Lying Cat

I should probably clarify, whenever I've been to their actual store (I'm nowhere near, geographically, but have travelled for Warmachine tournaments and the like), it's always been fine to use. Like, I can go in, see something I want to buy, give them the right amount of money and leave with it, if you see what I mean - but this is such an insanely low hurdle to clear it barely seems worth mentioning. But their online service seems dreadful, and shouldn't be touched with anybodies barge pole, let alone your own.

Me too! Ordered some templates for Infinity 2nd Edition and the order was delayed and delayed and delayed. I ended up, purely by chance going to their store and they had the templates on the shelves. I asked about that and got shrugged shoulders at the store and no answer by email. After about 8 months they started emailing me asking me if I'd like a refund and the like but only being in the hole for £12, I sent them polite messages back saying that I'd like to maintain the order and reminded them that they did have what I needed on the shelves. Obviously, no response each time. In the end, I did get my templates, a month after 3rd Edition launched and the old templates are incompatible with it. Obviously what occurred was that they didn't want to fulfil web orders when they could sell to customers in store. It was only after the templates changed and they had no chance to sell any with the new edition that they sent them to me. Fuck. Wayland. Games.

I've always been a big fan of Games Lore. Been using them for about a decade and they've never made an error* and have always been super helpful. * Outside of when I ended up paying £700 for £70 worth of board games at the Expo, due to them making a mistake with the decimal point, and me not reading the amount. Was still sorted in a matter of days, though.

Remember the golden rule of GMing: If the players get stuck, two guys with guns kick down the door and have a clue on them.

Awesome. I've cleared the 15th as a date we might play - but just so you as the GM know, the only days I can't really do are Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

If you need another player for Cthulhu, I wouldn't mind giving it a shot. But If you've already got four people, I'm more than happy to step aside. I'm also quite interested to see how forum games are - I may possibly try to run something in the future. --- In other news, the Kickstarter for that Vampire Card Game went up and it looks like a mess. The core set looks to have about 75 unique cards in it, roughly - and the manual has in depth clarifications for 32 of them. Game will be a mess. Can you imagine trying to demo to somebody under those conditions?

It counts down if people don't connect for some reason or leave the queue. To my eternal shame I have spent £3.99 for the privilege of dressing up as a burger.

It's the weight of the Splotter stuff that makes their minimalist design so fantastic. Honestly, I can't imagine playing Food Chain Magnate if the city tiles were elaborately designed - you'd never be able to extract the key visual information quickly enough. I mean, that game takes long enough to play and loses you enough friends already without somebody taking twice as long on their turn because they have to hunt out the best Lemonade route on a busy map! It's the minimalism that makes the design good for their stuff. Personally, I'm pretty tolerant of bad artwork on stuff - and really, bad is very subjective anyway. I know some people who think Escape From the Dark Castle looks like a total mess, but I love it, probably because of the Steve Jackson's Fighting Fantasy books or something. That Vampire card is just hideous - I'd prefer they went down a simpler route rather than text boxes with one pattern seemingly floating on top of another pattern and huge tracts of dead space because you've only gone one Discipline icon. I half wonder whether they're trying to make it look like VTES to appeal to those people, even though this game is pretty lightweight compared to that.

There's a new Vampire: the Masquerade card game (not VTES) hitting Kickstarter tomorrow, but the card designs are pretty vom. ... like, it's sort of like an unironic throwback to 90's card design. Such a mess.

I think my biggest problem with the Gordon outfit is that his mouth makes him look like a vampire.

Those are some particularly lovely minis.

I honestly think that the 144fps mark is where diminishing returns begin to set in for most people. There will of course be people who can resolve stuff much higher, and others who stop seeing it much lower. Personally, I struggle to really see more frames past 100. But the problem is that 144hz monitors are pretty ubiquitous and affordable these days, and I have a suspicion that it's harder to get people to upgrade their monitor than it is any other part of their computer - so you need to keep pushing the numbers up to make the case for a sale. 360hz is ludicrous though. That's getting into jet fighter pilot levels.

No, not lying I'm afraid. It was a good TV series for sure - definitely not bad or anything.

