Gifts Ungiven

...check this out:

http://www.gamingreport.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=My_eGallery&file=index&do=showgall&gid=101

A new prepainted, collectible Star Wars mini game. Looks like we have Eps 4-6 coming out first, then 1 and 2.

Yet another thing I probably won't buy, but the figures do look neat.

If anyone feels like being corrupted:

Star Wars Miniatures

I've watched it in play; the system is quite fast and very simple. The miniatures look nice, too. Online retailers sell the boosters at a reasonably steep discount (36% or more). You can get a case of 84 for about a hundred bucks.

They do look nice, but I'm wondering if this is the kind of thing I should talk others I know into buying, since I already own so many games.

We just watched the Revenge of the Sith trailer.

I'm psyched.

I'm well aware that Attack of the Clones is a painful movie experience. Note all the rewriting stuff earlier.

Regardless, I'm psyched.

On a related note of Sith Goodness, I recently bought one booster of miniatures for the Clone Strike set for Star Wars Miniatures. We mostly have original trilogy miniatures and haven't bought prequel ones, as there's just more of an emotional attachment to, say, Stormtroopers than Clonetroopers. kwc bought the Clone Strike starter set, so he has General Kenobi and Jango Fett (to complement his Boba Fett from the original set). I decided I'd buy one booster to see what I ended up with, and I now have Darth Maul. Nifty, and a good complement to my Darth Vader.

We ran the two against each other a few times and Maul won unless Vader got lucky. This makes sense, though, as Maul is better on his own, whereas Vader is a good team player (assuming the other members of the team don't mind summary executions when they screw up).

Last week, I found a very cheap supplier of single miniatures from the Clone Strike expansion for Star Wars Miniatures. Coolstuffinc.com has, on average, the lowest prices I've seen for Clone Strike figures. I was especially happy to see their very low prices for "bulk" infantry such as Clone Troopers and Battle Droids.

kwc and I purchased a bunch of figures which should arrive within a week. He concentrated on Jedi, while I went for the large groups of basic troops. In addition to the figures that are coming, we both have a handful of figures already, including Jango Fett and General Kenobi for kwc and Darth Maul for me.

Here's the list of incoming figures:

kwc's list:

C3-PO
General Veers (These first two will help play scenarios with our classic figs)
ARC Trooper
7 Clone Troopers
4 Clone Trooper Commanders
2 Clone Trooper Sergeants
Agen Kolar
3 Jedi Guardians
Ki-Ad-Mundi
Kit Fisto
Luminara Unduli
Mace Windu
Qui-Gon Jinn
Saesee Tinn
Asajj Ventress
2 Dark Side Acolytes
Durge
Aurra Sing
Zam Wesell

my list:

Aayla Secura
20 Clone Troopers
4 Clone Trooper Commanders
4 Clone Trooper Grenadiers
4 Clone Trooper Sergeants
Luminara Unduli
Asajj Ventress
20 Battle Droids
4 Battle Droid Officers
Destroyer Droid
4 Geonosian Overseers
20 Security Battle Droids
10 Super Battle Droids
Zam Wesell

So kwc can bring the Jedi action and I can field hordes of disposable troops. Fun all 'round.

I've realized that the Rebel side in the classic Star Wars Miniatures set is pretty boring. The Imperial side is a lot of fun to play. In addition to Vader and the Emperor, there are Storm Troopers, Storm Trooper Officers, Heavy Weapon Storm Troopers, Elite Storm Troopers, Imperial Officers and Scout Troopers.

It's understandable that they wanted to include the major named characters from the classic trilogy, but the other units didn't have to work so poorly together and be so uninteresting. Here's the Rebel complement:

Bothan Spy (useless grenade tosser)
C-3PO (draws fire)
Chewbacca
Commando on Speeder Bike
Elite Hoth Trooper
Elite Rebel Trooper (those guys who die on the Tantive IV)
Han Solo
Hoth Trooper
Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight
Luke Skywalker, Rebel
Obi-Wan Kenobi
Leia, Captive
Leia, Senator
R2-D2
Rebel Commando (Endor garb and grenade throwing)
Rebel Officer (Hoth clothes)
Rebel Pilot
Rebel Trooper (more guys who die on the Tantive IV)
Wookiee Soldier

Assuming that you have to keep the named characters, I'd want to drop the following units:

Bothan Spy
Elite Rebel Trooper
Leia, Captive
Rebel Officer (Hoth clothes)
Rebel Pilot
Rebel Trooper
Wookiee Soldier

In their place, I'd like to have had:

First, some cosmetic changes:

Rebel Trooper (wearing the Endor clothing, and with a slightly better attack than a Stormtrooper, but weaker defense)
Elite Rebel Trooper (wearing the Endor clothing as well)
Rebel Officer (also in Endor clothing, perhaps offering the same bonus)

Then, some substantive alterations.

