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Chill la Chill posted:I guess you're probably right in the long run and I should have more concerns about it especially wrt growing the playerbase and balance keeping people interested. I think for me, I probably put some of my beer and pretzels game logic on there, which of course isn't an excuse. Any game should strive to be a Good Game with lots of thought put towards the long term health and people wanting to be interested and not disheartened that the cool Rebels crew just utterly gets demolished every time by Vader's Gang. You can be a Balanced Game while still having great minis and a great core ruleset, and I admit it's probably blinding me. I should add that I tried it, and the game has good bones. It is beer and pretzels friendly but the core game of initiative and positioning is very good. I just wonder what it looks like when power creep gets done with it, especially since I'd probably skip most of the prequel or Filoni Star Wars stuff so I'm looking at a year plus from now. hoiyes posted:I haven't played Shatterpoint and I never will because there's literally no wargames design choice I hate more than inscrutable dice rolls. The other player rolls their dice and I might as well not even watch them roll because then they play yahtzee with their unit card and tell me what happens. The arithmetic is not too hard. Attack dice are worth half a hit, defense dice are worth 1/3 a block, a quarter of your hits are crits and can't be blocked. Attack dice are worth 1/4 an expertise and defense dice are worth 1/3 and what expertise does is character-specific. Unblocked hits are steps down a track of stuff the attacker does. So I can just look at General Obi-Wan and say, "Oh yeah, this is gonna be about seven hits before defense. Four hits gives him shove shove pin with five damage, and everything above that is another shove, more damage (capping at 9), and miscellaneous bullcrap. Alternately he can jump away on five hits if he's just here to bash face or bounce off a dude's head Mario-style." You have his threat range and his threat, ezpz. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 10:54 on Oct 31, 2023 |
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Oct 31, 2023 10:34
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:35 |
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Someone posted the full changes to Armada on Reddit.
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Nov 1, 2023 17:39
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wait is there really not a droid control ship for armada
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Dec 21, 2023 12:15
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CitizenKeen posted:It bears very little resemblance to Hearthstone other than that they're both dude-bashers who exist in the shadow of Magic: The Gathering. The closer resemblance is probably Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn. It plays a lot like Battletech, but with two attacking lanes and Commander/Objective cards that announce your deck's basic plan. Also the cards are godawful ugly. Just this terrible mix of bad illustration and cheapass roto.
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Feb 29, 2024 06:30
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CitizenKeen posted:And if we're going to be critiquing art and layout (let's!), maybe use the actual cards instead of fan recreations. The better-looking Yoda with the grey-ish border is an organized play promo. The ugly Yoda is the actual card in packs. And it's a good example of how so many of the cards are just shockingly bad rotoscope.    There's nothing wrong with these two Chewbacca cards on their own, but it's obvious they're not creating some kind of cohesive look.   What is this, what are we even doing.    Can an image be the thread title? 
Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Mar 3, 2024 |
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Mar 3, 2024 02:39
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That Old Tree posted:I'm whatever on the style thing, but that Han art has bonkers color going on with the face. han needs to get checked out for liver failure
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Mar 3, 2024 04:44
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cards based on the SNL death star rescue sketch
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Mar 3, 2024 13:51
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uncle blog posted:It's weird how much better the art looks in real life. The game has a great table presence. Really pops i really do disagree. the art still looks like a mess but besides that the cards look like every single game ever. the card dress is completely generic, which makes the cost-power-toughness bash-guy-against-guy play feel even more generic than it already is. like i don't want to pick on orvin because what they're describing is part of the game that is actually interesting (the trades and the effort to consistently get a tempo advantage so you can burn some of it going face) but like Orvin posted:I played with Jyn leader (gives -1/-0 to opponent defenders) and kinda liked the survavibility she gave to my units. jyn erso's ability is that she gives guys -1/-0. very little about this game leans into being a star wars game rather than a set of generic game pieces with star wars names.
