Danielo

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KICKSTARTER PREVIEW

Components and rules subject to change.

Vitals:
Title: Thalara: The Last Artifacts
Designed by: Alexander Wrede
Publisher: Wredespiel
Year Published: 2020

Kickstarter Price: $15-$24

2-4p | 20-30 min | 10+

Introduction:

I haven't been taking on many Kickstarter previews lately, but when I head about Thalara: The Last Artifact, I was intrigued. I'm not usually a huge fan of two-player dueling style games, but I do enjoy some. Thalara's fast gameplay and interesting hand-building mechanic caught my attention. And since we're in the middle of a pandemic, having a two-player game that I could play with my family seemed like a great choice. So let's read on and see if this met my expectations or left me feeling disappointed.

In Thalara: The Last Artifacts you take on the role of a wizard/sorcerer/magician using the last few remnants of powerful magical energies to battle over the remaining magical artifacts. Each player has a deck of remnant energy that can only be used once per game, however as you gain artifact energy the artifacts become permanent parts of your hand and return after each round. The game continues until one player has a full hand of artifacts, or has run out of remnants to use.

Thalara: The Last Artifacts is available on Kickstarter right now!

Blooms:
Blooms are the game's highlights and features. Elements that are exceptional.

Fast Play
Simple Rules
Great Artwok
Balanced, but unique assymetric character powers

Buds:
Buds are interesting parts of the game I would like to explore more.

I didn't get to play the 3-4 player version, but it sounds interesting.
Several advanced characters add more complex gameplay.
Play gets faster and more intense as players get to know their characters and opponents' playstyle.

Thorns:
Thorns are a game's shortcomings and any issues I feel are noteworthy.

While the 3-4 player game seems interesting, I suspect it would be more chaotic and less tactical.
Some characters feel unbalanced until you understand how to use their abilities effectively.

Final Thoughts:

I have to say that I really enjoyed Thalara: The Last Artifacts. The 20-30 minute gametime is pretty accurate - our first games took about 40 minutes, but we got a lot faster as we got more comfortable with the game. The gameplay is very simple, essentially using numerical power cards (remnants) from your personal deck, which is identical to your opponent's deck except for the card backs, to compete over three other cards. If you are familiar with games like Smash Up or Ghosts Love Candy, you're familiar with this mechanic. It's nothing special in itself, but brings about some interesting interactions and decisions.

Each round you create a hand of 7 energy cards, made up from a combination of Remnants and Artifacts. You start with the same 20 Remnants as your opponents and can choose which of those to use each round, but as you gain permanent Artifacts your hand becomes more defined and you'll have fewer Remnant energy cards to add to it. The Remnant energy is generally more powerful (with strength ranging from 1-5) whereas the Artifacts are less powerful (strengths from 0-3), but worth points at the end of the game (1-3 points). This creates and interesting dynamic of deciding when to splurge with your high-energy Remnant cards, even though that might mean winning a lower-energy Artifact.

The tug-of-war aspect as you battle over the available Artifacts is interesting enough, but it's the character abilities that really make the game shine. Each character in the game has a set of four spells that they can use each round. In order to use a spell you must first play an energy card to a conflict, then you can add a spell to a conflict that has the required types of energy in it. There are five types of energy (denoted by colors and iconography) and spells require one to three specific types of energy to be used in a conflict to cast a spell. It's the spells that elevate the game beyond just a bluffing/deduction game of combat. Each of the characters' spells are very unique, yet thematic for each character.

Myrja, the Fire Amazon, has a collection of spells that destroy energy. Canto, the Bansinger, has spells that might be considered "artistic" or that have a lot of flare. Kandhran, the Leader of Albren, casts spells that are pure brute strength, and Accaina, the Time Traveler, has spells that manipulate your hand and the battlefield. Each of these, as well as the other characters in the game, have very unique playstyles. They take some time to learn and get comfortable with, but they all seem balanced, interesting, and unique.

