The Others: 7 Sins Unboxing Part 2 - Core Set

Part 1 of the unboxing showed what was in this mammoth Kickstarter, now we look at what we get in those boxes. We should start, obviously, with the Core Box set

On opening, this is crammed to the brim with gaming goodness!

First up is the rulebook, which is unsurprisingly very Zombicide in its presentation. It looks good, layout is clean and uncluttered and I'm sure it explains everything well...but that's the scope of a different blog.

You get tokens, though as you'll have seen from part 1, we have the plastic replacements for these in any case.

You get mission cards with map tile layouts

Under all of that are the minis...

But first we have dice and cards. 

So let's deal with the elephant in the room first...or at least, the elephant-sized monster! The largest thing in the Core set is Pride, a betentacled monstrosity with claws and suckers galore. Its striking a threatening pose and the sculpt is nice and fluid, it looks like those tentacles would be constantly in motion, writhing and flailing;

Detail on this model is great, and the pre-assembly has been done nicely. It really is crying out for a really good paint job, and will definitely be a central "wow" piece.

Next up are the other monsters for Pride, the sin of Sloth, members of the "Hell Club" (the figures in red/pink) and corrupted nuns, hobos and doctors (the figures in the brownish-grey at the top)

Let's start with the remainder of Pride, since we've already done the avatar. Here's the controller;

It's a really nice figure with a feeling of Johann Kraus from Hellboy II. We then have the Abominations. You get two of each of the three sculpts, which are all great figures in their own right, and they reflect elements of the avatar, which binds them together nicely;

We then move onto Sloth, which has the following Avatar, a sort of slug-human monster hybrid;

The controller for Sloth is next, a quite unobtrusive guy in a raincoat;

The abominations for sloth continue the slug-beast theme, these being massively mouthed, grasping creatures. Again you get two of each of the three sculpts, and these are pretty substantial models:

We then depart from the grey plastic to go to a pinkish-red and the members of the Hell club. These have a heavy SnM vibe, but I think they gel together well and overall the detail and posing is good, even though they're no my favourite genre of baddies.

Creepy orb dude and what might be his wife...get their tailor - he's big on rigid plastic wearables....

Although the female Hell club figures here are not wearing a great deal, it fits with the theme and they're not doing anything stupid, like pouting or trying to be girly. They're just into SnM at Hell club, y'know?

The creepy twins....yeah...

The best figure in the Hell Club set set for me is the biggest brute - you said what? No, I never said you looked like you were wearing a skirt....sir.

And the last set of "baddies" are the corrupted. First we have a set of corrupted religious types;

Next up are the hobos;

I particularly like the guy with the noticeboard! He takes us to the doctors and nurses;

Thus we come to my first issue and disappointment with the set - the nurse, despite being horribly corrupted, is still a bit "TnA in your face" for me. The nurse really doesn't need such large or prominent (and very visible) breasts.

The doctors expressions are a bit too "grinny" for me as well - they just come across a little too comic, but this is a minor grumble.

Finally in terms of figures, we have the characters. There are 7 (one has standard and wolf forms), and are generally of very high quality, with a couple of disappointments which I'll mention individually.

First we have this sword-wielding lass, who is a much better female figure - she's feminine without being overdone or slutty. I think she'd make a great DnD figure too!

OK, the next one is again a bit TnA, but despite this I rather like it, she's not sexualised in a vulnerable way and she looks like she'd kick ass. Detail is great and the painted examples I've seen look amazing.

The next guy has some good elements, and not having his large rifle weapon in a firing position is a bit different, but I just wish the figure was a bit more dynamic - the gun is great and the pose doesn't sell it well, making it look awkward.

Then we get to demon-dude, who I like a lot more - the musculature is great, he looks like a real brute, and having a huge chained hook as a weapon is unusual to say the least! He looks ready for action and I'm sure he'll look great painted. The only minor downer for me is that I wish he didn't have braces - I mean, they were NEVER going to fit him, so why would he bother?

OK, from one of my favourite hero figures to my least favourite - this is what CMON often do with female figures, and I don't get it, really/ So here you have a hyper-sexualised girl with a tiny skirt and scooped blouse, too much exposed flesh, a ditsy pose and expression..but wait! She also has tentacles coming out of her arms, so that's ok, right?

No, no it's not. Oscar hated this figure, so do I and I know it'll be the last one used of all of them. Massive miss for me, and disappointing given the quality of the rest of the set. I could understand it more if this figure was in an add-on box with other similar sculpts, so that I could just ignore them. As it is, however, she's in the core box and I think it's a poor example to set.

OK, from a low to a higher point - other than the rather silly over-sized sickle-sword (not sure what else to call it!) I really like this guy. The braces here are forgivable, they're in tune with the rest of him, but they make the braces on the demon dude look weird, I mean, is this some sort of club? Despite that, what's even cooler about him, is that he's a werewolf, so you get him in two versions....

The werewolf pose is interesting because it's not the standard kind of werewolf we're used to seeing, baying at the moon or raising over-sized paws to strike...he's got that odd sword thing, and he's pointing...this has intelligence, he's not just a beast, and I like that take - it's different.

So I'll end with a real paradox for me, because this figure is both my favourite and greatest disappointment. On the one hand, he's a cool, dual-wielding guy in a trench coat, so casual he just walks around with his weapons at his side....but then you look at those guns and...wtf? His handgun is fine, but what happened to the uzi-styled autopistol? It looks like it was cut from a sheet of blank Styrene! I think it looks pretty bad, and detracts from the detail and look of the model overall. Given the look and detail of the other heroes, I think this is a pretty odd oversight. It's bad enough that I may either replace the gun or cut it off entirely - he'd work with just the handgun after all.

