It Can't Possibly Be Time For Gencon 2012.

Happy to report that this has not happened to me in a dream... yet.

I know this must happen to hundreds of people every year, but it's finally happened to me, this year, this Gencon - how did time move so quickly for Gencon to only be a week away? Something evil is playing at the edges of reality. Don't trust the things that move (or don't move in a conspicuous manner!) at the corners of your vision. It's gremlins, gotta be gremlins. Of course it could be leprechauns. Not the nice kind that give you gold, but the evil kinds portrayed in a long run of perpetually-poorly made sequels and prequels. You get the idea, something wicked this way comes, etc.

Regardless (not Irregardless - that'd be evil gremlin talk), Gencon being a week away means it's time to get to business thinking about what this year's gonna mean for me. Usually I start Gencon preparation in two ways - what I want to play, and what I want to buy. I'm happy to say that the what I want to play greatly outnumbers the what I want to buy category for this year.

In case you missed it... FFG announces in-house deck boxes!

I'm pretty much a shill for Fantasy Flight Games at this point, and I'm ok with that. Anyway, my favorite game from them this past year has been the Lord of the Rings LCG. While storage was easy throughout the entire first cycle of cards, I've now had to expand a bit, and while it's been manageable, carting all my cards around for forever is out of the realm of something I want to do.

FFG of course has a solution up its sleeve. Today they announced their own line of deck boxes, and unlike the some of the safer designs of their card sleeves and gaming tokens, these boxes actually appear to be something offering a bit of innovation and something new. Take a look at the art they've thrown up at that announcement page:

It really does make sense that they'd put their love of tokens together with their love of making open-ended customizable gaming products. It's such a simple innovation, but I love the little token bin at the bottom of these boxes. They also promise to be quite large since FFG claims they comfortably hold 100 sleeved cards. Of course this means I'll be able to carry four Lord of the Rings decks around really easily with just two of these, but I can't help but be excited by the other possibilities these have. Just one of these should be enough for you to carry all the stuff you need to play any tabletop RPG. Mini's, tokens, dice, power cards (for 4th ed.), and a bunch more. Throw a golf pencil or two in there, fold up your character sheet, and you're good to go. Throw a little portrait of your character behind the window on the front of the box, and you've classed up the joint to boot.

Way to go FFG, and hopefully these are the same quality we expect out of all your bits and bobbles you put out!

Announcing The Threat of War fan expansion for The Lord of the Rings LCG

For a little over a month I've been playing around with the idea of developing a mini-expansion for one of my favorite games out there - The Lord of the Rings LCG from Fantasy Flight Games. I'm a huge Tolkien nerd, and not satisfied enough with monthly expansion releases, I decided to try my hand at designing some player cards. I wanted to challenge myself by designing a new card type for the game and settled on trying to figure out how to get the epic armies of Middle Earth into a Lord of the Rings game designed all around a small group of questing heroes.

To that extent, I've put together a first draft of the expansion weighing in at seven pages. That's two pages of rules for how to play Armies and five pages of new cards. In all, at the current time, there are 18 cards designed - four for each of the four factions and two neutral cards. I'm looking for some help in putting together some rough mock-ups of the cards and really would love to find some players to playtest what I do have designed in both solo and multiplayer cooperative play. If you're interesting in participating, please leave a comment to this post or you can email me at TheHopelessGamer@gmail.com. Anyone who helps out will be listed in the final pdf which I hope to publish here for free for everyone to play.

I've included below the introduction I wrote for the document so you can get a better idea of what I'm aiming for with this expansion as well as a little preview as to how Armies function in the overall game.

Introduction

Armies are a new card type for the LotR LCG from Fantasy Flight Games. This mini expansion is very much a work of a fan of the game and not meant to be considered as condoned by or really having any connection at all with Fantasy Flight Games or the Tolkien estate.

Through out the epic stories told by J.R.R. Tolkien, the heroes and champions of the free peoples feature heavily, and yet armies play a strong role as well. Without the mustering of Rohan, King Theoden could not have rode across the fields of Pelennor to defeat the king of the Haradrim in single combat. Aragorn alone could not have turned the tide of that same battle without the rangers of the Dunedain and armies from Southern Gondor. While Sam and Frodo courageously trekked across Mordor, King Elessar's army drew the gaze of Sauron away from the tiny hobbits and toward the threat at his front gate.

To this extent, Armies are not designed to replace the heroes and allies we know and love in our decks. Armies are distinctly not considered a character for example in the rules when it comes to ways the players can affect them. Also, you'll notice that Armies are useless when it comes to questing – exploration of the lands and pursuit of a quest will always be the work of bold individuals and small companies of heroes.

