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Is this where the BattleCON players are lurking? Seems to be more active than BGG or Reddit (and I think anything is more active than the official BC forums). Good games to the gencon tournament people.
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Aug 4, 2015 15:27
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OmegaGoo posted:Question: Does Talton know they need a technical writer? Please tell me they know this. Email him and ask? Also you can do it for free on the Lvl99 playtesting forum.  fozzy fosbourne posted:Anyone play Millenium Blades at the con? I'm interested in impressions when the feeding frenzy is over OK, so I played Millenium Blades at Gencon w/ Brad as a moderator and GutterOwl + 3 randoms as opponents. Here is a rundown of how it went: Backstory: I wanted to back this game, but ended up only backing at the 5 dollar level because I was afraid of the game being a bit of a bear in terms of rules, but I wanted the KS exclusives if that weren’t the case. Flavor I am not too clear on this, but the flavor is there is a CCG that has been played for thousands of years called Millenium Blades. Setup: This game requires quite a bit of table space and someone with a pretty good knowledge of the rules. I would almost suggest having a moderator for the first game. It is very frantic during the deckbuilding phase and players will probably have lots of questions. You draft a bunch of “booster packs” and a core set and make a HUGE pile of cards that comprises the store deck. Then choose three promo sets from bronze-silver-gold. There are some other fiddly bits, but they aren’t too important right now. So the game is split up into 2 main phases, deckbuilding and tournaments. You can either start with a pre-release tournament or start with deckbuilding depending on how you want to play, but will still only be three tournament. (Optional) Pre-Release Tournament Deckbuilding Round 1 -> Tournament Round 1 Deckbuilding Round 2 -> Tournament Round 2 Deckbuilding Round 3 (if no Pre-Release) -> Tournament Round 3 (if no Pre-Release) Prerelease: We played with the pre-release variant since we were all new. This gives you a chance to see how your deck works without too many specialized cards in it. A pre-release is like a normal tournament, just with less cards, less points, and no metagame cards. Deckbuilding: So now that you got a feel for how the tournament flows, you can make better decisions regarding buying cards in the deckbuilding phase. There is a lot more to this phase compared to tournaments in my opinion. First of all you need to know what you can/should buy. A deck box represents all the cards in your deck that aren’t represented by actual cards in the game. You can have only one. The expansions have different deck boxes, but starter decks are +8 points for each [symbol] you have face up (max 30). An accessory represents something outside the game, like a hoodie or ring of some sort that can affect the game. You can have two of these. Deck protectors are the starter, it negates an opponent effect on a card. A deck can contain up to 8 cards. These are the cards that you will play the tournament with. A collection is something you build to sell for points at the end of the deckbuilding phase. In the upper left corner is a star value. You collect enough cards that share a symbol (fire, water, scroll, etc) and DO NOT share a number (sequence doesn’t matter) you get a significant amount of points. Metagame are two cards that get revealed in-between the three rounds of deckbuilding. These are usually from what I saw +15 RP (different from VP) There are a lot of ways to modify your collection: Sell aftermarket: Take one of the cards in your collection and sell it for the card’s star rating placing one of your three sell markers on it. Buy aftermarket: Buy a card for an amount of money equal to star value. If there is a sell marker on it, give it back to another player. The sell marker is a very important thing in this game. It stops a dominant player from just completely wrecking everyone’s day on the deckbuilding phase. It also makes you really think about what you should do, and in what order. Buy store: This is like buying random booster packs, you just blind buy based on the cost of the pack and the types of symbols you are digging for. You can do this as much as you want. Fusion store: Discard from the game an amount of cards equal to the type of promo you want to buy. Put a sell token on that particular promo, you are locked out of that promo this round. Trade player: You can just straight up trade with other players. This has to be a 1:1 trade in star level, but you can sweeten the pot with friendship points. These are cards from +1-+3 that allow you to make even trades even when they aren’t so even in reality. Tournament: A tournament consists of taking an action and playing a card, in either order. Cards have Play effects that happen upon playing, score effects that happen if card is faceup at end of tournament, flip effects that