Star Wars Unlimited Some Thoughts

news, rant, star wars

Last week FFG dropped a teaser trailer (embedded below) on YouTube for a new Star Wars collectible card game (ccg) called Star Wars Unlimited that is coming out in 2024.

And you know what the world needs is more opinion based on the very scarce information that is out there from the over represented demographic that I am part of.

I know nothing about the game play, price model, etc. So what follows is pure speculation and blue sky thinking.

FFG are not strangers to the ccg model (Star Wars Destiny, Keyforge) despite being more known for creating the lcg model and using that.

But there are a few hurdles FFG need to over come to make Star Wars Unlimited a success that isn’t just a flash in the pan.

These are the same hurdles that the Disney Lorcana ccg will also have to overcome when it comes out later this year.

The first hurdle being supply of the initial release. FFG have not had a good record on this front. Grossly underestimating demand, and long delays before getting more produced and into shops will damage the sales and take up of the game. It happened to Star Wars Destiny and also to some extent Keyforge. New players need to be able to easily get their hands on the game after trying it. FFG haven’t had a great record on this front so far.

Next up is the release schedule of the sets/expansions. Another area FFG did not have much success with in the past. But then neither have Plaid Hat Games with Ashes, or Wizkids with Dice Masters. Wizkids and FFG had delays that clashed with the following set. So you ended up with small delays between sets, no time to explore the new stuff. It ended up messy and expensive. With Ashes it was long long delays between sets that helped kill it off.

FFG also need to get the number of sets released in a year right. Which I believe is going to be three. WotC in their attempt to gauge more money from players have been releasing a ridiculous amount to product in a year. For me and my wallet I think FFG have hit the right amount to release.

Organised play (OP) is one area I think FFG have always been weak. But going from the YouTube video (below) it looks like they have learnt a lot from WotC.

I’d like to see more about the prize support. But with pre-releases being a thing now, draft, limited formats. We are in for more of an MtG experience I hope.

I’ve yet to see what the Lorcana plans are for OP. But OP is the life blood of the game that along with the availability will determine if the game has legs (if we assume the game play is good).

Rotation. There has to be rotation. Which sets are legal for the Unlimited version of standard and for how long. Obviously there has to be their eternal format as well where all cards can be played. Plus how will they handle bannings? But I’m sure they will release those details in the following months.

I think if they can solve these issues then we should have a hit on our hands that won’t be more than a flash in the pan.

I have some thoughts on the first look video contents but they are for another day.

Good to be back!

Fenland Gamers, game night, life, the universe, and everything

It’s felt like an age since I last did any board gaming.

With the car woes not yet resolved I was glad I was able to arrange for a lift home from the community centre. It meant I could hop off the college bus on the way home, walk to the community centre, and play some games.

The gaming drought was about to be over.

Jonathan had bought along Letters from Whitechapel. A Game I last played with Jonathan back in 2016. Back then it was a three player game with me taking on the role of the infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper. In that game Jack managed to avoid capture, carry out his crimes, and disappear into the night, never to be caught. In other words I won, Jonathan and Debbie lost.

Last night Dave was to be Jack the Ripper whilst Diego, Jonathan, Charlene, and myself would be the boys in blue trying to stop Jack.

The first game was over during the first night with Jack running out of time to get back to his hideout.

It was a learning game, and refresher. So can we really count it as Dave was learning how to play, and be Jack at the same time?

Our second game went to the third night with Jack being arrested by me. But he had already claimed four victims by this point.

Charlene’s crime board had worked, but sadly it had not been effective enough to save more lives.

But our collective deduction skills had been more mighty than Dave’s tricksy skills.

These were two really fun games.

Good grief I look so old in this photo. When did that happen?
Photo copyright Jonathan Warren

A big thank you to Jonathan for the lift home. Without it I wouldn’t have been able to go.

A brief car woes update. I have wheels again.

Green Flag got the car started again, and found the fault to be the battery. So once at the garage I passed on the info. It was lucky it was the that. I was prepared for something more expensive like an alternator (whatever one of them is).

