Let's talk Small-Team Skirmish Games

MattDP wrote:

stoic wrote: I have the whole Dungeon Command set too, all five factions. The prices now are outrageous!

They're not *that* high. Scalpers are asking for silly money, but if you look at price histories on BGG and Ebay, sets are selling for $30-40, because ...

Mr. White wrote: Not sure why they stopped at 5. it seemed the DDAS/Dungeon Command sets were a great pairing.

... it's simply not a very good game. The card effects were mostly uninteresting dice buffs, and your hand of cards ran out quickly. When it did, the deterministic combat just turned it into a predictable, boring slog.

The goblins were the best set because their card effects were based on movement, and that allowed some degree of creativity and surprise. But their cards ran out as fast as everyone else's.

So I'm happy to stick with Shadespire. In terms of "measuring games", The Walking Dead: All Out War is a pretty good small-scale miniatures affair which, as an added bonus, and almost uniquely among miniatures games, is good fun played co-op or solo.

Dungeon Command has a few weaknesses, and, your comments are fair. But, Dungeon Command gameplay is deeper than most realize. Not many took the time to mine its depths. I think many of its initially perceived weaknesses and criticism are overcome when one engages in deck-building, which no one bothered widely to do. Moreover, no one also bothered with team customization by mixing both characters and order cards together from all five factions in Dungeon Command's Advanced Game--that's a shame! That's where the game would have developed nicely, just like Shadespire is doing now. Hasbro killed off Dungeon Command too soon and it failed to promote the game (Why, Hasbro, Why?!). It was killed off before enough momentum developed so players moved on to other games before realizing Dungeon Command's full potential. Yet, there's an underrated and misjudged gem here.

In Dungeon Command, you're allowed a deck of 30 order cards and you're allowed to customize your deck. You can select and use more than one of each type of order card, but, no more than 4 of each type. This is great, but, of course, this is also my major criticism of Dungeon Command because Hasbro didn't make this deck-building process easy. They didn't offer supplemental card packs and discontinued the game too early for most to find duplicate cards in the faction boxes to do this. Moreover, in some factions, they also didn't give you enough of a faction's "good cards" to make the faction competitive unless you used deck-building.

The solution to Dungeon Command's deck-building problem (and making each faction competitive) though is to proxy the order cards. We did this by putting all of the order cards in sleeves and making wanted and/or needed duplicates with color copies that we placed in sleeves. It's true that your order card deck is limited to only 30 cards, and, once you use them, then your deck is exhausted. But, this also acts as a needed game timer. This limitation also forces you to use your order cards wisely and efficiently. And, you'll see how you're supposed to use order cards strategically in Dungeon Command in the brief discussion that follows.

One layer of depth in Dungeon Command that was often overlooked is that your team's characters develop a spatial synergy with each other that allows them to use order cards from your hand which some of the individual characters alone wouldn't normally be able to use. This synergy occurs when you strategically place your characters adjacent to each other on the map to set up attacks for use with powerful order cards--this setup can be devastating to your opponent. The synergy occurs because adjacent characters borrow INT, STR, CON etc. from other adjacent characters with those same abilities--the borrowed abilities are used to activate order cards. This creates options and combos in the order deck where one would normally see limitations when choosing which order card to use. When you realize this feature of Dungeon Command, then the game's meta really pops! I don't think that this strategy in Dungeon Command was made clear enough from its rules, and, you only really figure this out after repeated play.

My biggest criticism of the game is that the first X minutes is always "race to grab all the treasures", a process I found boring and frustrating.

stoic wrote: They didn't offer supplemental card packs and discontinued the game too early for most to find duplicate cards in the faction boxes to do this. Moreover, in some factions, they also didn't give you enough of a faction's "good cards" to make the faction competitive unless you used deck-building.

Great comments, thanks for sharing. This, I think, is the real killer issue. Part of the problem with the game is that most of the included cards really didn't do much to make the strengths of the system stand out. It was mostly a matter of a stat buff here, a reroll there.

A minority, though - particularly, as I mentioned, in the Goblin box - did more interesting things. They encouraged movement, use of terrain and, as you mention, grouping characters to boost effects or build cool combos. I kept expecting a new box or, better, as you suggest, a supplemental card deck to make more leverage of these things. But it never came.

I'm still not sure it would have been a *great* game if it had had extra support. But I certainly agree it had a fair amount of untapped potential.

I was pretty heavily involved in playtesting Dungeon Command, and bought heavily into it on release. I havent played in a few years so I cant get too far into the discussion beyond my impressions.

