KeyForge: Age of Ascension release

Last night, the friendly local gaming store held a tournament to celebrate the new KeyForge release, Age of Ascension. This introduces a bunch of new cards, and a few new mechanics, but all decks are supposed to be compatible and balanced with the original release.

It was a three-round sealed-deck tournament, so we got a new deck every round with five minutes to look it over before playing.

The deck-naming AI is still producing quirky results that never quite hit the mark.



On the other hand, flavor text is significantly improved. Much of the text in the first set looks like it was written by an intern ten minutes before a deadline. Now, though...



(Mars First: "'Mars second, third, and fourth, too, if you ask me.' -Ulyq Megamouth")

(Eureka!: "15 years, 40 million UX credits, and a 3% improvement on the real duck.")

This, though, is everyone's new favorite card. Who cares if you can only play one card if it's a really good one? And it's a common, so this will be popping up a lot.



Much fun was had by all. Of the three decks I got, the first (Sezan) feels like it has the ability to demolish pretty much anyone that gets in its way. The second (Loudfighter) was full of good anti-creature cards, but unfortunately my opponent had almost no creatures. The third (Vegas) got me a win due to a couple of lucky draws of just the right combination of cards.

Somehow this placed me third, for which the prize was... one more deck, thus upsetting my carefully laid plan of buying a four-deck-sized box a couple weeks ago, since now I have five. Argh.

Next week it's back to Chainbound tournaments every other Saturday, so I think I'll bring Sezan and see if it really bulldozes everyone the way it looks like it can.

Enfilade! 2019 after-action report

Let us rewind the clock to last weekend in Olympia, WA, where the biggest miniatures-gaming convention west of the Mississippi (270 people this year) was happening in the basement of a Hotel RL. And where I forgot my camera, unfortunately...

For the Friday afternoon session, I was signed up for the Battle of Manzikert (Byzantines vs. Seljuks). This was a very simple scenario with a simple system; there was time to play it out, switch sides, and play it again. In both cases, the elite Byzantine knights smashed through whoever they were up against and the Turkish line unraveled from there.

The system used De Bellis Antiquitatis, which plays very fast and can be adapted to anything from ancient to medieval times. Here was where I decided it's what I'm going to use for my African scenario. The book includes an exhaustive list of armies, including some African ones! One of the other players was able to point me to where to order it these days.

Saturday morning was an ambush at a crossing on the iNyezane River during the Zulu Wars. In real life, says the GM, the Zulus didn't all manage to show up for the ambush at the same time, letting the British take them down easily. This scenario imagined the Zulus having more coordination.

It seems to me that the British could still have done well if they'd simply set up their lines on their side of the river, stuck the guns somewhere nice and safe behind them, and then crossed the river at their leisure after shooting the Zulus to pieces as they approached. In our battle, the Brits decided to try to hustle the wagons across as quickly as possible, which led to the Zulus pinning them against the river. The other British flank, which also crossed the river quickly so that it could be charged at easily, collapsed after a couple turns, letting the Zulu forces on that side sweep around and surround the wagons.

This strategy may have had something to do with the Brits being operated by three teen/pre-teen boys and the father of at least one of them. Another gamer on the Zulu side noted that young gamers tend to be very impatient about getting the fighting started.

Saturday afternoon, I played on the Pict side of a Viking raid on an Irish village. Vikings got points for collecting livestock and supplies and escaping with a minimum number of crew. Pict victory conditions involved killing Vikings and burning their boats. Livestock were also able to fight being carried off, but this turned out not to matter as few Vikings even made it as far as the livestock pens. Two Viking boats escaped, but without enough men left for a victory; one was burned; and one had no one left to operate it. They did burn down the biggest building in the village though, the bastards.

Enfilade! does allow for a few non-war games to be played, so Sunday morning I was signed up to run a game of Iron Dragon in memory of the late lamented Mayfair Games. No one pre-registered for it, but three people wandered up looking to play, and we had a few kibitzers on and off. It wasn't until setting up that I noted that the list of playtesters in the back of the rules named two wargaming groups-- so this was even more appropriate for this con than I realized.

With three newbies present and me desperately trying to avoid winning, this could have gone on a lot longer than the 3-4 hours I'd claimed in the session description. But we declared an end at around the 4.5-hour mark, due to one person needing to head home and others needing to go help capture a rare Pokémon in the nearby business park. Players seemed like they enjoyed it, the only catch being that they'll have to scour eBay to look for copies.

All in all, a nice weekend spent looking at things other than computer screens. I told plenty of people about my plan to bring a proper scenario next year, so now I have to do it, right?