Forar

I've only got, like, 7 figures actually based. Maybe 11 if you count the built in bases on the Clockwork Traps, so I may just have to dive in on this one, if just for the basic sampler of 4. Strangely, since I've got pretty much the entire guild bought, built and glued to bases, it might end up seeing more use with the giant pile of Robotech minis I've got coming in from Kickstarter in the fall (in theory, I suspect Winter. 2020. This is Palladium Books we're talking about here)

Wait... then there's hope for a 1.5 card for Hannah? :-O

http://www.wyrd-games.net/forumdisplay.php?116-Europe ?

I wish Wyrd would make an official announcement about this thing. It's been brought up a half dozen times in various sub forums over the last month. :-P

I did not buy into the tier I did specifically because of Hannah, but at the same time, an LE figure was part of my consideration, and a significant part of why I snagged a Gaming Room tier to split with a friend. So while I certainly won't lie and say that Hannah (a figure we knew almost nothing about) was a massive draw, I do feel a bit annoyed that if my crew and I stick with 1.5, Hannah will apparently be utterly unplayable for me. If they included 1.5 and 2.0 cards with her, I would be very happy, but I respect that it's a pipe dream, as those precious hours spent designing and playtesting a figure for a (soon to be) outdated edition wouldn't really be all that sensible when there are countless hours of games testing to do for 2.0 and feedback to compile, just on the 2.0 version of her, let alone the rest of the game.

LET THE GAMES BEGIN. /popcorn

Or you'll be held accountable for every thing they don't like that makes it through to release. No pressure or anything. Not like your interpersonal relationships now hang in the balance of something utterly beyond your control.

70 people in this subforum perhaps. The main forum page says there are 280 people online currently (including guests), and I'm sure that's only going to shoot up as more people get home from work/school. Personally, I'm wrapping up work, heading home in 20 minutes, and likely relaxing with a little dinner and unwinding from a long week. Maybe paint up a figure or three. Was nice to knock 5 out earlier this week, maybe try to keep the momentum up and aim to finish my remaining 29 on the backlog in the next couple of months. Gotta clear out space for when the Robotech miniatures game dumps like 150 figures in my lap at once.

I guess that depends on the going definition of "mid day" we end up seeing put to use (and assumes there aren't any last minute delays). I'm hoping for sometime in the next 3-5 hours, but yes, I'm not expecting it in less than 11. Anytime before 2am EST will be considered a bonus, as per Eric's post.

... nope, definitely Battlestar Galactica. It's actually a fairly strong theme throughout the series.

The forums are a pretty safe place. I assume they'll be here, and even if they aren't, some intrepid soul will link them swiftly. And it'll be easy to tell once they've come out. Look for a burst of threads and posts on the matter, followed by more threads praising the update, others lamenting the update, others lamenting the people lamenting the update, rage quits, bursts of simply ecstatic joy and love... basically when the forums lose their collective minds in the span of about twenty minutes. Battlestar Galactica style; this has all happened before, and it will happen again. :-P

Everyone I knew loved Scrye, but Inquest was always my magazine of choice. I never traded heavily so pricing didn't mean much to me, I just enjoyed the articles, previews, and Magic: The Puzzling bits.

It's funny, but I've seen this brought up a few times, and even as someone who only runs one faction (but owns almost all of it), I look at my carrying case and just have to shrug. I've been playing for a year and a half now or so, and I still have figures that haven't even hit the table, or only see highly infrequent play. I feel pretty safe saying that between a mix of terrain layouts, opponents (I'm lucky enough to have over half a dozen players in my gaming crew), game sizes, master combinations, strategies, schemes, and an emphasis on eventually using things other than our go-to figures, we could probably play out Malifaux for years and years without even putting a dent in the sheer versatility possible. You can change the game pretty significantly with nothing more than a 5 soul stone increase or decrease, all else being equal. Don't get me wrong, I'm still cautiously optimistic, and expect to spend most of this evening chewing through the beta info and digesting it as I see what has changed between the editions and how those interactions will in turn change the game (on the micro and macro levels), but if my group collectively throws up their hands and demands 1.5 only... well, I guess I'll just have to buy figures based on appearances more than anything. Maybe proxy some new ones for old ones. Or hell, see how hard it is to compare an entire faction and see if it's possible (in a balanced manner) to 1.5ify some 2.0 new stuff.

