First Batman game thoughts.

Played my first game of the Knight Models Batman game last night with the good gentlemen Pulp Citizen. It was immensely fun and after pondering the game somewhat today plays in my opinion very much like the cartoons play out with various members being stunned and knocked out. One thing I'm learning is how many diverse enemies Gotham City has as a lot of these villains etc I'd never heard of before until this game came out lol.

It was only a small game I neglected to taking any photos sorry. We played a Plunder Scenario I took all my Penguin Crew (They got quite a bit of extra gear mainly because of Penguin adding on extra cash) vs Black Mask and his crew.

Penguin Crew

Penguin
Titan Blue Penguin
Royal Penguin (Ammo Clip, Nightvision Goggles and Grapple Gun)
Blue Penguin Shield (Titan Does)
Penguin Emperor

Vs

Black Mask Crew 

(Totally forgot what gear PC took as we selected it at the time not beforehand)
Black Mask
Riddler
Goon 02
Prisoner 03
Prisoner 04



What I picked up about the game

The game itself is pretty cool its always set at night time so you characters only have a certain vision range. But whats cool is you randomly roll up a number of lamp posts at the start that give out a 10cm radius of light. If your character is in that radius then the can be seen from anywhere on the board. Also a quantity of  Sewers are randomly rolled for allowing sort of teleporting across the board but there is a 2 turn delay before your character pops up. Grates can be blocked as well.

Activation is determined by first drawing a token unseen from a bag and the colour determining who wins. They then get to choose whether to move one of there crew first or second etc. That person then moves a member of there crew and play reverts to the other player to move one of theres.

Only weird thing (well something new to me) there is a sort of planning phase before you start each turn where you pre allocate your Will tokens across Movement, Special Attack and Defend these allow you to perform various actions at a cost of said token. This is kind of cool as it makes it more tactical so your sort of restricted by your plan as to what you can do. Certain characters such as the Riddler has rules that allow him to adapt to the turns events as they unfold.

I found it interesting that there different damage types stun and blood. Stun you can recover from over time blood you can't. Taking either damage reduces your Will per so many points of damage you've taken effectively causing your characters to be fatigued. Shooting is fairly straight forward.

I quite like the Blink rolls you get when shooting at people. For every piece of terrain between you and your target you get to roll a sort of save to see if its deflected depending on the type of terrain determines what you need to roll. Hand to hand combat is fun as well depending on how you spend you will you can defend and block peoples attacks (rolling dice of course) which is cool as it gives the impression of people scrapping.

Victory conditions can take some getting your head around. You pick 3 objectives each at the start and these are deployed along a central strip of the board. Different types have different rules (Ammo you spend a Special counter to replenish ammo stocks, Titan Cannister a titan does etc) but possession (Base to base contact) of an objective generates you VP points each turn. Now I won the game on VP last night 25-15 I think but this was mainly down to me snagging to of my objectives early on bagging me 5VP a turn for 3-4 turns and then holding up a great number of Black Masks crew with my Titan Blue Penguin. Don't get me wrong this was my first game and it a learning curve as well as PC trying out different elements for his crew that might be being taken to a tournament this weekend. The game seems to be about scoring victory points and you do score VPs for taking down the opposition but not as many as you get for the objectives. I think in bigger games its harder as you can contest objectives more easier as well as defend your own.



I made my own objectives but you can buy official ones which I think you need for the Official Torunaments.

I shall certainly be getting more into the Batman game I think firstly I'll expand the crew up to 300-350 rep and I'm very tempted to start a Law and Order crew.