Reactions to new games at GenCon
Daniel Blum
of at GenCon. I haven't had time yet to read the complete
rules of any of these, so I can't comment on rules clarity
and completeness at the moment, but I thought people might
be interested anyway.
Quest for the Grail - Horizon Games
This is the Preview Edition that you may have seen Dave
Nalle posting about - right now it comes in 60-card starters
taken from a 125-card set. I bought four decks, and I believe
each one had one of every common card except for the common
Warriors, of which there were a few more, plus assorted uncommons
and rares.
The cards are very attractive, overall. The card backs
(there are two, one for the Quest deck and one for the Court
deck) have heraldic designs and are some of the best I've seen.
The card faces are reasonably well designed. I would have preferred
it if the card types (Event, Action, Warrior, etc.) were in larger
type, but overall the design is good. The artwork is (almost?) all
taken from public-domain works, and is in consequence generally quite
good. While I would probably still prefer original work to cropped
pieces (which most, but not all of these are), these are cropped much
better than most of Spellfire's, and are generally quite appropriate.
They set the mood very well, at least if you're looking for a sort
of 19th-century romantic Arthurian sort of mood, which I rather
like. My favorite cards are the Celtic (?) designs on some of the
Action cards (these are combat boosters, similar to Giant Growth in
Magic). My least favorite are many of the Knight cards, unfortunately.
Many of these are done in the same style and appear to be black-and-white
illustrations which have been colored in - while they're not bad, they
look a little rough next to the oil paintings on many of the other cards.
The cards have gold and silver borders - the same card can have both borders,
if anyone cares. The stock seems as if it might wear a little too
easily, but I expect that a different stock will be used in the regular
edition.
A quick summary of gameplay: everyone uses two decks, as mentioned
above. The quest deck contains Quest cards (natch), which your knights
or other players' can defeat to gain Valor. Your Court deck contains
your knights, domains, events, and everything else. Domain cards
represent parts of Great Britain (in this edition, Britain [meaning
the south-east portion of the island]), Cornwall, South Wales, North
Wales, and the Wastelands) and are used to support Warrior cards.
Every Warrior (a category which includes Knights, Kings, Squires,
Men-at-Arms, and a few other cards) has a cost in Domains - you have
to have that many free Domains to play the Warrior, and at the end of each
turn you have to remove any unsupported Warriors. After you play a Warrior,
you can give him Companions and Lady Companions, which add to his abilities.
Then you can send each Warrior on a Quest, which involves pitting him
against a Quest card in combat. Warriors and Quest cards have three
stats which are used to detrmine combat results (along with dice rolls).
Defeating a Quest allows the Warrior to raise his Valor by a certain
amount, the player to draw a card, or the player to play a Reward card
on the Warrior (of a value up to the Quest's value). Rewards are permanent
bonuses or abilities (temporary ones also exist - Actions). Warriors
can also challenge each other for a Valor point.
The object is to get one knight up to 12 Valor, at which point they
have to defeat Quests to reach the Grail. We didn't get nearly that
far in the demo, so I can't comment any more about the endgame :).
So far I like the game quite a bit. It is on the simple side
compared to Magic or INWO, but there's nothing wrong with that. I doubt
I'll ever buy a whole booster box for it, but I expect I'll buy a moderate
amount of the regular edition and any expansions that might come out,
and play it fairly regularly. It's simpler than a number of other games,
and has a narrower universe and narrower gameplay than some, but it's
still fun. I'd probably peg it as being about the same as Wyvern in terms
of complexity, but I prefer it to Wyvern, which I find to be almost
completely lacking in atmosphere and not too strong in the interesing
gamplay department, either.
I don't know what the ideal number of players is - I would guess 4.
Wing Commander - Mag Force 7
I find this to be a definite improvement on Star of the Guardians,
which I found rather dull. The cards still have a less than exciting
design, but they're better than SotG's (those combat stat icons have
got to go, though). The ship artwork is still overhead views, but
this time they are computer graphics (at least they all are copyrighted
by Origin). Weapons systems cards have pictures of ship diagrams with
the relevant system pointed out - better than you might think. The
manuever, battle damage, nav point, pilot, and luck cards have paintings
on them, which are decent if mostly not spectacular. There are some nice
touches on the cards - every ship is in a squadron, and above the combat
stats at the bottom appear the squadron's name, logo, and motto. The
Kilrathi mottoes are a lot of fun. The Terran mottoes are all (?) in Latin,
so I couldn't understand all of them, but they're a nice touch anyway.
The big difference between this game and all the others on the market
is that the card set is split in two, and each starter contains cards from
only one half (yes, it does say which it is on the box :)). Kilrathi
and Terran cards each have their own back design and their own symbol on
the face of each card. Boosters are mixed, so if you don't run decks of
both sides you'll want to trade cards with people who have the other deck,
as you can't mix them at all (except Nav points, which are just laid on the
table as a board).
Gameplay is fairly simple: each player gets a carrier (a card in every
starter, I believe, although you can always cut the back off of a starter
box, since they're shown there) and puts it in front of him/herself. Five
Nav Point cards are laid in an X pattern in between the ships (all Nav
Points are the same, although they are differentiated by Greek letters).
Ships can move from the carrier to the center or their two near points,
from a near point to the enemy's matching near point or to the center,
and from the center to anywhere.
The heart of the game are the resource points (I don't remember if this
is what they are called, but it doesn't matter). You start with a given
number and if you reach 0, you lose (the other way to lose is for the
enemy to bomb your carrier twice). Every turn your carrier produces
two points, and there are cards that will add more. These points are
used to play all the other cards. You start by playing ships, weapons systems,
and pilots, and putting the latter two on the ships (one of each per ship).