I have a handful of sealed 4th Edition MtG starters and some sealed boosters from sets around that time (Ice Age, Homelands, Chronicles, Alliances, Fallen Empires, etc) and have always kind of wanted to do the same thing. And while Magic can certainly have a 'pay to win' aspect, there are ways to mitigate this. One is by playing some of the variant gameplay types. A newer one (that's now officially supported) is called "Elder Dragon Highlander", or EDH. 99 card deck, no more than 1 of any card other than basic land, and 1 extra card that has to be a legend. Deck cannot contain colours that are not found on the Commander's card, so deck building is generally based around the commander's theme (such as tribal decks like elves or goblins or whatever) or mechanics (such as commanders that do well with lots of artifacts or enchantments or extra lands, etc). Now, obviously you can still drop $Texas on those 100 cards, but the need to only have one of a given card in a deck can make things really interesting. Rather than just finding the 9 best cards for your deck and loading up 4 of each for raw consistency, you end up with a lot of design space to work in, including using cards that 'regular' play might find sub-optimal. Oh, EDH is also a primarily multiplayer variant, which means that beyond the game itself is a political metagame, where people strive to be dangerous enough to not be worth dealing with, but not so dangerous that it prompts the other players to jump them as a team of necessity. As the best funded player in my group, I'd often happily loan out some of my decks, so people could have a little more variety in what they played without having to drop a big pile of cash on the endeavor, and so they could see what it was like from the other side of the cards. Much like facing particularly nasty Malifaux crews, it can be enlightening to see just how a well tuned deck plays out, how tough some of those calls can be, etc.

Unfortunately the 31st is still like 7 hours away for them. And I suspect we'll see it late on the 31st. Basically I'm guessing 35 hours from now, if it shows up before midnight I'll just be pleasantly surprised. Blizzard has left me well prepared for expecting the worst on these kinds of things. :-P

I think I have, like, 10 or 20 Rage cards laying around somewhere. Along with a Starter or two of Jihad (yes, before the name changed), some Middle Earth starters, a big pile of Battletech CCG cards, an even bigger pile of Rifts CCG cards (note, both of these fell a bit flat for me in part because I'm not a fan of 'the library as a life pool' mechanics, even if I recognize it's basically a straightforward mechanic with room for manipulation like life totals), and god knows what else. I think it was Inquest back in the 90's that came with a few random cards from assorted games. I also liked that. Edit: also a big pile from the 24 CCG, though those might've been thrown out.

Really, nobody's gaming group or store are going to be indicative of any particular trend. It's too small a data set against too large a community/player base to say anything useful other than "In my area/at my store the game is in decline", but without a much larger amount of info, for all we know the 10 players that stopped participating at Store X are being offset by 20 players who've picked up the game in the last week at Store Y. Figure sales (by state, by country, global, etc), book and fate deck sales (possibly among the better indicators of new players joining in), tournament/league/event participation, all of these would likely give a much better picture of how healthy/growing/declining the player base is or isn't at a time. And I feel this is compounded by having the open beta for 2.0 coming out tomorrow. I liken it to the pre-expansion malaise that strikes many guilds and gamers in MMOs (yes, WoW in particular), when they know that things are about to be heavily shaken up, and as such see little point continuing to grind away at content that will soon be 'old', out dated, to be replaced with new adventures to be had. While obviously it's not a perfect analogy, I think there are parallels all the same. We've seen on these very forums, people comment that their groups have been revitalized knowing that a new edition is coming, but we've also seen many who say that interest has utterly dried up. Whether it's edition fatigue (likely old baggage from other games that swapped editions every couple of years), a sense that massive change is coming and players who were looking for 'an out' finally found it, or simply apprehension of the unknown, it's an issue that will affect individuals and communities alike. I think getting our first taste of what the next generation of the game will be like soon will at least help people figure out how they feel about the changes, rather than hoping for the best/fearing the worst as many seem to be, and uncertainty is something that not everyone handles particularly well.

I wish I'd had the time and cash to pick up a ton of CCGs back in the day. Still have a starter box or five of a half dozen games tucked away somewhere, but my main source of cardboard crack has always been Magic. Even when I get away for a few years, I often find myself drawn back in and suddenly I wake up in a stupor, covered in naught but a pile of opened booster wrappers and with surprisingly pristine cards sorted by rarity and colour and ooooh foils, shiny.... I... I think I should go. I'm starting to feel the urge again...

Seconded. micahwc's summaries of the last one were very helpful.

