Anima Tactics Arrival

I said in my last blog post that I had ordered a few things for Anima Tactics, and yesterday everything finally appeared by UPS fairly early on in the day, which is rather shocking in and of itself. The box that MiniatureMarket shipped in was about the size I was expecting when it did show up on my door step, however, what I wasn't expecting was all the filler in the box. What you don't see in the pic is XII who I took out of his blister and put him with the rest of Wissenschaft.

A part of my thought the starter sets were going to be larger, as they were supposed to be holding six minis inside each box. Well, they certainly did cram all those minis into those boxes to make them fit. Well go into more details about the start set in a moment however.

The book itself was in good condition as I nearly always get from MiniatureMarket. Still filled with the beautiful artwork I was originally drawn to Anima for, and nearly half the book dedicated to the Saga 1 and Saga 2 characters. More or less a good book to get the basics of the world you are to be expecting to fight in. As I have used the Anima Tactics ruleset before, there wasn't anything out of the ordinary in that section either. The rules are still very easy to understand, and yet incredibly deep. It will only take a new person to the game a few fights to realize that blowing all your Action Points every round leaves you nearly defenseless.

The biggest problem with new people getting the rulebook now is that while it goes over the majority of the current line of organizations and characters, the game has moved onto Saga 3 and added new characters and groups that you will not know anything about unless you look on the Cipher Studios site or find an updated team builder. Granted, this is a problem for any tabletop game that wants to keep expanding after the book releases, but it is still a con none-the-less.

So on to the starter sets, which has a lot more commentary I can do as I have purchased previous starters and characters from Cipher Studios before. These new starter sets, like the old ones, are filled with the plastic chits to use to track Action Points, all the required bases, and all the minis floating 'loose' in the box. All that in the same size box as the Dark/Light starters used (as well as various characters).

What neither starter set included, that the Dark/Light ones did, was a quickstart rulebook and the token sheet. The quickstart rulebook of course being far more important, as now a person either needs to download it or get the hardcover book. I bought the hardcover book, but I am not a new person coming into the game. I would like to see both of those missing items placed back into all the starters, and not just the Dark/Light starters. Not everyone will want to print out or use a tablet/smartphone when trying to learn a new game. Not having the tokens readily available is something I think all sets should have, since you have a LOT of effects going on in the game normally, and the minis have a lot of wounds which need to be tracked.

By floating loose, I mean they are not packed up individually and all the bits are rather jumbled. I had to go through and figure out which bits went to which character. Some of the figures I had to Google and figure out which characters got which bits. Momiji had a ton of floating bits in the Samael box set, and took me a while to make sure all were accounted for. Once again, these sets are labeled as starter sets, players will go in with the assumption it is for new players to the game, and having a ton of bits they have to dig through may turn off a few folks. There is a big difference between two mini starter sets having loose bits like the Dark/Light sets, and having 6 minis worth of loose bits. I will say though that I didn't see any damaged bits, and everything was accounted for while I did inventory.

For $37.49 you do get a good number of pewter minis, and a nice selection of some decent characters that, for me anyhow, will actually be used further down the road once I work out my own list. This minimizes future purchases since I only need XII for a leader and Cordelia for my long range sniper. Of course this will vary between players and chosen forces. If I decided to do a mecha themed Wissenschaft force, the starter set would be nearly worthless to me.

The last thing in the package was XII, and I was rather shocked when I found him in a blister and not in a box with his own artwork. It didn't take me long for me to remove him from his blister and put all his contents in with the starter set. Figured it was safer than having to try and keep track of both items until I get them put together.

So at the end of the day what do I think of the new starter sets and my order in general?

Book
Pro:

• Filled with beautiful artwork and lore.
• Every Sage 1 and Saga 2 character has a dedicated 1-2 pages of background.
• Rules are created in such a way that it won't take long for people to learn how to play.

Con:

• Rulebook ONLY includes the Saga 1 and Saga 2 characters, and there are Saga three characters and entire organizations not listed in the book.

Starters
Pro:

• Good deal for the money IF you intend to use majority of the minis included in the box set.
• Although all bits are loose, everything is packaged well and nothing really moves.

