June 2016

Eldritch Moon spoiler season!

Wow. I’m not really intending to post a whole bunch of blogs about this, but I wanted to say something about this today, at least, because I’m kinda blown away by how interesting this new stuff is for the upcoming set, Eldritch Moon. If you’re not following the spoilers, then turn back now! Otherwise, take a look at this video that went up on Wizards’ website yesterday:

My goodness, meld cards!

When I first watched this video, I wasn’t convinced. I mean, it just felt way too gimmicky for my liking, and I didn’t think I would ever want to bother with it. I mean, sure, the card is a beast when you can get it melded, and recent spoilers seem to support that other cards will be similarly insane, but I couldn’t really see me playing a deck with these things. I’d much rather have won the game by the time any such meld shenanigans could have happened.

But I’ve been mulling it all over today, and I think I might be convinced.

First of all, I still think it’s a bit gimmicky. And mechanically, I think it could be a bit of a nightmare. Knowing how poor my luck is, I don’t think I would ever be able to get to the point where both of the required cards are out, and even if I could, I would probably end up having one or both bounced or something happening to them! But I really like the fact that one “side” of the card is a perfectly good card, and allows you to meld if you have the required other “side”, while that second “side” allows you to essentially bring back the first from your graveyard, if it should have ended up in there. Definitely leads to a tactical play, and I think it could be a whole other level as you try to mind game your opponent. Just play Gisela the Broken Blade and watch the panic whether you have Bruna the Fading Light in your deck or not! (I think my favourite play would be to play them the other way around, just to confuse the issue!)

Thematically, however, I think it’s really cool as a demonstration of the insanity that has invaded Innistrad after Emrakul’s arrival. It’s a crazy mechanic, let’s make no mistake, so entirely fitting with the craziness that’s going on there!

I’m scared for the pre-release, of course, but I’m also more than a little bit excited now, I have to admit!

Secret Wars I

Hey everybody!
Tuesday means just one thing here at spalanz.com: boardgames! Today, I’m taking a first-look at one of the big-box expansions for Marvel Legendary: Secret Wars volume one. It’s an expansion that came out almost a year ago now, in support of the Secret Wars storyline that was Marvel’s thing for 2015. Not knowing anything about that storyline, I was nevertheless intrigued by the look of a lot of the cards and mechanics, though have only now gotten round to playing with the game!

In true big-box expansion style, there are a whole load of new cards – 350, according to the back of the box! In addition to the ‘more of the same’ heroes and villains and masterminds, we get a couple of other interesting twists that I’ll get to shortly.

The superheroes of the game are predominantly divided into The Illuminati and The Cabal, which sounds really intriguing to someone who doesn’t know what either of those things mean in the Marvel universe! There are also Avengers and X-Men, and a new Spider-Man, so there’s a broad spectrum there. The four masterminds are really odd, however, and have kinda fired my interest to see just what the storyline was about! We have a zombie Green Goblin, a wasteland Hulk, a “goblin queen” Madelyne Pryor, and a “super sentinel” called Nimrod. All very interesting! It’s important to note that some of the artwork – and perhaps, some of the concepts – is from the original Secret Wars event that ran throughout Marvel comics in the mid-1980s, which I’m slightly dismayed to note means it’s roughly as old as I am… Anyway!

From what I’ve seen thus far, there aren’t any massive changes to game play, you just do as you always do in this game, recruiting heroes and fighting villains, all the while trying to stop the mastermind before his scheme goes off. They have made a few small changes to the way the game can play, of course, by enabling some villains to become a second mastermind if they escape! Looking at the Wasteland Kingpin card in the above picture, you can see he has a Master Strike ability, which will trigger if he has escaped and is placed as a second mastermind. These new bad guys don’t replace they current mastermind, but rather act in concert with him, meaning you need to fight extra hard to win! While this didn’t trigger in the game I played, I really like the idea, and I hope that we see it happen on future villain groups, also!

A new bystander is added to the game, a Banker, who gives you recruiting power when you rescue him, but only to buy a hero below the bank. A new small deck of cards is also added, Sidekicks, who allow you to return them to the Sidekick deck to draw two cards. You can only buy one per turn, though Black Panther’s rare card allows you to just gain three of them, and they can prove to be really, really useful when you need to dig through your deck for the better cards! I also thought this new deck was super thematic, as a Sidekick is basically providing you with a modicum of help without being too overpowering in and of itself.

Time for the big change to the game: the one vs many mechanic.

Marvel Legendary is a co-operative game, where the players work together to overcome the evil mastermind and win. However, in the manner of Descent, you can now have a player take on the role of that evil mastermind, and actively work against the players!

