King of the Hill (Reign in Hell)

Today I zipped over to a mate's house and we played our first game of Reign in Hell. It was a lot of fun, actually more fun than I had anticipated. It is a rare delight to be able to play a game outside on a sunny Monday late in summer - that was most definitely not hellish whatsoever.

The game's setting (Demons fighting over souls in Hell) provides an adequate excuse for painting some war dollies and rolling dice with a mate - I wrote about it some here. 

We ended up playing the King of the Hill scenario using the game board I made (detailed here). That was surprise #1: all we had was a 22x30 inch board with a 6x6 area in the middle (aka the hill) and no other terrain, yet the game was a hoot. Why? In part, it's because there's no ranged combat i.e. it's all melee. Also, this particular scenario was objective-based, so the focus was on achieving the objective, only incidentally beating each other up.

What struck me as interesting? Each of the minis only had a handful of characteristics and one or two special powers. For example, my cabal included a Tentacle Beast, whose unit card looks like this:

The Evolution elements only become part of the game once a few campaign games have been played - Units gain experience and can upgrade. So having so few things to keep in mind means you can concentrate on the gameplay. The gameplay is very straightforward with each unit being activated once per turn, but the sequencing and order are quite fluid. Units have 3 basic actions available to them and action resolution typically involve rolling d6s. After a few mistakes, we got the hang of it and were really enjoying the game by the end of the session.

I suspect there will be a few more!

Here's the game board with demons ready to kick off.

 

Rob's Cthulhu-inspired cabal were disturbingly lovely

We initially used dice as tokens to remember who had been activated
during the turn, but later found little markers that did the same trick
but just looked a lot nicer.

Much of the action was focused on "the Hill" - there were
lots of combos being created to outwit the opponent.

Rob's cabal suffered a number of casualties (is that even possible
in Hell??) but they all pulled through to fight another day.