Once again, the entrances to the halls are packed way before the actual opening times. Probably because Jim Butcher is going to have another signing session today and people want to queue up early so that they can make sure they get his autograph.
Then I dropped by the Cthulhu Wars booth; of which I was a backer, to take a look at some of the figures. They were pretty good, in fact much better than I would have expected. It's not often you see such faithful translations from resin masters to boardgame plastics.
Especially Cthulhu. That's a pretty gorgeous looking piece for a boardgame. Then I discovered that Kickstarter backers get a free Tshirt when they visit the booth, which was cool so I picked one of the free Cthulhu Tshirts.
Then I went to another booth for a demo of Video Game High School; which is by Plaidhat Games. For those who are unfamiliar with them, they're the ones who made Mice and Mystics, as well as Bioshock Infinite. It's a worker placement game with a bit of a twist or RNG in it, due to the fact that you need to complete certain tasks every round but your resources are generated with dice rolls so you may not always have the resources you need to complete that task. However, it also minimises the RNG by allowing you to get temporary resources which you can use to complete tasks. Overall, it was pretty decent and I would have bought it on the spot except it's only available for pre-order. Bleh.
Then I went for a Mage Wars demo but on the way, I saw this really cool Battle of 5 armies board game set up. They were using heroclix figures instead of the actual board game miniatures and they had set up a much larger board to accommodate the larger figures.
As for Mage Wars, you play a mage who summons various creatures. It's like a constructed card game with tactical positioning. Overall, I didn't really feel like it was my thing since it's neither a CCG nor is it an actual war game.
I also managed to get a demo of Heroes of Metro City, which is yet another deck building game where you play as a group of heroes. The concept was interesting, where you require 3 different types of resources; somewhat like Legendary, in order to buy different stuff. You need power to defeat villains and you need plot to buy cards that give you power. However, there was also a third requirement; energy, which was needed to power your powers. You could have a really awesome card in hand but if it required more power than you could generate that turn, you wouldn't be able to play it. Overall, it's somewhat interesting but it also kind of sucked because it felt like the game went by a bit slowly because of that. Also, we only played 3 rounds of the game, which was barely enough to get a feel for the game. Due to that, I'm feeling somewhat uncertain about how I feel about the game in general but I do know I have a lot of deck builders already. So this means I probably wouldn't get it, yet I may have changed my mind if the demo was longer.
I also managed to take a look at the SDE: Forgotten King figurines. Overall, pretty decent quality. And of course, Marie Claude was standing in front of the booth as usual.
Of course, there was also a cosplay competition going on that same day so really, she didn't seem out of place at all. Except for you know....the huge tracts of land...
Lots of really good costumes could be found. One of the best I saw was this Iron Man costume but before I could take a photo, the cosplayer went into the judging hall and I lost sight of him after that.
I also ended up getting another free tshirt from a raffle at the UDE booth. (Lots of free Tshirts today)Earlier on I had dropped by to get the VS system Gencon Preview. Some short history here, I was a huge fan of the VS CCG back when it first came out. Unfortunately, it eventually died to lack of support as UDE moved onto their new cashcow, World of Warcraft TCG. But now apparently UDE was trying to bring it back and selling a Gencon Preview deck for 50 USD.
To be honest, the UDE preview buy wasn't worth it at all. While it may be interesting to new players, the real issue is that the deck actually consisted reprints of the first core set of VS, which includes the Sentinels, Xmen and Brotherhood. Sure you get some promo cards and a tshirt but as someone who's played VS since the start, I don't need more bloody xmen/sentinel/brotherhood cards. Also, I'm somewhat puzzled by the switch to being a LCG; like AGOT or Conquest. It's a good format but this seems pretty different from anything they've ever done before. Unless they're trying to make it more like Legendary.
Overall, I'd still be interested if they reboot the VS system; especially since they will be including more comic houses other than just DC and Marvel this time around. However, they really need to stop with their shenanigans and just really come up with a great game and support it.
No comments:
Post a Comment