Earth Reborn

I made a few posts about Earth Reborn before but I never got around to saying anything about the game itself.




And that is an oversight on my part because the game is AWESOME.



It is a skirmish game that uses only a handful of miniatures as well as a game board. It is set in a post apocalyptic Earth where two factions have risen in the former USA to battle for dominance. The first faction is NORAD a sort of futuristic American military and the Salemites occultist necromancers. It doesn't take itself to seriously and its packed with awesome devices like radio jammers, jet packs and zombie serum.



My friend Damian and I played around twenty games of it when he came to visit and we had an absolute blast. It invariably creates crazy situations and cinematic show downs. We unfortunately made a few mistakes that might have made it play even better than it did. This was particularly true of combined actions which would have made it much easier to everything from hacking video surveillance to torturing people (all options in the rules). It also seemed to suffer a little from balance issues. In the training scenarios it seemed like NORAD was completely invincible. In the randomly generated scenarios it seems like the Salemites were unstoppable. This didn't tend to matter so much because even losing is ridiculous fun but it will be interesting to see how this can be improved when we play the rules we messed up correctly.

Here is a photo of the game in play.

Essentially you get a random selection of command tiles and a certain number of command tokens every turn. Each tile allows you to do different things to different levels. For example you might have a tile that will allow you fire twice close combat once and move three times. You can buy additional tiles in a variety of ways that will help you out. It is a good system that lets you take whatever actions you need to.

The game is great and seems to be endlessly repayable. It creates an air of excitement and tension from the very first turn. You never know when someone is going to blow a whole pile of command tiles and ninja bolt in and plant a bomb, or launch a missile or whatever other crazy objective you might have drawn. It's not a campaign game so people tend to get splattered fairly regularly. Casualties don't tend to matter tremendously compared to victory conditions although with such small forces even losing one man is a significant loss.



I'll definitely play this again and would suggest anyone who is keen for a fun tactical game that focuses more on cinematics than realism to check it out.

Photos

A few quick snaps from the DoB tournament. Ill bring order to this chaos later...

Sigurd comes up aces for the first and only time

Andy's Turks see the hand of god in their good fortune

The battle rages

Jim's awesome camp. I'm modelling up a version that is on fire for next time.

The Byzantine's advance towards defeat

Hossenfeffer intervenes

Seriously, Wayne's terrain is ridiculously awesome

Crusaders V Normans?

Some awesome knights

Closer

Knights

Mr Penny's archers facing a spot of bother

Sigurd retreating from a horde of Turks.

Sigurd!

Here is a quick picture of my warlord for Day of Battle, the mighty Sigurd of the Varingian Guard. He will be leading a force of Byzantines in our tournament. Quail in terror, or prepare a bribe to avert his wrath.

Unfortunately this is taken on a laptop webcam so its sub par to say the least.

Back to it!

So it's been AGES since I've managed to update the blog. Mostly this is because we have recently bought a house! The house part itself was great but the moving/cleaning of the old place was less phenomenal. However, we were finally ensconced in our new place and then my parents arrived for their annual visit. This is always something of a stressful time. They stay for about a month with is a LONG time to have guests in your house who need to be entertained and looked after. Combined with working a forty hour job and doing a few project around the house this has SERIOUSLY cut into my hobby time. As if this series of disasters were not bad enough my camera recently met with a wet and mysterious death! I'm also studying for the next in an interminable series of degrees which occupies a good deal of time




So to recap, no time, no money and no camera.



So much for the negatives, now to the positives.



I have a new house! This comes complete with a full basement which is slated to be turned into a batcave (this is essentially a man cave with family applications). I will hopefully be doing some designs of my dream game room in the near future although financially it might take a while to actually materialize. The current state of the basement is sufficient that I can unpack and access most of my minis and equipment which previously was all boxed up which has made it much easier to organize my mountain of half completed projects.



I've also been spurred to action by my local gaming scene. We have an annual meeting and swap meet coming up on the 28th of July and I'll be participating in a Day of Battle tournament. This is a medieval small scale battle game that has been produced by a guy in our local area. I wouldn't have normally gone in for it except for a neat feature of the rules that requires you to design and personalize your own warlord. This lead to a few write ups of character histories on our forums and the creative trash talk that set in really sold me.



I have absolute no figures for this period (25-32 mm medieval) and a few of our local guys are generously brining extra troops to allow us to play. IN order not to be a complete beggar, and to have an appropriately characterful warlord, I'm putting together a unit for that. This has gotten me back to the painting table in a big way. Once its done I will hopefully put up an article featuring this unit.



I've also been inspired recently by the Meeples and Minatures pod cast. I normally listen to a lot of audio books and lectures but I was having a bit of drought in this area and needed some audio to listen to in the car. I had heard Meeples and Miniatures' name kicked around in a few online forums so I decided to check it out. I have to say I really love it, it keeps my mind focused on gaming and is really really interesting. To be honest it makes me want to spend an enormous amount of money on miniatures and board games because the narrator's enthusiasm is incredibly contagious.



All these positives still leave me with the issue of being camera less (except for my wife's laptop camera) which has to be addressed.