You then launch ships and on later turns move them around. When you
confront enemy fighters, you can attack; during combat, you can play
maneveur and battle damage cards to increase your stats or decrease your
opponents' before combat resolution. There are luck cards which do
various useful things, in battle and otherwise, and secret orders. Only
one of the latter can be used at a time - you place it face down on the table,
and reveal it only when you have met its requirements. For example, you may
have to capture an enemy transport, if one has been played, or have a fighter
visit all five nav points. These orders are not mandatory, but if you
complete them, you get benefits (e.g., making your opponent play with
all his/her cards revealed).
This game is fairly simplistic, but it is after all based on a
simplistic property (don't get me wrong, I love the computer games,
but they're not exactly deep). It seems to capture the spirit of
the original fairly well, and it IS fun. This is another game that
I expect few people will obsess about, which is just as well :). I
bought $25 worth, and I may not buy much more. That's as much as I'd
spend on a decent boardgame (or less, even), and it's definitely good
enough to play as often as I'd play a good boardgame, if not good enough
to play twice a week, including frequent tournaments (which is how
I play Magic when I have time).
If there's a way to play with more than 2 players, I don't
imagine that it's that good. With all the new games that are really
only decent with at least four people, it's a relief to find one
that HAS to be for 2 :).
Super Nova - Heartbreaker
This is something like Stellar Conquest in spirit - you discover
planets, colonize them, build them up, make ships, and go out to
conquer people. You start with one populated planet - although
you can discover a new one (from your hand) each turn, you can't
put population cards on them unless they are Homeworlds, in which
case the specified cards can be placed there immediately (e.g.,
I could play a Terran card on the Terran Homeworld, even if it's
not my starting planet). Other planets must be colonized, which means
sending out ships from your starting planet.
This is a fairly complicated game, so I'm not going to try to
describe the whole thing. There are three basic factors for everything -
Military, Diplomatic, and Economic. These correspond to three types
of "combat," which have different effects (for example, winning an
Economic battle can be better than winning a Military battle, because
in the latter, a defeated ship is destroyed, but in the former, you
keep it [you bought it, essentially]). Planets and ships have base stats,
which are modified by population cards and a whole slew of others.
Planets and ships also have population limits, which limit the number
of those cards that can exist on each one. The way to win the game is
to control planets having a population limit total of at least 13.
The cards have decent artwork, although few cards really knocked me out.
They are well designed - all the important information is easy to read,
and much of it is located at the left and bottom edges, so you can place
modifier cards under planet/ship cards with just those edges sticking out.
Every card says at the top not only what kind it is, but also during
what phase it can be played, which is an excellent idea.
This game shares with SimCity the distinction (among CCGs, anyway) of
being designed to be played from a single deck for all players. Playing
with individual decks would probably not be a good idea, and not because
of the cards and rules that assume that there is a common discard and dead
pile - these could easily be modified. The problem would be that making
killer decks would be far too easy. For example, there is a race called
"Floaters" which does not subtract from population limits - you can put
as many on a planet as you want. Since they have stats just as good
as many other races', there's no reason not to fill a deck with them.
If dueling-deck rules are ever developed for this game, they will
have to include SERIOUS card limits. In normal play, this is not
a problem, so I don't consider it a game flaw.
Super Nova seems to be a multi-player game. I played a two-player
game against the designer, which went rather quickly. The problem
is one shared by INWO and several other games - unlike Magic, they can
be won without doing anything to your opponent, so his/her defenses
don't necessarily matter; if you get ahead, they have to have some
way of interfering with YOU. INWO is actually OK 2-player because
it has lots of ways of interfering in other players' actions. Super
Nova is more like Spellfire (only in this one way!) - if one player
gets significantly ahead, a single opposing player probably can't
stop them, but three or four probably can, so multi-player games
work better.
Super Nova will also probably never be one of the "big" games;
while it has more depth than Quest or Wing Commander, the lack of
a viable individual deck format will limit its popularity as it
does SimCity's, I expect. On the other hand, it will never be
a "money" game, and I expect that with enough people it's a
blast.
Dragon Dice - Guess Who
Better than you probably thought. Better than _I_ thought, although
it was a little hard to tell for sure, since the people running the demo
weren't giving us the complete rules, instead running us through a simplified
version. Because of this, I won't bother describing it in detail, since
I'd probably be wrong anyway :).
Essentially, it's a simple wargame where each unit has its own
individual CRT (you roll for movement, too, actually). You form your
dice into three armies and go through some abstract maneuvers to try to
capture terrain dice. I don't know what part the monsters, Amazons, and
dragons play, as we didn't have any of those dice.
The dice look OK, although some of the symbols are hard to make out.
They don't look as nice as the ones in the ads, since the latter are
computer mock-ups (at least that's what Steve Schend told me at the
Chicago Comicon). TSR gave every GenCon attendee a King's Die, which
allows you to resurrect dead units, or some such thing. Interplay
was giving out Dragonmaster dice, which allow you to control dragons
of the same color (Interplay is doing a Dragon Dice computer game,
naturally, which will include ANOTHER promo die - Dragon Lord [1 of
4]).
I may actually buy one starter and kicker just to play the full
game and see what it's like. It seems cute, and there can't possibly
be vast numbers of rules problems such as those that plagued Blood
Wars (there can't be any timing issues or whatnot because of the
structure of the game).
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Dan Blum to...@mcs.com
"I wouldn't have believed it myself if I hadn't just made it up."
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