Update of the Rings

Just a quick little update on how my games of the Lord of the Rings LCG are going. As you recall, I'm attempting to play through all the Saga Expansions that make up the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. I'm beginning with "The Hobbit: Over Hill and Under Hill" and goddamn is it hard!

I've played the first scenario four times now, twice with each of the suggested decklists at the back of the booklet inside the box, and I've only come close to defeating the troll brothers once. How the first scenario works is thus: It's divided into three parts. The first part only requires seven progress tokens to complete it, and the encounter deck is lacking in any type of enemies, so this is pretty easy to accomplish. In fact, the first time I attempted it, I breezed past the first part on turn one.

The second part is when the trolls come out to play. Tom, Bert, and William come marching out along with their troll cave, and spell doom for my party. The threat amount they dish out is enough to make you almost lose the game (and engage you, if you haven't made it to 50 threat) if you're not careful, so to mitigate this, I engage one on my turn. The problem with the trolls is that each one imparts a special rule to all of them. One makes it so that the trolls can only be fought by one character (and at armor 2, with 10, 11, and 12 wounds respectively, this isn't easy), one makes it so that no damage can be inflicted on them while in the staging area, and the third won't allow you to play attachment cards on them.

Now, it's still preferable to engage them, because if I don't, they engage me, and that means I draw a card from a deck of "sack" cards. These cards are only bad, as they immobilize various characters (each one's different) for indefinite periods of time. This means they can't do anything until the sack is removed (at which time it's put right back into the sack deck), and these opportunities come infrequently as I've found out.

Needless to say, this is a tough scenario. It only ends once the trolls are defeated or the encounter deck runs out of cards, in which case the sun comes up and the trolls are turned to stone. That's the third part of the scenario... It just ends. So really, the meat is in the middle.

So now I've tried each of the pre-made decks twice; it's time for me to deckbuild. I want to stick with heroes and allies that were present during the age of the Hobbit, and not stray into any LotR-era characters. I've never built a deck in LotRLCG before. I'll post it up where when I do and tell y'all how it went.

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They're taking Carmin to Isengard!

I'm still working on my Age of Sigmar (AoS) stuff for the Las Vegas Open (LVO) in February '17, but I'm a gamer, and like many gamers I'm often swayed by ideas or thoughts that come into my head. Recently I'm tugged towards Middle-Earth.

I work in a games shop, and as a games shop employee I have to be tuned in to what's happening in the gaming world. It seems that within the last year or more Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) has been shaking up its Living Card Game (LCG) line, starting with the acquisition of the Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) property, and continuing on with their separation with Games Workshop (GW), and the ending of Warhammer 40,000 Conquest and the final death of Warhammer Invasion. This got my attention and gave me an opportunity to take a look at my own LCG collection and take inventory to see what's missing, what needs to be acquired, and what needs to go.

At around the same time I've been taking another look at The Hobbit Strategy Battle Game by GW. This is spurred on by a friend's desire to give it another go after he re-watched The Hobbit movies. Of course, I don't want to take away any time spent on painting my AoS stuff, so what's a Lord of the Rings (LotR) nerd to do?

I'm going to give the LotR LCG another shot. I remember it being hilariously difficult to complete the quests when I first gave this game a go when it came out. However, I'm willing to give it another shot, this time taking my time and putting my paltry deck-building skills to the test. I'm going to use the LotR Quest Log (note: you must be logged-in to FFG's community site to view the link) and keep track of my progress and, most importantly, not get frustrated when things go poorly.

All the boxed expansions I own, to say nothing of the monthly
adventure packs!

Anyway, I have a lot to work through, obviously, and I'll make periodic posts about it here as well in case you care about that kind of thing. I'm going to start with the Hobbit expansions, then go on to the Lord of the Rings expansions (which are still ongoing). Then, depending on how I feel, I'll try all those adventure packs that have you play through the "behind-the-scenes" bits of the War of the Ring.

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Warhammer Invasion

With this game and the other LCGs Fantasy Flight does (to say nothing of other non-collectible card games like Illuminati, Dominion, Munchkin series, Chez ____ series, etc.) I will no longer need CCGs like Magic again. In fact, I formally renounce CCGs here!

The goal in Warhammer Invasion (Invasion) is to burn down two of the three sections (or zones) of your opponent's capital city, which is represented by a piece of board game board-like material that sits in front of you. Each section of a capital city can sustain 8 hits, but these hit thresholds can be boosted on a 1 for 1 basis by playing any card you want face down in that section. Not only can these sections be attacked, but you must place your cards down into one of these sections whenever you play cards. By the way these sections are named (from left to top to right): Kingdom, Battlefield, and Quest. Cards are sometimes restricted in terms of which zone they can be played in, some gain bonuses for being played in certain zones, but mostly you just choose to play cards into certain zones to boost defense, or boost the hammers there. Hammers have different effects depending on the zones they're in. In the Battlefield they count as damage icons; in the kingdom they add to the number of resources you get every turn; and in the quest zone they add to the number of cards you draw every turn. Most every card has hammer symbols on it, and the kingdom and quest zones start with 3 hammers on the capital city. In order to play these cards you must pay a number of resources (that you get at the start of every turn per hammer in your kingdom zone) that the card says at the top left of the card, plus any faction symbols underneath that number, that's reduced by the number of cards of that faction in play.

