Incursion heading for a re-release!

Nazi zombies and werewolves led by demented and scantly clad gals fighting heavily armored US soldiers who are wielding heavy machineguns and blowing bubbles with chewing gum? Yep that's Incursion in a nutshell. The game which have been in hiatus over the past year is heading for a re-release and update. Jim Bailey is back at the helm and intends to breathe life into the game once again.

Here's the message from Jim on the Grindhouse Games Facebook page:

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"Okay, let's open it up. Let's just kick the door down and get right into it, shall we? John Roberts and I are heading up a re-release of Incursion. Yeah, it's gonna be a Kickstarter. Cat's out of the bag now! If only I had that tool when I first set out to do this thing.. The game maintains a stratospheric 8 out of 10 on Board Game Geek and has a die-hard fanbase. Why? It's a damned good game and it's authentic. Don't take my word. Go read all the reviews, Go see what folks like Michael Barnes and Superfly Pete at Fortress Ameritrash have to say about it. Go see what Anatoli has to say about it. Go to the Grindhouse forums and read about it.

Though a world-class cast of artists and designers participated throughout two print runs and the SNAFU expansion, this was all funded initially by the sale of my golden-age comic book collection and thousands of wargaming figs I had painted. Now that we have Kickstarter, we can finally knock this deal up into the clouds where it belongs and shank evil monopoly big distribution at the same time.

Plastic: the holy grail. It's what we always wanted to do. Just never had the hundred grand up front we needed. Yeah, lots of boardgamers bought the game and played with cardboard standups and LOVED IT. Lots of miniature lovers bought the metal because it's heavy, hard, and beautiful and built their own 3d boards. We're going to keep/expand the metal line but also convert everything to boardgamer-friendly and horde-builder plastic. We have new missions, new models, and all sorts of other stuff planned. Metalheads and previous purchasers rejoice: we will craft the Kickstarter such that you can get ONLY the new stuff if you wish, and/or just go whole-hog and gorge yourself on plastic.

Though the game is a re-release with lots of new add-ons, upgraded components, MUCH higher quality print stock ,new art, and PLASTIC, getting to Kickstarter is still unfortunately a couple of months away. It's alot of work to plan and execute "one of the big ones". I hope you will join us for the ride.

Jim Bailey

Oh, here's Rosie

"

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I think this is a great opportunity and look forward to see what Grindhouse comes up with for their future Kickstarter campaign. You can follow the news and updates on their Facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Grindhouse-Games/139536469402885

If you are a against using that site you can always follow the main news andupdates which will be shared on my blog.

Make sure to check out the Incursion related battle reports and reviews on my blog HERE to learn more about the game!

Or jump straight into this two part AAR written and compiled as a comic (yes I'm quite happy with the result of this experiment)
PART 1   PART 2

Incursion:SNAFU game session AAR

Played two games of Incursion the other day with a friend, two scenarios from the SNAFU expansion. "Make it glow" and "The Hive" since we wanted to play the large scenarios that use two boards as you rarely get to do that.

I was pretty much caught up in the game itself so did not take notes, and the light wasn't the best which meant a lot of the pictures turned out badly.

In short the Allies won the "Make if Glow" scenario as they managed to put down both the Panzeraffe, Drohne and the Blitzhund at the loss of a single Bazooka A.P.E.
If they had not gained such an advantage in victory points then perhaps it would make sense for the Germans that still had Gretel and Ilsa to continue the fighting but it was rather impossible to make a comeback in points so we ended the game and picked another scenario instead.

In the second scenario, "The Hive" we used the MI-13 guys - they are really fragile to say the least. I kept saving 2 command points so I could buy away a potential "booby trap" card since it's a 50-50 change of killing a MI-13 soldier with that card. This second scenario was more of a back and forth sense of despair. Paddy Mayne led the assault down the tunnels to the southeast and parked himself in a nice reaction fire spot where he could pick off zombies from safe distance. Naturally he failed every single reaction fire roll and then ran out of ammo leading to a Blitzhund moving up and tearing his face off. This was still turn 1... great I had lost 1 of my heroes already.

The Blitzhund caught the scent of a shotgun armed MI-13 soldiers, and I was silently hoping that guy would die. His reaction fire situation would never bring down the raging beast, but I had a "Blaze of glory" card on my hand which would allow him to spend his full action point value to perform "post death" attacks against the Blitzhund. And my opponent had been baited into buying away other cards that I had played during the turn so he had no points to buy away my Blaze of Glory card. The Blitzhund of course shredded my shotgun trooper but got killed as well. A cheap sacrifice, wish it had occurred before Paddy Mayne got slain.

At the same time the rest of my MI-13 band was picked off one by one fighting zombies in the northern tunnels until only Zip Kelly and another trooper remained. It looked really hopeless, and then my last regular soldier died as well. However I was able to kill off Ilsa von X and one of the Drohne's so the situation were suddenly Zip Kelly vs the zombies (and 2 remaining Drohne). With a lot of luck I could still win.

But then I made the stupid mistake of trying to shoot at one of the remaining Drohne's instead of running up and beating it to death in hand to  hand where Zip Kelly had better chance of inflicting wounds. So I wasted something like 14 dice and only inflicted a single wound on the brain in jar that then returned fire and killed my remaining character.

Incursion: Zombie country part 2 AAR (comic)

Part 2 and the exciting conclusion of the adventures of corporal's Jackson and Neville.

A quick recap: Both soldiers explored all 3 rooms in the previous level, awarding them 3VP. They still need to explore one more room and escape with at least 1 soldier to earn 5VP and win the scenario. Both soldiers have received one wound each so they are limping about and are in a bad spot if they run out of luck - a single booby trap card could kill them at this point!

This has been a most interesting experiment, and the feedback on part 1 have been great and very positive. With that in mind I may return to this format in my future Incursion battle reports - there are a couple of single player scenarios left to play which aren't quite as long as this one so they would be less tedious to write using the comic book style.

Incursion: Zombie country part 1 AAR (comic)

And now for something completely different, I'm toying around with this new software "Comic Life" which is a way of creating comics out of pictures stored on your hard drive. Lets you do the layout, adding texts, choose fonts, etc. I guess only time and creativity is the limit here. It is awfully time consuming though and perhaps not the best way of writing a battle report but this is just something I wanted to experiment with.

Let me know if you think this sucks ass or if you guys like it. It is not likely I will use this software very often and the amount of games where this style works is rather limited. I'm thinking Incursion, Strange Aeons and perhaps the boardgame Arkham Horror.

Anyway, the scenario is another single player scenario from Incursion: SNAFU called "Zombie country". It is a pretty hard scenario, you only have 2 APE grunts and have to explore 2 boards (though not at the same time) where there are a total of 6 rooms. Each room contains a little surprise - most likely zombies, zombiebombz and werewolves - one room is empty and one contains a stranded APE trooper which will join your little quest.

The difficulty derives both from having only 2 basic grunts, but also because of the deck of cards used for this scenarios. There are a lot of very punishing and bad cards. Any wounds received on the first board will carry over to the second board as well. Any cards in play will be cancelled and re-shuffled. If the allies linger too long on each board the Germans will receive help from a Drohne. So they have to haul ass without being reckless and use the command points wisely.

This AAR is based on the first half of the scenario. Part 2 will be posted in a day or two.