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I'm vaguely wondering if there would be any game potential in Clairvoyant Button Men where you play the same rules but roll all the dice before you start (each dice can be rerolled a maximum of 5 times so there aren't that many extra numbers to deal with) It'd probably just make being screwed by bad rolls worse, though.
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Aug 3, 2022 21:06
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So I got my order from Atlas Games. Here's what they actually sent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUKpK2t1u2I Randalor fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Aug 4, 2022 |
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Aug 4, 2022 00:13
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Very surprised to see it's in a Leder Games shipping box? Maybe they're sharing warehousing? If I recall correctly the Burger Box was pretty much proposed via the On The Edge mailing list, to try and save the game from death by giving retailers the ability to get full coverage of the game with a smaller investment. I believe it was literally made by them opening up existing boxes and sorting their contents into slipcases. Some of the expansions have card pools small enough that you can get a complete set from a box, so good luck. Maybe some highlights? And/or, are you actually going to try playing it? hyphz fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Aug 4, 2022 |
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Aug 4, 2022 01:13
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hyphz posted:Some of the expansions have card pools small enough that you can get a complete set from a box, so good luck. Maybe some highlights? And/or, are you actually going to try playing it? I'm going to definitely try playing it, and hopefully I can make a few decks. There's a convention held annually in a city a few hours away that I may start running "Dead Card Game" blocks at if I can find enough good old card games and get enough cards to make some decks for. I'm sure people would be interested in playing games that were from the anything goes days of CCGs, before things fell kind-of into place. If people want, I can do actual unboxing videos to show off the cards, or at least crack a few packs on camera. Speaking of, evobatman, any idea what you're going to do with your old Blood Wars cards? I'd be interested in taking them off of your hands for you to have as another game to run at conventions.
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Aug 4, 2022 01:26
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You’ve got upwards of 2000 cards, I would think you could make a few decks..  Remember to try multiplayer. I don’t remember a whole lot about deck building. But watch out that there’s no summoning sickness or equivalent. Also, controlling opponent’s cards is powerful as they stay in their position in your conspiracy for the purpose of targeting attacks, and there’s a common card (Blackmail) that Controls for one turn. (I think there’s exactly one card immune to Blackmail and the flavour test is something like: “She’s the only person on Al Amarja who genuinely isn’t involved in anything underhand.”)
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Aug 4, 2022 04:26
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hyphz posted:So, to put off gritting my teeth and doing Shadowfist, I'm starting writing now... I've got a little time off so hopefully I can do the game justice.
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Aug 4, 2022 09:12
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Anyone remember the Monty Python and The Holy Grail CCG? I was really into buying those cards for a while in my mid-teens. All I really remember about it was it had Sir Not Appearing in This Film and the card wanted you to paste a pic of your face in the cut out and it got a bonus if he had your face or something like that.
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Aug 4, 2022 11:45
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Victorkm posted:Anyone remember the Monty Python and The Holy Grail CCG? I was really into buying those cards for a while in my mid-teens. All I really remember about it was it had Sir Not Appearing in This Film and the card wanted you to paste a pic of your face in the cut out and it got a bonus if he had your face or something like that. Yes. It was up there with the Austin Powers CCG as a low effort licensed game. It sucked to play and if you were the kind of person who'd buy it you knew every line in the movie by heart anyway so there was nothing new for you.
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Aug 4, 2022 12:14
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hyphz posted:You’ve got upwards of 2000 cards, I would think you could make a few decks.. Assuming my math is right (and considering that this is early morning, that's not a guarantee), I should have 3780 cards total. My biggest "worry" is not having enough of the land equivilants to make enough decks. I've seen a recommendation on BGG to make half-decks that you mix together, which is how I'll probably tackle it. Treat it like Magic's Jumpstart and focus the half-decks on specific groups.
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Aug 4, 2022 12:36
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Midjack posted:Yes. It was up there with the Austin Powers CCG as a low effort licensed game. It sucked to play and if you were the kind of person who'd buy it you knew every line in the movie by heart anyway so there was nothing new for you. Yeah, its charm lasted precisely one game in my experience. The same experience could honestly be had by just watching the movie again. It was by KenzerCo and I think that 'gamers recite the entire movie' was the height of airquotes humor at the time.
