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Ledhed posted:I don't think they'll ever go to blister packs for the regular releases. The images in the previews are always mock-ups with blister packs, but unless they change manufacturers suddenly it's always gonna be cardboard boxes for the 60-card packs. In the announcement for the 40k packs they said it's going to be blisters from now on. quote:n addition to powerful new warlords, the Warlord cycle introduces our new LCG® packaging to Warhammer 40,000: Conquest War Packs! This packaging is molded plastic, but every War Pack still contains the full complement of sixty cards.
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Sep 4, 2014 18:51
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Carteret posted:We'll see. They have been showing images of it off and on for a while now, and it looks like something they'll do eventually. They already use them for their PoD stuff, and if anything it will just make their products have a unified image on the shelf. I think it's because the POD stuff is printed in the US and the rest of the LotR stuff is printed in China.
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Sep 4, 2014 19:05
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Epi Lepi posted:I think it's because the POD stuff is printed in the US and the rest of the LotR stuff is printed in China. This is the reason. But, as shown above, they've already commented on the fact that they are going to the blisters.
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Sep 4, 2014 19:20
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Blister packs are also more shrink resistant and necessary if they ever expand distribution beyond game stores.
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Sep 4, 2014 20:24
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I think the turn-around time would be faster as well. No longer do we need to wait the 4-6 weeks for boxes of cards to make it across the ocean. I also imagine there is a nice profit margin increase when FFG cuts out the middle man and prints everything in house. Finally, this is subjective but I think the POD cards are slightly better quality than the other ones. I am all for the blister packs even if it messes with my organization scheme.
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Sep 4, 2014 21:42
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It's not you, they use better quality stock on their in-house printing, but they tend to have rougher cuts around the edges (enough to notice by feel and when in a big stack of cards. Should we expect a price hike with the transition to blisters? And, I know this is dumb, but is the environmental footprint of blisters significantly more than that of cardboard? I'm surprised that the move to blisters would mean a move to wider distribution. I've seen other card game, Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon at Target before (maybe toy stores too? I haven't been in an actual toy store in more than a year.) They tend to have a lot MORE packaging there than at a game shop, where the boosters aren't in individual holo-foil boxes ala the gigantic Yu-Gi-Oh boxes. Oh well, I won't be a grognard about it, if more people play more games then I'm glad for it.
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Sep 4, 2014 22:00
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The move to blister packs isn't necessarily a move to POD. They have said that they like the flexibility that they have now, but can't beat the sheer numbers that China can do.
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Sep 4, 2014 22:36
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FFG is definitely not WotC, they won't be doing all of their printing in-house.
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Sep 5, 2014 06:11
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Not sure if this really means anything, but FFG was showing off the upcoming Space Wolf and Great Unclean One packs at GenCon in a display case and they were all in blisters.
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Sep 5, 2014 15:47
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If the blisters are like the Netrunner draft packs, they are not very secure. If I was my 10 yr old self now that 3rd SanSan would have been stolen out of a draft pack with no noticeable manipulation of the packaging. Doesn't matter anyway, FFG is gonna do what they want. The print on demand cards are nice though and you really notice the quality upgrade when you have a deck of only them.
