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Warage Review

Matt Thrower Leave a comment

warage-1

You’ll realise, no doubt, that Warage is a clever play on words. Making a compound of “war” and “age” cunningly creates the word “rage”, conjuring the white heat of fantasy melees, the ancient and primal fury felt my elf for orc and vice versa. It’s a smart title.

The game underlying it is not smart. It’s a dumb game, but it’s dumb in a good way, the sort of way that an overly playful rottweiler puppy is dumb, full of teeth and fluff and eagerness. It’s a game where you slap down cards, gloat and chug back beer.

In this it is markedly different from most of its brethren in the Living Card Game fraternity. Most LCG’s are scrupulously focused on the two player experience, and consist on an intricate dance of variables in both deck building and card-by-card play.

Warage takes up to six players, and up to four can play using this introductory set alone. And the things you have to track are scores for magic, melee, defence and hit points, which are used as a sort of catch-all currency with which you sustain damage and pay to put cards into play. And that’s it.

Your deck consists of a character type and a race, which will give you your starting stats and a couple of special abilities, and 48 equipment cards with which you gradually fill your hand. On your turn you can sacrifice hit points to play cards from your hand into equipment slots for your character to use. Then you can either make one melee attack followed by as many magic attacks as you like, by simply adding your base score for the attack type, any buffs from weapons or equipment and a dice roll and comparing it to your target’s defence plus buffs and a dice roll. They take the difference in damage.

There’s more to the game than that – you can sacrifice cards in play or blind from your deck to regain hit points, for instance – but not a lot. And yet, in that curious way that Living Card Games have of being more than the sum of their mechanics, this pared down rules set manages to offer a wealth of possibilities by being as tricksy and imaginative as possible with the variables at its disposal.

There’s a card that allows wizard types to pay a few hit points to use their magic score in place of defence, for example, and an axe that allows the wielder to skip damaging his opponent in favour of blowing away some of his equipment instead. There are minions you can bring into play too, like the Merchant who is expensive to buy but grants you a higher payback when you sacrifice cards although he, like all followers, can be targeted and killed himself.

warage-2

With enough cards, it’s amazing how many different combinations you can build. The majority are just simple stat buffs, it’s true, but there’s certainly enough to deck build with, although you don’t even have to do that since the game comes with four pre-built decks so you can just tear off the shrink and get down into the action. But just like the gameplay itself, there isn’t a whole lot of depth to deck building. You just string together cards that look fun and powerful and hope for the best.

Those who’ve been paying attention might have spotted some possible balance issues. Only one melee attack per round, but as many spell attacks as you like? Sounds like a recipe for disaster, as does the lack of a cap on stuffing your deck with ultra-powerful cards. But there are checks in place: warrior type characters have high attack and defence scores compared to magic users and lots of ways to buff them further, so their one attack is devastating and they can shrug off the repeated needling of their wizardly counterparts. And powerful equipment costs a lot to play, so wear too much of it and you’ll deplete your hit points until only one lucky die roll will bring you down.

The ability to cash in your equipment for a quick heal if you’re at death’s door can make games drag a little, but some common sense needs to be applied: in most cases if you’re at the point of stripping your gear and other players aren’t then doing so is just prolonging the agony. Better to take a quiet exit. And as long as the game is kept clipping along at a reasonable rate you can expect them to last about ten minutes per player, which is about on the money for such a lightweight brawl.

There will also be inevitable complaints about multi-player. There are two modes, team and individual but both allow players a free choice of targets from amongst their enemies and so positively encourage table-talk, alliances, banter, king-making and all the other deadly sins of modern gaming. Which would be a bad thing in an intricate four-hour plus game of empire building but is perfectly suited to thirty minute grudge matches.

One thing that doesn’t work so well is the amount of trivial maths it involves. Your starting pool of hit points is 100, and it’ll be going up and down in increments constantly as you buy equipment, heal and take the pain from your opponents. There’s a lot of adding and subtracting and it sits ill with the loud, brash nature of the play itself. This is a game I want get involved in when I’m too wasted to do sums. My copy came with some free card sleeves, but I kind of wish it had come with a free calculator instead.

Warage has balls. I admire the fact that it dares to be something a bit different in an overcrowded genre, and that it dares to make the differentiation the lowest common denominator of being simple and stupid, trashy and thematic. I like the way it features mechanics that seem designed to frustrate and annoy people who chose to try and play it optimally rather than obviously. It might well be that it’s too simplistic to maintain long-term interest, and that the inevitable expansions that attempt to address that problem will spoil the careful balance of light rules and fast games that make it work. But for now, it’s all the Warage.