Whew! There's a short summary. I hope it's somewhat succinct, and clear. I love this game. Being a long-time Warhammer fan, I guess I can be considered biased, but my time on the front lines of the Old World also gives me the knowledge with which I can grade a game of this caliber. Invasion feels like you're playing Warhammer. For those of you out there that don't dig miniatures games because you don't like painting, or building, or modelling in general, don't have to be forced into the miniature hobby to get the Warhammer experience. When you unleash the Orc deck, it feels like you have a horde of green skins at your disposal. My favorite example is the dwarf deck, which I've discovered is my favorite in the starter box. The dwarf deck is slow to start, but if you don't deal with them right away they become almost impenetrable. Let's do a faction breakdown 'cause people like that:

Dwarfs - Slow, but tough as nails, with lots of damage negating abilities
Orcs - Lots of troops, and destructive powers. Not as tough as dwarfs, and will likely hurt themselves in addition to other players
Chaos - They have some tough units, and some not-so tough units. They have alot of special abilities that screw with their opponents cards
Empire - They're the chaos of the order alignment. Their special abilities are tricky, but unlike chaos, they effect mostly themselves.

Those are the four factions released so far. They've released a few cards for Dark Elves and High Elves, but nothing that can be built into a deck so far (plus, they haven't released capital cities for either elves). They also have Skaven, but they're neutral cards that can be used with any destruction deck. The armies are ordered into two alignments: Order (Dwarfs, Empire, and High Elves), and Destruction (Orcs, Chaos, and Dark Elves). This is where the game seems most tied to Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR), and why my friends and I jokingly (and lovingly) call Invasion: "Warhammer Online the card game".

So far there's only the starter set with four forty card decks (one for each of the factions), along with 24 neutral cards, a bunch of deck building draft cards, and about eight High Elf, and Dark Elf cards. The deck building draft cards are used for this little sub-game where both players build decks using the draft cards which screw-up the process for the other player. I haven't given these rules a shot yet, but the basic deck building rules are quite free form and simple. No deck may have more than 100 cards and need a minimum of 50; no mixing order and destruction; and no more than three copies of each card.

They're also releasing a battle pack per month. These things contain 20 new cards inside the 40 card pack, and will boost all factions. Like the basic game these are non-collectible and all battle packs of the same kind will contain the same cards. There's also a league kit that's pretty much just a prize kit, as it contains a few prizes, and some loose guidelines on how to run a league.

Overall I'm very excited about this game, and here's why: It's a Warhammer card game that's non-collectible, and is enjoyable and re playable. It feels like I'm playing a game of Warhammer, but it's different than playing a game of Warhammer, and anyone that knows me can testify that I like games that switch up how I play. It lets me explore an aspect of the Warhammer world I've never done before and doesn't require me to buy $40 of booster packs to keep up with the Jones'. The Battle packs are around $12 CDN, and contain 40 cards instead of $5 for 15 random cards in the case of Magic: the Gathering.

Here's some downsides: right now there's some balance issues with Chaos and the Orcs. People perceive the Orcs as too powerful, and Chaos as not powerful enough. My win:loss ratio against Orcs is supporting this statement, but I've had a rough time against Chaos as well. I hope the battle packs will remedy this. Also, the league kit was a bit of a letdown. The prizes are phenomenal, but I was hoping they'd structure it a bit more for me to run the league. I understand the desire to allow the organizer tons of freedom, but I had no direction with that thing. If it weren't for an enthusiastic customer who helped organize it with me, I'd be lost at sea. Thanks Zach!

Also, one aspect that's bothering me, is the fact that there are alot of people that are buying three copies of everything to maximize their decks with three copies of every card. Now, I know this isn't something actively encouraged by FFG, or the designer, nor is this to the same degree as the arms races in CCGs, but still I was hoping an LCG would allow me to escape this kind of thing. If I wanted to be beaten by someone because their deck is min/maxed due to the fact that they spent $36 on battle packs instead of my $12, I'll go back to tapping land and burning mana. We'll see how much of an impact this has on my gaming, but I'm enjoying buying one of everything and playing it as a self-contained game just fine.

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P.S. I also wanted to mention that another downside with the game is cosmetic: The box says 2-4 players. It is most definitely not 2-4 players, and I had a customer buy it on that assumption before I did some investigating inside the rulebook back when this game was released. There are no official, or satisfying fan-made multi player rules out there. FFG has hinted that they want to make multi player rules but they haven't. I tried a 3-person game and it was confusing as hell.