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I mentioned earlier that I sold off most of my VTES collection a while back, but I kept a curated "cube" for drafting, plus a bunch of constructed decks. I kept: A Toreador + obfuscate deck, with guns A deck built around Aksinya Daclau: Gangrel + presence, using her ability to bounce bleeds A Tremere beat-and-bleed deck built around Uta Kovacs and Serenading the Kami A wall/rush combat deck built around Massasi, who might be my favorite combat monster A six discipline toolbox built around Saulot An Animalism weenies deck A Samedi zombies deck fueled by obfuscate A Malkavian stealth politics deck
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Jul 28, 2022 01:14
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I Have Inside Me Blood of Kings, Yeah: The Highlander CCG This writeup will be a bit different from VTES or Anachronism. For one thing, I no longer own any of these cards. And while I played avidly for a couple years ba ck in high school, that was back in the 1990's so... yeah. I'll recount what I can remember of the rules and try to highlight the things that made the game stand out, for better or worse. The basic mechanics revolved around attacks and defenses. Attacks hit a specific spot on a 3x3 grid up at the top of the card, and defenses (usually) blocked a 2x2 corner of the same grid, or a 1x3 row on that grid. Think of it like playing a baseball video game: the pitcher tries to aim for a specific place in the strike zone, and the hitter tries to guess a broad area they think the pitch it going to come into. In Highlander, a lot of this came down to luck more than bluffing or reading one's opponent, although certain abilities might make someone favor certain attack or defense patterns and you could use some info from that. Attacks weren't played blind (except Hidden Attacks, which were face down), so you had your own turn to respond to what you saw coming by playing a block. The guessing game was more about deciding what to keep and when to play it, rather than guessing at what was coming at you in the moment. Generally you made one block on your turn, then one attack. You could do other poo poo on your turn, but that was the basic structure. The players would trade turns attacking and blocking, with special stuff mixed in for spice.  If an attack went unblocked, barring some special card reducing damage, the defender was struck for some damage. Players started with... ten??? life, I think, so attacks didn't usually do more than 1 or 2 damage. This made the game short and snappy, and I remember playing plenty of games in under 20 minutes.  But this game had some wild poo poo going on. For example:  Your hand was your life total. So, as you got tagged for damage, your maximum hand size decreased accordingly. This could make for some truly runaway leader poo poo if one player got an early jump on the other. You always drew up to your maximum hand size at the end of your turn, so it was important to have a good mix of things in your deck contruction that you could vent on your turn to keep drawing into fresh attacks and defenses. If you didn't have an attack, you could "Exert" to try to top-deck one. Exertion was done for other reasons too, but in this case you milled the top.... five??? cards of your deck to keep one attack from among them. You didn't want to do it too much because you died if you decked out. Your deck was 60 cards, but you could potentially be drawing 4+ cards per turn if your deck was really humming. Damage didn't typically mill you (see above), but some decks could specialize in attacks that knocked you prone or disarmed you, necessitating exertions to block or attack respectively. You could also Exert to make an attack stronger, thereby forcing your opponent to Exert in order to defend against it. So there was a meta around Exertion and a lot of mechanics used it in some way..jpg) There were unblockable attacks. Yes, that's right: in a game where you have about ten life and your resources were dependent on that, your opponent could just... hit you, given the right card. It's hard to overstate how broken this was and how much it warped deckbuilding around it. It would be like a creature in MTG who is unblockable but who also deals 4+ damage instead of 1 or 2, and who also forces your opponent to discard two cards when they land. There were pre-game cards that started in play. These included characters, weapons, Watchers, or magical tricks. Looking back on it now, it's not unlike MTG's Commander in that you could count on these cards being in play, so you could build your deck around them. The characters, especially, were designed with this in mind. Some pre-game cards could only be won at tournaments, and they were OP as hell. I never ran into any myself because my podunk town didn't have a tournament scene for this game, but I remember reading about them and saying, "this is some bullshit." It is a way to create a runaway leader problem, but in real life! HUZZAH Most of the cards had "Gems" at the bottom which determined deckbuilding restrictions. For example: your Persona (character) has a certain number of gems printed on them in different colors. The number a Persona has determines how many of each you can have in your deck. Some of the game's best cards have multiple gems on them, so they take up more real estate in your deck. It was a weird, interesting, and not entirely intuitive way to do something fresh with deckbuilding. All in all, I remember having fun with it but there's probably more to the mechanics than I ever bothered to do with it. I only ever played with a couple of my buddies and my mom (who didn't give a drat about card games but was a big fan of the Highlander TV show and was a good sport to me in my nerdy youth). The fact that there were dozens of sets made for this thing up until, apparently, 2017 is more proof of the game's depth and potential than any personal experience I can describe. It's probably worth checking out. Resources https://highlandercardgame.weebly.com/ Is the game's official unofficial home, and has links to forums, rules, and card databases http://www.watcherdatabase.tk/Cards.html is a complete database of cards, from the game's first set in 1996 through the most recent sets in 2017(?!?!)
