest advances the enemy timer (which summons the boss quicker and causes you to lose essentially) so you have to do so carefully. I’ve never been able to get Roger working in a way that makes me want to pick him over Hellboy and was curious if I could change my fortunes here at all.
I was cruising with Roger and Abe through most of the scenario until the boss spawns. For this case, it is Ghostly Rasputin who can’t be killed and you have to help a B.P.R.D. agent off the board which takes quite a lot of time as you slowly move each turn. Rasputin is trying to kill you each turn in the meantime. The problem I ran into with Roger was that he was low on energy right before the boss and I didn’t have a chance to recharge him before Rasputin. Once the boss spawns, you can’t rest any longer as well. Rasputin made things worse by spawning 5 frogs in total and eventually, Roger couldn’t damage them any longer which guaranteed that we couldn’t win, even with Abe nearing the exit.
So this experiment didn’t work even if it was a fun game up until the very end. I would have won with a third investigator, I reckon, and I was reminded that the game is balanced well for two investigators UNTIL you get to the boss which does not scale with the player count in any way. I struggle to remember all of the abilities of three characters (even two isn’t easy sometimes) but I still enjoy the game even with that and it doesn’t feel like it affects the outcome overall.
Most importantly, the terrain looks great and works well too. The only thing I noticed which was disappointing is that some of the corners of the cardboard tiles are looking a little worse for wear. I’m not sure if you can repair those much as they bend and split. Unfortunately, nobody has made any 3D printer STLs for that sort of thing either so in the future, I may have to look at other options like Dungeons & Lasers or maybe even scratch building some terrain tiles, if need be. It might not sound like it considering the results but I had a good time playing, especially the second attempt which was pretty engrossing. Hellboy is a great dice-chucking game. The strategy is pretty straightforward and so are the rules which makes it pretty relaxing to play.
That’s pretty much my week done and dusted. I will likely have a couple of surprise “bonus” articles coming up as neither focus on the wargaming hobby but still might be of interest to some of you. I look forward to carving out the time needed to write them so that I can can share them.
Kuribo's Painting 