Friday, September 11, 2015

Axles and Alloys 2 and Magic: The Gathering Arena of the Planeswalkers


fg and I tried out the Axles and Alloys 2 rules last night. The rules are easy to remember after a couple of rounds, but we found that with only one vehicle per player and a big, largely empty playing area, play was pretty straightforward. We will probably give this a try again once he has painted his vehicles.

The photo above shows the dashboard I made for the game and some of the markers. I wanted a way to track the speed with some sort of a dial, and after some googling (including on how to create a speedometer face using Excel) I found a couple of blank speedometer faces which ran up to about 270 or 280; I reckoned that by using a factor of 10 I could use them to track the speeds of each vehicle. The indicator needle is a hair-pin, which I passed through a hole made in the centre of the face.

The photo below shows a close-up of the Dropped Weapons markers I made. The top shows an oil slick (made by tracking some wood stain across the base), dropped spikes (bits from the Pegasus Models barbed wire kit), and mines (fingernail art gems painted green).


After Axles and Alloys we played two games of Magic the Gathering: Arena of the Planeswalkers. This is a rather typical "wizard war" kind of game where the players play opposing wizards and their henchmen. The production quality is high, and the artwork on the cards are very good, which really add to the feel of the game. Each school of spell is also very distinctive and offer many tactical possibilities. I really enjoyed playing the Mind Mage.


My only criticism is that in the basic set the spells are rather limited and fixed and there is no advancement for the wizards. Hopefully with future expansions there are more spell cards and there can be some deck-building involved. I will be keeping an eye on this range.

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