My current CCg/LCG obsessions

Jack Hooligan wrote:

True, but you only have what, 10-15 card choices? Not hard to build a deck with such limited options. Plus, it's the same deck everyone else is building so more of a race than anything else.

yeah, 12 card choices but almost UNLIMITED ways to build one deck with those 12 card choices. And the skills that get tapped to be good at that game are deck building skills. Do you flood your deck with silver or do you try and get the good abilities and powers in there?

People that are good at deck building can take a quick look at any game of Dominion and know pretty quickly which way to go.

Guys like me buy a bunch of ADVENTURER cards and lose to their frickin' sister.

I hate HATE that game.

My friends who are amazing at it are amazing deck builders from days long gone.


I think Dominion is a game that appeals to people who love deck building (and many other people too). but Dominion will be HATED by people who don't like or weren't good at deckbuilding (me)

What about people who never actually got involved in a CCG in their life? That's my case, and I love Dominion.

Barney, I'm not sure how Dominion is really that much different from deciding what to build in a game like Puerto Rico. The reason the game has been successful is that it's essentially taken that concept of deck-building and turned it into a Euro-game. I don't mean that in a bad way, but it's not that much different from numerous other Euro-games. The idea of buying different items that give you different effects is a pretty standard Euro mechanic. It's used in tons of Euros, like Puerto Rico, Race for the Galaxy, Dungeon Lords, Endeavor. The list goes on.

It looks like Summoner Wars is also good for people who want to collect a little, but would rather not have to build decks.

yeah I love Summoner Wars and have the Guild Dwarves vs. Cave Goblins starter, but it doesn't really play like a CCG. My favorite part of a CCG is stringing together card combos and knowing/waiting for the right time to play a card. Summoner Wars is more about tactical positioning. Great game, but not really a CCG in my mind.

Where's Aarontu to sell me on WARS?

WARS is awesome! I don't have time to post much right now, but I'll be back later tonight.

Aarontu wrote:

WARS is awesome! I don't have time to post much right now, but I'll be back later tonight.

The suspense is going to KILL me!

Jack Hooligan wrote:

Big League.

There are several outstanding game stores. Being the town with the largest University probably helps.

Texas is the heart of the Warhammer Indy tournament scene and Austin is right in the middle. There are 40k/Fantasy events almost weekly. And there's constantly been a Blood Bowl league going on since about '01.

More to your liking, there are national/world CCG events held here from time to time, on top of the weekly tourneys.

There are at least four yahoo/meet-up groups I'm aware of that organize regular boardgame events.

All this, and I play games in my garage with friends. I actually went to a Boards and Brews meet-up and it was really cool. But they usually meet during the week, and living about 20 mins south of Austin and having a 3yr old (with another in Aug), I play with other guys in a like situation down in Kyle on the Friday nights I'm not at a show or something.

Wow, that's a lot of gaming! I don't do any minis gaming these days, but I'd love to get back into Blood Bowl, hunting down a Necromunda group would be awesome, too.

I've never played a CCG outside a circle of friends, so any kind of organized play sounds kind of intimidating.

In the end I'm sure I'll find the rigors of academia to be quite time consuming and I won't be able to fit in all the gaming I want.

I've been eyeing Warhammer: Invasion since it was announced. I keep thinking I should buy some before the first wave expansions get hard to find, but I haven't had the extra cash during any of my infrequent C/LCG cravings.

Also, I wish more people did Skeletor-style Guide's for games. If anyone wants to write a guide to the expansions for this game, how they affect play, and which are the best in their opinion then I for one would like to read it.

Never got into CCG's. It always seemed like a huge waste of money. I had a buddy from Worcestor that paid over 200 bucks for a Magic card called black lotus. I was dumbfounded. I played MTG a few times with him and his buddies; they had loads of "house" card lying around, but I never bought any of my own.

That all changed with FFG's advent of the LCG. Right off the bat they changed the format of the very two CCG's that I had had the most interest in and made them more accessible. They were no-brainer purchases for me. (bought a few as gifts too. Makes a good present, and it's a great way to con people into getting into the game.) I have all three of their core sets, and almost all the expansion packs for AGOT and Cthulhu, but I haven't gotten around to playing Warhammer yet. I've been playing the shit out of both of them lately too. One of my most frequent gaming pals live around the corner from me, so it's easy to get a quick few games of either in when we can't find other players for something else.

Of the two, I'd recommend AGOT more. It's waay more thematic, and the mechanics really work with the theme as well. If you're a fan of the books you can't go wrong and the core set has enought diversity that it can keep you occupied for a long ass time without expanding or doing any more deck building than FFG's already done for you. The new format in which they're releasing the expansion packs is even more consumer friendly, especially for tournament or league players.

What is it about the gameplay of AGOT that you enjoy jay?

Mad Dog wrote:

Also, I wish more people did Skeletor-style Guide's for games. If anyone wants to write a guide to the expansions for this game, how they affect play, and which are the best in their opinion then I for one would like to read it.

Seconded.
I got the base set a couple of weeks ago, and am liking it a lot. I decided to get two expansion packs - and ended up searching for and trudging through spoilers to figure out which two to get. It became a matter of counting how many cards in each set I'm probably going to play with.

The 1st cycle has now been completely released, so it's a great time for someone to establish WI Buyers Guide or some such....