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Sep 5, 2014 18:38
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Recently played through the last of the Dwarrowdelf cycle and the Hobbit: Over Hill and Under Hill saga expansion, thoughts: The Long Dark: Sped through this one too quickly to get a decent feel for it. Foundations of Stone: Really cool gimmick and I hope they revisit the idea of splitting the players up in the future. The Nameless Things were also pretty neat. Shadow and Flame: A decent boss fight ruined by the fact that I mis-read the setup instructions so we cheated super hard. Will re-visit in the future. We Must Away Ere Break of Day: This one gave us some trouble as we just couldn't slow down our questing through the first phase enough to take time to build up in the first couple games. Eventually we got it right and pretty casually took them down after that. Over the Misty Mountains Grim: Another quest that messed with the usual encounter deck setup, though this one disappointed me a bit. The first half felt very much like Journey Down the Anduin with the Stone-Giants, but the switch between decks was a huge let down when it was so trivial to reduce the number of encounter cards coming out from six to two. Pretty easy quest overall, especially with the treasure cards. Dungeons Deep and Caverns Dim: I actually liked the riddle mechanic a lot (though this may be my bias as I got the first four riddles right on the first turn). It's a shame that the one treachery that took away progress on the riddles came up when we were one short, because it stalled the game just long enough for us to be overwhelmed when we started the third phase. There were about 14 enemies on the table when we threw in the towel. Also my friend recently started buying expansions for this as well. He went a little far ahead and got the newest cycle and saga expansions. I generally wanted to go through them in release order but I don't want to be a dick and avoid playing his stuff, so we'll end up doing the Black Riders saga before continuing on to Heirs of Numenor. sirtommygunn fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Sep 6, 2014 |
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Sep 6, 2014 08:42
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Gravy Train Robber posted:
Based on my very extensive experience of it the mechanics really sucked.
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Sep 6, 2014 10:34
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Well holy poo poo. Bought LotR, decided to get a feel for the game by playing a solo game. Keep in my at this moment I only have the Core Set. I figured mono-sphere would be too weak, so I combine Spirit/Leadership and take Eowyn/Theodred/Aragorn as my heroes. I discard ten cards that affect "other players" since obviously that isn't going to help me. Cool, right? I set up "Passage Through Mirkwood" and let's loving do this... ...and get the poo poo kicked out of me. It takes me three GAMES to make it to stage 3 and unfortunately poor Aragorn can't withstand the tide of spiders. I read the rules and phases to make sure I wasn't making harder on myself and sure enough, it's just a tough game solo. At least with the starter decks, it is. I had a lot of fun, and I will definitely pick up some APs, but drat this game can be rough. I think i'll play again without Shadow effects. Edit - Thoughts: It's tough to make a decision whether to commit to a quest or have defenders/attackers to deal with encounters. PtM starts with a Forest Spider out, which hits pretty drat hard on the first combat round following engagement. God help me if I draw another Forest Spider/Dol Guldur Orcs on the first encounter draw. I realize that's part of the depth and strategy of the game, but Christ it's a parade of death if I draw creatures immediately. Final Edit - Played another game, solo-Leadership. Went without Shadow effects, which probably made the game TOO easy because I absolutely steamrolled it. Made Aragorn a Steward of Gondor and took an undefended attack to boost Gloin with some resources. I ended up drawing and playing Gandalf TWICE, which was a huge boost in cards and Threat. I got lucky and drew some Locations and Treachery cards, which allowed me to flood the field with Allies. Was a much easier game, but I suspect that was due to the lack of Shadow cards. LotR is pretty awesome and I look forward to more. TheHoosier fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Sep 9, 2014 |
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Sep 9, 2014 04:14
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Passage through Mirkwood may start with a Spider out, but you also have the Old Forest Path, so you can ready a hero when you travel to it in the first round. So you can send in one mroe hero than you would normally be comfortable with. For instance, if you used Eowyn Aragorn and Theodred, you could send in everyone so that you have a good questing strength, then pay a resource with Aragorn and ready him, then travel to the Old Forest Road and ready Theodred. If you drew a location, no real threat. If you drew a treachery, hopefully it isn't too bad. And if you drew an enemy, you should be able to either block both or take one undefended and still be able to attack. And that's without any other allies or events you might have. Or if your threat level is low enough to not auto-engage both enemies. You should persevere with the deck you built. But if you want to play around with with single spehere decks: single-spehere Spirit or Leadership, (Lore maybe), can do passage through Mirkwood usually. Solo Tactics is tough because you don't have enough willpower to deal with normal questing and you end up relying on Legolas + Blades of Gondolian to get quest tokens. alternatively, play two handed. I recently introduced a friend of mine to LOTR. I gave him my all my cards (Core, Hunt for Gollum, Dead Marshes, OHUH, OtD, BR) and said "Pick three heroes - best to only pick two spheres - then pick atleast 50 cards". He went with a dwarf deck of Thorin, Bombur and Gloin. I went with Bard, Beorn and Eowyn. We both made the absent minded mistake of adding Ally versions of our heroes. He later swapped out Gloin for Ori. First the did Passage through Mirkwood. We trounced it fairly easily - and my friend was dissappointed that when he finally had everything good out, we had strolled out of the Forest. We then did the Journey down the Anduin. we started out okay, taking our time to take out the Troll, and having to kill a lot of enemies to finally make it into the raft. We kept a fairly clear staging area until we landed ashore. My threat level was a bit too high, and I managed to do a little to clear out three enemies before my threat hit 50 and I was out. My friend cleared out the remaining enemies the turn after and continued onto Lorien.