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Aug 4, 2022 13:15
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How much experience do we actually need with a given game before we can make an effort post? I'm planning on doing writeups for Force of Will and Decipher's Star Trek, but I can also do one for Hecatomb even though I've only played it... twice?
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Aug 4, 2022 14:07
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Randalor posted:How much experience do we actually need with a given game before we can make an effort post? I'm planning on doing writeups for Force of Will and Decipher's Star Trek, but I can also do one for Hecatomb even though I've only played it... twice? Go for it. I played Highlander a bunch but I haven't played for 20 years. If someone else wants to jump in after and write a second effortpost, I'll just put both of them in the OP.
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Aug 4, 2022 16:22
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Randalor posted:How much experience do we actually need with a given game before we can make an effort post? I'm planning on doing writeups for Force of Will and Decipher's Star Trek, but I can also do one for Hecatomb even though I've only played it... twice? Meh. I've already done a writeup on a game I never played (but only because nobody played it). I'd say any game that you actually held in your hands and looked at is cool.
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Aug 4, 2022 17:13
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Gynovore posted:Meh. I've already done a writeup on a game I never played (but only because nobody played it). I'd say any game that you actually held in your hands and looked at is cool. Okay here's my effort post on magi-nation then: you have a deck and you pick three magi to represent you. each one has abilities and hp. when one dies, you go to the next, when all three die you lose. my friend taught me the game one day and of course gave me her not-so-good deck. i looked at the three magi and went okay this order looks pretty good. she said i could go first to get the feeling of things. i looked at my magi, then looked at the cards in my hand. then i looked at her magi. then i did some math. then i looked at her magi again. then i went "okay i'm not sure if this totally works but i think from what you said this is okay?" and I played two cards that went on my magi and attacked for exactly enough damage to kill her magi. she looked at the cards. then she looked at my magi. then she looked at her magi. "yep, that works" I never played magi-nation again. no way i'd ever get that high again.
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Aug 4, 2022 17:27
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Midjack posted:Yes. It was up there with the Austin Powers CCG as a low effort licensed game. It sucked to play and if you were the kind of person who'd buy it you knew every line in the movie by heart anyway so there was nothing new for you. I never played the Monty Python one but I vaguely remember it was one of the "your guys go around and do missions" CCGs that never really took off and were basically started with Star Trek (where you basically built a board and went around it trying to dig through encounter stacks). I think you built a kind of pyramid of face down cards, and you had to work through the pyramid encountering a card per row until you got to the top, whereupon you could start turning over cards from a set of 5 in the middle of the board looking for the grail? It did remind me that there was a "serious" Quest For The Grail CCG as well with proper Arthurian legend. I seem to recall it was impossible to actually find the Grail in that one, but the point was the good we did along the way or something.
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Aug 4, 2022 18:35
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hyphz posted:I never played the Monty Python one but I vaguely remember it was one of the "your guys go around and do missions" CCGs that never really took off and were basically started with Star Trek (where you basically built a board and went around it trying to dig through encounter stacks). I think you built a kind of pyramid of face down cards, and you had to work through the pyramid encountering a card per row until you got to the top, whereupon you could start turning over cards from a set of 5 in the middle of the board looking for the grail? That sounds about right from my memory of the rulebook. Never played it just bought a bunch because I was precisely the type of gamer described above who had memorized the movie.
