Upcoming Product - Star War Destiny

Given that Gen Con 2016 just happened, we're seeing tons of exciting new game announcements.  One that I'm particularly excited for is Star Wars Destiny.  Just like yesterday's post about RuneWars, this game is being put out by Fantasy Flight Games.  They really have their heads on right over there.

This is going to be a collectable card/dice game.  What does that mean?  Well, we've already seen a bunch of regular FFG fans expressing, let's call it "mild agitation" online.  FFG produces a number of LCGs or Living Card Games.  With an LCG, new expansions come out regularly, but there are no randomized packs.  If a new set comes out, you go down to the shop, spend $15 or so and get a full play set of all the new cards.  Destiny isn't an LCG.  It's a CCG.  If you want a specific card, you'll be buying lots of these...

I don't mind CCGs.  I used to be a big fan of Magic the Gathering about 10-15 years ago.  I finally gave up on that because it's cost prohibitive.  The MtG folks figured out how to completely invalidate the majority of your collection every year or so by maintaining a stranglehold on the tournament scene and dictating that only recent sets are legal for play.  I just don't see FFG doing that.  X-Wing is on Wave 10 right now and every model ever made is still legal for play.

But you want to know more about the game, right?  Well, the game is a duel between 2-3 Characters on each side.  I get the feeling that most battles will feature two Characters per side, but I think that if you pick weaker Characters, you can fit up to three.

The rare and super rare cards each come with a custom die, matched to the card.  The commons and uncommons don't.  As you play, you're able to activate a Character, or whatever card has a die attached to it, to roll dice.  Depending on the outcome of the dice, you'll have different options for that round of the game.  It looks like the dice "reset" back to their cards after being used and also at the end of each round of play.

In the below image, you can see an example of Luke Skywalker with one attached upgrade activating and rolling dice.

In the above example, his core die rolled 3 melee damage and his force training upgrade gave a +2.  What this means is that later in the round, the player can choose to make a melee attack that will deal five damage.

If you're interested, here is a full play through video that really shows off the game.  It's fairly long, but the two players are being given a demo.  I think in a real game situation, it would be quite quick.



I'm excited and can't wait for this.  There are two starter decks that will run $14.99 each, with booster packs costing $2.99.  I expect that I'll see more reviews before the game is released, but I'm anticipating buying into this.  It looks like a really fun game without the ridiculous expense associated with Magic the Gathering.

Upcoming Product - RuneWars

Fantasy Flight Games is getting into the non-board game based tabletop miniatures business.  Consider me extremely interested.  Up until this point, I've predominantly been a Games Workshop customer when it comes to table top gaming.  Lately, I've been dabbling in Privateer Press's offerings, but I'm not sold yet.  Warhammer Fantasy sort of died when GW released Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40k has been slowly suffocating under the weight of its complex and ponderous rule set.

I'd say that Fantasy Flight Games has never really made a table top war game before, but that's not entirely true.  Star Wars Armada and Star Wars X-Wing are both basically table top war games, but with capital ships and star fighters instead of skeletons and knights.

RuneWars appears to be be a skeletons and knights version of Armada or X-Wing.  As you can see below, there are many of the hallmarks you'd expect from an FFG game.  You have lots of unit and upgrade cards, command dials and movement templates.

Let's have a look at some of the components in a little more detail...

Each unit comes with a unit card, showing the stats and normal attacks.  These stats show melee and ranged attack dice as well as any abilities the unit might have.  You can see in the below image that the Reanimate (Skeleton) Archers roll both red and blue dice when making a ranged attack, but only roll a single red when making a melee attack.  Assuming this game is like X-Wing and Armada, the color of the die determines the likelihood of a given outcome.  As an example, in Armada, the black dice tend to deal a lot of damage, but can only be used at short range.  I'm assuming we'll see a similar mechanic with the different dice colors.

Another similarity between Armada, X-Wing and RuneWars is the use of command dials to determine your units actions.  Presumably, at the start of each round, you'll pick your units' actions on the corresponding command dials.  The left command dial is your unit's action for the round.  The right dial is a modifier.  Each action has a related number.  This is the initiative number.  As you can see in the image to the left, the Reanimate Archers have a number of optional actions.  They have relatively high initiative numbers for their forward movement actions, while the knights have lower numbers.  This does a good job of representing that skeletons are slow and shambling while knights are pretty good at a forced march.

BUT...  a miniatures game is nothing if the miniatures are garbage.  How do these stack up to, say a Games Workshop offering?  Sure, we have lots of pretty pictures...

