Meow! HissssBOOM!

I have been a big fan of The Oatmeal for a while now. His style of humor just seems to mesh with my own in delightful ways. His sense of weird and truth (and weird truthyness) are everything I look for in comedy. And it doesn't hurt that his art is hilariously adorable. He is accurate about dogs, as well as cats and even grammar in a way mere mortals can only dream of being.

I guess you could say I like his work alot.

So when I heard that The Oatmeal was making a GAME on Kickstarter, I was intrigued. When I heard it involved kittens exploding, I pledged immediately. A lot of other people did too. In fact, people threw about 8 MILLION DOLLARS at him for the chance to meet their end via combustible feline.

The Oatmeal and his companions, Elan Lee and Shane Small, also did something that very few Kickstarter projects have achieved (especially one of this size): They delivered on time. They promised to ship in July, they shipped at the end of July and it just so happens that a few days ago I received my pledge. And now I'm here to share that with you.

A small blue box arrived with an adorable kitten and some big white letters on it.

I was mildly confused because it said it was shipped by Blackbox.

This box is blue. Not black. I expect better, dear sirs. I expect better. Luckily it got better. In fact, I received the best packing slip I have gotten in any package ever, and I doubt ever will again.

In fact all of the inserted paper materials have a delightful sense of whimsy about them.

Inside this blue (not black) box were two more boxes: My regular edition of Exploding Kittens and the NSFW edition.

A lot of fuss was made about the fact that a special addition was going to be made to the box, something that would surprise and delight us. At least in my case, they were correct. I could tell you what it is, but I think showing you would be better.

I spent a fair amount of time just opening the lid and giggling. I won't tell you exactly how much time, but I assure you it was inordinate and mildly disturbing.

Inside, of course, is the regular Exploding Kittens deck, a slot for a second deck and a little folded page of rules.

Lifting up the deck shows off the bottom, which has some lovely art of a litter box.

Lets not forget that I also got the NSFW Deck as well. The box is nice, but the deck will be going into that extra slot in the regular box for sure. It doesn't even have any cool art inside, just a plastic insert.

As for the game itself, well, it is not deep. Each player gets some cards, which do stuff and every turn each player can play those cards, then draw a card from the deck. If it is an Exploding Kitten and you don't have a Defuse card, you blow up and are out of the game. Last player standing wins. There are a couple extra rules, but that's the core of the game.

I will end this little unboxing with a selection of my favorite cards, first from the normal deck:

And then from the NSFW deck:

By the way, Smoke Crack With A Baby Owl is my favorite card. Of all time. In any game.

That's all for now! Happy gaming!

Shadows of Brimstone Unboxing

December has been hectic as always so here I am posting at the end of the month, trying to say I made posts monthly in 2014. I'm still 4 days away from the new year, so I think it still counts. Anyway, I do have a purpose for this post beyond just shoring up the numbers. And to that point I just have five words for you:

Wild west Lovecraftian dungeon crawl.

That's a pretty exciting string of words right there. At least three of those words are my favorite things ever. And while I'm not the biggest fan of the western genre, I can appreciate a good gunfight. Moreover, I do enjoy WEIRD west stuff, so what I'm about to show you has me pretty excited.

YEEEEHAW!

That's right, my FLGS got in the retail version of Shadows of Brimstone! Right before Christmas I snatched one up as an early gift to myself. There are actually two base sets for the game, one set in a mine and the other in a swamp. I felt the mine was more western-y, so I got that one, but each set has different classes of character in it and I really want the preacher. I hope they put out a preacher add-on pack someday because I don't really want to pay $60-$85 (depending on where I buy it) for a guy in black frock.

Anyway, here you can see the back of the box with all its pretty pictures:

Opening it up, you get to see the sprues of plastic minis, all wrapped up in their baggies:

The sprue minis are interesting to me because this is Flying Frog Productions' first foray into more hobby-style miniatures. FFP's other games have more traditional board game minis: soft plastic, low detail and pre-assembled. But more on that later...