Mage Wars Review

Matt Thrower 4 Comments

mage wars box

I’ll wager that anyone who ever played Magic: the Gathering more than once has, at some point, wondered how great it would be if creatures weren’t just static lines of attack and defense, but actively engaged in tactical manoeuvre. You don’t need to wonder any more because that, effectively, is what you get in Mage Wars.

Furthermore, I suspect that anyone who ever played Magic: the Gathering more than once has, at some point, been so annoyed by rubbish card draws that they pondered on a variant where you could have a bigger hand, or more control over the draw. Mage Wars addresses that problem too, with swaggering overkill. Because in Mage Wars you don’t get a bigger hand, or control over the draw, you can pick whatever you like from your entire deck each and every turn.

Of the people who’ve entertained either question, I believe that the majority rapidly dismissed them as being unworkable. They’d add too much time and complexity for the interest they added to the game. That didn’t put off the designers of Mage Wars though, who seem to be intent on proving the naysayers wrong by making a working sandbox into which you could chuck the kitchen sink of theoretical Magic variants and see what happened. And it turns out the stock answer is half correct.

Playing Mage wars does add astonishing amounts of time and complexity to the proceedings. The rules entreat you to start with apprentice mode and that’s what I felt like looking the game over. The archetypical Sorcerer’s Apprentice, staring up with mixed wonder and terror at their master’s tower piercing the dark clouds above. Wondering how frail humanity could possibly spend years internalizing all the mystical secrets of the cosmos without exploding.

Sadly this lovely metaphor was ruined by the intrusion of the game components, which are an unfortunate mix of competently executed but generic card art and horribly gaudy graphic design. But it’s an accurate picture. With you brain already overloaded by thirty pages of text-dense rules and over a hundred kinds of effects, opening your spell book – really just a stylised binder for your chosen deck cards – and trying to choose two from the entire selection is likely to precipitate meltdown. Not to mention the point when you realise you’ve got to do the same every single turn.

And so, weary apprentice, your journey begins. Trudging slowly up the spiral stairs of the ancient tower, your back bowed under the weight of card options and your footsteps dogged by rules exceptions. Some may stumble on the ascent. Those who reach the top must survive a vicious assault from a new set of advanced rules, and single combat against eye-watering downtime and a chaotically variable play time. Few will persevere. But those who do are blessed with power beyond imagining.

The end of the ascent is a collectible card game nirvana, the realisation of the hopes and dreams of millions of card game fans all over the world. The other half of the old saw was wrong – all the extra complexity adds a whole lot of extra interest to the game. Indeed so much stuff has been shoehorned into Mage Wars that it’s a marvel the game is not more bloated than it already is. It might be difficult and the learning curve might be close to vertical but it’s still the minimum required to deliver its extraordinary promise.

mage wars in play

Let’s check off that wants list, one at a time. For starters, there is enough variety in the box to stand alone. There are expansions, of course, and you may want them but you won’t need them in the way that, say, the Living Card Game model requires regular players to pitch in for updates. This is self contained. You can bake all your favourite play styles from the ingredients provided, from swarms of petty minions to specialising in ultra-powerful monstrosities from the nether dimensions. Or if you prefer the direct route, your choices range from neutralizing your opponent with counter-charms to buffing your own mage into a berserk killing machine. It’s all here.

Second, there’s a fully realised tactical combat model with just the right balance of strategy and randomness. Ranged and melee attacks, different kinds of armour to overcome, a slew of special effects like Rot and Cripple. It takes place on a board just big enough to be worth manoeuvring over, and on which you can manipulate the terrain and summon powerful features like spawnpoints, creating an ever-shifting map of strategic options and taking the focus away from your mage.

Speaking of which, a third realisation in Mage Wars is a distinct avatar. No longer are you limited to expressing yourself only through your card choices. Each of the four mages on offer here tends toward a certain spell selection – although no choices are ever entirely forbidden – but also has particular special powers that tie in with their forte. Beastmasters, for instance, can cast extra summons and bond one as a Pet for a special buff.