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Mar 4, 2024 17:34
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Elblanco posted:Sounds like a core set to me Contrast this with the other four Star Wars CCGs, where being a Jedi or a droid was something with an inherent game effect, or where (even after the first set!) your deck would be something like "battle droids" or "characters you'd expect to find on Tatooine" or "Luke, Han, and X-Wings." This seemed to have very little of that; at best I saw a few cards that wanted to be with other rebels or imperials, and a penalty for playing good guys with bad guys. (Even then, it felt weird that Han and the bounty hunters were as good/evil-locked as, say, Darth Vader or Leia.) This seemed very lacking thematically by comparison. The rules seemed to fit soldiers and war materiel well - bounty hunters fighting mercenaries, fighters attacking ships - but having R2D2 or Tarkin be a character you play, get an effect, then trade immediately for chip damage in a fight in the ground, that felt weird and lousy. I did not love how even in the premiere set we had per-card damage tracking and two kinds of per-card tokens already. This is a lot of crap to stack on a card, especially when two of the token types have an effect that offsets but does not eliminate the effect of wounds. Upgrades were a mess. I played Devotion on a Star Destroyer multiple times, and Entrenched a TIE fighter. Even more than the characters, the upgrades didn't feel like they meant anything. They were just lumps of numberwang. I'm not sure there were any space-specific upgrades even; I didn't see any. Rares and Legendaries were often draft-ruining bombs. I drafted Tarkintown and Dooku and they were consistently a free card's worth of tempo for too little. If you drafted a couple good rares/legendaries and could consistently play them, they frequently would come down and just blow out the entire board. There were rares that just sent every unit killed this turn back to your hand, stole units with no restrictions, or just had a solid body and killed something when they entered/left play. The worst I saw was Avenger, which killed a unit when it entered play and every time it attacked. For a game with two lanes, space seemed very undercooked. I drafted that TIE, a raider, a Z-95, and a rebel capital ship and generic star destroyer, both of which I just ate the cost penalty on. Frequently I just beat my opponent to death in the space lane with those! It felt very easy to race face in space due to a general shortage of spaceships in the set, plus everyone's leader was a ground unit. I saw Leader Tarkin and Han, and it felt strange that neither of them helped with space combat very much. (On the other hand, Thrawn was very impactful and just rocked my poo poo overall.) Events all seemed to be removal except for Search Your Feelings. I saw a ton of minor variations on "destroy unit," "deal n damage to unit", "unit attacks (out of sequence)", "unit deals damage to unit," etc. Occasionally there were MTG-style +n/+n combat tricks or "draw card" too but they seemed to be consistent tempo losses. I also saw some "choose two (of four)" cards, always played to kill a unit and do something else. There didn't seem to be any sense of place or condition to the game. People had base cards (and I drafted a rare one with less life but a one-time effect, which was neat) but it didn't feel like you were attacking Cloud City or anything. The characters just seemed to be in the same nowhere arena as MTG or Hearthstone, with no cards that represented advantageous or detrimental conditions except as attachments to one character or else one-time effects. Leaders did provide this effect, but there were a lot of officer-commander-type characters with static effects that did not survive long enough to feel like they were having a significant effect overall. I did actually like the stripped-down Hearthstone feeling as a game. It still works as a struggle to build enough tempo to convert some of that tempo to face damage. That's still fun! On the other hand, I didn't love how often I was just going face. I drafted Iden/Tarkintown and while I didn't love Iden - basically every blue commander I saw looked better except Chirrut, who was a joke - but by drafting with an eye for Restore and removal effects, I was able to win games just playing face hunter more often than not. That's not fun. (In fairness, this may be a pre-release teething issue. People drafted cards that looked cool, while I drafted thinking I wanted to curve out. A lot of people showed me neat-looking expensive cards but few people played them against me.) I did like, for drafting, how many of the cards are just Star Wars stuff and not locked to good/bad. I had a Cloud City guy with a 70s porno stache and he felt like someone who could just get mixed up with anything. Sadly, he did not have an ice cream maker. I had a couple cross-side cards and having the option to play them felt good, although I only really played one. I like just going ahead and doing the MTG commander thing. It's nice that the game starts with a limited announcement of your overall plan, and it felt neat that, usually, you had your leader meddling every turn. Playing your leader, however, generally felt bad. The ones I saw were not very interesting units, even by the already low standards of the game overall: generally just the same effect as their passive ability. Plus, my opponents tended to prioritize punching them out again. It was neat that they're a free Ambush unit (and this is most of the value I got from Iden), but it felt bad to see people play Luke, Grand Inquisitor, or IG-88. They'd get one attack before immediately getting their leader's teeth kicked in. Speaking