You can also see the card decks, and below the minis we have the rule books and game sheets:

As you can see there are four classes included, and the back side of each sheet has the gender-swapped version of the same name on the back, except for the Saloon Girl. Her male counterpart is called the Piano Player. But then maybe I'm not so sure...
 

Yep, the Piano Player is totally a woman in drag. Which makes sense. No self-respecting gunfighter is going to take a painted working girl into a monster battle. So she's gotta slap on a fake mustache to get in on the action. Or maybe he's just a really effeminate guy who turns out to be a total hard-ass when the tentacles hit the fan. Either way, I chuckled.

Under the sheets and cards we find bases, one of FFP's famous game soundtracks and dice:

That yellow die is the Peril die and is used to generate the number of monsters that appear in some encounters. Its faces number 3, 3, 4, 4, 5 and 6, so you can see tons of monsters pop out if you're made to roll it more than once.  It's also nice to see an eight-sider in there because those are rare in games that aren't based on D&D.

Lifting up the insert shows us the sheets of tiles and counters:

Punching out these leaves you with something that looks like this:

Yep each of those stacks of counters is a single type of counter, excepting when there were so many I had to make double stacks for the ones they includes ridiculous amounts of. May God have mercy upon your baggie supply.

Speaking of which, those three card decks you saw earlier? That was a lie:

Those decks break down into tons of tiny decks that you use all of to play the game. All of them. You might end up not using a deck simply because you didn't draw the right cards, but the chance still exists that you might need to draw from it, so shuffle all of those cards. Every. Game.

Back to the tiles, all of them are jigsaw ended so they stay together, and double-sided for when you travel through gates to other dimensions. They look very pretty when put together:

I set about assembling the miniatures, which could have been easier. Flying Frog really tried to produce good, multi-part miniatures, but their inexperience shows through. They weren't the worst I've had to put together, but the combination of lack of instructions, poor sprue vent placement and odd piece keys (with sprue vents poorly placed on them) made it slow going. Luckily I had a little help:

"Can I eat that one? I'll eat that one."

Eventually I ended up with these nasty critters:

And the intrepid heroes:

Now these are all nice minis, but they really could have been soft plastic board game minis. The details are already a bit soft and most of them are reasonably simple models that could have been single-piece cast. I know that FFP want's to push this game as a "hobby system" rather than a simple board game, but they ended up with minis that are neither showpiece quality or easy to get playing with right away. It was a nice try but I think they will alienate pure board game players and miniatures gamers will just supply replacement pieces from other companies that are higher quality.

That said, there is a great game in this box. The rulebook is a little scattered but the info is all there, and BoardGameGeek has an extremely useful rules reference sheet to help get you headed in the right direction. It plays well solo, and scales for between 1 and 6 characters, providing you have the other core to expand past four.

It plays as a pretty simple "place next tile and fight the monsters there" exploration game, similar to Warhammer Quest of old. There are 12 or so scenarios with special rules to make each different and a system of experience to have your character progress from game to game. You can even take trips into town for more adventures. With skills, gear, artifacts, mutations and stat increases, each character quickly becomes unique over the course of a few games.

I got to play an extremely short first game, subbing in Mick Francis for the gunslinger so I could have a pretty painted mini.

As you can see, the game takes up a pretty large space...

And after only two rooms, I hit the objective. Don't worry, I still had plenty of monsters to fight.

"All this for only D6 dark stone each?"

All in all, it was a blast, and I imagine longer games would be even more fun. Mick and the unnamed marshal have enough experience to level, so I'm sure I'll be planning another game soon. If you like westerns with monsters and exploration, you won't be disappointed if you pick this up.

Happy gaming!

Relic Knights First Impressions

Recently I went to the first annual Vermont Comic Con. The con itself doesn't warrant a report. It was small, few guests of importance and while there were a lot of great costumes, there were also some dreadful ones too. I'm not complaining. It's the first year and it was bound to be a small show. I just don't think it needs a blog post.