Con:

• Good deal for the money IF you intend to use majority of the minis included in the box set.
• No quickstart rulebook or token sheet.
• Loose bits require player to run an inventory and figure out which bits go to which character, which can be daunting.

Conclusion
Effectively I can get two completely playable 300 point forces and rulebook for less than $100 with the new 'starter' sets which is fairly cheap once everything is said and done. If someone already has a friend with the main book, and already settled in to use 4+ of the minis from the starter sets, then the deal can't really be beat. If that isn't the case however, I would suggest to a new person to get either the Dark/Light starters or the main rulebook and just proxy for a while.

Move still on going

And this is my painting load...

You may notice something about me while reading through my blogs. I have a horrible case of Gamer's ADD when it comes to staying with a game for any length of time, usually I find myself trying, or returning to, a new game after a time of silence while life gets busy. My mind gets wondering to other systems, and you see my hop between other games during the downtime. Only a few games I never actually push forward with, Warhammer 40K and WFB have never actually panned out for me in the last few years as quick examples. Just because I leave a system however does not mean I don't enjoy it however, as you can guess Heavy Gear Blitz is still one of my favorite games and will remain so for a long time going forward, but every now I then I enjoy a different ruleset, genre, or scale. It also leads me to be completely overloaded in terms of projects.

During this time of my wife and I packing our house in order to get it onto the market and also try to get a new house for ourselves, gaming is not something we find we have time for much anymore outside PC gaming. Of course that leads me to looking into numerous other systems, I have looked into a few systems lately, especially Hell Dorado since it has a Kickstarter live right now. Funny thing about me looking into Hell Dorado is that it made me want to start playing Anima Tactics again and get the Wissencraft force up and running that I had planned back when I first was playing the game. Of course this means I went out and bought the minis for Wissencraft and Samuel for my wife.

This just keeps adding minis to my plate that I still haven't been able to touch. I really need to lock down my spending since I still have the Gundam fleet for Firestorm Armada, my Kings of War Elven Force,, Heavy Gear PRDF, Sedition Wars, and now Anima Tactics. Like a never ending flow of minis. Not even going to touch on the fact I was almost tempted to do a Kings of War force in 10mm scale, which would have added even more minis to the mix.

I am a terrible person.

Customization - How Much is Too Much?

One of the things that irk me while gaming, and has turned me off of various games is the amount of character customization available to me during the creation of the army. I am not saying I expect every miniature to have it's own rules for creation, as that would be simply too much for the table. I do however go into a force creation wanting to make a force or fleet *mine*, and some games do this better than others.

One of the worse offenders of character creations is Anima Tactics where almost every miniature has a name, stats, and about the only power you have over it is if you give it an accessory or not. They have some absolutely lovely miniatures, but the fact everyone is a special character is a major killer there. They are not alone in this regard either, as WarmaHordes also has this to a degree with the Warlock/Warcasters being 'special' characters right out of the gate. You will find that I don't even really enjoy playing Warhammer or 40K with special characters either. To me, as soon as you add a special character, the force is no longer really mine at that point.

On the flip side, if you have too wide an option for character customization, then you run into the issue of redundant, overpowered, and just worthless pieces of equipment. you see this heavily in WFB and 40K for instance. Look at the WFB Slann and how many people take the Cupped Hands of the Old Ones magic item as just one example. HGB sort of falls into this same category as well to a degree, as there are many gears that simply are outclassed by other available gears. Cheetah versus Jaguar for a quick example.

Wargaming is a strange beast in that even in this topic you will find peoples thoughts vary greatly about what they feel about the use of special characters and character customization. You are going to have people that play games like Mordheim that put HEAVY focus on individual characters because that is the game it is built around, then you have the other extreme of games like Firestorm Armada that has zero special 'characters' as all ships come just as listed.

For me, I find Firestorm Armada's lack of customization fine for some reason because it is in fact a ship and not an actual individual  It could be from all the various Gundam, Firefly, and Babylon 5 episodes I have watched over time (I am sorry but I simply have not watched Star Trek or Star Wars outside of the passing glance if it was on TV so can't talk about their space battles), but for me the tone of a ship should be based on the exploits of the crew aboard that ship. You take that combat to a gear or other man shaped mecha, and suddenly I start wanting more option loadouts available to me as I could easily see a pilot customizing his mecha to fight in his preferred methodology.

