Gencon 2015 #2

So Gencon has finished and it was a blast. Although, as usual I spent most of my time queuing up at various stands. 

Day 2 started with me queuing up at the UDE booth for the new VS TCG system. I have this much to say about UDE though, they have horrible organisation and quite frankly, their business tactics as a company leave much to be desired for. 

Why do I say this? Mostly because during Gencon 2014, they released a limited edition promotion for the new upcoming VS TCG (which is the one released this year). That cost 50 USD and what was a real burn was that they merely re-printed all the cards from Marvel Origins (one of the very first VS sets to be released and one that I already have) and released that. I, and countless others, paid 50 bucks for that, along with some 'new' cards that supposedly would be useful for the new version of VS. 

Guess what? Those cards are completely useless as they are incompatible with the new version of VS. So in essence, UDE got countless suckers to pay 50 dollars for scrap paper last year. 

Then there's this year, where they had snaking queues around their booth for the new VS system but most of the UDE employees were basically...totally unhelpful when it came to trying to get basic information out of them. Information such as whether they had enough sets of VS left to sell, or where their heavily advertised 10,000 prize money VS tournament was going to be held or even WHEN. How on earth is this not basic information to most of the staffers? Or at least, if one staff doesn't know, they should at least be able to redirect the person to someone on booth who has concrete information. 

So why do I keep coming back to this system? Because it's a frigging superhero TCG that's why. It's the American equivalent to Super Robot Wars and that's reason enough. I'll probably expound more on the new VS system in another post, because it's fairly different from the old one. 

I also dropped by the Spartan booth where they had some new previews of the upcoming Halo stuff. Apparently, more ships are slated to be released new Dec 2015 so that's good news for Halo players. However, the large ship pictured above is apparently; probably, going to be in Resin due to reasons to do with production quantities. 

Managed to grab a demo of Fairytale games, which was a Kickstarted funded way back in 2013. While I like the miniatures, I wasn't too convinced by the gameplay that I wanted to blow either 60USD on the base game or 160 on grabbing all the miniatures. I mean, there's something about having a pretty decent miniature of Snow White or Robin Hood but I have limited cash and limited luggage space. 

The gameplay is simple enough, you start with certain number of points that you pump into your traits. Your characters explore new areas by drawing location cards and flipping them over. You can get ambushed by NPC minions or you can fight among yourselves and the whole goal of the game is to be the final survivor in a fairytale battle royale. 

When you get into battle, you and your opponent each draw battle cards, which will help decide what moves your character can perform. Each character have their own special moves, which utilises a certain combination of the battle cards; such as Weak+Hit cards together may allow you to do 2 damage. When you take damage, you take it from your trait points. Any trait points. For example, if you had pumped 5 points into Strength and you take 2 damage, you can choose to take it from Strength, leaving you with 3 strength. Other than that, traits don't really affect how much damage you can do or how much damage you can avoid. 

I also dropped by the PlaidHat booth for a tournament of their newly released game, Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn. I will probably go into this as well in another post because the game deserves it but I will say this, this was a very good game and they sold out of it on the 3rd day of Gencon. In fact, I would say this is Plaidhats new Dead of Winter. 

I also got a demo of Dungeon Saga, which was pretty interesting. Anyone who's familiar with Dreadball or Deadzone would instantly be familiar with the mechanics in this system. 

It's yet another dungeon-exploring game with a campaign system. You play the role of adventurers who must stop a necromancer from wreaking havoc on the surface world. The gameplay uses d6s and the value in each stat tells you how many dice you need to roll for that test. For example, your attack stat would tell you how many dice you roll to attack while your armor would tell you how many to roll when defending. Your defense value would be the number that enemies need to beat when rolling their attack roll. 

For example, if my defense was 4, an opponent would need to roll 5+ on his attack dice. However, I would then roll my armor dice and compare my results to his successes. If he had rolled 5,5 on 2 dice and I rolled 5,4 on my armor dice, we would compare highest to highest and then next highest to next highest. As long as the defender ties with the attacker, it negates that hit. So my 5 would cancel his 5 while his other 5 would beat my 4, resulting in one hit and 1 damage to PCs. For NPCs, they don't quite have HP but they generally require 2 hits in 1 attack to kill. 

In a nutshell, that was my Gencon experience. I would have had more demos but with 2 tournaments in a row, I just didn't have that much time. Still, it was pretty enjoyable.