A big thank you to Jonathan for picking me up and dropping me off at the garage. Without him getting the car woes sorted would have been a lot more eventful, and longer. Mainly because of a flaw in my plan that didn’t foresee not getting a loan car while the work was being done.

The universe conspires against me…

life, the universe, and everything

But at least it let me get my work clothes washed!

Late yesterday morning the washing machine decided enough is enough and threw in the mechanical towel.

The only fortunate thing was the car isn’t due to be fixed until next weekend. So this weeks pay packet has been redirected to buy a new washing machine. Which should arrive sometime Wednesday.

I’m glad I had the new Zelda hotness to play this weekend. It’s been a bit depressing not playing any boardgames. Which looks like being repeated next weekend.

My gaming stats for May are going to be so low.

I have started putting the Tapestry Folded Space insert together. I’m a long way off from completing it and putting it in the box. Basically I’m doing a couple bits a day, letting them dry over night, before doing the next small batch.

Right that’s the “life” update for now.

Early impressions of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom

nintendo, switch, Tears of the Kingdom, video games, Zelda

Friday for many a Switch owner was the much anticipated highlight of the year, with the long awaited release of the latest entry into the Zelda series and sequel to Breathe of the Wild, Zelda Tears of the Kingdom.

I had been hoping that my pre-order with Amazon would arrive the day before. But sadly it did not.

Instead Friday morning I woke to an email saying my pre-order had been dispatched. There was no indication of when in the day it would arrive.

Lunchtime the only clue Amazon were prepared to give me was I’d have my copy of the game by 11pm. It wasn’t even showing as out for delivery.

If I was lucky maybe it’d arrive before I got home.

Next time I checked I had a delivery estimate of between 3pm and 5pm. It would most definitely be waiting for me. I could breathe a sigh of relief.

Mum said the game had arrived in the morning. So much for Amazon’s tracking of your package.

But I had the game that’s the important thing.

After tea it was time to return to Hyrule.

Tears of the Kingdom is beautiful.

I love the art style. It looks amazing on the Switch Lite lcd screen. The soundtrack is pretty awesome too. There is some speech in the game that is reserved for cutscenes. Otherwise it’s little speech bubbles you have to read.

After the initial cutscene and limited interaction that launches the plot for this instalment you are starting up in the clouds on some of the floating land masses.

I was pleasantly surprised by this. I had been expecting to start on the ground and having to wait and open up visiting the floating islands. But instead I’m right up there experiencing the new mechanics in this sequels version of the plateau.

As you gradually get introduced to the new mechanics that power up the artificial arm Link has (yes technically Link is a cyborg now!) you get to start crafting stuff that you need to access bits of the map, reverse time, or pass through solid objects.

I love the crafting. I can’t wait to start trying stuff out. Although I’m not that creative.

Definitely as I’m moving between floating land masses I was getting Bioshock Infinite vibes as I rode along rails.

As I get near to the edge of the floating land masses I start to feel nervous. It’s hard to describe the feeling for sure. But with the long drop mere pixels away my fear of heights is kicking in.

I don’t know why this happens when I play video games. But it does. I first noticed it as a thing back when I was playing Half Life 2 on my Xbox360 up in County Durham.

Maybe it’s an immersion thing that I’m so immersed in the game that it becomes real to my senses.

So you can imagine how I felt having to jump off the floating land mass and sky dive down to ground level on Hyrule.

I did not enjoy that initial having to look down and jump off the edge. But once I was falling the feeling went away.

Although visually Tears of the Kingdom looks just like Breathe of the Wild, it does feel different as you play it.

I’ve only just started to the scratch the surface of what Tears of the Kingdom has to offer. This is such a rich rewarding game I can’t wait to see what treats the game has in store.

Brief car woes update

life, the universe, and everything

The car woes are going to drag on for another week because the garage can’t fit me in on a Saturday until the 20th.

Which means I will have to go board game cold turkey until the car is fixed.

It really is a pain not having that flexibility that a motor vehicle gives you.

I’m even having to use online shopping for the food shop.

In the meantime the cards for that Mindcrank and Duskmantle Guildmage combo deck are slowly arriving in dribs and drabs. Although the main stars of the deck haven’t arrived yet!