The mastermind player has a deck of Ambition cards, though he does also get a starter deck of SHIELD agents like the regular players. On his turn, the mastermind flips over the top of the Ambition deck rather than the top of the villain deck, and places it face-up in an Ambition row. He can spend the attack points to play any of these Ambition cards, which have a universally bad effect for the hero players, but the mastermind player can still recruit heroes and defeat villains if he wants to.

I haven’t tried this mode, and was only able to summarise it above by reading what the rules sheet has to say on the subject. My first impression of the mode is that it feels distinctly tacked-on, though it’s probably the best way to implement such a mechanic onto an established game.

To be blunt, there isn’t really any meaningful interaction between the regular players and the mastermind player: the ambition cards are basically ways to mess with the regular players, but the players will likely know what the mastermind is going to do because they can see all four ambition cards at all time in the row. I imagine this mode would see the regular players just carry on as they always do, with the odd collected groan if the mastermind then plays a card that forces them to discard all of their attacking superheroes, for instance. But there’s no way to stop them on their turn, and it just feels a bit like the mastermind would be a marginal player in the game. Maybe it plays completely differently, though, so I suppose I’d have to try it first.

It’s worth mentioning that this is only volume one, and there are a few more Ambition cards in volume two (which I have played previously, and will hopefully get round to taking a look here soon!) These new cards do much more interesting things, though are still in the vein of messing with the regular players rather than the more directly interactive stuff. But I think I might be expecting too much from the mode of play, and as I said above, it’s probably the best way this could be implemented.

There’s a definite flavour that comes out of this box, and it definitely makes it worthwhile for a purchase. I’ve already said that I don’t really know anything about the storyline, but this didn’t really impact on my enjoyment of it, though I would imagine that knowing the story would have a distinct advantage as you could get some really flavourful villain and hero groups going on there. I have played with volume two, and this will have its own blog, but I’m not sure how the two fit right now, if indeed they do at all, as there are distinctly different themes from the second box.

All in all, really enjoyable to play, and definitely worth getting if you haven’t already done so!

Hobby Progress, week 25

Well folks, the title of this blog is a little bit of a misnomer – as there has been little progress made this week. I’ve had a pretty crappy week of migraines, so haven’t been able to do much of anything, unfortunately! But I have managed to build something:

View this post on Instagram

It's been a while since I've done anything meaningful, sadly, but here's a picture of the latest project, the Seeker Chariot of #Slaanesh! Pretty delicate, but got there in the end – now just need to put the paint on, hopefully this'll be a fairly easy task for the chariot itself, not so sure about the seekers themselves… #Warhammer #AgeOfSigmar #Chaos

A post shared by Mark (@marrrkusss) on Jun 28, 2016 at 10:32am PDT

It’s the Seeker Chariot of Slaanesh! I’ve been wanting to put this together since I had it, because it looks so complicated and stuff, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten so far.

Hopefully next week will see a little more progress!

Deathwatch!

Hey everybody!
It’s another game day here at spalanz.com, and for today’s blog I’m doing something a little different, looking at a game that I’ve never actually played, and don’t think I ever will! But expect a lot of waxing lyrical over the next few paragraphs, as I take a look at the Deathwatch RPG!

One of Fantasy Flight’s four RPGs set in the Warhammer 40k universe, Deathwatch allows you to take on the role of a space marine as part of a Deathwatch kill team, in a variety of adventures, foremost of which are purging the xenos from the galaxy.

The game is played in a d100 system, where you roll 2 d10s and add a modifier, hoping to roll under the target number. For example, your base stats are generated from rolling two d10s and adding 30. The check you attempt will then be against one of these stats, with a modifier to show how easy/hard it is (+30 for easy to -30 for very hard). So if you try to trick somebody who isn’t paying attention, you may have to roll against your fellowship characteristic with a modifier of +30, your target number could therefore be as high as 80. This core mechanic is somewhat confusing to someone like myself, who grew up on the d20 system, but it’s always good to try out new stuff!

There are a few things that work alongside this, and one that is worth mentioning here is the Demeanour mechanic. It’s basically a nice way to get people to do some real roleplaying of their characters at the table – each character has two demeanours, a personal one and a Chapter-based one, but you can only use one of these once in any one game. While some people can be uncomfortable with this sort of thing, I suppose it’s important to point out here that it is a role-playing game, so you should expect to role-play at least a little… To me, at least, it sounds really cool!

Each space marine character has a set of nine characteristics, which manage to evoke both the tabletop wargame as well as classic roleplaying archetypes: weapons skill, ballistics skill, strength, toughness, agility, intelligence, perception, willpower and fellowship. The interesting thing, for me, about the system is its use of solo mode and squad mode, as mentioned in the video trailer above.