OK, so figures done, we round out the box with cards for everyone and the game map tiles.

Phew! That's a lot of stuff you get in the core box, and we've not even touched the Kickstarter freebies or the Apocalypse expansion set yet...more on those in the next posts...

The Others: 7 Sins Unboxing Part 1

The Others: 7 Sins was a Kickstarter I backed way back as a late pledge, simply because I loved the grotesque nature of the minis and I like the gameplay of Zombicide, another CMON release (with Guillotine Games). It was supposed to ship in March, but delays brought it to July, then it delayed again and the South Korean shipping firm that pledges were on went into Liquidation, the most affected being the one supplying UK pledges....that meant that eventually I gave up on looking for updates, just accepting that it would arrive whenever it chose to!

Now I was in Germany all last week, but as I checked my personal emails on the Monday evening after arriving at the hotel, what did I see but a shipping notification...cool, I would get the package soon! When I checked, the tracking info said it had already been delivered. That meant 4 more agonising days knowing it was sitting at home whilst I was several hundred miles away...Aaarrgghh!

So on my return the first thing Oscar and I did, despite both being exhausted, was to open the box and delve inside....here's what we found....

First, the box is pretty massive - here's Oscar hiding behind it for scale (he's as tall as me now, so no children were harmed in the making of this unboxing!)

Opening the box it is pretty packed to the brim, with only a couple of air-pockets in the top to stop stuff shifting about

On the top of the pile are the plastic upgrade to the tokens that come in the main game. These look nice and clear, and look to be enhancing the game experience

We also plumbed for the optional Art Book

We then get a box of extras for the Apocolypse upgrade...

...along with the Apocolypse expansion box itself

I stuck on extra plastic wounds and corruption markers - I thiunk these will be useful in any number of games beyond this one

Some extra dice...

...and the other 5 sins that aren't in the core game, plus Beta and Omega team.

The core set seems quite small compared to everything else by comparison!

The other sins....

And the other characters;

So this is the complete initial unpacking of the shipping box - here's the total haul;

That's quite a lot of stuff! Next time I'll look at the core set and Apocalypse expansion, and show why we backed this Kickstarter in the first place...gruesome but beautifully detailed minis!

Fanstorm Armada - Background technology...Weapons & Shields

Hello again to another post on background for Fanstorm Armada. This time I'm going to be talking about technology, since that underpins a lot of the writing as well as game effects that are used in any game. I started this waaaay before I became involved with Spartan games, and I kept it bubbling ever since. It really came out of wanting to create a better ship customisation tool than existed in v1 at the time, and then disappeared in v1.5 (which was a shame since it fostered a lot of community involvement, creativity and discussion).

The first part of this was weapons technology, since that is a pivotal part of the game. Although there were small hints as to the technologies involved, like Dindrenzi using railguns, Aquans using lasers and the dirty Terrans using nukes...those dirty, dirty terrans....This is a bit like saying the US military uses missiles, ships and aircraft in its military - it's not really engaging. So I started looking at weapon development by looking at my ship construction, and I derived this from the physical models and the stats at the time.

A prime example are the mass-drivers on the Terran Battleships and Dreadnoughts - there are two of these, so its possible to reverse engineer the stats of a single one assuming that weapons "link" internally in the same way they do if ships in a squadron do. This makes sense, since multiple weapons on a single ship do anyway (think broadsides and turrets or multiple broadsides and so on). As it happens, this works out quite nicely for the terran main weapons - not quite so well elsewhere because it wasn't thought of in the model design phase - models are designed on the "rule of cool" rather than hard stats, though when I was in the FFG Chris (the model designer) did usually get the stats before finalising designs so that they aligned - something which i also think is important...model stats should reflect how the model looks.

Now the document I present to you is a WIP which I shelved because of other commitments and the likelihood of it ever being officially implemented...now of course I am free from such strictures so I can let you all see this little view on my mindset and I will update it to make it relevant to the current/future rules (Fanstorm v1). So here it is, my views on weapon development in the FA universe, part 1 v1;

Weapons in FA

Next a few musings on shields, since that's another underpinning technology of several races. This is a bit harder to make seem "real" since the underlying principles are, of course, much more fiction than science. Still, putting something down on paper seemed like a good idea

Shields in FA

Another area that is hugely overlooked, yet pivotal, in FA is the concept of the Foldspace drive. Why is this so important? Well, the workings of this drive determine the size and nature of the conflict in the FA universe, since this will determine how communication works, what the combat radius of a ship is, tactics employed etc. This also has to mesh with things like in-game mechanics of Fold-Space entry, Fold-space escape and battle-shunts. It also has to explain why the Terrans abandoned their wormhole network, which seems like a pretty big deal - instantly travelling from one system to another vs spending time in foldspace...

I posted on the Spartan Games community about this as Spartan Alex, but as "my thoughts" rather than canon, since it wasn't an official Spartan announcement. I haven't yet collected these together in a conherent document, but it quite neatly deals with most of the above issues (it being incredibly laborious and random to get any official sanction on anything). This also explains the existence, size and shape of Fathom's Reach and the Storm Zone, and the border zone between the Zenian League and the Kurak Alliance. It was also essential for developing my narrative for the ongoing direction of FA, which would incorporate the Leviathan class ship - so more on that in another blog post :-)