Grabbed by the Balls

Hello people,

Sounds painful but more the fact that my multi-phased hobby rehabilitation kicked off last night as I got down to the club (Enfield Gamers) last night for the first meeting of the year.

Plenty of new faces and after a fair amount of obligatory banter, geek and otherwise, I got in my opportunity for a third ever game of DreadBall. A good starter on Phase 1 then :)

Waiting for Rich to finish loosing to Shaun I had a good look through Shaun's DreadBall box (KickStarter) and was mightily impressed by the quality of the product.

The hooter sounds as I desperately try to remember what comes next!


1st rush 2 point score.........

The rulebook is the now relatively standard high quality, super glossy, perfect bound offering that we've all become used to. Plenty of good fluff and full colour art to go with the rules which has also become expected.

I had been tempted to pick up an MDF pitch as I wasn't sure how good the standard offering might be given that Mantic have often been criticised for the quality of their card tokens.
I shouldn't have doubted as it's a nice thick high quality printed offering outdoing your standard Blood Bowl board by some margin.

I had also read that the figures are true 25mm and relatively challenging to the regular GW painter. This proved to be the case for the former. I find myself to test the latter supposition.

 

...quickly followed by a 4 pointer!

It having been a good couple of months since last playing my previous games I honestly had to get Rich to remind me how things kicked off (groan....) and there was the odd prompt and explanation along the way.

Having said that I was very quickly playing my third ever game with the full rules, cards , special events etc with no reference to the rulebook what-so-ever.

As much as I'm an "experienced" gamer and prefer to learn by playing rather than reading I do think that this is testament to the smooth and streamlined nature of the game, it's very intuitive. I like that.

So, Phase 3 motivation project is DreadBall then :)

Tsunami strike back......

Back at the game I threw caution into the wind and with the dice in my favour quickly stormed into a 6 point lead when gaining a 7 point lead is an auto-win!

Having just bigged myself and / or the game I did then make a series of noob tactical errors as Rich fought back with his superior knowledge and experience of the game. Even with that undoubted advantage he only just manged to draw the scores to level before producing a super-jam special plat card only last rush score to steal the game.

Plenty of good lessons learnt for my good self which is no bad thing and all in the very best manner.

....to steal the game in overtime!!

So I had fun, learnt some new tricks and got myself well back into the gaming saddle. Good stuff.

 

Mr Christian, my soon to be housemate, also made the trip down for the night and left clutching Shaun's loaned copy of the game. I'm scheduled to move in on Sunday. Sunday night we're playing DreadBall. Phase 2 good to go!

 

All good stuff which leaves with a warm fuzzy geek-glow.

 

Merry New (Gaming) Year indeed :)