I really enjoyed playing Thalara: The Last Artifacts, and feel like it's relatively small form factor, fast play time, and simple gameplay that still offers good depth, make it a winner - a Bloom game for sure! It'll be a great two-player filler, and could even be fun with three or four players, though that seems like it's be more chaotic. You can find Thalara: The Last Artifacts on Kickstarter right now for $15-$24 (depending on if you want the full set for four-players or just the two-player set). For that price, I think this would be a great addition to anyone's collection, especially if you do like two-player games that really feel like a battle of wits against your opponents.

Buds, Blooms, and Thorns Rating:

Bloom! This game is great and worth
adding to your collection! It should be
on just about every gamer's shelf.

Pictures:

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GJJ Games Reviews are independent, unpaid reviews of games I, George Jaros, have played with my family and friends. Some of these games I own, some are owned by friends, some are borrowed, and some were provided by a publisher or designer for my honest feedback and evaluation. I make every attempt to be both honest and constructively critical in my reviews, and they are all my opinions. There are four types of reviews on GJJ Games: Full Reviews feature critical reviews based on a rubric and games receive a rating from 0 to 100. Quick Reviews and Kickstarter Previews are either shorter reviews of published games or detailed preview reviews of crowdfunding games that will receive a rating from 0 to 10 based on my impressions of the game. Buds, Blooms,and Thorns reviews are shorter reviews of either published or upcoming games that highlight three aspects of a game: Buds are parts of a game I look forward to exploring more, Blooms are outstanding features of a game, and Thorns are shortcomings of a game. Each BBT review game will receive an overall rating of Thorn, Bud, or Bloom.

danielin.melin

This post is going to start a hobby documentary on how to rehabilitate poorly treated used models and salvage an army using hobby skills. It'll also document my dabbling with Convergence of Cyriss from a gameplay perspective. I'm still mainlining Trolls, but I figure I'll play with my new CoC every once and a while.

Why start Convergence?

I've had bits and pieces of CoC sitting in my closet for years. Maybe a year after release I picked up an original Prime Axiom and Transfinite Emergence Projector basically new in box for like $60 for the two of them, figuring it was a deal too good to pass up. I also picked up a friends Aurora and Clockwork Angels when he was selling out of the faction (my wife said they were pretty).

In terms of design, they've certainly appealed to me from a gameplay perspective. With the latest release of Orion for the faction they really seem like they have the tools to be able to deal with pretty much anything, which is something PP has been setting as their goal for their limited release factions. I also kind of like the idea that once I've bought into it, I'm basically done with major purchases. It's all about experimenting with the limited toolset as the meta changes.

Also the focus induction mechanics seem really cool. I appreciate the puzzle in each game of trying to mastermind how to make the clockwork like system of getting the focus around to maximize efficiency. I'm an engineer by trade and the way PP made that clockwork system into a game mechanic really intrigues me.

What made me actually jump into the faction was that I found two separate retail for retail trade opportunities. Someone was looking to trade CoC for 40k Orks, and was interested in the entire lot I've been looking to offload for years. I also found someone who wanted nearly all of the Circle I was trying to offload and we worked out equitable trades. It's always a great value when you can do retail-for-retail trades on models you own to get models you want. The downside is that the very large lot I got in exchange for my old Orks was largely piles of crap that I had to salvage. Luckily the trade I got for Circle was excellent.

What to do when you get badly treated used models

One mistake I made on my first trade with the Orks for CoC was not asking for pictures of the models I was trading for. Note to readers: Always Ask For Pictures When Trading On The Internet.

This ended up being pretty bad overall, since the models I got were nearly all broken, some of which looked like they were given to a young child to try and paint, and some were clearly nicely done conversions that were then traded to this person who then mistreated them. My trade was to include an Axis and Lucant, but since the models weren't complete the person included a second version of the models, all of which still required bits orders from PP or just wholesale replacement of the model to get something functional.

Nearly every walking Vector chassis had all their legs broken off at weird angles, and two of the Inverters I got are missing the chain+flail bit altogether. What's worse is that I found the unit of Reciprocators I received weren't actually glued to their bases. The person used blue sticky tac and then spray painted metallic spray over all of it.