The A Game of Thrones Mother of Dragons playmat turned up. But as you can guess the planned gaming session to give it an outing for this Saturday has had to be cancelled until the woes have come to an end.

That’s it for now. Hopefully better news in the next post.

Coronation Gaming

Game day

Friday it had looked like I wouldn’t be able to make the planned days gaming round Diego’s on Monday.

I had shared my car woes on the Messenger group set up to plan the days gaming, and that I was not able to make it.

From that posting Charlene and Jeff both very kindly offered to give me a lift.

Both very generous offers that considering neither lived near me and would have to go out of their way to pick me up, I felt I had to turn down.

If a friend needed my help I’d go out of my way to help them. But ask for help? I can’t. It’s very hard for me to ask for help or to even accept it. Call it a personality flaw. But that’s me.

In the end Jeff direct messaged me saying he’d pick me up at 10am, and I could show him where Diego lived.

I was less of a detour for Jeff than Charlene. So there was a little less guilt accepting the generous offer.

The morning of the bank holiday celebrating our newly crowned sovereign King Charles III Jeff was a little early. Luckily I was ready.

Our days gaming started with a game of Terra Mystica.

I’d never played this before, and like one of my students hadn’t done the homework assigned to us by Diego of watching a how to play video.

Terra Mystica – who was which faction

I enjoyed the game and would like to play it again to explore the options more.

It struck me as very much a game where you have to play to the strength of your faction.

With the dragon lords I was playing I think I could have been a bit more aggressive in my expansionism. I was very aware of my limited power tokens (if that is what they are called). But my issues were during the early stages of being too expanding and running out of power tokens, and also generating enough workers. In the last couple of rounds I had the problem of having lots of power tokens and not nearly enough workers to use the tokens with.

I did spend most of the game trailing far behind on the scoring track, but a late surge of points during the final scoring from the priest tracks got me enough to draw last place with Diego.

Jeff and Ben shared the victory. Apparently there is no tie breaker in this game!

Our next game was Cat in the Box. Which Diego just romped away with the victory. Apart from the last round he was scoring over five points a round. It should be noted that Ben scored zero points the whole game.

Our third and final game of the day was Red Rising.

Ben won this game also. However as a five player game it played a lot quicker than I thought it would.

I had four cards I was holding onto from my initial hand as they allowed me to use them as either any named character or colour during the end scoring. I thought these will be really useful. Did I get any other cards that they could be used with? No. didn’t see any come out either.

I also spent a few rounds trying to get a third red card, which never showed up. And I couldn’t get to the one in one of the columns. That stopped me getting a cool combo that would have netted me over five helium in two turns.

Ben took the victory in this game while I was denied the first loser position by a couple of points. Diego took that honour.

I had a great day gaming with amazingly kind and generous friends.

There was only one way to finish off such a great day. Buying Mum a Chinese take away to celebrate her birthday (which just so happened to be the same day as this one off bank holiday). Yes I left Mum at home looking after the mutts on her birthday.

Car woes, and latest Marvel movie

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The second long weekend of May, aka The Kings Coronation started off so well yesterday with my car not starting. “It’s dead Jim” to paraphrase a famous fictional starship doctor.

Luckily a very kind neighbour was able to give me a lift to work. So I wasn’t late and losing pay (being paid by the hourly that could have hit me hard). Then thanks to a colleague at work upon hearing my car woes I investigated whether there was a college bus I could catch.

It turns out there was and it was free.

My walk home from the centre of town from the Horsefair allowed me to stop in at The Luxe and get a ticket for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (GOG3) on the Saturday.

Sadly the car troubles meant I was not able to attend the Fenland Gamers club night.

Today after getting a couple of magazines to read and a birthday card for Mum I sat down with a vanilla latte and a bag of Galaxy Minstrels to watch the third and final part of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy.

I was a bit apprehensive about the movie as I knew it was a bit darker than the other two entries in the trilogy. Especially with the subject matter it touched upon.

