By Peter Ruth II

Friends, I’ve decided that I’ve been remiss in not sharing with you the vast pool of knowledge that I’ve learned over the years regarding tabletop miniatures gaming, and so this is the first of many articles that will pass on some of the laborious research I’ve carved out of the Internet. The tag will be “Miniatures Gaming 101″ and I’ll be putting articles ranging from figure sources, game rules, painting tip sites, terrain building help, the best books to buy, and all manner of things relating to all things miniature. I’m not a great figure painter, though I can hold my own, but I am a very capable terrain builder, so I’ll likely share some of my projects with you fine folks as well. So, let’s begin with a great source of material to quickly and cheaply get a table going for a skirmish: Pegasus Hobbies (PegasusHobbies.net).

There was a time, so long ago, that I was playing Battletech, Mage Knight, and all manner of miniature game on paper mats. Yes, they do serve a purpose, but why would you want to if you didn’t have to, and further, if it wasn’t prohibitively expensive? It’s because I didn’t know just how many miniatures companies are out there, nor did I know just how inexpensive miniatures terrain can be if you know where to look. Well, I was at a game store just before I got sick a year and a half ago, and I saw this wonderful, detailed church sitting on a Warhammer table. After inquiring, it turns out that the guy spent all of two hours painting and assembling it, and the amazing part, he spent just over twenty dollars on it.

I immediately got online and found that this company’s products are both inexpensive and ubiquitous, and so I jumped in with both feet and got both a Gothic City Ruins and the same church set that I had seen at the store. As soon as I got it home I realized just how easy it was going to be to turn the box into what would be the ruins of the Esoteric Order of Dagon church, an ancient, decaying factory, the burned-out hulk of an old apartment building, and so many other terrain features. Within an hour I had glued it and assembled it, and because I tend to overthink things, three hours later I had the whole thing primered, painted, blackwashed, and three-color dry-brushed. It is simply amazing how wonderful these things look once you’ve got them painted.

I’m never one to do something half-assed, so I took it further once I’d had it for a year and really got interested in making beautiful landscapes to play on, so I then based the entire set, flocked it (including adding moss to the model), and put another ten dollar Pegaus set of rubble in the center to create the illusion that the top of the building had fallen in long ago. In all, it looks just like I hoped it would, and I’m out maybe a total of 6 hours time and forty bucks in materials. That said, it was very nice looking with a simple blackwash/drybrush treatment, and the flexibility of the sets are such that if you were to buy two, you could present them on the table as four sides of the same ruined building.

The second set I got was, as I noted, the church itself. The beauty of these sets is that you can make them in a great many configurations, and so I made mine a little non-standard, since I’m a pretty non-standard individual myself. I ended up making it an “evil church”, airbrushing the entire thing flat black and following with a grey drybrush treatment. I also airbrushed ~flame light~ on and around the lanterns but it didn’t turn out as well as I liked. It’s still got some work to go, a year later or so, but it’s been good enough for my table so I haven’t put effort into it to get it to what I consider “quality work”.

About a month ago I downloaded and printed the free rules for “The Skank Game”, otherwise known as Warlords of the Wasteland 2085, which is a post-apocalyptic skirmish game that includes vehicles and very light RPG elements. I was looking for a Fallout-esque game and therefore I needed to have some post-apocalyptic game pieces. Well, a forum member at Fortress:AT was talking about Pegasus’ Syberclicks terrain, which is the Warhammer 40K equivalent of the Hexagon terrain (shown left), so I bought both the large and small packs, which cost a total of $32.00. Well, let me tell you, it’s really quite modular in that you can build virtually anything you can imagine, much like Lego products, but with a very “hodge-podge”, scavenged feel to the buildings. As usual, I couldn’t follow the directions as listed, so with the small set I made something not remotely resembling the shown product, which integrated into the walled wasteland outpost I

created using the large set. The wife likes it, and she’s a tough customer to please, so I’m content. It’s very lightweight, so I think it really will need to have a base on it to sturdy it up. It snaps together with these clips that I believe were sent by the Devil himself, because after 2 hours of modelling, my fingers were LITERALLY bleeding. They’re a real bitch to assemble, no doubt, but it’s worth it. As you can see from the photo of the frames, there’s a bazillion little rippy bits and each one is sharp as a razor, even after you’ve removed them from the frame. The clips come in six styles, from 90 degrees to multi-angle three-way, and there’s a lot of flexibility in what you can do. Again, these things bite into your hand like a spur when you assemble the buildings, so be advised that you will not get out of this without some serious finger damage. I’d argue that it’s worth it.

I spray painted the assembly after I glued it, and while you don’t need to glue it, I wanted this to be a permanent structure so I used some CA and with a fine needle tip, dispensed a small drop at each joint and let the capillary action draw it into the connector. It’s very durable now, and I left several joints unglued so that I can break it into two pieces for storage. I’ll base it using some small lengths of plasticard epoxied to the bottom and flocked with sand. I may even use some modelling clay or Sculpey to create small berms along the base to make it look as if the structure has been there a while.  What I was going for, in all honesty, is something like a scaled-down version of the”juice” refinery in The Road Warrior. This photo shows what I built, and in retrospect, I really should’ve primed it, but the Rustoleum Hammered Copper spray paint usually sticks to pretty much anything. This is just the first coat, and only sprayed from top down. I ran out, so off to the store I go after work for another to finish the job. Once I’ve got it coated, I’ll airbrush several layers of brown, grey, red, orange, and yellow on it to create a very rusty metal look, then I may or may not hand-paint some “hot spots” of dripping rust effect.

Along with the Hexagon stuff I also got the Pegasus Technobridge, which runs $15.00, and will save me a ton of time having to scratch build it out of Plasticard and balsa. It’s the same as the church stuff, very simple to construct and looks great right out of the box, although I’ll be painting it, probably to match the outpost, and then putting some sand on it here and there to give it a more realistic look.

Now, Pegasus also creates some pre-painted stuff as well. For fantasy, or even some early American settings, you can buy a lot of small buildings that come ready-to-play. These are made of a hard stone material, perhaps even dental stone, so they’re really rather heavy for their size compared to the Gothic stuff. This Small Stone Cottage cost me $13.00 and its larger brother cost me maybe five dollars more. They’re a single, solid cast piece, so these are really only good to create the feel of a village rather than actually allow you to have door-to-door fighting. I’ve used these for Strange Aeons, and they fit in passably with my 1920′s period pieces fairly well. It beats having to build and paint a Plasticville O-scale building, which I’ll get into in a another Miniatures Gaming 101 article, when all you want is a prop piece to sit on the table as a thematic line-of-sight blocker.

