Just a gentle competition reminder

        
      

Yep this is just a gentle nudge to remind people that I am still running my Dark Age story competition, although you don't have very long to get your entries in now. Yep, you've got roughly 24 hours. I know a number of you started writing your stories, but haven't yet submitted them, so this is me just reminding those of you who started to finish them off. I haven't exactly had a flood of entries yet so there is a good chance that if you knock together a good story ending you could be in with a shot of winning yourself something. You can see a list of the prizes here. Any way good luck to those of you who do enter. Peace out!

Review: Dark Age Outcasts Starter Box

 

This is the first of two starter set reviews that I'm going to be doing for Dark Age. The outcasts are in fact the newest faction in Dark Age, well... until the Core were released that is. So they should in theory be the most accomplished of the miniature ranges on offer in Dark Age. Also they're the faction that I chose to go with, mainly on the back of the Mongo miniature, which sadly isn't part of the starter set. As with the Dark Age Apocalypse Rulebook and the Dark Age Forcelist Book, this Outcast starter set was sent to me as a review copy. So make of that what you will.

Product description

Well inside the box you will get 8 miniatures in all, 3 Scuts, 3 Wasteland Warriors, 1 Bully and 1 Brute. These will range from single one off sculpts, to some multi-part miniatures with some quite small details. The miniatures are made from a white metal and all in all there are some 27 components, ranging from huge hulking bodies to teeny tiny knee pads. Some of the pieces are really small so be careful when extracting them from their various packets as it's quite easy to drop them or have them go shooting off, forcing you to spend nearly an hour on your hands and knees searching for a tiny knee pad, that when you find it you aren't even sure where it's meant to go... not that this happened to me of course. Ahem. Any way, you also get seven 32mm round lip bases and one 40mm round lip base, as well as 4 character / unit cards, helpfully for the units in the starter box.

Just a gentle competition reminder...

  
  

Hello everyone, this is exactly what it says it is, it's a gentle reminder that currently I'm running in conjunction with the guys at Cool Mini or Not and Dark Age a story competition. You can read the original article here. We have just little over a month to run this competition as it will close on the 19th of November 2012, I'm not too afraid to admit that although we've had some entries already, we've not had as many as I thought we would... while that might be personally embarrassing for me, it does represent something of an opportunity for you lot. It makes it easier I guess to win, and while winning the nice miniatures and book is reason enough, if any of you are aspiring games writers etc. then it is an opportunity to get some of your writing actually published by a games company. Yep Dark Age will publish the completed story, with the conclusion by the winner on their website. If you aren't interested yourselves perhaps some of your readers might be, so perhaps some of you could pimp the competition out for me, I'd be really grateful. So here are the prizes in full again:

Dark Age Story Competition Prizes Turn Up

    
     

Yay!!! Competition Swag.

Well it's exactly like the headline suggests. I've got those prizes I told you guys about in my Dark Age Story Competition Article... except I have more than I originally thought I would:

• Dark Age: Devastation (expansion rulebook)
• 1x CORE Pathfinders
• 2x CORE Rends
• 1x blister of CORE Menials
• 1x Skarrd Nightmare Juggernaught
• 1x Skarrd Abomination

 
Yep you read that right a Skarrd Abomination has been added to the pile of swag that I've got to give away for the story competition. So hopefully that will give you guys further incentive to get your entries in to me here, so far they've been a bit slow, but I'm hoping that's because you're all taking your time to perfect your stories! I hope.

Review: Dark Age Apocalypse Forcelists Book

   
     

This review should have gone live yesterday, but I was trying to cheer a friend up who suffered a bereavement, so apologies for that. On Tuesday of this week  I reviewed the Dark Age Apocalypse rulebook, well today it's the turn of the Dark Age Apocalypse Forcelists book. It's a far bigger beast than the core rules, and is far more filled with that lovely fluff that many of us so enjoy. As with yesterdays review, this book was a review copy sent to me free of charge, I'm making this clear just for the sake of full disclosure, so you can judge my review with all pertinent information at hand.

The cover art in all its gory glory!

Product Description

As with yesterdays review of the Dark Age Apocalypse Rulebook, the Forcelists book is a full-colour hardback rulebook, that comes in at a whopping 356 pages long.  That's a pretty hefty tome if you ask me, and it is a very heavy book that you really won't want to be carrying around with you to clubs and tournaments. The pages are yet again satin finish... mmmm... satin... I'm still a fan of satin finished pages. The pages are this time crammed with fluff and some utterly fantastic artwork, plus there is a veritable bucket load full of unit profiles and rules. Everything currently available in the Dark Age universe in fact. If you like your games to have a strong and detailed background, history and setting then this book certainly ticks that box. Obviously it also provides the Forcelists for the games five main factions, the Forsaken, Skarrd, Brood, Outcasts and Dragyri.

Review: Dark Age Apocalypse Rulebook

Dark Age has a pretty visceral look about it, which isn't surprising considering the game was inspired by the Artwork of Brom. Speaking of Brom there is currently a highly successful Kickstarter campaign running for the production of a book of his works. The game tries to take his macabre and twisted creations as inspiration and then turn them into a brutal experience on the tabletop. As always I'll fess up right at the start, this product was sent to me free of charge to review after I did some research for an article introducing the game on this Blog. I wasn't sure I was going to like the game, but hey I thought I'd give it a blast as so many of my readers had asked me to take a look at it for them. Truth is I was reluctant to spend my money on it at first, so getting some review stuff really helped. I mean I have a lot of games to play right now and adding another didn't seem like a wise idea at first. Now? Well read on to see what I think of the game now.

