Let's Read the Horus Heresy 14: First Heretic

The first falling star came down in the heart of the perfect city.

 - The Horus Heresy: The First Heretic, Aaron Dembski-Bowden

"No Recall or Intervention can work in this place. There is no escape."

 - Lorgar Aurelian, probably

Here we finally are, with my legion: the Word Bearers. This is my first Aaron Dembski-Bowden book. He's highly rated by both Horus Heresy tier lists and reddit users, so let's see what we get. There's almost an element of danger here, because I'm kind of looking forward to this one.

**

I'm quite happy to say that The First Heretic more than fulfilled my expectations. Dembski-Bowden writes well, and I think he gets a crucial point: the Horus Heresy is, first and foremost, a tragedy.

So, the book finally stars the Word Bearers. Lorgar's seventeenth Legion, formerly the Imperial Heralds, known for their fanaticism in the Imperial cause and as the inventors of Chaplains, the skull-helmed heralds and confessors of the legions. The problem has been that in the previous novels, the Word Bearers have mostly been pantomime villains.

In The First Heretic, we finally properly see things from their point of view. The Word Bearers thing is that they're very religious, and basically worship the Emperor as a god. When we've encountered the Imperial cult in the previous volumes, their holy text has been the Lectitio Divinitatus, which attests the divinity of the Emperor. Lorgar wrote it.

Emps himself, however, does not approve. He also thinks the Word Bearers are moving far too slowly for the Great Crusade, and to chastize them, he sends the Ultramarines to destroy the city of Monarchia that the Word Bearers spent ages building for his glory. The inhabitants of Monarchia get to evacuate and send one distress call, which has the entire legion rush back. Emps himself then forces them to kneel in the ashes of the city, in ritual humiliation.

As I'm sure you can imagine, this is a tremendous success and the Word Bearers immediately mend their ways.

Several of the previous Horus Heresy novels have featured Word Bearers First Chaplain Erbs, always sort of lurking around, doing something villainous and best visualized as Mike Myers's Dr. Evil with his little finger to his lips. We now know where Erbs learned his trade: from Lorgar's adoptive father Kor Phaeron, a fairly ancient augmented human (i.e. not a proper space marine, he was too old for the procedures) who clanks around in Terminator armor like a mechanized Palpatine. The two of them encourage Lorgar to go on a quest to find gods who are willing to be worshipped, and again, those of you who know the lore know how this goes.

At the forefront of Lorgar's quest is captain Argel Tal, a name many people will recognize. He's an excellently written character, and so is Lorgar. The two of them carry the narrative, with Argel Tal as the point-of-view character who has his doubts about whether these are the kind of gods they should be worshipping. The story culminates in the Drop Site Massacre at Isstvan V, where Lorgar duels Corvus Corax of the Raven Guard.

**

This is a very successful book. It's a tragedy for just about everyone involved, from the Emperor on down. It's a successful one because while Erbs and Kor Phaeron are still mostly just being evil, the motivations of the key characters are deeply understandable.

There's some talk in the book that each Primarch embodies some attribute of the Emperor, and passes that on to his legion. It's stated here that Lorgar's attribute is faith, which makes all of his Word Bearers fanatically loyal to him, and at least somewhat explains his deification of the Emperor. Now, because we've read The Last Church, we know that Emps is an angry New Atheist, so we get that this pisses him off. But Lorgar apparently never realizes this until the destruction of Monarchia and the humiliation of his legion.

You really do have to wonder what the Emperor was thinking. If Nicaea and sending the Space Wolves to destroy Prospero were terrible decisions, and Emps not telling Magnus what he was up to seems inexplicable, I think there's a good argument that the ritual humiliation of Lorgar and the Word Bearers is what kicks off the whole Heresy.

Lorgar's greatest personal tragedy is that he's a genetically and sorcerously engineered super-soldier who doesn't want to be a soldier at all. He's a leader but not a warrior, but it's not like the Emperor asked him. He's the Primarch who doesn't want to be a Primarch. Clearly he's happiest doing theology and building cities for the Imperium, so I don't know, why not let him do that?