That being said, one of the vendors there, Brap's Magic, had a demo of Relic Knights going and I just happened to be wandering through the gaming area at the time. I didn't see much, but I was instantly hooked.

And, honestly, how could you not be?

Now, I am already a fan of Soda Pop Miniatures' stuff through Super Dungeon Explore. I own the first edition of that and went whole hog on Forgotten King, which I can't wait for. Relic Knights had been on my radar during the Kickstarter but I didn't take the plunge. I totally missed that it came out this summer. Since fortune had placed it in front of me, I decided to take the plunge and bough two faction starters for a little less than 80 bucks.

When I choose factions for games, I generally take a few things into account: looks, playstyle, relative power, etc. I also choose two factions for any game because I anticipate having to either play alone or teach others how to play who will never buy in themselves. I also like to have some variety of choice, since if I hate how one faction plays I have another to fall back on.

My reasons for choosing Cerci Speed Circuit as my main faction was neither deep nor carefully calculated.

Cerci is sort of the "fan service" faction and it has a lot of ladies with big boobs on fast machines or carrying around big wrenches. But most importantly to me, the lady on the cover in the white suit is Marie-Claude, the in-game representation of model, cosplay enthusiast and occasional Soda Pop Girl, Marie-Claude Bourbonnais.

She even has a cosplay costume for the character!

She is rather popular among Soda Pop fans and the company has worked her into their games. I also have the SDE version of her coming for Forgotten King and I'm so excited. Mari-Claude is one of my favorite cosplay ladies so it's great to get her in miniature form.

My second faction choice was more an effort to choose something opposite to the first. Cerci is good, fast, wears revealing clothing, is relatively weak in combat and has a lot of healing. I ended up choosing Black Diamond to counter all that.

Black Diamond are unscrupulous mercenaries, have lots of heavy armor, are slow-ish but have great ranged attacks. They don't heal but they have armor and numbers. While a few of the other BD members bust out the sexy gear, the battle box has none of that. Plus I also ended up with boxes that were green and purple, colors I really like, so maybe that was a subconscious factor.

I've had these things for all of 24 hours, so take anything I say from here on out with a grain of salt. These are my first impressions, so this is kind of like an unboxing rather than a review. That said, I have read the rulebook like 3 times now, so I have a little idea of what's going on.

All in all the battle boxes are great deals. Like most starters, they don't necessarily have the best troops in them but you get pretty close to a minimum starting force and play just fine out of the box if you don't mind playing small games. Both boxes contain exactly 27 points of models and it would only take one more purchase to take it up to the minimum 35 point game size.

The box contains not only models but all of their stat cards, a play mat to track activations, an Esper battle deck (which everyone needs to play), essential game tokens and a rule book. This rule book isn't a page of quickstart rules but the full rulebook minus the fluff. It has REALLY tiny text and there are more than a few typos, but the rules are all there and it seems like a fun game.

The models themselves are good quality resin-plastic. The facial details could be a little sharper, so that might be a challenge if I ever decide to paint them. They were fairly easy to assemble, except for the Cerci Royal Wrecker. Never again. If you get one, my advice is to assemble the torso first, then the legs and attach together after. Mine is missing a piece because I couldn't fit it in after I glued the legs on. Don't repeat my mistakes.

I don't know much about the fluff but the general gist from the book is that a force called the Darkspace Calamity has devoured the universe except for one last galaxy. In this galaxy, there are people called Knights who can manipulate a power called Esper and have companions formed out of pure Esper called Cyphers. These Cyphers greatly augment the Knight's power. The most powerful Knights are Relic Knights, who a have found ancient Esper powered machines to ride into battle. During the Darkspace Calamity, these knights are trying to push back the encroaching darkness, but some are trying to help it or are taking advantage of the chaos.

