Post by deusxmachina on Jul 1, 2008 12:11:49 GMT -5
I was at Origins last week and spotted a cool looking poster in the Fantasy Flight booth so I stopped to check it out. Turns out it was for their Mutant Chronicles Miniature game. I'd heard the game was coming out a few months back, but with boxes of Mage Knight, Mechwarrior and Dreamblade already in my attic gathering dust I pretty much had dismissed it out of hand. But as I was looking at the cool minis they had set up, the demo guy told me they'd scrapped the blind pull concept for the game and all the product would be buy what you want from fixed starters and boosters. So I decided to get a demo. I was very impressed.
The minis themselves were nice. The sculpts were very good and the paint jobs ranged from ok to good, about what I've come to expect from mass produced prepainted minis. The game play was very smooth. The rules were quite easy to pick up but there was quite a bit of depth of strategy. Turns moved quickly with each player moving only two minis at a time before switching to the opponent. We played a small skirmish game in just a little over a half hour with rules being explained, so I expect a regular game of that size would usually be able to play out in under 30 minutes, but it looked like it would be easily scalable up for larger longer battles. The real beauty of the game though was in the army building. This I thought was a real stroke of genius. There are three elements to your force, each of which comes in three levels; bronze, silver and gold. The elements are the minis themselves, with bronze being weaker, silver a little tougher and gold even tougher still; ability cards, which were quite powerful but often only single use and again in three power levels; and finally action tokens which you would give to a figure on your turn to activate it bronze would give the figure one action, silver two and gold three. There are no points to add up to make your army you simply put together a set number of each level, like 3 bronze/3 silver/ 3 gold and you have your army. The trick is you can pick and choose from the three elements to make up each level. For example you could have 1 bronze mini, 1 bronze card, 1 bronze action token, 1 silver card, 2 silver action tokens, 2 gold mini, and 1 gold card to make up a 3/3/3 army, while your opponent could have a completely different mix. With the starters containing 6 figs, all the cards in the game, and a bunch of all levels of action tokens it seems like right there you have quite a bit of flexibility in army design. Add in a few minis of your choice and I could see having a real nice flexible force with a substantially smaller investment than I've spent on many other games.
I tried out a dozen or more new games at Origins this year and this was hands down my favorite. I just wish I hadn't waited until the last day to try it out. I can't wait for it to come out in August. I'm planning to pick some up. I'd be happy to bring them down to Twinsburg some Tuesday if anyone in the area wants to try them out. Also if anyone around the Cleveland area knows of any shops that are planning to carry the game please let me know.
The minis themselves were nice. The sculpts were very good and the paint jobs ranged from ok to good, about what I've come to expect from mass produced prepainted minis. The game play was very smooth. The rules were quite easy to pick up but there was quite a bit of depth of strategy. Turns moved quickly with each player moving only two minis at a time before switching to the opponent. We played a small skirmish game in just a little over a half hour with rules being explained, so I expect a regular game of that size would usually be able to play out in under 30 minutes, but it looked like it would be easily scalable up for larger longer battles. The real beauty of the game though was in the army building. This I thought was a real stroke of genius. There are three elements to your force, each of which comes in three levels; bronze, silver and gold. The elements are the minis themselves, with bronze being weaker, silver a little tougher and gold even tougher still; ability cards, which were quite powerful but often only single use and again in three power levels; and finally action tokens which you would give to a figure on your turn to activate it bronze would give the figure one action, silver two and gold three. There are no points to add up to make your army you simply put together a set number of each level, like 3 bronze/3 silver/ 3 gold and you have your army. The trick is you can pick and choose from the three elements to make up each level. For example you could have 1 bronze mini, 1 bronze card, 1 bronze action token, 1 silver card, 2 silver action tokens, 2 gold mini, and 1 gold card to make up a 3/3/3 army, while your opponent could have a completely different mix. With the starters containing 6 figs, all the cards in the game, and a bunch of all levels of action tokens it seems like right there you have quite a bit of flexibility in army design. Add in a few minis of your choice and I could see having a real nice flexible force with a substantially smaller investment than I've spent on many other games.
I tried out a dozen or more new games at Origins this year and this was hands down my favorite. I just wish I hadn't waited until the last day to try it out. I can't wait for it to come out in August. I'm planning to pick some up. I'd be happy to bring them down to Twinsburg some Tuesday if anyone in the area wants to try them out. Also if anyone around the Cleveland area knows of any shops that are planning to carry the game please let me know.