Dude! Take Your Turn!
A Gaming Life
Preview – Dead Reckoning
John D. Clair is one of my favourite designers, and I find the “card-crafting” game mechanic to be very neat.
Space Base is #16 in my best games played of all time list and its position is well-deserved (even though it’s not a card-crafting game).
For that reason, one of my best experiences at Dice Tower West last week was a sit-down meeting and play with Alderac Entertainment Group CEO John Zinser and Clair (along with developer Mark Wooton) to play Clair’s new pirate game coming to Kickstarter in May, Dead Reckoning.
It was an amazing experience, really making me feel like part of the boardgame media. Wow, an actual individual demonstration! An appointment that was on my calendar and everything!
It helps that the game seems great too.
Before getting into the nuts and bolts of the game, though, let me say that the Ian O’Toole artwork is wonderful in this game (but then, isn’t it always with him?).
Also, please note that while everything is near final, changes could be made to the game and we played an (almost finished) prototype so the bits and pieces may change after this post too (like stabilizing the middle mast of each ship, which kept popping out when it was grabbed).
Also, I didn’t actually get pictures of everything (whoops!).
Let’s take a look.
Viscounts of the West Kingdom now on Kickstarter
I should have posted this yesterday, but wanted to get the Dice Tower Con post out and I don’t like to do two major posts in one day.
Yesterday morning, the Kickstarter for one of my most anticipated games went live.
Viscounts of the West Kingdom, designed by Shem Philips and S J Macdonald and with art by Mihajlo Dimitrievski, will be published by Garphill Games and Renegade Game Studios later in 2020.
Dice Tower West – Positives & Negatives
(Edit 9/24/21) – Apparently they have changed hotels for the 2022 Dice Tower West convention, so almost all the negatives mentioned below may be gone! I’m not familiar with the Rio, so can’t comment on it. Check out the Dice Tower West web site for information on tickets!
See original post below for my March 2020 experiences
I just recently returned from my first “big” con experience, and I thought I’d share some of my thoughts about it.
Yes, I’ve gone to SHUX (which is kinda big here in Vancouver), but that didn’t involve travel at all. I’ve also attended some smaller cons here in Vancouver as well as some down in Bellevue, Washington (Dragonflight and OrcaCon) and Bellingham, Washington (CascadeCon), but those are within driving distance.
Dice Tower West is the first con that was a “destination” con (it’s in Las Vegas, which means flying!) and I was really looking forward to going.
I’ve been a fan of the Dice Tower and the people involved for many years, so the idea of meeting some of them, and even gaming with them (!) was a real attraction. This, plus meeting some other people who haven’t gone to the other cons as well.
And I have to say that overall I had a blast!
But there were some negatives as well.
Las Vegas (the Strip, at least) is very glitzy and almost overwhelming. Everything there is designed to separate you from your wallet and I found that a bit off-putting. I’m obviously not the target audience, not being a gambler and not being interested in the shows and stuff for the most part.
But it was pretty.
Let’s go over the positives before I get to the rather large negative, though.
Nomad Games to Add a New Expansion to Smash Up App
Yesterday, I received an email from Nomad Gamesthat made me very excited.
No, it wasn’t a new Talisman: Origins expansion or anything like (though I do love getting early access to those!).
No, they announced that the Smash Up app is going to be getting the next expansion!
Pretty Pretty Smash Up will be the second expansion after Awesome Level 9000 to be added to the app.
Asmodee North America New Parts Replacement Policy
Let’s say you buy a game from somewhere. Anywhere, really. A friendly local game store, or Amazon, or even from a friend.
Then you open up the game and…oh my, there’s a piece missing! Or malformed! Or it broke when you tried to punch it out of the cardboard!
What do you do?
Usually, you contact the game company and they’ll just send you the piece or pieces.
Game companies are really good that way.
Well…not any more, at least where Asmodee USA is concerned.
They are implementing a new Parts Replacement Policy that is…shall we say, not as friendly as everybody else.
The basics (in case you can’t read that screen shot, my apologies if you can’t) are that instead of contacting Asmodee and getting the part replaced, you now have to ask the store to request a replacement from Asmodee. Asmodee will then ship them a new copy of it and you can exchange it for the defective copy.
App Review – Epic Card Game
Edit: 3/5/20 – Multiplayer update again. The latest app update has extended the timer to 48 hours! Definitely appreciate them doing that. The game is still enjoyable and now that I realize just how much old stuff is in the replay when you log in, I’m no longer confused.
The latest update also optimized the game for the phone a little bit more. I just tried it. It’s not too bad, though it’s still not my preferred way to play. At least I don’t hate it anymore.
