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I’ve actually been playing champions with my almost five year old. I mostly just play his turns for him but he’s getting very good at recognizing aspects and what certain cards do.
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Jul 22, 2022 05:37
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John Romero posted:I’ve actually been playing champions with my almost five year old. I mostly just play his turns for him but he’s getting very good at recognizing aspects and what certain cards do. That's super cool! I'm happy for you two. I've always felt that it's good to play games with kids even if they're not able to read well yet. They pick up stuff surprisingly well and it teaches them lots of important things.
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Jul 23, 2022 09:45
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Finally got my hands on Spider-Ham and SP//DR. We took on Rhino and Zola both playing with all three villain phases, thought that was called Heroic but I guess that's just the name of the mode where you get more encounter cards. Anyway, Rhino we threw in Scarlet Spider's Sinister Six which was alright. For Zola we threw in Inheritors which was pretty tough. Really like the new sets, having a pair of sets with a horde of minions is great and will make Thor/Valkyrie happy. SP//DR isn't as bad as I thought she'd be and often times proved quite good, I'd say she's the strongest case I've seen so far for a hero to not run any resource cards. She's very tanky, which is great on top of having a source of readying herself. Just being able to defend and then do something else or double attack/thwart is extremely good and I always miss it in characters that don't have a decent way of readying(one of my complaints about Nova). Also tossing in those Limitless Staminas were even more gravy. I thought she'd be hurt more by the fact that her tutor only gets her upgrades but her other cards weren't as necessary as I thought they'd be. I also really liked that her "panic button" card was free to just throw down, I really hate when they make these kind of cards cost your whole turn to play. I only ended up using it once and that was because I was at 5 health did everything I wanted to on my turn and was flipping down and reshuffling anyway so it wasn't a huge deal. Spider-Ham looks alright, however I think I'm going to build Miles now though as I'd been waiting for all those Web Warrior protection cards to drop before I built him.
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Jul 26, 2022 19:29
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His Justice pre-con isn’t that bad, he’s the only one who could reasonably run spider woman, and chance encounter can make her free repeatedly.
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Jul 26, 2022 21:13
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Much of mutant Genesis is on Hall of heroes, and there’s a lot of fun stuff. They clearly thought about how to make the X-Men different, in terms of keeping your team alive and well situated, as opposed to the avengers who all strike at once and can body block after that happens.
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Aug 5, 2022 08:01
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Only announcements so far regarding product was for Wolverine who comes after Phoenix(has a hurt himself to do things bit, and his healing factor offsets this) and it sounded like Storm was after him but not confirmed. The other announcement was for the villain pack with is Mojo putting you in different genre TV shows. Sounds like it could be similar to Kang where one player is in a comedy and the other is in a drama, and you have to get through your show to regroup and face Mojo but that's my speculation.
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Aug 5, 2022 09:30
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That sounds really good. The X-men stuff is looking good. I hope they put some more copies of X-Jet out with the hero packs because being able to generate wild resources is a huge help. The heroes are looking really good, and it’s gonna be tough to decide who I want to play first. I also really appreciate that they’re updating the art. It goes a long way to help makes cards look unique and fun even if they’re just reprints. With Wolverine being confirmed I wonder if we’ll have a reveal on the FFG website maybe even next week?
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Aug 5, 2022 14:52
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personally i think it would be sick if they did the same type of smaller villain/scenario packs about specific storylines like a days of future past scenario or even campaign maybe
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Aug 6, 2022 16:35
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John Romero posted:personally i think it would be sick if they did the same type of smaller villain/scenario packs about specific storylines like a days of future past scenario or even campaign maybe I don't think you're alone on that. People loved Hela because it had those similar Lord of the Rings LCG vibes. I'd specifically like to see some kind of crazy X-Men awful future modular scenario thing using the Moria X stuff from Hickman's arc as a starting point. Like it starts off the same with the X-Men taking on Magneto but then depending on which "bad future" module you randomed/chose you could end up in Age of Apocalypse, House of M, Days of Future Past, etc.
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Aug 6, 2022 19:23
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This is the LCG thread but it seems like most of the talk is Marvel centered. Considering Arkham and Netrunner have their own threads are those pretty much the three LCG’s worth considering if you want a good game and a somewhat active community?
