With the Magic: the Gathering resurgence, you’d think some of the others would rear their heads as well to get some attention and here we are with a big one: Netrunner.
While a great game from back in the day it was too was fun to play with just a starter deck– so fun that no one bought any more cards and the game didn’t have a long lifespan, or any lifespan I can remember. There were towers of Netrunner cards along with the MTG land cards at Gencon one year, and that was sad because there’s nothing like Land in the netrunner card sheets. Announced today, Fantasy Flight has gone ahead and removed the CCG part of the equation with the new edition, in the Living Card game format, branded to their “Android” universe. Looks like a must buy if you like that genre– I for one loved the old Netrunner, but never got in more than 20-30 games, which was still at great deal for an 8$ starter deck.
Ah Shadowfist, I predicted after 2011, and that year’s kicking ass by me, that I would have it done to me in 2012 (and probably for a long time after). This weekend, I lost the right to call myself the big cheese as we were beaten in a heated final at Plattcon to Jim Sensenbrenner and a deck he made that morning (!?) (featuring a rather unique alternate power generation engine that I will go into once he releases his decklist). Due to my own laziness, I just used the same deck I won with last year and though I never got my meaty combo out in any of the games (big bruiser has to come out, and he only did once) I was still able to get into the final with the rest of the jank stuff in the deck.
The final had TWO Ascended-only decks in it which is a milestone for the faction, at least from what I’ve seen. They haven’t been competitive as a stand alone faction for over a decade now since their domination in the early days of the game. While Op Killdeer is still the best card in the game, it has to be saved for the absolutely most important moments or it’s just wasted on trifles. The rest of the faction (alone) typically does not have the punch through to win in the fast, power stealing, denial heavy environment these days. Yet, it warmed MY cockles to see the EASTERN KING hit the table in a tournament. The raw shock and awe to have a size 11 Golden Gunman ready to lay some beatings was awesome. The only answer the table had was a Neutron Bomb when he brought his huge fighting to bear on the Architect player. I’ve been collecting Eastern Kings for years now, but have yet to put him in a deck that worked so I think it’s about friggin time.
All told, it was a great tournament with a pretty good turnout (8 players) and a lot of intense and friendly Fist. Now I hope to actually get some games in to practice and even make a new deck before Gencon rolls around and I defend my other 2011 title.
Reprint of Seven Masters vs the Underworld is available NOW. It’s an absolutely essential expansion if you want to use the Seven Masters (the best new faction IMO) and great for everyone else (Big Bruiser PAP!).
Also, online play will be available via LackeyCCG soon. Great news for everyone that moved from the nerd kingdoms to hipsterville or the sticks…
Four Mountains Fist action will again be more possible for newb players
One of the best Shadowfist expansions is getting a reprint in the next few weeks! No more begging off people on the streets for Shun Dai, Never Surrender or Kun Lun Clan Assault cards (a common no less!). I’ll be picking up a box for sure to flesh out some of my missing rares and pumping up my uncommons. If anyone is getting a box and wants to do some trading for the stuff they need, shoot me a message. With deference to Netherworld 1, this expansion has both the best art and some of the best cards in the game, what’s more it has all but three of the cards for the Seven Masters faction, that is playable with a box and a half or so of this set. A must have.
I actually made it to the Con this year, family in tow just off a weekend+ of strep throat for me and the missus as well as my car getting totaled in a t-bone on the way to work. We were crossing our fingers up to the last minute that the one uninfected shorty in the family would stay healthy and she did: in her body at least. After 5-6 hours at Gencon, I will never be sure if she’ll be right again. As any attendee is well aware, some of the things viewed there can never, ever be unseen. There was one moment of almost-regret when, while being dragged through the morass in the dealer hall by her and her cousin, we essayed into a dank waft a malodor the likes of which neither of their young, unblanched olfactory organs had experienced before. While I winced and imagined the sort of lifestyle choices that accompanied such a reek, they just pushed on, dragging me to whatever corner of the dealer hall their fancy took them.