In conclusion, you can get a lot of really great terrain, and I mean an entire city block’s worth, for around a hundred dollars with Pegasus, and the stuff is so easy to assemble, aside from the Hexagon finger-scourge stuff, that it’s a no-brainer. My only complaint with any of it is that they have only a few “lines” to choose from. I’d love if they moved into doing something like Plasticville, but in different time periods. It would certainly save me a lot of time in sourcing parts to kit-bash into what I want. Hope you enjoyed the article, and there’s much more to come.

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By Peter Ruth II

I’d heard about Settlers of Catan a hundred billion times, at least, as it’s widely called “The Fazzer Of Ze Euroz Gaming”, and I’ve heard it panned by Ameritrash folks as a gaming atrocity. Although not as widely hated, at least publicly, as renaissance farming or weenie trading games, it has been the subject of scorn and ridicule. “It doesn’t have a body count”, they said. “It doesn’t have much player interaction”, the said.

Well, don’t mind the bollocks, because “they” are invariably full of crap.

I had played Settlers of Catan all of one time up until 2 weeks ago, and it was a learning game four years ago at GenCon, with some guys I had never met. Me, being my usual self, just saw there were three guys about to play, so I sat down, and said, “What color am I?” One of them said, “Mediterranean tan?” and I figured I was at the right table. They graciously allowed me to play, although none of them had played, and by the time we were done, 2 and a half hours later, I realized that not only was I at the wrong table, but I was playing the wrong game. They bad mouthed the game the whole time, I later learned that we were playing it wrong , and I had subconsciously written off the game as another crappy Euro game. “How could it be so popular?” was ringing in my ears. So, I went back to playing games where people get blown up, cleaved in half by energy weapons, or where demons and zombies roam freely.

Fast forward to three weeks ago, when I decided to trade for a copy of Settlers as a gift for my bestie’s wife, the one staunch proponent of all things Euro and Tikal in my little gaming legion. Now, since I always get screwed into being the game teacher, I figured I had better learn the game before I tried to teach it, so I bought in on my iPad. What a horrendous mistake that was. “Why, pray tell is that, Mr. A Pimp Named Slickback?” you might ask? First, no need for the “Mr.”, and the reason it was a mistake is that after purchasing the game, it is the only game I’ve played on my iPad since. I mean, we’re talking addiction-level playtime, in excess of 80 hours over the last 2 weeks alone. Worse still, since I’ve learned it I’ve requested it at every game night, multiple times. Holy Mother of God, what a great game. I’m desperately hooked at this point. I’m not saying that I’d suck your dick for a sheep, but I’m not saying it’s out of the realm of possibility.

Now, the iPad game is fast, and fun, but only in a limited “I kicked the AI’s ass” kind of way. The real fun is not in the winning, but rather in convincing your friends that they ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE THAT GRAIN, and they should pay you one of each other commodity for it. It’s about the sale; the small victories along the way. It’s about the other players looking over at the person you just took for everything but their underwear, with that, “Say what, bitch? You just gave him WHAT, for WHAT?” look of amazement and disbelieving scrutiny. It’s about the “take that” moment when you put a settlement along an enemy’s road, thereby crushing their hopes of that quick 2 point score they’ve been trying to earn over the last ten turns. Anyone that says Settlers of Catan has little direct player interaction is clearly either not playing it right, or a jizznozzle.

The game’s rules are very simple, which is a boon if you’re the game teacher, and the game is actually quite simple to understand. You get commodities, you trade commodities, and you build things to earn points. On its face, you’d think that there wasn’t much there, but once you really understand it, every single turn has agonizing decisions that will affect the balance of power. This doesn’t even begin to address the fact that there’s a wild card in play, the “robber”, who is the Catan equivalent of a thermonuclear attack. You drop that bastard on a tile that has an opponent’s building adjacent to it, and you can not only steal that person’s crap, if they have too many cards, they lose half their cards.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the robber poisons the land like a cloud of radioactive fallout, so that the region doesn’t produce anything, which is the icing on the uranium cake. Best of all, he stays there until someone else rolls a seven to move him, or someone has a card that allows him to be moved. It’s brutal beyond compare. The look of consternation and hate that follows such an attack is well worth the price of admission alone. Do it to the same player twice, consecutively, or if several players do it to the same player consecutively, and it is wholly plausible that their face will crack open and hatch a Velociraptor, who will subsequently devour your gizzards in a blinding sea of blood and unabated rage. Like I said, it’s a brilliant game.

If there is one weakness to the game design, it’s that the starting position that you place your initial settlements in is so utterly important that one mistake or miscalculation can cost you the game before you even take your first turn. That said, luck plays a large role in the game as the tiles that produce commodities are activated by a die roll, so even the perfect initial settlement placement can be stymied by straight-up hateful-ass dice. The mitigating factor is that you can trade things every turn, so even if you have bad die rolls, and even if nobody will trade you anything, you can trade things back to the “bank”, at confiscatory rates, to advance your position.

In the end, it’s a really good game that I overlooked for a long time due to a group of guys who poisoned me against it, my own blatant idiocy, and a cacophonous sea of disgust released by dyed-in-the-wool Ameritrashers who decried the game based solely on the fact that it has wooden bits instead of plastic Space Marines. Hell, if this game was re-skinned with Imperial Roads, Ork Outposts, and Tyranid Hives, sort of how Talisman was re-skinned to Relic, Settlers of Catan: 40K edition would be an instant best-seller. And I’d be first in line to buy that crap, aaaaaaw yeah.

Why I’d Settle Down With A Settler:

· Simple rules but complex strategy make this game a real winner

· Player interaction is heavy, with an emphasis on negotiation and screwage

· A modular-board system makes this infinitely replayable

· With many expansions such as the wonderful Seafarers expansion, it’s a living system

Why Catan Means “You’z a Ho” in Catanese:

· Starting positions are so important that it seems almost unbalanced

· The dice-heavy commodity production adds randomness, but can ruin your fun

Overall:

It’s a bit ridiculous to call this a pure Eurogame as the genre exists today because luck and direct player interaction play such a large role in Settlers of Catan. I mean, I understand that it has light rules, and is playable by everyone, so by that standard, it could be construed as a Euro, but it shares so much more with Ameritrashy Dudes On A Map games like Axis and Allies than it does Agricola, in my opinion. The only thing missing from this game is a body count, and with the Cities and Knights expansion, a body count does exist, albeit in a very abstracted way. The long and short is that this game should be in every single gamer’s collection, either physically or digitally, since it’s available for Xbox360, iPad, and on the web.