As a starting point, FFG published a web scenario, Final Sanction, which acts as an introduction to the game, and is highly recommended for getting into the game. It pits several pre-generated characters against a genestealer horde in a run-down manufactorum complex, that staple of Warhammer 40k lore!

The game is set in the Jericho Reach, and a wealth of supplementary material has been published that explores that setting, including Necron Tomb Worlds and Tyranid invasions. The core book comes with rules for creating marines from one of six Chapters (Black Templars, Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Space Wolves, Storm Wardens and Ultramarines), though these supplements feature many, many more – my personal favourite was finding out that Novamarines are presented in Honour the Chapter!

One of the draws of this game is always going to be the wide variety of space marine chapters you can choose to base your character upon. Having them all come together as a Deathwatch kill-team is going to cause some problems for unit cohesion, but this is where the solo mode shines, as you can retain that sense of your own chapter tactics, while in squad mode you can work together with your battle brothers to achieve the mission objective. It sounds really awesome, I have to say!

I came to this game late in 2014, when I was first getting into the 40k universe with my Necrons, and was hungering for knowledge about the faction while waiting for the new Codex to drop. The Outer Reach really fired my imagination, not least because of that amazing cover art, and over the months since I’ve bought a few of the books available (as shown above!) While, as I said at the beginning of this blog, I don’t think I’ll ever get the chance to play this game, and it looks like FFG might actually have abandoned it now, it remains an idea that really interests me, and the books remain a constant delight to read through for background, etc.

Hobby Progress, week 24

Hey everybody,
It’s week 24 of my Hobby Progress blog, where I show off some of the awesome stuff that I’ve been doing to progress with my various Warhammer projects – and various really is the theme! As hinted at last week, this week’s report is going off on the deep end with Chaos, let’s take a look!

View this post on Instagram

There Will Be Blood (for the Blood God) #Warhammer #AgeOfSigmar #Khorne #Slaanesh #newarmy #awesome

A post shared by Mark (@marrrkusss) on Jun 17, 2016 at 4:29am PDT

Yes, this happened. I feel like I need to provide some kind of explanation for this, as I feel most people who have followed this progress series – or, indeed, almost anything that I’ve written on this blog – might be a little startled by what appears to be such a left-turn in my hobby career.

I’ve talked previously about how I first got interested in Warhammer through the card game, Warhammer: Invasion. That’s still one of my all-time favourite games, and I’m still amazed that I’ve made it through more than two years of blogging about games without doing a spotlight on it… Anyway, the card game is just great, and while I haven’t played it in a while, my all-time favourite deck to play is a Chaos one. I think I’ve tried out every kind of deck in my time playing the game, but Chaos is by far and away the one for me. Indeed, because of this, it’s more weird that I haven’t gotten any Chaos models sooner, really! (Well, there was that Demon Prince…)

So I managed to pick up a box of Bloodletters super-cheap recently, and I’d long been thinking about getting some Bloodreavers or similar because I know I’m not very good at painting skin, but would like to get better. So I decided I would like to get a small warband together of Chaos dudes: the plan was to get some Bloodreavers, led by a Bloodsecrator, and include a small band of Bloodletters. Initially that was going to be it, but then I thought it’d be nice to have the Herald of Khorne miniature in there, too, so I bought him last weekend.

But then, there’s Slaanesh…

Again, if you’ve been following my hobby adventures, you’ll know that I’ve painted my Ogors purple. I have quite a number of these guys, though only one has actually been finished so far. At any rate, one of the reasons for this is that I like the idea of Slaaneshi Ogors, but I also just think that, of all the Chaos gods, Slaanesh is the coolest. That isn’t because I’m a perverted degenerate (I think), but more because Khorne is all brutal, Nurgle is just disgusting, and Tzeentch is pretty but weird. Slaanesh is also weird, but there’s a distinct elegance to his stuff most of the time, before it devolves into the obsessive behaviour stuff. There are a lot of art pieces for both the Invasion card game and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (which I also love, but haven’t featured yet) that feature Slaanesh cultists and the like, and they’re really quite beautiful.

On a tangent here, I feel like GW would be doing a great disservice to the community if they actually do get rid of Slaanesh, which many people seem to have been fearing is the plan for Age of Sigmar since its release last year. The Horned Rat has already displaced the Dark Prince in the pantheon, and I’m concerned that it would be something akin to dumbing down the franchise to do this permanently. Sure, there are problematic things with Slaanesh but, as pointed out in an excellent article recently featured on BolS, there is a way to do this that could still work, and I hope GW will find that way. Certainly, the short story from Christmas, Godless, implies there will be something to come on this subject. I may actually dedicate a blog more fully to this subject in the near future, anyway!