Rebel Scout (more Endor garb, with Stealth, Spotter ability and otherwise weak stats)
Loyalist Noble (a commander effect that lets one or two units move but not attack after it takes its activation)
Rebel Medic (or Medical Droid -- something that can heal non-droid characters)
Boush (if you're going to have another Leia, why not this one?)

That would have made me happier. Here are some possible stats for Boush:

Boush, Leia in Disguise (20 points)

Hit Points: 50
Defense: 18
Attack: +8
Damage: 20

Special Abilities:

Unique

Thermal Detonator 20 (Replaces attacks: range 6; 20 damage to target and to each character adjacent to that target; no save)

Force Powers:

Force 2

Some observations from the miniatures game:

All Battle Droids: not so good
Battle Droids with Geonisian Overseers providing Double Attacks: very good
All Jedi: not so good
Jedi with Clones and Aurra Sing: quite good

Hunh.

"Base Set, featuring 48 soldiers and vehicles from WWII plus detailed hex maps of terrain representing the battlefields of Europe, will be first shown to the public at the Gencon game convention in Indianapolis this August and is set to hit store shelves the following week. A 48-figure expansion, bringing additional vehicles and troops into combat, will follow in December. More expansions are planned through 2006."

Some random notes from the most recent Star Wars miniatures chat, with the game designers (who, incidentally, are very good at following the online SW minis community and using it as a gauge of what's working and what's not):

For the Endor pack:

• Intended to deliver a handful of miniatures and lots of maps

Champions of the Force, the next expansion, will contain:

• Additional New Republic units (not something I care about)


• Yuuzhan Vong not represented


• Lucas nixed many Old Republic units, so more Sith than Old Republic


• Queen Amidala


• Exar Kun

For the upcoming spacecraft miniatures game:

• Miniatures will be "relatively" sized, rather than truly in scale


• Will not supplant the normal minis game in the production schedule

Upcoming releases in general:

• As long as people keep buying


• They have a couple years' worth of material planned


• Bounty Hunters set will have remakes and new bounty hunters


• No new Ewoks in the next two sets, but there does seem to be a demand


• Their contact at Lucasfilm really wants them to make Jar-Jar


• Their policy is to start providing set facts 6-9 months before release


• Either a new Emperor or a Darth Plagueius figure will be showing up

From the Star Wars Minis message boards:

The best custom Star Wars minis ever

Also, from Boardgamegeek:

A list of game reviews from the early days of White Dwarf magazine featuring more than one name that's become familiar to me in the last five years or so.

I've been tinkering with some thoughts on new rules sets for use with my Mechwarrior figures. Take a look at the extended if you're interested, and feel free to comment.

Last year, I sold off some Magic: the Gathering "power cards" that were (1) worth a lot of money and (2) not so fun for friendly play, which is all I'm likely to ever do again with my Magic collection. Recently, I did a survey of some of my other game-related items to decide which ones are likely to never, ever be used. Decisions I made:

1) I'm keeping Space Hulk. It's a great game that I will introduce to y'all who haven't played it at some point in the future.

2) I'm keeping the Space Marines I've put together, pretty much for use with Space Hulk (there's an issue of White Dwarf Magazine with rules for normal Marines in Space Hulk).

3) I'm keeping all my Epic stuff. I will put together the things I have not yet assembled, Krylon coat all the metal pieces to keep them from oxidizing away, and try playing with the new Epic Armageddon rules set.

4) I'm really not going to do anything with other unused or partially used miniatures, so a whole chunk of nostalgia is going on the ebay auction block. We have:

The old Space Marines boxed set, fit to produce three squads (30 marines). This is a second one that I never assembled.

A bunch of old Chaos Space marines.

32 Eldar Harlequins. These actually saw a reasonable amount of play time, back in the day.

Some other random Eldar.

Marneus Calgar, a Space Marine diorama. So far, this is the only one not selling.

36 Melniboneans, including one or maybe two Elrics. Bought when I thought I was going to participate in a fantasy wargame campaign -- they were packaged as Elves, but they're Melniboneans.

The Last Starfighter Tunnel Chase game. Seriously.

As I wrote earlier, I was selling some old minis and other stuff off on ebay last week. Here are the final selling prices:

The Last Starfighter Tunnel Chase game came in the lowest, at $1.25. I guess that 1984 bad-SF-movie nostalgia isn't strong enough.