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Sep 9, 2014 09:59
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TheHoosier posted:I had a lot of fun, and I will definitely pick up some APs, but drat this game can be rough. Copy/pasting my recent response to another new player who asked a similar question the other day in the Board Game thread. quote:
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Sep 9, 2014 11:31
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Dual sphere decks don't work well in the base set, especially if you're attempting the last scenario. They really need the neutral cards from the adventure packs that cost 1 and give a Hero an extra sphere.
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Sep 9, 2014 12:01
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Or they have to be Leadership/X and you need a Steward of Gondor. What about dual spehere decks with other APs/expansions, but no Song of X cards?
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Sep 9, 2014 12:14
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Leadership/Spirit is the best combo straight out of the core set, because you can put Celebrian's Stone on Aragorn to give him access to Spirit sphere. The songs are good, especially if you're running Lore and have Rivendell Minstrell (THFG) in your deck to search for them. If you can also combo that with Love of Tales (TLD), then you can get some resource generation going as well. You don't, however, want to build your deck reliant on songs. More times than not, I have seen that go very poorly, where your three copies of a song are buried deep. Moving away from the earlier cards, I finally got around to playing Black Riders. I'm doing campaign mode, with a mono-Lore "kamikaze" deck. It relies heavily on Doomed cards from VoI to get some cheap effects, then Loreagorn is there to reset my threat when it gets high. I was able to one-shot the first two quests in Black Riders, but didn't have time to try the third.
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Sep 9, 2014 13:23
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A few people at the store I play at are trying to get a LCG night going. I have 3 core sets of LOTR and Netrunner. Any good demo decks I can put together with the left over cards I have minus the 1 offs?
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Sep 13, 2014 02:20
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Just falling into the lotr rabbit hole now. Should you mainly focus on adventure packs before moving on to deluxe expansions? I got the black riders pack mainly for all the hobbits so far.
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Sep 16, 2014 00:22
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Sgt. Anime Pederast posted:Just falling into the lotr rabbit hole now. Should you mainly focus on adventure packs before moving on to deluxe expansions? I got the black riders pack mainly for all the hobbits so far. You can't really go wrong, just keep in mind that each deluxe is designed for certain adventure packs. If you look around the product page on FFGs website for LotR you'll see what I mean. The gooncensus leans toward playing everything in release order, when feasable.
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Sep 16, 2014 00:28
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So far aside from black riders I just got the uh first phase adventure packs? The ones not sold out at least. How often do they reprint them?
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Sep 16, 2014 00:30
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Sgt. Anime Pederast posted:So far aside from black riders I just got the uh first phase adventure packs? The ones not sold out at least. How often do they reprint them? Every couple of months, if you check the Upcoming page on the FFG it will give you a rough idea of what's in the pipeline and when it will arrive. I say rough because FFG and deadlines don't mix well.
