Abaddon hope all ye who enter here...

Apologies... that's a terrible pun...

A different game this week courtesy of my friend Anthony and one of never heard of before...Abaddon by Richard Borg.

Borg, of course, needs no introduction... Battle Cry, Memoir 44, Battle of Britain, Commands & Colours, Battlelore and many more classics all came from him (incidentally I recently discovered my 1st ed. set of Battlelore in the loft... I was sure I'd sold it years ago!!)  Boardgamegeek lists 136 games and expansions (including the classic Bob the Builder Build it and Win It card game!!) that he's had a hand in.  Anthony and I were both of the view that the format of most of Memoir44/C&C etc is an ideal structure, especially for quick evening games that are tactically reasonably challenging, but which are simple enough to pick up.

This weeks game, Abaddon is a kind of grimdark/battletechy version of Memoir 44... sort of.  I'd never heard of it, and it certainly doesn't seem to have taken off in the way that some of the other Borg games have.  Each player has a force of Mechs, ranging from lighter Recon mechs, to big stompy ones, as well as some infantry.  The models are fine and the bases conveniently have stats printed on the for movement, dice type and armour as well as slots which hold damage counters.

Like Memoir 44 etc, the game uses special dice with symbols on them... unlike the other Borg games however, these aren't used for damage but are rolled to see who activates each turn.  There are also cards but, again, their role is slightly different to the usual order cards.  These are Weapon System cards which are needed to attack/defend or to give special attacks etc.  These need to be carefully managed though as they aren't automatically replenished.  You can opt not to use them but and just rely on armour instead.

We played the easiest intro scenario and straight away I took a gamble on using one of my precious cards... in this case a rather deadly Doomsday Bolt which, while it requires a 'Command' result to come up on the dice and then only has a 1 in 6 chance of success, immediately destroyed one of Anthony's mechs!!  We then had a couple of turns of manoeuvre before I was able to combine fire onto another enemy mech (I think they are referred to as Links in the game) and destroyed it.  To be fair my card hand was pretty good and definitely gave me more options than Anthony's

It's a nice game and its curious that it didn't take off.  We're planning to try one of the more advanced scenarios at some point so it'll be interesting to see what that adds to the game.