of, the most impactful characters felt like the worst of modern MTG creature design: characters with middling-high stats who generated value immediately or when they left play. Ambush and When Deployed/Defeated were just too much better than characters with actions, On Attack, or static abilities, because they were so difficult to protect and it took so long for them to get any value. This makes a lot of characters feel even more like generic game pieces. The Emperor is a removal card on a stick. An AT-AT is a burst of healing(?). This actually feels thematic for the Rogue One characters (K2 was a literal suicide bomber as I recall) but it isn't like the R1 characters are any more likely to be designed this way. Anyhow I didn't much like it and ditched my cards to another player for the cost of my buy-in. It's not a game I would stick with or recommend to anyone. If what you want is a Hearthstone clone, that's actually the most fun thing about it, with two lanes and the same struggle back and forth to curve better than the opponent and get tempo. But as a Star Wars game or something you'd play long-term? Super generic and indulges in some of the worst design failings of Heathstone and MTG both. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Mar 4, 2024 |
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Mar 4, 2024 20:45
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CitizenKeen posted:One note: Iden is generally considered to be one of the top two leaders right now after a number of tournaments. Oh I can definitely see how. She's consistent value for something you are going to do every single turn, sometimes even without taking a specific action to do so, and she's a very impactful character just as 4... whatever-they-call-power with Shielded and pseudo-Ambush. It felt like even the low-power, high-toughness leaders could only survive two hits from on-curve units at best anyway. She felt weaker for draft, though. Krennic would have been even more obnoxious going face. Chewbacca slowed the game down a lot, which would make high-cost bombs a lot more useful. I saw an Andor that drew for going face and had IG-88, but it would've meant using a generic blue base instead of Tarkintown. Maybe it's just thinking the grass is greener, though. Which was the other top-tier leader in constructed?
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Mar 4, 2024 21:48
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CitizenKeen posted:Sabine > Cassian Andor, etc. fwiw I saw sabine and could've drafted her but seemed like she would've needed a whole architecture to be any good. ticking down each base is just an invitation to a race, which doesn't seem that useful without building a much tighter aggro deck than draft allows. OTOH andor drawing an extra card for going face once a turn seems incredible in a format where your card quality is wildly random, bombs win games, and you can't just run whatever the meta card advantage tools are at-will. That Old Tree posted:As someone who acquired an almost complete set for a song but haven't had the opportunity to play or even read the rules, what was it about L5R that sucked? I got the impression, years after the fact mind, it was generally looked on pretty favorably other than the way releases were scheduled. the original CCG? super duper powercreep combined with too many factions to support all of them in one set. you'd build a deck for one faction, then play that deck until it fell out of favor (or a key piece got the legs cut out from under it). now you have a bunch of cards that are all locked to this one playstyle or faction that probably won't ever be useful or tradable before the whole mess gets rotated or plowed under by powercreep. and if you were attached to just one faction or character or storyline, lmao Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Mar 4, 2024 |
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Mar 4, 2024 22:15
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Feeple posted:...why? the ability to play off color with a tax was a thing in BT
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Mar 11, 2024 06:05
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CitizenKeen posted:Shadows of the Galaxy preview season is upon us. First cards are Mando-centric, but looks like we're getting Aphra (!), Mando, and Bane this set as well. i like how this is unclear if you're talking about Cad Bane, the villain who is a dishonorable scoundrel, or Darth Bane, the villain who is a cruel masked master of the dark side of the force, lol anyhow maybe i should stop belaboring it but "here is an imperial commander, he gives low-cost units +1/+0" does not bode well that the expansions are going to shake off my first impression that this game is very generic
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Apr 3, 2024 22:31
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is it harder to grasp that Moff Gideon buffs guys who cost less than 3 than that he, I don't know, buffs troopers and bounty hunters? encourages a playstyle where you freely sacrifice pieces to pursue an obsessive end? i realize he's not exactly a deep character! but i look at that card and you could change the name and have it 100% work for any stormtrooper commander or any tie squadron leader or half the various imperial villains in the spinoff cartoons or that squad of stormtroopers han runs away from on the death star or tim russ's character from spaceballs. if you swapped moff gideon's name and stats with director krennic, iden versio, or grand moff tarkin persona cards from the first set, would anything at all be amiss? it's not that this particular card is too simple, it's just that it has no distinct personality. the vast majority of them don't.