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Sep 16, 2014 00:47
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FFG put up the video tutorial For conquest here: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=5057 Based on those videos I've decided to buy into Conquest, what's the consensus of the amount of cores I should get? I'm thinking 2 so I can make deno decks that are more consistent.
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Sep 17, 2014 10:12
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Everything I've seen is "at least 2"
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Sep 17, 2014 11:38
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I'm going to pick up 2 and then see if I can trade for other poo poo that I might need.
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Sep 17, 2014 18:36
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Willeh posted:FFG put up the video tutorial I'd start with one (or OCTGN) to see if you like it, then buy one to two more. The single core set experience is actually pretty good for showing the general game dynamics, but deckbuilding is extremely limited until you hit two cores and really comes into its own with three. (Also, the game owns.)
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Sep 18, 2014 06:28
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I'm buying 3 because I loving hate money.
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Sep 18, 2014 06:32
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Carteret posted:I'm buying 3 because I loving hate money. A great poet once said, "Mo money, mo problems," but he never said anything about nerdgames, so I'm sure it'll work out fine. The real question is when the hell is this game coming out?
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Sep 18, 2014 06:38
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GrandpaPants posted:A great poet once said, "Mo money, mo problems," but he never said anything about nerdgames, so I'm sure it'll work out fine. I already own all of GoT, star wars and Netrunner so I might as well get 3 cores  so I can build proper demo decks.I think the game is coming out properly somewhere in october? It's FFG so who knows when it will show up in Europe 
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Sep 18, 2014 08:24
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GrandpaPants posted:A great poet once said, "Mo money, mo problems," but he never said anything about nerdgames, so I'm sure it'll work out fine. You'd think they'd learn the lesson from Netrunner was not: don't release your game right after Gencon, but: have the expansion also ready to ship within a month and a half. My guess is that they want to have the first of Conquest Packs or whatever they're calling them, ready to go in December. Release in mid-October gives everyone two months to play around and learn the game before the new pack becomes available. If they released right after Gencon there would be too long of a delay and scenes might start dying off again like happened with Netrunner.
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Sep 18, 2014 08:42
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Willeh posted:I already own all of GoT, star wars and Netrunner so I might as well get 3 cores You should also get LOTR.
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Sep 18, 2014 12:56
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So uh, despite being possible, I would really not recommend playing 4 player Doomtown. We just got done with an intro game with the starter decks and it took 3 hours. More finely tuned decks might be better, but there was the randomness makes everything swingy, so you basically have to hope it swings enough your way at some point for you to finally get victory. Good lord it took a while, though.
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Sep 21, 2014 03:20
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To be fair, my first games of Netrunner all took 2-4 hours too. That said, Doomtown doesn't really impress me that much, especially relative to Netrunner and Conquest.
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Sep 21, 2014 03:39
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OK, so, my fiancee and I wandered into our local game store and picked up the LOTR core game. This was probably a terrible life choice for my monthly budget, but after playing it a few rounds and finally getting a handle on things, we're really liking it. I had one quick question about a situation that came up while playing that I haven't seen answered online. I was playing with Thalin and had him committed to a quest when the Black Forest Bats got revealed. He was my only committed hero at the time, so I was forced to remove him. I was confused as to whether he still deals his one damage to the bat before being removed or not. Since his text says "as it is revealed" I'm assuming he hits first before the "when revealed" text, but I wanted to make sure.
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Sep 22, 2014 15:26
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Max posted:OK, so, my fiancee and I wandered into our local game store and picked up the LOTR core game. This was probably a terrible life choice for my monthly budget, but after playing it a few rounds and finally getting a handle on things, we're really liking it. Correct. He hits first, which is nice for any 1 HP enemies that are revealed, because he will kill them before their card text is activated.