So anyway, I like the idea of Slaanesh, and as the instagram picture at the top of this article shows, I’ve also decided to go for a kit that I’ve liked the look of for a long time, the Seeker Chariot! Having seen just how amazing they look in fellow blogger altsain’s post from Tabletop Gamer’s Diary (which you should totally check out by the way, as there is some fantastic content to be found there), I decided to get one! Unfortunately, it came broken, so I’m waiting on a replacement sprue, but it looks fantastic, and I cannot wait to get started there!

I think my Slaanesh thing will be a little bigger than the warband described for Khorne – I’m concerned that GW might be about to get rid of the range, so I want to get at least one of everything, but I’m also thinking I might get another Seeker Chariot, and perhaps a third to make up as a Hellflayer. So, I’m really excited for that!

But onwards! What have I actually been doing this week? Well, the answer is: Bloodletters. I’ve actually only built six of the ten so far, and have sprayed the whole lot Mephiston red, so it feels little like I’ve been cheating to say I’ve painted anything this week, but there we have it, unfortunately! They do look absolutely great, however!

I’m very excited by these little devils, and while I’m probably going to go for a really simple and straightforward colourscheme, I’m looking forward to seeing them come together all the same!

That’s it for this week, anyway! I’m probably not going to have the time to do anything this coming week, as I’m on holiday, but you never know what next Sunday’s blog might bring… stay tuned!

No longer Standard: Magic 2012

I’ve been doing a few game day blogs on Magic the Gathering over the last few months, but today I thought I’d do something a little different, and take a look at some of the older cards. While I really enjoy playing Standard decks, and even like that rotation keeps things fresh and stuff, I also like investigating some of the older things that are still hanging around, and have built up a small collection of cards from previous sets of the last ten or so years. Today, I thought I’d have a bit of a ramble about one of those I’ve recently been investigating: the Magic 2012 core set!

Some of you might think this choice a little odd – why start with a core set? There’s so much theme from the various sets over the years, yet core sets are, by design, fairly bland and easy to get into. Well, I actually like the idea of the core sets, as it seems like they provided a lot of the staple cards for that Standard season, provided a really cool way to get into the game with fairly minimal confusion, and also provided a good amount of reprinted cards for players who don’t have a lot of cards. I’m not exactly cut up to see them go, either, and the new Planeswalker decks do sound cool, but still!

M12 has especially fired my imagination, however, as having a lot of really awesome-looking cards: the staples are there, but there are also a couple of interesting new things along the way, and the art! Oh my, the art. I think this is the first set I’ve encountered where I’ve felt genuine regret for not having investigated this game sooner. I can’t quite explain it, I just feel like it’s a really great set to make a start with.

Like all sets, you get a couple of cycles of cards that have some kind of theme to them, to help provide some kind of theme in an otherwise generic set. Here, my stand-out favourite is the Mage cycle of 2-cost 2/1 cards that have some flavourful theme for their colour. This is one of the things that attracted me to this set in particular – look at the art on these things! They each look absolutely stunning! While these cards aren’t going to set the world on fire, I still love these sorts of things!

The set also has a cycle of themed artifacts that gain you life if anyone casts a certain colour of spell, similar to the Magus Staffs of later core sets; a cycle of Titan cards that cost 6 mana and have a powerful enter the battlefield effect – and five Planeswalkers.

Core sets have minimal confusing mechanics, though do feature a couple to get players into the game. For M12, the returning mechanic was Bloodthirst, which returned from the original Ravnica block in 2005. If you play a creature with the Bloodthirst keyword after an opponent was dealt damage on your turn, that creature comes into play with a number of +1/+1 counters on it. The core set also introduced Hexproof as an evergreen ability, which I thought interesting!

As I said, one of the main draws to this set for me was the art – it’s just so beautiful! I’ve been struggling to get a deck together, as I’ve bought a bunch of packs online in a sale, along with a couple of singles just for the art, but have managed to put this thing together that has yet to see play:

Creatures:
Alabaster Mage (x3)
Onyx Mage (x3)
Benalish Veteran (x2)
Serra Angel (x2)
Bloodrage Vampire (x2)
Vampire Outcasts
Elite Vanguard (x2)
Blood Seeker (x2)
Arbalest Elite (x2)
Duskhunter Bat (x2)
Stonehorn Dignitary
Pride Guardian

Enchantments:
Personal Sanctuary
Divine Favor
Lifelink

Instants/Sorceries:
Taste of Blood (x2)
Timely Reinforcements
Sorin’s Thirst (x3)
Consume Spirit
Doom Blade

Artifacts:
Angel’s Feather (x2)
Demon’s Horn (x2)
Elixir of Immortality

Lands:
11 Plains
10 Swamps

Like most of my decks, it’s creature-heavy, as I like having guys out on the field to do things with. There isn’t really a theme to the deck, though it does have a bit of a lifelink thing going on, notably with the ‘lucky charms’ artifact cards. It primarily sprung out of a desire to use the mages, however, and while I don’t really hold out much hope for it – particularly seeing as how I’ve really limited myself in only using M12 cards – I think it’ll be fun to at least try!