Product Description

The Dark Age Apocalypse Rulebook is a 96 page full-colour hardback rulebook. Although there is a brief amount of fluff at the start of the book it is unashamedly full to the brim with crunch, or rules as 'normals' refer to them. So in effect it is 90 pages crammed with ways to play games of Dark Age, right from the basics as you'd expect, up to a full and extensive campaign system. The pages are a satin finish, and long-term readers of this Blog will know just how happy that simple pleasure makes me... yeah I'm a bit obsessed with my satin finished pages. I never claimed to be 'sane'.

Dark Age story competition

 

Right I told you all I'd consider doing some more competitions at some point in the future, well the future is now baby! But I'm not doing a prize draw again, in fact I won't be doing prize draws for some time. So for now I'm trying something a bit different. This might backfire horribly on me, and almost certainly will... but what the heck, I'm giving it a go. Below you'll find the start to one of my long winded, and badly written stories. However, I hope one of you can actually help me out, because I haven't finished it yet. What I require from you is to come up with a suitable ending to my yarn. So what are the rules? Because every competition needs rules! Right? They're as follows:

1. You must write an ending to the story 'Sandstorm' below.
2. You must then email this ending to me at this email address TheFrontlineGamerBlog@gmail.com, with the following in the email topic 'Dark Age story competition entry'.
3. Although Dark Age is a no holds barred sort of game I'd ask you to keep it 'clean' people. No unnecessary swearing or auto-erotic asphyxiation!!! I'll accept 15 rated entries, but R rated hardcore porn and gratuitous splatter fests might not be accepted. I will email you ASAP to let you know if I think you've gone too far.
4. Entries must be no longer than 1500 words. I'd love for it to be longer, but if we have 100 entries... well you do the maths that's a lot of reading and a lot of words.
5. You do NOT have to be a follower of my Blog to enter this competition. Although it'd be nice if you did follow me. I'm a truly spiffing fellow, and a thoroughly nice chap. Plus I think my Blog's awesome... although I accept I might be a tad biased.
6. All entries must be submitted by 12:00 noon GMT on the 19th November 2012. I'll then have a chat with Bryan at Cool Mini or Not about when we'll annouce the winners, and then we'll let you guys know. I think this gives you all plenty of time to get a decent story ending together so late submissions will not be accepted. Sorry!

The entries will be judged by myself and Bryan Steele of Cool Mini or Not / Dark Age / Ravage Magazine fame, and 'Multitasker Extraordinaire' and all round top bloke. So what do you get? Well the winning entries will win, unsurprisingly, Dark Age swag. The precise Dark Age swag is:

• Dark Age: Devastation (expansion rulebook)
• 1x CORE Pathfinders
• 2x CORE Rends
• 1x blister of CORE Menials
• 1x Skarrd Nightmare Juggernaught

Which sounds pretty cool right? I haven't yet decided how I'm going to divide the swag, it might all go to one outstanding entry, or more likely it'll be split between a number of good entries, with the winner obviously getting the lion's share. Also the completed story with the winning entrants conclusion will be posted on the Dark Age website. Pretty cool right? Well I hope you think it sounds pretty cool, because I think it sounds pretty cool. Any way on to my short story...

Games that currently intrigue me: Dark Age

  
    

Before I start prattling on about this game I need to inform you all that when I contacted the guys at Dark Age Miniatures to ask some questions about the game they decided they wanted to send me some mini's and the rulebooks. So as always keep that in mind as you read this 'first look' at the game. I personally don't think I'm that easily bribed, but you might have differing opinions. Right I'm going to be honest with you here, the whole post apocalypse road warrior thing has been done to death in many walks of life. Be it comic books, films, novels or indeed wargames. The dark, destroyed, dystopian future where humanity has descended into a mass of unruly, brutal sects hell bent on clubbing each other to death, with whatever household implements, or piece of masonry they have to hand... and then probably eating their victim. We've all seen it and we're all I'm sure familiar with many of the themes. Sometimes it's done really well, and other times it's done not so well. Part of me loves the whole genre, and another part of me detests that many don't try to do anything new with it or spin it in a different way.

Concept art mutilation Juggernaut

So for me Dark Age sat of to the side along with two other skirmish level games, Eden and Urban War, amongst others, as products that were potentially a bit samey and covering similar ground, certainly in terms of broad brush strokes and a few visual ques and themes with the miniatures. So when it came to looking at them for these articles I knew I'd have to decide on one and just run with it. This was because I couldn't really muster the will to go out and learn the differences between the three products to decide if any of these post apocalypse skirmish games were for me or not. In short I benched them all, this despite many of the miniatures from the ranges looking cool and appealing to me personally. I decided I'd stick with games I could distinguish from others easily and shoot for them first. Then I started getting into the swing of things with this series of articles on 'games that intrigue me'... and I started getting requests from readers to cover certain games. A few raised my eyebrows, as quite frankly I wasn't expecting them to be of much interest to many people.

Amongst that list, nay, right at the top of that list was Dark Age, while none of its post apocalyptic competitors have received any requests at all. It was almost a two pronged assault actually, what happened was I got a lot of people asking me if I had looked at Dark Age as they were interested in playing it and would appreciate my thoughts on it... and the second group were a very small (but vocal) handful of readers who played the game and told me I should cover it because it's a great game. Now I'll be honest, had that small group of devotees sounded like slavering poltroons with barely a brain cell between them I might have skipped over the game again, but they didn't. They actually sound like grizzled wargaming veterans, like me, and the more I prodded away at who they were and their gaming experience, the more they started to sound like me. They told me I'd enjoy the game and that I should at least get myself a copy of the free quickstart rules. So yeah I became intrigued...