happen if you take the action to flip a card, plus some others that I forget. A tournament can be very much multiplayer-solitaire or a bloodbath depending on how people built their decks. There is an ability called clashing where you have to compare star numbers with each other to activate a strong ability for the winner (sometimes even loser). All cards for the most part have two game states: not-flipped or flipped. An opportunity cost for doing a strong action is to flip the card, thus making it useless. This has a consequence of possibly getting you less points with your starter deckbox. Maybe you bought a different deckbox and that is cool? While you are doing all these abilities you are earning RPs. The RPs are ranked at the end and you get VPs based on how well you did against your opponents. VPs increase as the game goes on. Final Thoughts Gameplay: The game has a lot of moving parts, but seems to be no worse than any of Lvl 99’s other stuff. It is incredibly unique. The real time aspect is really awesome, and Brad even said that take-backs are actively discouraged in the rulebook which is awesome. The tournaments are actually deceptively simple. I imagine with a good flowsheet the deckbuilding could become simpler too (there are lots of free prizes and such that might be missed otherwise). I have obviously not covered everything and this post is huge. Art: The art for the game is great Fabio Fontes is really getting better and better with the amount of art he has had to churn out. There are awesome Easter eggs to discover in the art and flavor text. Other: There is an inherent silliness to the game. At one point a janitor came up to us and was asking about the game. At one point he asked if we were in a tournament to which we just had to reply, “well yeah, sortof, in the game that is…” If anyone has any questions myself and GutterOwl (probably) would be happy to answer any questions.
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Aug 4, 2015 16:59
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That sums up MB pretty nicely. I've played about 10 games on the just previous version and the analysis part of deckbuilding is really simple once you've got the cards down, but for first game or two it can be really confusing because there's so much reading. We usually take a minute or so reading everything before starting the timer if there are new players at the table. Prerelease Tournament is kind of a throwaway, it's useful for getting a feel for the game but isn't all that great otherwise since decks are very static/"solved". Game is pretty fun and really silly. Optimizing is tough, and we've seen some pretty nuts combos. Note re: trades: You can even out trades with money at $1 per star, which is useful.
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Aug 4, 2015 17:08
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Post about the decks you made and the kind of comboes you did and things. 
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Aug 4, 2015 17:20
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How well does the game scale up/down in terms of player numbers? How long does it take to play?
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Aug 4, 2015 17:27
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Four player game with all of us playing at as relaxed a pace as you're going to get was often ~2 hours including setup and teardown (both of which take a while because the stack is ginormous per the current rules). Two player game was closer to an hour and a quarter, but because each timed round is 25 minutes (20 minutes + reading cards + making packs) you can't get below that hour and a quarter mark. Tournaments are pretty quick because people know what they want, but some abilities can be a bit fiddly when they require naming cards or otherwise making decisions based on other people's boards. Two player game is odd because collections work differently and there are less cards in play, but still pretty solid. Not really bad, though. Plays well at 3 and 4. Haven't played with 5 yet but the table space gets huge and I suspect tournaments start taking a bit longer than I'd like.
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Aug 4, 2015 17:31
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Andarel posted:Four player game with all of us playing at as relaxed a pace as you're going to get was often ~2 hours including setup and teardown (both of which take a while because the stack is ginormous per the current rules). Two player game was closer to an hour and a quarter, but because each timed round is 25 minutes (20 minutes + reading cards + making packs) you can't get below that hour and a quarter mark. Tournaments are pretty quick because people know what they want, but some abilities can be a bit fiddly when they require naming cards or otherwise making decisions based on other people's boards. That's pretty good, although my group tends to add an excruciating amount of time to almost all games. ... No! I don't have room/time/money for this! 