Saturday I was free from the burdens of unprotected sex and I while I missed the Shadowfist world championship by 23 minutes, it gave me ample time to wander around and get some demos and shop. Here are some of the results I can remember.
Ventura: new game by Fantasy Flight dealing with the Condotierre period in Italy. Interesting take on the whole ‘hexes make up the board’ mechanic that Nexus Ops, Kings and Things and Twilight Imperium use. You draw and lay the tiles nearest your own controlled area, so the board builds out form a conflicted center. All and all, an easy, fairly elegant area control game that I would have picked up immediately had the price point not been… drum roll please: 80$ ! That’s what I would expect to pay for a big box hobby game like Descent or Ikusa. While it seemed like a good game, the price point is going to crush it.
Blood Bowl League Manager: An insta-buy when it comes out, this was the belle of the ball for me. I was highly skeptical they would be able to pull this off, and they did! It’s a little deck building a bit of bluffing, some luck and the most important part: they integrated the block dice really well into the whole game mechanic. Essentially, you have a deck of your players and you play them on different games that make up a season. It’s abstracted but essentially represents you pulling out all the stops for a game with a player position for whatever effect in that game. If you have more strength than the opponent for each game, you win and get whatever benefits the game provides. This could be more player cards, some team special abilities or special coaches (or just fan factor). Whoever has the most fan factor at the end of the league wins. Looks like it can scale with players and really easy to play a short game or a really long campaign. Can’t wait to get my hands on this one. FF ran out of their 300 copies on Friday morning, or so I heard. Damn.
Rune Age: Another new one from Fantasy Flight. I half-heartedly tried to get into a demo of this but after looking over someone’s shoulder and seeing how Dominion-esque it was, I took a pass. Some will like this a lot. Unless someone says it’s not like Dominion at all, I’ll take a pass on this one.
Talisman Dragons: it was there, but after the 10 hours worth of games a few weeks back, I was just not ready to pick this up yet. Definite purchase, just later in the Fall.
Shopping. I was tentatively looking for some Dreamblade stuff and it was found only at one booth and fairly expensive. I missed last year’s con, but there was plenty around in 2009 to be had, mostly for a song. It’s a solid area-control miniatures game and with the figures super cheap, no reason not to pick up a bunch. As they ramp up in price; not so much.
AT-43 was also on my list, and I found one booth with a couple of very cheap items I needed, and another booth with a bunch that was half off retail, but still expensive for my tastes. Again in 2009 there was a ton to be had (mostly due to Fantasy Flight’s liquidation) but that well has very much dried up. AT-43 is an excellent game and I’m quite close to having a Therian and Red Block army of some size to meddle with. Along with AT-43 is the old 3.5 Confrontation stuff– amazing minatures for the most part and one booth had a bunch, but they just didn’t have anything I really needed. I may be kicking myself someday for not breaking the bank picking some of it up. The main issue is, I paint so slowly the stuff will sit in boxes for a decade before a brush hits it at all.
Warhammer: I found a booth that had TONS of bits and I will be hitting that every year that they make it. I would literally spend the whole con going through their shit. They didn’t have anything exceptionally old, but had a mess of stuff for any and all of the big box GW games (Necromunda, Blood Bowl, BFG, Man O War, etc).
Sadly, I didn’t buy a single ‘new’ game to say, like most years, “a ha! I got this at Gencon, we must play!” This is due to blood bowl league manager being sold out and Ventura– well 80$ was just too much to spend.
"I'm not sure what that smell was my childe, let's move on quick!"