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Aug 4, 2022 20:40
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My dad was a J.R.R Tolkien nut, so, of course, when the CCG boom happened, we latched on to Middle Earth: The Wizards, a CCG about having adventures in middle earth. This is, of course, different from the later Decipher LoTR game, which came out after the movies. Fundamentally, you have two "halves" to your deck, 30 "free peoples" cards that help you to win, which you use during your turn, and 30 "shadow" cards to stop your opponent from winning, which you use on other player's turns. A Free People's card-  A Shadow Card -  The goal of the game was to gather 20 marshalling points (henceforth, MP) before your opponent, and then call a "free council" to do final scoring, which had its own set of modifier. At the start of the game, you set out 20 mind points of character (Aragorn, above, has 9 mind, and is insanely overpriced, stats-wise, mostly because there's a large number of specific cards that require him to be in play to work) and began in Rivendell. A sample starting party might look like this-     On your turn, your parties (you can have more than 1 group of yahoos running around, though our play tending to lean towards having a single giant mass of folks) travel to a site (see Weathertop, a lovely site below)-  ,generally by looking at a map of Middle Earth and picking your route, noting the symbols that you pass through -  Of course, if you start at one of the havens, the site cards helpfully list a path there. When you move, your and your opponents draw cards as listed on the card (Weathertop above, gives both players 1 draw, again, not a very interesting location). Your opponent(s) then have a chance to play hazards against you, to a maximum of 1 per character in the moving party. Hazards generally take the form of attacking monsters or events, and, to be played, require either a match on the site you’re traveling to or the site path. These orcs, for example, can be played either to the wilderness in the path to Weathertop or at the ruins themselves-  When attacked by a creature, you have to deal with each of the “strikes” of the creature. For these guys, that’s 6 power in 4 strikes. Normally, a character can defend against 1 strike, tapping to do so, and comparing their prowess (the left number in the shield) +2d6 against the prowess of the strike. However, you might want to handle a second strike (-3 to character prowess) or without tapping (-2 to character prowess) Boromir, for example, can handle a single strike of the orcs without tapping automatically (6 -2) + 2d6 >= 6, and has a very good chance of handling 2 strikes without tapping (6-5) +2d6 >= 6. Assuming all the strikes of the attack are defeated, you can claim the defeated creature for their points value (the orcs are 1 point) and then do the same thing for each hazard on the path (if someone had choked on a roll, or even tied the orcs instead of beating them, you wouldn’t get the point, and the character would have to make a body check, trying to roll under the right number to avoid dying and instead just being wounded, which required going back to a haven to heal). Finally, you arrive at the site, And have to face another round of attacks at the site (2 strikes of 6 power wolves) and get to play….  for 1 big point (assuming Bilbo made it through everything untapped, or else you'd have to wait for next turn) ! Finally, at the end of your turn, each player refills their hand to 8 cards, and play passes to the next player. Needless to say, the game played rather slowly. In particular, some of the more powerful strategies involved moving between low risk locations and influencing factions, like the Men of Lake Town, to support you by rolling and adding the character’s direct influence (the hand value) against the faction’s value.  My personal favorite deck involved bumping around Bag End, recurring the site to allow you to assemble 20 points worth of hobbit allies while exposing you to almost zero danger (I was a very timid child). There were decks about having a bunch of dwarves going to the Lonely Mountain to become King under the Mountain, decks about Aragorn becoming King of Gondor, decks about raiding dragon lairs to grab a bunch of magic weapons, etc. In general, however, to actually play an interesting deck involved getting together a lot of rare cards, because you'd need not only Aragon, for example, but also Minas Tirith (the site), the card to crown him with, and various factions in the area to ensure that you make the magic marker of 20. Of course, if Aragorn dies during the game, you basically lose, because no-one else can replace him. The game also had a whole bunch of special rules, including searching for rings to try to find the One Ring (accomplished by gathering rings, information, and then rolling a bunch of dice and hoping for very lucky results), which you can throw into Mt. Doom to automatically win the game. There are also rules to try to recruit other players’ characters and factions away from them, which I remember as being very annoying and complex. Over the course of the lifecycle of the game, more complexity was added in the form of a bunch of new ways to play were added, including playing as Nazgul (in The Lidless Eye expansion), or a corrupted wizard (in the Fallen Wizards expansion). Fundamentally, the game does a much better job of making you feel like you’re wandering Middle Earth than the later Decipher game, but a much worse job than the current FFG LCG. Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun playing with my Dad, but that didn’t have much to do with the game itself.
