Despite her pop-star looks and elecro-chick-pop start that one of my kids liked– Poppy couldn’t help herself and it looks like she has put out another full on nu-Metal style album.
Out in mid-November, the singles that have dropped have been super heavy and right on the mark for the direction Poppy should always go.
Ah the Marvel Heroes FASERIP game from the 80’s, the Superhero game we should have been playing as kids instead of Champions and TMNT– well maybe not TMNT, that deserved roll in the hay or three. While I haven’t played the FASERIP rules in several years, I developed a short campaign for it awhile back but never had the players go for it (and I got lazy and just ran DCC). The version we played was the retroclone called FASERIP by Gubintroll Games and came out in 2015. It was great BUT had one major issue– compatibility with all the Marvel Heroes stuff (and there is a LOT) from the 1980’s and early 90’s. Self-contained, it was a blast and I loved the push your luck character generation system, there just wasn’t anything out for the system to pick up and play, so while we played it, I jetted over to the older game.
That said, there is a NEW edition called Advanced FASERIP that cleans up some rules (which were already streamlined from the older game) adds some more combat options and best yet, comes in a hardback book from DrivethruRPG for a mere 25 bucks!
Why would you want this when there are so many other Superhero games on the market? If you haven’t tried it the Marvel Heroes game where FASERIP came from is excellent, and is by far the most OSR superhero game (rulings over rules) AND has the only meta-currency (karma) outside of Japanese RPG games that makes sense. FATE and other games got their bennies and chips from FASERIP, but IMO, FASERIP does a better job with it than it’s children. Give it a spin, generate some randos and go to town!
I have been waiting for Arcs since the kickstarter announcement with some trepidation after playing and being pretty lukewarm on Oath which was a fairly expensive game to which has been sitting for a long time on the shelf after a mere 4 plays. I can happily say after 4 games of Arcs that it was well worth the price and wait, especially with the Blighted Reach expansion. I have no idea if it will dethrone Twilight Imperium (or more importantly to our group, Eclipse), but I have some thoughts on this game after about 10 hours of playtime so far, discussions with the play groups (one group more dirty casuls and one as heavy as they can get).
Base Game
Arcs base game comes in a Root sized box and is moderately complex to learn a due to a player’s operations economy being controlled by a card bidding mechanism echoing Twilight Imperium’s role selection mechanic. At it’s core, players play a card from their hand to give them operations (stuff you can do with your pieces) for the turn, a lot like A Study in Emerald except that the first card played during a round effects the cards and operations that the other player’s can play for that round. There is NO trick-taking in Arcs, and if you read or watch a video where someone says that there is, they don’t know shit from shinola as we would say at the Sheepshead table. That said, players of Bridge, Hearts, Euchre, et al will see some similarities in the way cards are played but it is thin and more in the spirit of those games than anything mechanically borrowed. Operation types come in suits, and players must overplay the lead card in the lead suit played in order to get a full set of operations from that suit. For example, if someone plays a Construction card with a 5 on it, the other players must play a Construction card with a higher number, or have a reduced number of Construction operations that turn. Players can also play a card from another suit to get a single operation from that card during that round. While mechanically different with the lead, follow mechanic, it’s a bit like the COIN games where certain players that got operations cannot play any for the next turn or turns.
Victory points are scored by players who fulfill that hand’s Ambitions which, a bit like bids in Bridge, are selected by the leading players at some point during the hand. These include stuff like ‘most stuff blown up,’ ‘most enemy agents captured’ or some accumulation of resources over the other players. The fight over being the lead player is both to get the most out of your operations and to be able to select the ambitions you want to go for during the hand rather than the ones the others want to go for.
With all that, Arcs seems like a card game, but it’s not. The real game involves players running their operations, whether moving ships around and attacking, building stuff or controlling the various parts of the guild in a set of mechanics exactly like bidding for cards from Study in Emerald. The way the Ambitions work can allow long play combos that score massive points in areas the other players may have completely ignored earlier in the game.