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Jul 28, 2022 02:46
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Rage God, where do I even start? So, back in 1995, anything World of Darkness related was basically a free money machine. Due to the strange alchemy of late stage goths realizing they could be depressed at nerds without being made fun of, and nerds realizing that goth girls would spend time with them if they pretended to be vampires rather than wizards, in the late... Nah, gently caress it. You post here. You know who White Wolf are, and what World of Darkness is. Seeing the success of Magic: the Gathering, and realizing that they’d just sold off the CCG rights to their biggest property, Vampire: the Masquerade, to WotC, White Wolf decided to try and recoup that mistake on their next biggest cash cow, Werewolf: the Apocalypse. Werewolf the RPG has been described, charitably, as Captain-Planet-but-with-Werewolves, and honestly, that’s about as accurate as one is going to get. White Wolf had a very particular philosophy about role playing that occupies one polar axis of the war game/theater game, which, at the time, seemed new and revolutionary. To get into this, we have to delve back into RPG history for a moment. My apologies for the detour, but I promise it’ll make sense in a bit. Old D&D, adapted from Chainmail, was essentially a Rogue-like computer game played with manual computers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxF1osPkplA It was antagonistic and competitive, such that at Gen Con and other conventions one could have actual judged tournaments with measurable statistics and deterministic paths through the adventure being run. It was very much like the War Games from which it was derived: any silly voices or role playing was secondary. It took a while for characters to even get names of their own: rather than “Melf” or “Murlynd”, it was just “Gary’s Character” or “Ernie’s Character”, Now, on the other end of this axis from the Wargamers are the Theatre Kids. Fluffier games like Toon or Teenagers From Outerspace were a framework for improvisational comedy scenes, with some loose rules for resolving conflicts. In comparison to games like Rolemaster or Palladium Fantasy, which were determined to numerically measure and rate every possible aspect of a character, these sorts of games worked narratively, caring more about story quality or comedy value than strategic acumen. Neither style of game is better than the other. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses, though their partisans can be like any niche partisan who will explain in great detail why HO scale is the only proper scale for model trains, and anyone who prefers N isn’t an actual model train fan but a mere poser who doesn’t understand the hobby. White Wolf was firmly in the latter camp. So much so that they mocked people who played their games competitively as playing “Vampions” (after Champions, a crunch heavy superhero RPG), or being Munchkins or Twinks. Unfortunately, this meant that their attention to things like “dice probability” and “game balance” were very much secondary to “this cool fan fiction I wrote about my RPG character”. Games with built in power imbalance between characters like Apocalypse World or Blades in the Dark can be very well done and fun to play, but often White Wolf had a big gap between their reach and grasp, and the developers would be openly hostile towards folks actually working out the non-narrative mechanical aspects of their games, because that was Roll-playing, not Roleplaying. Now, all that said, a lot of card games are competitive things, especially when prizes are at stake. The goal is to win the game. I doubt anyone plays Poker or Bridge for the roleplaying experience of courtly intrigue. French Tarot players are quite disinterested in fortune telling. It’s entirely possible to play Magic without giving a drat who Urza is or whether Yawgmoth is the good guy or the bad guy. Notably in Magic, the lore obsessed player (“Vorthos”) is on a separate axis from the Timmy/Spike/Johnny styles of play. In the Commander format, there’s an entire pregame phase where folks are supposed to discuss the sort of play experience they want to have, and the level of power they wish to play at. But there are no such discussions in Standard or Modern tournaments; the goal is to win as quickly as possible, because there are prizes at stake, and the winner will receive them. You can probably see the problem already. In true White Wolf fashion, there was little thought to how the game would actually play if played as a competitive game, rather than a collaborative storytelling experience, and they actually lament this in “With Fang and Claw: the Rage Strategy Guide”:    Thanks, Justin Achilli! While it is certainly true that one could have Rule Zero conversations about the style of play experience each player wants, that's just not going to happen in a competitive tournament. So, the game itself. There were three main types of cards: Character Cards, Sept Cards, and Combat Cards. Characters were double faced, Sept and Combat were marked as such.   