Has anyone played the Heroscape re-imagining Magic the Gathering: Arena of the Planeswalkers? It’s a fairly light tactical miniatures. I say fairly light because it adds spells on top of the Heroscape formula. I quite like it, I think it’s a really good alternative to the typical ‘family game’ dross people traditionally play, with just enough meat on it to keep more invested players interested.
It appears that it may be not longer supported by Hasbro. No new set for the holidays and the existing three sets are at clearance prices on Amazon. I just picked up the two expansions as I don’t want to be caught short like I was with Heroscape.
I didn’t care for it. Right out of the box, for one thing, it gave you rules and options for pieces not in that set. I understand wanting to get a big set-up for an ever expanding structure, but… it’s not a good feeling to open up your new game and feel like it’s missing stuff as you read the rules and play. They should have started bigger and not be so everyone buy multiple sets centric.
Yeah, I’d have loved a huge starter set in the vein of Rise of the Valkyrie, with lots of terrain and miniatures. Still, you can buy all three sets for ~$45 now, so you can get a lot of stuff.
It’s annoying that all the units are unique, they missed an opportunity to sell people multiple copies of the same set to do army building there.
some thoughts on Black Orchestra vanished … stupid editor. I’ll write it later again
this I could save from discourse:
So my next strategy will be to try not to get caught by the SS until late game, there are ways to avoid SS raids, so maybe that is the meat of the game. Try to stay alive until 43-45 …
Some event cards I have an issue with. In order to attempt a plot I need enough motiviation. Some event cards raise your motivation, like the Kristallnacht… so now I feel good about the event card, because bad things happen and this raises my motivation.
Or in stage one there is a Hitler speech event, that brings down his military support to its starting value. So I look forward to Hitler’s speech…?
So the problem is that really terrible events in history raise my motivation and I look forward to those events in the game… on the other hand it is logical, but somehow creepy…
Except most won’t. I mean it wasn’t bad, but I didn’t leave my one set really wanting more or being excited. It felt so limited that I had no desire to run out and buy more. If they’ve stopped making these, which it sounds like they have, I am not alone with that experience. I think there was a reason why the mainstream games went big with lots of pieces and then, after you were hooked, said look there’s more. I mean I read this game thinking oh I can choose this piece or… the same piece but all the options they talk about in the manual are not actually available with one set. The choice felt like zero… and going out to buy a another set just to get a choice didn’t leave me happy.
I left the game feeling it was lacking a lot of content, not wanting to add more content to a game I enjoyed.
I think they where intentionally aiming the game at the the casual and family board gaming market. If it had been successful there I expect they might have put something out aimed at hobbyist gamers as it would then have cross-over appeal.
I understand your complaint about not getting everything you’d like in the box, but it is very cheap!
It was, but they are the ones that told me I was missing stuff, in the rule book. How much did they save by rinsing and reusing the same manual like that? It literally told me about cool things I didn’t have and tried to sell me the expansions before I even played. It was not a good way to do it. You can sell those other expansions in a small booklet about other things to buy, or have the “extras” at the back of the book or something it was just… unpleasant right out of the box.
Gloomhaven continues to be awesome and tough. Our regular fourth was able to join us this week and started up a Scoundrel, wreaking a fair amount of havoc before being trapped in a corner and arched to death midway through. In the late game, our Tinkerer also was taken out of the fight by being riddled by arrows. We did barely manage to both win the scenario and get the treasure chest the turn before my Mindthief would have been exhausted and our Brute wasn’t doing a lot better. At this point we now have four different scenarios we could pursue and everyone except the Scoundrel has levelled up, so we will do the bookkeeping on that next time before selecting our scenario. And I feel like I’ve played enough to give a pretty solid recommendation (buy this if you can and like tactical dungeon crawling!), although we still haven’t unlocked anything major so it’s I guess theoretically possible that stuff could suck. It doesn’t seem likely though.
You could do it by playing two (or if you were really crazy, more) characters but it recommends bumping the difficulty level because you’ll have perfect coordination (in theory, at least) between your characters. There’s enough tough decision making for one character that two seems like it would be pushing it, to me. But if you really must play solo or not at all, it’s possible.
so I made my first order from CoolStuffInc. They charged me instantly, and there is a pre-order in there so it won’t ship for a bit. Is this normal practice for them, an e-tailer charging before shipping?
BHP, Sears, Target, Walmart, Newegg, they will hold the charge, pending, until the label is printed and it ships. This is the first one I’ve seen that posts the charge right away. It’s actually contrary to the policies of the major credit card companies for them to do that.
The guys at Shut Up & Sit Down just posted a glowing review of the Arkham Horror LCG…which is apparently out of stock everywhere. Does anyone here have any experience with this? Is it really any different from say the LOTR LCG? How much does the FFG model affect the enjoyment of this? Is it viable solo?