Edit: 2/20/20 – Multiplayer update. I am now in two online multiplayer games and while there is a bit of confusion, overall it works great asynchronously. To set up a game, you do need to have your opponent on your friends list, but it’s easy to send an invite after that. You have a 24-hour timer (not 48-hour like somebody had told me earlier) to take your turn.
I do wish that it was a 48-hour timer like Star Realms, but this is manageable. (Though please, White Wizard Games, if you could make it 48 hours, that would be so much better).
The confusing part is that the replay of turns when you go in to take your turns (though I really do appreciate having the replays!). It also replays some of your previous actions as well! The first time I saw this, since it had been many hours since I had taken my turn, I thought the AI had taken over for me and reported a bug. Now I realize that it’s part of the replay. Once I got used to that, it actually works pretty well.
Overall, online multiplayer works very smooth and I do like it a lot. Though having had to take one of my turns on my phone because of the timer, I have to reiterate that I hate this game on my phone right now. It’s way too hard to read, as noted in the update below. The iPad does work great, as I guessed it would.
Edit: 2/18/20 – I have to add that when I wrote this review, I had only played the Steam version. Now that I’ve played it on iOS as well, it’s virtually unplayable on the iPhone (haven’t tried iPad yet, but I’m sure that’s fine since it’s bigger). There’s no other reason for it than screen real estate. White Wizard did everything they could. You can zoom cards, play them from the zoomed state, and all of that. But the text is just too small for the phone, even zoomed. It made my eyes hurt.
For something to be truly called “epic,” does it need to have huge creatures ready to fight? Masterful wizards who will conjure these demons and unleash mayhem upon the land?
Is it just a fitting description of my ego?
Epic Card Game is a card game (duh) in the same vein as Magic: the Gathering where you are playing cards to ultimately try to reduce your opponent’s health to zero (in the game! I’m not talking about committing a crime or anything).
New Game from Garphill Games
Today’s a holiday up here in the Great White North, so just a quick post.
How did I miss this late last week?
I know I’ve been scooped by other blogs, but I don’t care.
I have to share what looks like yet another cool game from Garphill Games, as the cover (and slight information) was shared on Facebook.
This is so new that it’s not even on Boardgame Geek yet!
I’m intrigued by how it uses some of the core mechanisms from Raiders of the North Sea. I did see something on Reddit from somebody who spoke to somebody who is helping playtest this game who said “it was like if you’d taken all the best parts of the original Raiders and all its expansions, and then made it into a 45 minute game.”
Not much more is known than this, but it’s another Shem Phillips design with artwork by his brother Sam (Circadians: First Light).
I’ll be keeping my eye on this one. And that means so will you!
What will be most important is to see how different it is from its ancestor and see how it goes.
Watch this space for more information.
And happy Family Day!
Viscounts of the West Kingdom Cover
Can I just say how much I love the cover for Viscounts of the West Kingdom?
(Editor – No, you can’t)
This cover is amazing!
It’s just whetting my appetite for March when this hits Kickstarter.
Will this hit my Top 10 games played in 2020? Will the West Kingdom series become three for ten?
The anticipation is maddening!
(Don’t I look good in pearls?)
New to Me – January 2020 (Part 2)
Whew! I’m finally awake again after finishing last week’s Part 1 of my “New to Me Games – January” post.
That really took a lot out of me. It’s been a week and I’m just now recovering!
Excuse me while I hop on my Peloton and limber up for today’s posting.
My fellow Cult of the New to Me members are very happy after seeing today’s post. There’s a game from 2009 in there! And 2016! Of course, there are a few too many 2019 games on there so there was a little grumbling.
I may have to do something for them for Valentine’s Day.
So, without further adieu (all of my adieu was sold for a tomato at a Chinese market anyway), let’s begin!
New to Me – January 2020 (Part 1)
It’s a brand new year! And this time, I can actually say that while talking about 2020 games (unlike last month).
January was a busy month for new-to-me games. I went to two conventions on back-to-back weekends (that was a lot of fun but also very tiring). At least they weren’t long drives!
I did kind of feel a bit out of it after the second one, though.
The Cult of the New to Me was really happy with me, though. There weren’t even any attempted coups!
Maybe a few too many 2019 games for their tastes, but there are a number of 2017 and 2018 games in there (and even a 2009 game in the next part!)
Next part?
Yes, I said next part.
I played a grand total of 28 games in January (34 plays). Fifteen of them were new to me games. There is no way all of them are going to fit in one post.
Thus, this is only Part 1.
Part 2 will be coming.
This also means that the descriptions of the games will probably be a bit briefer than usual. Maybe I should actually do that for all of these posts.
We’ll see.
So without further adieu (all of my adieu was traded for some water on an alien planet anyway), let’s get started!
Dude! Take Your Turn! 