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Aug 4, 2015 17:36
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AMooseDoesStuff posted:Post about the decks you made and the kind of comboes you did and things. My deck stayed pretty mono red the whole time. I bought a red/dark synergy deckbox, but couldn't find dark stuff I liked. I concentrated on getting swole red cards. I had to concentrate on not becoming a target for GutterOwl actually. My game involved playing cards for RP, then flipping them for more RP, but not so many that my I broke my deckbox bonus (max 30 points). I should have had a sweet trick with an egg and a guy who gains me 40 then loses 40, but that combo was over my head and I had trashed my egg anyway. GutterOwl concentrated on getting a lot of clash cards from a certain booster pack (swords incarnate), that is to say cards that directly challenge other players. Yet another player concentrated on winning the meta because they had knowledge of what it would be before we did.
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Aug 4, 2015 18:10
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Even with a bigger pool I like the red cards because you can take a pile of points (30 or 40 is a nice number) and then burn the card for the future. They're convenient across the board. There are also some fun gold promos that let you do weird things with cards that are really really nice if you're dealing with red. Seems like deck boxes have changed a good bit since I last played. Used to be 5rp/element card, sounds like the current iteration is stronger + more interesting. Anyone in this thread NY area? I know about 5 people around here that play battleCON and am trying to get some sort of organized group together. I've played Gutter Owl and Mad Fnorder, but only at GenCon...
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Aug 4, 2015 18:44
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djfooboo posted:Email him and ask? Also you can do it for free on the Lvl99 playtesting forum. "You can volunteer to do a job for free that someone ought to be paying a professional for" is kind of a lousy pitch to be honest. Even fans of L99's stuff seem to agree that the rules need better technical editing (ask me about having to consult an FAQ on Boardgamegeek to find out that wounded mages in Argent are supposed to return to your pool at the end of the round since the rulebook only mentions healing and banishing being able to get them out of sickbay) so I can't imagine that this guy has just somehow missed that memo, and relying on free fan labor is a less than optimal solution.
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Aug 4, 2015 18:54
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Millennium Blades unfortunately has a lot of wording issues at the moment, though I know Ithry and a few others are going over things and trying to clarify/rework and remove edge cases. They use playtesters to get what they can, but right now nobody's even close to WotC's level of templating. It's unfortunate. For example, Egg cards technically don't copy Play effects. For some reason.
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Aug 4, 2015 18:59
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I swear, most of these problems can be fixed by sitting down, making a glossary of all your terms, then re-applying them consistently so they conform completely to the glossary. It may take a bit of time, but it's not hard.
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Aug 4, 2015 19:05
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I backed Millennium Blades myself but I have to admit that if any game is going to live or die on clarity of rules and interactions between moving parts it's going to be the CCG simulator with a zillion possible cards per game.
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Aug 4, 2015 19:05
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Could someone give me a rundown on all the games that aren't Argent or Battlecon? Like... if they're worth actually buying even at 20 bucks?
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Aug 5, 2015 18:08
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signalnoise posted:Could someone give me a rundown on all the games that aren't Argent or Battlecon? Like... if they're worth actually buying even at 20 bucks? I would say all of Lvl 99's games are try before you buy. Saying that, I have had the best luck with Sellswords. If you ever played Triple Triad on Final Fantasy VIII, imagine a game that took inspiration from that. I enjoy Pixel Tactics, but most my friends aren't too fond of it. It is a little slow to enact you plans with the way turns work. Noir is solid and has a black box edition now. It is primarily a 1v1 deduction game that can be played many different ways. One player is a gumshoe and the other a killer. You manipulate the board in an effort to find out who each other are. 7 Card Slugfest is a speed take-that game so.........
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Aug 5, 2015 18:42
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I would second Sellswords and Pixel Tactics as well. I'm reasonably excited for Exceed but willing to have my hopes dashed upon the rocks.