During the Drop Site Massacre, he charges Corax even though he knows it's a duel he can't win. But he's rather die than watch his legion butchered. That's real heroism. Like I said, how do you not feel for the guy? So far he's a rare Primarch in not being at all a buffoon or a lunatic.

Argel Tal is also very sympathetic. Like I said, he has serious doubts about what they're doing, but his loyalty to his Primarch is such that he doesn't just follow along, but volunteers. Of course, he comes to suspect that he's doing this because of the gene-seed he has from Lorgar, but he does it anyway. The stories of Lorgar and Argel Tal are properly tragic, the setting is very space operatic, and the whole thing is just a satisfying, well-written story.

**

The First Heretic also features a Legio Cybernetica unit attached to the Word Bearers, where some of the battle-automata have been inducted into the legion as honorary members. So I'm very much afraid that's all the justification I'm going to need to paint some Word Bearers robots in Legions.

Finally, I want to point out that Lorgar is consistently described as golden, and after the dramatic events on Khur, he spends quite a long time brooding and smearing himself with ash while wearing only a loincloth.

This, by the way, is where I abandon publication order. Like I said at the start of this project, I absolutely will not read all fifty thousand Horus Heresy books, and even though I've heard good things about Prospero Burns and Abnett's been quite good, I have to be honest and say that I find the whole space viking thing so unbelievably boring that I cannot face the idea of a whole novel of them. Because there will apparently never be another Elder Scrolls game, I have to reserve my viking cliche tolerance for another playthrough of Skyrim. So I will be back next time with something out of sequence.

To sum up, I found The First Heretic grand and intoxicating. It's by miles the best Horus Heresy novel so far, and I'd say that if you're interested in Warhammer and are going to read one book in the whole series, I'd make it this one.

Let's Build Modiphius Terrain

Earlier, I had ordered a couple of Fallout figures from Mōdiphiüs for my Renegades and Heretics, and I found them to be good quality, but the range as a whole was kind of uninspiring. However, I did order some Nuka-Cola machines for my Imperial Knight's base:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Michael Halila (@michaelhalila)

I thought it made for a fun addition to the model, and the resin terrain pieces were all fairly good quality. This made me take the plunge and order their Skyrim Word Wall.

The whole thing came in one piece, and the cast quality is really excellent. It's even got all the little Nord runes on it and everything, and I'm delighted to report it's the Unrelenting Force wall: the best shout in Skyrim because it has by far the greatest comedy potential.

I covered the whole thing in Basalt Grey, and gave the words and the darker bits a Black Ink wash.

The non-dark stone then got light drybrushes in Neutral Grey and Medium Sea Grey, and I did the FUS runes in Deep Sky Blue and Fluorescent Blue.

I was lazy and did the same greys on the back.

Here it is! Armiger and Arch-Militant for scale.

It's a simple paintjob, but I'm very happy with it.

**

Soon after I finished my word wall, Modiphius dropped the price of their Red Rocket station, and I felt like I had to get it. I'd looked at it earlier, but frankly it was way too expensive.

It's a very hefty box! Most of the weight is the 3'×3' neoprene mat, which is all right, I guess. Not really something I was interested in. It doesn't look bad, and although it's quite creased from being folded in the box, I'm pretty sure it'll even out.

What we're really here for is the Red Rocket building. It's made out of fairly strong, good quality card, with plastic connectors holding it together. There are also two resin coolant pumps and a resin Red Rocket.

You start by building the ground floor of the station. Two things struck me. First, there's no assembly instructions in the box: you have to get them off the Modiphius website. It's not a big deal, but it's annoying scrolling around a PDF on your phone. The instructions are also shoddy. You have to squint quite a bit to make out what goes where, and ludicrously, all the card pieces are named on the sheet you punch them out of - but the instructions don't use the names. This is just silly.