Shadowfist. Though I missed the nationals Saturday morning, I did make it to the invite-only tournament for past tournament winners, which started right after the morning tournament final concluded after a 4 hour final! I was able to pull out the win after getting a tie in my first game, winning my second game after a long slough (thank you petroglyphs!) and winning in short order the three man final. In the final against ascended and architects (least that’s what I saw), I started strong and got a High Noon face off using a foundation character (thank you Yellow Senshi Chamber!) and a ring of gates out (protecting from stuff going back into my hand which my deck hates). The Ascended player laid out bull market (5 power to all players) as a response to the end of my turn, allowing me the power to lay out a site and be at play and take for my next turn. Then he announced that he had gotten all Feng Shui in his draw. Now, getting all Feng Shui at a time like that really sucks, but to announce it in the final of a tournament–it basically said to both myself and the other player that he was pretty much out of denial cards and we needed to go for the win. The Architect player to my right brought out some little stuff, but couldn’t take a site (thank you Final Brawl!) and after gaining 4 power in addition to the 5 from the Bull Market, I was able to lay out a foundation character, a Big Brusier and have a power left for a confucian stability to stop the inevitable zzzzzap (which came in the form of an Op Killdeer). Going for the win, the brusier got redirected onto a 9 body site (he’s only 8 fighting) , but my foundation character’s damage was redirected onto that 9-body site via the yellow senshi chamber, reducing it to a feastable number for the big brusier, for which the table had no answer. All in all, I got real lucky with my draws and was able to capitalize on both the bad luck of the other players as well as some mistakes on their part.
After winning this and the Wisconsin state championship this year after many years of tournaments of just barely not making it into the finals, I’m looking at a long decade or so of getting my ass handed to me in competitive play as I well deserve. Bring it!
Well I had a week off and gaming got friggin’ done. A lot of it. Game after game of Shadowfist, two 5 hour + games of Talisman 4th Edition, Dragon Lairds and a weekend of handful after handful of D10’s being thrown for Exalted to top the shit off. Thanks to everyone that suffered through the debauchery, the rump-gasps, rank foists, dank, oppressive basement conditions and cursing as it was probably the most solid week of gaming I’ve had since 2004 or so. To have two days in a row that consisted of waking up at 10AM, stumbling around trying to find food and the preparing for a few hours for another almost all nighter of the ultimate nerdery is really a gift that one at my stolid age and life-choices shouldn’t be allowed to have.
Shadowfist: Some great games were played and beatings delivered (as usual). My only issue is that 4-player is the maximum enjoyable size. Five player just starts to break down, not the game engine at all, but the ability for players to play with the intensity that a multiplayer CCG requires for that long of a time. I’d rather get 2-3 three player games over the same span of time than one big-ass five or six player game. My decks did OK, with the exception of my A-list deck, which did phenomenally well in the hands of some of the less experienced players (I never played the deck myself). One player, we’ll call him STEVE, got Ting Ting, the Golden Gunman and Steven Wu out onto the table at the same time. Even though he didn’t win that game, this was a moral victory forever. The most interesting deck I saw out of the group was a horrific use of Bonechill by Mouth.
Dragon Lairds: Becoming a favorite, though one person, we’ll call him SCOTT, wins every game all the time. While this is derivative of another game (can’t remember the name), I wouldn’t play without the Tom Wham (and friends) art work.
Talisman 4th Edition: Like Shadowfist, if you have more than 4 players, you’re just not going to be able to sustain the intensity over 5 hours of play. Though the two games we got in were fun, I think that’s quite enough Talisman until the Dragon expansion is released this Fall. The new horse deck is great as well as the trinkets and non-item rewards you can get, though I am still wrestling with the ability of players to gain Craft from monster trophies. Overall though with more than 3, I would say this is just not going to be on the menu for a long time to come. Notable is that someone tried to play the Monk (who got awful nerfed in the new version) and failed. This is understandable when your only power is to have +3 to normal Combat.