Getting back into standard foot soldier themed games though, there are so many good games available to people, and yet I have found so few good character customization options available. Strangely enough, for me one of the best I have seen is the Kings of War ruleset. All the characters have a set stat line, they could be equipped with a great sword, sword and shield, halberd, or a harp if you so wanted, and it wouldn't change their stat line. In fact, even the magic items have a section that state that the magic items warp and twist to the form most preferred to the user. What this allows is for you the player to make ANY character to lead your forces and not worry about massive impacts and gear discrepancy since the weapons you put on the miniature don't actually affect that miniatures playstyle.

As I said, for me character customization seems a weird beast to tame. So obviously the question is, where do the players think the companies should aim for? Make a system like WFB, Mordheim and HGB with multiple loadouts per character, or a simpler game where the characters are preset like Warmachine and Anima Tactics? Should more companies walk that line Mantic does with trying to allow as many various companies as possible?

Remembrance...

I never really thought about it until this morning. It is well documented that I dislike painting, but I have never really thought about when I actually stopped wanting to paint. Until this morning anyhow.

I have a semi-large collection of Anima Tactic minis on my desk that I actually did paint up to pretty nice standards, although I did mess the bases up. Romeo Exxet is probably my favorite in a very simple way. I really like how his gold armor came out looking against the dark blue armor and white cloak. All my minis though, except a couple, turned out pretty good, and were easy for me to paint up quickly. Romeo just happened to be one of my favorites, even if he was more or less exactly painted up exactly like the fluff pic was (cloak was different).

After I got those minis painted however something changed in my mindset. I don't know why, but I didn't want to paint minis anymore. Certainly didn't want to paint whole armies at least.

I am going try try my hardest to get back into things with the new Retribution of Scyrah force, as I am going to use the same basic color scheme as Romeo, and nothing nearly as complex as my Menoth test paintings. We'll see if I can get this force painted up or not. Afterall, this is the first time I put any effort forth in making greenstuff bases for the minis.

Legend of the five rings

I found a couple starter packs from a few years back that I bought for myself and my wife to introduce her to the game. We never did get the chance to play, and the game more or less got forgotten about. Well, looking at the cards everything seemed like pristine condition so figured I would see what I could do. I have played L5R in the past and really enjoyed it, so wanted to see if it was just me or if the game actually held my interest.

First problem I ran into with the decks is that apparently the newest rules assumes you have a few cards in in the decks that these older decks did not have. No problem though, a bit slower on the gold contribution at the start of the game, but still playable.

Second problem... I am picky about card games. I dislike using game games without card protectors, because I don't want the cards to get damaged in anyway. Same reason I treat my normal wargaming army books, codexs, and Forces of X books all with tender care when handling them. I just hate stuff that costs so much to get damaged from use. Anyhow I didn't have any spare card holders I could think of on hand, but thankfully I tend to jump games so often that I managed to find a couple games that were just sitting away unplayed for a few months and with no need for the extra protection. L5R cards now good to go in that regard.

I tried to play a solo game, set out the four provinces and everything per the rules and played through. I have to admit, the game is still fairly intricate. Granted it isn't as deep in gameplay as Warhammer, Warmachine, or Anima Tactics, but it also takes up much less space.

My wife's deck was a Scorpion clan deck, while I had a Dragon clan. back when I first started playing the game many years ago I started with a Lion clan, and my best friend at the time used the Shadowlands as his deck. Almost as soon as i started getting the solo game cards rolling out, flash backs of back in the day came back. Building up armies of monks and samurai, defending my territories against the enemy, wishing I had just a little bit more gold to buy this one more person. All great fun.

I really do need to get more updated cards though, as it seems the design (from the pics in the official online rules) of the cards seem to have changed. I'm not sure how high I rank this game in my priorities, as while I do enjoy it, I do have other wargame materials I need to get before anything else. it will certainly be one of those games I try and get the wife to play when it is just a little to late to play a game of Warmachine though.