I’ve been enjoying quite a few of these old-style block decks of late, so stay tuned for more “no longer Standard” rambling blogs soon!

Hobby Progress, week 23

It’s week 23 already! Can you believe it?! I’ve had another fairly slow week, as I try to get the two Orruks that I’d started last week somewhere near finished. Progress has actually been good, I’m quite impressed with myself at least, so I’m glad to have that to report, anyway!

The new chaps were painted red rather than green, as I wanted to try something different, so in my headcanon, the red Orruks are the run-of-the-mill brutes who like to bash stuff up, while the green variety are more cunning and climb to the top of the pile. Hence why my green guy is the brute chief (do they have a name?) and the other two, well, aren’t.

These guys’ armour was painted following the Stoneskulls scheme as laid out in the How to Paint Ironjawz book from Games Workshop, and while I’ve probably been more heavy-handed with the sepia shade this time, overall I’m quite pleased with the result. I’ve once again gone for the flayed-skin look to the bandages and wrappings, and the loincloth thing on the one with the big choppa. I think the overall effect is of too much red in the model – and what with the bases and the armour having a similar colour scheme also, it’s led to a fairly narrow palette overall!

I quite like the effects on the weapons, though, even if I do say so myself! The wrappings are kislev flesh shaded with a mix of carroburg crimson and agrax earthshade; this shade mix was then used first on the axes to try to simulate dried/old blood. I shaded them lightly with agrax earthshade and then nuln oil to tone it down, but overall it looks nice and grimy – well-used, if you will! I’m toying with the idea of trying some kind of rust effect, but for now I prefer to have less than more.

View this post on Instagram

And finally, the two remaining brutes! #Orruks #Warhammer #AgeOfSigmar

A post shared by Mark (@marrrkusss) on Jun 12, 2016 at 3:41am PDT

Finally, I’ve built up the last of the models from the box. I said above that it’s quite the narrow palette, and that’s kinda putting me off jumping immediately into doing them, I’m half-thinking I’ll submit them to the next painting competition at my local GW, which is one where you need to paint up an entire unit of Age of Sigmar stuff. I could just put some of my recent Stormcasts there, but I think I’d rather do these guys. It’ll force me to complete the unit of five, at any rate! So stay tuned for that!

It’s been a quiet week, then, without a great deal of activity to speak of. I’m pleased to be making progress, of course, but still. Next week will hopefully be very exciting, anyway – and, dare I say, Chaotic…?

The Worldwound Gambit

Hey everybody!
As you may recall, I’ve been on something of a Pathfinder kick recently, re-starting the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Card Game scenario, and if you follow me on instagram (and let’s be fair, why wouldn’t you? Food and miniatures, and the occasional book or comic – it’s got it all!) you’ll have seen this bad boy crop up about two weeks ago:

View this post on Instagram

Now, for something different… #Pathfinder

A post shared by Mark (@marrrkusss) on May 26, 2016 at 1:25pm PDT

Well, I’ve finally finished it! Yes, two whole weeks it took me, though I was obviously doing other stuff for that time as well…

This book was actually really good. It was a little ploddy at times, but in the main I really liked it. It follows a group of thieves and rogues as they attempt to stop the demonic incursions into Golarion by marching right into the Worldwound itself and destroying the Tower of Yath there, which has been acting as something of a locus of power for the demons. Each of the six brigands is a fairly interesting character, and the folks they meet along the way also make for an enjoyable read.

So why did it take me two weeks to read?

The book is told in the present tense, which I’m not all that much a fan of, and while the characters are fairly interesting, as I said, they’re not stand-out amazing to the extent that I was all that interested in the story. We have a halfling lock-picker, a fire mage, a drug-addict bard, a pacifist half-orc, a noblewoman blade fighter, all of whom are led by a sort of dashing rogue thief. They all seem to have a shared history that is only really ever implied, and their motivation for going into the Worldwound and destroying the Tower of Yath is a bit precarious at times, and I found myself not altogether convinced by it – basically, demon invasions are bad for business, so they risk death and destruction to ensure they can still go about their con-artist ways.