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Aug 4, 2022 21:16
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I had one starter deck from that game. Had the Witch King in it, one of the creepiest depictions of him I've seen
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Aug 4, 2022 21:22
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Victorkm posted:That sounds about right from my memory of the rulebook. Never played it just bought a bunch because I was precisely the type of gamer described above who had memorized the movie. The only thing I know about the Monty Python CCG is that there was a card called, "Get on With It!" It ended someone's turn if they had taken too long. This stuck in my memory because (jokingly) every card game ought to have such a card.
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Aug 4, 2022 21:24
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MonsieurChoc posted:I got myself a copy of Romance of the Nine Empires, the fake card game made as a tie-in to the movie The Gamers 3: Hands of Fate. The movie plot is itself a big reference to drama surrounding L5R tournaments, and the mechanics are recycled from Legend of the Burning Sands. I'm on vacation right now, but I'll do a write up of LBS when I get back next week. One of my favorite games ever, though a lot of that is nostalgia rather than genuine quality. Really influenced later l5r and other ccg design too (despite l5r coming first)
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Aug 4, 2022 22:49
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nomadotto posted:*Words about Middle-Earth Wizards* I won't lie, this actually sounds like a really good basis for a modern adaptation. Maybe give it an LCG treatment of "Here is a game in a box, with new decks as expansions" or maybe the Villainous treatment if you make pre-made decks with a respective Shadow deck for each that other players draw from.
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Aug 4, 2022 23:00
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I'll add that great write-up of Middle Earth when I'm not phone posting. Thanks again to everyone for contributions!Arivia posted:Okay here's my effort post on magi-nation then: I have a bit of experience playing Magi Nation. While you may have missed a rule or ten in being stoned, your post does get at the biggest problem I had with an otherwise fun game: it had a major runaway leader problem. I'll start working on an effortpost about it to explain this and the actual rules. I'm busy this week so it'll probably be posted next week.
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Aug 4, 2022 23:14
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No clue how or why, but my local Ollie's had a stack of Decipher's Star Trek Mirror Universe booster boxes. Right between Doomtown Reloaded and High Command boxes.
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Aug 5, 2022 00:21
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:No clue how or why, but my local Ollie's had a stack of Decipher's Star Trek Mirror Universe booster boxes. Right between Doomtown Reloaded and High Command boxes. Holy poo poo. Might go check mine this weekend because I'd snap those up for funsies.
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Aug 5, 2022 01:42
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:No clue how or why, but my local Ollie's had a stack of Decipher's Star Trek Mirror Universe booster boxes. Right between Doomtown Reloaded and High Command boxes. How much? I'd be very interested in them if they're not too much and you feel like doing a fellow goon a favor.
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Aug 5, 2022 02:00
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I opened the Cut Ups Project booster packs. I hate you all and I now have a headache. Though lol at the literal nazis being called "NeoFascist Weinerheads". And being called literal dime-a-dozen hate addicts.
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Aug 5, 2022 02:22
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Randalor posted:How much? I'd be very interested in them if they're not too much and you feel like doing a fellow goon a favor. Like $10, I'll stop by this weekend and see if they're still there.
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Aug 5, 2022 02:55
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:No clue how or why, but my local Ollie's had a stack of Decipher's Star Trek Mirror Universe booster boxes. Right between Doomtown Reloaded and High Command boxes. OG Doomtown might be worth an effort post. It had a really big scene here locally for a while but the first big expansion that came out after the end of the first story arc sort of spelled the beginning of the end because it had cards that led to some very oppressive decks that you either played or you countered or you lost. People just sort of wandered away.
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Aug 5, 2022 03:07
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:Like $10, I'll stop by this weekend and see if they're still there. Oh awesome, if you're willing to pick them up and send them to me I'll pay you for them and for shipping.