GOG3 can be viewed in a couple of ways. The first as a separate stand alone movie, and the second as part of the three movie story arc. Although in reality it’s three movies, a Christmas special, the Infinity Gauntlet and End Game, plus the dire Thor 4 Love and Thunder.

As a stand alone movie it works, but just. You really do need to have seen the previous entries to the story to get the most from GOG3.

As the final entry I think this is a really great end to the story.

Yes tonally GOG3 is darker than the previous parts. It does have moments of humour, but these are used more sparingly and to greater effect. In a way I’m reminded of when the first Guardians came out. It felt fresh especially with its humour. And now Gunn has done it again. Pulling back on the humour, touching on more adult themes. A stark contrast to the way Marvel movies have been going in recent years.

As always the soundtrack is awesome, great use of source music, and there are one or two scenes that are similar to the previous movies.

I really enjoyed the movie. A couple of moments near the end my eyes nearly leaked. Which I say bravo to Gunn for manipulating me emotionally to that point.

I’d like to say Marvel are back on track. But at the moment GOG3 seems the outlier from the past few years.

Whilst I was enjoying GOG3 the latest three promo packs for Rolling Realms arrived.

If you get all the promo packs currently available for Rolling Realms you have doubled the number of realms that came with the game.

I like to think that Jamey Stegmaier has invented a new roll and write sub genre called the living roll and write. It’s the roll and write version of an lcg. How else do you describe the promo packs for the game? They work just like the packs that lcgs get adding more content.

Right time to read those magazines I bought. Laters.

My 2023 UKGE Plans

UKGE

We are fastly approaching that time of year when the UK board gamers migrate to the Birmingham NEC for the UK Games Expo.

Unlike last year where I went for just the day. This year I am going for all three days of the show. It’ll be more like two and a half days as I always leave about midday on the Sunday.

I’m hoping whilst there I’ll get a chance to catch up with one or two friends, and also meet one or two new people that I only know from social media.

Games wise I have nothing I want to buy particularly.

If there are some of the map packs for Cartographers I’ll pick them up. I’m hoping the Star Realms d10 life counters are on a stand. And I might find myself buying the 5e version of the One Ring.

Accommodation was booked a while back, and it looks like the Saturday night there will be a small contingent of Fenland Gamers staying there. So an opportunity to do some gaming there in the evening.

I just need to prebook my NEC parking in the next week (it works out cheaper) and I’m debating whether to buy my UKGE ticket before.

Usually there is no benefit from doing so. The ticket isn’t cheaper, you still have to queue.

If you are going and interested in meeting up or just saying hi. Leave a comment below and we’ll arrange something. Or just stop me on the show floor. I’ll be the one looking like a rather sad Santa.

It’s been a long week for such a short week!

MtG, MtG Deck Building, still alive

It’s been a couple of days since I last posted, and I know how folks hope that the drivel has finally stopped if I haven’t posted for a day or two. And I so like to disappoint.

Even with a bank holiday on Monday, and turning 55 last Sunday. This shorter week has felt so long. Which I think is due to how hectic it is at work at the moment.

But gaming has been happening. Well last night it did with a second session of the Shadowdark rpg. But there will be a post mortem post about that in a day or so.

The cards needed for the Mindcrank and Duskmantle Guildmage combo deck have started to arrive. There were three envelopes waiting for me when I got home yesterday. With more on the way.

This deck is a different build to the one I had a few years back now. That was fun to play. So I’m expecting this to be just as fun.

I like experimenting with different deck archetypes, and I definitely have my favourites. But the experimentation does help in becoming a better MtG player. Even at a casual level. It allows you to assess the opponents deck, make inferences about possible cards, or type of card, and allow you to adjust your tactics based on that information.

For example if I was up against an elf deck or something that has splashed green, I would do my damn best to disrupt that early ramp from those Llanowar elves.

Those two new poison decks from Card Kingdom have given me the urge to revisit my Atraxa Commander deck and look at what new cards I should be considering to add to it. Although playing Atraxa as a Commander does put a pretty big target on the back.

Tuesday I got an email from Chaos Cards saying that they had the A Game of Thrones Mother of Dragons playmat back in stock. Something I had given up hope of ever owning.