The book starts fairly dramatically, with a full-on demon invasion of the town of Mendev, and then sees the main protagonist, Gad, assemble his crew to take down the demons. It was during these opening half-dozen or so chapters that the realisation finally dawned upon me: this is basically a role-playing game adventure told in novel form. As soon as I realised this, the novel became so much more enjoyable to read, and made so much more sense to me. The way the characters would move from place to place and encounter obstacles in their quest, which usually gave one character a major role and several others a minor part to play – the whole thing was really nicely done, and the present-tense storytelling makes so much more sense, as this is what you would do if you were a GM.

Some of the reviews I’ve seen for this book have mentioned its haphazard nature, and the cipher-like characters with little backstory explained. If you approach this as a RPG story where you don’t have to roll dice but can just sit back and see what happens, then the book is definitely worthwhile reading.

So, where am I up to with my Rise of the Runelords campaign?

Well, Darago the Necromancer and Sajan the Drunken Master finally started on the path through Burnt Offerings, and it started out really well! I’m playing this adventure path solo, which isn’t all that complicated if I’m honest, as the only real thing to remember is to turn over the top of the Blessings deck after each character takes a turn. Suddenly, I’m seeing those cards that allow you to discard to explore your location in a whole new light!

During the first game, Attack on Sandpoint, the villain, Ripnugget and Stickfoot, kept turning up within the top two or three cards of the locations, so it was over rather quickly! I have to say though, the main villain of this scenario is a goblin riding a lizard – how awesome is that?!

Next up, we have Local Heroes, which I remember playing back when the game was still fairly new, and from memory I thought it was a kind of respite-quest, where you basically get to skulk around and see if you can get more stuff. Well, not so this time around! Darago actually died to a Skinsaw Cultist! Good grief!

I was actually, genuinely bummed when this happened, having been really excited to get going with the character back when I started my quest. This all happened at the end of May, and I haven’t yet gotten round to starting the new character, Seelah the Paladin. My love of Lord of the Rings recently resurfaced, of course, so I’ve been thinking more about that game, though I have still picked up the Inquisitor class deck – for the inevitable death of either my Monk or Paladin characters! I do think I was perhaps a bit too reckless with Darago, discarding in the hope to get better cards, and not realising that I could in fact be decked by enemy damage. Gah!

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it already, but the next box in the Adventure Card Game line is the Mummy’s Mask path, which I am super excited for as I love anything that gives ancient Egypt a fantasy trope (Tomb Kings, I’m looking at you!)

On the Threshold of Discovery! The ancient lands of Osirion are blanketed by the sands of time, and eldritch secrets and vast riches lie just beneath the sun-blistered surface. As modern Osirion opens its tombs to outsiders for the first time in centuries, many of these lost treasures and secrets are now emerging—some more malign than others. Can your group of heroes brave terrible guardians, foul cults, and the burning sands of the desert to stop the rebirth of an ancient tyrant?

This complete cooperative strategy game pits 1 to 4 heroes against the monsters, curses, and traps of the Mummy’s Mask Adventure Path. Choose your character’s class, build a deck of equipment, magic, and allies; and explore dangerous locations as you journey through an exciting fantasy tale. As your adventures continue, your characters add unique gear and awesome magic to their decks as they gain incredible powers, all of which they’ll need to challenge more and more powerful threats.

So that is really exciting! Stay tuned for more Pathfinder goodness, anyway, as I hope to make it through to the end of Burnt Offerings soon!

Star Wars: Clone Wars season two

Hey everybody,
I’ve been making my way through the second season of Clone Wars tv series lately, so thought I’d come along here and follow up my look at the first season. There are a couple of interesting moments in this season, though overall I was surprised to find it was a bit of a let down, if I’m honest! Let’s take a look…

Like the first season, there are several episodes that form arcs throughout the season, which I kinda like as a series of twenty-two episodes, of twenty minutes each, always has the risk of being stand-alone and kinda pointless. There are very few single episodes in the second season, in fact, as all of them have links of varying strengths with each other.

I think the most important of these arcs is that dealing with the Mandalorians, because it caused such a massive stir in the community at the time it was released. Up to this point (late 2009), author Karen Traviss had been behind several highly successful novels, including the Republic Commando series, and a few tie-ins to the new Clone Wars itself. Traviss had made a name for herself as the Mandalorian Queen, writing her clones as having a strong cultural tie to the Mandalorian, Jango Fett. Of course, Mandalorians had been popular within Star Wars fandom for years since Boba Fett’s costume made him so many fans, and they had grown into a race of superhuman mercenary awesome guys who we were pretty much browbeaten into loving instantly.