Armies are expensive in a number of ways, and whenever a hero has gathered such a sizable force to aid him, he lights a bright beacon that attracts Sauron to a potential rival that much quicker. Still, an Army can only be brought together under the leadership of the heroes. Will you lead the Armies of Middle Earth against hopeless odds and the limitless swarms of the Enemy?

The One Ring - The Canon of My Home Game.

I've been speeding my way through The One Ring since picking it up at Gencon, and it has me more excited to GM than I've been in quite a long time. I got to play a full session demo of it (four hours) at the convention, and I think it was an invaluable experience in helping me grasp the rules on a first read-through. TOR is a system built from the ground up to address the unique traits of Tolkien's story that have been surprisingly difficult for medieval fantasy games such as D&D to handle. While it does some things similar to other systems and isn't entirely alien, it does a lot of brand new things that seem intuitive and obvious after you see them in action.

I'll be writing more about TOR in the future since it's a game I badly want to run, but today's post was inspired by something I read in the Lore Master's (GM's) book of the TOR base set. In the book, it's addressed that The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit can be incredibly intimidating settings in which to run a game. One thing I discovered recently in playing the Lord of the Rings LCG from FFG with my group is that I probably am the biggest Tolkien nerd out of all of us. The Lore Master's book actually endorses the idea that the one who's the biggest nerd should probably run the game. More than that, I love their take on the official canon that gives some room for the LM to play around in Middle-Earth without forcing his players to play characters named Aragorn, Frodo, Legolas, or Thorin.

Gencon Photo Fun Finito!

I mentioned on Monday that I had just a few more pictures left to post from Gencon. Today's the wrap-up of all the great new stuff I got to check out while at the convention, but I warn you, it is quite the random collection.

Gencon Hype - The One Ring

Being my most anticipated game left for the whole year as well as being my number one goal item to pick up at Gencon, I'm gobbling up The One Ring information as quickly as possible. This is why I was so excited to see a video interview with the game's designer, Francesco Nepitello, talking about the very beginnings of what would become the newest Lord of the Rings RPG. You can follow the link above to take you directly to Cubicle 7's page, otherwise feel free to watch below.

Gencon 2011 Want!

Gencon is generally considered to be the big release party for countless new gaming items. If you want to make a splash with your new rpg, board game, dice, or other random game bits that land somewhere between, Gencon's the last big deadline of the summer to make it happen. From Fantasy Flight Games to Privateer Press to Cubicle 7, everyone wants to get the "new hotness" to make headlines on blogs and long lines starting at 10:01 next Thursday morning.

At the same time, with the Gencon auction and plenty of used game retailers in the vendor hall, Gencon is a fantastic place to find that one item you've been searching for for years or to pick up something on the cheap that you've been meaning to give a try. While the flashier new stuff is always excited and grabs my attention big time each year, often it's the smaller, older, cheaper stuff I pick up in the auction that really makes me feel like I found a treasure. Of course the flip side of that is that sometimes you just want to see something new because you want to give it a shot before purchasing. There's no better place to try a demo of a game or to check out something you've been eyeing than Gencon.

Without further ado, I present you my Want! list for Gencon 2011. To be honest, I don't have a ton that I need to purchase right at the show (saying this now, I know I'll change my mind once I get there), but I'm very excited to see some things in action. Let the coveting begin!

An update on The One Ring! Finally!

It's a fantastic year to be a Tolkien nerd. First of all, obviously I'm obsessed with the Lord of the Rings Card Game from Fantasy Flight Games (I've posted about it a bunch in its less-than-three weeks of existence), and I continue to play the game almost once a day.

The other Lord of the Rings game set to be released this year, The One Ring rpg from Cubicle 7 has been a much bigger mystery than the Card Game. We've got bits and pieces here and there including the fact that, like the Card Game, the license for the RPG is based on the books rather than the movies (which I much prefer to games based on the movies - simply because we have so many based on the movies in the last ten years). We've also heard that the designer, who also designed one of the best board games I've ever played - The War of the Ring - has taken a more generational approach to the game. He cites Pendragon as a major influence. Cubicle 7 has released more insight in that the game will release the different time periods for Middle Earth (note: not the Ages) as distinct settings that players can either play the same elf or possibly dwarf through out but may produce offspring and new generations of heroes for humans and, potentially, hobbits.

