The official explanation is simply that they could not come to a licensing agreement with WotC. Whether that is true, or partly true, or not true, or whatever, I have no idea. Still, a sad day.
If the shutting down of Warhammer Conquest is any precedent, jump on it now. It’s going to really quickly get difficult to find older packs for a reasonable price.
I’m not interested enough to pay going prices for it, since while I have enjoyed the design since it was a CCG in the 90s (still have some of those cards), I rarely get to play two player games and prefer coop when I do. But at 75% off, which is what I paid for Warhammer Invasion and Warhammer 40k Conquest, I would bite in a heartbeat.
I bet Wizards is planning to resurrect the TCG in some way.
Not convinced Wizards are going to do anything with it. I think Hasbro has made them focus completely on D&D and Magic. More likely Wizards thought the Netrunner license was worth more money now, and FFG didn’t think it was worth paying the higher price.
So I tried out Spirit Island for the first time last night. I played a game solo to prep for my real gaming group this weekend and learn the rules. I picked the Shadows Flicker spirit and got my ass kicked. It seems I may have made a poor selection for a solo spirit, but I’m looking for any beginner strategies you guys might be able to offer.
Specifically, I had the following questions in my solo game:
- The spirit I played had no way to create new Dahan. I didn’t see a good way to protect them other than gathering/moving them a bit. Maybe I just need to not worry so much? But without them, it’s even harder to kill off stuff.
- Is it a good idea to mostly pay attention to what is coming up for a Ravage this turn?
- When starting out, is it better to spread presence to gain energy or card plays? With the spirit I had, it seems like card plays are important to generate elements since the inherent abilities allow killing off explorers.
I think I’m going to try solo one more time tonight before our group game tomorrow. Any tips would be appreciated.
It sounds like it’s just the Neturnner Card game and that android and board games in that world are here to stay with FFG.
Yeah, the original Netrunner card game used the Cyberpunk 2077 license from R. Talsorian Games, and FFG already had an in-house cyberpunk setting in Android, so they just licensed the game from WOTC, not the theme. Not sure what that has to do with my post, though.
Excellent! Thanks so much for posting about the Spirit Island price drop. I’ve been hoping it would come down in price for a while.
Me too! My copy just arrived today!
My tip is that you should play two gods. The game doesn’t really come alive until you’re grooving on some of the synergies they can set up. But even if you don’t try it solitaire with more than one god, you’ll see when you and your group play tomorrow. I’ll be curious to hear how it goes.
-Tom
I just tried another game (didn’t finish yet) with Lightning & Earth gods. It went much better. And even something as simple as Lightning giving Earth the ability to use powers fast was huge. I’m beginning to see what people mean by there being a ton of options on any given turn.
FunAgainGame Relaunches Their Website, sort of.
Apparently their liquidation was all part of some plan. Some… highlights:
By 2017, we grew to the point where we controlled approximately 25% of the Kickstarter game fulfillment market, including games like Scythe, Gloomhaven, Mythic Battles: Pantheon, Keyper, Anachrony, Factory Funner, Crisis, Dinosaur Island and hundreds of others. Today we have nearly 100 publishers in our large warehouse and we continue to service their warehouse and project fulfillment needs.
We are in the process of opening an East Coast warehouse to allow us to provide nation-wide zone optimization and 2-day shipping to anywhere in the Continental US. Stay tuned
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Given deterioration in the general retail environment, led by the behemoth Amazon, we learned there was no longer any money to be made in online retailing and decided three months ago to liquidate that inventory and cease general retailing of boardgames online.
Funagain Games will become your primary destination for hard-to-find board games from around the world.
I’m glad to hear they’ll still be around. In 2005ish, when the board game renaissance in full bloom, they were an amazing online source for games. I still hold a fondness in my heart for them, even if I have other sources these days.
I put Runebound 3rd Edition on my table this month. This includes the Unbreakable Bonds expansion that introduces co-op play to a game that should have been co-operative from the beginning.
Part of my reasoning for buying Runebound is that it was meant to be a much better dungeon/adventuring game compared to another seemingly popular game with a distinctive orange box. I won’t mention it by name, but if you’re still unsure, to box is adorned with a heavily armored mage or knight looking character on the front. I don’t think that game could work out whether it was a mage or a knight either. Fortunately, the rules are much more simpler in Runebound. In classic Fantasy Flight fashion, there’s a learn to play guide and a reference manual. Neither manual is perfect, I’d like to see some important points made more prominent in text as opposed to boring Terrinoth lore occupying my rulebook. Maybe I’m alone here, but I much prefer my rulebook to have rules only, and would gladly have lore placed elsewhere. Even as an appendix or something. Those little callout boxes explaining lore would be much better served by examples or reiterating important points.
