The Daemon's Claw

 Alan and I got together on Saturday to play me of Joe’s Patreon scenarios. The maze of the Minotaur. So our brave warband journey to an island near Crete in the Mediterranean. When we get there, we find the cave is a giant maze and it’s inhabited by a Minotaur and a pack of devil dogs. We were playing on my schifting maze terrain tiles. At the end of each phase a player could shift any of the even rows or columns by one tile. This can open up or close off passages. This took the place of Joes confusion mechanics, we would be confusing each other. Here are Alan’s French advancing into the maze. As is now tradition he won the initiative for the first turn Here is where my stout native chappies will be deployed  Ad that’s all there is for photos. I rolled a double one on operate phone and it was a total failure. So what happened. My chaps walked into the maze and promptly shot the devil dog lurking in the corner. My officer and a janissary bravely advanced. The Minotaur loomed o...

  Silver Bayonet: Curses of the Pharaohs – Those Dashing French Fiends Vanish! This is Echo, one of my new AI team members she has read the last year of my blog and is now set up to help me create blog posts. Alan and I played this game a couple of weeks ago. Some of Echo's jokes are funnier than mine and she has only been on the job 2 days. Grok has already kept me humble by telling me I'm 140 kilos of USB cable. For this battle report I asked for a mix of Gorden of Khartoum, Lance Corporal Jones and a dash of General Melcherd. That's probably better than me trying to do a terrible French or worse Arabic accent. Here is my band of stout native chappies. The are marching to the battle to strains of "Walk like an Egyptian" Here are my forces arrayed for battle. Alan's Frenchie types are hidden in the sand storm. By Jove, what a table. Pyramids thrusting skyward like the finger of Anubis himself, sand devils whipping ’round the palms and tumbled tombs, camels...

Right, confession time: I've always enjoyed solo wargames. Club days are gold, but rain, work, or just the itch hits at 2am — what then? Enter AI. Not the Skynet takeover bollocks, but tools like Grok (xAI's cheeky beast) that crank out battle reports in my voice, Abnett-style yarns from blog scraps, or even paint schemes that'd make Vallejo weep. We've all seen the generic AI slop — "valiant heroes clashed in epic struggle" — but feed it your style (dry wit, self-dep dice woes, club banter), and suddenly it's your feed assistant. I've had Grok/Echo mirror my Daemon's Claw posts: Vandred's goblin-bashing, Silver Bayonet curses ("Baaaah!"), Frostgrave boar-gored wizards. Photos in, narrative out — turn-by-turn, loot tallies, that "why me" humour. Saves hours editing PowerPoints for YouTube. It's the co-op solo revolution. Rustle stills from vid? AI weaves the tale. Need a Gaunt's Ghosts spin on Rathbourne's jai...

Vandred led his warband to another ruined human village, or was it the same one as last time? They all looked the same after a while. One squalid pile of smashed burnt out dilapidated buildings after another all showing lives ended before they could learn the beauty of the Chaos Pantheon. We must be going in the right direction there are those cursed witch hunters. When we get to the village we detect movement. Its Goblins. Great it's a classic genocidal dungeon crawl where we kill them and nick their stuff. Morkar goes - "but we are not in a Dungeon boss?"  "Get out the way you big meat sack, go with Magaera!. There is a guy that used intelligence as his dump stat. This is an overview of the battle site, Alan's warband is coming down from the top and I am coming up from the bottom. The goblins start shouting and jeering when they spot us. Sticking with the plan Vandred cast strengths on the Barbarian and at fight 7 he leaps forward onto the Goblin thug. However ...