Secondly, there doesn't seem to be any way to attach the building to its base. With the card as light as it is, it'll never stay put, and I could see this becoming very annoying.

The card is quite nice, though, and I'm almost surprised how good it looks despite the plastic connectors. I actually googled to check if there really was no way to mount the building, and finding none, I grabbed my trusty Finnish equivalent of PVA glue and stuck the walls on the base.

This worked quite nicely, and I decided to reinforce my building by supergluing in a couple of scenery items, like this GW barrel:

And an appropriate Fallout container.

With that done, I moved on to the next phase: the canopy. 

After I moved from the canopy to the roof, I realized that the assembly instructions were even worse than I thought. You use the same piece for both the roof and the floor of the building - or so I thought. In fact, the two pieces are mirrored, and if you pick the wrong one for the floor, you can't mount the Red Rocket signs on the roof. The instructions don't tell you this, of course. Guess which piece I already glued.

So that's annoying, but I can work with it: I just need to glue the signs onto the roof edge the old-fashioned way. That's not the end of it, though. The roof isn't really attached to anything either, but I get that, because then you can lift it off and use the building interior. However, this does mean that the roof will shift around a lot, which isn't great. What's worse is that the whole canopy is only attached to the building with a single plastic connector. It's just hopelessly flimsy: even assuming the resin rocket, the whole thing shudders and shifts if you so much as look at it.

If this was for a diorama or something, it wouldn't be ideal; for a piece of miniature wargaming terrain, it's inexcusable. People are going to be placing models and templates around it, poking about with tape measures, bumping the table and so on. Terrain can't be this flimsy. In my opinion, this whole thing is going to need a proper base, and it should have come with one. Since it doesn't, I'll build one.

Before I do, I really have to say that I'm a bit disappointed with this kit. The instructions are garbage and the end result is flimsy. If I'd paid the frankly outrageous original price for this thing, I'd be pissed.

**

Sadly, adding the resin rocket doesn't help much. The four pylons are meant to fit into slots in the rocket's base. They don't.

While I had the rocket on there, the pylons did stay more or less still, but I'm still really uneasy about the whole canopy resting on just one plastic connector. Especially since the rocket won't actually stay on, as the slots are just too small for the card pylons.

So, it was basing time. I optimistically started with some thick card.

Then I cut down the tabs on the pylons to a size that actually fits the rocket, and after a lot of frustrating wrangling, managed to superglue the rocket on.

If you ask me, there's no way that thing stays up there without glue. But with superglue for the rocket and to make the pylons stick to the base, it sticks together and makes the whole canopy much less wobbly. I then painted the resin coolant pumps, cut a little base for them out of some of the leftover card, and stuck them on.

Next up, a Nuka-Cola machine.

At this point, I decided the walls looked a little bare, and got my flatmate to print me a selection of tiny weathered posters.

I mean is it really a garage without an explicit calendar in the office area?

I also added a poster to the garage area, and I have to say, I think it looks great.

In the public-facing area: Torquemada is watching! Behave!

Finally, I added a poster for a lecture course I taught last fall:

And my favorite touch: wanted posters from my Rogue Trader tabletop campaign.

I have to say, these little posters made me very happy indeed. All that was left to do after this was glue sand to the base.

And paint it Neutral Grey to go with the rest of my scenery.

**

So, this was a mixed experience. The word wall is lovely, and the Red Rocket station was a disappointment. To sum up: if you buy the Red Rocket kit thinking you're getting an easy to assemble, ready to go piece of wargaming terrain, well, you're not. If you buy it as a starting point for a terrain piece you're going to spend a bit of time and effort building, then I think it's not a bad purchase. But that is to say that it doesn't exactly do what it's sold as.

Having said that, I might well be persuaded to buy more card terrain, as long as the price is right. The resin word wall, on the other hand, is absolutely fantastic, and I'm delighted I bought it. In general, Modiphius's resin terrain pieces have been really good, from the small bits to the big stuff.