You assembled a pack of Werewolves or Wyrm aligned baddies, sent them to the Hunting Grounds, and killed as much as you could. Victory was achieved by killing a set number of Victory Points worth of enemies in the hunting grounds. Importantly, this means that a player could win even if their entire pack was wiped out. Characters each had a number of characteristics:  Renown is how much a character costs during deck building. A standard renown limit was 20. Werewolves and Wyrm characters cannot be in the same pack, of course. And you cannot have two versions of the same characters in the same pack (i.e. if you have 7 renown Lord Albrect in your pack, you can’t also include the 13 renown King Albrect). Rage and Gnosis determined which cards the character could play. Health, how much damage they could take before dying, and sometimes a box of special abilities and/or flavor text. Most Character cards were double sided, and when a character took equal or above their Rage or Health score, they transformed into Crinos form (“Frenzying”). There were also cards which transformed a character by playing it.   Sept cards represented Pack stuff, like Gifts, Equipment, Rites, Caerns, ally summoning, voting at Moots/Board Meetings, Quests, and, perhaps most importantly, Prey. For those familiar with MTG, Rage basically has a ton of Instants which can be played under various circumstances, as well as enchantments and equipment. What it can look like after a while:  Prey go into the hunting grounds. They are Enemies for werewolves, and Victims for the Wyrm. These are the main guys you’re going to be killing for Victory Points.   Enemies killed by a Wyrm player are worth 0 VP, same with Werewolves killing Victims. Yes, this makes mixed faction games difficult and sometimes feel like solitaire. Unlike many games of the period, players did not alternate turns. Each player moved through their phases simultaneously. Redraw phase -- Discard as you like, and draw both your Sept hand back to 5 cards Regeneration phase -- Each character that regenerates removes the lowest damage combat card from itself, and that card goes back to its owner’s discard pile Resource phase -- play equipment and rites and battlegrounds and events and prey and such Umbra Phase -- If you have a Caern in play, you can shift a wolf into the Umbra if their Gnosis is greater than the Gauntlet of the Caern. Some Prey can only be attacked in the Umbra, and you can also hide characters there to let them regenerate further. Stuff can’t cross the Gauntlet, so if, for example, you have a character call a Moot in the Umbra, it only affects characters in the Umbra, and only characters in the Umbra can vote on it. Moot Phase -- Vote on stuff. Combat Phase -- At the start of Combat, each player designates one character as their Alpha, and sends it to the Hunting Grounds. They take actions in order of Renown, and there’s basically two actions: either attack the other alpha, or attack a prey. There’s other stuff one can do, like issuing a challenge to a non-alpha, binding a spirit into an ally, or destroying a territory, but we’re sticking with the basics here. It’s the sort of thing that’s easier to see in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMsnYzoXQVs And this, unfortunately, is where the game kinda falls apart, because what should be a cool game of bluffing and tactical choices rather quickly turns into a one sided beatdown.    Yeah. Those cards that Justin was complaining about in his little rant up above. The guy just doesn’t understand a tournament mindset, nor the joy that some players derive from pubstomping. It might sound like I hate this game, or have a grudge against it, but that’s not quite it. It’s a game which disappointed me. Back in high school, I was absolutely the kind of person to try roleplaying via ccg. I’d build a themed deck, based around a more difficult strategy, and proceed to get my face stomped in by well tuned decks designed to win. In playing the way that the creator “intended” I was having less and less fun. Style means very little if you’re just pushing cards around impotently then losing. The Internet, though, has done oodles to help with errata, new cards, and rules revisions, so it plays a lot more fairly than it did back in 1995. Why did it fail? Well, for one, it wasn’t Magic. Nothing was. Secondly, White Wolf massively over printed the first couple sets, such that you can still get boxes of Unlimited and The Umbra, 30ish years later, for $15-20 on eBay last I checked. There was basically no way for WW to recoup their investment, later sets like War of the Amazon and Legacy of the Tribes were subsequently underprinted which messed up the game economy even more, and so the game was discontinued. They sold the rights to Five Rings publishing, who claimed that they were going to do some light restructuring and keep the game going, but the resulting product, Rage Across Las Vegas, was 95% incompatible, had a weird roll out schedule, little to no tournament or prize support, and then WotC got a patent on “tapping,” which helped put the nail in the coffin for the first wave of CCGs. FRPG was bought by WotC and the game was quietly discontinued. A fuller history can be found here: http://rageccg.weebly.com/history-part-1.html However, the game, like most WoD games, had a rabid fanbase, who kept the game afloat via fan supplements and rules committee updates. There’ve been more unofficial sets than “real” ones at this point, including “Rage’s Least Wanted” which provided errata for cards like Mangle up above to make the game more balanced. It also has a pretty robust scenes on LackyCCG and Tabletop Simulator as well. Full rules here: http://www.werepenguin.com/rage/rules/ Discord: https://discord.gg/MJUWWCjW4P Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 07:04
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It appears that there is essentially in-line flavor text on Hogling and True Fear? "A hogling (smog elemental) infests the area" "The Garou can seize their opponent with gripping fear" Unless these are rules I don't understand, of course.
