Reservations...

[Keldaur]

1 hour ago, Killax said:

Questions I would ask myself before going into this game would be:
- Have you enjoyed Magic the Gathering in the past or present?
- Do you like Games Workshop miniatures?
- Are you looking for tactical games that are around 45 minutes to an hour? 
 

I really hope it ends up this way. Because it reflects pretty much my thoughts on what i want out of the game. My magic fix paired with a miniature tactical game fix all in one box with extremely short games and easy to set up.

[Killax]

3 minutes ago, Keldaur said:

I really hope it ends up this way. Because it reflects pretty much my thoughts on what i want out of the game. My magic fix paired with a miniature tactical game fix all in one box with extremely short games and easy to set up.

Yeah and most importantly someone has to be open minded for it. I know that certain types of veteran miniature gamers seem to react very allergic to games they don't know. Oddly even the newer Age of Sigmar players can act this way. In the end it comes down to preforance and I know some simply dislike board and cardgame aspects for whatever reason they might find.

Warhammer Underworlds is a new game and only by trying it can someone really dismiss it. I think there are reasons to dislike it, main reasons there would be:
- It is a Skirmish game, meaning you can't emulate 'good scale/full scale war' (games).
- There is a lot of 'piece management. Cards, special dice, tokens for keeping objectives, tokens for activations, tokens for points that need to be flipped because you can spend it but also 'keep it' and tokens for moves. Frankly speaking this is the only gripe with the game.
- Games currently leave little to no room for narrative parts. There is narrative on the cards but there is very little to no immersion currently other than the nicely printed boards.
- Most of the game is 2D.

With this in mind I can understand why some would leave it aside for those reasons.
However I also feel that regular Wargaming usually leaves the narrative out and also more commonly functions with 2D parts (no terrain, very little terrain, paper terrain etc). 

[Blutsteigen]

I'm going to play pretty casually, and if involved in competitive play I'll probably have to run it. So no worries here, but I can mildly relate to your concerns about exclusive expansion cards.  

The point made above about trading and secondary market will address  this just fine,  I wager.

[dtw]

I think most of the reservations the OP has about the game are actually the main elements that would have excited GW corporate.

The most profitable systems, whether card, board or video games all require continued buy in.

As for taking the cards and selling on the models, I doubt anyone will want the models without the cards? At least for Shadespire.

What brightens my attitude is, as Gaz said, the game in the core box will be playable as that core game forever. If you never want to get into proper deck building, or not sure if you want to, it can start and end there. That's very clever.

For me, the coloured plastic is a HUGE plus. And I'm glad that GW is doing this more and more. I played Heroquest and Space Crusade and those multi-coloured minis did the job for me.

As for competitive play, some systems sell competition packs, which contain prizes, sign-ups and all that sort of thing. If GW do this it would be fantastic but "old" GW would never have dreamed of doing something like that. If we see such packs it really will mark a sea change in their attitude to the "community". However, it will also demonstrate that they realise they need word of mouth and community to really sell this game. If people want this to have longevity they need to get it out and push it at clubs.

The fact that this forum is the only place I could easily find discussing the game makes me a bit sad. I'd have hoped GW would realise people wanted a space to do that online.

My biggest concerns are around "buy to win" and power/"must have" cards specifically shipping in expensive packs. In the past GW has been pretty cynical about that sort of thing. I guess that only matters for hardcore tournamenters. Balancing that though is the fact that if you buy EVERYTHING you can field a variety of warbands as you please, with, apparently, no more models to buy.

[Gaz Taylor]

40 minutes ago, dtw said:

As for competitive play, some systems sell competition packs, which contain prizes, sign-ups and all that sort of thing. If GW do this it would be fantastic but "old" GW would never have dreamed of doing something like that. If we see such packs it really will mark a sea change in their attitude to the "community". However, it will also demonstrate that they realise they need word of mouth and community to really sell this game. If people want this to have longevity they need to get it out and push it at clubs.

I think they are doing this. I'm sure I have seen something mentioning packs they will be selling to clubs/events for this. I'll try and find out more or you could ask on the Twitch Stream tomorrow (Thursday) which is doing some Shadespire stuff

42 minutes ago, dtw said:

The fact that this forum is the only place I could easily find discussing the game makes me a bit sad. I'd have hoped GW would realise people wanted a space to do that online.

There are a few Facebook groups but I think this will catch on more as the game gets played. Its very new teritory really as it's a minature/board /card game mash up and we've not really seen it. I think the community will grow and grow as more warbands are released.

46 minutes ago, dtw said:

My biggest concerns are around "buy to win" and power/"must have" cards specifically shipping in expensive packs. In the past GW has been pretty cynical about that sort of thing. I guess that only matters for hardcore tournamenters. Balancing that though is the fact that if you buy EVERYTHING you can field a variety of warbands as you please, with, apparently, no more models to buy.