Anyway, now I have some terrain, for better photo backdrops if nothing else!

Warhammer 40,000: Tankhammer

Our first forays into Warhammer 40,000 last year were infantry affairs, mostly because that's what I had on hand or easily available, but also because our Rogue Trader tabletop campaign characters who were involved in the Ignatian rebellion mostly fought on foot. I decided we should try something different.

**

Our Marines already had a Whirlwind and a Vindicator, so building them up into a vehicular spearhead detachment was easy with a Predator. It turns out that while I've painted my Marines in Basalt Grey, which is the closest match to Citadel's old Codex Grey, the vehicles are considerably lighter. It's either some Miniature Paints light grey - there's a brand name from a time before search engine optimization! - or Vallejo Neutral Grey, which is the closest match I could find.

With the addition of the Predator, the Marines make a spearhead detachment consisting of a Tech-Marine, Predator, Vindicator and Whirlwind, which clocks in at 469 points. As it happens, adding the three Armiger Helverins I made earlier adds up to just shy of a thousand points, so that's an army as far as we're concerned!

**

I had earlier bought a Start Collecting Blood Angels box because it was a cheap way to get the Terminator Captain I used to make my 28mm Captain Phasma. It also came with a Baal Predator, and combining that kit with a Chaos Predator created the loyalist Predator above, as well as this lovely Hellforged Predator:

I wanted a Predator with a twin lascannon because I was a little nervous about all the Imperial armor, and the Baal kit's heavy flamers seemed like an obvious complement to the Hellforged Predator's close combat ability - although that's not likely to see much use against an army with exactly one model on foot! Also, for some reason the Hellforged Predator is an Elite choice, which means a vanguard detachment is indicated. The rules for Dark Apostles changed with the Vigilus supplement, so I'm going to bring mine as a HQ choice so I can try out the new prayers.

I also bought an ancient Space Crusade Chaos Dreadnought online on a whim, and it's an elite choice as well!

To round out the vanguard detachment, I'm bringing my Berzerkers; I'm interested in seeing what they can get done against armor. That makes a vanguard detachment worth 510 points.

Since the other side has tanks and Armigers, what can the Ruinous Powers pit against them? I'm thinking Chaos Knights; specifically, these two War Dogs.

I've named them Meridia and Namira, and I can't wait to see how they do on the battlefield. At 174 points each, they're a 348-point auxiliary super-heavy detachment, meaning we're left with about 150 points to use. As it happens, I bought a copy of the Wrath and Rapture set when it came out, and last summer, when it was way too hot to sleep, I started assembling the Bloodcrushers, and I absolutely love the Juggernauts. So seeing as how I'm playing Word Bearers, why not try some demon summoning? I'm leaving the last 150 or so points as reinforcement points, which just so happens to be enough to summon these guys.

So in total, what we've got is two approximately 1 000 -point armies made up of models we want to try on the battlefield. I have no idea what's going to happen.

**

We set up my old Necromunda terrain at the summer cottage, and decided to play the Only War scenario again; we rolled Domination for the primary objective, meaning we'd be scoring victory points for holding objectives.

The objectives were set up in the graveyard in the center of the board, on the bridge next to it and in some of the ruins next to the end of the river. My opponent chose that side to deploy on, leaving me to charge up the direction of the river. Our starting deployments are below:

The Imperial side went first and shot the shit out of my guys. General Hopps selected Renegade Armiger Namira as her Duty of the Forsworn target and promptly led her Helverins to shoot it to pieces; I had to use a command point to stop it from exploding and taking half my army with it! Under this withering fire, there was obviously no way out except forward. With Whirlwind rockets bursting among them, the Berzerkers and Dreadnought charged into the cemetery to secure the objective there. Renegade Armiger Meridia strode ahead to avenge her fallen sister, and on my left, Hellforged Predator Boethiath barreled toward General Hopps' Armiger Helverin.