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Jul 30, 2022 08:28
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Railing Kill posted:Sweet Highlander writeup Hell yeah, thank you. All I could remember is some folks at the shop briefly showing me the cards and telling me about some tournament rule where your character could actually lose their head and a card from their deck in the process or something like that.
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Jul 30, 2022 08:40
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TheKingslayer posted:Hell yeah, thank you. All I could remember is some folks at the shop briefly showing me the cards and telling me about some tournament rule where your character could actually lose their head and a card from their deck in the process or something like that. There was a Head Shot mechanic. IIRC, there was a Head Shot card that had to meet a few conditions: 1) It had to be played in conjunction with an attack that hit the top row of the hit box 2) The attack had to be made a Power Attack (usually by Exerting an attack, but some attacks couldn't be Exterted and couldn't qualify) 3) The Head Shot itself called for yet another Extertion If the Head Shot went unblocked, that was game over.  The permanent loss of a card from your deck is a separate thing, I think. There were pre-game cards called Quickenings that you typically got from winning tournaments. If you lost, or perhaps lost to a Head Shot specifically, you lost one out of your deck for your opponent to take. It was conceptually fitting, but in practice I could see that being extremely salty. It's one of the few examples of a game which didn't ban (what were essentially) ante cards across the board in the mid-90's like MTG and VTES did. These cards weren't common so it's not like it always came up, but the fact that they only pertained to really important promo cards is worse, IMO. It would be like if Powerbase: Montreal were a loving ante card in VTES tournament play. 
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Jul 30, 2022 13:33
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Oh, and I added that  Rage write-up to the OP. Thanks again, Toph!
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Jul 30, 2022 13:33
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Magnetic North posted:It appears that there is essentially in-line flavor text on Hogling and True Fear? You would be correct, flavor text and rules text are blended. Unlike the somewhat charming and weird rules clarifications of early Magic cards, clearly delineated from the flavor text via italics, early Rage didn't really bother telling you what was narrative and what was rules.   vs.     Note that on Small Town Cop, they have mixed two cards together (".38 Special" and "9mm Semi-Auto Pistol"), while in the art, he is holding a shotgun. so who knows which it is supposed to refer to?   And yes, 9mm is strictly better than .38. The only difference is that 9mm is uncommon, so theoretically you'd have access to fewer 9mms. And Shotgun, the rare, is better than both  In later sets they got a bit better...  ...but sometimes the old natural language slipped in...   ...and many would have "you know what I mean" style wording which could produce fights down the road:  Who are police? Beat Cop and SWAT Officer surely count, but what about FBI Agent or Neighborhood Watch? If Kinfolk Small Town Cop is a player's chosen Alpha, does The General pull him to his side?   Athena is a "Former Government Agent" so does she count as police? And why does a General pull police and not military personnel, anyways? It's clear that the strategic intention of the card is to load up the Hunting Grounds with police victims, and then use them to dogpile the opponent's Alpha, but fitting that efficiently into the rather small box they've designated for rules text on Characters...  Or how about the Senator? Is in "Office" a cheeky way of saying "In the Hunting Grounds" or "In Play"? Does he have to somehow win a Moot to be elected?  All things which could be clarified via proper playtesting or errata, but also symptomatic of White Wolf's tendency to never playtest with people outside their in-group, so that potential problems with wording never really got fixed. It recalls the rather infamous original wording of MTG's Time Vault "Opponent loses next turn"; what they mean is "The player activating this artifact takes another turn after this one" or "Opponent skips their next turn", but what they wrote... As the fan sets have shown, if the game had gone past 1996, a lot of the edges might have been smoothed out and things balanced for better playability, just as MTG quickly got a banned and restricted list, started fixing "mistakes" like the Moxes and Ancestral Recall completely destroying the resource availability mechanics of the game, so that by "Type II" and "Type 1.5" the game played quite differently, and wasn't necessarily just a game of rock/paper/scissors if the players had sufficient money put into their decks. But White Wolf did what White Wolf always did, and instead we get essays in the strategy guide telling you that it's no fun to be a cheese weasel and it's way more fun to play with bad and inefficient cards. Full Spoilers are available here: https://www.ccgtrader.net/games/rage-apocalypse-ccg There's some great old CCG art, including some really nice Richard Kane Ferguson pieces, alongside some really crazy 90s stuff. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 15:51
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That Chorister card's wording is so wild. Not differentiating between flavor text and rules text is bad enough, but to mix the two in one sentence is some next level poo poo. The 90's were so nutty for CCGs.
