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I am so unbelievably hyped for this announcement about L5R. It was always my favorite CCG, hands down, and I've been hoping for an L5R LCG ever since Netrunner showed what FFG could do with the format. I hope the rules changes won't be too sweeping, but there are definitely one or two rather odd mechanics that the game's been stuck with as a legacy issue; I wouldn't mind a few changes (why hello there focus values and entire dueling mechanic). But man... L5R. As an LCG. My only regret is that we don't get to play it in 2016. Wonder if I can win another sword this time 'round. 
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Sep 11, 2015 22:15
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Dueling is probably my least-favourite mechanic in L5R, next to the old version of Cavalry.
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Sep 11, 2015 22:24
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PrinnySquadron posted:Dueling is probably my least-favourite mechanic in L5R, next to the old version of Cavalry. I love the idea, but the execution has never been good. What's the new version of Cavalry? I think that I heard about it being changed, but the last time I played was the Samurai arc. They'd already started doing good things like sprinkling Cavalry into factions without making for all-Cav armies (so... Unicorn was kind of dumb, but the rest were okay).
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Sep 11, 2015 22:26
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It's a once-per turn engage action to move one unit to a battefield now, instead of a whole separate assignment.
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Sep 11, 2015 22:27
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PrinnySquadron posted:It's a once-per turn engage action to move one unit to a battefield now, instead of a whole separate assignment. Wow. That's a pretty drastic change, yeah. Kind of enforcing the "take a little bit of cav" deck composition.
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Sep 11, 2015 22:28
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It's a lot better since it now forces Unicorn to pay attention to assigning rather than pretty much ignoring what the Defender is assigning.
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Sep 11, 2015 22:30
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fozzy fosbourne posted:On a totally different topic, I hope that Lukas Litzinger is stepping down from A:NR lead to secretly work on an unannounced revamp of another one of Richard Garfield's board games,Vampire: The Eternal Struggle. I read some rumors that FFG had the license and was working on it once upon a time but then they said it was canceled, but maybe it's possible that they are re-theming it somehow. Garfield was doing an AMA on reddit last year and let it slip that FFG was working on a VTES LCG. FFG's CEO quickly quashed it on BBG with the following post. quote:Dave, FFG did look into publishing this game for a time, and we decided to pass on it for a number of reasons. Richard was not up to date (no fault of his) on this decision. I remember being extremely excited because they had just come out with a social deduction boardgame called Blood Bound which featured "rival vampire clans" and was most surely their attempt at a V:tM like setting for a VTES LCG to use. I figured it was their way of introducing to setting much like how the Android boardgame did for Netrunner. Unfortunately, most of the internet's response to Blood Bound's aesthetic was pretty negative and I wouldn't be surprised if that factored in to them canceling the LCG. Never say never, I guess, but I'm extremely skeptical at this point after the CEO's statement. Free Gratis fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Sep 11, 2015 |
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Sep 11, 2015 22:42
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I wonder if VTES could be rethemed to some generic superhero theme. FFG doesn't have any piece of that market, which always strikes me as strange.