Our shooting put a bit of a dent into the enemy, but failed to knock anyone out. My Predator failed its charge at General Hopps, and was very lucky to not take any damage from the overwatch; Meridia, however, managed to damage the Predator and succesfully charged the Vindicator, very nearly destroying the Space Marine tank with its chain-cleaver. Victory points at the end of Turn 1 stood at Imperium 2, Chaos 1.

The Imperial side's second turn shooting wasn't as destructive, damaging my Predator and remaining Armiger while the Vindicator fell back, and the Whirlwind knocked out two of my Berzerkers. On my turn, my Predator made full speed for General Hopps, this time doing some shooting damage and succeeding in the charge; Renegade Armiger Meridia likewise charged the damaged Predator and destroyed it. My Berzerkers reached the Armiger holding the objective and made it into close combat with it, with my Dreadnought holding the objective in the cemetery. I now had more models in range of the central objective, bringing victory points to a 3-3 tie.

The third Imperial turn opened with General Hopps falling back into the ruins at the edge of the battlefield, and the unengaged Helverin destroying Renegade Armiger Meridia. Meanwhile, my Berzerker Champion brought down the Helverin with his power fist after it stomped one of his comrades, and the Berzerkers consolidated into combat with the Vindicator.

With only a couple of turns to go, I decided it was high time to drop a command point on Dark Pact and summon the Bloodcrushers! The Dark Apostle's daemonic ritual was succesful, and three Juggernauts ripped their way into reality and grabbed the objective on the bridge. My Dreadnought turned its guns on General Hopps' Helverin, but failed to damage it, while the Predator barely damaged the loyalist Whirlwind with its lascannon, and failed to roast General Hopps with its heavy flamers. Our shooting was miserable, but at least the Berzerkers wrecked the Vindicator, losing one of their number beneath its crushing tracks and consolidating into the loyalist Tech-Marine who had been trying to repair it.

By turn four, the battle was concentrating on the ruined water still at the head of the river. The Whirlwind fired a barrage at the Juggernauts, knocking one of them out, and General Hopps blasted my Predator to within an inch of its life. In a desperate bid for victory points, the Tech-Marine disengaged from the two remaining Berzerkers and sprinted for the objective in the central ruins.

On my second-to-last turn, it was becoming clear that we were heading for a Khornate finale, so after my shooting was, once again, indecisive, I started charging: the Bloodcrushers stampeded into General Hopps, the Berzerkers charged the other Helverin, and my Dark Apostle took matters into her own hands and charged the Tech-Marine. She quickly overpowered the loyalist scum, grabbing the objective and sealing the win on victory points for Chaos. However, on the next turn, a point-blank salvo from the Whirlwind destroyed my Hellforged Predator!

While General Hopps defeated one of the Bloodcrushers in close combat, the Berzerkers toppled the other remaining Helverin, losing their icon bearer in the process. My Dark Apostle charged General Hopps, bringing down the Armiger with her Cursed Crozius and ending the ferocious battle for the water still in a Chaos victory - barely!

With the Whirlwind still in play, the Imperial forces weren't eliminated, but I won on victory points.

**

It was a fun game with plenty of drama! So, what did we learn?

First of all, the Helverins are terrifying against vehicles. 4D3 shots and Damage 3 is a hell of a combination against anything with lots of wounds; they knocked out one Renegade Armiger in their first shooting phase, and I was actually shocked my Predator survived as long as it did. I'm considering getting some for myself! Or renegades and heretics lascannon teams. Or both. The Hawkshroud doctrine meant that the damned things only stopped firing effectively once we literally took them apart in close combat.

Because of the murderous Helverins, I barely got to try my own Armigers at all, but what little they managed was encouraging: Renegade Armiger Meridia nearly destroyed a Vindicator and blew up a Predator before being gunned down. They also tanked a lot of fire before going down, which let my Berzerkers get into close quarters, where they were, once again, absolutely excellent. This game was a pretty good reminder that eighth edition is really all about volume, in both shooting and close combat, and Berzerkers with chainswords definitely bring volume! Last time, they chewed through a blob of conscripts; this time, they smashed a tank and two Armigers, with the champion and his power fist in the lead role. I am never fielding a Chaos Marine army without them. In fact, I should maybe make a couple more - and definitely finish painting them...