All of these things contribute to a final checkbox which is a brilliant evocation of a theme. All of the CCG’s I’ve played, with the notable exception of Netrunner, have generally failed to really communicate a sense of what they’re about through the play. Rich card art and clever quotes are not enough. As you sit, fuming over your awful hand in Magic, how often do you really feel like an omnipotent archmage? Well you will in Mage Wars. An archmage that you, yourself, have created and bought to the board to duel with your opponent.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more impressed with such an obviously derivative game as I have with this one. Mage Wars wears its influences proudly, almost daring critics to lambast it for lacking a little imagination in the face of the mechanical brilliance it conjures forth. It’s living proof that recombining the best bits of older games is still a valid path to greatness. It’s not a game for everyone: learning is a struggle and frequent repeat plays and deck rebuilds are required to get the most out of it. But for those poor in cash but rich in time, it’ll repay the effort put in a hundredfold.

Cracked LCD- LOTR LCG Retroview

Michael Barnes 2 Comments

lotr

I reviewed Fantasy Flight’s Lord of the Rings Living Card game not long after its core set released back in 2010. To refresh, there were some things that I liked about the game but I chafed at its packaging and the way that Fantasy Flight was effectively limiting the game’s capability as a standalone product by not including a nominally complete and self-contained set of cards that would not require further purchases to link to existing keywords, combinations, or other potentialities. I stand by this review, but I thought it would be interesting to try the game again now that it’s matured over the course of nearly two years with monthly expansion packs and a couple of larger add-ons.

I felt that the game was good enough to give a second chance, and thus here is the first ever Cracked LCD Retroview- a post facto review where I’ll go back and re-examine games that got middling to even bad reviews to see how they fare a few years on. I’m not going to tell you how to play the game, describe every piece in the box, or anything like that. Read another review if you want that. This is a way to dig a little deeper and analyze a little harder with the “new” worn off and with the hype long dead. I think this is particularly a compelling opportunity to revisit games that have changed a lot or that have taken on a life of their own

My retroview of LOTR LCG was made possible by trading my way into three core sets (thereby “completing” a playset of the core set cards) and all available expansions up through the recent Hobbit set, which suggests a more campaign-oriented way of framing the scenarios. I have every card currently available and thus the full range of deckbuilding options are available to me. And I still can’t beat the Dol Guldur scenario from the core set.

Even though it remains a popular, widely played, and widely written-about game, The Lord of the Rings LCG is a strange product that doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the current market. It’s effectively a co-op CCG wherein each player builds a deck and somehow needs to find synergy and mesh points with the decks built by other players. But due to the nature of the adventures, which supply different goals, challenges, and adversaries, no one deck could possibly stand a chance against each story and that means that it’s necessary to build a custom deck for each. It’s a very demanding, sometimes incredibly difficult game that either gets way too hard or way too easy with more players, but some scenarios seem to be impossible with one or two players. Enveloping all of the above is the odd fact that the game absolutely plays best as a solitaire game with one player building and playing two decks concurrently. And then there’s the whole LCG model, which exists rather awkwardly between one-stop board game packaging wherein one player can buy a game and play with others and the serial, individual purchases required of a CCG.

The sum of the above is that LOTR LCG is a solitaire CCG that requires a greater-than-usual commitment to both acquiring cards and deep-dive engagement to get the most out of it. This makes it a quite unique title, and as a single-player game it’s astonishingly rich, layered, and replayable. Particularly when you’re building two decks to work in synch with each other, and working out how to manage threat, deal with difficult encounters, and accomplish goals is really quite rewarding- if you’re willing to put in the time to fail scenarios, re-jigger, and try again with different builds. This is a game that you can really dig into, if you’re willing to deal with some of its idiosyncracies. And the serial purchases.

In some ways, the game is an intricate, high stakes puzzle (which again, makes it ideal for solo play) and some of the thrill comes from do-or-die decisions that seem to happen every other turn. The entire game can literally hang in the balance of choosing whether or not to commit a character to a quest or to block an enemy. Sacrifice is inevitable, and topdecking Gandalf at a moment of desperation is genuinely exciting. But due to the nature of how cards are drawn from an encounter deck to determine the threat number players must meet by sending characters to quest and the appearance of overwhelming foes, the game sometimes can feel as though too much hinges on not drawing cards that add more cards to the row through a couple of keywords. You might go into an encounter phase drawing two cards but wind up with five- and it can be very, very difficult to clear them.

So a big part of the game- and the deckbuilding- is working out strategies to deal with eventualities like that and tailoring decks to work with the particulars of each scenario. You’ve got to think about mitigating threat, having enough characters with good questing ability to keep pace and move through location cards, and having attackers or blockers at the ready. This can be very difficult to do, and some scenarios can be quite frustrating if you’ve simply failed to bring the right cards or right strategy. Again- that “all purpose” deck doesn’t exist.