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Sep 22, 2014 15:58
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The more I think about it, the more I'm bothered by the combat resolution in Doomtown, despite the novelty of a poker hand based system. My main issue is that it's super swingy, in that a 3 stud gunslinger can (and has!) lost to a 0 draw dude. I literally fended off a four man lynch mob (the Law Dogs' Judge dude's Job ability) with a 0 draw dude, and despite how good it felt, it wasn't quite so cool when I was on the receiving end of that a few rounds later. Without a deterministic (like Magic's power/toughness) way of doing things, games just feel like they come down to luck because shootouts are both random AND swingy, despite how one may stack the deck. Also, shootouts take foreeeeever, since you're constantly checking for tricks and forming posses and having to look up the difference between a full house and two pair and it just bogs the game down when you have to do this like 2-3 times a round. The game just doesn't flow very well at all as a result. Do the battles in Conquest flow well/are resolved quickly? At the very least I look forward to deterministic mechanics. GrandpaPants fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Sep 22, 2014 |
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Sep 22, 2014 16:12
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GrandpaPants posted:The more I think about it, the more I'm bothered by the combat resolution in Doomtown, despite the novelty of a poker hand based system. My main issue is that it's super swingy, in that a 3 stud gunslinger can (and has!) lost to a 0 draw dude. I literally fended off a four man lynch mob (the Law Dogs' Judge dude's Job ability) with a 0 draw dude, and despite how good it felt, it wasn't quite so cool when I was on the receiving end of that a few rounds later. Without a deterministic (like Magic's power/toughness) way of doing things, games just feel like they come down to luck because shootouts are both random AND swingy, despite how one may stack the deck. Also, shootouts take foreeeeever, since you're constantly checking for tricks and forming posses and having to look up the difference between a full house and two pair and it just bogs the game down when you have to do this like 2-3 times a round. The game just doesn't flow very well at all as a result. Hmm, I'd say battles in Conquest are probably a little worse paced over all once you have a lot of guys on the board. There's a lot of effects flying around and I think the first time a couple new players have a battle where each has a Warlord +5 guys it's going to be pretty slow. The thing about Doomtown is that while you're right it can be super swingy, in my experience it's not as bad as Netrunner's swingyness because it's rarely a life or death situation in Doomtown. If you're moving to the center of town, calling out the first guy that moves out there and then both of you are throwing all your guys into the fight, yeah you'll end up in situations where you have to go send that 0 draw guy to fight a 3 stud not to lose and it can swing your way. I think an important thing to remember is that a lot of those great hands come from cheatin' and right now there aren't quite enough ways to punish cheating, particularly ones you can have on the board and reuse. Cheating should be the way in which those decks that consistently draw 4 of a kind or full houses can slapped down. It's a hard lesson to learn that it might not always be worth fighting, especially since the mechanic to fight is so pushed. It's the type of mechanic that Conquest is playing with as well; knowning when to push. In Doomtown though the cards in hand can really swing things a lot more so having strong shootout cards and going into a shootout with a terrible shooter can be a strong play at the right time, and turning tail and running home with a 3 stud might be the best option if you think that guy has something up his sleeve and you've got nothing. edit: I understand what you're saying about the Magic analogy though. My vanilla 3/3 will beat his vanilla 1/1 100% until we start adding other effects into the game. In Doomtown a 3 stud and a 0 draw are both still at the mercy of the draw. My argument is that this is a part of the game to make sure you don't just have a board advantage and use that randomness to bluff yourself into a better position than you could normally be in. PaybackJack fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Sep 22, 2014 |
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Sep 22, 2014 16:52
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mongol posted:Correct. He hits first, which is nice for any 1 HP enemies that are revealed, because he will kill them before their card text is activated. I like to imagine how this goes down thematically. Something jumps out and Thalin freaks and swings his axe, then he realizes it is a bat and freaks out.
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Sep 22, 2014 16:58
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brother-joseph posted:Not sure if this really means anything, but FFG was showing off the upcoming Space Wolf and Great Unclean One packs at GenCon in a display case and they were all in blisters. It's funny you say that because they've already said that's the packaging they're using going forward.
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Sep 22, 2014 17:46
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