Thinking Outside the Box

I've been really busy the past few weeks, but wanted to write up a quick message for Halloween! We tried our "Devoured By Zombies" VS System event last week and, while still fun, it didn't work as well as I'd hoped. I think my rules were a little too stringent, which made it pretty difficult to actually have a playable deck AND be able to eat your opponent's characters. I think allowing recovery effects would be fine, but I'm still not sure about having 'can not be stunned' legal in that format. Putting devoured characters into play late in the game also seemed a risky proposition. Especially if you were dealing with small characters like one- and two-drops into turn six and seven. It just didn't capture the zombie horde feeling I was looking for. One disappointment that I had was that no one really tried to build anything Halloween-themed except for me. Granted, the characters available to Underworld are not the greatest, I still h...

As a precursor, I loathe games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero . My friends that do like them assume that since I'm a musician I'll be good at these games. In terms of playing the crappy plastic drums, those I can manage, but still think they're pretty silly, not to mention extremely uncomfortable to sit at. The singing at least is still sort of like karaoke. But when I got handed a little plastic guitar w/ buttons on it because, "hey you know how to play this song!" and subsequently had to try pushing buttons in the wrong place on the fretboard I was immediately turned off. "This is NOT a game for musicians," I thought to myself. Enter Rocksmith . I hadn't heard about this game (for xbox and ps3) at all, but had it pointed out to me by my girlfriend in a flyer a few days before its release. About a year and a half ago I bought her a guitar, amp along with a book / DVD for beginners. I even spent some time in the first few months showing he...

Devoured by Zombies!!! So how exactly do you capture the idea of zombies in a superhero card game? By turning things on their head and considering all of your opponent's characters as zombies, that's how! I hope this seems somewhat thematic for the Halloween event. If you have any suggestions or comments please submit them to me before the 21st of October. Here's the idea... Rule 1: All characters in play gain the keyword Devour . This keyword's text is, "If an opposing character stunned by this character this turn would leave play, instead remove it from the game. That character is considered devoured ." This keyword can not be removed by card or character effects. Opponent's cards removed from the game this way go in a pile on your side of the table. Rule 2: Once per turn, at the start of the combat phase, you may put the lowest-cost devoured character card into play. This does not cost any resource points. If you have two devoured ch...

Recently I've been writing up sort of session notes combined with review thoughts into a collection of sentences. Well at least I think some of the strings of words might qualify as such. I'm still making ground after lamenting my lack of gaming, so that's been fun. Thursday's VS System sealed constructed event was Marvel Legends / Marvel Knights. We had a good turnout of 6 players, including one new player! I do hope that we can maintain attendance of around that number. It makes for good match-ups and variety, as you're not playing against the same three people every week. The sealed decks that I saw were pretty interesting. Although mine wasn't particularly effective I was able to win a game. As we usually do with sealed games, we followed it up with a rare draft to give everyone a chance at the rares from the packs. Saturday was my family's Thanksgiving dinner. This is the first time that I can recall ever having it on the Saturday. It...

I like horror games. Shocking, I know. The biggest issue with horror games isn't that they're scary and that people don't want to play them. The issue is that a lot of people think it's a little odd to play horror games at say...Christmas, or Thanksgiving, or at your birthday party. That makes Halloween a sort of horror gaming feast to the rest of the year's famine. With that in mind I scheduled nothing but horror board games for the entirety of October's events. The first game played was a new game to my collection, but not a new game. The version of Fury of Dracula that I bought is produced by Fantasy Flight Games, but is actually a remake of an older game of the same name, produced by Games Workshop. I sort of have a love-hate relationship with Games Workshop, because I think they make great stuff but it's generally too expensive. I also have a lot of trouble finding people to play Warhammer 40k with that I don't greatly disklike, so that...