Regardless, I keep dashing myself against some of these scenarios over and over again, toolboxing and “Monday morning quarterbacking” builds to try something different. I’ll run a Dwarf-focused deck (using a lot of cards, obviously, from the Khazad-Dum block with a Rohan-focused deck that backs up the combat power of Thorin and the gang with lots of questing options and mobility. Sometimes it’ll work, sometimes it will fail spectacularly. It’s how the game rolls.

And you’ve got to roll with it if you’re going to play it. There are some gamey mechanics, like how attacking and blocking are totally separate functions. If you lose a character, the difficulty of any scenario ramps up dramatically and there are very few cards that will bring one back from the dead. Like some of the more challenging co-op games with automated adversaries, it’s the kind of game that can go south very quickly if the player doesn’t- or can’t- react to tactical situations.

After playing the game extensively over the past couple of months and getting the lay of the land as far as how the game exists beyond the core set, I would definitely recommend it for solitaire gamers and committed partnerships but I would recommend those looking for a three or four player game to go elsewhere. Getting into the game can be expensive, and my suggestion there is to buy two Core Sets and the first block of expansions (The Mirkwood Cycle) to really get a sense of its potential. Going this route- and adding each adventure pack’s card incrementally into the card pool- will keep you from getting overwhelmed, and it will keep the power curve on course with how the game has developed over its releases. A third Core Set is kind of a waste of money, as there are only something like 15 cards that only occur once in each box.

Tough, deep, dramatic, infinitely replayable. These are signs of a good game, even when some of the quirks of the design and infuriating vagaries or rules uncertainties threaten to derail the whole affair. But- once again- when you’re playing it solo and not as a group entertainment, those kinds of things don’t matter so much since you can work through these things on your own time. I think this is a great game with lots to offer if you’re willing to dive in and explore- and this is something that definitely was not apparent when I first reviewed this game.

Infiltration Review

Matt Thrower 2 Comments

infilatration box

Gaming is littered with quirky little titles that play bait and switch with gamers, masquerading as a style of game they don’t actually provide. It’s not a problem, as long as the game is fun. Indeed it adds to the novelty and charm of the title for the open minded. Dungeonquest, for example, looks like a role-play mimic but is in fact a push-your-luck title and a wonderfully brutal one at that.

Infiltration is equally deceptive. At first glance you would expect this to be a fairly straightforward cyberpunk adventure, where the players take the place of criminals attempting to loot a research facility for information before the police arrive based on a partly-random timer. Collect the most data, and get out before time is up, and you win.

And in a sense, that’s what it is. The game is furnished with quality thematic art and the requisite background quotes and flavour text to add a fake air of authenticity. It also offers plenty of opportunity for the players to interact with people and things in the research facility and to do what criminals in botched heists do best: royally screw one another over for a profit.

However, played with these expectations the game is bound to disappoint to some extent. While the card decks that are dealt from to create a new set of rooms for the facility on each play through are richly varied, thematic and interesting, the same can’t be said of most of the other components of the game.

Players, for instance, have no special abilities. They can take only four actions – move forward or backward through the room cards, interact with the room’s function or loot some of its data. To supplement this they also start with four items which are mostly one-shot variations on the basic actions. But the items deck is pretty small. As a thematic exploration, it works moderately well. As a heist game it lacks the variety and tension required to support repeat plays and has a weak strategic framework against which to make interesting decisions.

infilatration CARDS

It is, therefore, a damn good job that Infiltration isn’t really either of those things. Sure it’d be nice to see some greater variety in actions and items, but it’s not necessary. Those elements are present but rather than make the game, they just add pleasing extra dimensions to Infiltration’s primary purpose. Which is to be a bluffing game.

The first clue is the way that so much of the game starts face down. Rooms cards can’t be seen until explored or examined via technology. The data files they contain are face-down chips of varying value, and it’s the value you score at game end, not the number of counters themselves. Players hands, and stacks of data files, are hidden from one another. Each turn they select an action individually, play it face down, and only resolve the effects once everyone has chosen.

All this hidden information is absolutely crucial to making the game fun. Many of the card effects add to the sleight and confusion, such as the “Blackmail” item which permits a player to cash in some of his hoarded data files to escape the facility with sublime ease. But its clearest in the action that allow players to steal data in the first place. There’s two variants for this (use “Extract”, trust me) but both mean that players get the most if they’re the first to resolve that action, and less if someone else got there first.