Random Eldar came in at $3.50, and the Space Marine diorama at $4.28.

The Chaos Space Marine collection hit $42.75, while the now-rare Melniboneans came in at $52.00.

The Imperial Space Marine boxed set that I bought way back when for $20 sold for $88.78. What's sad about this is that it would run a person about $110 to field an equivalent number of plastic Space Marines these days, so even though I made a massive profit, it's still a great deal for the buyer.

Finally, my old Harlequins sold for $97.77, which surprised me until I realized I was offering a complete set -- unlike the little groups of Harlequins I'd seen sold on ebay previously.

I hope everyone enjoys their new toys.

In the extended: the stats for pieces in the upcoming Star Wars minis Champions of the Force set. I'm really looking forward to it.

For those who care, draft rules in the extended.

People took some pics of the upcoming Bounty Hunters set for Star Wars minis at GenCon. Here's the link:

BH set pics at The Holocron

Notes in the extended.

Following up on m's recent post about the Nintendo Wii, I have a question for all my DS-addicted peeps out there: Has anyone purchased, or is anyone planning on picking up, MechAssault: Phantom War for the DS? As it happens, there's a coupon in there for the plastic minis version of said game, so if you had it, I might want to beg it off ya'.

In another subset of the minis gaming genre, Battlewagon Bits is a neat little site that sells individual components of GW multipart miniatures to aid in your customization work. After all, why buy a whole pack of Chaos Marines when all you really wanted was some Chaos Heavy Bolter plastic bits? I no longer buy any GW minis, but if I did, this site would be awesome.

Wizards of the Coast has finally put up their information page for their upcoming Star Wars space minis game, which is due for release in late November.

Here's the page

For the moment, this is a standalone, collectible-format game featuring a starter pack that comes with 8 randomized spacecraft as well as Executor and a big Mon Calamari ship, and boosters that each contain 7 minis.

They've also posted the rules here. They're about as simple as the rules for the normal minis game, with the removal of the complications provided by cover and terrain in the normal game.

You can see a couple images of actual minis scattered around the site. At the moment, the Star Wars home page shows us an X-Wing, a TIE Interceptor and the Millennium Falcon. The product page features Slave I (in Jango rather than Boba colors, I'm told).

The next Star Wars minis game, Spaceship Battles, comes out at the end of November. Someone posted the setlist and some stats on the SW minis forum, so I've included both in the extended. One fun bit -- the basic TIE Fighter comes with the ability "Infinite" -- when it is destroyed, it is returned to the fighter pool and can be launched again.

Sweet.

The Star Wars Starship Battles Game went on sale this week. The starter was already sold out in both local game stores I checked in on today; the game has been much anticipated in the community.

The minis themselves look really good -- better than the normal minis. This isn't surprising, as the mass production methods used for collectible minis are more forgiving to vehicles than to people.

The stats for all the ships are already up at swshoebox, and my normal eBay source is posting the minis for sale today.

After some test plays of the new Star Wars Starship Battles game, I've decided that it's just a little too simple for my tastes. There's very little motivation to actually maneuver the capital ships, and the fighters, while fun, play out like a fairly routine chess game.

I've decided to transfer the game to a free-standing (that is, normal) minis game, with measured distances, playable on any old surface.

Modified rules and stats in the extended. Opinions welcomed from interested parties (e.g. folks on whom I'm going to inflict this).

One thing I have to watch is my tendency to assign myself more projects than I have time for. Be it at work or otherwise, there's always more interesting stuff to do than time in which to do it.

The corollary to watching how time is spent is making sure I don't spend money on things I won't have the time to actually work on. That said, there are some outstanding projects I'd really like to find both time and money for.

The first miniatures game I ever played was Warhammer 40,000 - Rogue Trader, a quirky little game that spawned a vast empire of miniatures gaming and derivative IP in the form of computer games and a burgeoning online world. I've held onto my Rogue Trader book, as well as other jewels like Chapter Approved and the Compendium, but I sold the bulk of my miniatures, keeping just the Space Marines:

(Picture found at The Stuff of Legends, a really handy miniatures website.)