Rating:

4.5/5 Stars

Check out the website here to see what the game’s like and what expansions exist:

http://www.catan.com/

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Lock $ Foils In Crack Addiction

By Peter Ruth II

I’m not sure if it’s because I’m cheap or because I’m a natural-born sceptic, but when it comes to gaming, I’m what one might call a “late adopter”. I didn’t get an Xbox 360 until 2010, I didn’t start playing Heroscape until Wave 6, and I didn’t get Mage Knight: The Board Game until about 3 weeks ago. This is especially true with anything collectible or “living”, because the price for buying into a miniatures game is very high if you make a poor choice.  So, while I played Fantasy Flight’s X-Wing Miniatures game some months ago, I wasn’t excited enough to jump in with both feet and start building fleets. I have maybe three thousand dollars in miniatures and terrain, books, and whatnot, so a game has to be pretty damned good in order for me to even consider buying it.

Well, I had a buddy over yesterday for an X-Wing game day, and after playing my third game, I was hooked. If you want me to just cut to the chase, here goes: X-Wing is the smartest, most entertaining fighter skirmish game I’ve ever played. This says a lot, because I’ve played probably twenty of these games, from Full Thrust to Renegade Legion to Battle Fleet Mars to A Call To Arms; I’ve got a lot of experience with these games and X-Wing is easily the most approachable and tightest.  The draw, for me, is that the game hits that magical sweet spot where complexity and practicality intersect. Very few games ever hit that spot, generally erring either on the side of simulation or oversimplification. X-Wing, however, gets it absolutely perfect, with enough complexity to make it a game worth playing while having very simple, understandable, and intuitive rules that don’t get in the way of the players. It literally blows every other fighter combat game into itty bitty rippy bits.

Now, there’s been a lot of praise about the miniatures on popular bloggers’ sites, on the dreaded BoardGameGeek site, and in the press. From the perspective of someone who is used to buying Descent, with grey, unpainted miniatures, well, maybe that’s true. But from the perspective of someone who has bought and painted hundreds of miniatures, I’m just not all that ultra-impressed. They’re quite good, I’ll totally grant that, but they’re not so good that I’m all crazy over them. The attention to detail on the model sculptures is very, very good, but the paint jobs are no better than your average Star Wars Miniatures Game model. That’s not to say they’re bad, because they’re not, they’re simply not what I would call a ‘gold standard’.

At ten dollars a pack, which comes with one miniature, a modular flight stand, and some cards, it’s a pretty good deal, when you consider everything, but the miniature itself doesn’t command that kind of price. They’re also very fragile, and I can see some of the Tie Fighters, especially, having their wings broken off, requiring glue. The flight stands are also kind of cheap, with the posts being very thin, maybe a tenth of an inch in diameter, and I can see those snapping off as well if you’re not pretty careful, especially since cleanup requires that you break the flight stands into their component bits. Litko makes some replacements that I think surpass the original design from a “monkey-proof” perspective, but I don’t think I’d buy them unless I broke a stand.

Now, the core set comes with all the bits you need to play, such as tokens and whatnot, and it comes with two Tie Fighters and an X-Wing. It’s about $26.00 US all over the internet, and I think that’s a better deal than buying the expansions for ten bucks a piece. There’s a bunch of cards in the box as well, and you can spend some of your battle point allotment buffing up your ships with all kinds of upgrades, like cluster munitions (banned by 108 countries, but not the Empire) and mines, crew, and other goodies. Each ship also has several pilots, which define what abilities its associated model has with it. All in all, it’s a big bunch of stuff in the box, and quite honestly, if you just wanted to buy the box, I think you’d have plenty of adventure for a while until you realize that getting more stuff means more adventure, more variety, and ultimately, a prolonged experience with the game.

The first wave had the core set, Tie Fighter, X-Wing, Y-Wing, and Tie Advanced expansions, and the new wave that just released has several expansions: Millenium Falcon, Slave One, the A-Wing and a Tie Interceptor. After the three plays I had, playing with everything but the A-Wing and Tie Interceptor, I went online and purchased two core sets, two Tie Advanced, two Y-Wings, one A-Wing, the Falcon and Slave One. I paid $144.00 at Miniature Market for the whole lot of it, if that helps you out, and I spent money set aside for a new shotgun, which if you knew me would make you think I’d lost my mind. It’s simply that good. I could play it all day, I suspect, because when my buddy left last night, I was so wound up and itching for another game that it reminded me of how I feel about Heroscape; I could literally play that game for a couple days straight and never get completely worn out on it. Add to that the fact that you can play two to four players, and that it has some interesting scenarios included above and beyond the standard “kill them before they kill you” formula, and it’s a total win.

The game’s core mechanic, the one that really makes it shine, is how it handles movement and turn reconciliation. At the beginning of your turn, each ship has a little disc which you program it’s movement on, and then you put it face down. Each ship then moves and assigns actions from worst pilot to best pilot, and afterward, each ship attacks from best pilot to worst. It’s a very clever system that doesn’t sound like it’s all that novel, but it works so damned well because it provides amazing balance to the asymmetrical forces. You can load up on cheap Tie Fighters, but they’re going to be moving first and shooting last, so the more skilled Rebel pilots may blow you out of space before your cheap ties ever get a shot off. It’s just brilliant.

The thing that really struck me as the pinnacle of the game’s brilliance is that in a game like this, luck can play a huge role, since dice are used for combat resolution, but there are enough options to mitigate bad luck that it makes for an engaging experience. You can expend your ships’ single action per turn to allow re-rolls, to automatically block hits, or repair shields. There’s also range bonuses so that you can think ahead to where a shipwill potentially end its movement, allowing you to roll an extra die if you charge in for the kill, or stay back out of harm’s way. In short, it rewards smart play and risk taking proportionally, which is really hard to do in a game that involves dice.

The only thing that I think might turn some people off is the ruler-based movement system. I think it’s really well done, and it comes with movement templates, but if you’re the kind of person who is really stuck on hex or square movement, it might be a detractor. Luckily, the movement rules are very intuitive and contingencies are built into the rules so that you won’t have to guess at what to do when two ships come into contact with one another. It’s a smart system, and since I’m used to using tape measures to play miniatures games, I thought it was a refreshing departure from the standard hex-based systems. It allows a lot more flexibility, and when it comes to fighter combat games, flexibility is where the tactics are at. There’s nubs built right into the bases, so there’s no room for making mistakes or having rules lawyers get all pissy, which is a welcome design feature that’s often overlooked.

This is a must-have game, no doubt about it. It has everything I want in a game. It’s furious, fun, and matches last about an hour from first move to last dying breath, making it quite fast. It’s an amazing game, and with the large variance in game play based on the fact that each model has maybe thirty permutations when you consider the pilot, weapon, and upgrade cards. I think the only thing that will cause this game to flame-out will be about six months after the point that they stop making new ships. I’d bet there’s going to be dedicated fan-sites if there’s not already, and there’s already a big tournament scene, so maybe, like Heroscape, the game will continue on well past its shelf life has expired. In any event, I know that I’ll be playing it for a very, very long time and my only complaint is that I’m starting so late that I missed out on a lot of the events such as the recent Kessel Run.