I didn't take pictures before I started fixing everything, but you can see exactly how awkward the pinning/leg reattachment went on some of the jacks, as well as how bad the paint job was:

Nothing like sticky tac for getting models on bases!

It was actually piled all the way up in huge amounts. Lots of scraping to clean it up.

Talk about a mess.

You can see what lengths I went through to get the legs back on. This was the only way it'd fit.

It looks like a 5 year old was told to pain this guy. The leg in the air was the only leg actually still glued to the model when I received it.

The solution in nearly all cases was simply pinning, lots and lots of pinning legs back after dry fitting to see which pieces went with which broken jacks. Fortunately I was able to get all my vectors up and stable on their bases.

My unit of Reciprocators were missing the tips of their halberds. These are near impossible to find bits for online, but I ended up going with the Steelsoul Protector spear from PP and luckily I was able to use the tip of the spear as a replacement for the halberds and have it work out nicely. All in all it was $30 in bits from PP to replace parts either too broken to salvage or bits that were straight up missing. Not terrible, but not great either.

What was worse is that the Clockwork Angels and Auora model I had effectively fell apart over the years they sat in my closet. My friend had used some really thin pins and apparently a not very good superglue. I basically re-pinned everything with the Angels, though making sure to use a much thicker paperclip as my pinning.

Thicker pinning = Better Pinning

Between pinning up Aurora, 3 units of Clockwork Angels, and building a fresh Father Lucant, lets just say I never want to build anything like that again. My fingers still hurt from all the pinning I had to do to get those things securely built!

Next Steps

Once everything has been built up (I still have a few servitors to do), I'm going to apply basing material and then test out using a metallic spray paint as a base coat. I'll have to paint the base and the basing material black again, but it theoretically allows me a lot of speed up in terms of getting the army painted up quickly. I definitely like the metal look, and I'm really keen on the idea of an easy to paint faction.

Gaming Results

I've been wanting to play a Synergy caster since forever and now I have my first opportunity with Syntherion. He's also got a really nice toolkit and is pretty well rounded. Apparently he's fallen out of favor with the larger meta as very few people seem to be talking about him, but I wanted to give him a shot.

Since I was playing a friend of mine who is just hopping back into the game with a brand new faction (Circle), I decided to avoid some of the more blatant power pieces like the TEP or Axiom, just giving things a go with heavies in Destruction Initiative:

Syntherion
-Corrolary
-Cipher

-Cipher

-Assimilator

-Assimilator
-Inverter

-Diffuser

Optifex Directive

Algorithmic Dispersion Optifex

Elimination Servitors

Attunement Servitors

I squared off against Tanith running

Feral

Stalker

Loki

Reeves of Orboros + UA

Skinwalkers + UA

Wolves of Orboros + UA

Gallows Grove x2

Unfortunately for me the first time I put CoC on the table I had…performance issues.

I initially thought that being a WM veteran of over 15 years I'd be able to master the Focus Induction mechanic in my first game. I was wrong. We weren't playing on clock since my friend isn't really used to the game yet, but if I was on clock I'd have surely clocked out given the amount of time it took me to figure out how to allocate and induct in the right order to accomplish everything I wanted to in each turn.

I was actually holding my own fairly well in the game, but a missed Magnetic Hold screwed up my plans and then after charging in on the Feral+Loki on my feat turn, I didn't realize a mistake: I charged in where I'd trigger admonition, but this charge was the last activation for me in the turn – meaning the Stalker with Admonition could move to threaten Syntherion and not worry about anything else coming in.

I also was bad at contesting when I easily could have multiple times, so rather than having to take the assassination victory, my opponent just had to kill an objective and survive a free strike to move Loki into another zone to win on scenario.

After the game I realized that taking a single TEP in the list would dramatically improve my ability to handle the 20+ infantry on the table, allowing me to better focus on getting up in the trading game.