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Aug 5, 2015 18:59
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gently caress I still need to write that post. Here's the short version: Pixel Tactics: Concept is a card game version of tactics RPG combat, like Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea. You have three ranks of dudes (vanguard/flanks/rearguard), and each unit has different abilities depending on which rank they're in. Amusing concept, but huge and swingy and unbalanced out of the box. Might be saved by the drafting variant from Super Pixel Tactics, which I'm told will be the official tournament variant. Alien Rope Burn and Tollymain know more about it than me. 7 Card Slugfest: Real time card game. Sorta feels like Brad wanted to make a gamier version of Falling or Slamwich. And by gamier I mean "trying to do more math really fast, with needlessly complicated special character abilities." Played it once at Gen Con 14, haven't felt the need to play it again. Sellswords: Did you like Triple Triad from Final Fantasy 8? It's Triple Triad from Final Fantasy 8. [Upcoming] Millennium Blades: Yugioh: the Anime: the Board Game. You are CCG nuts playing the fictional Millennium Blades card game. Plays like Galaxy Trucker crossed with a tableau builder, with a much more relaxed timer and a more interactive resolution phase. Game is split into two phases: Deckbuilding, where you build your tourney deck (tableau), buy/sell/trade cards with the market and other players, and assemble collections for bonus points; and Tournament, where you assemble and manipulate your tableau and try to disrupt your opponents. loving huge table eater like Argent. On my "must buy" list after one game at Gen Con. I will probably never get it to the table ever. Disc Duelers/Power Play/Resistor/NOIR/Master Plan/Exceed: Never played 'em. [Bonus round] Golden Sky Stories: Made in Japan, translated by Star Line Games, sold/distributed by L99. The single most twee, sugary tabletop RPG ever created. You play small animal spirits on the outskirts of a rural Japanese town straight out of Miyazaki, doing good deeds for the human townsfolk and the minor gods of the forest. Will rot the teeth out of your head. Sample adventures include:
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Aug 5, 2015 19:06
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Millenium Blades does horrible unspeakable things to tables. The only game I have that is comparable in terms of table consumption is probably Imperial Settlers where you take 50% of the deck and just kinda fling it at the player boards to watch it consume all available space. To put it simply, Millenium Blades is 7 sheets of 11x17 paper (5 player mats, 1 aftermarket, 1 normal market), plus elbow room and overflow while deckbuilding, plus a place to put your money and friendship and sell tokens if you don't have them on the map. Golden Sky Stories sounds adorable.
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Aug 5, 2015 19:23
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UNRELATED: New info on the upcoming tournament format for BattleCON, according to conversations with Brad.
Brad's logic:
gutterdaughter fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Aug 5, 2015 |
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Aug 5, 2015 19:29
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Andarel posted:Millenium Blades does horrible unspeakable things to tables. The only game I have that is comparable in terms of table consumption is probably Imperial Settlers where you take 50% of the deck and just kinda fling it at the player boards to watch it consume all available space. To put it simply, Millenium Blades is 7 sheets of 11x17 paper (5 player mats, 1 aftermarket, 1 normal market), plus elbow room and overflow while deckbuilding, plus a place to put your money and friendship and sell tokens if you don't have them on the map. I dig games that make me break out a poker table tbh
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Aug 5, 2015 19:36
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Gutter Owl posted:Brad's logic: These all make sense. He was also spitballing ideas about a Devastation Remastered that involved changes to the bases (I remember something about a potential Dash being something like before activating move 1/2, EOB move up to 2, you cannot take more than 2 damage this beat) but that'll have huge repercussions on characters like Byron and Marmelee so idk how likely that is. Either way it sounds like he wanted to do a card-only upgrade kit that slotted into Devastation because he was pretty happy with the production values otherwise (unlike War needing all-new art) and it has more copies in circulation than original war did. Did he mention anything about how he wanted to nerf Arec/Ottavia other than the standard errata to Arec? signalnoise posted:I dig games that make me break out a poker table tbh It's also realtime for extra flailing.