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Sep 11, 2015 22:50
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Super stoked for L5R with actual playtesting and balance and streamlined rules and not mandatory con exclusive promos in an lcg format.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:01
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I miss old Cavalry, it was what made Unicorn interesting and special but also either really good or extremely underpowered. I really liked the end of Diamond/Lotus where they're suck you into different battles that you didn't assign to. Naval got changed in a more concise way and it was for the better. Really though at the end of the day the clan mechanics were only as good as the cards that supported them and that was always a mixed bag where the best you could hope for is that your clan had good card support come Kotei season. It took the design team about a million years to figure out that solitaire honor decks were loving extremely detrimental to the game, as were enlightenment decks that could "cheat" rings into play. I also played dishonor for a long time and running into Shadowlands decks was autolose so I was happy when they got brought into the mix as the Spider clan. I didn't play this arc or even buy the core set, but from the looks of things ever since Samurai, the factions were sharing a lot more mechanics which seemed like a good thing in that each faction had more playable archetypes, but a bad thing in that playing the OP deck of a certain style might have meant you had to do it in a different faction. Dueling has always been the worst mechanic as well. I didn't dislike the focus value idea, it was more or less similar to destiny in Star Wars and should have served as a balancing mechanism for powerful cards versus utility cards. Dueling has always been this stupid idea that "it's a gamble" except it's not in any way shape or form a gamble when one deck is built to win and the other isn't. I'm also not sad to see Imperial Assembly bullshit and Gencon promos and winter sets, get thrown off the wagon either. Something that would be cool to see would be to do a similar thing like with Star Wars and aGoT and Conquest, and focus on "pods" of the families with clans. So instead of making a destiny deck with just all Scorpions, I'm playing Scorpion Clan , which has a Clan champion with 10 cards in a combination of specialty buildings and resources, and a few Personal Guard. The rest of the Destiny deck is made with 5 families, three of which must be scorpion and 2 can be from other factions. So my deck is Courtiers and Samurais so I'm using the Bayushi Family "pod", the Shosuro family, and Soshi families, they are supported by an allied faction which in this case is the Lion who are the "Akodo" family, and the "Matsu" family. Those cards each contain say 6 cards in some combination of personalities and resources. So you've got 10 cards that come with your Clan 30 cards that come from 5 Families made up of 6 cards each. There's your 40 card destiny. Fate more or less stays the same though certain familiars could have certain "forced" additions in the fate side as well. That would make for interesting combinations and a lot more of the "politicing" of who's clan your second.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:01
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fozzy fosbourne posted:I wonder if VTES could be rethemed to some generic superhero theme. FFG doesn't have any piece of that market, which always strikes me as strange. Made this legal action against UltraPro will be resolved by FFG taking of Vs.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:04
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gently caress Naval forever. Just sayin'.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:11
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I wonder if this L5R announcement has anything to do with Lukas Litzinger changing his role from lead on Netrunner to other projects after this cycle.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:14
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PaybackJack posted:
I really hope they don't go into the Pod system. I feel that system is one of the main reasons Star Wars and Conquest are in the state they are now. Giving up so much deck building control really hurts the over all health of the game.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:16
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Yeah, no, pods can gently caress right off. Netrunner works fine without them.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:18
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Pods are okay but they make there metagame turnover slooooooooooow. There was also a huge difference in fun to me between seeing a new release in the netrunner style CS seeing one in the Star Wars style. NR was just immediately more exciting because of the granularity of options you get when you can replace cards individually. long-ass nips Diane fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Sep 11, 2015 |
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Sep 11, 2015 23:21
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LordNat posted:I really hope they don't go into the Pod system. I feel that system is one of the main reasons Star Wars and Conquest are in the state they are now. Giving up so much deck building control really hurts the over all health of the game. Star Wars is in the "state" it's in now because FFG has bungled the release schedule for 2 years. The broken cards would still be broken even if they didn't have other cards you had to play with them. Then you just end up in a Jackson Howard situation. Pods work really well for Star Wars. Most people who complain about them never even tried the game.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:23
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I never really feel the loss of deck construction agency in Conquest since the squad cards tend to be really loving good and only account for less than a sixth of the deck. It annoyed me in Star Wars though.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:23
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LordNat posted:I really hope they don't go into the Pod system. I feel that system is one of the main reasons Star Wars and Conquest are in the state they are now. Giving up so much deck building control really hurts the over all health of the game. I disagree. It has a negative perception from the people who want to absolutely control every card in their deck, but both systems are better because of it. Conquest wise hits a much better balance in keeping the pods small and restricted to a small group of cards that form the base of your deck and I like that idea. The problem with it there is balance, games where you can draw into those cards where you can't run more than 1x of are almost like completely different games. So a pod system that has consistency is a good way to go. I'll still point to the last Worlds for Star Wars where the field was totally shook up and where in Netrunner the same Crim deck didn't evolve past the previous Worlds at all. That's terrible for the meta when there are so many good cards that you can't shake the old ones. Star Wars in is a great place right now, everything outside of Pure Smugglers is doing really really well. Conquest I'd assume that Space Marines are still doing good but since our scene died I don't know what it's like now. When I quit DE and Orks were looking pretty competitive. Also note that I'm only advocating for the dynasty deck pod system in a L5R LCG, Fate deck should be more or less completely open. PaybackJack fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Sep 11, 2015 |
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Sep 11, 2015 23:23
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I honestly think Fantasy Flight will be good to L5R. I'm looking forward to how they handle the IP, and I think they'll do a good job. I just hope I get to continue writing for the game in some form. The novel's half-done, I hope I get a chance to finish it!
