Wiz-War has returned, and it looks horrible!

Jexik wrote: I think I gotta play this sometime, if for no other reason than to know what the fuss is about. I had heard awhile ago about the inspiration to Richard Garfield. The other game cited is Cosmic Encounter. Interesting that Magic started off two-player.

At this point you'd be pretty hard-pressed to really trace the strings back to Wiz-War and Cosmic, but it's true. It's just that every other game has cribbed the same stuff, usually from Magic, so it's less of a revelation.

Wiz-War gave you the idea of wizards fighting, and crazy multi-spell combos. That's the heart of it, and Magic clarifies by taking away the board and treasures aspect to focus on "fight to 0".

Cosmic gave it the wild game-breaking powers on cards (and reinforced clever combos), and the idea that bringing different stuff to a game made it feel like a unique game every time.

That's about it. Inspirations, cooked up into a totally different thing. All three games are fun on their own merits, but there's no secret shared DNA.

Not Sure wrote:

Jexik wrote: I think I gotta play this sometime, if for no other reason than to know what the fuss is about. I had heard awhile ago about the inspiration to Richard Garfield. The other game cited is Cosmic Encounter. Interesting that Magic started off two-player.

At this point you'd be pretty hard-pressed to really trace the strings back to Wiz-War and Cosmic, but it's true. It's just that every other game has cribbed the same stuff, usually from Magic, so it's less of a revelation.

Wiz-War gave you the idea of wizards fighting, and crazy multi-spell combos. That's the heart of it, and Magic clarifies by taking away the board and treasures aspect to focus on "fight to 0".

Cosmic gave it the wild game-breaking powers on cards (and reinforced clever combos), and the idea that bringing different stuff to a game made it feel like a unique game every time.

That's about it. Inspirations, cooked up into a totally different thing. All three games are fun on their own merits, but there's no secret shared DNA.

Maaaaaan... Did we need your insight here. Thanks for sharing the expertise! I bloody well forgot about all of those damn FFG counter spells. I took 'em out of my "big book of spells." Hell, I probably got the idea from you!

And in doing so, I treated FFG's edition as a "sand box" sort of WW. Playing RAW, it may have been a lesser experience for the WW fanatics. I still adore FFG's handling (w/ options), and still wish the SJG version had spent more time on aesthetics.

Long live Wiz-War!

BTW - I'm getting out of baby jail to attend Adepticon. If anyone wants to throw a fireballl or two, let me know

Yeah, I've said many times that Wiz-War is flexible, and you can do a lot of things without breaking it. Using the parts as a toolkit is basically the point. Old editions shipped with blank cards, just for groups to write their own stuff.

FFG bent it pretty far to make it fit their idea of where games should be at the time, but it still survived, ironically mostly by undoing the things they'd done.

(except "Cracks". That's an absolute win by FFG, and one thing I hope SJG keeps)

Not Sure wrote:
(except "Cracks". That's an absolute win by FFG, and one thing I hope SJG keeps)

Wild. I wouldn't have guessed that's the thing you'd keep. It'll be interesting to see if cracks are addressed in this afternoon's play through.

I'm hoping this version sells a hundred thousand copies so publishers start to realize that small-package, inexpensive games have a place in the market. Games at the $30 level are in birthday gift range, and they get kids into playing. Upsizing everything is eating your seed corn.

$30 is an impulse buy. $90 is an "investment" and you get a whole pile of bullshit expectations included in the package.

I'll mention that the trans-eukaryote community will be pleased, tree people finally get the recognition its deserve.

Sagrilarus wrote: I'm hoping this version sells a hundred thousand copies so publishers start to realize that small-package, inexpensive games have a place in the market. Games at the $30 level are in birthday gift range, and they get kids into playing. Upsizing everything is eating your seed corn.

$30 is an impulse buy. $90 is an "investment" and you get a whole pile of bullshit expectations included in the package.

I'll mention that the trans-eukaryote community will be pleased, tree people finally get the recognition its deserve.

I honestly think everyone has made way too big a deal out of the art. It's honestly really refreshing that this is a full version of a fun game that is only $30. I mean, those are 2005 prices. True, the game has limited appeal to modern gamers, but it's got a lot of appeal to the Steve Jackson core audience, and I think that might actually be the best case for this game. SJG has the distribution to get this game into lots of stores, and if a kid my son's age walks into a game store with birthday money...there's one game he could definitely afford.