This was also the first post-Vigilus outing for my Dark Apostle. In retrospect, it's obvious I should've picked Benediction of Darkness as my prayer, which might have stopped at least some of the horrible mauling we took on the first turn - although of course it wouldn't have helped my Armigers. I was very pleasantly surprised with how killy my Apostle was at close quarters, but she again struggled to keep up with the Berzerkers. Summoning daemons only makes the problem worse! But I still like the Apostle, and they, of course, remain the only impeccably fluffy warlord choice for Word Bearers. I'm going to model some Dark Disciples to boost her prayers.

The Bloodcrushers didn't really do much; then again, fighting Armigers is hardly their forte, and they did tie up General Hopps until my Dark Apostle delivered the killing blow. My Dreadnought seemed cursed, as I don't think it actually damaged anything, but at least it managed to sit on an objective and net me some victory points. The Hellforged Predator was also slightly out of its element; it would have been nice to see how it does with some infantry to broil and eat. The twin lascannon felt finicky and unreliable compared to the terrifying damage output of the Helverins.

On the Imperial side, the Vindicator didn't really get anything done, probably mostly due to bad luck, but my venerable Whirlwind was surprisingly effective, bagging several Berzerkers, a Juggernaut and even a Predator! I'm tempted to paint a kill marking on it for that last one. The Helverins' surprisingly murderous effectiveness was already noted, and unfortunately I'm told that I'll be seeing more of them in the future...

**

To sum up, Warhammer is genuinely fun. I was very happy to try out some of the new units, and for next summer, I'm planning to expand our table so that we can field 2 000 point armies. So we'll be back!

Cities: Skyrim and the Mass Transit DLC

Last time, I was building freeways and wondering about the rise and fall of commercial zones in Cities: Skylines.

I've taken to using a couple of mods: All Spaces Unlockable does just that, with costs scaling up as you unlock more map squares, and Infinite Oil & Ore Redux, which makes the ore and oil industries a reasonable proposition. The latter was since rendered obsolete by a mod bundled with the game itself, but All Spaces Unlockable is definitely worth it.

I also wanted my city to look a bit more diverse, so I trawled through the Steam workshop looking for more vehicles and growable buildings. I especially wanted more delivery vehicles; donut vans are all well and good, but too many of them start to look a little ridiculous. In case anyone's interested, I put together a collection of assets on Steam that includes all the vehicles and buildings I use. They all work, and as far as I can tell, they haven't slowed my laptop down at all.

Finally, I also tried a couple of custom maps. There's one of Tamriel that's kinda fun, but I really enjoyed this map of Skyrim, so that's definitely one I'd recommend.

**

Since I last blogged about Cities: Skylines, the Mass Transit DLC came out. So far, it's the only DLC I've bought, because come on, mass transit. In practice, it's kind of a mixed bag.

To start with the bad, most of the exchange hubs are nuts. The ferry-bus exchange has a regular ferry pier and like ten bus platforms. Same with the monorail-bus exchange, which is also huge. We finally got multi-platform train stations - with platforms for six sets of double track. Six. Who has six sets of tracks? Multi-platform subway stations though? Not included.

Frankly, the only useful transit hub is the metro-monorail-train hub. It takes two sets of train tracks, so for 70 000 cash, it already costs less than two train stations and keeps the intercity trains with like six passengers on them from clogging up your whole intracity train network. You effectively get a metro station and two monorail stations for free.

As for the new kinds of transit, I have to say I'm kind of torn on the monorails. They have the same passenger capacity as trains and you can run the tracks over roads, so it's really handy for areas where you don't have space for rails; but this is kind of countered by the fact that the stations are massively noisy. Also, annoyingly, the roads with stations on them won't snap to your roads but only to the global grid, so that sometimes makes your streets irritatingly wonky. I'm currently mostly using them because the train-monorail hub is the only reasonable multi-platform train station.