Playing the game. Gosh it is hard. I do not recommend it for co-op. Playing through failed scenario after failed scenario shows just how bolted on this mode is. The skill deck is made out of 6 distinct card families. One family is the party/co-op deck and that deck gives added options when at least two characters can link up and move around the map together. Maybe they’ll get enough trophies to learn these co-op skills. To get to that point, I spent the first half of the game having each character do their own thing trying to explore as much as possible and build them up. If there were another person present, it would still be solitaire gaming. The second half was all about linking up to defeat the big bad together. Total failures thanks to being under-equipped.
One character from the base game isn’t even suited for co-op. One of his inherent skills is about battling another hero. Why would anyone do that in co-op is beyond me. I suppose they could if they want this character to get an extra two gold and one trophy, at the expense of making another player lose an action. Might as well throw the fight then I guess. I don’t know, it just doesn’t make sense. Some of the cards in the game still apply where an option is to harm the other heroes in some indirect way; fine in a competitve sense, but out of place in a co-op game.
Flipping tokens for battle is pretty cool. I like it, but don’t love it. The monster AI sheets are nice, though I learned that trying to kill monsters from the start to get trophies is going to be painful, bordering on impossible. It seems to be imperative that heroes get some sort of economy happening, buying new items/tokens to then take to battle with them later on. With time pressure, there’s not a lot of room to waste healing up and/or being delayed. To get an economy happening means grabbing supplies from a city, then delivering to a settlement on the map and making a small profit on the way. Yay! (sarcasm) Otherwise, earning gold by being lucky with card draws and succeeding with the requirements.
I’ve shelved Runebound for the time being. For a solo/co-op game, I never found any synergy between characters unlike say, Pathfinder ACG or Darkest Night. I never felt like I was on an adventure eagerly delving into the unknown to pull out some amazing weapon or item to empower me like I’d get with Eldritch Horror. And while I would stop and carefully plan out my options with combat, it was far from burning my brain. I believed internet opinion that the co-op makes Runebound fantastic; it had me excited about busting it out and playing it. Right now, I disagree completely with the enthusiasm.
In my experience, games generally work well as either a competitive game or a coop game, not both. And if one of those modes is added in an expansion after the base game was designed, that’s probably the one that’s not going to work. If they’re both in from the start, it depends. A Touch of Evil seemed clearly designed around the competitive mode and coop barely a fig leaf afterwards. (One reason I really didn’t enjoy my time with it.) Mage Knight didn’t get its best coop content until the Lost Legion expansion but even in the base game coop/solo play is just much better balanced and less prone to certain fun-sapping situations like one player getting to all the encounters before you can (which is one of the things I hated most about earlier editions of Runebound - I’ve heard 3rd is better about that but TBH I’m never going to find out because the earlier editions were complete trash).
I am hoping that the Near and Far expansion will be an exception, because I’d enjoy the gentle storytelling and exploration of that game more in coop, but we’ll see.
Played a couple new games yesterday. Heart of Crown is a japanese deckbuilder about helping princesses become powerful enough to take over the kingdom. Simply put, it was Dominion with a whole bunch of extra shit bolted on. Needless to say, it failed to impress me, though my friend enjoyed it a lot. I guess i just prefer more streamlined deckbuilding experiences like Dominion and Star Realms.
Next we played Black Orchestra, a coop game about trying to assassinate Hitler. Despite the awesome theme, this fell pretty flat for us. I think one of the biggest problems was the rulebook, but the gameplay itself was also a little lacking. The conspire action felt super swingy, and there were parts of the game where it was unclear what we should be doing (especially towards the end). Was very disappointed with this game, and I will be surprised if it gets any more plays in our group.
Runebound is a game that bounced off me. I liked the overall mechanics, but for the PVP I didn’t like you really just had one chance to take out the boss. We played it as PVE and it was ok, but did feel tacked on.
Played a six player game of John Company, a game about running the East India company. It’s sort of a weird combination of 18XX (you run companies, but for your own benefit, not the company’s benefit), and Kremlin (you’re assigning offices based on a weird seniority system). It’s largely a negotiation game, with the twist that you can extract “promises” in the form of cubes from players to do them favors; they later have to pay you $2 to get them back (or exchange favors, or promote one of your guys), or they suffer a 2VP penalty at the end. Considering the winning score was 11, that’s significant.
It was fun, but we spent most of the game just figuring out how the systems fit together. One player, for example, finally worked out a way to make a lot of money; but it was too late in the game for him to have a chance to turn the money into VPs, so he ended up losing. More of an experience game than a truly competitive endeavor, but that’s ok. It was a good group for it.
Then most people had to leave, so we played quick 3-player games of Mines of Zavandor and Valetta. Both pretty good.
Was there a backstabby/alliance fun-factor like with Kremlin or Republic of Rome?