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Sep 11, 2015 23:27
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LordNat posted:I really hope they don't go into the Pod system. I feel that system is one of the main reasons Star Wars and Conquest are in the state they are now. Giving up so much deck building control really hurts the over all health of the game. Huh? Conquest is doing great, and the signature squad system has really helped it have more diverse builds with a small cardpool. Cato and Ragnar (the two SM warlords) are both viable but tend to play quite different cards, broadly as a result of the differences in their signature squads. There are somewhere between four and six "top tier" decks, and there is only one warlord in the entire game who is almost universally considered non-viable competitively (Urien). Relative to where games like Netrunner were at this time in their life, Conquest is a wonderland. Fetterkey fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Sep 11, 2015 |
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Sep 11, 2015 23:40
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FFG got away with experimenting with the pod system because the SW LCG didn't have an immediate predecessor. If they try the same with L5R, which has twenty years behind it, the players will freak the gently caress out. It's not a risk worth taking when the original system isn't broken.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:46
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All I ask for is just cards in this LCG. No chits. No sliders. No cardboard pieces of crap i have to punch out or put together. Just give me cards.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:56
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Corbeau posted:FFG got away with experimenting with the pod system because the SW LCG didn't have an immediate predecessor. If they try the same with L5R, which has twenty years behind it, the players will freak the gently caress out. It's not a risk worth taking when the original system isn't broken. They already commented on there would be some design and mechanics changes. I doubt they're going to leave the game as is. One of the reasons I suggested the "pod" system with families is that it's similar to IDs/Factions are with Netrunner but with a tighter restriction on who you can add. Rather than say you have a generic amount of influence to spend on other people, or setting any non-loyal within a pair like Conquest doesn't feel right for L5R. Breaking down the clan structure into houses makes more sense, and would make deck building easier for new players, with the fate side being unchanged you'd more or less end up making the same number of choices as a runner deck does now. Dynstasy Deck 1 ID x10 cards 5 Families x6 cards each. 40 Fate cards of your choice. I guarantee you they are going to do some type of pod/grouping because asking new players to build 40/40 decks is pretty overwhelming. Ask Me For Warez posted:All I ask for is just cards in this LCG. No chits. No sliders. No cardboard pieces of crap i have to punch out or put together. Just give me cards. Bad news there's almost certainly going to be a cardboard dial for honor.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:59
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I wouldn't be surprised to see Strongholds by house as well as clan, and even altering the structure for playing out-of-house cards, but pods is a vastly bigger step than (for example) Netrunner's influence system. Again, fix the broken and terrible stuff (dueling, focus values, celestials/events both existing, etc.), not things that aren't broken to begin with (deck construction).
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Sep 12, 2015 00:04
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Corbeau posted:I wouldn't be surprised to see Strongholds by house as well as clan, and even altering the structure for playing out-of-house cards, but pods is a vastly bigger step than (for example) Netrunner's influence system. Again, fix the broken and terrible stuff (dueling, focus values, celestials/events both existing, etc.), not things that aren't broken to begin with (deck construction). Deck construction isn't broken per say but they do have some issues to address there. The matter of going first and starting holdings definitely need to be smoothed out. To further fantasy design, imagine that now there were 5 provinces for each player and that number only ever went down. At the start of the game you reveal your Strongholds which came from your House choices and those represent your provinces and similar to War of Honor they could be turned off by destroying the province, and power wise are on the same level as Regions. Seeing 5 dynasty cards a turn means you'll see your whole dynasty deck in a minimum of 8 turns if you never lose a province. Losing a province now just negates the stronghold ability but not the replenishment of dynasty cards which is a big issue. The number of times a game ends after you lose a province and don't flip any dudes was always a lovely issue. Turning the strongholds into gold production speeds up the early game as well and means relying less on pure resource cards from your deck, meaning that the only support resources you would run are ones that have some cool ability. I guess I'll have to jump into aGoT before I decide how I like their system for using Unique guys, but one complaint that the pod system doesn't address is the 1x a card in your deck that you never see. So maybe there could be more consistency there in this game. I'm just not a fan of the straight influence system in Netrunner because for a long time it just meant you saw the same stuff in every deck and I have when decks get distilled down to one deck that's the "best" which is what Criminal was for a long as loving time. More restrictions on deckbuilding means less choices but actually more freedom to experiment beyond 1 or 2 cards. People complained that Sith in Star Wars was dominant and boring for a while but actually the Sith decks people were playing were usually only centered around 2-3 pods, which meant that while those pods were really good, the other 2-3 pods you ran were really up to your choice and made the field much more interesting when the popular decks are actually only sharing a common 60% of the cards in them. Against compare to Netrunner where once the distillation of what's good got made it meant that the decks were at most 85% different from one another. Part of the issue with the Netrunner system is that it was so math based and L5R is not nearly going to be so bad, so perhaps that wouldn't be such an issue when you're talking about playing Personalities who don't have ongoing shifting math variables that you need to calculate on the fly in a game.