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Jul 30, 2022 16:21
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Don't forget Past Lives.  These were ultra-rare chase cards, making them quite possibly the first foil card in a CCG. However, White Wolf had the bonehead idea to put exactly one Past Life in each booster box. Unscrupulous LGS owners would crack a box, open boosters until they got a Past Life, fill the box back up with boosters and put it on the counter. When players got wise to this, they refused to buy boosters that weren't from a sealed box, which led to them buying mostly from distributors... which meant that the LGSs got screwed.
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Jul 30, 2022 17:25
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I forgot to mention that On The Edge also put chase cards in its final expansion. There were 2 in each box. Literally in the box - not in the boosters! The idea was that FLGSes could take them out to use as singles, prizes etc. In practice no LGS gave a crap about OnTE by the time it came out and you could generally just dig in the booster box on display and pull them out of the bottom. “Hey these cards were loose in the box, can I have them?” “On The Edge cards? Whatever.”
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Jul 30, 2022 17:33
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Sadly when Five Rings picked up Rage they decided to put it under the Ryan Dancey masterpiece of distribution known as Rolling Thunder which didn't help things.
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Jul 30, 2022 18:00
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Gynovore posted:These were ultra-rare chase cards, making them quite possibly the first foil card in a CCG. Correct! There was a quite interesting and somewhat sad editorial on the subject of price gouging and chase cards in the first issue of the short lived Ventura magazine in July/August 1995 by Ross Rojek, the at-the-time owner of Beyond the Pale in Sacramento CA, and, uh... known for some other stuff:   (Big props to https://ajabahyena.tumblr.com/rageccgmagazines for their extensive collection of Rage CCG history) Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 18:04
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Did the 'multitude of superhero card games' ever happen? I remember a couple but nothing like that.
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Jul 31, 2022 00:02
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So was On The Edge actually any good? I'm willing to buy cheap booster boxes of a dead CCG from the publisher if it was at least somewhat decent, and this way people can find out if Atlas Games is actually still selling it, or just haven't bothered to update the pages for a CCG that died before Y2K. Edit: Also, if we're mentioning CCGs that died, I remember there was one for Aliens Vs Predator (based off the Dark Horse comics, not the 2000's films, thank god), RIFTS, hell, I think we still have a bunch of my dad's Star Trek TNG cards that he had kept in a drawer until he passed away. I was also into Force of Will for awhile, so I may do a writeup on that. It'll be a bit out of date on mechanics, but AFAIK the base rules haven't changed in the past 5 years or so. My wife and I got into it more when it was focused on real-world myths and stories. Randalor fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 00:50
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There also was an Aliens card game from the late 90s based on the movies. The company also made Predator and Terminator games using the same rule set so they could all be played together. I should dig through the bin my dad put all my cards in when I moved out. Packed away with the 5th Age Dragonlance card based rpg TSR put out right before they died.
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Jul 31, 2022 02:09
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I mean, OnTE was enjoyable when I played it casually, but I only ever played it with a few people. The main complaint was that the influence-based victory condition made “goldfishing” too easy (that’s playing while ignoring the other player, named after an old article that said you could do Magic deck testing “against a goldfish floating belly up”), and that the basic strategy was too simple (this was called “Garry’s cat” due to a persistent USENET poster who would write “my cat could do that” in response to strategy posts) Shadows in particular got a lot of hate because it introduced “low-lives”, 0 cost characters with major disadvantages. But in a 2 player game, a low-life played in front of your big puller was an extra turn of their pull, unless the opponent had something with Bulldoze or could somehow attack multiple targets. hyphz fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 03:43
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So at some point Decipher was printing trading cards of random kids? https://www.tcdb.com/ViewSet.cfm/sid/95869/2000-Decipher-Boy-Crazy
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Aug 1, 2022 08:33
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That... can't be real. "Favorite cause: Holocaust"? This looks like material from a cut Tim & Eric bit. Edit: lol https://www.ebay.com/itm/3344654581...%3ABFBMysvmkctg MeinPanzer fucked around with this message at 12:14 on Aug 1, 2022 |
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Aug 1, 2022 12:12
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Wow, doing some reading on this and the facts are coming fast and hard. Apparently Jason Colorado was a chase rare.
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Aug 1, 2022 12:16
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TheKingslayer posted:So at some point Decipher was printing trading cards of random kids? MeinPanzer posted:That... can't be real. "Favorite cause: Holocaust"? I just about sprayed coffee all over my phone screen. Holy poo poo
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Aug 1, 2022 12:48
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Man, that one-two punch of Holocaust-Korn.
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Aug 1, 2022 13:07
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MeinPanzer posted:That... can't be real. "Favorite cause: Holocaust"? But at least he's interested in a girl for her personality and not her looks!