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Aug 7, 2022 02:19
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LotR is pretty good and not quite dead yet.
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Aug 7, 2022 02:55
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sirtommygunn posted:LotR is pretty good and not quite dead yet. my local shop has like 5 dudes who show up and buy every single lotr release and nothing else, never are seen any other time
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Aug 7, 2022 04:19
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I think FFG has had a small push with LotR, they're rereleasing a bunch of stuff in a newer format and just updated the core set. I am bummed that they seem to have abandoned competitive LCGs, though. I had a ton of fun with Game of Thrones and Star Wars, which is maybe my favorite card game of all time.
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Aug 7, 2022 08:27
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FishFood posted:I think FFG has had a small push with LotR, they're rereleasing a bunch of stuff in a newer format and just updated the core set. I am bummed that they seem to have abandoned competitive LCGs, though. I had a ton of fun with Game of Thrones and Star Wars, which is maybe my favorite card game of all time. I wonder what the FFG deal is in terms of mechanics when they create these games linked to an IP. It seemed to me like Conquest was a great system that they could have just relaunched with a Twilight Imperium skin. Netrunner clearly had some mechanics in the deal as the universe was already an FFG creation. Not that you get a huge fan crossover from one game to a spin off, see WARS but it feels like there's obviously space to keep designing and continuing to grow some of these games so I wonder if a unique mechanical system is part of the licensing deal with a lot of these games.
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Aug 7, 2022 13:08
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Would this be the correct thread to talk about Sentinels of the Multiverse?
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Aug 7, 2022 14:44
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sirtommygunn posted:LotR is pretty good and not quite dead yet. Arguably more alive now than it has been for at least a year.
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Aug 7, 2022 14:58
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Dawgstar posted:Would this be the correct thread to talk about Sentinels of the Multiverse?
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Aug 7, 2022 15:05
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Sentinels is a traditional game that plays like a LCG would. I’d honestly be fine with chat in here because I don’t think it would sustain it’s own thread and it’s similar enough.
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Aug 7, 2022 15:42
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Which of the LCG’s need the lowest investment for the best experience? I understand most are playable with core but don’t really shine without some expansion.
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Aug 7, 2022 23:29
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Apocron posted:Which of the LCG’s need the lowest investment for the best experience? I understand most are playable with core but don’t really shine without some expansion. Probably LotR if you are willing to buy second hand. Entire sets weren't terribly expensive a year or two ago. edit: I'd recommend Tabletop Simulator to try some out before you buy, if you aren't averse to that particular program. I got my cousin hooked on Arkham through TTS.
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Aug 7, 2022 23:35
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Apocron posted:Which of the LCG’s need the lowest investment for the best experience? I understand most are playable with core but don’t really shine without some expansion. Honestly you get a really great experience with Marvel Champions right from the get go. I still play against the original villains to this day. The core heroes are still relevant to this day (She-Hulk not so much IMO but some people think differently). The game definitely does get even better with expansions but the core set will go a long way. It sold me on the game when I originally bounced on Arkham and LOTR myself.
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Aug 8, 2022 01:02
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PaybackJack posted:I wonder what the FFG deal is in terms of mechanics when they create these games linked to an IP. It seemed to me like Conquest was a great system that they could have just relaunched with a Twilight Imperium skin. Netrunner clearly had some mechanics in the deal as the universe was already an FFG creation. Some of the mechanics you could definitely adapt but I do think they do a lot of work to make their designs theme specific. The Star Wars LCG was asymmetrical with the "light side" trying to destroy "dark side" assets while the baddies were looking to run out the clock for their inevitable victory via Death Star. You could rename the mechanics, of course, but the close tie between mechanics and theme was definitely part of the draw. I am also a weirdo and really liked the bizarro pod-based deck building which was the biggest hurdle I think a lot of people had with it and would love to see that return in some fashion.
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Aug 8, 2022 01:16
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I'll second the Marvel Champions recommendation. Its core box is more 'complete' than the other two and its rules are less complex, but it still shares enough DNA with them that you'll find either of them easier to pick up later if you're so inclined. I really miss Netrunner. I'm glad Nisei exists but I personally can't get into it, mostly for the reasons discussed at the end of this video (which is a nice love letter to the original game): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev24b_17-Po tldr; Nisei is an amateur production, which always sounds pejorative when I say it out loud, but I honestly don't mean it in a bad way. I find it hard to engage with 90% of the fan-made content mods in computer games, too, but in this case it just doesn't feel like real Netrunner to me. I'm kind of surprised FFG hasn't launched a new game in the Android universe yet. I doubt they'll ever make another PvP LCG, but could you make a good co-op version of Netrunner where the encounter deck represents a Corp or a Runner?