So basically Destruction Initiative = 1 TEP minimum, at least to start. Given how excited I am to play with that piece, let alone the possibility of a few lists running two of them, this seems like a good general principle to start with.

danielin.melin

#Nintendo #gamedev #indiedev #SuperMarioRun

In September of 2017, Nintendo released an update to Mario Run which, amongst other things, introduced players to a new way to play, dubbed Remix 10.

Yokohama

This popular TMG title is in private Beta right now, and I've been able to get several games in. It's nice to be able to play before the general release and give feedback about not just bugs, but suggestions to make the implementation better.

La Granja

I played this "modern classic" when it came out, and thought it was fine, but I wasn't sure what all the hype was about. It has recently been released on BGA, and the implementation is pretty good. I've gotten a few games in so far, and while I am enjoying it, I'm still not sure it's worth the fuss. So far, the more I play it, the better I like it.

Teotihuacan

I very much enjoyed Tzolkin, so I had automatic interest in Teotihuacan by one of the same designers, as it was touted as a "spiritual sequel" (I hate that term!). When it came out, I never really had a chance to play it, and pretty soon I stopped hearing about it. When I recently found out it was in Alpha at BGA I was excited to finally get a chance to play! I'm currently about 2 games in and I am enjoying it pretty well. Interestingly, Teotihuacan sort of scoops 2 of my own designs! It has dice "workers" that level up when you use them, which is the main mechanism of my worker placement game Apotheosis, and it is a big rondel made of tiles, like the latest version of the Isle of Trains board game that Dan and I are working on.

In addition to those newer titles, I have been playing some old standbys on BGA as well:

Stone Age

Every time I play Stone Age, I remember how good a game it really is. I haven't played in a while, so it was fun to explore a starvation strategy again (some say in competitive games starvation isn't viable, but in a casual game I crushed everyone with it), and in another game I did the opposite -- I managed to get a bunch of farms right away.

Race For The Galaxy

Another solid title that I haven't really played much since Eminent Domain came about, RftG is a great game. I still think I prefer it 2-player because of the additional agency and ability to sort of combo plays.

Hanabi

I've even tried some Hanabi on BGA. I doubt I'd enjoy that with random people, but with my two Hanabi friends it was a blast. We played a bunch of games, but kinda stopped when we got a perfect 30 points (including the multicolor suit), with no bombs, and almost all of our clues left -- can't possibly do much better than that!

danielin.melin

Heavy French and Italian cavalry

When I finished the Swiss pike, my original intention was to launch straight into a pile of 200 landsknechts to give them some more opponents, however, I also had quite a large lead pile of cavalry to do, first off was a couple of units of Swiss and Italian mounted crossbows (that don't feature in this post) and having done them I decided to try some of the many Gendarmes and early 16th century knights that were also sitting in the box. I had figures from 3 different manufacturers which I had accumulated over the past 6 months, a dozen of the SteelFist Gendarmes, 6 charging and 6 with upright lances, 6 late 15th century knights from SteelFist, 8 Gendarmes and 8 archer types from Eureka, and finally 24 Foundry Gendarmes (only 12 of those finished so far).
So, having painted all of the above in this last few weeks I thought I'd give you a brief comparison.

Steel Fist Gendarmes
So first, the Steel Fist figures. I can find very little to say about this companies figures apart from unstinting praise, beautiful sculpts, great and enormously varied poses, high quality casting and metal, they are excellent figures. They produce 2 different sets of Gendarmes, one charging, one with lance upright. All the figures and horses are different, with separate heads and weapon arms, and sheathed swords. plumes are also separate, so the permutations are enormous. If you wanted to get super adventurous you could swap in some of their Landsknecht heads or maybe Perry ones. The horses are all individual barded mounts, if you want to find it, there is amazing detail on them.
My only very small issue with these figures is that you might need to drill out the odd neck to get a better fit with whichever head you choose to place on whatever body. These are outstanding figures.The best way to buy them is as a set of 6, this way they come in at £5 a figure. Not cheap, but generally you get what you pay for in this life.

Steel Fist again, remarkable figures- side-show Bob leading the charge.