Since then, the game world has advanced and grown. The most recent edition of Warhammer 40,000, the fourth edition, features cleaned-up rules but the same rich world, with twenty years of additional material. Among the "new" additions since I last played are the "young" race of the setting, the Tau:

The Tau fascinate me, and a 40K Tau force is one of the ways I'd spend time and money, if I somehow acquired a surplus of both. However, there's an option even cooler than a 40K Tau force. Far more than Warhammer 40K, my game of choice in the day was Space Marine, a game geared toward larger-scale battles, using smaller-scale minis. Instead of being 28mm tall, a person is 6mm tall -- roughly 1:300 scale. I was first drawn to Space Marine -- later rechristened "Epic" -- by a friend's copy of the very first epic game, Adeptus Titanicus. AT featured giant war machines from the world of Warhammer 40K, like this Warlord Titan:

Sometime in college, I acquired nine or so Warlord Titans in a trade (I traded away some 40K stuff I was never going to use). Fixing these up is one of those projects that requires no additional money, just time. However, if I once again had that inifnite money and time, I'd also pick up these:

Yup, those are epic-scale Tau, available (at a price) from Forge World. Sadly, as a niche product in a niche category, they're not cheap. That squad of infantry (called "Fire Warriors," by the way), would run me about $24, or about $1 for each 6mm-tall soldier. Ouch. That's way more expensive than my old epic minis cost me, even adjusting for inflation.

Okay, enough of that. Now back to writing a paper.

Wizards of the Coast has announced that the 2008 Star Wars Miniatures championship will be held at this year's PAX. The tournament is open to all comers, but you have, well, today to preregister for PAX before that option closes (otherwise, you're stuck paying at the door).

You can read the announcement here. It's 150-point Constructed format...and I'm not a competitive player, so I have no idea what the latest tech and best builds are for Star Wars Minis these days. I recommend checking out the Star Wars Minis forums and swShoebox.com for proper format research.

A little while ago, Sam Black wrote an article about GenCon that focused to some extent on lessons he'd learned in other games that could be applied to Magic. This has inspired me to give some thought, from time to time, on lessons I'd picked up in various games that are portable across games generally.

Specifically, I've idly pondered what I might have picked up during my Mechwarrior gaming days that transitions well to Magic. I was pretty good at Mechwarrior, most of the time maintaining our highest local rating and "going infinite" in real life tournaments (something you could do back in the day by trading off extras of the premium tournament prizes in online trades for minis you needed). In no particular order, here are some lessons I picked up from Mechwarrior:

• Research Matters - I improved significantly in Mechwarrior after I spent some time (1) reading ideas from players who were in the game when I came in, (2) looking at successful army builds, and (3) just spending time looking at unit stats. This was important in Mechwarrior in the "rote memory is helpful" manner, inasmuch as you wanted to know how each unit's stats would progress over time. It was also helpful, however, in letting me know which options I had available, and exposing me to concepts that I wouldn't have run into via directed search. This is, in fact, an idea I'm planning on touching in over at In Development in the future.

• Technical Precision Matters - There's an edge in many games in just knowing how the rules actually work. This isn't so much a matter of rules lawyering as it is a matter of just knowing what your operating space is. This came up recently in a Magic tournament when I floated a random green mana before sacrificing a land with Knight of the Reliquary and then let that go while my opponent ran through the rest of his turn...until he wanted to go into combat, when I paused him, paid another five mana, and flashed out a Cloudthresher. He wasn't sure I could do that -- hadn't he said he wanted to go to combat? Of course, the way the game works requires a double priority pass on an empty stack before we can shift into combat (as the judge we called confirmed). My opponent didn't know this, and walked into something as a consequence.

• Fast Play Matters - Mechwarrior, like Magic, was played in timed rounds. You benefit, of course, from being able to think and play the game quickly. However, this is more about making sure your opponent is playing quickly. I've been fortunate not to run into players who are clearly stalling, but at the same time, there are players who play as if they weren't really aware that rounds are timed. We had one prime offender in the Mechwarrior circuit who clearly was not thinking about his upcoming turn at all during your turn. This was apparent the first time I played him, as he started each of his turns by adjusting the dials on his units (this is sort of like starting a Magic turn by making minor adjustments so that your land are all nicely parallel, then staring at your cards for a while, then finally untapping...). I adjusted to this in two ways. First, I made sure to urge him to play faster, and suggested that he take care of whatever minor adjustments he cared about on his turn. Second, I made sure to get an early, high-value kill, since I knew that I could only do so much about his play speed, and I wanted to end with a game win if he timed us out. In a Magic tournament, I'd just call a judge on him if he didn't speed up, of course.
  

I'm sure there are more lessons that transferred out of Mechwarrior, just as there are more that have come out of other games I've played and other areas of my life. It's a good exercise, and I'd be interested in hearing what lessons other people feel they've picked up in one game that transferred into another.