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Apr 3, 2024 23:41
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SWU is frustrating because the persona cards are so close to being genius. your persona's personality, companionship, scheming, behind-the-scenes action, that all sets up what you're doing. then your character comes down and it's a heroic entrance or dramatically raises the stakes! and yeah they get picked off but hopefully faith in your friends or the scheming plan or the weight of oppression will carry the day. it's just... not that. some characters get tantalizingly close (luke, thrawn). but most of them are just a very generic buff who turns into a guy with the generic buff. its frustrating because i don't want to poo poo on a fundamentally solid game that is only unremarkable in the way that it almost completely lacks any design inspiration when it comes to reflecting what it's based on. but it's something i kinda always want to rant about whenever i think about it because that failure is the most interesting aspect of the game. CitizenKeen posted:Out of curiosity, what’s a modern Star Wars game you think got theme right? shatterpoint, with a big caveat about the mixed success of the combat resolution. and armada, with a caveat about how the imperial fleet kinda turns into starfleet battles in a bad way Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Apr 4, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 00:39
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hoiyes posted:That the same Shatterpoint where the same list might include Luke Skywalker, Bariss Offee, Darth Maul, the Grand Inquisitor, Obiwan and a Stormtrooper sergeant? that's silly, it would be savage opress, not darth maul. you can only have two primaries at a time jokes aside, they are doing the kind of gonzo EU thing where darth maul not only survives being cut in half but also has a brother named "savage opress" so yes i am okay with that. the game even reflects this: you could do that, but most of them would not get along with each other mechanically so they'd be a bunch of independent lone operators doing their own thing. star wars still works with a motley bunch forced together by circumstance. it's not the biographical facts or the timeline stuff that matters anyway. it is capturing the personality of the characters, or the dramatic pace and rhythm of a story or battle or struggle. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Apr 4, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 01:18
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StashAugustine posted:It's all a sliding scale from "technically the comics are as canon as the movies" to "yeah the movies are kinda dumb too" anyway. I just mean "EU" in the kind of trashy star wars brand licensed spinoff way anyhow. once we have the goofy diet darth vader who runs a school for students who aspire to being mara jade, i'm okay with a team up between carth onasi, darth krayt, and the kid-friendly clone troopers who have a problem with discipline and conformity
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Apr 4, 2024 01:47
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canyoneer posted:The comics provide Doctor Aphra plus the murder droids and Krrsantan but also lightsaber kneepad guy. is there something bad about aphra, idgi
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Apr 4, 2024 04:39
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hoiyes posted:Luke Skywalker, Bariss Offee, Darth Maul, the Grand Inquisitor, Obiwan and a Stormtrooper sergeant https://twitter.com/starwars/status/1775931341353140575
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Apr 5, 2024 00:35
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CitizenKeen posted:People talk about it like it's the end-times, but Embracer had $2billion in debt if I recall correctly. Combined with its existing obligations, Asmodee is now sitting on €1.59b ($1.7b) debt on its lonesome. "Run for the doors" strikes me as alarmist but it's not great.
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Apr 23, 2024 19:20
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:35 |
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the ringbound board-book is a cool idea
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Apr 26, 2024 22:34
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