Now the bad news. Currently the Gendarmes are out of stock and unavailable due to the current emergency. I will be getting another dozen as soon as life returns to normal. I urge you all to do the same (but not until I have my order in).

Earlier Italian Knights from Steel Fist

Somewhere along the way I bought 8 earlier knights on unarmoured horses. these tie in well with the Perry plastic set, I replaced one of the heads with a Perry one. Not as flamboyant as their later brethren, but similar in style and quality, separate heads and lance arms.
All of the Steel Fist figures look BIG. Nothing wrong with that, and they are the same size as Perry medievals.

Eureka Miniatures Gendarmes, with heavy cavalry support

Next up are the Eureka miniatures. Lovely figures, well cast, great, crisp detail, separate lance arms, alternative sword/hammer/mace arms and weapons, these are really well thought out figures, separate plumes, lovely Barded horses- you can create a lot of variation with these figures, price for these is £28.25 for a set of 8 which is very good value. I will be getting another 8 of the Gendarmes. They also produce Archer/coustillier types which are nice, although without the massive variations of the Gendarmes. Good figures. My only comment would be that are a little bit small,not a lot, but a little, certainly when compared to Perry and SteelFist. In their own units alongside each other they look absolutely fine, but I would be reluctant to mix them in the same units with the other manufacturers.

Eureka again, very varied and clever designs

Foundry Gendarmes

Finally we have Wargames Foundry. Wargames Foundry are... well, Wargames Foundry. Consistent, high quality sculpts to good standard. They are sort of benchmark figures. Separate cast lances and sword scabbards, the latter of which fit really neatly into a lug on the figure. Cast on heads. The figures are fine, albeit a tad dull. All in a sitting lance upright pose, little animation, and I guess if you have read this blog you know I like a bit of animation.
There are basically 3 or 4 head variations on 2 body types. Then the horses......I've never been a huge fan of Foundry horses, to much shaggy pit pony for my liking. I bought 7 different mounted packs of the Gendarmes....and there is only 1 barded horse type and 4 unarmoured horse. However, I can live with that, what was a bit of a shock was the casting quality. It was bloody awful. Massive lumps of flash, mould lines, the works. 24 figures and horses took me about 4 hours to clean up and assemble, which is a bit poor, and after all, Foundry are charging premium prices for 30 year old sculpts. I bought them on a deal which was great, but if I had paid full list price for them I would have been disappointed. Compared to the more modern figures their age is showing, but, they paint up as fine as they always have.

Another view of Wargames Foundry

Foundry head on

All of these figures were a joy to paint, and I'm really pleased with them, I set them off with a bunch of Pete's Flags, which, let's be honest, always make average painted figures like mine look brilliant.
Flags, faces and bases....that's all you need.

All banners from Pete's Flags.

danielin.melin

The Remote Exploit Development Team has just announced BackTrack 4 Beta. BackTrack is a Linux based LiveCD intended for security testing and we've been watching the project since the very early days. They say this new beta is both stable and usable. They've moved towards behaving like an actual distribution: it's based on Debian core, they use Ubuntu software, and they're running their own BackTrack repositories for future updates. There are a lot of new features, but the one we're most interested in is the built in Pico card support. You can use the FPGAs to generate rainbow tables and do lookups for things like WPA, GSM, and Bluetooth cracking. BackTrack ISO and VMWare images are available here.

Website: http://www.remote-exploit.org

Danielo

martes, 22 de septiembre de 2020

Buds, Blooms, And Thorns Preview Of Thalara: The Last Artifacts By Wredespiel

lunes, 21 de septiembre de 2020

Convergence Of Cyriss - A Side Project

sábado, 12 de septiembre de 2020

Thoughts On Super Mario Run: Remix 10 And The Nature Of Rewards

Recent Gaming, Online Edition

Yokohama

La Granja

Teotihuacan

Stone Age

Race For The Galaxy

Hanabi

viernes, 4 de septiembre de 2020

Gendarmes: A Bit Of A Comparison.

lunes, 31 de agosto de 2020

Backtrack4

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