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Aug 5, 2022 03:25
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Randalor posted:I opened the Cut Ups Project booster packs. I hate you all and I now have a headache. I hope that wasn't too negative a thing.. It's a.. unusual set, probably chosen only because it was also the first RPG supplement - which is tricky, since it's one of the strangest aspects of the setting. Any highlights to show? Before you ask, Copyright Violation doesn't bypass the draw mechanic and C. A. Radford is always the same person for uniqueness purposes.
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Aug 5, 2022 04:04
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I'll be taking pictures of some of the more... interesting cards on the weekend, I'm heading to bed now and I've only got about 3/10tha of the cards fully sorted. Some of the card art fall squarely into "Not sure if racist or just bad art" though. I cracked this set first because, hey, it's just 90 cards, how bad could it be? Black text on a veeeeery faint textbook over a dark green and black background. Someone thought that was a good idea. The cards all have round corners at least, so there's that.
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Aug 5, 2022 04:09
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Nazis are a very explicit enemy of the Cut-Ups in the setting, so don’t think they’re mentioned a bunch in every set.
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Aug 5, 2022 04:47
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In the spirit of keeping things going - To boldly go where many goons have gone before, the Decipher Star Trek CCG  What is the Decipher Star Trek CCG? Star Trek is a game primarily about playing solitaire faster than your opponent and pushing your luck. The core game does a good job of emulating episodes of Next Generation or The Original Series, but it very quickly became insanely bloated with weird complexity, edge cases, and silver bullet cards, in addition to having a core balance problem. That's all well and good, but what is a game like? At the start of the game, you establish a “Spaceline” of missions, taking turns with your opponent to seed 6 locations, each of which generally has a mission associated with it, like so:  Missions have requirements (the mission shown above requires a Federation, Bajoran, or Non-aligned team with the listed skills and stats) and a points value, which you get for solving the mission (here 25) and all locations have a “range” (here, 3) which is the cost to move to them from the adjacent location. Then, players take turns seeding the spaceline with cards from their seed deck (normally 30 cards, if I remember correctly). Seeded cards were generally one of Outputs, which limit what characters and ships you can play -  Dilemmas, which are hidden under your opponent’s missions to slow them down by stopping or killing their team, like so  Or weirder stuff, like Q’s tent (which allows you a sideboard of weird silver bullet cards)  As the game progressed, the seed phase got more and more complex, but this was the phase that allowed you to interact with the opponent the most, so treasure it. Once turns began, players on the turn could play exactly one card, like a character-  Who has a set of 3 attributes and maybe a couple of skills, designed to overcome the mission requirements and likely Dilemmas your opponent seeded A ship -  Or an event-  There were also interrupts, which didn’t count against the 1-per-turn rule. Then, if you had a ship and sufficient crew to fly it, you could move the ship up the the ship’s range in distance units, and, if you were feeling lucky, attempt a mission. Missions were the primary way to win, with the player getting to 100 points first winning. You can also effectively force a win if you can blow up your opponent's outpost, as they won't be able to play any more cards, but that was a difficult thing to accomplish. When you attempt a mission, you flip over seeded cards, in seeded order, 1 at a time, completely resolving the card before moving on to the next one. An important note is that unless the attempting team is completely killed or the Dilemma specified that it stops the team, they’ll continue to move forward. Therefore, a common strategy was to attempt a mission with a small team of disposable characters in hopes they could trip the really brutal killing Dilemmas without risking your big important characters, which did a great job of emulating the shows. This could be countered by including some “walls” (Dilemmas which forced a team to stop) before the kills, but then there was no cost to seeing what skills you needed before attempting again. The choice of which mission to attempt, and how much to commit to an attempt could be really interesting in a bluffing and reads sense, since you knew how many cards were seeded under each mission, but the fact that space missions required you to commit your entire crew (unlike planet missions, which let you choose how many folks to commit to the attempt) and that knowing who and how much to commit required you to memorize a whole huge number of Dilemmas really went against the core “call or fold” fun. Speaking of red-shirts, one of the core problems of the game (and there were many) was the