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Aug 1, 2022 13:45
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So this is an actual game, btw, and not just like baseball cards for girls.Wikipedia's entry on this game posted:Gameplay began with a group of participants opening a pack of cards. One individual within the group would decide which of the boys in the pack they liked best, and write this down along with their reasons why. Then the other members of the group would write down which boy they thought would be good for this same individual, and why. The group would then take turns explaining their choices and reasoning. Players who guessed correctly earned a point. Play continued until everyone had a chance to select a boy, and the player with the most points won. The game includes boys from across the United States, from different ethnic backgrounds and hair and eye colors, including disabled boys. Rough timing on the magazine release there. Also, apparently the age range for the boys is 12-22..  Boy Crazy's FAQ section posted:About the Boys We don't want any sickos ruining our game by harassing these prime boys. That's why all members of our adult Boy Crazy search team make sure to respect the privacy of the cutest boys they find in malls and sporting events around the country, photograph, and parade around to be judged like cattle.
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Aug 1, 2022 14:11
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While we think the boys are all cool, we do have to respect their privacy. This is also why we don't use their last names on the site or on the cards.
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 Alright, I'll add this to the OP when I am not phone posting. The extent of sexism in the 1990's/2000's really needs to be preserved for posterity. God drat.
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Aug 1, 2022 15:03
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I got myself a copy of Romance of the Nine Empires, the fake card game made as a tie-in to the movie The Gamers 3: Hands of Fate. The movie plot is itself a big reference to drama surrounding L5R tournaments, and the mechanics are recycled from Legend of the Burning Sands.
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Aug 1, 2022 16:21
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Lol I remember when some buddies and I discovered boy crazy at one of the old discount dead CCGs booths at Gencon. It was all anyone could talk about for like two days.
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Aug 1, 2022 16:52
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Huh, TIL that Boy Crazy was the original Dream Crush, which is actually pretty fun.
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Aug 1, 2022 17:54
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MonsieurChoc posted:I got myself a copy of Romance of the Nine Empires, the fake card game made as a tie-in to the movie The Gamers 3: Hands of Fate. The movie plot is itself a big reference to drama surrounding L5R tournaments, and the mechanics are recycled from Legend of the Burning Sands. Oh, do tell. I was a big L5R fan back in the day. Burning Sands was interesting, too. The dueling rules were fun, I think?
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Aug 1, 2022 22:11
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This is amazing.
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Aug 2, 2022 00:10
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Did anyone else here play Warlord: Saga of the Storm? I used to have a great time with that one. The gameplay and theme was pretty much the gateway drug that got me into D&D
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Aug 2, 2022 04:51
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I played Blood Wars when I was like 14-16, and for some reason I kept picking up sealed decks for years after. I'm 41 now. 
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Aug 2, 2022 14:58
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So I bit the bullet and ordered 1 each of the On The Edge products and... Atlas Games shipped them! I was expecting an email along the lines of "Yeah... we don't actually have X set in stock anymore" but they're all apparently still available. Would people here be interested in unboxing/booster box opening videos when they arrive? They should be showing up this week (shipping was not cheap, but I am a  goon).evobatman posted:I played Blood Wars when I was like 14-16, and for some reason I kept picking up sealed decks for years after. I'm 41 now. I'm intrigued by this game because there seems to be very little information on it, on the other hand, I'm terrified because it's made by TSR.
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Aug 2, 2022 15:15
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Dawgstar posted:Oh, do tell. I was a big L5R fan back in the day. I never played Burning Sands, so I can't really go into details. The cards for Ro9E look neat though.
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Aug 2, 2022 15:18
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Randalor posted:I'm intrigued by this game because there seems to be very little information on it, on the other hand, I'm terrified because it's made by TSR. The mechanics are simple and fun enough for beginner to intermediate play, and our DM ran his campaign in Planescape so it was nice to see cards of all the things we'd heard about, but I'd imagine that any attempt at high level competition play would be extremely unbalanced and exploitable.
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Aug 2, 2022 15:58
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Randalor posted:So I bit the bullet and ordered 1 each of the On The Edge products and... Atlas Games shipped them! I was expecting an email along the lines of "Yeah... we don't actually have X set in stock anymore" but they're all apparently still available. Would people here be interested in unboxing/booster box opening videos when they arrive? They should be showing up this week (shipping was not cheap, but I am a Hell yeah to unboxing dead CCGs! I am honestly surprised they were still live and shipped them. It reminds me of the time my podcast buddies found out, circa 2015 CE, that the original Space Jam website was still live and still claimed to be able to sell you merchandise. None of us took the plunge on
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Aug 2, 2022 17:29
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Railing Kill posted:Hell yeah to unboxing dead CCGs! I am honestly surprised they were still live and shipped them. Atlas Games is 100% live as it's still running active projects at the moment. It's just amazing they still shipped OnTE. Should have grabbed a Lunch Money deck while you were there. And yea, big thumbs up for the unboxing video, that'll be big nostalgia vibes.