Why X-Wing’s Force Is Strong:

• Incredibly approachable game play with simple to understand rules
• Very clean design that’s quite smart without being overburdened by complexity
• Very flexible ship design system allows for a lot of variation in squadron builds
• Scaling of the luck factor allows smarter players to win, although luck is a factor
• Nice ship models help immerse you in the game

X-Wing’s Failures To Launch:

• It’s a bit on the expensive side for a miniatures game
• The models are nice, but the paint jobs are just above average
• The flight stands seem to be on the flimsy side
• Ruler-based measurement can be a turn off to some people.

Overall:

If you like miniatures games, get this today. It’s simply one of the best examples of a mature, well conceived design in recent history. There are a tremendous amount of reasons to buy this game, and the only things I think that might take a bit of the shine off of it for some people is the price, which is a little bit high for a game of this type, and the ruler-based movement, which I love but some people might take exception to. It’s simply brilliant in every way, and I cannot recommend this game highly enough. I put my money where my mouth is, too, and I think for a cheap ass like myself, this is the highest honour I can provide a game – its purchase.

Rating:

5/5 Stars

Learn more about X-Wing at Fantasy Flight’s page here and watch the tutorial:

Read the rules too, by clicking here.
Litko’s Flight Stands, which I think are superior here.

NeoExodus Chronicles: Usual Suspects is available from:

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Warfare Is Fun As An Army Of One

By Peter Ruth II

Anyone who has read my articles for any length of time knows that I’m not a huge fan of solo games that don’t involve an electronic device. Long have I held the stance that board games are made for people to get together, have some fun and conversation, and really, the game is the centerpiece for a social gathering more than the sole purpose of just playing a game. So, when I recently traded for D-Day Dice in the Fortress: AT “Arms Trade”, knowing that it was highly attuned to the frequency of solo gaming, I was a bit skeptical that I’d like it, but I kind of had to see what it was about. My thoughts boiled down to, “Killing Nazis and lots of dice? What could go wrong?” But let’s get to the basics before I explain how I feel about the game.

The whole idea of the game is that you play Australian, French, American, and British forces attempting to storm a beach and take out a Nazi bunker. This is accomplished by rolling dice every turn in order to gain resources which will allow you to progress through the mine-laden terrain. You can “find” items by spending one type of resource, you can advance up the beach by spending another resource, and you can gain specialists which give your unit special powers with another. The last resource you can roll for is the most important: ground-pounders who will keep you alive, because if any unit runs out of troops, it’s game over for everyone.  To forestall that, players in the same space can freely trade resources, which is the only player interaction in the entire game.

D-Day Dice is, quite simply, a rather mechanical resource management game that uses Yahtzee style set collection as the core progress mechanic. Now, as exciting as storming a beach and wasting Nazis sounds, in D-Day Dice, it’s not. It’s very dry, repetitious, and doesn’t provide a ton of tension, except in small doses at very irregular spurts. It just lacks that “special something” which makes you want to play a game; maybe it’s excitement, maybe it’s interaction with other players, I don’t know. It just didn’t tickle my pickle like I had hoped when I envisioned a dice game about invading Normandy. It felt more like a game that put the focus on accounting arithmetic rather than excitement. The real crime in this is that you don’t actually get to kill Nazis; in fact, the only thing that dies in this game is your troops.

While it works pretty well as a solo game, when playing with more than one person, the game is quite chaotic in that each player takes their turn at the same time, independent of one another except during the “trading/buying” phase of a turn. So, really, the only thing that has players “playing together” is the fact that you can trade things, and since many of the special resources are from a pool, one person’s actions can limit another’s. In essence, each player is an army of one, so to speak, that just happens to be on the same beach at the same time.

With the interaction amounting trading resources to keep others alive so that you all don’t lose, it’s a lot like Witch of Salem. Unfortunately, I’d argue that Witch of Salem is a better multi-player game, in fact, because it’s less of a static puzzle to be beaten as much as a dynamic, situational puzzle. Plus, it executes theme better from a mechanics-integral-to-theme standpoint than D-Day Dice, I think. This is really a multi-player solitaire experience, and because you don’t really get to kill anything, and you’re just collecting resources and moving up the ladder, it’s just not that exciting. Not bad, just not exciting.

The real strong point in the game is the bits, because they really did an exceptional job with everything that comes in the box. I mean, the one thing Kickstarter proves is that people are willing to throw handfuls of money at something if the bits are appealing. The first, and most important thing, is that the game comes with resource trackers in the form of dial-laden cards. Each card has six dials, two of which track up to 99 using two each, and the other two being single-dial trackers. They really did a good thing here, because you’re using those trackers constantly during a game, and had they gone with chits or something, it would’ve been ~the fiddliest game ever~.

There are also four double-sided maps which represent eight unique terrain sets, with some missions being much longer than others. These are loaded to the hilt with icons, so the art isn’t really all that important, although it’s pretty good, because you’re really just moving from icon-filled area to the next as you advance. There’s also 24 custom red, white, and blue resource dice, four unit dice, and some D6 dice with red six pips that I have already re-purposed for another game. It’s got lots of nice half-size cards in there, with no art to speak of on them, but I like the fact that you can actually read them, and the icons make sense. The rule book is also very nice, easy to read, and does a far better than average job of getting you into the game quickly and without much need to go back to it. It’s also got quarter sheet sized cards that have a very nice rules summary.

The maps are quite unique, and give a lot of variability between sessions, with each of them having attached scenarios which generally limit what special resources, such as commanders and items, are available for that game. So, there’s a lot of replay value, but due to the design, it amounts to essentially having eight unique puzzles to solve. My copy came with a stretch goal: a canvas messenger bag, which my daughter immediately annexed for her own purposes. I don’t entirely know why they didn’t spend that stretch money on something that made the game better, such as more maps, more players, or whatever, but hey, people paid for it so it must’ve served a purpose. All in all, the whole production is incredibly impressive, and if you’re a bits whore, you’re going to absolutely drool over this.

Getting back to my opinion on D-Day Dice as a game, I’ve played it seven times now, three solo and the balance with three and four players, and I have to say that it just seems to work better as a solo game. There’s great solo rules built right into the game, so it’s not like it’s tacked on. I will say that it’s easier to win with one player, without a doubt, but the difficulty and complexity don’t scale from two to four players. If I had to point to one overriding complaint about the game, it would be that it’s a little ~too~ simple, lacking any sort of nuance, and the real driving force in the game is the push-your-luck aspect.  That’s fine, but it’s just not all that compelling, and the gameplay doesn’t evoke any feeling like I’m storming a beach, or really, doing anything but rolling some dice, doing some math, and spinning little dials in the wrong direction for the twentieth time to update my resource count.

