A Home Raiders Solo Play and Solo Learn Experience

A long long time ago in the ancient days of 2015 Vesper-On games ran a kickstarter for a game called Home Raiders about tiny people from tiny dimensions opening tiny portals in to our houses and fighting battles in our living rooms.  The models were 1:1 scale and the forces of New Lilliput were coming to our defence primarily against the Gremlins who wanted to steal gizmos and doohickeys from our devices, the Lords of Dust (Egyptian Penguins) who wanted to dump their toxic waste (dust) under our sofas and behind out TVs, and the Fair folk, fairies and lost children looking to bring nature back to dominance in our world.  Battles would be fought on our carpets, tables and bookshelves, and terrain would be whatever was there naturally.  If you put your coffee down on the table mid battle it became a new piece of terrain.

It was a charming delightful idea and myself and many others backed it and were happy when our deliveries arrived many months later.  However before I could finish building and painting the game, and before they could finish releasing the initial line,  the company went bankrupt and the game died there and then.  TTCombat have bought the license and still sell the products but they have done nothing with it.  I’m assuming they are only selling inherited stock and haven’t been making any more.  I have been hoping to hear that they are going to develop the game now that Carnivale is up and running (They bought the games in the same deal), but I have yet to hear anything.

Anyway, due to everyone around me having children and changing jobs or moving away I find myself in a period where it is temporarily hard to get a game in so I am using this time to dig out games I’ve bought but not tried and learning them solo style.  I’ve just tried my hand at 40k and now I’m going to give Home Raiders a go.

The Models

The metal models look fine painted up, but are a little fragile in places.  Those spear tips want to bend and snap off.  The clear bases are nice, but once I started drilling them to attach the models they started to crack.  The superglue also caused a little frosting in places.  Still, I got it all to work well enough.

The sculpts themselves were kept basic.  Lots of open surfaces with minimal sculpted detail.  The design choice was similar to a kids colouring book.  Keep it simple so a child can block colour it.  However as an experienced painter I found the lack of detail and texture to be a hindrance at times on some sculpts.  I know how to use the texture to do the work for me.  I also found some of the detail that was there was flat and got lost in the paint at times.  I painted these a few years ago so I’m writing this from memory.  I don’t think I did too bad a job all things considered.  I also bought the Fair Folk as they were going to get dragon riders and I don’t own any real dragons yet.  Those models never got released in the end.

Reading the Rules

The rules (Available here) were a very quick and simple read.  I was surprised when I’d gotten to the end of them they were so short.  Its mostly self explanatory and a lot of them are optional.  The game is aiming itself as an entry wargame for children.  Something for parents to use to get their children started.  As they get used to moving and firing then you can “turn on” special abilities etc.  Nice idea.  I’ll be using everything from the beginning I think.

The game runs off custom dice with either, blanks, Aces, or Crit Aces on them.  This is mildly confusing because the symbol for an ace is an exclamation point, which I kept reading as an “i”.  The rules kept talking about rolling aces and I didn’t know what that meant.  I think this could have been worked a little clearer.  Either by changing the term, changing the symbol, or including the symbol anywhere they use the term.  It’s a niggle though, but a point of confusion.

The turn order is decided by drawing gems from a bag.  Every unit or solo puts a gem in a bag coloured for its faction so you can spend it to activate any unit you choose, but only once each per round.

The Stat Cards (Available here) are nice and simple.  They are one sides and have lots of symbols, which take a small amount of getting used to.  They keep the numbers simple.  There’s no huge points costs requiring maths skills.  Everything costs 1-3 points so young children could cost up an army without running out of fingers, at least at battle box level.

The special abilities are not included on the stat cards.  Instead each stat may have a coloured background.  You can then check that colour to the tables on the last 2 pages of the rules to see what special ability (IE Push, Shied Guard etc) they have access to.  This is great for not overwhelming new players who want to play just the basic rules as they don’t even need to know those colours have any significance.  However, when you want to use these abilities it gets confusing.  Firstly, telling the colours apart isn’t always simple.  The pink and the red look a lot alike.  My main issue is that I forget that stat has a yellow background, and even when I remember I have to keep looking it up.  It doesn’t help that a yellow background for the Melee stat will mean something different to the Defence stat having a yellow background.  The backs of the cards are blank.  You could easily put the relevant text on the back there.  if they really want to keep some cards simple then printing two sets of cards, one with and one without the extra info would surely have not cost more than a few pennies more?  I will be making my own card backs for any future games and keeping them back to back in card sleeves.