If you're sick of staring at screens, and don't want to get locked into an online game with some random guy online unless you absolutely have to (understandable), I thought I'd scribble out some of the stuff that's occurred to me over the years when I've been playing the game across two different editions of the game. It's important to remember that I am principally a Greyjoy player, and they've got quite a specific style of play. The Golden Rule: Game of Thrones is a complicated game with a hell of a lot to think about. You can lose a lot of games getting lost in trying to be clever, so the most important thing to do at the start of every turn is to look at the board and ask yourself "can I win this turn?" Deck Building - Game of Thrones has it's roots in the Magic: the Gathering school of needing to get some resource cards out to pay for stuff. It's less necessary as you have your plot deck to provide basic income, but you definitely want to be including more stuff, especially as the upper level characters are pretty expensive. Generally you want this sort of ratio for your deck: - 25% Economy Cards - this includes cards that you destroy to reduce the costs of these things. Stuff like Sea Tower is great, especially early on as it provides cost reductions for a deployment cost of zero. Generally I rate cost-reducers above +Gold cards because gold can be stolen, Cost-Reducers can't really be used by your opponent. 25% Low Cost Characters - I think for Second Edition, a "cheap" character is going to be between 1-3 Gold to play out. You never want to be without cheap characters to soak up military claim, and it's absolutely legitimate to include characters in your deck just to have them die in the place of the characters you want to keep. While there's nothing in 2.0 as crazy at this 1.0 Theon, it's fine for people to die. Generally I don't include multiple copies of my cheap uniques for this reason. 25% Higher Cost Characters - So this is the 4+ cost guys. These are the cards that you'll generally hinge your strategy on, and they need to be protected by your cheap dudes. Before you include multiple copies of these guys, consider whether you really need that many copies. Once they die, all duplicates in your hand become dead cards. It's best to include multiple copies of cards that you really need to draw. 25% Everything Else - This is quite a tight category for Attachments/Events/Locations, but having a flood of these things is a total nightmare. ... From this point, you just refine the deck through the usual process. Finding you're ending up with too much money with nothing to spend it on, take out some economy cards, etc. This is a large chunk of the fun of the game for me. In terms of your Plot deck, there are a couple of things I always like to include: - A card with some cash! Pentoshi is a great example of this. It helps your opponents, but if they're likely to be getting a smaller advantage than you! If you combine this with an Agenda like Red Door, it really helps you get your start customised to begin with. If you can get a couple of econ locations out as part of Setup, you can really come out of the gates fast by playing Pentoshi and buying a whole bunch of characters. Obviously, if you don't have any money, don't use Pentoshi! A Reset - Valar or Wildfire Assault are excellent. If your opponent is pulling ahead of you, kill everyone. If you notice that your opponent has got a bunch of his super important characters out, then Valar. Kill them. Once they're in the dead pile, they're out of the game. Then you can start to come back. Tutors - If your deck really hinges on some specific dudes or locations, tutors can really help with getting them out. Consider a Stall - Calm over Westeros is a great first turn card if you want to build board position. Name Military as the conflict type and it means that your opponent will be reduced to claim zero and unable to kill your dudes. If the deploy a Claim 2+ card on the first turn, they're likely giving up a lot to do it, and you'll blunt it anyway. A high initiative card - sometimes you really need to be able to go first. Challenges Phase - This is of course where you're going to kick one anothers teeth out, so to speak. You'll generally want to approach this differently whether you're playing Melee or Joust. If you're playing a lot of Melee, please remember the golden Melee rule: Don't take the lead until you're ready to win on your turn. Melee games can rapidly turn into a "kick the leader" games - so just make sure you're doing that well. Also for Melee, forget about honour. If you can win on your turn by absolutely savaging the player who's least able to protect themselves then do that. There's absolutely no reason to stand up to the big guys unless they're going to win if you don't. I've won a lot of games, and a few (local) melee tournaments by maintaining a slightly distant second place, wait for the winner to be kicked in, dropping my high initiative card the next turn and then wrecking him enough to scramble up over the Power threshold before he has had time to recover. If you're playing Melee with friends, it can be hard to do this, especially if somebody is having a bad game and they're not having fun... ... but it's Game of Thrones. At least you're bringing the game to a close, and they'll probably be doing it to you next game. In terms of the actual challenges, you really need to think about the order you want to do them in. Military can make it harder for them to defend more challenges, Social can strip cards out of their hand they might try and ambush you with - generally I always do Power challenges last because they don't actually help the board state. If they've got a front line of big tough guys, then absolutely do not be afraid to poke at their front line with your Strength 1 starving peasant. You'll force them into a tough position where they either need to Kneel their Strength 5 powerhouse to block you (meaning they can't use it to hit you back), or you get an uncontested strike. On the other hand, don't always feel like you need to defend yourself. The point is to win, not keep your guys safe. And so what if that Strength 1 Starving Peasant has to die to satisfy their claim? Let them walk through, and take it unchallenged. That's just more Power for your turn. Generally, I'm always happy to take loses as long as I know that when it comes back around I'm going to be hitting back harder. It's fine to let your opponent exhaust their top guys charging you unguarded lines. If they kneel enough you might just get three unopposed attacks back the other way on your turn. This is why you need to have Claimbait chumps on the board at all times - to eat up this and leave your big guys to tear them apart on the return. The only thing to really remember is that lots of event cards activate if your opponent wins by 5 or more. So it can often be worthwhile trying to keep their victory to 4. But always remember, all that matters for the most part is that you got punched. How hard you got punched is irrelevant. --- I've probably written more than you care to read already, so I'll shut up now, but if you've got any questions, please do come back to me on it! I'm really enjoying talking about this game because I love it so much. Just make sure you keep your eyes on that 15 Power victory condition. Everything else is just a resource to get you over the line - getting protective over your board state because you like the character rather than because they're helping you win is sometimes a mindset challenging to get past - Game of Thrones as a lot of great characters, and people include their favourites. One of the people I used to play with always included John Snow as a triplicate because she loved the character so much and would always try and turn him into Voltron - I always did my best to kill him, because whenever I did she immediately went on Tilt and generally lost games because of it.

I didn't really enjoy the second season. It's basically Season 1 again, but less good.