It’s absolutely a puzzle game, but I’m not looking at that as a bad thing. It’s a neat little game that I think is great to whip out when your wife wants to spend some quality time watching Terms of Endearment; just get some felt so that the dice rolls don’t bother her and you can sit and play, pretending you’re interested in the movie. If you’re expecting an epic battle or something, or if you’re expecting that it’s an instant-classic Ameritrash co-operative, you’re likely to be a bit disappointed. I almost think it was designed as a solo game with the co-operative part tacked on as an afterthought.

Why D-Day Dice Is Victorious:

• - Truly remarkable production values for such a small game
• - Plays very well as a solo game, one of the few I don’t abhor
• - In 45 minutes, you’ve probably played twice
• - One of the most clear rule books ever made
• - Super replay value with huge differences in the scenario difficulty

Why I Should Probably Be Speaking German:

• - Multi-player solitaire is an understatement
• - Middling art and cluttered playfield
• - Just not that exciting or fun

Overall:

I never thought of D-Day as something that could be effectively demonstrated in a Yahtzee-style resource management game, and it turns out that I was correct. There is a disconnect between the theme and the mechanics, I think, and I think that detracts from the game’s shine. That said, it’s not completely boring or anything, it’s simply not very exciting. It’s a bit on the dry, mechanical side, but it’s not without merit; it’s simply a puzzle game that has very little player interaction, nice bits, and that has a little more math than I’d like. Personally, I’ll almost certainly play it a bit more before giving it up in trade, but I can almost guarantee that I’ll never play all eight scenarios, and I’ll probably not play it with other people.

Rating:

3/5 Stars

Learn more about D-Day Dice here: http://www.ddaydice.com/

You can download the print-and-play version here: http://www.ddaydice.com/ddaydicetrial.zip

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Two Parts Cthulhu + 2 Parts Diablo = The Best Narrative Game You’ve Never Heard Of

By Peter Ruth II

Every once in a while, a moment of clarity will occur in your life where you have to kind of sit back and re-evaluate just what the hell it is that you think you’re doing. For some people, it’s sitting in a bar, completely tossed and chain-smoking Marlboros, realizing they should quit the lifestyle before they become a sucked-up Iggy Pop look-alike. For others it’s sitting, glazed, on the couch in a dope-fuelled stupor, perhaps concluding that you’ve been watching a TV that’s not even on, and that you should put down the bong for a minute. Life tends to kick us in the bollocks from time to time with little gems of wisdom, and about a year ago or so, I got mine.

It came in the form of sitting, playing a quick game of Ave Caesar with my daughter. What, pray tell, was this great epiphany that changed my thinking? Put simply, it’s that while I know I’m not really into card games but really like board games, but by and large, I realized that I really, honestly prefer tabletop miniatures games. Really, boiled down, I just really like toys, playing wee war games, and most especially neutralizing the enemy and blowing their stuff up. So, as I was sitting there thinking to myself, “Wow, Ave Caesar would be way better if it was more like Circus Imperium, or better yet, if we were just playing that instead”. I simply realized, in that moment, that even when playing games that I think are just cracking, I would just about always rather be playing a tabletop miniatures game.

Now, lots of people out there are the believe that mechanics and gameplay are equally as important to a game as an integral narrative is. Euro-game players might pretend that’s true, but the proof that they don’t actually believe it is that they play Euro games instead of American games. Games like Space Hulk are only great because they imbue upon the player the feel of being a doomed Space Marine plodding through the halls of an abandoned mining vessel, crawling with razor-clawed death. Unfortunately, a truly great game only comes out once or twice per year, if that, so in the interim you’re stuck playing games that are merely average if you want something new. My recent revelation has shown me that not only do great games come out quite often, but that there’s a huge back catalog of games that people have mostly never even heard of, but that are so tremendously good that it defies reason that people aren’t talking about them.

I believe it’s because the big-name reviewers of the world primarily concentrate on boxed products because that’s the only way they’re going to play them. After all, why would someone acquire and prepare terrain and miniatures for a game that they find sucks asshole? Aside from even that very valid point, most people hear “tabletop game” and think that the only ones out there are Games Wankshop style games that amount to spending six months painting and assembling an army for the purposes of throwing handfuls of dice once a week at a stinky game shop. I get that.

But, on the other hand, those same big-name reviewers will review “Living Card Games” which are essentially the same thing as tabletop games are, from the money perspective; you spend inordinate amounts of money on packs or boxes of cards to play what amounts to the exact same game, over and over again. Some even review “Collectible Miniatures Games” which are the worst form of spending too much on the hope of getting something useful. But many of these same folks will never bother to look at RPGs, even though they like board games with RPG elements. So, it’s not really the fault of the reviewers, I think, as much as a fault of the hobby for not realizing that there’s quite a few games out there that fall in the middle between tabletop games and RPGs, because people simply don’t know that they exist.

In writing this, I thought about the fact that there’s such a wide gap between the narrative and immersive theme between the realms of the RPG and the board game. For instance, in Runebound, a very thematic adventure game, you can choose one of many characters and their associated miniature, and you fight against cards depicting all manner of beasts. There’s a narrative going on, and a fun enough adventure game, but when the game’s over, it’s done. When you want to play again, it resets and you start over, playing another two hours worth of game. You’re not heavily invested, and so you get a fairly shallow experience, although Runebound delivers as much story as any narrative board game.

On the flipside, you have RPGs, where you may or may not have miniatures, but the experience is really more cumbersome than some people want. I, personally, don’t really feel compelled to play a game that rewards talking in a faux British accent (which is weird because Faerun isn’t anywhere near the UK) or using antiquated words like “forsooth”, “behold”, and “hark”. I, quite simply, don’t need to be balls deep in-character to enjoy a game. That said, I do like the idea of a persistent universe, and I think I’m not alone in that. Maybe that’s why so many people embraced the concept of continuity in Risk: Legacy. Some of us simply wanted more out of our games, and it’s a shame that few board games deliver that experience.

Then there’s the investment factor, the one thing I think that keeps a lot of people from exploring tabletop games. People envision huge outlays of money for “one game” and that’s ostensibly true, but only if you still think Warhammer is the only one. The reality is that this new breed of games requires you to have only a few things to share between them all: miniature models and miniature terrain. For 200 dollars you can buy enough terrain and miniatures to have a good time of it, and if you’ve got a particular period in mind, such as “1920′s”, or “Victorian”, or “Fantasy” in mind, you buy the models and terrain once, and simply change the rule-set to fit the game style you want to play. And honestly, if you own 100 games in your collection, you’re lying to yourself if you believe that a $200 investment is even a blip on the radar, since of those 100 games, 40-50 of them have either never been played or have been played maybe once or twice.