Cable cars are very niche, but if you've got steep inclines on your map, they can be darn useful. Blimps I'm still sort of struggling to find a use for; they only take as many passengers as a bus and are darn slow. But really, who cares, because the reason you build a blimp depot and set up a route is to see blimps floating majestically over your city. So I love them.

Finally: boats! Ferries are wonderful. I remember playing on the Black Woods map and desperately wishing I could connect passenger harbors, but ferries are even better. The ferry piers are cheap and fairly unobtrusive, and the ferries take 50 passengers each, which means they can handle more volume that you might expect. I'd say they're almost worth the price of the expansion on their own, but I guess you do really have to like boats for that to be true.

Some of the stuff we got for free with the accompanying patch, and I'm extremely grateful for the opportunity to add and remove traffic lights. However, the stop signs aren't exactly ideal. In one of the developer diaries, Colossal Order intimated that they were originally considering yield signs rather than stop signs, which is disappointing because yield signs would have been so much better. Stop signs are useful for small roads with low traffic joining bigger roads, but any time there's a larger volume of traffic, they'll just create a massive traffic jam. The specific instance given in the dev diary is roundabouts, which are a great example of why stop signs are bad. Yes, if only one road has moderate or heavy traffic, putting stop signs on all the others gives it priority. But if there are two or more roads with real traffic feeding into the roundabout, stop signs are useless as they'll just create a massive backlog of traffic. Yield signs might actually work, but stop signs turn moderate traffic into a total logjam.

On the whole, though, Mass Transit is a pretty good expansion. The weirdest thing is how impractical the transit hubs are, and the absence of multi-platform metro stations is inexcusable, but the boats and blimps are good. I'm happy with my purchase; as with everything on Steam, this too will be on sale, and unless you're some kind of revolting monster that doesn't like boats and mass transit, I'd recommend picking it up.

**

As I was writing this, Green Cities was announced as the next expansion. I'm cautiously optimistic; leveling specializations sounds good, and I'm intrigued by the promise of road modding. Might we finally get to place zebra crossings? Apparently we are getting a non-polluting alternative for garbage disposal; frankly, it'd be about time! I do wonder what "sustainable cities" means, though. You can have a city with no polluting industry right now; because you'll then be importing all your goods, that just means you're having someone else do your polluting for you - not exactly sustainable.

Nonetheless, I remain very happy with Cities: Skylines.

Let's Play Magic: the Gathering: Mind vs. Might Duel Decks

I mentioned ages ago that before we got into this whole living card game thing, the previous time I played any kind of card game that wasn't either bridge or poker was with a Magic: the Gathering Ice Age starter set.

The thing about Magic is that as near as I can tell, Richard Garfield pretty much invented the modern collectible card game. All the other card games we play, whether Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones or Arkham Horror, use mechanics that are functionally almost identical to those in Magic. So you might even go so far as to say that this is also a project of historical interest.

This summer, I happened to find what I think is a Revised Edition Mountain card hanging around our summer cottage. I used it as a bookmark, which is probably what made the idea of playing again start to grow on me.

So eventually the inevitable happened. If I remember my university classes correctly, Islamic theology maintains that everyone is born a Muslim, but not everyone manages to stick with it. Therefore, one does not convert to Islam but rather returns to it. Something similar seems to be true about Magic; at any rate, I, too, returned.

Our friendly local gaming store had some 7th edition starter sets hanging around, and we grabbed one. The starter set gives you one blue-white deck and one red-green one, with a booklet explaining the rules. Ours was a Finnish edition, and I have to say that the translation was very well done! The rulebook gives a reasonably good walkthrough to a sort of pre-scripted game; once it leaves you on your own, though, my blue-white deck had the edge in some surprisingly powerful creatures, and my partner ended up being overrun by bunnies.