I really like the CoC LCG, but haven't tried the other two yet. Warhammer seems very comat driven, so I was curious how it differed from MTG.

Another vote for Warhammer Invasion. Has gotten a fair amount of play over the last 6 months.

I went through the CCG obsession just last year, when I was clearing some of my old stuff out of my parents' house and found a box with my old cards in it. I had a nice nostalgia trip going through them and then I remembered that one reason I like CCGs so much is that they offer an insane amount of variety and depth in play. I had cards from crappy CCGs like Overpower, Star Trek, Wyvern, and Sim City.

I got really into Star Wars CCG for a little while and even bought a few cards online for cheap for my 'scum' DS deck and 'Massassi Base Operations' LS deck. I then build a couple 40 card decks themed around Hoth that I could play with someone who wasn't super into the game (I played with it once with my brother) . I then somehow learned about WARS TCG and bought two booster boxes and all 6 preconstructed starters for $20, a deal I believe is still going on at some online store.

WARS is awesome. Decipher learned some things about CCG mechanics from designing SWCCG, and WARS has some definite improvements. One drawback is (of course) that it's not Star Wars. But on the plus side, the problem of super rare mains that you NEED in order to have a good deck is gone. There are characters with proper names, but they usually only have power 1 and are not the type of card you want to make up a large part of your deck; the more common units usually represent entire squads and are more powerful in battle. The card sets and gameplay is similar to the early sets of SWCCG, but with some of the more interesting things from the later sets (like 'tutors', multiple battle destinies, the ability to 'stack the deck', and weapons that are actually good).

One negative point about SWCCG is that it has a very large set of rules, covering a wide range of obscure situations, mandatory planetary rules/layouts, specific card actions, Jedi tests, Sabacc, etc. The rules in WARS are much more streamlined. For example, there are no specific rules for docking bay transit; docking bay rules are simplified and stated right in the docking bay location text. All vehicles and ships are assumed to be piloted, and weapons' abilities are used like interrupts instead of having their own set of rules.

WARS is better than SWCCG for people who want to either draft, or just mix and match weird combos, because it has 5 factions that all feel different, and you can use any cards in a single deck that you want. A card from a faction required you to have one to three of that faction's locations on the board in order to play it, to prevent people from playing "5 color" decks without consequences. It sort of feels like they merged the 5 color thing from Magic into SWCCG. "Mana location screw" shouldn't a problem because you can pick a good starting location that should let you place most of your units all by itself, and it's easier to find a specific card in your deck than it is in Magic.

Best of all, WARS has very good artwork for a CCG, and it has an interesting backstory for a game not based on an existing fictional work. The main knocks against the game, as I see it, are the relatively steep learning curve and 1 hour play time, which are both barriers to getting new people to play (and also the same knocks against SWCCG). It's a cool game that I unfortunately haven't had opportunity to play very much.

Mad Dog wrote:

I've been eyeing Warhammer: Invasion since it was announced. I keep thinking I should buy some before the first wave expansions get hard to find, but I haven't had the extra cash during any of my infrequent C/LCG cravings.

Msample wrote:

Another vote for Warhammer Invasion. Has gotten a fair amount of play over the last 6 months.

I'm another one that has been sorely tempted to pull the trigger on this one. Keep telling myself that I don't want to get addicted to a C/LCG, but this one keeps beckoning at me.

I think I came real close to picking it up at one point and then was scared off by mutterings of differing card sizes. Did this ever work itself out satisfactorily?

I'm also guessing that there aren't any plans for FFG to reprint the Corruption Cycle in the new format? i.e. 60 cards (20 in triplicate). I think that this was something else that made me hold off to see whether FFG would address the first wave or leave it as is.

I've played AGoT, WH:I recently, and a few years back I was seriously into L5R. Coincidentally, all of these games have multi-zone combat. It works out for some better than others.

I really like AGoT LCG. Combat is very rich, because it subverts many of the usual standards found in CCGs. Instead of your dudes dealing damage to each other, each combat plays out as a sort of area majority game, with rewards and punishments dealt out accordingly. It's very different, a little brainburning, and a lot good. The Core set is good for playing out of the box. You might find that there's a bit of imbalance with the starting factions, but this can be tweaked without much deckbuilding required. Just remove a few of the super-strong or useless cards appropriately and things should even out.

Warhammer: Invasion, I didn't like so much. There's a lot of heads-down resource management going on, and takes the spotlight from actually going out and interacting with your opponent's cards. Combat works out very simply - I find it lacking in tension because it often just boils down to numerical attrition. The three-zone combat system works out poorly here, since the attacker will often just choose to attack the least defended region - I find that it just reduced the tension instead of adding to it. Having said that, playing out of a single core set is quite reasonable, although you do have to distribute the neutral cards between the four factions somehow.

L5R - I used to play this competitively, but dropped out a few years back. It has a huge focus on combat actions, more than any other CCG. It's not unusual for a whole army of attackers to be held off by a single defender on the strength of combat tricks. There's also three or four entirely different ways to win - it's a really good, rich, complex game. It's also really a deckbuilding heavy experience (starter-only play is poor), and often faction balance is unstable. I haven't played this in a long time, but recently I've been having the entirely unreasonable impulse to drop $120 at my FLGS for a set of starters.