How did I end up 8 months behind on my painting updates? Well it all began when I jacked in my job and went freelance...Then took a new job, which I then left after 3 days to take an even better job, which has been an all consuming time suck, even if it has been a rewarding one... All of this turmoil has meant that painting and blogging have had to take a backseat to working and travelling. Right, let's get into this backlog! Starting with August! ISS Vanguard (7) We're still plugging away at ISS Vanguard. Here we have a couple of new enemy types, neither of which we've actually faced in our c ..read more

When I first heard the words Marvel Zombicide, I thought, hard pass. Nothing sounded more like a cash grab tie in than that. After all, Zombicide is about every day people who step up to become heroes in a zombie apocalypse, how do you put super heroes into that? Then I read the comics... I started with the first issue and ended up reading everything else. Marvel Zombies flips the script on Zombicide, quite literally, by having you be the zombies. Consumed by the hunger, your zombie heroes must rampage across the city, consuming innocent bystanders to stave off madness. While the game shares ..read more

Betrayal at House on the Hill was a game that was talked about a lot when I first entered the hobby, the quintessential halloween game, which has since been replaced with better modern classics like Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition. However, it was one that I always fancied trying out and when hasbro brought out the family friendly Scooby Doo edition I decided to grab a copy and see how it plays. Betrayal at Mystery Mansion has you take on the role of the Mystery Incorporated gang. You begin by choosing the type of haunt you'll face from one of 5 possible types. Each of these can lead to one o ..read more

With every game in existence getting a "Roll & Write" version these days it's hard to care about each and every one of them. However My City was always a game that intrigued me and a faster playing, shorter campaign seemed like something I might get to the table with the family or the Games Night crew. My City Roll & Build is a campaign played over 12 different scenarios, split into 4 chapters. However, before you get too excited about those "different scenarios" they may not be as different as you might think! For example, the first three episodes, the training wheels are very much o ..read more

Time to pay the rent! Our dungeon home is being invaded by pesky heroes but our troll landlord also wants his share of our treasure! Can we keep the heroes and bailiffs at bay? Keep the Heroes Out is an adorable little tower defence game with ten asymmetric player factions, twenty different scenarios and a fairly big problem of scaling difficulty. On your turn you play cards from your hand to take actions on the board. Each player faction works differently. For example the Dragon is a single powerful monster than can fly, so has many move cards, or shoot fire, so has many ranged attack cards ..read more

One of my most anticipated games of the last year was Freelancers, the tongue in cheek roleplaying board game in a box, based on the very popular Forgotten Waters. This one was always likely to be a win for me and sure enough I love it! Freelancers is a story, first and foremost. You begin by crafting your hero. Choose from one of 9 different fantasy races and 21 different classes. This is done by simply combining two sheets torn off the included pads. Players then fill in a few story prompts before reading aloud their heroes background and filling in the gaps with the answers they gave as th ..read more

Roll Camera is a cooperative worker placement game where I love the theme and the tongue-in-cheek humour that clearly comes from an industry insider, but that I found the experience just a little lacking. The base game of Roll Camera is essentially a solo experience split between multiple players, a fact that is evident from the way that dice can become locked as you assign them to work on set, limiting your fellow players to fewer workers. The base game compensates for this solo puzzle nature of the game by having minor player powers for each player and, arguably, the best thing in the game ..read more

"But it's cooperative" could actually be the byline for 2023 in gaming. Co-op games are on the rise and along with them are co-op variants of existing titles. One such game making the rounds last year was Mists Over Carcassonne, a co-op variant of Carcassonne that literally no-one was asking for... but one that is actually surprisingly good. When it was announced that a co-op version of Carcassonne was coming out I couldn't see how such a variant would even work, given that Carcassonne itself is a very cutthroat competitive game. In base Carcassonne players lay tiles into a central map and cl ..read more

Upper Deck are finally slowing down on the number of Marvel Legendary expansions they are putting out each year so one of the few to hit the UK shores in 2023 was Black Widow. This set focuses on bringing back a handful older mechanics while only introducing only new one, Unleash. The returning mechanisms are Divided cards, which allow you to play a card for one of two effects, generally making for some powerful heroes. Dark Memories, which require you to build a deck with multiple colours in your discard pile to trigger the effect. Dodge, which allows you to discard a card and draw a replace ..read more

Set thousands of years after the events of the base game, your tribe of humans must overcome new obstacles and face new dangers in Paleo A New Beginning. Gone are the tribal hunters of Paleo, in a New Beginning your humans are more civilised, discovering the benefits of farming and animal husbandry allowing them to plan for long term survival, rather than just making it to the end of the day. Of course, with these added benefits come new dangers too. A dangerous tribe, nocturnal beasts and a mountain of fire all threaten your humans as they try to survive in this new world. Paleo, A New Begin ..read more