An evening at the club, and Dreadball

...and one of the many reasons I like our club :D

Talk about variety - last night we had:

Warhammer Fantasy
Dropzone Commander (must check this out sometime)
Dreadball (ditto, I have a team to paint)
WAB (playtesting for Carve Out A Kingdom)
Battlegroup Kursk
Bolt Action
Dystopian Wars (I think this got cancelled due to one player not being able to make it)
Battlefleet Gothic

Not bad for a Monday - we were impressively full - about 25 people.

Me? I spectated on the WAB for a bit, talked a lot about modding Chain of Command for a Falklands campaign with James (isn't modern technology fantastic when you can order a set of rules online and have them sitting on your tablet/phone inside 10 mins of starting the discussion!), and learned the mechanics for Dreadball.

On the latter? I know I'm late to the party here, but... Very very nice system. Jake Thornton would appear to have a knack for game design and manipulation of probabilities (which as a probabilities geek, appeals to me). I might have to start a second series of articles to look at some of the neat tricks he uses. The core system is based on rolling a number of d6 to score successes against a target number: some rolls you need 1 success, some you need more than your opponent. Neatly, if you get twice as many successes as you need, you get something Good - usually a bonus activation for that figure.

Also, 6s 'explode': i.e., any 6s count as one success and reroll to see if you get another. If you get another 6, you roll again, and so on. This is great partly because it means nothing is ever completely impossible (just sometimes really unlikely!), and with good dice you can pull off some really neat plays.

A couple of other nice mechanics: you can 'stretch' a run by one hex by making one success on a skill roll. If you want to go a second hex, you need another roll with two successes, etc etc. The throw/catch mechanic is nice - you get as many dice to catch a pass as you make successes on the throw. (Something the Vikes QB last night could have learned from!).

To add to the fun, you get a pool of coaching dice that you can add to any roll, but when they're gone, they're gone. All in all, it makes for a very neat system, where you have a lot of freedom of action and whether to take risks, without feeling completely ruled by random fate. I look forward to a proper game when I get my team painted up!