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Aug 8, 2022 02:16
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Yeah, I think PvP LCGs are dead (at least as far as FFG is concerned), but I’d love an “Android Heist” game, where a team of runners run heists and the corps are the encounter deck.
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Aug 8, 2022 02:51
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CitizenKeen posted:Yeah, I think PvP LCGs are dead (at least as far as FFG is concerned), but I’d love an “Android Heist” game, where a team of runners run heists and the corps are the encounter deck. Any particular reason for this?
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Aug 8, 2022 03:12
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Someone better informed might correct me, but I think when they were bought by Asmodee one of the first things they did was try to cut a lot of costs, and support for competitive play was one of those costs (another was getting rid of the FFG Supply card sleeves, which I miss). They recently sold Keyforge back to its original owner, too, and I think that was the last competitive game they had left.
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Aug 8, 2022 03:28
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Thanks for the recommendations! I had kind of decided against Marvel but considering everyone's opinion here maybe I'll reconsider getting it for Christmas? That's a shame! In that case aside from Netrunner (just bought System Gateway) what would you say is the best competitive LCG? Maybe someday I'll see if I can find it second hand.
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Aug 8, 2022 03:38
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Lord of the rings really suffered, in my opinion, from being a pile of bullshit. The monster decks in that are so god drat gnarly once you get outside of the core ones. I had multiple experiences in lotr that lined up with how people described their experience with Ronan the Accuser in Marvel. Which is to say, game lost on turn 2. Marvel on the other hang generally feels pretty even handed outside of the guardians box.
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Aug 8, 2022 04:22
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FishFood posted:Some of the mechanics you could definitely adapt but I do think they do a lot of work to make their designs theme specific. The Star Wars LCG was asymmetrical with the "light side" trying to destroy "dark side" assets while the baddies were looking to run out the clock for their inevitable victory via Death Star. You could rename the mechanics, of course, but the close tie between mechanics and theme was definitely part of the draw. I am also a weirdo and really liked the bizarro pod-based deck building which was the biggest hurdle I think a lot of people had with it and would love to see that return in some fashion. I was working on a DS9 mod of the Star Wars LCG system based on the Dominion War, and the "Balance" was the balance of power in the Alpha Quadrant. The clock was the Dominion getting reinforcements through the wormhole and solidifying their foothold enough that they wouldn't be dislodged. I also loved the pod system.
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Aug 8, 2022 06:49
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Apocron posted:Any particular reason for this? Card gamers are addicted to the collectible / secondary market part of card games. They don't like the idea of not having to chase down cards or everyone having equal access to every card.
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Aug 8, 2022 14:00
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Failboattootoot posted:Lord of the rings really suffered, in my opinion, from being a pile of bullshit. The monster decks in that are so god drat gnarly once you get outside of the core ones. I had multiple experiences in lotr that lined up with how people described their experience with Ronan the Accuser in Marvel. Which is to say, game lost on turn 2. Marvel on the other hang generally feels pretty even handed outside of the guardians box. As someone who really likes LotR: yeah, it really is a bunch of bullshit and I wish they had put more thought into easy mode than "just take out some of the bad encounter cards idk". I really like experimenting with decks but I feel like I can't do that when playing with friends because of just how brutal most quests are.
