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  • Barnestorming #1977.1- Star Wars LCG in Review, Looper, more Oi!

Barnestorming #1977.1- Star Wars LCG in Review, Looper, more Oi!

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Barnestorming #1977.1- Star Wars LCG in Review, Looper, more Oi!
There Will Be Games

 You will believe a Rancor can punch an X-Wing

On the Table

Star Wars LCG reviewed at NHS. It’s good. Could be really good. It feels more complete than the other LCGs have out of the box, but at the same time there’s teases for multiplayer rules and other factions that you’ve got to buy later. I don’t appreciate that, but I suppose it’s better than telling the player that they need to buy extra cores to complete play sets.

I’ve actually been kind of surprised at how much I’ve enjoyed it…and yes, last night I actually did have that “Rancor punching an X-Wing” thing. It was awesome. But not as awesome as a last ditch Imperial attack with Vader’s TIE Advanced. It lets you draw a card and if it’s a unit, you get to use all of its attack icons. Drew the card. It was Vader himself. BOOM. Imperials for the win.

The Sith may be a touch overpowered, I’m not sure. Some of their stuff is just crazy. Like that Rancor, it just destroys units and eats one every turn. He ate Yoda last night.

I’m going to stick with it, I think it’s got legs…and I do like the design quite a lot, a good mix of traditional CCG mechanics with some perversions like a blind bid auction for initiative and that cool Death Star timer.

Playing lots of LOTR LCG, which means I’m continually letting a deck of cards beat me into a pulp. I have everything through the Khazad-Dum block, so I have a large field of cards to play with. Being able to really deckbuild makes a huge difference, and a big part of the fun is making decks with specific purposes for each adventure…and then coordinating two of them. I think it’s one of the best solo options out there, once you…yes…buy more. But buying more also gives you a tremendous amount of variety, between the quests, variables in the quests, fielding different heroes, trying out different sphere combinations, and of course scads of cards. I finally feel like I don’t miss MECCG.

On the Consoles

I’ve barely even turned any of them on in the past couple of weeks. I fired up Halo 4 to see what it would look like on our new LED TV, but that was it.

But I did write a little piece on video game violence over there at NHS.

On IOS

Wow, Hundreds is HUGELY overrated. Cool, minimalist style…boring and completely uninteresting gameplay. Touch a dot, it gets bigger and a number goes up. If it touches anything else while it’s growing, you lose. Your goal is to make all of those numbers add up to 100. Oh, then there’s sawblades. But it’s not really a puzzle game, it’s more about watching and timing growth. I hate it. Played 30 levels, deleted. Wondered why I bothered playing that match of it.

Thrower and I are locked in mortal combat in Battle of the Bulge. He is losing badly.

On the Comics Shelf

Lots of Brubaker Cap, finally knuckled in and bought the third omnibus that has been sitting up at the used book store since Summer. I really like the story I’m in now, with Red Skull, Arnim Zola, and Dr. Faustus trying to take over the US…economically, by crashing the housing market, and politically by getting a radical, puppet candidate. Some of it is surprisingly prescient for 2008, with protests breaking out over big banking and what not.

The new Star Wars comic, called “Star Wars” is pretty good. It’s all classic characters, classic settings. Not sure about setting Leia up to be a ruthless bad ass, but there’s some potential. It’s Brian Wood, so there’s a good writer on board.

I think this week I’m going to read all the Prophet I can, and probably that Garth Ennis Nick Fury series.

On the Screen

Wow, Looper was really good. I thought the first half of it was borderline awesome, the second half sort of runs aground and loses its nerve but for a while there I was thinking we were heading into possible classic status. It falls just short…as long as you don’t really think too hard about the usual time travel peccadilloes, and then it just becomes a shambles.

You could have told me that it was based on some lost Philip K. Dick story and I would believe you. It’s all there. Drugs, memories, 20th century fetishism, invented slang, psychic powers, time travel, paradoxes. There’s some really awesome SF writing in it, and the concept is brilliant. Gordon-Levitt’s makeup in it kind of freaks me out though, they did some subtle work to make him look like that other guy that’s in it (no spoiler). It worked.

I watched Sling Blade for the first time since the 1990s, for some reason I was in the mood to see it. It’s really held up well, a southern story that’s a lot funnier than I remember it. Man, Dwight Yokam is an ass in it.

I have Dredd on rental.  It better be as good as everybody says. I am VERY particular about Dredd. If his voice is not exactly like the pinball machine, it will be a failure in my eyes.

On Spotify

Gonads, Menace, Red Alert, Infa-Riot, 4 Skins, Slaughter & the Dogs, Cock Sparrer, Special Duties. Pretty clear that this is another Oi! week.

New Bowie record in March. WTF.

There Will Be Games
Michael Barnes (He/Him)
Senior Board Game Reviews Editor

Sometime in the early 1980s, MichaelBarnes’ parents thought it would be a good idea to buy him a board game to keep him busy with some friends during one of those high-pressure, “free” timeshare vacations. It turned out to be a terrible idea, because the game was TSR’s Dungeon! - and the rest, as they say, is history. Michael has been involved with writing professionally about games since 2002, when he busked for store credit writing for Boulder Games’ newsletter. He has written for a number of international hobby gaming periodicals and popular Web sites. From 2004-2008, he was the co-owner of Atlanta Game Factory, a brick-and-mortar retail store. He is currently the co-founder of FortressAT.com and Nohighscores.com as well as the Editor-in-Chief of Miniature Market’s Review Corner feature. He is married with two childen and when he’s not playing some kind of game he enjoys stockpiling trivial information about music, comics and film.

Articles by Michael

Michael Barnes
Senior Board Game Reviews Editor

Articles by Michael

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