Played! Judge Dredd - The Cursed Earth

So after another break from gaming, due to weddings, helping with DofE expeditions and the like, Steedo came over for a very short notice game of Judge Dredd - The Cursed Earth (JDTCE) - was planning to pop down the local but that didn't happen!
JDTCE is a re skinning/variant of Lost Epeditions with a Dredd theme - the quality of the cards is very good - and the box matches Odin's Ravens so that's nice - they can sit next to each other on the shelf (gathering dust like all the other games .......). Steedo reckoned the the component quality was higher than in lost expeditions. The objective of the game is to catch Max Normal who has gone into the Cursed Earth carrying the Block Mania virus, before the perps (Satellat and Mean Machine) catch him. So we are chasing and racing to victory ..... Obviously if the team of 3 judges die you lose .... So more than one way to lose.
You set up a location track, then deal out encounter cards to either move on, gain experience (survival or negotiation), food, ammo or health. The encounter cards also help the perps move on, expend ammo/negotiation/health and gain radiation - which you can't get rid of and if rad tokens exceed health the character dies. There are also Psi events, now we did play this wrong (which may partly explain some of our lack of success, but not much), which means you add a card to the end encounters to play or take a health from Judge Anderson,  then each player takes a card, chats about it without being specific and the best (least worsed) is added to the end of the encounters.

We settled into a standard Street Judge level of the game and caught up and passed the perps, before sucumbing to radiation poisoning .... Then we tried the Cadet level and did worse .... So we tried it again and died .... Then again and the result was the same - death! By this time the pub had been forgotten (sorry Fudger) as we had to win a game!
Once more unto the breach we went this time playing Chief Judge (Hard) level, with a change on strategy - one of the judges (Giant) was going to take most of the hits and radiation - and we were doing to chase down Max.

This worked - victory!

The game plays well and Steedo and I enjoyed the challenge - hopefully it will get some more plays soon (before I forget the rules) and I will need to try it solo. But apart from character names and locations I am not sure it felt like Dredd (as I recall the comics from the mid eighties that are in the loft).  Anyway a good game!

Morts