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Aug 8, 2022 14:45
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LOTR is a game I love, but it's got some problems. A lot of bullshit designs for encounters or even just specific cards. Its biggest problem is the way it handles player scaling: you've got more players, you draw more bad cards that you gotta deal with. Seems simple, right? The problem is that the encounter cards often have what I like to call "quadratic bullshit." They say things like "threat X, archery X, where X is the number of players in the game" or "Shelob gets +2 atk and attacks each player in order" or "deal 1 damage to each exhausted character." Global effects like this punish every player equally - but if you've got more players, you also draw more of them. If a solo player draws a guy with archery X, you've gotta deal with 1 archery - easy. If the players in a four-player game draw four guys with archery X, you've gotta deal with 16 archery, which comes out to 4 per person - a lot less easy. Now obviously you're not gonna draw four of the same guy, but if all (or at least, lots) of the cards are doing things like this, then the overall impact of those cards is going to be a lot more punishing. Or the Shelob card, which is fresh in my mind because I just played that one recently. In solo, you suffer one attack, which is pretty survivable. In four player, one card is responsible for four attacks, and then you still gotta draw three more encounter cards. So why is it like this? Well, the power of synergy is strong. Two players working together are more than twice as effective as one player. So if the encounter deck scaled linearly, then bigger groups would have a big advantage. Furthermore, some aspects (like the number of quest points on quests) do not scale with players at all. So you've got players, whose power scales as something like Xn, where X is the player count and n is some nebulous and hard to define exponent that's definitely more than 1 but significantly less than 2. And the player's opposition is a mix between things that scale as X0 (the quest points), X1 (regular enemies, treachery cards that punish only one player, etc.), and X2 (quadratic bullshit). A lot of quests are nigh-impossible with 3 or 4 players because they have too much of that quadratic bullshit in them, unless you stick to the brokenest decks. Other quests are cake-walks with 3 or 4. And there's a lot of variance within each quest, too, because if you flip a bunch of X1 stuff in the quest phase and all the X2 cards get discarded as X1 shadow cards, then it'll be easy, but if it goes the other way, it'll become impossible. I'd say that 95% of my "bad experiences" with particular sessions of LOTR have been because of getting too much Quadratic Bullshit. Arkham Horror sometimes has this problem as well. The infamous treachery card Ancient Evils robs the players of an entire round's worth of time, denying the players 3*X actions and X cards and resources (somewhat mitigated by also eliminating a mythos phase with X encounter cards). In a four-player game, you will draw Ancient Evils four times as often, and each one will be four times as impactful. Quadratic Bullshit. But AH has the problem a lot less than LOTR does - the
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Aug 8, 2022 15:22
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Apocron posted:Any particular reason for this? Look at non-FFG LCGs, and they did even worse financially. Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn is fantastic, and limps along. Pagan: Fate of Roanoke is supposed to be a spiritual successor to Netrunner, but it has to be released in Kickstarters. Competitive card games belong to weird MTG Finance types like Flesh and Blood. Co-operative games are an easier sell, because you can say to yourself "Gee, one day I'll play this with friends, but for now, I'll get value playing by myself." On the FFG front, yeah, Asmodee gutted their catalog. Single-player games require a little less balancing than competitive games (I think) because it takes longer to get to the margins. Separate thought: Marvel Champions rules, but its chief problem is the 15 card heroes. It seems like a great idea, but you end up with really lovely heroes. With Arkham (for example), only two cards of your deck are defined - the investigator's signature asset and their signature weakness. Those are factors, but mostly you're choosing an investigator for their investigator card. If FFG accidentally undertunes a deck (or overtunes), they just shift the card pool. Add more cards that benefit weaker heroes (see the rise of Agility). With Marvel, there's no saving a 15 card pile of poo poo; that's 40% of your deck. It's not just about the ability, it's about the fact that while FFG was exploring the design space they ended up putting a whole bunch of weak cards in your deck and there's nothing you can do. Also, FFG's unwillingness to errata Marvel because it's "casual" just sucks. Pods rule.
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Aug 8, 2022 17:43
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The problem is LCGs don’t scale well to a long term competitive market and its harder to break people into the game as the game goes along. If I have a moderate player of my LCG, they buy enough cores for a play set and the new release whenever it happens. If I have a super hardcore player they spend exactly the same amount of money. So my revenue is limited by player number. There is nobody buying a booster box to draft some cards or a random booster buy because you are in the shop. The sales are stagnant past a certain point. Card games are expensive to make (art mostly) and the money an LCG makes you is a tiny fraction of what a CCG makes you. If a new player comes along, in a CCG I can build them a commons deck from my bulk and give them it for free, they can try the game out at their own speed and decide to commit or not. With an LCG I have no bulk to give away, I need all my cards for my play set. Then if a player does on ramp they can’t really fill out their deck with singles, they have to go back and buy every pack they need to build their deck and some of those packs did not stay in stock. So past a year or two, putting together your LCG deck could cost hundreds of euro/dollars as you needed 3 of the core set and so on. Also the monthly pack model was a nightmare for exactly the same reason the Rolling Thunder model AEG tried in the late 90s sucked, keeping it in stock was too hard and it ate too much shelf space. Other LCGs still on the go include Doomtown, which has a new base set arriving from Kickstarter this year from Pinebox. They are also launching a 7th Sea game Kickstarter (only thematically linked to original 7th Sea) at the end of September. They just had a 65 player pre-release tournament at Gencon, looked fun.