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Sep 12, 2015 00:39
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The issue with Netrunner is that they hosed up a few core set cards and made them way too influence cheap (hi Datasucker!). e: (Also Desperado.) Corbeau fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Sep 12, 2015 |
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Sep 12, 2015 01:00
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I wish they were willing to release a Netrunner 2.0. Most of the "problem cards" in that game lie in the core set.
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Sep 12, 2015 01:14
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^^^ I agree and feel like they will probably cave on that unless there is some patent on completely ripping off M:TG's standard format. To make another analogy, they've got a core set with Lightning Bolts and Counterspells and poo poo in it and it's going to blot out a lot of the design space unless they rotate some of that stuff out occasionally Card draw, tutoring, and graveyard recursion are so abundant in Netrunner, at least on the runner side, that sometimes adding a single card to a deck can make a huge difference. Like adding 1 Medium to a tournament worthy MaxX deck without a djinn to tutor it is perfectly normal and will likely make a big impact. Runner decks feel like Legacy/Modern M:TG toolbox decks or something, I love it. Anyways, point being that the abundance of card draw and tutoring abilities kind of indirectly makes big difference in deck construction. Baby LCGs seem to suffer a bit not only from their smaller card pool but the limited amount of cards they see in a match due to fewer draw/tutor/recursion effects that are in the environment, early on. fozzy fosbourne fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Sep 12, 2015 |
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Sep 12, 2015 01:14
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fozzy fosbourne posted:^^^ I agree and feel like they will probably cave on that unless there is some patent on completely ripping off M:TG's standard format. To make another analogy, they've got a core set with Lightning Bolts and Counterspells and poo poo in it and it's going to blot out a lot of the design space unless they rotate some of that stuff out occasionally Can't really disagree on the Runner side there since my Valencia deck that runs 7 one ofs in a 50 card deck has a over 70% win rate at tournaments and the 1 drops always have a big impact.
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Sep 12, 2015 01:31
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Ask Me For Warez posted:All I ask for is just cards in this LCG. No chits. No sliders. No cardboard pieces of crap i have to punch out or put together. Just give me cards. It wouldn't be a Fantasy Flight game without tokens! To be fair, L5R also technically required a way to keep track of honor and current cards accumulate tokens, so there wasn't just cards alone in that game. But it's nothing like Netrunner or many of the other FF games when it comes to tokens. I remember opening the Android Board Game and just staring at all of the tokens to punch out.
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Sep 12, 2015 02:11
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fozzy fosbourne posted:I wonder if this L5R announcement has anything to do with Lukas Litzinger changing his role from lead on Netrunner to other projects after this cycle. Lukas tweeted that he is "no longer in the lcg department but you never know". What the gently caress. Can we vote him back in or something? Even if it's against his will. I'll get the tumblr started
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Sep 12, 2015 04:13
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I like Lukas but I think Lang is a fantastic designer and I hope he is the lead designer on the L5R LCG.
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Sep 12, 2015 09:35
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What makes L5R good? What's the defining mechanic(s)?