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Aug 2, 2022 19:01
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Randalor posted:Would people here be interested in unboxing/booster box opening videos when they arrive? They should be showing up this week (shipping was not cheap, but I am a https://youtu.be/umj0gu5nEGs
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Aug 3, 2022 13:36
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So, to put off gritting my teeth and doing Shadowfist, how about a collectable game without the cards? No, not Dragon Dice, although that could be done here. I'm talking about.. 1999. Magic is in a bad state. "Combo Winter" is in full force and trashing the appeal of the tournament game for many people. But you know the other thing that's big? One-on-one fighting video games! Since Street Fighter 2 in 1991, the field had been building continuously, and although many of the "classic" games were already out by 1999, the field was still in fast development and a little far away from the death of local arcades and the growth of online play which trashed the longetivity of the genre by drowning it in sweat. Attempts to create tabletop versions of the games were common, with the Street Fighter RPG (by White Wolf, no less) and Video Fighter in 1994. But in 1999, James Ernest's Cheapass Games made two independent attempts to capture that market. One of these was the semi-collectable card game (multiple preconstructed, unchangable decks) Brawl. And one of them was Button Men. Why the name? Well, behold a pack of Button Men:  (Usual "dead game, low quality images" disclaimar here) That's what it looks like. Button men were literally buttons - badges. Each button represented a character, and all you needed to play was one of those and a handful of dice. A single pack got you two buttons, enough to start playing right away, and they were non-randomised so you could collect all the characters or just go for your favorites. And you could easily tuck some dice in your pocket, pop on an appropriate button, and anyone at your FLGS or the convention or wherever you went would know you were down for a round or two of Button Men any time - and since a round would last less than 5 minutes, why not? As the game landing with a hard bump proved, there's plenty of reasons why not. For starters, people don't play games like that. They didn't play video fighting games like that and they don't play tabletop games like that. You're not likely to meet someone, play a 3 minute game with them and then leave. And if you're going to hang out with them a bit more, may as well.. play a more involved and fairer game. Button Men did actually have a following for a while, and also had the benefit that it was cheap to make and Cheapass Games was quite happy to license the mechanics, so there were a number of expansion and spin-off sets. There is still some small community around the game, but not enough to make it playable as a "lifestyle game" in the way that video fighting games have classically gone for. The game was reprinted via Kickstarter in 2017 as a board game boxed set with the badges replaced by cards and the dice included in the box, and although it funded and delivered, it disappeared again immediately after that and is now lost in the depths of the 3rd-last product on the Greater Than Games webstore. So how do we play? We'll need dice. As I'm sure you can guess from the numbers, each of those numbers represents a dice. The X gives you a choice of dice. So, hey, let's do this live. Hannah is going to beat up Kublai (that was the game's original tagline - "Beat People Up"). And yes, Kublai is one of the zombie food attendants from Give Me The Brain, also a Cheapass Game. Hannah chooses a d20 as her X dice. Kublai chooses a d6. We start by rolling all our dice. I'm going to list the dice values and dice sizes next to each other, because they're important. Hannah gets 3/8, 6/10, 2/10, 5/10, 8/20. Kublai gets 1/4, 8/8, 3/12, 19/20, 3/6. Kublai has the single lowest roll, a 1, so he goes first. On a player's turn, they must kill one of the opponent's dice if they can, or pass if they can't. If both players pass consecutively, meaning that no more successful attacks can be made, the game is over and we go to final scoring. There are two ways to kill a dice in the basic game: the power attack and the skill attack. The power attack is simple: pick a dice you have, pick an opponent's dice that rolled lower, kill the opponent's dice and reroll yours. The skill attack is (slightly) harder: pick a single dice or set of dice that add up to a value exactly matching an opponent's dice. Kill the opponent's dice, reroll all of yours. At the end of the game, we count score. Dead opponent's dice are worth their size in points; dice of yours that are still alive are worth half their size. Highest score wins. And that's it. You now know all the rules of the Button Men basic set. So. As mentioned, Kublai goes first because of his 1. He uses his 8/8 to declare a Skill Attack against Hannah's 8/20 and kills it, rerolling 2/8. Hannah picked a d20 to be a bit stronger, and it