Heya, Mojumbo here today to tell you all about my experience
at the Origins game fair! It was truly an enjoyable experience and I had a lot
of fun playing with both new and current members of the community. In particular, I was glad to see that the
game was rather easy to pick up and play for first time players. Our initial
fears that the game may not translate so well over to physical were struck down
and the launch was a success.
For this article, I’m going to give my impressions of the
various types of games that were being played at our booth. First up, the demo
games!
The Demos:
I never realised just how good Shadow Era would be for
demoing. Since the game is rather simple to pick up and learn it translated
really well into grabbing attention to the game. By turn 4 or so completely new
players would be comfortable playing turns on their own only stopping to ask
questions about slight nuances (though you would have to remind them to
generate shadow energy at the start of their turns for the first game). Also,
when combined with the fact that everyone always seemed to mop the floor with
me on their first try (…probably due to poor sacrifice decisions on my part)
they would be enthusiastically getting out of their seat to buy a starter deck
and dive into the world of Shadow Era!
Now even though the physical game does require some
dice/tokens to keep track of things it proved not to be much of a problem for
players since we were at a gaming convention and everything you needed was
readily available for sale. For example, you could use some colored poker chips
to indicate status effects such as red chip = ablaze, green chip = poison, etc.
To track health for the purposes of our demo we would count up damage using
six-sided die until it reached our hero’s maximum health, but there are many
different ways to track health I saw being used that work just as well such as
pencil and paper, a calculator, or a couple ten-sided die counting down.
The Drafts:
Shadow Era Drafts were a hit! Going into the weekend we
actually weren’t even sure we would be holding any organized play events, but
after getting multiple people asking us if we are holding any drafts we decided
to cook up a format on the spot. We tried out 6 pack drafts with no faction
restrictions, 6 pack with faction restrictions, and so forth to great success.
Then Kyle, in a true stroke of Genius, came up with the
Meltdown format by asking “what if we just get players to open 3 packs, remove
the hero and redeemable codes, and shuffle the cards together?” Thanks to Kyle,
we now have a nice alternative to drafting that is unique to Shadow Era and
sure to prove enjoyable to a wide variety of players.
I’m looking forward to digital meltdown and digital drafts
being implemented. It will be fun for sure!
The first ever Free for All game:
I got to be fortunate enough to watch over the first ever
physical Free for All (FFA) game being played between 3 players. It was a
Moonstalker, Banebow, and Majiya vying for domination of the board.
The game synopsis: going into this game the Moonstalker
player was undefeated against the other 2 players in 1v1 games so they wanted
vengeance on him. In true FFA fashion, this game seemed determined to be a 2v1
match. However, after knocking the Moonstalker to less than 10 hp and with 0
cards left in hand the Banebow and Majiya started to turn their attention
towards eachother. The Banebow player had a distinct advantage thanks to his
Wrath of the Forest (WotF) draw engine providing him immense draw power. He
used this draw power to slowly but surely overwhelm Majiya whilst Moonstalker
used Regeneration and Lone Wolf to try and recover from his grievous wounds.
During this time I got to see Supernova hit all 3 players (yes, Supernova is
king in FFA games)! Ironically, that very same WotF backfired on Banebow as
after he had eliminated Majiya he decked out…giving our sneaky Moonstalker
player the win and continuing his undefeated streak.
During this game I came to appreciate the value of the
recent wording changes we made during the PFG process for Call of the Crystals.
Having cards read “friendly allies,” “enemy allies,” “your ally,” “other ally,”
etc. makes it very easy to determine how cards should work in a multiplayer
environment. These players were able to play their FFA game rather seamlessly
without needing my help for much. I only had to jump in to tell them how to
resolve a rabid bite against multiple players/targets (we decided to roll a six
sided dice with 1-5 being the 5 potential targets and 6 being a reroll). I
expect FFA to be a hit amongst friends!
The first ever 2v2 game:
So, the design team was at the airport after a long week
spent at origins and we decided to sit down have a friendly 2v2 game to see how
it would run before we went our separate ways.
The heroes used were Elementalis (Mojumbo) + Nishaven (Razcrux) for team 1 and Boris
(Nachyo Chez) + Jericho (Soothslyr) for team 2. We decided to set up our turn
rotation as: 1a -> 2a - >1b -> 2b with both 1a and 2a not getting the
7th card draw or 1st point of Shadow Energy. To win you simply had to kill 1 of
the 2 heroes on the enemy team.
We found that it was too difficult to hold a team game using
base hero hp values because it’s far too easy for one team to pick on a squishy
hero (like a mage) while his partner is forced to watch him fall with no way to
help out. A possible solution is to combine both heroes hp values into one lump
sum so this “rushdown” strategy is a little less viable (for those curious, me
and Raz were smashed pretty soundly). Like FFA, I expect 2v2 games to be a fun
casual gametype for friends to partake in.
Going Forward:
In case you haven’t already looked we have released our
official limited events at http://www.shadowera.com/showthread.php?15846-Presenting-Shadow-Era-Limited-Formats.
In particular, I can’t wait to play in my next 6 pack draft. I managed to craft
an epic 30 card Darkclaw deck that put Fangs of the Predator to good use! Our
next stop to showcase physical product is likely to be at GenCon Indianapolis
taking place from August 16-19. We hope to see you there ready to play some
Shadow Era.
Well that does it for my origins experience. Hope you
enjoyed the blog post, good luck in your games, and make sure you have fun!
This is Mojumbo signing out.
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