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Sep 12, 2015 15:15
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Thirsty Dog posted:What makes L5R good? What's the defining mechanic(s)? Here are a few of the big points: It's a dueling game with multiplayer support, The 1v1 game is really strong and it scales up to 5 players easily. There are 3+ win conditions making for more varied deck design. You can kill all 4 of the other players Provinces, get all 5 of the Rings into play, or lower the other players Honor to -20. Your units (Personalities) preform the actions. Most action cards take a Personality of one class or another to perform the action. This plays hugely into the combat of the game since most the time they have to be at that battle to be able to take an action there. Combat is really tactical. It is not just smashing your numbers into their numbers. It is about scouting ahead for advantages, tactical maneuvering from one battle field to another, and even having your commanders duel one on one before their forces clash (tho if something is getting cut it will be the dueling). Another thing is how you build 2 decks, one called the Fate Deck that is entirely attachments like weapons, armies, and spells and action cards (also the rings but those are their own thing). The other is your Dynasty deck with holdings (kind of like lands from MTG), events, and Personalities. You start the game with 4 provinces that each get 1 card face down from your Dynasty deck and you flip them up at the start of your turn. Those are the cards you get to pay for and put into play. So there is a gated aspect to growing your table. Each player also has a Stronghold that is like an ID card that gives them some base gold, starting honor, how strong your Provinces are in combat, and some extra bonus effect. The core of the game is attacking the other players Provinces to kill them. When you attack you send Units (Personalities plus all their attached cards like Armies) to a Province and fight whoever the other player sends to defend. If you beat their army's total power plus the base power of the Province on their ID you kill the Province and it gets removed from the game. Meaning they are down 1 slot for buying cards as well. When they are out of Provinces they lose. The other ways to win are the Rings (Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Void). Those go into the Fate deck and each have their own condition to be played. Earth can come out if you defend a Province with units and win, Void you need 2 or less Rings in play and to Discard your Fate Hand. Once they come into play you can "bow" them for a effect. Void lets you draw, Earth prevents people from moving your units to other battles, etc. If you get all 5 in play you win the game. The last way to win (in the core rules at least) is lower a players Honor to -20. The main way to do this is with Courtier and political action cards. Ranging from things like forcing some one to run from a Combat to dishonor them then using actions targeting them to shame their family and lower their standing. It is a really tricky combo focused way to play that focuses on controlling battles to avoid having to really fight and slowly draining their honor down till you win. If you want a full how to play for the current rules check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iiqktGGafw FFG is likely to rip the game apart and rebuild it like they did for Netrunner but it honestly kind of needs it at this point after the mess that has been the last few editions. Edit: I forgot to add the flip side of dishonor victory. If you rise your family honor (by the ways of buying high personal honor people, winning in combat, or spells/actions) to 40 or more you win the game. So there are 4 base ways to win the game not 3. LordNat fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Sep 12, 2015 |
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Sep 12, 2015 16:09
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Thirsty Dog posted:What makes L5R good? What's the defining mechanic(s)? Natural Language
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Sep 12, 2015 16:53
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To me what drives L5R is in no small part the player-story interaction, and that starts with the evocative way the rules support the setting. You've got 4 (usually provinces) in front of you, and those provinces generate gold and personalities and events like festivals, then you've got the whims of fate deck. Personalities can win honor for your clan or can become dishonored. You've got bureaucrats and politicians moving pieces behind the scene at the Imperial court while a few samurai and some peasant followers are the boots on the ground. When you attack, you attack each province individually. And there's a lot of shenanigans moving people around through really evocative cards with natural language. In the early days people were really, really loyal to their clan, and players had a lot of say in the direction the story went through major tournament results. That first part died down somewhat due to absolutely horrible balance, and the second was just not sustainable. There was still a really nice level of player interaction with the story with name a card events and campaigns where tournament winners get to claim lands or name cards. So, my playgroup has always had an on/off relationship with L5R, we decide to pick it up, fall in love all over, and then abandon it 6-8 months later due to just a horrendous meta. After the last time we swore off AEG forever, but man there was still a lot to like. So, all of our playtest/ grind decks had a single copy Kamalakar as a sort of inside joke. It wasn't a good card. It was a bad card. But we really liked saying "Kamalakar confounds the enemy."  So, in a name a card event (for followers) we decide that if anyone in our playtest group won, we'd name our card Kamalakar's Harem.  Goddammit they did it. Now it's fluff. A lot of the name a cards are little inside jokes like this, but they could also be used to resurrect dead families or even clans, subtly changing the fluff in cool ways.