It's possible, but I imagine there are enough copies of books 2-4 (especially 4) around that they won't be hard to find for some time to come. Which becomes a question of whether there's enough of a surge in demand for stores to react by bumping up the prices, or if those same stores have a high enough stock and/or minimal buying increases (also potentially off set by people liquidating their old collections, as can be the case with edition shifts) that it isn't an issue. I mean, as it stands there are copies of 1.5, 2, 3 and 4 available on Amazon for $20-30, so unless the game's popularity swells enough that demand outpaces the supply (which is potentially in itself fluid, especially since some people who are on the edge of selling may decide to act if they find they can get a little more for their books than what they paid for them), but I doubt we'll see a Book 1 style issue anytime soon. Edit: for clarity, I'm not really trying to dispute the matter. I'm just saying that I see how it could go either way. Maybe the price plunges because interest in 'out of date books' drops rapidly and people start liquidating store and personal stock in a race to the bottom, an effort to 'cash out' before they get even lower. Or stores are mostly sold out already (depending on when the last print run was and what demand has been like since they were handed out) and people hold their books tightly because they enjoy the fluff enough, making those few remaining gain in price/perceived value. Or it's a mix of both and in the short and/or long term prices stay relatively neutral. So basically it's a gamble. Given the current prices, I'd say it's probably safer to buy if interested in fluff than to wait until it's too late. Worst case scenario, a $20 book drops to $10 or something. But if the demand goes up and the supply can't keep up, who knows how high some of those $20 books might get. So personally I'd wait and see, but I don't think buying now is necessarily a bad idea. There's only so low those things can go, and Book 1 showed us they can go pretty high (with again, noting that it was presumably a MUCH smaller print run than any of the later books, especially the last few).

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the rules are available before 5pm EST, which would let me print up some cards at work. If it's an evening release, we'd be stuck trying to play with tablets and phones, which could get confusing flipping back and forth. Worst case scenario it'd be a week to read over the rules, familiarize ourselves with them and get some games in the following weekend, but given that we're on a bit of a timeline with August looming, I'm hoping to have as many opportunities to test as possible.

It's the old "Malifaux Book 1" problem all over again. Early last year, when I got into the game, my group and I noticed that book 1 wasn't generally available anywhere. The few places it could be found (ebay, Amazon, a few select stores) were trying to charge simply absurd sums for it (generally over $100). Of course, with the release of the mini rule book, many considered this a non-issue, but as someone who likes being able to flip around to read up model stats back and forth, and did want to catch some of the fluff, that was... less than helpful. Eventually they announced book 1.5 (much to the chagrin of some, I recall at least a few on the forums commenting on having paid those absurd amounts recently) which mostly solved the problem. So now we're basically facing it all over again. The beta will give us access to the cards and basic rules, but those who like having their half dozen'ish books on the RPG shelf/collection are kind of caught. Do they buy now for the fluff, or wait and hope for a M2E Book 2 / 3 / 4? Obviously Wyrd are aware of this matter, so personally I'd wait and see what starts getting announced for Gencon in the next couple of months. Also, keep tabs on local stores that sell Wyrd products. If there is a re-release coming, it's possible some will try to liquidate their stock, which might let you buy at a discount price. Or watch Ebay post Gencon, I suspect some gamers out there might try to sell off some of their 1st Edition books to help pay for their 2nd Edition books/models/etc. Basically, it comes down to why you want them. Does it look like your crew will be staying with 1.5? If so, I'd at least wait for the Beta to come out in a few days to feel secure in that assessment and ponder purchases from there. Just want them for the fluff? Wait and watch for sales and see what Gencon brings. A few saved ebay searches might go a long way.

Man, clear plastic for the figures and LED lit bases would be *amazing*. Though building an LED into a 30mm base would be quite impressive. I experimented with trying to light up some 50mm bases for my Sonnia crew but while it initially worked, it was a very amateur job and the connection didn't hold. Should really invest in a proper clamp setup and give that another go.

They're back on page 4 of this sub forum, but yeah, we heard about this product and chatted about it. Not really much to say until either Wyrd gives us a more in depth look and/or someone gets their hands on one.

Probably, depends on what synergy I can build using my Guild figures. I wouldn't be opposed to snagging a starter box or a few select models to spice things up when I run him, but I'm not terribly interested in buying an entire minion set for one master with no cross pollination. Similarly with Lucius and his Neverborn ties. I think it'd be cool if there were some Guild/Resser & Guild/Neverborn minions, or just some that they can hire no matter who they declare for (like McCabe always being able to hire certain figures, whether he's a 10T master or Guild), but I'll have to wait and see. The other side of that is whether or not my local crew gets on board with the edition shift. As I've commented a few times in other threads, they're mostly old Warhammer players, so significant shakeups to game systems are something they're well accustomed to. Accustomed to fearing and hating, that is. I'm striving to keep an open mind and like a lot of what I've heard. Mostly just waiting for the open beta now to see the actual changes, rather than pushing too hard in either direction (fearing the worst, hoping for the best). Basically, I like making informed choices, and right now it feels like we basically just know enough to be a danger to ourselves and others. Hopefully next week starts providing those answers, and we can begin to figure out where we go from there (personally, as a local crew, as a community, etc).