Blackstone fortress is a now slightly discontinued game by Games Workshop. It was basically half board game, half RPG in which you play a session, save your progress and then take that progress on with your now upgraded characters in the next session.
It had a couple of advantages over a lot of other board games, in that it was cooperative, you CAN play on your own and that it also had a tonne of expansions (See the pictures at the bottom), it also still has an awful lot of community support, both in terms of extra scenarios and extra support for characters, + third party 3d printed stuff etc, etc, etc.
So it was strange that something so popular and so beloved got cancelled.
As I had just got the first boxset this was a bit of a pain as a number of the expansions were more than a little rare and so would never get a reprint, however with the help of a couple of friends, we managed to get everything before the scalpers got us.
Then we settled down to the solid job of painting. Blackstone is famous for the quality and diversity of its models, We got the base box painted and then sat down for our first game. It was a bit steep on the old initial learning curve but we got the hang of it, however we’re mainly painters not gamers. So once we’d had one big session, we put it back in the box and got on with painting miniatures.
Then comes the move away from my office to the far more communal setting of Bad Moon Cafe, and with that comes people coming up to you and saying “Hello, my name is X. Can I join you?” It’s a very open and easy going place like that, that was how our little group started to grow, soon the option of playing actual games came up, not being hard bitten wargamers various less stressful games were mentioned, then Blackstone came up,
“you’ve got Blackstone!!? painted?. Let’s play that, I’ve always wanted to”.
So I bring the initial box, and a new person joins us starting that day, because for some reason its a game people want to play. now Blackstone is very much like 40K Rogue trader, in that while just the players can control it, and you can even play it totally on your own, it benefits from a bit of DM’ing to bring out the best in it.
Initially the guys had the normal battle with the rules, but one offer to do the DM role later and we are having a very, very high speed fun game.
Everyone was very enthusiastic, with multiple people coming up and checking/confirming what the game was, and could they join in future weeks (not a problem its easy for people to drop on and off with out causing issues with the campaign).
Again why GW cancelled the damn thing I will never know.
Anyway, here we are, and we’re going to do a long term game and report it here. and if there’s multiple people, or people get out of sync, we’re not gonna get over excited about it. We’re going to run multiple scenarios and report all here.
So a brief overview to those of you who have glared at Blackstone’s rules and wondered what was going on.
Basically is a number of short scenario games.
They could be a small skirmish battle with a layout, or they could be a card challenge, or they could be just a series of dice rolls.
Each one of these encounters can take between 30 seconds and half an hour.
And you get rewards for completing these “encounters”. These come in 2 forms 1) Upgrades for your character. 2) Clues for a chance to fight the big boss(s).
Fight 4 big bosses and you get a chance to fight the biggest boss.
That’s basically the core idea. Each expansion added on to this makes it more and more involved and more and more complex, and can take the same characters all the way along, in the meantime they’re adding extra characters, extra diversity etc etc
A good fun game once you got the hang of it and perfect for a setting such as Bad Moon.
I would actually like to apologise to Bad Moon Cafe at this point. I booked our normal painting table with an option for playing Blackstone on it. Then didn’t do any painting, blocked line of sight with a huge painting box. Barely ordered any food and drink, occupied three tables, forgot to pay the gaming charge. Basically got in the way, then finished everything in a flurry and left exhausted.
Sorry, it’ll be cleaner next week If you let us back, however the pizza was great.
Campaign 1: Current progress
- Explorers: Janus Draik, Pious Vorne, Amallyn Shadowguide, UR-025
- Upgrades: None (they have not been back to Precipice yet)
- ArcheoTech: 12 Points
- Clues: 4
- Discovery Cards played: 5
A slight background for Blackstone
As you can see above, there is a huge mixture of bolt-ons, add-ons and bits and bobs for Blackstone. There are several major expansions that introduce game changing rule differences. There are a myriad of smaller expansions which add extra characters and a few specialist challenges. Then there are tonnes of rule expansions + campaigns and such like, that came out in white dwarf, that were compiled into annuals, and then finally, there were all of the naughty little GW ways of getting you to spend more money, which is to bring out a rule in white dwarf that requires you to buy a box-set to get one miniature, we managed to get them all and then in addition there is one company that did all of the 3d scenery, which fit Blackstone. This alone occupies about two large boxes. we have not painted all of these but we will get round to it. But as you can see, they will really add to the game.