Sunday, August 17, 2014

| Miniatures And Terrain Turbo Painter

Suddenly it all makes sense!

Anyway, got in a couple games down in LA this weekend:

- Cave Evil: vs my brother-in-law, who's pretty into metal and cheesy metal artwork and thus is the target market. Total unfair advantage Ameritrash game, lots of fun. But it definitely needs two things. a) more than two players; b) to be played without A.P. types. Playing it in an overly analytical manner would make it completely long and unfun.

- Golem Arcana: I got my kickstarter copy of this and played the tutorial games solo (sad trombone). It's a miniatures game, but all the rules tracking and number crunching are done on your tablet -- you tap the various pieces with a bluetooth enabled stylus, so for example I'd tap an attack option on Golem A, then tap his target, Golem B, and the app does the calculations, keeps track of ongoing effects, and so on. It's a surprisingly sophisticated minis game, kinda nice to just be able to blaze away without having to go through a thick rulebook to figure out how to work through an attack resolution or whatever. Downside: at least on my iPad3, there's enough delay in the communication between the stylus and the app to make me a little impatient. Not a total dealbreaker, but a bit annoying. Hopefully this can be cleaned up a bit in further app revisions.

- Finally, I got my steam key for the Warmachine Tactics video game. It's in beta. Still pretty rough around the edges with lots of UI work, polish etc required, but mechanically it seems solid and seems to hit a good middle ground of accurately modeling the tabletop game vs. being quick to play. It's basically Warmachine XCOM. Can't really recommend it in its current state, but hopefully it polishes up nice by release. Definitely can see this being fun to play with you guys.