The game itself plays pretty slick. You have a cadre of models led buy a knight (either relic or questing) and the two sides battle it out over objectives set at the start of the game. The most interesting thing about the game is there are no dice. Each character has a set of actions that are powered by Esper, which is generated by drawing cards from the battle deck. Each card has a primary Esper type, which is worth two points, and a secondary type worth one. You can either pay for an action, which then goes off automatically, or you can't. Some actions, like attacks, your opponent can use actions to defend against.

Players alternate activations in the order they set the game up at the start of the turn, meaning that the battle has a constant flow. There is very little downtime for either player. Movement is fairly unique in that all models have two movements, one before an action and one after. This means there is a lot of maneuvering going on, which helps give more tactical depth to what is generally a skirmish game with very few units.

Scenarios are also generated using the battle deck by flipping over a card for each player. The primary Esper type defines that players primary objective and the secondary type the secondary objective, as outlined in the book for each type. This means that both players will rarely be working toward the same goal and each game will be very different from the last. Games also take up very little space, playing on either a 3'x3' or 4'x4' board depending on game size. That said, you will need some space to line up activation cards and battle decks which are pretty necessary for game play, so don't get rid of those 4'x6' tables yet.

So in summary:

Things I Like

• Marie-Claude!
• Skirmish size
• Diceless
• Anime style
• Tons of scenarios
• Forlorn hope setting without any "grim-darky-ness"
• Starters are a great deal

Things I Don't Like

• Not a ton of fluff available outside of buying the main rulebook.
• Details on minis could be a little sharper.
• Game is highly reliant on tokens/markers with generic numbers on them, necessitating keeping notes. I hate note-keeping in miniatures games.

So obviously more pros than cons and I can't wait to try a few games out. I'm not sure that I will expand my forces out very much beyond the starters, but there are a couple models I think I will have to pick up based on looks alone. And it's hard not to fall into that "must have minimum 35 points" trap.

That's it for my initial thoughts on Relic Knights. Happy gaming!

It's Adventure Time (Card Wars)!

I'm a pretty big fan of Adventure Time. I love the way it spoofs geek culture and find it pretty goddamn hilarious. One of my favorite spoofs is from the fourth season, when Jake and Finn play a game of Card Wars.

Don't know what I'm talking about? Well here's a taste:

As you can see, its pretty much one big send-up of Magic: The Gathering and CCGs in general. Being a gamer, I couldn't help but want to actually play that game, pig and all. So imagine my unbridled glee when I found out Cryptozoic Entertainment was actually making a real life version of Card Wars!

That's right, they didn't just make an Adventure Time card game. They actually made the game the characters play on the show. Obviously the hologram technology in the episode is a long way off, but for bits of cardboard and paper, they did a mighty fine job.

Cryptozoic has produced two double deck sets: Jake & Finn's decks (from the episode); and BMO & Lady Rainicorn's decks. Two themed decks together in a starter is a great deal for 20 bucks. So far, I have only acquired the Jake & Finn set.

It comes with Jake's 40 card Cornfield deck, Finn's 40 card Blue Plains deck, 8 oversized landscape cards (4 for each deck) and a bunch of tokens for damage.

The landscape cards come in sheets paired with 10 tokens or so, which have 1 and 3 marked on either side of them. I will say that the tokens are hard to punch out without ripping, and I find them a bit fiddly. I suggest finding two D10 dice for each player and a handful of small D6s to record creature damage. But, if you don't have that at hand, the counters work just fine.

The object of the game is to use your creatures and spells to reduce your opponent from 25 life to zero, thus becoming the Cool Guy and obtaining all the gloating rights that entitles. Plus, the Cool Guy gets to go first in the next game played, so there's that too. If no one is obviously the coolest, the first player is chosen randomly.

Probably not going first

Each player places their landscape cards touching each other in a row, then matches them up to form lanes. Creatures and buildings are played to these lanes in order to fight, and an undefended lane can be used to damage your opponent.

Each player shuffles and draws 5 cards. The starting player goes first and cannot floop or fight on the first turn. A card is drawn at the start of each turn and then a player has 2 actions to play cards with. There are 3 types of cards: spells, creatures and buildings.