My favorite part of the base game and where Leder Games really showed their smarts is the battle mechanic. Part of me thinks LG would like to go back to OATH and use Arcs battle dice instead of the Attack/Defense dice. In Arcs, only the attacker rolls the dice. They have three types to choose from: all out attack, raid and skirmish. Each one has some risk/reward that players have to mull over before rolling. All out attacking can do as much damage to your own fleet as to the enemy’s but you will hammer the crap out of them regardless of your own damage. Skirmishing has no risk to your ships, but has a good chance of not doing much and Raiding gives some ability to steal things from other players with some big risks. It’s a tough decision in the game to make and yet it resolves VERY quickly. Of all the parts of Arcs that are good, the dice combat is great.
Blighted Reach / Campaign game
with Dr pepper product placement….
While fun, the base game isn’t super compelling for me– it lacks the meat on the bone for this type of game, and isn’t a ‘smash everyone in the mouth quick’ game like Nexus Ops either. Base Arcs is also extremely reliant on the cards you get and can be very frustrating turn after turn when you just don’t have what you need to do anything and the other players do! it’s not like Euchre or Sheepshead where you get some bad hands but, if you play right, you can mitigate the damage. In base Arcs, a couple rounds of bad cards and you are going to struggle with cobbling together any type of points. It’s fun, but for the time it takes, I would rather throw down Root or Study in Emerald.
The base game IS a good base for Arcs’ massive and completely insane expansion, Blighted Reach. I’ve only gotten one game of this but it was between 4-5 hours long, so I got a solid feel for what this game has to offer in it’s full form. While longer, it is superior to the base game by a wide margin.
I love games where you do not engage with all of the mechanics of the game with a single or even a few play throughs (hello Bios Megafauna and Pax Renaissance!). Arcs has this in spades (trick taking pun detected). The expansion adds four major things to the base game: the Imperial regency/ fleets, the blight, event cards, and best of all: Fates.
The Imperial fleets and Regency which does not allow players to fight each other early game and taxes the game by sucking much needed resources from the Reach to the Imperium. I was quite worried about the complexity of this addition as there is a first Regent who has to run a set of operations in a little booklet periodically in the game and the activities and effects of the Imperial fleet seems pretty daunting at first, but it’s all plainly and logically designed. Since there are regents, of course there are rebels (outlaws) who can attack anyone anywhere (but don’t get the protection of the Imperial fleets).
Secondly is the Blight, which is some alien entity that spreads from planet to planet, much like the Amoeba in the old Amoeba Wars game from the early 80’s. This had very little effect in our game, but again, you do not see all the game’s mechanics in a single play through (or even a campaign).
Third are Event cards (gasp! is this really a Cole Wherle game?) that add the much needed roller coaster aspect to Arcs that was totally missing in Oath (and is not needed at all in Root). These can be mitigated pretty easily by the players, but when they fire off, they can do a lot of damage to everyone. They are triggered when a player plays an Event card from their hand and some dice decide whether the Regent governs the reach or an event takes place. Players have some control over whether the events happen most of the time.
Lastly are the Fate cards, which are most analogous to the Aliens from Cosmic Encounter but not only do they have different rules and cards, they have their own way to ‘win’ as that Fate through the entire campaign. At the end of a game (in the campaign) players “Resolve their Fates” and determine if they can (if they won their Fate’s goals) or want to continue with their original Fate into the next game or draw new ones. Where have I read the exact phrase “Resolve fates at the end of an Act before” ? Tenra Bansho Zero! If Leder Games wasn’t familiar with the Karma system in TBZ I would be uncannily surprised based on this part of Arcs.
Fates are the part of the game design where Arcs goes from a somewhat normal 4X space game with interesting mechanical flourishes into one of the most monstrous and insane games I’ve ever played. Each Fate has a path through the Acts of the campaign games that must be abandoned if the player fails to meet their Fate’s objectives, at which point they choose from Fates only available in later Acts of the campaign– and these are much more aggressive and dangerous Fates to the Reach AND the other players. So, if a sad sack of a player takes the high hard one from the other players in the game, you can bet they are going to come back with the nastiest Fate they can choose and anal-ly re-thread the occupants of the Reach as much as possible. The amazing thing about FATES in the first game of a campaign is that they can and will often have common goals and the objectives of one may compliment the objectives of the other. While under the thumb of the Imperium (or as outlaws too), players may work together to further their own goals as there is no winner until the last game of the campaign. One player may WANT another player to outlaw and attack the Imperium to free up some of those juice resources taxed away for Imperial use.