Quite frankly, if you’re looking for narrative and theme, I’ve never seen anything on the market that can compete with this new breed of tabletop games that I’ve discovered. I mean, there’s games for every time period, every  genre. To that end, I’m going to be talking about one of the best games I’ve ever played, Strange Aeons, which is a Lovecraft-themed adventure skirmish game. It has all of the things that American-style gamers want: integral theme, persistent characters, easy to understand rules, and a beautifully crafted campaign system. To top it off, the game uses a persistent universe where the actions you take in one game affect every game you play in the future, but in this game, you don’t have to rip up any cards or put pasties on the rule book. It, simply put, delivers more theme than Arkham Horror, takes less than 20 minutes to set up, and takes 30 to 60 minutes to play through a single scenario. You really can’t beat it.

The concept of Stange Aeons is that in the 1920′s, Woodrow Wilson created a super secret government agency called Threshold, specially trained and loaded with experts on the subject of the occult, to stop the forces of evil. Each skirmish is part of a larger, ongoing campaign complete with character development, persistent items, as well as permanent injuries and death. In short, it is the “Diablo III” or “XCOM: Enemy Unknown” of tabletop games.Suffice it to say that it’s a bad ass skirmish game that is wholly unlike anything else I’ve ever played, and there are simply no words to describe how completely awesome it is.

Strange Aeons can best be described as a tabletop and RPG hybrid. It has all of the elements of action RPGs such as looting, levelling, and buffing your squad. All of this is done in the frame of either random or predetermined scenarios, of which there are 11 of the former and a half dozen of the latter, and that’s just in the core rulebook.  When you add in the three expansion modules, we’re talking about a tremendous amount of unique scenarios, none of which feel overly similar to one another, leaving you with a wealth of replay options. It’s a goldmine of great adventures, and as I noted, it’s all persistent, so if you take a week or month off, you can come back right where you left off, with your characters still being set up and ready for action with all of their goodies.

The Strange Aeons core rulebook costs 30 dollars, and is a high quality, wire-bound affair. There are a very few things that I really had to think about in order to understand, mostly regarding close combat, but once I got to their site and, most importantly, found their very short FAQ, it was obvious that I was reading too much into it and that the problem was mostly me. The game is really rather simple to understand, once you get your head wrapped around it, which should take exactly one play-through, and after that, it’s all gravy.

But let’s say that you have no desire to get into painting, terrain making, and all that bollocks. The great news is that the entire game can be played using a box of Heroscape: Rise of the Valkyrie if you wanted to, because the system doesn’t care what miniatures or terrain you use. If you don’t want to do that, You can use a plain hex-map and ignore the hexes, or not, or you can set up empty toilet paper rolls on your table as columns if you want. Any minis or terrain will do. It’s a hex-less system, although it can be played with hexes, so you can use any terrain you wish. I, personally, loved using Heroscape terrain because the scale was such that it made it very easy to implement. As I got into the game, I decided that I really had to get miniatures and terrain for it, because it’s just that damned good and deserved the extra flavour.

Let’s say, though, that you don’t own a single miniature, well, then you will need to get some models to play the game. Uncle Mike’s Worldwide has a pretty wide selection of them, all in PVC plastic (the same awesome stuff that Reaper’s BONES line is using) that takes paint well without the need to prime. Each set is $12.00, although they have a starter kit for $50.00 that has a ton of models and pretty much everything you need to start playing. That’s how I got started after playing the demo game with Heroscape stuff several times.

Anyhow, back to the gameplay itself. The game is generally a one versus one affair, although the game has solo and multi-player rules which are actually really fun and don’t feel “tacked on” at all. But in the normal game, it’s a team of Threshold agents against a group of “Lurkers”, with each game being different due to the layout of the board, the enemies you’ll face, and the scenario you’ll play. I just got their Shocking Tales #3 supplement, which will has more weapons, more sorcery, more bad ass scenarios, and the new Psychic Powers rules which will totally blow your mind. To give you an example of how truly unique and thematic the game is, if you want to activate a psychic power, your opponent holds up a Zener card, and if you guess the correct symbol, you get to activate it. Who does that? Most games would simply have a player roll a D20, but Uncle Mike doesn’t mess around. If it’s in the game, it’s soaked to the soul with theme.

One of the neatest things in the game is that when any of your agents runs out of hit points, they’re not just dead. They might just be incapacitated momentarily, they might just have been knocked down, or they might have been so seriously injured that they’re removed from play. Even if they’re removed from play, though, it doesn’t mean they’re dead. Models taken from the table can die, of course, but they could instead have a crippled limb which cripples him for the rest of his virtual existence. Or, you can be so injured that you become “Hideous” which causes any other human model, including friendlies, to flee in fear upon the mere sight of you. To top off the list, you can get a phobia, such as fear of enclosed spaces, which stops you from entering buildings or going too near walls in the future.

It’s simply amazing how much detail went into the game, and more importantly, how well executed it is. All of these things I’ve listed are seamless because they’re put right onto your character’s bio. It adds a lot of realism that is not found in any other tabletop game I’ve ever played, and truly makes you think about your actions because they will have consequences. It’s not Warhammer where you basically just trade hockey-punches until the dice favour one side; it’s very tactical, incredibly tense, and very, very exciting. Paired with the truly well-designed Lovecraft integration, the game is mind-bendingly good. I mean, I just can’t think of enough adjectives to describe it. Flabbergasterously scrumdiddlyumptious, maybe?

To get into just how much content there is, to date, there’s more than 40 unique Lurker types, ranging from the lowly, but deadly, Cultist, to the unseemly Tcho-Tchos, Hybrids, Blasphemous Construct, Formless Thing, and all the way up to a mind-bending Godling, all of which are totally unique. There’s also maybe 30 skill types, 20 weapon types, three spellbooks, six or so special artefacts which present game-changing powers, eight types of special equipment such as a bullwhip and an lead breastplate, and an almost incalculable level of customization for your Threshold agents.

For each of the aforementioned Lurkers, there’s several models you can choose from, and you can check out Uncle Mike’s models at his website, which I’ve linked to at the bottom of this article. I’ve been a huge fan of Lovecraft pretty much forever, and the game, the theme, the setting…all of it really captures your imagination. I particularly like the fact that the models are made in PVC because the medium is just absolutely perfect for painting with Vallejo, Citadel, or Apple Barrel acrylics so that you can truly make them your own. But let’s say that you’re not keen on Uncle Mike’s models, there’s literally HUNDREDS of miniatures companies that produce resin, PVC, and white metal miniatures for whatever you want. I just purchased some Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield models from a couple different companies, in fact, because there’s nothing better than fighting the forces of evil with a Badass and an Amsterdam-loving junkie, right?