Each card costs 0, 1 or 2 actions, and requires that many of a certain type of landscape to play. Spells are played for their effect and are discarded. Creatures are played directly into lanes and stay in play until they are killed or a player chooses to replace them with another creature from their hand. Buildings are played below a lane and affect that lane with it's abilities, remaining in play until an effect removes them or they are replaced like a creature. Cards can only be played on your own turn.

Some cards have the ability to floop to use abilities. This is basically tapping, like in Magic, so the card is turned sideways and stuff happens. Flooping doesn't cost actions and can be done anytime before or after an action is used. Cards may not floop during combat, so floop wisely beforehand.

Combat is pretty straight forward. Each non-flooped creature attacks one by one in the order you choose. If there is a creature in the attacker's lane, they both do damage to each other. If enough damage is dealt, a creature dies. Attacking an empty lane means you hit your opponent directly. A creature only attacks in its own lane, but cards can be used to move them around before battle to give you a "strateegic advantaage."

Overall, I find the game extremely fun. The rules are simple and straightforward, I love the art and the concept of making a game from a show rather than out of a show is a pretty neat concept to me. I like that I'm taking the role of Finn or Jake rather than waiting for my Finn or Jake card to pop out of my deck. I also like that combat has a spatial element to it, which is a lot easier to grasp than, say, Magic's combat clusterfuck. It also makes your choices of placement very meaningful and adds a good layer of strategy to an otherwise pretty basic game.

I also really like the landscape setup because it keeps the play area minimal. All the action takes place either on the landscape or directly below them. It's hard to find a CCG style game that can be played on a restaurant table or TV tray that doesn't turn into a sprawling mess. The games are also fairly short too, with most lasting less than 20 minutes.

You can also build your own decks. While the release format is 2 complete decks per box, you can mix and match the cards to build unique decks. As long as you don't include more than 3 of any card and have enough of each landscape needed, you can go to town. As the decks include only 1 of certain cards, getting a full playset of every card is a little price ($120) it's still far less than most Magic sets. Still, I'm perfectly happy with the decks as is and find learning to play each one part of the challenge, so I don't think I'll be deck building any time soon.

There are 2 things I don't really like about the game. The first is that the decks included in the Jake & Finn set have a complexity disparity. I'm starting to get the hang of Finn's deck, but it is obviously harder to play than Jake's. Finn's deck plays very much like a blue deck in Magic, with lots of tricks and creatures that are a little sub-par on their own but can be paired with some sneaky effects to get the most out of them. Jake's deck on the other hand, plays much like a red deck, with some direct damage and a bunch of really great attackers, so the learning curve is a lot lower. So, for new players, hand them the cornfields until they have a good grasp on the mechanics.

The second is that there is a major wasted opportunity in the set. You see, one of the pigs has a secret message to be decoded on it, and they included a little sheet of red plastic to decode it with.

This is really exciting at first, because you think you'll find some great secret, a tip or maybe a fun joke. Well I'm going to spoil this right now:

It's an advertisement. For the iOS game. That's it.

Crypytozoic took a fun idea and ruined it with marketing. Instead of having something that might drive sales of future sets by adding something fun for collectors, they chose the most boring route possible and made us all feel like a dumbass for staring through that little red piece of plastic. So yeah, toss that little red plastic card away. I assume the same is true for the BMO/Rainicorn set, but if it isn't I'll let you know.

All that aside, I can't wait to get the second set and start exploring the play styles in there. I'm intrigued by the name "Useless Swamps" for BMO's deck and (as a black deck player in magic) really want to see what kinds of funny cards show up in it.

I really recommend picking up at least one set of this game. It's light, fun, great for younger players and is a good way to get that Magic "fix" without busting out the 1000 card collection to cobble together a decent deck. Plus you get to be the Cool Guy once in a while.

Unless you suck at card games. A lot.