That one point of critical uncertainty alone injects massive tension and psychological manipulation into the game. Everyone has to grab as much data as possible in order to win, so if there’s some left where you are, stealing it has to be a prime consideration. But the same rule applies to everyone. So unless you’re first in turn sequence this round, dare you risk it? Action selection is suddenly transformed into a sweat-soaked frenzy of second guessing and double bluff as you try and work out what everyone else is holding and planning.

That’s just when it comes to downloading data. There is, of course, plenty more. Items can allow you to make sudden jumps back and forth through the facility. Others allow you to break tech-locks or murder employees in certain rooms, releasing more data. There are room effects and non-player characters which will hurt or hinder players encountering them. But you only have one action per turn. It’s all about dare, wondering whether you can waste a valuable action to set a trap for another player, or whether you may become an unwitting victim of your own schemes. It’s all down to those cards held and selected by your opponents in utmost secrecy.

infilatration in play

But of course making your decisions in an information vacuum means there’s little mechanical strategy. That’s the source of the common whine about it being excessively light and lacking replay value. The important decisions are all about bluffing and reading your opponents intentions correctly. The replay value is in interacting psychologically with the other players, not with the game itself. It’s a kind of strategy, but not the strategy some gamers might be looking for. Especially not from the same designer as the mechanically stripped down and low-interaction favourite Dominion.

So Infiltration turns out to be a bluffing game in disguise. In this category it stacks up against an impressive number of popular semi-abstract games like Poker which arguably do the whole psychological angle rather more impressively. What makes Infiltration special are the other strings to its bow. The simplistic maneuver and hand management aspects. The beguiling cyberpunk theme sitting on top the the mechanics like a graphical overlay on a pool of data. The direct and often rather nasty player interaction. The push you luck aspect of balancing the data grab with the need to escape alive. None alone may be done particularly impressively, but as props to the core bluff, they function brilliantly.

It’s that blending of relatively common elements into an unusual combination that makes Infiltration. It’s a fast playing and easily learned game that offers you a gripping hour of cyberpunk plot twists, tension and backstabbing and doesn’t let up until the final score tallies are made at the end. Single unexpected plays and events can totally change the course of the game and you have to be able to take that in your stride, while recognising that the skill comes in doing your best to anticipate and ensure things aren’t quite so unexpected. Manage that, and you’re in for a treat.

Cracked LCD- Star Wars LCG in Review

Michael Barnes 3 Comments

 

 

Fantasy Flight Games struck Star Wars paydirt in 2011 with X-Wing, and right there at the end of the year the company released its second Lucasfilm-blessed product, a Star Wars-themed Living Card Game. Announced some time ago, it had a somewhat troubled development with the original design hewing by most accounts fairly close to Nate French’s co-op concept for 2010’s Lord of the Rings card game. With Eric Lang billed as the designer, the title is now a rather traditional two player, competitive card game. Fortunately for Star Wars fans and the rehabbed CCG set, it’s a really good one that follows X-Wing’s lead in sticking close to classic source material (with just a smattering of Expanded Universe material).

 

You probably don’t need much of a high-level description. Player one, Light Side (Jedi or Rebel Alliance). Player two, Dark Side (Sith or Imperial Navy). There are resource and hand management elements. Character and vehicle cards, equipment, and locations from the flims. Said cards fight to blow up the other side’s objective cards. Preconstructed decks are included, but you’re really going to want to build better decks. I shouldn’t have to tell you these things.

 

However, it does get more interesting than all of the above. The core game may not be particularly innovative, but it is definitely rock solid, well-designed. It’s both comfortable for veterans and accessible for newcomers. But Mr. Lang- whom you may remember from my 2009 Game of the Year pick Chaos in the Old World- has a few tricks up his sleeve that make this game more compelling than it seems at a glance.

 

First and foremost among the more interesting things that the Star Wars LCG does is to completely rewrite how we build decks. Instead of going through and assembling your deck by meticulously picking each card, you select up to ten of your faction’s objective cards, resource-providing locations that often have a special function. Each objective card comes with a stack of five cards, so you are effectively creating your deck from micro-sets. This is a brilliant idea that makes the deckbuilding much more approachable and definitely quicker. Old-time “Spike” players may chafe at having some of the decision making taken away, but having to select from packets and work out the synergies there is totally satisfying.

