11. WHQ - Cursed City

The models look really great individually! All the characters are really great sculpts, but some of them don't quite do it for me, they just seem a bit too AoS-ish. Notably Dagnai Holdenstock, the Duardin, and Cleona Zeitingale the missionary. I'm tempted to replace these with an older Warhammer Dwarf Engineer and Mordheim Sister of Sigmar, respectively. Also, Gorslav the Gravedigger just seems a little out of place aesthetically. Cool model, but seems to fit more within a horror video game than the style that GW is building.

All the enemies are great, the new aesthetic of undead looking a little more Eastern European is really awesome! However, the zombies are a little bit too detailed for me. I prefer the look of the soon-to-be-released zombies with less going on, so I might swap them out when they get released.

I'm keen to get the models painted up before starting the campaign, and like everything new, I want to take a lot of notes and produce a great story out of this campaign. Not sure how to do this yet, whether it will be on here, as a podcast or a youtube video. But somehow I'd like to document what the gang is doing and how they work their way through the city.

For now, I've set up a page for Cursed City works, and I'll keep this page free for the more editorial/review style of chat.

29/4/21

So I finally got my copy, and wow is it a full box! So much in there to unpack and look through. The sprues are absolutely full of minis and there's plenty of cards and terrain tiles. I was really impressed by the rulebook/quest book so far too, but I haven't really got stuck into them yet.

7/5/21 - First Adventure

We finally threw some models down and rolled some dice. It was good to finally get into it from my perspective as I've been thinking and reading about it a lot.

There were four of us in the game, 2 with a lot of Warhammer style experience and 2 newbies and all of us had great fun with it. It was a lot of work for myself trying to set up, teach and keep it all moving, but I think we got into a good rhythm. No one really took on the role of 'Leader' so everyone and anyone rolled dice or made decisions. This was good, but it also lacked decisiveness and cohesion and ended up really with just me telling people to roll for this or that. There really is a lot of extra stuff hanging around, and it takes up table space quickly. With the map built, hero cards, initiative track and doomsday clock, it's a pretty busy place. Then add in all the extra minis you need (which could be any of them), the hostiles cards, the tokens and card decks. It's a really hectic place. I'm trying to come up with a few ways of minimising the clutter and making things a bit easier to see for all players. I'm also keen to magnetise the doomsday clock and Ulfenkarn overview board as those tokens don't need much impetus before they disappear.

But as far as game play goes, it's a fun adventure. We played with Cleona, Glaurio, Emelda and Brutogg. I played perhaps a bit too fast and loose with Glaurio, getting him knocked down, then my Partner had to go, so I took over Cleona and almost got her killed off too. It was getting late and felt a little bit repetitive so we shortened the finish point to only 7 champions instead of 10. We also played around with the enemies too, trying to see what each did, and man those Vyrkos and Korsagi are scary! We also brought in level 1 hostiles instead of level 0, and spawned them from random gates.

It's nice that there's plenty of room to house rule, and I'm sure we'll make some new ones as we go through. It will be interesting to see if we stay with the same characters throughout the quest, or swap and change. It's nice that there's the freedom there, as we can also introduce other players if required.

We were also talking about perhaps having a player take on the role of the hostiles and the 'City' as well. Still rolling the dice for behaviour, but just having someone take ownership of those and target who they want to target involves another player and takes the burden away from us (or me really).

We're very excited to keep playing through the story and build up a bit of atmosphere around it as well. So I'm going to perhaps prepare a board for it to sit on. Then try and write small narratives that sit alongside each game. Nothing extravagant as I've found taking copious notes really takes me away from the game.

The group dynamic is nice, having two experienced gamers able to help out and do some of the heavier lifting in terms of rules etc is good, but too many gamers and this might get a bit tedious. It definitely feels like a game that needs to be played for the right reasons. Anyone taking this too seriously won't have a good time.

The other element that is somewhat frustrating with this is the dice. With the results of an attack being only a single success or fail, rolling blanks really is a let down. You could go a few turns rolling blanks and really not be engaged at all. It takes a fair bit of concious effort to enjoy those moments for what they are, but fluffing everything and having to wait until 7 other groups do their thing before you get another chance can be a long time. The odds of rolling blanks isn't bad, it's just that we managed to do that a lot!

And finally, as to which character I want to play with...? I still don't know. Glaurio was fine, was able to act at range and melee which is nice, but nothing made me love him yet. I'm sure I played him too agressively, and should have kept him back a little longer. I'm interested in trying a wizard type next I think, or perhaps Darrock the Witch Hunter