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Thoughts after the first game


LeperColony

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Last night I managed to get my first game in, it was a single-commander King's Empire v. Burning Man.  I taught, two other people played.  One with Malifaux experience, one without.

My overall impression is highly positive, and in a lot of ways it reminds me of how I felt when first encountering Malifaux.  Game play was fast, easy to to teach, and the fact that all models can only take a single point of damage really adds a lot of tension to Penetration flips, even when Assets are involved to be flipped or scrapped.  Part of this was that, unlike Malifaux, there were far fewer DF/WP triggers (in fact, we didn't encounter any).  I'm sure rules bloat will change that in the future, but for now it works.

Titans are visually impressive, but they don't (or didn't) dominate the game.  And in fact, by pricing, they're not supposed to.  So I found their dynamic different from large models in other games (like Knights in 40k), and I liked how they worked.

The two factions had different play styles, and the balance seemed decent (though again, these were only single commander, and I built both armies to be pretty basic).  

Of course, we also did a few things incorrectly.  Most significantly, we didn't notice the limit of spending one token of each type per activation.

My biggest complaint was that the rulebook was not as clear or helpful as it could have been.  There is a consistent failure to provide consolidated information.  To give one example, I had known that Reinforcement tokens could be used to flip assets.  But I was having trouble finding it, because it isn't mentioned in the Reinforcement part of the Upkeep, or in the Reinforcement entry in the token's section.  This is just one of several similar organizational/consolidation issues.

The lack of clarity regarding the Modification step of duels is problematic.  When do you spend tactics tokens to flip additional cards?  Is it during the Flip step?  I thought maybe it would be, but the Flip step specifically says "flip one card," and it's the Modification section where it says tokens are spent. But did they mean non-tactics tokens?  Again, a little clarity would have been appreciated.  Malifaux has a very detailed set of rules governing flips, cheating, triggers, etc.  TOS needs it too.

Along similar lines, TOS only provides detailed rules for flips as part of duels.  But what about flips that aren't duels?  We had an asset where a player could flip two cards, and if either was a Ram, damage was reduced to 0, but it was unclear to us if TOS allowed you to cheat.  We decided you could, but we may have been wrong.

I'm personally not a fan of having made the black joker less impactful.  True, you can't cheat it, but if you are flipping multiple cards, you can select something else.  If you really can spend tactics cards to flip during Modification, that means you can just ignore the black joker for a single tactics tokens?  Seems anti-climactic.

There were a few component quibbles too.  We would have liked if the tactics tokens had "Activated" printed on the other side, so you could use them to track activated models.  Seems more efficient and elegant than repeating "tactics" on both sides.

We also thought it was a little irksome that TOS fate decks, which after all are advertised as being useful for Malifaux or TOS, didn't have wound pips.  I mean, why?

But taken as a whole, and with due allowances for the fact that we played a small learning game, TOS was a good experience, and we're all looking forward to more in the future!

 

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I'm not certain if the ebook version has it, but the hardback rulebook addresses several of these on the quick reference page in the very back. This forum also has an improved PDF version that contains even more details.

I've enjoyed my first game too, although I don't come from a Malifaux background. It reminded me or playing Warmachine, but with a scale similar to Warhammer 40k in regards to the number of models on the board. I'm really liking these multi-model bases as they speed up a lot of the fiddly bits of unit positioning. 

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