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Sep 12, 2015 19:00
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L5R has been made great by a combination of theme and mechanics. Neither one would provide the same success in isolation, but together they've provided an exceptional game. The L5R world is deep, contains a ton of interesting characters and factions, a mix of predictable themes (fantasy Japan) with unpredictable ones (Mongols, India, and however much of the Arabian-esque burning sands has leaked in since I last looked), and a metric ton of player-driven history. That's probably the most critical element of the story: while the story is still written by AEG (and now FFG I guess), players have had an enormous impact on the game. Emperors rise and fall because of player actions, and the apocalypse has been a very real possibility in the past (and AEG once released a small set to show the sort of direction they'd have taken if players made it happen: think Feudal Japanese 1984 ruled by not-Satan with a dash of pre-industrial Mad Max desolation). The fact that cards and sets are designed with the story in mind means that those story choices then bleed over into the cards that people are playing six months or a year later. Between the strong faction design and this unparalleled player story involvement, L5R tends to create loyalty and player identification with the game (and with the factions) like no other game I've ever seen. I played competitively back during the Race for the Throne, and there are player choices, with story and mechanical consequences, that I will probably remember forever (still mad about the whole Jimen fiasco, though at least we didn't end up with a Scorpion emperor...). The game mechanics are robust, but also much, much more flavorful than any other comparable card game until Netrunner came around. Even in pure mechanics, the dual deck types, and corresponding different resource flows, add a whole additional layer of resource management that dramatically affects the pace of the game (since the relative availability of dynasty and fate cards is likely to shift from start to finish). Yet nothing quite won me over to L5R like combat did. See, in combat, you're actually attacking your opponent's territory (not their land-equivalents, called holdings, but the abstract locations that provide players with a flow of dynasty cards). You have to assign units to attack different areas, and your opponent has to assign defenders to answer your attacks. And then poo poo starts moving around and cavalry gets involved and you've got a ton of interesting stuff happening even before characters start dying. And then, in actual battle, you have one of the simplest and best mechanics in the entire game: once everyone is done taking battle actions, from cards in play or from their hand, then you tally up total strength and the loser is annihilated. The winner walks away clean. Now, that rarely actually happens because people have actions to play, but it's a critical threat hanging over everything that happens previously. If you decide to fight a losing battle, then you'd drat well better have a plan. It's surprisingly true to theme for pre-modern combat, means that endgame battles are decisive rather than attrition-fests, and adds intense urgency to the game of maneuvering between provinces. It's not unlike how intense a critical run can be in Netrunner, and it's happening constantly in L5R. And that doesn't even touch on the political game. Some factions are going to tie you in knots with the imperial bureaucracy, and you really don't want to be on the wrong side of a powerful magistrate. The pre-battle action phase can be simple... or they can be intense, even decisive, depending on the decks involved. The theme is omnipresent and the mechanics intricate - and like the imperial court in the story, one misstep can mean disgrace and utter ruin. L5R tends towards decisive results rather than incremental victories. Of course, this does have the drawback of pushing L5R up there with Netrunner in terms of complexity. AEG has made large steps forward in clearing up confusion in card templating, but there's still a lot to know about when and how different action types can be played, and what sort of actions players inherently possess as players (and I'm not talking a couple - it's ballooned to half a dozen or more over the years). Plus it remains to be seen if FFG can maintain (or improve?) the quality of card layout and card art that AEG settled into towards the latter years. Some of the newer card templates for L5R are the most gorgeous cards I've ever seen for a game:      So pretty... and holy poo poo the text overload! Did I mention that L5R has an absolute shitload of traits and keywords?
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Sep 12, 2015 19:49
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The only two card games I've played that were more complex than L5R were Game of Thrones and Doomtown. ...Which isn't necessarily a good thing, but it's certainly notable.