I'm stupid excited for this game now that we've gotten our first glimpses of some art. The picture included in this post is that of a Misty Mountain Goblin and drips with a unique flavor that I'm hoping runs through out the game. If this is the style they're going for - slightly cartoonish with larger-than-life details - I'm pretty much sold on the game and books if for no other reason than a fresh perspective on Middle Earth. You need to go check out Cubicle 7's website directly (if that link doesn't work, you can find their homepage here) to find an image of Smog as well as a really great interpretation of Dol Guldor. Chuck was able to get a ticket for The One Ring at Gencon for him and me for separate sessions, and it's now the game I'm looking forward to most playing there. I'm actually happy that we are in different sessions as we'll get a good feel for how the system works independently of helping each other enjoy it. I'm sure there'll be more to report in the future!

Musings on Building a Two-Sphere Deck: Thorongil Deck

I've been playing around with deck building and am trying to build a good solo deck using the standard deck building rules - 50 cards and no more than 3 copies of a single card in the deck. The biggest problem I've encountered is resources. It's just too hard to build two-sphere decks right now (especially with just one copy of the core set) as when I'm deck building, I want to just use 29 cards (+ a third copy of Gandalf) from the sphere with two heroes and 20 cards from the sphere with only one hero. When I'm deciding on which 20 cards to include from the sphere with just one hero, I auto-dump the cards that cost more than 2 and go from there. I figure I never really want to wait more than two turns to be able to play a card in my hand (making the five or six cost cards from the sphere with two heroes questionable includes as well, but I need more cards to get to 50!). I assume as we get more low-cost sphere cards and new neutral cards deck building across spheres will get much easier. However, given the nature of neutral cards to be so easy to get out, I don't think we're going to see a bunch of those released.

Lord of the Rings LCG - Blondes Have More Fun!

I've now gotten several solo games of the Lord of the Rings card game under my belt with each of the starter decks and can now say that I have a firm standout favorite of the four. I won my very first game with Aragorn, Theodred, and Gloin and thought Leadership might be right for me. I didn't figure out until after a few more play-throughs that it was actually the awesome Aragorn-Theodred combo combined with Steward of Gondor that really shined, and although I like the sphere, it's not my favorite. Tactics, specifically Legolas, had grabbed my eye right away since they're the real combat monster deck. While they're fun to play, in solo they need a ton more options, specifically to take care of locations, to be playable right now. Glorfindel's my favorite LotR character ever, and so I had a lot of fun playing him, Denethor, and Beravor as they are extremely defensive and have a ton of staying power (not to mention how useful all three of the hero powers are), but I just couldn't get too far in questing.

If you've played the game, you know which sphere is left - and which blonde I'm referring to. Spirit was actually the deck I was least thrilled by from all the previews, but Eowyn is the master quester and when you combine her with Dunhere who is actually a great combat hero and Eleanor who, while her power is conditional, can defend pretty well on her own, the Spirit deck is a great balance between questing, location clearing, and combat.

Playing with myself is fun! A review of Lord of the Rings Card Game from FFG

I first posted a glimpse of my thoughts about the newly-released core set for the Lord of the Rings Card Game (LotR CG) from Fantasy Flight Games this past Wednesday. Overall the materials and packaging of the game were pretty average matching my previous experiences with other LCG core sets. If that's how I would describe the play and theme of the LotR CG I would be extremely disappointed. Luckily, there's a whole lot more to the game, and it stands out as a unique collectible card game that plays off of some of the most familiar tropes in fantasy gaming while offering a brand new style of card game.

Unboxing of the Lords of the Rings LCG from Fantasy Flight Games

Yesterday I was finally able to pick up my copy of the Lord of the Rings Living Card Game (LCG) from Fantasy Flight Games. We first heard about the next LCG days before Gencon 2010, and the announcement completely threw me off my game. While I was getting excited for RPG's like DC Adventures and Dread House, FFG just threw this announcement right out there and distracted me from everything else. I knew one of my first interviews that week would have to be with anyone I could find that could tell me anything else about this mysterious new rings game.

Without too much difficulty I was able to wrangle the game's producer, Jason Walden for an interview, and I was completely sold. Set between the Hobbit and the trilogy, based on the books not the movies (AWESOME), and cooperative/solo play? This was pretty much my dream product. As more news surfaced we found out that the game's expansion packs were going to offer new quests every month to try to overcome, and it just kept getting better and better. Fast forward to the last week as rumors of an April 18th release date loomed ahead of us, and I began checking Noble Knight every day to see when it was up for me to scoop up and enjoy. While I was disappointed that they didn't have it yesterday, I was able to stop by on my way home from work today and immediately grab a copy.