Exalted: What can I say, I know the issues everyone on the internet has with this game and yet when we play it, it’s hellaciously fun. Not as much combat happened during the sessions we played compared to the last session with these characters, so only a hundred dice hit the table instead of hundreds and hundreds. I’d been planning to run one of the (very few) published adventures (with some tweaks) for the game and it worked out well, inserting some of my own characters in here and there and decreasing the difficulty when an experienced RPG gamer pulled a Steel Reserve fueled newb mistake and wandered off during a dungeon crawl portion only to be jumped and nearly destroyed by one of the most obvious traps ever conceived. While the combat has an awesome amount of crunch, I’m still not totally sold on social combat. It’s interesting, but one of my players mentioned immediately: “if this is dropping my willpower, why wouldn’t I just instantly attack?” Exactly. In two instances of social combat from published adventures, both have antagonists that speak through other mediums so they cannot be instantly attacked (Return to the Tomb of Five Corners and Daughter of Nexus). That’s telling about what players are apt to do during social combat when up against an actual enemy. From reading the interweb tubes over the last year or so, and my shock at antagonists from the Scroll of Exalts with 50+ charms, I was thinking of converting the whole campaign to Feng Shui or FATE, but after these sessions I just don’t see the point. I won’t mince words though that Exalted is a heavy bitch of a game to prep for and run as a GM, and as you get to higher power levels, well nigh impossible.
Nodamage and I headed out to Plattcon yesterday and though it’s a smallesque nerdcon, it had a very big game for me– the Wisconsin State Shadowfist Championships organized by John Monett. The board game room was dead (where were the free-rental board game guys that made it to the similarly sized Gaming Hoopla?) so Nodamage was dragged into 5 hours or so of Shadowfist as an almost n00b. Not expecting it at all but I pulled enough points to get to the winners table and then caught a few breaks in the final for the win. I’m the Shadowfist Wisconsin state champion for 2011, the big cheese as it were.
My first game was horrible with just a spew of foundation characters coming from my hand and I figured I wouldn’t be able to do anything during the tournament, but game 2, even without any Dragon resources, I was able to rapine through defenses with everyone’s favorite dude with a rock chained to him: Shun Dai.
The final was a mosh, Decks were (as far as I can tell): Dragon/Monarchs, Monarch Fire deck, Jammer Deck and my Hand/Dragon. The Monarch Fire player got to 4 sites really fast with two Fire Mystics who were also hurting everyone’s cards whenever an event hit the table, what’s more, the Jammer deck had Frag the G out for more site damage– so sites were falling fast to smallish characters. Three turns to the end I had no sites on the table and one in my burned for victory pile with what looked like no way to win. But the worm turned and I got a couple sites out and a Big Bruiser who started hitting the damaged sites with no blockers that could stand up to his beats. A big part of the endgame was that Ting Ting, played by the Monarch/Dragon player, got toasted by a card I had never even seen before— ouch.
My MVP cards were:
Character: Shun Dai (got me into the final)
Event: Blue Meditation
State: No states in the deck
Edge: Chinese Connection
Sites: Tomb of Angry Spirits
I didn’t take notes like I do at Gencon about decks, but there was a scary Jammer deck there and of course, whatever Willow puts together usually hits like a ton of bricks, but I only played her in the final and didn’t see enough to know what her combos were about. All in all some great games and looking forward to seeing everyone at Gencon for some more beatings.
Wisconsin state championship in Shadowfist this coming weekend at Plattcon. I’m either going to play my Dragon ‘A List’ deck or the Hand/Dragon big Bruiser cycler. Neither deck has done great at the Gen Con tournaments, but I’ve just missed getting to the final by a few points with both. I’m thinking of stripping out the legendary Iron Monkey from the aforementioned Big Bruiser cycler as he really is just has a giant target on his chest any time he hits the table and what I’ve found over the years is that he just doesn’t take sites all that often. I only got one box of Empire of Evil so far but there are some juicy tidbits in there to throw in to each deck– it’s just deciding which NOT to put in that is the challenge. One thing I love about the Shadowfist tournaments is that they are friendly and fun AND hardcore competitive. It’s a very tough blend to hit for a game, and a game community as getting walloped is usually never fun in a game–and Shadowfist has a lot of walloping all round.
“a standalone game of deck-building action that takes 2-4 players through the cutthroat excitement of an entire Blood Bowl season, all in about an hour.” Well this looks interesting and it’s being designed by the dude who made Chaos in the Old World so that’s cooking with gas. Is it a CCG? That’s the question. I doubt it as the game is certainly not infinitely expandable with a limited number of teams. Like Dungeon Quest and the oodles of Talisman expansions, this is yet again something from Fantasy Flight that my money won’t be able to avoid.