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Sep 12, 2015 19:56
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Yeah, the big draw of L5R has always been a reliance on tactical decision making as opposed to M:tG being reliant on strong deck building. Not to say that you can win with crappy cards or that combo decks don't exist or even that card balance is never an issue. One "issue" that has been sort of debated is how important the actual units are as opposed to units in other games. In L5R your personalities are your units, similar to how creatures are in Magic but they're actually quite a bit more important and cards that kill units and personalities are often really expensive or have other drawbacks that prevent them from being extremely common place. For example an old card Kolat Assassin was a way to kill a person outside the combat phase, but cost 10 gold and gave you a hit of honor loss. Most people cost 7-8 gold on average so that card was expensive removal. The more common ways to deal with people in battle were to bow(tap) them or send them home. A unit that's bowed doesn't contribute towards determining who wins the battle so it's entirely possible that 1 person defeats 5 simply because he's the only one left standing. This meant that battles were focused on using abilities on cards to bow/send home/kill your opponents units rather than simply adding numbers. Because you're typically adding two people a turn to your ranks, your personalities are very important and being able to retreat from a losing battle is sometimes what needs to happen. Other cool mechanics are: The imperial favor The player with the most family honor can bow an honorable person to take the favor. The favor may the discarded as a cost for various effects but the ones that have stayed around for a while are that the favor can be used during the action phase to cycle a fate card, or in battle to send home an attacking unit. Back in the day, and perhaps still today, the Lion clan who have small cheap personalities with low force(like attack power) but high family honor would take the favor then attack with a single small unit, if you defended they'd throw down cards to win the battle but if they couldn't then they're retreat using the favor to save their own guy. Crane clan typically runs some type of honor gain deck, and they sit on the favor to send home people when attacked. Honorable and Dishonorable personalities One of the coolest things in the game is that a player may have their person dishonored throughout the course of the game. Being dishonored makes you vulnerable to a variety of other effects but means that when that personality dies his controller loses his personal honor. Shaming and killing or taking control of dishonorable people is a really fun theme. Back in the day there was a seppuku rule that if you were a Samurai you could kill yourself to rehonor. There is a separate discard pile for dead people and it's noted which ones dies honorable and which ones die dishonorably. One of the big issues with dishonor theme is that way back a good 12 years ago, a lot of personalities had an honor requirement to bring them into play, which meant if your family honor dropped below a certain level, you might not be able to bring anyone into play. Later editions added a rule to increase the cost of a person to ignore the honor requirement. In short, dishonor is a cool mechanic that the design team would occasionally make viable but the massive headaches it caused to players typically meant it never stuck around very long as a victory condition, so it was usually just a method of control. I did win a 12 man tournament during the first expansion of Samurai edition with a dishonor deck so that was pretty cool. Movement As noted by other posters, each player has 4 provinces(typically) at the start of the game. Movement on attack or defense is something that's very important. Also assigning where you attack and with who must be done all at one time, so you can either send your whole force to one place or divide your forces and attack multiple provinces. After you assign to attack the defender chooses where he wants to defend, if at all. It's possible you have situations where someone bluffs attacking two provinces just to draw our defenders, or a person ends up attacking a completely different province, through movement cards, than the one they originally assigned to attack, or maybe even the defenders use an ability to suck an attacker into their battle at a different province to pick them off. Having 4 different battles is a really interesting mechanic and leads to really interesting choices in the early game. As noted destroying a province gets rid of whatever card is there so that's a big issue to. You might invest more heavily in an attack because you see that their clan champion(a powerful personality) is in the province and will be bought next turn. This is one of the big draws for games like Conquest and Star Wars for me as well and something I really enjoyed about Netrunner is the ability to apply pressure on different fronts and in L5R it really helps to make the game feel like actual engagements with tactical depth as opposed to just two units punching each other like in Magic. Great art There is some fantastic art in this game. Probably my second favorite game for the art next to Star Wars LCG. If you like Asian themed stuff it's great. The game is typically very gender friendly. Of course there are some scantily clad women on some of the cards, but it's thematic: female Samurai aren't running around in bikinis and what not. If you're at all interested I highly recommend you watch this video and then go track down a copy of War of Honor. If you're just interested in the CCG then watch the video and just bear in mind that the victory conditions are abstracted and the tiles/fortresses aren't a part of the ccg. Spookyelectric posted:The only two card games I've played that were more complex than L5R were Game of Thrones and Doomtown. I remember getting into L5R and the amount of "rulebook effects" and keywords was staggering. It was a mountain of a game to learn but once I did it was really worth it for the depth that it gave the game. I'm excited to check out aGoT based on your comparison alone. PaybackJack fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Sep 12, 2015 |
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Sep 12, 2015 20:13
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