One of the friends I play card games with is a huge Power Rangers fan, and he picked up the "Heroes of the Grid" boardgame, giving me a chance to try it out. As regular readers will know, I'm not much of a fan myself, but appreciate the appeal, such as it is, but a boardgame full of superhero miniatures will always get my attention. Sadly, for some reason the figures in Heroes of the Grid are around the 40mm mark, so probably not of use to many wargamers unless Marvel Crisis Protocol is your go-to.
This won't be much of an AAR, sorry, as the pictures uploaded in the wrong order and it's a bugger to fix, so I'll just be talking about the game and providing some commentary as I go.
Heroes of the Grid is cooperative, with an enemy AI mechanic based on this track of cards, the players can choose to "attack" the next card in sequence or a later one that perhaps will have worse effects. The Rangers typically act first, then play alternates, so choosing the best moves is a big part of the strategy.
I was playing as Zach, from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, whose abilities enabled him to sacrifice cards to power other attacks. Your deck of cards is also your health, so this play style made Zach risky but powerful. The Dragon Ball Z playmat is what I use for every card game, so has no particular meaning here.
At a certain point in the game, a "Villain" will arrive, signalling the final turns. We got Rita, who is the most powerful in the core game, so we lost pretty quickly after that. Even with the large size of the figures, the detail is pretty nice and I suspect they'd paint up well.
The all-important scale shot! Putty and Green Ranger next to a GW Underworlds Skeleton, about all I had to hand at work that wasn't a Space Marine or Reaper Bones.
Each turn, a number of enemies spawn in each location; if any location becomes too full it is denoted as "Panicked". If all locations become Panicked, the Rangers lose. This isn't too dissimilar from other co-op games like Pandemic, but we lost to a bad flip only a couple of turns into the game and that kind of spoiled it for me.
I just took this picture because it's a Power Axe, you know, like Warhammer.
The basic board at the close of the second turn, moments before the random card flip lost it for us. Rangers can travel to different locations, but can recharge Power by going through the Command Centre.
The start of the game looked pretty intimidating, but the Putties aren't too tough and decent teamwork clears them out nicely.
Obligatory box shot. There is a huge number of expansions for the game already, which makes sense given the dozens of Power Rangers teams around.
And being a miniatures gamer, I had to get an action shot, even if this was after we were soundly beaten.
I'm not big on custom dice for minis games, but for board games I don't mind so much. These would also work nicely for SuperSystem or Super Mission force if you wanted more utility out of the purchase.
After one game of Heroes of the Grid, I'm not terribly impressed, but mainly due to the random way in which we lost. Yes, I would have liked a resource for a couple of Power Rangers characters in 28mm, but I'll live for a little longer without them. What is there is good, especially if you're a fan, as the depth of characters is astounding for such a young game. From what I understand, the fan community is also pretty active, with lots of homebrew stuff out there and even new ways to play the base set. Unless my friend ropes me into a campaign of the game, I'm unlikely to revisit it here, though.
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