Initial Threshold squads generally consist of your main character, two or three supporting Agents, and perhaps a civilian or two. So, games are generally five Threshold models against what may be many or few Lurkers. Regarding the Lurkers, there are many more options available that affect the scenario itself, and are bought before the game begins with build points, such as adding “Scenes of Horror” which cause models to flee for their lives, or become catatonic with stark, raving terror. Lurkers can also add “Plot Points” with build points, which change the underlying rules of a scenario. The team size is symmetrical from the perspective of “force strength” as determined by the build cost of a list, but the teams are most certainly not symmetrical in their makeup, nor are the missions.

I don’t have a ton of disposable income, nor do I have a lot of spare time, with a big job and 2 kids. And since I got sick, my gaming time has become a precious, precious resource that I guard jealously. Those of you who’ve read my articles for years now have a feel for me, for what kind of things I like, and the level of hyperbole that I tend to engage in using. But this time, I’m not being facetious or over-reaching. Strange Aeons is, quite simply, astoundingly good. I have literally sold off more than half of my board games because once I realized how great some games can be,  I don’t have time for average any more. I encourage you with every fibre of my being to download the demo rules, play a quick scenario, and at least give it an honest look. It is remarkably good; so good, in fact, that I think it may well prove to be the perfect beer-and-pretzels, action RPG, skirmish game.

If nothing else, what I’ve learned from the experience of playing Strange Aeons is that there’s this huge undercurrent of games that nobody I know is talking about. It’s not being put up on BGG, likely because three quarters of the inhabitants there won’t even think about a game that has an actual theme, requires more effort than being an expert in statistics and probability, or God forbid, requires a bit of imagination and creativity. But there are so many truly remarkable games, some of which are free but were developed by some of the old-school game designers like Chris Taylor, the kind of guys whose shoulders contemporary game designers are standing upon.

People really should explore these, because if you have a game collection of even 50 games that include Ameritrash, you can probably snatch some bits out of those games and play these tabletop miniatures games, and it costs you absolutely nothing. That said, if I had to spend my money on one, Strange Aeons is the one, and I’ve put far more than my fair share of money where my great big pie-hole is. Pair that with the fact that once you have a small collection of miniatures and terrain, you can then port them over and play games with similar styles but different themes, such as .45 Adventures, a “pulp crimefighting” game, or Chaos In Carpathia, a gothic horror game that has Victorian heroes fighting the likes of Dracula, Mummies, and Werewolves. That said, for me, Strange Aeons is the cream that rose to the top, and there it shall remain.

In the end, Strange Aeons has everything that an Ameritrash gamer wants: a strong, integral theme, it has a compelling narrative that develops during each mission and extends to every other match you subsequently play, it has truly meaningful decisions, it is soaked with replayability due to the nature of the scenario and campaign system, it has great bits, and new to the list, a persistent game environment. It’s only real weakness is that it can require investment of time and money if you choose to get into the world of tabletop miniatures games, but the game itself can be played with things that you already have around the house if you choose to do so. All in all, it may be as close to being the perfect Ameritrash game as I have found thus yet, although I will delight in the continuing hunt.

Why I Never Had A Real Uncle Mike But I Could Certainly Adopt This One:

• The persistent “action RPG” nature of the game is unbelievably good
• Unique narrative tales are the staples of Strange Aeons
• Almost unlimited replay value to start, and ends cleanly with persistent, growing characters
• Incremental purchases and expansions allow you to buy as much, or as little, as you desire
• Constant publisher support, forums, and thousands of miniatures available make this a living game

Why This Tcho-Tcho May Be A No-No:

• If you get balls deep in this game, expect to spend a couple of hundred dollars on terrain and miniatures
• If you don’t like to paint, your options for pre-painted pulp miniatures are somewhat limited

Overall:
This is a hard “product” for me to write about because it’s not like board games where it’s a one-off purchase. At the end of the day, the review scores and commentary is based upon the core rulebook and the Morbid Adventures expansion. The fact that I bought miniatures and terrain is wholly irrelevant to the fact that the rules are what the game is made of, and since I initially played with Heroscape models and terrain, I think it’s a fair assertion.

While the Strange Aeons miniatures are quite nice, and relatively inexpensive, the fact is that there is no requirement to ever purchase anything aside from the aforementioned rulebook to have the full experience, provided you have any miniatures from any of any number of games. Hell, you could really play the game with tokens if you wanted, although it would certainly take away from the cinematic feel of the game.

Rating:
4.75/5 Stars

Take a look at the Strange Aeons site: http://www.strange-aeons.ca

And take a look at the miniatures available from UMW:
http://www.strange-aeons.ca/photo/strange-aeons-miniatures/

And then, if you dare, explore the fora at Lead Adventures, starting with Strange Aeons’ child board: http://www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?board=45.0

And then, when you’re finally ready….I’ve made up some nice, thematic rosters and a quick reference guide with all of the major charts and rules therein:
http://www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?topic=45929.0
All images used for this review are courtesy of Uncle Mike’s Worldwide and/or Lead Adventures Forum user Mason, who is simply the best terrain maker I’ve seen.

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Just When I Thought My Interest Was Dead…It Rose From The Grave!

By Peter Ruth II

I said before, in my review of the launch packs, that I wasn’t a big fan of the game system because it lacked a lot of the "white knuckle" factor because of the efficient model the system has at its core. Well, Curse of Undeath doesn’t undo the fact that this game is geared towards being a purely strategic skirmish game without any real random factors. But what it did was rekindle an interest in the game for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are the quite wonderful miniature sculpts that were in this box. I’m actually considering picking up the Goblins pack just to see how it plays out compared to the previous iterations.

Anyhow, this is how it went: my buddy came down this weekend and brought his Dungeon Command sets, hoping to prove me wrong. In what can only be called fate, Wizards sent me a copy of the Undeath pack, which arrived Friday. Thus, I literally had no reason not to go forward and give it a go, especially since at this point, I am not one to tempt fate. It turns out that I stand by my assessment of the original game products, as products, but no longer do I think the system is, in and of itself, a failure. Rather, the system is actually pretty good, but the other packs’ lack of interesting things to do when being attacked really turned me off.

See, I never got the Tyranny of Goblin pack and I gave away the previous Dungeon Command packs, so I had pretty much written the game off. It’s not a bad game by a long shot, and I can see the draw for some people, but suffice it to say that from my five or so plays, I really just wasn’t into the game, despite being a huge miniature skirmish kind of guy. That said, Curse of Undeath really kind of changed my mind on what the game offers, because this particular pack brings a lot of what I believe was missing in the other packs.