Then we got episode 12 of Clone Wars season two, The Mandalore Plot. Turns out, the Mandalorians are a peaceful people, who have confined the war-like vestiges of their culture to the moon of Concordia (Concord Dawn, anyone?) and live in harmony much like the Naboo and Alderaanians we’ve come to know from the EU. The Duchess of Mandalore herself leads the pacifist Council of Neutral Systems, in fact. At the time, rumour had it that this change was too much for Traviss to stomach, and she left the GFFA as a result. You can read the author’s own words on all of that here.

Anyway!

The arc features Obi-Wan investigating claims the Mandalorians are arming against the Republic, and we soon learn he and Duchess Satine have some prior history together. The two discover that a breakaway faction of Mandalorians have re-formed the Death Watch and plan to overthrow the pacifist government, with the help of Count Dooku.

This arc is actually pretty great, if I’m honest. The Mandalorian controversy aside, I feel that it reaches deep into the Star Wars lore and provides a real treat for a lot of fans. Sure, there are many moments that I wish hadn’t happened – though at least Jar Jar wasn’t in any of them. I really enjoyed seeing the deepening of Obi-Wan’s character, and think the idea that he is actually a lot more worldly than many other Jedi provides an interesting tension with Anakin. There is a lot here that makes Obi-Wan a really interesting Jedi, one that certainly learnt a lot from Qui-Gon Jinn.

There’s a pretty extensive arc set on Geonosis that, if I’m honest, just annoys me immensely. We get to meet the Geonosian Queen, and while that makes total sense, as the Geonosians are essentially bugs, the whole zombie/mind-control thing with the worms was just ridiculous, and seemed a completely contrived way to engender the danger for Ahsoka and Barriss. Oh yeah, Luminara’s back, and this time she’s brought her padawan with her. The two are terribly mishandled, in my opinion, and serve merely to show how much better Anakin and Ahsoka are. I find this a bit annoying, as Luminara and Barriss were officially introduced in the novel The Approaching Storm, specifically as a counterpoint to the master-and-apprentice relationship that Obi-Wan and Anakin have in Attack of the Clones. Barriss is probably a padawan for the longest time among all of the Jedi, and their roles here are the worst part of this for me, I have to say.

And that includes having Anakin and Ahsoka throw Rex off a massive wall and then Force-leap to the ground after him. Harumph.

The arc that opens the season follows Cad Bane on a job for Darth Sidious, stealing a Jedi holocron that holds the names of all of the Force-sensitive children in the galaxy. Putting aside the issue of just why the Jedi have this information, but are seemingly doing nothing with it, the arc is something of a let-down, as we once again get to follow Ahsoka making a hash of things yet being thought of as some kind of kickass character, and Anakin being an incredibly bad example with next to no repercussions. It was good to see Bane again, though I do feel that he is the sort of character that would benefit from less exposure. His role here is okay, though, and we do get some absolutely wonderful film noir-like shots of him in his rented room, so I can’t complain too loudly!

Bounty hunters suffuse the final arc of the season, as well, as we have what should be an absolutely awesome finale to the season. I think we all knew something was going to be up with Boba Fett going after Mace Windu after that scene in Attack of the Clones when he picks up his fallen father’s helmet, and while we did get a young adult series of books that dealt with this (I should do a blog on those, they had some good moments), none of that is canon anymore. Clone Wars has essentially re-done the storyline, and I have to say, I’m surprised nobody had thought of doing this previously with the character.

Boba Fett is a clone, so he infiltrates a Jedi cruiser (I still find it hilarious that they’re legitimately called that) as a clone cadet! It’s kinda genius, I thought! Of course, he glowers and grimaces a lot, and it really is obvious that he’s not one of them, though I suppose the writers need to telegraph these points to the target audience. It’s a really terrific conceit, and they even got Daniel Logan back to play him (and the other cadets). It turns out that Boba is being helped in his vendetta by Aurra Sing, who is just as crazy as the EU had us believe all these years. We even get to hook up with Hondo Ohnaka once again!

However, the arc is just a bit too, well, obvious in the way it goes. Clearly Boba isn’t going to get to kill Mace, because Palpatine does that in Revenge of the Sith, but there was a certain stilted feel to the three-part arc, that really disappointed me, as it should have been tremendous, by rights.

At any rate, I think I should probably draw this to a close now, because I could ramble on all day. This is by no means a complete look at all of the episodes – the Zillo Beast is rightly left out, I feel, and while it’s cool to see folks like Mon Mothma show up, Senate Murders was something of a low point for me. But I wanted to give at least a rough overview of the season, and I suppose my top three episodes overall!

This was actually more difficult than for season one, as I don’t really like any of the episodes from this season – those on this list are therefore the best of a bad bunch, ones that I can just about tolerate. Death Trap is top merely because of the awesome idea of having Boba Fett infiltrate the clone cadets; Holocron Heist has some wonderful visuals of Cad Bane, and Duchess of Mandalore has some great cat-and-mouse intrigue on Coruscant. I wouldn’t really say I love these episodes, but they’re the best I can come up with, if I’m honest!