Will the art drive him away? Not my kid, but then he's lived in a house with board gamers his whole life.

drewcula wrote:

Not Sure wrote:
(except "Cracks". That's an absolute win by FFG, and one thing I hope SJG keeps)

Wild. I wouldn't have guessed that's the thing you'd keep. It'll be interesting to see if cracks are addressed in this afternoon's play through.

It's not the only thing. FFG made a decent edition, and the game had been out of print for over a decade when they did, so they deserve some credit. I have a lot of lasting frustrations with the 2010-era design choices they rubbed on it, that I think mostly got shown to be somewhat harmful to fun.

But there were occasional flashes of good design insight there, and "Cracks" were definitely one of them. It completely erased an annoying chore from earlier editions, in a way that seems obvious after the fact. Schools was almost there, but the need for all of them to be "balanced" in certain ways made them turn out sort of bland. The second expansion tried to lean more into this, but then it made self-reinforcing schools that only really worked in small-deck games. Too much Magic influence, not enough Wiz-War.

I had forgotten that I did take the advice to remove a bunch of the counter spells. There were way too many of them, resulting in turns just going nowhere.

Yep. That was a great point that I'd also forgotten about. When I said we play with Big Book of Spells, it should be Big Book of Spells and About 1/3 of the Counterspells That FFG Included. Having a few of them is cool, because you as the attacker never know when someone might have an Earthen Wall in hand. Having so many that people constantly have responses to your cool attacks just doesn't work.

San's (Edit: and Sag's!) point is also salient. That price point makes it much more workable in these days of $60 minimum games. Again, I don't agree at all with the "limited appeal to modern gamers" perspective. I think that's just a flat out misperception of the current audience. Trying to mask the other issues with this release by suggesting that they're solely appealing to nostalgia is misguided, IMO. My primary objections had to do with labeling (SJ as "developer) in a very minor way and them tying it to SJG's other misogynist crap in a major way. Everyone getting all hyped about a new version of WW carries the other crap along with it, which is why said crap takes up more than half of the KS campaign page. They're basically just using that nostalgia and excitement about a new version which looks and sounds like the same half-assed approach that SJG takes to most things in order to promote the other stuff.

I played Magic starting with Revised and ending in the late 90’s. I didn’t play Wiz-War until ‘98. Suddenly things like some of the spells and walls made sense in the context of Wiz-War being the origin.

You know, I've never tried curating a single deck with both expansions in the FFG edition. I tried my hand at it today, removing about 85 cards from the deck. Mostly that was a good two-thirds of the counters, as well as a lot of cards that got doubled in the deck and a couple of energy cards just to keep the ratio. We'll see how it goes!

SJG put up a play through yesterday. As someone who has been complaining loudly and repeatedly about the aesthetics of the game, after watching that I have to say… it looks fine.

This is a totally fine version of the game, the worst piece of art is just the largest but the tokens, standees and tiles all look fine. Toss those cards in opaque sleeves and the rest of the contents into another box and I won’t even have to look at the hero piece. The production still screams out for the loving touch of a designer, e.g. Why the fuck is the dryad character tilted at some weird angle on the card backs? but it’ll be fine and very functional for playing.

I don’t agree that a low cost and terrible aesthetic need to be synonymous and I wouldn’t want this game selling a billion copies and delivering that mixed message.

www.youtube.com/live/c8ixpUk2jvw

The first photo on the campaign made it look like very ugly and very underproduced game. It gave the impression that nobody cared about this game, and that one could expect sub par components, shoddy copy, and even worse illustrations.

With the new images, it actually looks pretty good. I'm not a fan of the art style, but it works okay when getting a good view of the standees. Shipping to Europe makes it a no go, but maybe I'll look for it in a shop when it's released.

I would be very happy to see tons of copies of this in their booth as opposed to more Munchkin nonsense.

We kvetched about the Unmatched boards' muddled design and that wound up being a non-issue. The only missed opportunity here is a P&P pledge level that comes with a free ziploc bag.

$30 makes me want to break my moratorium on adding to the collection, though. This is a pretty specific question, but can anybody speak to whether it's worth having both Cave Evil and Wiz-War?