I can see your concern but too be honest, the buy to win is countered by you can only have the max 12 Objective cards with around 20 power cards and none of those can be duplicated. So you can have all the cards in the game, but you still need to construct your deck to your playstyle. Plus there doesn't seem to be any deck delving mechanics (apart from one card I have seen means you can draw a power card after your opponent has killed a fighter or something). 

Buy to win will always be around because some players are just like that, but it's not going to mean that they will be winning all the events. 

[Rhellion]

On 10/15/2017 at 4:02 AM, Lucio said:

My biggest reservation with Shadespire is the longevity of the game. It's a crowded market out there and the game's tied to a less well established IP.

Don't get me wrong, I'm buying this at the first opportunity, and likely picking up every warband too in the same way I've done for Blood Bowl. It's just the nagging feeling that there's not quite enough interest in the product to generate critical mass.

It's a valid concern, but the way they explained this at Adepticon is that Shadespire was a Flagship / Core game.

Age of Sigmar
40k
Shadespire.

[Keldaur]

It's hardly uncharted territory, imperial assault exists. But yeah the most important part it's about prizes, acrylic tokens and the like to stores (non GW) or clubs and a somewhat competitive circuit.

[Dave Fraser]

I spoke with my local store owner who said that they had already talked about tournament support packs.  He didn't detail what it was exactly but seemed to suggest it was broadly comparable to the x-wing tournament support.

I've never played magic (or any CCG) and I'm genuinely unsure if this is a game I'll ever play but to buy the starter (20% off RRP) I get 8 unique models that I can paint up nicely and if the game isn't for me I suspect there will be people who have never looked at GW games before that consider this so there is likely to be a reasonable market for buying painted warbands, so I very much doubt I'd end up out of pocket.

Locally there seems to be quite a bit of interest just now (and not just from the AoS crowd) so I'll just see how it goes.

[Killax]

I think that the prime advantage GW has here is that they arn't known for their boardgames all to much, let alone 1vs1 boardgames. Blood Bowl was an exception but as mentioned before Blood Bowl shows it's age compaired to Guild Ball. To the point where a gamer that feels like competing will be more likely to pick up Guild Ball. This doesn't mean the models from Blood Bowl arn't amazing but one could say that Games Workshop was a little too late for most fans of Blood Bowl. As before I would see Mordheim falling is a similar positon due to Malifaux being a much better fleshed out Skirmish City Fight game.

Shadespire on the other hand is new, the closest game I can think of which was akin to it was the WoW miniatures game from ages ago. They too had cards, characters and even offered Warband building but what lead to that fall was the booster packs with unknown information. I am very happy that Games Workshop didn't decide to go a similar route.

The beauty of Shadespire really lies in it's simplicity. Having said that it also rewards tactical play extremely well but because it requires dice there still is some luck involved. This mix is ideal because it often leads to a 50/50 of luck and tactical skill. Most players like this a lot because they feel they can impact the game (they can) but also don't just obliterate 'noobs' by being tactically superior all the time because dice are still involved (luck). When I see the reviews some seem like cards are impacting the game a lot (true) but the practicle use still is decided by dice. Likewise Ive seen about 50/50 comments on Stormcast being "better" vs Bloodreavers being "better". All of this leads to good design.

In many cases simple design is great design and I think Shadespire is the perfect example. Too simple is what Age of Sigmar for example started out with, you need some restrictions, but since the General Handbooks I feel AoS is also in that nice realm of easy to learn and hard to master.

[dtw]

Drawing from a deck adds another random element too.

[Killax]

4 hours ago, dtw said:

Drawing from a deck adds another random element too.

True, though with a free mulligan and fill up to 5 every time youll likely see your 20 if you want to. 

[Attackmack]

It isnt unlikely that later on we will see expansions released featuring single models with a few cards, some specific for that model/warband while some are common. This is absolutely essential if the game is supposed to star active as a competitive game. It must expand and evolve at a constant rate.

The main issue with x-wing, IMO, is not that it forces a player to keep buying ships but that it forces a player to buy ships of all factions. A mainly/only imperial player dont want to spend money on rebel ships just to get that one essential card.

So my hopes for shadespire is that it will adopt what I understand FFG is currently doing with Runewars TMG. That is, similar to x-wing it expands the game with cards through various upgrades BUT all common upgrades are available through each faction's own boxed upgrades. So while you will be forced to keep buying expansions, at least you can stick solely to a single faction and still get access to every usable card.

Ive only just opened, assembled and smelled the fresh ink of my Shadespire box but im already in love with it! At the very least it will be a great game to have shelved and ready to go when a friend is over for a beer, but in all honest I do hope my local community embraces the game as I actually feel some interest in playing it competitively

The last time I felt that interest was with "Star Wars: Destiny" which I quickly dropped as I started to realise how much money I would have to spend