1. Death Trap
2. Holocron Heist
3. Duchess of Mandalore

How about you guys? Shocked at how harsh I was on the Zillo Beast?! Can’t stand the Mandalorian controversies? Let me know in the comments!

Summoner Wars!

Hey everybody!
It’s game day once again at spalanz.com, and it’s time to look at one of my favourite card games that hasn’t seen the light of day in a while – it’s Summoner Wars!

This game is one of those deceptively simple battle games with some really nice mechanics that you either love or hate. Basically, it’s a game between two people (multiplayer rules are available, but it just feels better with two) where you’re trying to eliminate your opponent’s Summoner, not merely wipe him out or anything. Because you’re only going after one card, it’s a really strategic game, as you try to block your opponent while at the same time go after his Summoner. It also has a really interesting resource mechanic that, as I say, you either love or hate. Let’s take a look!

You start the game with a deck of cards that represent your faction, headed up by your Summoner. Plaid Had Games sells a variety of products for the game, and each faction deck available comes with a unique Summoner and a Reference Card, along with the rest of the cards. This Reference Card shows you where to place your starting units in relation to your side of the battlefield board. In addition to units, you also have Wall cards that you play to both help block your opponent’s progress, and which also serve as summoning points for your guys.

To begin, then, you’ll have a fairly generic setup, with your Summoner hiding out at the bottom of your board. Over the course of the game, you summon more units into play to help defend and overrun, but if you can’t pay their cost, or if you don’t have any available walls in play to summon adjacent to, you can’t summon those cards.

What’s this about summoning costs, I hear you ask?

In addition to Summoners, there are two other types of unit cards: Commons and Champions. They’re what you’d expect, chump units and more beefy units, respectively. Each card has an attack value in the circle on the top left and, under this, its Summon cost and what type of damage it deals, either ranged or combat (bow and sword, respectively). Each unit also has a health rating, and finally, some kind of special effect that it can do in the game.

Each player has a draw deck, a discard pile, and a Magic pile in their play area, and it is cards from this Magic pile that pay for the Summon cost. At the end of your turn, you get to “build magic” by discarding cards face down into your Magic pile. This is a good way of thinning out your hand if you drew massively expensive units in your opening hand, for instance. To pay for each point in a unit’s Summon cost, you discard face down a card from your Magic pile, so you really need to take account of what you use to build a deck (more shortly).

You can discard any number of cards from your hand when you build magic, but something I find really cool is that defeated enemy units go into your Magic pile – you use the bodies of your vanquished enemies to put build your own army on the board! Muwahahahahaha!

Ahem.

So how do you vanquish said enemies? Well, combat is obviously the main thrust of this game, as you try to hack and slash your way to your opponent’s Summoner.

Combat is pretty simple, and uses d6 to determine the outcomes. In the above picture, the Tundra Orcs’ Thwarter has an attack rating of 1, and deals Combat damage rather than Ranged damage, so needs to be orthogonally adjacent to the enemy. He rolls 1 d6, and if the result is 3 or greater, the attack hits. The 9-pip grid underneath the card’s name shows its health rating: the Zombie Warrior has a health of 2 so, while the 4 rolled is enough to wound the warrior, it won’t kill him this time.

I really enjoy this game, the level of strategy in particular is something that appeals to me as I get older! However, it’s also a game that I haven’t really gotten to play all that much – in fact, it’s getting on for four years since I last played it with an actual person! That’s pretty surprising to me. While each faction deck is playable right out of the box, Plaid Hat Games sells a bunch of decks to allow you to mix things up, specifically the Reinforcements and now, Second Summoners. These all add options that allow you to create custom decks to suit your own playstyle. There are also Mercenary cards that have been floating around the game for a while, though they are also a distinct Faction that you can play in the game, with their own Summoner. Each deck will be built around a Summoner, whose Reference Card, in addition to having the start-up formation, has a list of the event cards associated with him or her. You then have pretty much free rein to build a deck with no more than three Champions and 18 Commons.

The most recent product for the game is Summoner Wars: Alliances, which I haven’t bought but sounds great, as the original sixteen factions in the game have teamed up to form eight allied factions. Sounds pretty cool, anyway!

My games recently have been with the excellent app that is available for iOS and Android, and provides a really good play experience all from the comfort of your daily commute, or whatever! The main app is free, though it allows for in-app purchases of different factions and stuff, but you really get the gist of things without having to pay for all the add-ons. Definitely worth a look if you haven’t downloaded it already!