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Aug 5, 2015 19:38
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Andarel posted:Did he mention anything about how he wanted to nerf Arec/Ottavia other than the standard errata to Arec? Just that Arec's current errata isn't enough. He no longer breaks the game over his knee (End of Beat triggers need to be inviolate for certain characters to even work), but he still warps the environment way too much.
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Aug 5, 2015 19:44
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Gutter Owl posted:Just that Arec's current errata isn't enough. He no longer breaks the game over his knee (End of Beat triggers need to be inviolate for certain characters to even work), but he still warps the environment way too much. Yeah, figured as much. Nobody around here really plays Arec - well, not that too many people play BattleCON around here in general - but I suspected that to be the case from what feedback was going around... Was trying to get more chatting in with Brad but between playing all the games and him being pretty wiped by the time our game was queued up and I got a few free minutes it didn't really happen (and the rest was just kind of a sprint to the end). I guess the trick is drop early and hang around strategizing and trying to get an Exceed demo.
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Aug 5, 2015 19:49
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Gutter Owl posted:Arec and Ottavia both need nerf errata. Brad is still working out how to do this and get them reprinted. Out of curiosity (because I haven't really gotten in enough table time with them), what puts these two so far above the curve?
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Aug 5, 2015 21:56
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Arec has strong styles across the board (a good mix with almost universally positive stats and not much awkwardness), really powerful control with the ability to threaten various plays and spaces using his styles that care about position or call out bases and bonus ability to ignore soak because lol. Also he can call out Dash incredibly hard with Hesitation without that much risk, and Manipulative is really annoying to play against. Originally he made a lot of characters' UAs just stop working but now he's simply really annoying and strong across the board. He doesn't have raw power, but his ability to make the opponent randomly stop functioning well is very strong and doesn't really have a good counter for a decent number of characters. Basically, he's stupidly powerful against the characters his tokens shut down and decent against the rest until you learn how to play against him, at which point he's stupidly powerful against the characters his tokens shut down and then maybe-a-tiny-bit-worse-than-decent against his counters. Also his unique base is pretty dumb. Ottavia is similar in that she has really strong call-outs and can always shut down opponent's options with her UA. Her styles are reasonably good but not amazing, but the biggest strength she has is that a lot of the time beats come down to a 50:50 where you need to deal with two options based on speed and stun guard - Ottavia can use her UA to negate half of the 50:50, so she's got good odds of winning any given beat. Unless you call her options and keep her pinned, she has some really good escapes and can do good power beats with Anti-Personnel. Ranged characters always are sorta finicky against people who are fast and mobile, but she's got good tools against tanks (Cover is surprisingly good when your opponent is super slow or has a telegraphed power move that's hard to stop like Cadenza's Clockwork Shot) and Snapback/Cybernetic/Demolition all help her win trades against mid-speed characters while her UA helps her hang with the superfast. Owl's probably got a better sense of it, but I've played a decent amount of Ottavia and a bit of Arec - they're both pretty nuts. Andarel fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Aug 5, 2015 |
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Aug 5, 2015 22:12
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stabbington posted:Out of curiosity (because I haven't really gotten in enough table time with them), what puts these two so far above the curve? Both Arec and Ottavia commit the cardinal sin of BattleCON: They rarely have to make hard decisions. For most reasonable board and hand positions, each player usually has 2-3 viable options, often in some sort of weighted rock paper scissors relationship. For example, let's say I'm playing a game, and for whatever reason I anticipate either a Strike or a Shot. If I Burst, I beat the Strike, but lose to Shot. If I Drive, I can stun out Shot, but trade unfavorably with Strike. I can play Strike to clash Strike, hoping to put you on Shot post-clash, but doing so also tips my hand. In this situation, I have to make a tactical call of some sort. What do I want to achieve if I guess "wrong?" Do I want to minimize damage? Position myself for next turn? Press a life advantage by taking the mediocre trade? And so on. In these situations, both Arec and Ottavia can create win-win scenarios, because they can cover any "bad" decision with their ante. In the above scenario, Ottavia can play Burst, ante 2. If the opponent Strikes, Ottavia wins. If the opponent tries Shot (at -8 priority) Ottavia still wins. And since Ottavia is creating so many win-win scenarios, she can usually have Dash or Cancel available for the few instances she doesn't have a guaranteed win. And this is before factoring in exacerbating factors, like Ottavia's Shooter base, or Arec's rifuckingdiculous styles.