fact that there were no resources, so a really amazing card like  With a lot of skills and a pretty good stat line cost exactly as much as some random joker like  Now, all card games have a power differential between good and bad cards, but the discrepancy was HUGE and there was basically no point in including “lower value” cards, unless you really needed a specific skill and you couldn’t find it elsewhere. They tried to remedy this by massively inflating the skills and stats of completely random cards in various factions, so it wasn’t just “amazing Enterprise crew vs. Klingon Scrub Squad”, but there generally was no room for common characters or ships in most decks. Another way they tried to get around the 1-per-turn rule was the inclusion of download icons on characters, which let you search your deck and put into play a specific set of card when they came into play, like so-  Who downloads a Defense System Upgrade, but you can see that it was generally used more as a flavor than a balancing tool. Another major issue with the game was the lack of player interaction. While you could theoretically try to build a deck to fly your ship over and shoot at your opponents, it generally wasn’t worth it, although you could occasionally slow players down for a couple of turns that way. Stealing the other player’s missions was hard (you’ve probably build your deck to solve your missions, and you might not be even playing a faction that can attempt the mission), and hate cards were even printed to stop this  Hate cards were another big part of the game, with a lot of really crummy “take that” style of play-  As the game went on, things got increasingly complex, with the need to seed separate Delta and Gamma quadrant locations, which weren’t accessible without specific cards, and goofy things like the aforementioned Q’s tent, various locations on Deep Space 9, Alternate Universe doors  and other goofy stuff-  That said, I was fond of some goofy cards, like Devidian Door, which let you play things “from the future” at no cost, with the requirement that you remove a Devidian Door from your hand next turn or lose.  I understand some people are keeping the game going a-la Netrunner’s project formerly known as Nisei, but I cannot in good conscience recommend the game, other than as a curiosity. nomadotto fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Aug 5, 2022 |
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Aug 5, 2022 05:07
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I had some fun with the Trek CCG as a child. The lack of player interaction led to fewer playground fights than Magic! Our local meta had a quirk though. You see, our local games store closed partway through the Alternate Universe expansion, and the replacement was a Games Workshop that would never acknowledge such filthy non-Warhammer. So none of the silly later stuff ever made it here. I got quite a surprise when I saw the game many years later and found all the extra factions and silly side-deck mechanics. It was fun to cruise around the map and the game had a solid Trek feel. Shame even the most remotely recognisable character was an ultra-rare. Heaven help you if you wanted a ship that had been onscreen for longer than it's own explosion. I remember dealer prices for Trek being obscene, even by 00s standards.
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Aug 5, 2022 10:17
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There were two major issues I had with the Star Trek CCG, one being the "Door" mechanic they introduced in the first expansion that required you to have certain cards set up at the start of the game in order to play them (and eventually just stacks of side decks fhaf require seperate "door" cards to play), and that Decipher was allergic to ban lists,, and instead printed "Referee" cards to counter the problem cards and combos. Which required you to have the right referee card in hand when your opponent tried to use their broken card or combo. Such as Red Alert, which is a common from the base set that broke the economy of the game in half. The base set of the game was actually pretty decent and it was a solid framework for a game, just that it had the usual "early CCG" balance mistakes. Edit: in a game with a hard "1 card played per turn" limit, this is something special. Just look at this. This wasn't a "Once per turn/Once per game" deal either, it was a permanent effect that lasted the whole game. Cards were printed to cancel the effect, but this card was tournament legal for the duration of 1st Ed. I never played competitive, but I can just imagine the BS that went on. 
Randalor fucked around with this message at 12:54 on Aug 5, 2022 |
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Aug 5, 2022 11:37
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For a young nerd that was just kind of getting into gaming I loved how... I guess thematic the Star Trek CCG was. I felt like I could play out an episode of the show on the table and it was super neat. The shift to second edition was a way better game imo but it lost a lot of that flavor for me.
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Aug 5, 2022 11:46
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The middle earth game sounds pretty cool in concept but maybe boring in practice.