All that said, how does the game play? It’s smooth, has lots of interesting choices but for ‘modern’ game sensibilities, it’s extremely long (for older gamers, it’s not that long at all compared to some of the true monsters), and I won’t pretend the complexity level wasn’t daunting at first. You are not going to be able to get an Act (game) in a campaign on a school night unless you plan to start early and GO LATE. I think the fumbling over the rules in a group’s early games will be replaced with ANALysis paralysis and negotiation in later plays, so I would guess at minimum you are looking at 45 minutes to an hour per player. This length puts Arcs in a completely different realm than Root and Ahoy, and joins the mega-game zone like Republic of Rome, Twlight Imperium, Warrior Knights, Here I Stand/Virgin Queen and AH Civilization. I couldn’t be happier about that! With Arcs, we do not have a game that will compete with Root or Eclipse, both of which can be played in an hour and a half to two hours, nor with deeper but shorter games like Study in Emerald or Pax Renaissance that can be completed in about an hour with experienced players. If we bust out Arcs, it’s because we want to play a long, in depth game with a lot of player interaction.
So far after just 4 plays, Arcs base game is Ok, but with Blighted Reach, Arcs is a totally insane engine for a huge scope of play as well as a massive design accomplishment from Leder games. I cannot wait to get more games in. Time will tell if this hits the same spot folks want hit from Twilight Imperium, but I suspect we will be playing this game for many years.
Someone thought the El Grande marker was too smooth…
I shit you not.
Wrapped C.V Wedgwood’s Thirty Years War up this week– my god what a monstrosity. You have to take notes while reading this to keep track of the people with the same names. That said, Wedgwood does an excellent job threading a narrative through this huge mess and her core argument is that the Electors (Saxony, Bavarian, the Palatinate) could have curbed the power of the Hapsburg enough to avoid Spain, France and Sweden helping Germany/Austria destroy itself over 30 horrific years, but did the opposite. I do not recommend this book to anyone unless you are ready for something very heavy and quite sad really. A lot of you familiar with this period at all will have gotten it from Dan Carlin — he focuses on interesting but ultimately meaningless parts of the conflict which is ironic as it seems like he was searching for meaning through all this, which there is none. Part of the counter-reformation? eh.. not really. Hapsburg vs Bourbon proxy war? maybe.. but did that at all matter? War of Swedish aggression? For what? None of it made any sense other than let’s see how bad we can fuck up Germany and Austria.
With all that, I like this period as it’s the historical basis for the Warhammer Old World and all the core adventures from Mordheim to the Enemy Within are shadows of the actual real world conflict that occurred over this period, except there were very few heroes and the only result was to set Europe up for it’s next set of wars.
Interested in the period but don’t want to wade into something this beastly? Watch The Last Valley.
Gaming in this period, beyond the tie to Warhammer is pretty rich ground, but there isn’t anything that captures the conflict like say Virgin Queen or Here I Stand, which is surprising. Pike and Shotte is a solid rendition of the period in miniature rules, and even Pax Renaissance covers this period in broad, banker-focused strokes. As for this author’s thesis– there isn’t anything I could find in a board game where the true conflict between the Electors, the Emperor and the foreign meddlers was truly represented. The closest thing from the destruction and senseless conflict side would certainly be Root or something like Warrior Knights.
My second longest ongoing campaign was 13th Age and it’s a goddamn fine system for high power D20 madness. I’m not sure it even needed a 2nd edition as the first was really on the $$$, but designers learn a lot when their designs are out being hammered by the real world and I no doubt that happened even with these seasoned designers (Heinsoo and Tweet). Yes you can make parties of muppets and the art is of the ‘generic fantasy’ extraordinaire (all very 3E style as it has the same artists), but despite this, 13th Age has it where it counts for both player TOYS for their character classes and it is extremely easy to GM compared to ALL other D20 RPG’s in this mechanical weight class. I can’t recommend it enough, though it does not have anywhere near the adventure support of DCC or Pathfinder.
This is what it’s ALL about:
While I am still enamoured with Street Fighter 6 (for good reason), SNK is not sitting on their laurels and has announced their competition to SF6: a new edition of Garou Mark of the Wolves. G:MOTW was a late hardware NEO GEO title along with Last Blade and Last Blade 2 and it absolutely rocked. I feel it was a stronger and more compelling game than Streetfighter 3, and we played it on ton on the stand up at work for years.