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Aug 5, 2015 23:00
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I don't think Arec has an answer to that 50:50 with his tokens (since it's a pretty simplistic situation) but his styles are so situationally strong it's not a huge deal anyways. Mirrored Drive is always nice in this sort of situation, after all... @Owl/topic in general: How much are people playing online here? I saw a few matches in the old thread but didn't do much more than skim. (We played in LF at the gencon tournament, I had Kehrolyn/Shekhtur/Byron.)
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Aug 5, 2015 23:39
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I'm starting to suspect that Shektur and Eligor are not, in fact, a particularly good matchup for teaching this game. Does anyone have a suggestion for an alternate pair of characters?
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Aug 5, 2015 23:40
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It's a pretty reasonable matchup imo. What issues are you having / is one coming out on top a bunch or being understood more easily? Flight 1 has Pendros who's pretty newbie-friendly, Alexian who is kinda strange but is also pretty newbie friendly, Karin&Jaeger who is a bit trickier and Marmelee who is really hard to figure out for newbies and isn't easy in general. At Gencon I saw a few demo rounds of Karin vs Eligor, but I think Shekhtur is probably a better matchup for teaching. Maybe throw Pendros into the mix? He's good at punching things and does interesting stuff with spaces.
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Aug 5, 2015 23:45
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Pendros's UA is really really complicated until you figure out the timing of it. Shektur is fine. I've had luck with playing Alexian on the other side of teaching matches. Karin's not so bad. Runika is straightforward in her strategy but the math can be intimidating. Lesandra isn't bad, neither is Mikhail.
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Aug 6, 2015 00:20
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Pendros' UA is much simpler if the new player is the one playing Pendros because it's pretty intuitive. Nice thing is that he's also fairly forgiving.
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Aug 6, 2015 00:25
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Andarel posted:@Owl/topic in general: How much are people playing online here? I saw a few matches in the old thread but didn't do much more than skim. We like to run matches every so often, but things have been a bit dry lately. Why? Wanna play? I like modding them, and my games have stopped for the time being.
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Aug 6, 2015 00:27
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Aye, I'm definitely up for some games if other people want. Though I got my revenge on Fnorder for sending me to loser's bracket in round 1 of the tournament so that's the big one out of the way.
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Aug 6, 2015 00:49
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Youuuuuuuuuuuu!!!!  I'm still salty about that ruling! ONE DAY IT IS I WHO WILL REVENGE AT YOU! Mad Fnorder fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Aug 6, 2015 |
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Aug 6, 2015 00:51
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I want to believe it's just ambient rage from the Joal mirror you had just finished and the sweet Byron play.
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Aug 6, 2015 00:55
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Ugh, I threw the Malandrax match before that so hard. Definitely Tilt-o-clock. No feeling is better than a good read in Battlecon. No feeling is worse than thinking of the good read and passing on it.
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Aug 6, 2015 01:03
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Just play Cadenza and pretend you made a good read. It usually works.
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Aug 6, 2015 01:06
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Im also up for a game if there are takers/mods
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Aug 6, 2015 01:27
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I'll take on anyone who wants to fight me.
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Aug 6, 2015 01:41
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ActingPower, you moderator extraordinaire?
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Aug 6, 2015 01:48
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