 

Another element that feels fresh is a timing mechanic that keeps the game briskly- or ruthlessly- paced. Since it is a Fantasy Flight Game circa 2013, it has to have a dial of some kind and this time out it’s a Death Star dial. If it hits 12, the Empire wins. It goes up at least one every turn as well as when the Dark Side player takes out a Light Side objective. This creates a great thematic sense- the Dark Side gaining power that will eventually crush the Light Side, and the Light Side scrambling desperately to thwart Vader and company. There is a Light Side/Dark Side Force token representing the current balance of the Force that players contest by committing units to, reducing their battlefield utility. If it’s on the Dark Side, that Death Star dial goes up an extra tick per turn. The Light Side benefit is a damage marker on any Dark Side objective.

 

Commiting units to the Force struggle is just one example of how Mr. Lang has built in some very, very tough decisions. Deciding whether to pitch a really powerful card like Yoda to use its force icons or to hold on to it to deploy later can be agonizing. As in most CCGs or LCGs, choosing which units to attack and which to leave available for defense or other purposes is a prime strategic concern.

 

Combat offers a couple of unique concepts. Once attackers and defenders are declared, the game throws an auction at you. Yep. You read that right. The rules call it an “Edge battle”, but it’s really a blind-bid auction for initiative. Players take turns playing face-down cards until both pass. Cards are revealed, and force icons are tallied up to determine who gets to Han Solo and shoot first. What’s more, units may have increased combat abilities if they have the edge. As with any auction of this sort, there’s an element of bluffing. Does your opponent’s single card have one Force icon…or four?

 

Fate cards can also be played into the Edge stack. These cards might dole out damage tokens to combatants or objectives or do really mean things like restart the edge battle from scratch. Once it’s all sorted out, the edge winner focuses (this game’s version of “tapping”) units to trigger a string of strike icons. A blaster icon shoots a unit for a damage, a Tactics icon puts focus tokens on enemy units (delaying their refresh), and an explosion one deals damage to an objective. A player that loses the edge battle might wind up with their defenders completely destroyed, which results in another objective damage.

 

So we’re looking at a class act LCG that offers a strong foundation in traditional CCG-style mechanics but with some welcome perversions and of course all of that great Star Wars theme. Belay that bit. The Star Wars Card Game really isn’t any more or less thematic than any other CCG, all of which tend to be fairly high level and abstracted. Regardless, online complainants have already filed grievances about anti-thematic events such as a Rancor punching an X-Wing- as if that’s not awesome. If you’re looking for a highly narrative, canonical game wherein Admiral Ackbar can in no way be captured by Boba Fett, rescued from the Death Star, and then killed by an AT-ST then this may not be the game for you. I get it, the idea is that the objective cards are events or locations wherein the cards involved are meant to be interpreted as part of the larger story tableaux. It’s not intended to literally represent said melee between Rancor and X-wing.

 

The real issue, and the one worth getting internet upset over, is sadly once again tied directly to Fantasy Flight Games’ product strategy. I think that they’ve made some improvements to the LCG model and they’ve listened to some of the negative criticism, particularly after they willfully excluded cards that should have been in the core set, creating the need for players to buy multiple core sets to have enough cards to effectively build decks and get the most out of the game. The new deckbuilding model alleviates some of that and a single box feels like a reasonably complete and versatile game. But you’re still going to want a second core since you can have two of each objective set in a deck.

 

But why I am getting cards that reference multiplayer functions, and then being told in the rules that the multiplayer rules will be available in a later expansion…that I’m going to have to buy? Why am I getting “sampler” objectives for the Spies and Smugglers and Scum and Villany factions? Just to get Han Solo and Boba Fett in the box? I think not. I feel like I’ve been teased into buying more. I think it’s unfortunate that FFG hasn’t really worked out a way to sell its serial product lines without disrespectfully providing the customer with games that feel intentionally incomplete from the second you open the box for the first time. I’ve come to really appreciate the LCG model because it keeps games fresh, evolving, and it encourages players to explore but it is what it is, and it’s making the company money so the numbers are going in the right direction. It won’t change any time soon.

 

I’ll probably fall for the marketing scheme because I do really like this game and even moreso than past LCGs I think expansions are going to really make this game take off for both competitive and casual players. There are hints of larger ideas, like a mission card (Trench Run, of course) that lets the Light Side player attack that Death Star dial for an instant win. It goes without saying that there is plenty of material to work with and as a Star Wars fan it’s also awesome to see all of this new artwork and new interpretations. I’m excited about the multiplayer game, and I can’t wait to see what’s in the upcoming Hoth Force Packs.

 

Guess I’m a sucker.