You see, the other packs I’ve played with to this point felt dry, predictable, and served the game’s model for the sake of the model. The deterministic approach of the game is such that most of the time, you attack with your critter of choice, it does a predictable amount of damage, and then the other player does the same. There weren’t a lot of really good countering options, truly strong ones that did more than simply reduce an amount of damage done. With most skirmish games, and my most, I mean every other one I’ve ever played, the dice are either your ally or nemesis, and your attacks are not guaranteed. That simple randomness is what made your toes curl as the die is cast while you prayed to whatever God you pray to in order to come up with a favourable result. And so it goes, until one side is crushed.

Dungeon Command turned skirmishes to date on their head in that respect, because while other games like Star Wars Miniatures, for instance, have predetermined damage amounts, there is always the chance, slim as it might be, that the little battler will whiff. With Dungeon Command, there simply isn’t a case where an attack would miss, and therefore much of what gets your heart pumping was missing. While that didn’t change with Curse of Undeath, but what did change was the idea that you really couldn’t do much about it other than reduce the damage dealt by playing a card against an attack. Even that hasn’t changed, but the decisions just feel more meaningful based on the new cards.

With Curse of Undeath, you have a lot of new ideas that evolve from the simple fact that undead tings don’t generally tend to stay dead once it’s been re-animated. Vampires can drain life from their enemies and heal, and some of the critters that are killed get to get back up. There’s a mounted critter that once killed doesn’t just go away, but rather just has its steed slaughtered and you can put the rider right back into play where the steed was killed. And that’s just the beginning of the awesome that they put into this release. I mean, it almost feels like a different game because of what got put into the box.

It starts with the commanders, in fact, because these two have a lot of flavor that is due, in part, to the theme of the box. These are evil bastards who want death to reign, and it shows. The other factions are much more tame as far as theme, and while I’d not say it was painted on, they were more of the fantasy tropes that people have come to expect. Undeath is really built on the idea of undead things doing undead thing deeds, starting with the idea that if you kill off an enemy, you can summon them from the grave as skeletal critters. This has been abstracted into allowing one of the leaders to gain a higher leadership level per killed unit, which really adds to the box’s theme of hordes of dead things rising up from the abyss to chew up the living.

Then, the whole feel runs through the units, which is comprised wholly of skeletons, ghosts, and zombies, with a dash of skeletal dragon wizard. The miniatures are easily the best of the bunch, with a nice base coat on each, followed by a highlighting and a wash coat which is better than Heroscape’s by leagues and, in fact, better than the other packs that I’ve seen. The wash on some of these miniatures is a low point, though, because the reddish tones don’t really match the figures’ ivory base coat, so they just look a little bit off. The dracolich, for instance, looks like he was bathing in black cherry Jell-o, for instance. Still, for a prepainted miniature, they’re pretty damned snazzy. The art is also very good, as it was in the other packs, but that’s to be expected from Wizards at this point. But that’s not really what makes this pack special; it’s the powers and abilities of this lot that really made me fancy these more than the others.

As noted, Zombies can rise from the grave, which ensures a nearly limitless supply of cheap, front line cannon fodder. On top of that, you have skeletal warriors, and a mounted skeleton that I spoke of before. Once the mounted skeleton is killed, you can drop a skeletal warrior right on the spot that the critter dropped, which means you lose no table position. Then there’s a ghost which ignores walls and can’t easily be hit. On top of that, you have a devil dog, a naga-like skeletal tomb guardian with four arms and multiple attacks, a vampire that regenerates, and some sort of death knight who hurts you just by being near him. Finally, you get a lich which can spawn creatures and a dracolich which is, essentially, the King Daddy of the faction, with three attacks and a skeletal paw full of whoopass. All in all, this is easily the coolest faction I’ve seen, with the most true variety in what they do.

Now, that said, the critters and their innate powers aren’t really the draw. It’s the order deck that really made this into a bad ass little set, and primarily due to the fact that the cards in this set are very different from the first two. For starters, they’ve included some cards that really could be used in Dwarf or Drow decks more than this, and it’s apparent that this was the idea, since they depict Dwarves and skinned creatures. Two of them are simply magic sword cards that can only be used by humanoids, which are pretty standard fare. The other two, though, are cards that allow one creature to dodge a bunch of damage. The fact that these were included gives me the feeling that future iterations will include cards that are best suited toward building custom decks, which I think could be a real draw if a tournament scene were to emerge for the system.

The faction-specific cards, though, are where it’s at, though. I am not in a position to talk about power creep at this point since I’m only three games deep into this faction, but I will say that I beat the living crap out of the Drow and Cormyr factions. The magic of this pack is in the fact that most all of the cards are deeply rooted in avoiding damage and healing as a result of causing damage. Paired with the durability of the characters and their abilities, it makes for a fearsome and potent faction that actually makes you feel as if you have meaningful things to do when being attacked. I still miss the dice, and I’m still staunchly against deterministic attacks in a skirmish game, but this new faction’s abilities really got me over the hump to enjoying Dungeon Command.

The final thing to talk about are the cards for the Dungeons and Dragons Adventure System games, and this one is a shoo in for the best, because it gives Castle Ravenloft a delicious new set of baddies to beat upon with great disdain. Now, new doesn’t mean better, and if you have Ravenloft, the Zombies are the same model, although these are painted, while the rest are new. The only complaint I have is that the cards are rather bland, with none having any special effects. This is particularly puzzling as there’s a baddie called a Hypnotic Ghost, which I would’ve thought would daze a hero, but in fact doesn’t do anything more than most other baddies do. I’m only a tiny bit disappointed in this, though, because when it comes to those games, anything new is a good thing.

Why I Like To Play With Dead Things:

• New mechanics in this pack make it something really different than the others
• The models are really quite nice
• Anything that spices up Ravenloft is awesome
• - Nice that they included cards for other factions to include in their warband

Why I Want To Beat Edward And Bella To Death:

• The wash tones on some of the models are really odd looking
• The DDAS cards included in the set are pretty uninspired; nothing new to see here
• In an unrelated matter, any vampire wearing girly sparkle dust should be killed

Overall:
What this pack did for me was show me what Dungeon Command ~could~ be. I stand by my assertion that the lack of randomization takes a lot of the white-knuckle anticipation away from skirmish games, but what this taught me is that when the cards are interesting enough, they can make up for a lot of the vacuum. It’s sort of like reaching in your pocket and grabbing a box cutter when some drunken idiot is talking tough to you at the bar…you know something the other guy doesn’t, and it’s really going to ruin his plans for the night.

I was really pretty much done with this game system, but thanks to my buddy Frank, I think I’ll check out the Goblin pack and see what it has to offer. I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed playing with this faction as much as I did, and while I miss the dice, this goes a long way to making me think that maybe the system isn’t the problem as much as the initial factions released.

Rating:
4/5 Stars
Check out the game system at the Wizards site:
http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Product.aspx?x=dnd/products/dndmin/0786960434

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