Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth - actual blog

What, you want an actual blog post about the game?

Brutal.

It really does describe the game. Brutal is the perfect word for it. Brutal!

Oh okay then, here's a proper blog post about it.

12th March 2019.

It was a dark and stormy night. Well actually it was a fairly average and nondescript  gaming Tuesday at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking.

Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth is a reskinned, tweaked and updated version of 'The Lost Expedition, you can read my blog The Lost Expedition here.

Instead of crossing the insect and dangerous animal infested hell of a jungle, you are now crossing the mutated insect and mutated dangerous animal infested hell of The Cursed Earth. Lets not forget the flesh eating dinosaurs either!

Even worse, you're on a race against time: Because of a Macguffin you must reach Ol' Stoneyface's loyal informer 'Max Normal' before a gang of perps do.
They travelling along the expedition trail just like you and if the gang reach Max before the players. Well, they'll just murder him to death in a hail of machine-gun fire. 'Brraapp, budda budda budda'; I can hear the sound effects from here.

Now that you've read my blog post on The Lost Expedition and you know what I'm talking about. How does The Cursed Earth differ?

The expedition trail is different. Instead of a row of 9 essentially cosmetic cards to travel along. You create an location deck and the final destination card (along with 2 other cards) is shuffled to form the last 3 cards of the deck. At the start of the game 3 location cards are turned over and laid out in order. When the players (or the perps) are on the last card in the location row and need to move on, then the next location card is revealed.
This is a significant addition because.

• Location cards now have effect: On a rare occasion, it'll benefit you, sometimes it's neutral (some cards have no effect). Mostly though, they're just bad.
• You don't exactly what's coming next.
• Also, you don't know when Max Normal will be revealed, he could be in any of the last 3 cards.
• Apparently the expansion for The Lost Expedition (The Fountain Of Youth) adds this mechanic to the game.

The encounter cards are mechanically the same. During each day and night each phase players must play 2 cards from their hand. During the day phase, the cards are placed in numerical order, during the night phase they are placed in the order that they are played. Where they differ is in what decisions these are different to the card in The Last Expedition and are not just reskinned. In addition to this there's a new type of option that becomes available to the characters.

This option is 'violence'. Many of the obstacles encountered by Dredd & Co. can be solved by the application of violence. Spend 2 bullets or 3 health and the problem is solved in the good ol' 'Big Meg style'.
There quite a few situations that can be solved in this fashion and it feels suitably appropriate..

You still have 3 characters in your party, Dredd, Anderson and Giant in this game. They have more health than their contemporaries in The Lost Expedition. The group is still issued with an inadequate supply of ration and bullets. Each one of the judges still has their own area expertise.
Judge Dredd has Survival.
Judge Giant has Diplomacy.
judge Anderson, unsurprisingly has Psi.
Interestingly, only Survival and Diplomacy can be gained from the encounter cards.
Psi works differently, there appears to be way of gaining Psi expertise cards, (additionally, how Psi works differs in the different game modes).
For the co-operative game mode: When the Psi symbol appears, there are 2 choices.

• 2 encounter cards can be placed at the the encounter track.
• Anderson pays 1 life and every player draws an encounter track. Players the discuss which card is the best (without revealing them). The card that the players decide is best is played at the end of the encounter, the remaining cards are discarded.

Finally; there's a new resource to manage (and a new way to die)! Radiation. As the characters journey across The Cursed Earth, they can accumulate radiation poisoning. If a character acquires more radiation tokens than health tokens, the it's bye bye to that character.

As always, there some other rules to take into account. But that's the gist of it.

In short Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth is a lot like The Lost Expedition, but harder. Brutally harder.