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Aug 5, 2022 12:10
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 Star Wars Destiny  This was one of my favorite collectible games of the 2010s. Players assembled a team of characters using point values (bottom left of the card). The first number is for one die, and the second "elite" number got two dice. The dice reference gave you a handy reference for all the die faces. For example, some of Jango's die faces were ranged damage, some were melee, and one resource side. The blue resource side meant that you could only resolve it with other resource results. And that red side was a blank. Team composition was wild, too. You could only include either hero or villain characters, plus a few neutrals. Main, powerful characters were expensive and so only allowed you to field a few dice, but those teams were just as viable as a swarm of Stormtroopers; they all had their strengths and weaknesses. And it felt like Star Wars. Vader was expensive, so decks involving him felt slow, methodical, and powerful. The Stormtrooper and other swarm decks felt like shooting wildly and hoping enough of your shots landed. Probably the closest to Star Wars that any Star Wars card game has felt. Gameplay was done through alternating actions. Activating a character (rolling all its dice into play) was one action. Choosing to resolve dice was another, and you could activate all of your dice that showed the same symbol at once. So if Jango there rolled the 1 melee (crossed lightsabers) symbol, and a Tusken Raider also rolled some melee results, you could resolve them all and deal damage to Luke Skywalker. Activating all your characters and then seeing what you could do with your dice wasn't always a smart move, as it left you open to the many die removal cards. You might want to resolve some sub-optimal results rather than risk your opponent blowing you out by removing all your melee dice, for example. You also might want to play your own removal events, even if it means you won't be able to do everything you want to do. Dice manipulation was strong. You could discard a card from your hand to reroll any of your dice, and there were other effects that did that more efficiently (for better or worse). At its core, the game was a solid back-and-forth approximation of a skirmish in the Star Wars universe. Kill all your opponent's characters, and you win. And the dice themselves were great. They weren't stickers, they were printed on the dice faces in a way that unless you were regularly rolling on concrete, they weren't going to rub off. Kind of bulky, but they had to be in order to be legible across the table.  The battlefield mechanic was interesting. Both players brought a battlefield to the game, but only one (at random) was used. It represented where the battle was taking place. Even though only one player's battlefield was used during the game, "claiming the battlefield" was an action anyone could take. That player took control of the battlefield, letting them go first next round, and activating the "claim" ability. Because it stopped you from taking more actions that round, you'd often wait until you had nothing better to do, but there were strategic reasons to claim early. What killed it: Shortly after the first set release, there were massive supply issues. People around here got really into the game, but then couldn't get their hands on more cards/dice for weeks. I let people borrow stuff, but it was plugging the dam with chewing gum. Because the game was so fun, there was a resurgence once packs could be found - and then balance issues killed it for good. I can't remember all of the broken stuff well enough to comment, but most of the broken cards had one thing in common: cheating on die efficiency. Red and yellow both had cards that either let you change multiple dice to any side you wanted, or activate a character out of sequence, and/or resolve any of their dice. Jango up there was particularly bad; it made your opponent afraid to do anything, because it would trigger Jango and he'd burn down something before they had a chance to react. And the Hyperspace Jump card let you end the round early, erasing your opponent's strategy if you managed to do everything you wanted way before them. The base gameplay was amazing, but the developers pushed the action economy too far too fast when they should have been focusing on the unique die rolling gameplay. Lastly, as nice as the dice were, they were bulky. Carrying even a moderately-sized collection involved lugging a few pounds of dice around. Nothing a Warhammer player couldn't handle, but a lot to expect for card gamers. I held onto my cards and dice for longer than I should have (at one point a Vader plus die was going for $30; my friend made a few hundred dollar profit selling his stuff just before the crash), and ended up filling a lawn garbage bag in the trash after failing to even be able to give them away. The game lasted a couple of expansions and even a special set designed for draft. I love drafting, and very few games besides Magic care enough to try to create a limited environment, but it was too little too late.
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Aug 5, 2022 16:47
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Are we allowed to include dead digital CCGs on this? Or recent ones that stillbirthed?
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Aug 5, 2022 20:11
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hyphz posted:Are we allowed to include dead digital CCGs on this? Or recent ones that stillbirthed? Go for it!
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Aug 5, 2022 20:29
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