Until that email landed in my inbox the price of the playmat was easily over double retail plus a hefty shipping cost on top. Assuming there was one for sale.

So I didn’t even hesitate in clicking the link and ordering one. Nothing like getting something you really wanted for slightly less than rrp and with free postage.

The playmat should be with me next week. With hopefully enough people willing to play the following Saturday.

So that’s my game related stuff this week during a very very hectic week.

Tetriminos keep falling on my head!

gameboy, nintendo, retro gaming, video games

I was hoping to have written this post earlier, particularly on the release day of the movie.

However I made a decision that I wanted to watch the Tetris movie with Nathan. Which was after the release. That plan fell apart when at Nath’s he had no interest in watching the movie.

My first memories of playing Tetris go all the way back to when it was released on the Atari ST in 1987. I remember playing it whilst down in Brighton and it would have been after I finished Dungeon Master on my heavily upgraded Atari 520STFM (I upgraded the internal drive to 1.44MB, the memory was also increased to 1MB).

But the ST wasn’t the only version I played back then. Two or three times my friends and I played it head to head on the arcade version. All I remember is I got my butt kicked every time.

However Tetris really got it’s teeth into me the next time I owned it.

Like millions of others I got a copy of Tetris when they purchased a Nintendo GameBoy. That was the best bit of business Nintendo ever did. For many all the GameBoy was was a portable Tetris player.

Tetris was one of the games I played a lot of on the GameBoy. Before I eventually moved on to the likes of Zelda Links Awakening, Super Mario Land or Donkey Kong, the most lines I completed before dying was over 111 lines.

Probably as iconic as the game itself was its Type A theme music by Hirokazu Tanaka. Even now as I type this post that tune is playing in my head.

How Tetris ended up on the Nintendo systems at the time is what the Tetris movie is all about. At the time I was oblivious to all those happenings.

It wasn’t until I got a cover mounted extract of the classic book on video game history Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World by David Sheff that I became aware of the surrounding events.

So we are looking at over ten years after the events I was finally reading the story of how Nintendo got their hands on the rights to the console version of Tetris.

I think I’ve owned Tetris on every Nintendo handheld I’ve owned.

But we need a board game link here for this blog to.

Funny enough I think it’s had an impact on board games. If only to give designers the Tetrimino. Think Patch Work, Cottage Garden, Blokus.

Blokus has been a game I’ve wanted to try for a long time. But not one of those “I really got to play this” games. More a “it’d be nice to try this sometime” game.

The only thing this game has in common with Tetris though is the use of tetriminos.

I enjoyed the two player version I played. The games were quick, fun, and puzzley. And I wouldn’t mind a copy to play with Nath. Yes that’s how much I like it. Maybe if I see a copy at UKGE at the start of next month I’ll buy it.

The roll and write wing of my collection has a roll and write based on Tetris called Brikks. Sadly it’s a game that still sits in that pile of shame. I need to rectify that. It promises to be the game that most captures the feel of the video game on the tabletop.

The Tetris movie starring Taron Egerton isn’t the first “movie” about the game there have been one or two documentaries. Probably the most famous of which is the Ecstasy of Order about competitive players of the game. Which if I remember correctly (I watched it years ago) was very captivating, and interesting.

Egerton plays Henk Rogers and his performance is very good. As is the rest of the supporting cast of this movie.

This movie is obviously a dramatisation of the events that took place. Much in the vein of The Social Network (which I love) and Micro Men (which I also love). For me this movie also has a lot in common with biopics such as The Buddy Holly Story, The Doors, Walk the Line, and yes Rocketman!

I think it was Mark Kermode who once said it’s all about how these movies manage those magic moments in the subjects story such when The Doors came up with Light My Fire. Tetris the movie has those moments such as when Rogers is first shown the GameBoy and shows Tetris on it to the engineers.

I love the 8-bit retro look for the brief animated cut aways used through out the movie.

This is a great dramatisation. I really like it. It’s entertaining and manages to appeal to none gamers as well. Who knew the story behind Tetris coming to probably the worlds favourite handheld was so full of drama and intrigue?

A must watch.