...but it's hard to get a feel for actual model quality when all you have to go on are studio photos.  Well, we're in luck.  The leader of the undead faction appears to be Ardus Ix'Erebus.  I know this because he's a bad guy character in Descent 2e: Journeys in the Dark, a board game that is set in the same shared univers...  the world of Terrinoth.  The sculpt looks identical to the one in the pictures above, so its very reasonable to assume that the new RuneWars miniatures will be the same scale and aesthetic as the newer Descent ones.  Given this assumption, I took a photo of some recent Descent minis alongside Captain PointyFinger of the Soul Drinkers Chapter.

As you can see, the scale is similar to a standard Space Marine.  Some of the models are taller and some are shorter.  This is nice to see, given that an 8' tall Space Marine is the same height as a 6' tall Guardsman in the 40k line.  The details is pretty solid too.

All in all, I'm very excited about this upcoming game.  It's due to release sometime in the first quarter of 2017, so we have potentially six to eight months of waiting ahead of us.  I really hate that this hobby involves so much waiting for new product to come out, but I guarantee that you'll be reading a review a day or two after release happens.

Ugh...

Between work, allergies, not sleeping and trips to visit nearby family, I feel like I'm barely functioning.  I got out my paint stuff last night in an effort to knock out the detail work on the Skorne starter, but nothing happened.  I just sat there and stared at the models.  I ended up going to bed super early.  I'm feeling a little better this morning, but I think I need a full weekend of not doing anything and sleeping.

I will be posting soon about the upcoming Star Wars Destiny game and how it has elements of points based deck building as well as traditional deck building.  Oh yeah, it's a card/dice game.  Looks cool.

I'm also hoping to pick up Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition over the weekend.

My allergies...

...are killing me.  More to come tomorrow.

Skorne Starter Set about 90% Done

I sat down last night and crushed out some more painting.  This is a pretty simple scheme, but looks pretty good to me considering I have about 5 total hours invested in what you see below.

These are probably table standard at this point, but I have a lot more work to do on them in terms of detailing.  The bases may or may not need another coat of gloss.  I'm not sure.  The gloss is still wet right now, so the whitish pooling around the cracks will dry clear but very shiny and wet looking.  The goal is to make them look like they're trudging through a sort of groos swampland.

Skorne Titan Gladiator - Work in Progress Painting

I got a little bit of time to sit down and do some painting.  I'm not done yet, but it's in a pretty good shape.  I mainly need to go through and clean up the writing on the banner, the tusks and toes and all the ropes holding the armour in place.  I need to wait for the model to fully dry before I continue to work on it.

The gold armour is just a heav drybrush of Leadbelcher with a layer of Gryphonne Sepia over top.  The skin is basic grey and needs a bit of a drybrush.  I'll be dry brushing a lighter grey on top of the skin.  I am pretty happy with the base.  The whitish bits will dry clear (hopefully) and it'll just look like a really glossy, wet stone surface.  I'll probably need to put down more gloss to make it even thicker.

More to come!

Skorne Starter Set Primed + Cool Gold Painting

Priming has occurred!  The Skorne Starter Set/Battlegroup is based and primed.  My intent is to get at least one full model painted before Friday.  I just haven't had nearly the same amount of time as I used to for painting.

I found a cool way to paint the gold that I really like the look of.  I found a post on the Spikey Bits page.  You basically prime a model black, dry brush Leadbelcher, dry brush a bright silver and then lay down 2+ coats of a sepia wash.  The more you put down, the deeper the gold coloration.  The below image is two coats of wash.  I'm pretty excited to try this out.

Skorne Basing

Today, the skies opened up and drowned the world in rain.  This means that I wasn't able to do any much needed priming.  I did get the basing done.  My plan is to drybrush the cork with greens and blues and then paint the rocks grey.  I'll then gloss over the cork to hopefully make it look like swampy sort of look.  I'm not sure if it'll work, but it's worth a shot.

I particularly like the posing on the Warlock.  He really looks like standing on the high ground and flailing his whips around.

I should have more Skorne models showing up from eBay at some point either today or tomorrow.  I found the old Mk2 Starter, a set of tokens and one of the three option Titan kits for $40.  I'll be using them to expand this army pretty quickly.  I really want to use two Titans.

Skorne Color Scheme

I'm definitely going to start paint the Skorne models I bought as my next project.  I'm not sure what color scheme to go with.  Here are a couple of ideas.  I'm a big fan of the first pic.

Photo Filters

I found an app on my iPhone that adds crazy filters to photos.  Pretty cool looking actually.  This isn't directly hobby related, but I had some fun...

This is the original, followed by some filters...

And a couple more.  It's pretty cool to see things I painted turned into a sort of cartoony image.