We were also given a pair of 2016 Welcome Decks for free, so our FLGS really treats us pretty well. Admittedly this already added up to a reasonable total of cards to get started with, but I figured we could do better. Duel Decks seemed the best way to get stuck in with more contemporary Magic, and I picked the Mind vs. Might Decks to kind of go with our Lord of the Rings decks; since my partner plays mono-Tactics, the red-green Might deck seemed like the best match, while the red-blue Mind deck was close enough to my favorite sphere, Spirit.

In our first game - the first time I played Magic with real cards this millenium - I got off to a decent start before being destroyed by Rubblebelt Raiders. Knew I should've kept that Rift Bolt in reserve...

The second time around, it was my turn. First I got Young Pyromancer out, which meant a pile of Fire Elementals, and then I set up a combo of several spells next turn followed by Empty the Warrens; at the end of the turn, I controlled seven Fire Elemental tokens and eight Goblins, which promptly overran my opponent.

Next time, I lost in fairly short order, but I did get to drop a meteor on a tree, so it wasn't all bad.

So far, then, our limited testing bears out what I'd read about the Mind vs Might duel decks online: especially the Might deck is accessible to new players, and most of the time Mind will lose, unless it can pull off a spectacular combo and win by miles. Most importantly, especially if you know the above going in, it's damn good fun.

**

I also quite enjoyed Magic Duels on the Xbox, until about a month before Hour of Destruction came out, it was abruptly announced that it would no longer be supported. This is just a weird decision; they had no replacement to announce, but suddenly decided to pull the plug on the previous project anyway. Like the community, I too was surprised and disappointed, as I'd been looking forward to Hour of Destruction on Duels. Admittedly I hadn't spent any money on it, but frankly, if support for their video games is liable to just vanish into thin air with no warning, why would I? Surely the point of a free-to-play Magic video game is to advertise the physical product. Duels was doing pretty well at that.

Now, though, with no new cards coming and the AI opponent endlessly stuck playing the same Amonkhet staples, Duels feels pointless. Instead, I went and got Elder Scrolls: Legends, also a free-to-play collectible card game.

Legends is like Magic, except your mana increases each turn instead of having lands (which is like Hearthstone?), you can't play cards in the other player's turn (which is boring) and creatures are played into one of two lanes. It's not bad, actually!

**

Thanks to Magic: Duels, though, my partner fell in love with Filigree Familiar, so we now also own a Kaladesh bundle.

I have no objections to this: I used a number of Kaladesh cards in Magic: Duels, and I also quite like the art. For example, Kaladesh includes what I think is my favorite Mountain, an almost Roerichesque piece by Eytan Zana.

Because co-op games are our real passion and neither of us has any real interest in competitive play of any kind, our Magic hobby will mostly be a collecting one, which puts a premium on pretty cards.

**

So, reviews. The 7th edition starter decks were all right. My main complaints are that the card choices really aren't very inspired, especially if the aim is to use these sets to introduce people to Magic. Also, the way our decks were stacked, the Silver deck won overwhelmingly and the Gold player just had nothing they could really do about it. So not ideal. However, I do have to mention the translation again, because it's just very good compared to the kind of thing you usually find in products like these. So that, at least, was a pleasant surprise. Basically the starter set did a pretty good job of walking a new player through the basics of Magic, but with surprisingly boring cards.

Magic: Duels was actually pretty good, but then it was discontinued in such a callous way that it's kind of hard to see the point any more. The Elder Scrolls: Legends is better, and I guess we can expect it to be around for a while? Maybe? Anyway if you're into things like Magic I'd give it a shot; the story mode is an enjoyable enough experience. Also, by the way, several of the Legends cards are pretty enough that I'd be quite happy to buy actual physical copies.

Finally, the Mind vs Might duel decks were good fun, and at least for us, an entirely reasonable way for a new player and a very rusty one to get stuck in again. I'm pretty sure you could do a lot worse for a first or returning purchase to contemporary Magic.