just died in the first round because of a bad roll, giving a 30 point swing to Kublai. Hannah takes off her button, throws her dice against the wall and storms over to the next booth. Well, ok, hopefully not. But I hope you can already see the problem. Button Men is actually a simple enough game that you can do a complete analysis of a single dice condition in a relatively short time, and most are winnable somehow. But as any designer knows, actual probabilities rarely matter, all that matters is perception of probability and control, and Button Men is terrible at that. Yes, on average Hannah's d20 would not have been able to die to Kublai's d8, and although Kublai would probably be able to kill it with his 19/20 he'd have to reroll it as a result. But that didn't happen, and most people are never going to play enough rounds for the true dice curves to come into play, Plus, of course, it's possible that Kublai could kill Hannah's d20 with his 19/20, then reroll.. and get 20/20. Another dice against the wall moment. Anyway. Let's suppose that Hannah's a bit more even tempered that that. She's now got 3/8, 6/10, 2/10, 5/10, dead 20 to Kublai's 1/4, 2/8, 3/12, 19/20, 3/6. Sadly, she can't do anything about that 19/20, but any of Kublai's other dice are up for grabs. Since it's the most valuable dice and she can kill it with a weak roll, she decides to kill the 3/12 with her 3/8, and rerolls.. 3/8. No worse, but not much better. Hannah: 3/8, 6/10, 2/10, 5/10, dead 20. Kublai: 1/4, 2/8, 19/20, 3/6, dead 12. Kublai's 19/20 can still kill everything, but it's a risky reroll. So he decides instead to use a Skill attack with a set, and use the 1/4, 2/8, and 3/6 together summing 6 to kill the 6/10. He rerolls 3/4, 7/8, and 5/6. Hannah: 3/8, 2/10, 5/10, dead 20, 10. Kublai: 3/4, 7/8, 19/20, 5/6, dead 12. Hannah could kill the 3/4 with 3/8, but it's a low value dice, so she decides instead to kill the 7/8 with the combination of 2/10 and 5/10 to get to reroll both d10s. It's a pyrric gesture, since the 19/20 can kill either of them, but it might help. She rerolls 6/10 and 7/10 and has to be held back from smacking the table a second time. Hannah: 3/8, 6/10, 7/10, dead 20, 10. Kublai: 3/4, 19/20, 5/6, dead 12, 8. Kublai's choice is to either kill the 3/8 with the 3/4 or throw the big dice in. Since it's worth 10 points in final score if he keeps it, he decides to go low. He rerolls 4/4. Hannah: 6/10, 7/10, dead 20, 10, 8. Kublai: 4/4, 19/20, 5/6, dead 12, 8. Hannah realises it's all going to come down to whether Kublai holds onto the d20 or not, and so kills the 5/6 with the 6/10, rerolls and gets an 8/10. Phew. It might not be a washout. Hannah: 8/10, 7/10, dead 20, 10, 8. Kublai: 4/4, 19/20, dead 12, 8, 6. Kublai has no choice but to kill the 8/10 with the 19/20. Whatever he rolls, his 4/4 is dead, but he quietly prays to the god of the undead that he doesn't reroll under a 7. Unfortunately, the god of the undead is a traitorous bastard and he rolls a 1/20. Hannah: 7/10, dead 20, 10, 10, 8. Kublai: 4/4, 1/20, dead 12, 8, 6. With a huge grin on her face, Hannah kills the 1/20 with the 7/10. Her grin disappears when she rerolls a 2/10. Hannah: 2/10, dead 20, 10, 10, 8. Kublai: 4/4, dead 20, 12, 8, 6. Kublai kills the 2/10 with the 4/4. It doesn't matter what he rerolls, since with Hannah having no dice left, she can't attack on her turn and has nothing for Kublai to attack, so two passes are guaranteed. Game over. Final scoring: Hannah 20+12+8+6 = 46. Kublai 20+10+10+10+8+2 (for holding the d4) = 60. Kublai wins. How close was this? If Hannah rolled better on her final d10, Kublai couldn't have killed it with 4/4, and she'd have then killed Kublai's 4/4, giving +9 to her and -12 to Kublai. So technically it was a close game. But then again, it came down to what Hannah rolled on that d10. But that's just the basic game. What did the expansions add? Special dice. So many that 90% of the full rulebook describes them, but most buttons have only one of the special types, so you don't need to remember them all. But there's Armor Dice and Assassin Dice and Shadow Dice and Lucky Dice and Trip Dice and Morph Dice and Null Dice and lalala.. almost all of which just make alternative forms of attack, with the notable exception of Poison Dice which are worth negative points. You can still get some of the Button Men sets from Greater Than Games, but the end of development was announced after the second one. There's a Button Men Online, but it's in eternal alpha. If you're the kind of person who can tolerate massive RNG tolerance, who could have gotten on with the original Chaos Reborn, then Button Men is still worth a pop. But unless you've got the dicefeel of an experienced gambler, it'll probably be a bit frustrating.
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Aug 3, 2022 17:30
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Button Men is also the basis for Sailor Moon Crystal Dice Challenge. Yes this game is real, yes Mrs. Randalor owns it and the expansion.
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Aug 3, 2022 20:04
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