SF6 is going to be tough to compete with as it is an instant classic on so many levels, butt I have a soft spot for GMOTW and I’m hoping this captures the magic again of the first one.
Announcement trailer for KUSHNOOD BUTT!
Is this the most Appendix N Album cover you have seen since DRAGON FORCE Valley of the Damned?
Here is their bandcamp, it’s good stuff!
What on earth!? This is a game I never, ever expected to get remade (yet someone did TITAN right?).
Divine Right is a fantasy game where you play as a kingdom and try to get neutral kingdoms to join your empire and then…. go and attack other players. The art and map was done by none other than Dave Trampier. We had this map on our wall as kids for about 10 years at least, and as recently as a few years ago we ran a campaign set in this ‘world’ (around the Port Lork area).
I have both the original version (or rather, pieces of it) and the 25th Anniversary edition which had cool stuff, but the WORST printed counters I’ve ever seen (even worse than Princes of The Renaissance which was just printed on cardstock!
Anyway here’s the new cover (looks awesome) and link below. It has a GIANT Neoprene map option.
Vanillaware are naughty, naughty sumkas to be sure, with their cute but sexy Odin’s Sphere leading into their side scrolling answer to Diablo, Dragon’s Crown, with the largest breasts on record for a playable character. You’d think a studio so obsessed with giant barbarian woman’s thighs wouldn’t be able to crank out such good games time and time again, but they certainly have in the past and have done it again!
Before I gush all over Unicorn Overlord, I would be remiss if I did not mention that I did not like Vanillaware’s last game, 13 Sentinels, and wished I had never bought it. The story was Soul Nomad and The World Eaters level confusing with the difference being that the story parts completely got in the way of the combat. The early game the sequences where you run around as various characters in frustrating side-scrolling puzzles were so long and arduous as to negate the fun of the tactical mech combat once you eventually got to it, and even then, it was far to short in the mech, and way to long out of it. Even my kids that tend to like those sorts of games on the Switch just won’t bother with 13 Sentinels. Luckily, that is the past as we now have a game from Vanillaware that does the exact opposite: has a story and it gets the fuck out of the way for the joy of the tactical combat!
Unicorn Overlord, for those that may have never heard about it yet, is a modern Ogre Battle, which means it is an RPG with tons of different characters that are organized into battle units. Each of these units ends up having different capabilities in tactical as well as strategic contexts. Characters level up and have light item management (nothing like Dragon’s Crown/ Diablo though) and also grow affinity with their different combat groups over time. Choosing the right battle group for the right job at the right time is critical to success and building out those ‘right’ battle groups is half the fun of the game, the other half is the slaughter parts.
There are so many games around to put time into, why play this over other games? First, it’s absolutely gorgeous. For a tactical battle game, the art, character design and animation is over the top. Player’s have an option to skip battle animations but I almost NEVER do, just to see my plucky characters in all their animated glory.
Second, the core gameplay loop is done extremely well. You unlock new characters during the story and can combine them with existing units, form new ones and then try them out vs enemies or in practice. The strategic aspects of positioning, blocking, the action point economy and special leader/member powers on the strategic map is all just superbly done. As a fan of Ogre Battle/Soul Nomad and the World Eaters style games, I’m going to hazard to say that this is probably already my favorite in the genre.
Lastly: Tits. Everyone loves them. Every man, woman and child on earth. Vanillaware knows this.
Negatives, and there are a few, consist of a bit of chaos and confusion during the real-time strategic portion of the game, where, especially on the Switch, it can be hard to see what unit is next to another unit. I did get into a forever loop situation where two units, both out of action points, were constantly going to fight each other and neither could harm on another. One unit was up against the side of the map so the loser could not be pushed back. Lastly, while this is minor, the main character and his best friend are the most GENERIC anime fantasy characters imaginable, which is odd since Vanillaware typically has such cool designs for the main characters in other games.
While I haven’t finished the game yet (it’s long), I already highly recommend the game to everyone that likes this style at all.
Tactical view of a battle
Some basic tips
This is only out on consoles (Switch/PS5) and not the PC. Looking for something like this on the PC? Check out Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga.