I bought each set 4 times so that I had as many options to deckbuild and army build as possible. So each set was a $120 investment. I know that for a lot of things 4x was over kill, but I think WotC was banking on such players to really make the game successful. I never met anyone else who went that far.

So as a preconstructed game to meet with strangers and play competitively (as was intended) this was a huge flop.

I never felt that having these options merited the investment. I think wanting to love the game more than I did was what kept me in for so long, despite being fairly unhappy with how the game turned out.

I think the biggest failing was how each product was packaged and sold. For the $40 per set, you were encouraged to buy more to get the full experience. And if was an even distribution of items needed to make purchasing multiple boxes feel worthwhile, it would have been better, but you only needed certain cards in multiples and certain models, making redundancy create diminishing returns with each box purchased.

MattDP wrote: Great comments, thanks for sharing. This, I think, is the real killer issue. Part of the problem with the game is that most of the included cards really didn't do much to make the strengths of the system stand out. It was mostly a matter of a stat buff here, a reroll there. .

Your memory is a bit off here... Dungeon Command has no dice. Perhaps to its detriment.

Has anyone heavily played both Dungeon Command and Shadespire? How do they compare? I'm assuming Shadespire is the better game, but have no idea as I only used DC for the DDAS option.

I like Dungeon Command quite a lot but it really should have been sold as the Magic the Gathering boardgame.

Mr. White wrote: Has anyone heavily played both Dungeon Command and Shadespire? How do they compare? I'm assuming Shadespire is the better game, but have no idea as I only used DC for the DDAS option.

Having played them both, I'd have to say Shadespire is better in every way. I still have all my Dungeon Command stuff, but mostly for use in D+DAS.

So after a few more games, I think converting Frostgrave to use hexes is gonna need a fairly major overhaul.

I'd have to make new spell cards (minor since I'm already in the process of throwing that through the photoshopatron) and a crib sheet for everything else.

It's either doing that, or buying a whole new slew of terrain and mats to play the game with. I think the effort in Photoshop will be easier and cheaper in the end.

I would just do what Stoic is doing and use Heroscape while measuring, except that the spaces confuse the kid, since he is so used to counting spaces and not measuring.

GorillaGrody wrote:

Da Bid Dabid wrote: Does Gaslands have rules for any models not in vehicles? What about fighting hand-to-hand between cars ala Fury Road?

The system borrows a lot from X-Wing (without all the bullshit) and Formula D. Templates are used but easy to construct. Fair warning that there are special d6 dice, as well. The game is well supported and PDFs of all this stuff can be had for free.

Streamline Xwing with Formula D parts you say.

quozl wrote: I like Dungeon Command quite a lot but it really should have been sold as the Magic the Gathering boardgame.

So, here's the funny thing: A lot of people I know bought the game to get the prepainted miniatures to use in D&D and DDAS. Seems to me the smart play would have been to seek them out to buy the Dungeon Command cards, only, so that you could build your decks as you wish.

Also, I would like to (without pejorative or condescension) posit that buying into most miniatures games is largely bullshit. You're buying their models which a game is built on top of. For me, that's the opposite of what I think the consumer's model should be. Consumers should be buying the models they want based on the merits of the model, and then buy many cheap rule sets which can those models can be integrated into.

For instance, I have a ton of "lovecrafty/horror" models. TONS. I also have a ton of Post-Apoc models.

I have no less than 15 games that I can use for either. Zero investment required beyond my initial investment. I think that's the best (and arguably most efficient) way to get to play a bunch of games to fill that "itch" for new shit, without the ridiculous price points attached. I could literally take my post-apoc models and play GW games to my heart's content using my post-apoc models as proxies.

Now, this all dies if we're talking competitive play, which is something I've come to despise as nothing more than a pay-to-play scheme (see ColorCrayons' admission of buying 4x of each above for said reason) which I want no part of, personally, although some people have a much more competitive streak when it comes to gaming than I do, and I don't slight them for it. I would just prefer to buy once, utilize many times, than by purpose driven things that have only one use, knowing that the fickleness of gaming is such that interests wax and wane so often (see: Michael Barnes' litany of deal-a-thons) and buying heavily into a system will invariably end in remorse.

If you see any black vans with "Games Workshop" on the side, stay away from the windows.

the_jake_1973 wrote: I am definitely buying Gaslands now. Interested in playing Da Bid?

$13, shipped, for just the rules (no templates)

Templates are free

I’ll keep an eye out for the hundreds of skulls adorning that van, not to mention the Emperor hood ornament.