The premise is a family after the death of the husband/father after a long bout fighting an illness are pretty much broke and are forced to move to hicksville at the fathers old family home in the mountains.  The mountains have a legend of a group of children that all died in the local mines when the mines had a terrible accident.  The children now, back from the dead, come out at night and go on Zombie like killing frenzies.

As you’d expect the movie is pretty typical.  People go out into the woods get lost, park and make out, ignore warnings and die.  Overall it’s decently done.  The children are creepy looking and the death scenes have an adequate amount of gore.

Overall not a bad 90mins of Zombie like action.  I’d recomend it to anyone that likes Horror/Zombie movies.  It’s certainly worth a rental.  It won’t be one you go on about for a long time afterwards but it’s worth seeing once.

3.5 out of 5

It’s the prequel to all the other Hannibal Lector movies, giving you his origin.  The movie starts out pretty well but then it just goes downhill from there.  I mean god he learned the ways of the Samurai from his Asian aunt while living in France after escaping Russia near the end of WWII.

The bulk of the movie is him as a 20ish year old studying to be a Dr. and tracking down the soldiers that held him and his sister captive.  The movie really starts to drag in the middle and it’s far from the smart, shocking and thrilling movie that Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs were.   If you really need a Hannibal fix you can probably find some enjoyment here but I couldn’t.

2 out of 5.

I had always heard great things about the boardgame Arkham Horror. Long to play, yes. Heavy on the bits and pieces, yes. You need to have a 1200 square foot home simply to have enough space to set up the game, yes. But I had never heard from anyone how clearly impossible it is to succeed at the game.Now, I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, if I’m missing or mis-reading something in the rules, but it seems to me that the game is set up to make it next to impossible for the players to win. Granted, two of the four times I’ve played I’ve drawn Yig as the Old One that is awakening, which is stated in the rules as making for a shorter game. What they should have said is that Yig makes for a significantly more difficult game because it takes less open gates to awaken the Old One.

Here’s what I’m getting at. At the end of each player’s turn, a gate opens. There are a finite number of locations for gates to open in, and if a gate is already open then there is something called a “monster surge”. This means that out of each gate that is already open, a number of monsters equal to the number of players appear out of those gates. However, if the number of monsters on the board exceed the maximum number allowed on the board (for a four person game, that’s seven monsters), those extra monsters go into the “Outskirts”. If the number of monsters in the Outskirts exceeds the number of players (in this case, four), the “Terror Track” goes up by one. As the Terror Track goes up, shops in Arkham begin to close making it difficult for players to purchase the items they will need to win the game.

In my game last night, we had three monster surges in a row. In less than one full go around the board, the Terror Track rose to 3, meaning that the General Store in Arkham closed. We had a board full of monsters, five gates open, four monsters in the outskirts and two players in the hospital due to poor rolls when combating monsters. We called the game after four rounds due to frustration.

We sat around afterwards and discussed house rules that would make the game more playable. Some of the things we discussed were; allowing for successes on a roll of 4, 5 or 6 instead of just 5 or 6,  halving the number of monsters that appear in a monster surge, doubling the amount of monsters allowed in the Outskirts before the Terror Track begins to go up, and so on. I think one or a couple of these things would help with gameplay, until we’re either more familiar with the game or more willing to allow ourselves to lose the game quickly.

I’m going to spend some time checking out the forums at Board Game Geek to see if there’s some discussion about these things already, and to see if I’m missing something. More to come.

Addendum; I buggered up. You don’t open a new portal on everyone’s turn – just once per round! Okay – this makes a lot more sense to me, now.

Fantasy Flight Games has launched the new [official] website for the Warhammer 40,000 RPG: Dark Heresy

Dark Heresy

It’s got all the stuff you’d expect, info, product schedule, downloads etc…