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Aug 8, 2022 18:11
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I was interested in the 7th Sea reboot(City of 5 Sails) until I saw the cards, they're kind of ugly and hard to read and that it's limited to a single city. Wasn't half the fun of that game sailing around the seas on different ships? How do you gently caress that up? How much different is it going to be from Doomtown I wonder? Either way, I haven't been that impressed with Pine Box's mechanical design choices, but I do appreciate that they're working on adjusting the setup of Doomtown so players can have some locations start in play and making dudes/deeds cheaper so they can come into play more frequently. I think HidaO-Win has a point that competitive LCGs don't necessarily make a ton of money, but I think the problem was that Asmodee just didn't want to keep investing into the amount of Organized Play that was required to make them work. Looking back, I think really think maybe Asmodee was just trying to get themselves into the American market more and secure some licensing deals that were more easily accomplished by purchasing FFG. They gutted the online/digital division, the RPG stuff has all been outsourced and the only Organized Play stuff that still goes on is just at major cons for their big box games. Even all their Star Wars Miniature products seem to have dried up. I think at the end of the day Asmodee just wanted to wash their hands of having to run events and manage a community for these games. Obviously, COVID hurt all events but even before that they really just didn't seem to want to be in the business of having OP.
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Aug 8, 2022 18:50
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Yeah the 7th Sea cards have some interesting choices on font and presentation of the information. I haven’t got a chance to play the game yet, but I’ve a lot of time for the team involved as I know several of them pretty well and they are good people. Similarly they inherited a bunch of choices on Doomtown from AEG, so I’m interested to see how it works out. 7th Sea decks should be up as print and play soon, so I’ll give them a go and see how they feel in play. Asmodee basically bought up a huge amount of gaming companies and then portioned out content to specialists, so Atomic Mass got the Star Wars mini games, Edge got the RPGs and so on. FFG has been left as a shell with the LCGs and some boardgames.
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Aug 8, 2022 19:02
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PaybackJack posted:I was interested in the 7th Sea reboot(City of 5 Sails) until I saw the cards, they're kind of ugly and hard to read and that it's limited to a single city. Wasn't half the fun of that game sailing around the seas on different ships? How do you gently caress that up? How much different is it going to be from Doomtown I wonder? Either way, I haven't been that impressed with Pine Box's mechanical design choices, but I do appreciate that they're working on adjusting the setup of Doomtown so players can have some locations start in play and making dudes/deeds cheaper so they can come into play more frequently. Well all of the Star Wars mini games were sent over to Atomic a few years ago. They layed off most if not all of their organized play staff. Just look at this year's GenCon. You used to pay 15 dollars for a ticket to a lcg event. That ticket would get you a copy of the adventure and a alt card. This year it was 6 dollars and no copy of the adventure and no alt art. It was just paying them to organize a time for people to sit and play the adventure. I had some fun games with a bunch of people but overall it just felt bad and kind of like a money grab because for years the events have always been done certain way. As far as I know FFG didn't give a heads up about the change.
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Aug 8, 2022 19:04
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OP is expensive, requires extensive staffing and is always a headache, but it drives sales. I’m unconvinced there is enough meat in LCG sales to support it, I worked for FFG a fair bit staffing organised play for L5R and it was not cheap for them flying people out, renting venues and so on. Disappointing that Arkham Horror didn’t do a new event pack for this year.
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Aug 8, 2022 19:20
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I think fans are getting content with the daily card releases. I don’t think I’ve even played Journey through time a second time…
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Aug 8, 2022 19:42
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CitizenKeen posted:Pods rule. Did anyone ever put together a good web-based option for playing the Star Wars LCG, like Jinteki or The Crucible? I did some googling but couldn't find anything.
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Aug 8, 2022 20:50
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