Author: Paco G. Jaen

Roleplaying and board games reviews, podcasts, videos and interviews

Summoner Wars

You all know that I love Summoner Wars from Plaid Hat games, so when the opportunity arose to pimp out my game by getting the Vanguards, Fallen Kingdom, and Premium Board, I was all over it. The day I got them back home from Gencon, my daughter and I were laying out the board and ready to wage war upon one another, summoning not just new units on a fresh, new game board, but also summoning such smack-talk as “oh, man…that had to hurt! Not only did I waste your Common, I transformed him into a zombie!” There’s a whole lot new to the game now that the new factions are out, and I, for one, welcome our new Summoner masters. The new stuff is friggin’ awesome, and that’s that. I can also share that I finally beat my daughter at the game, using my new love, the Fallen Kingdom against her Tundra Orcs! w00t!

Heroes of the Fallen Lands

D&D Essentials are a new product line designed for new players. It boils down some classes to a single new build (sometimes two) with the express interest of making the game easier for new players to get involved in 4th edition and to create a new baseline for players to build from. The Essentials line comes in three parts: the part for everyone, the part for Players and the part for the GM. The part for everyone includes the new Red Box, the Rules Compendium and the official dice set. The Players books are Heroes of the Fallen Lands and Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdom.

Dominant Species

Once in a while, wargames publisher GMT decides to zig when everyone else zags, and prints a game that doesn’t fit their usual line-up. They did it years ago with titles like Winds of Plunder and Conquest of Paradise, and more recently with the cute Leaping Lemmings. This time around, GMT takes out the big guns: acclaimed wargame designer Chad Jensen (of Combat Commander fame), one of the biggest boxes and boards ever to roll off their assembly line, and a mammoth leap back in time to present us with Dominant Species, an evolutionary battle that’s roughly 90,000 years old. (Talk about a different breed of conflict simulation!)

Aliens: This Time is War

My interest was first piqued when I came across the game on the Geek by accident. The creator is clearly a huge fan of the film(s), and after a peek at the rules file and some of the sample cards in the images section I took the plunge. When the cards arrived from ArtsCow I was pleasantly surprised. It was the first time I have used the service, and I was unsure what to expect in terms of quality. Each card is well printed, with only a few fuzzy edges, and all the information you need to use is clearly printed.

Wu Xing: The Ninja Crusade

Wu Xing: The Ninja Crusade was a bit of a hard sell for me, being a quasi fantasy game in an oriental mish-mash fantasy culture with a heavy anime influence…that is kind of a laundry list of things I don’t like (except for the fantasy part). And yet, while I was reading (and loving) Apocalypse Prevention Inc., the book’s writer Eloy Lasanta asked me if I would be interested in checking out Wu Xing for a review…off the strength of the API series, I said yes.