Last night, I continued to make my way through all of the Bones episodes I’ve missed this year, mainly because I was doing something else when they were showing. It hit a snag when the last five or six turned out to be repeats – in fact, the Australian showing of Bones has been paused since March, and we’ve still got about 7 or 8 episodes of the current season to run. Not sure when they’ll do that, though.
Meantime, I was playing Field Commander: Rommel, a solo wargame. It’s also a fairly simple and quick-playing wargame, which I appreciated. I wasn’t in the mood for grappling with the rules of Fields of Fire, fascinating game though it is (the rules aren’t the best). Mind you, FC:Rommel destroyed me quickly: the Allies were not accommodating for my plans for glory!
Coming up, I’m rather hoping to get another game of Civilization – the AH boardgame – sometime, along with quite a few other games I’ve acquired recently and haven’t played enough.
Rich came as close as anyone has to defeating me in a game of Merchants and Marauders on the weekend, but I got very, very lucky in a pirate strategy and picked up 2 glory from Merchant Raids in the same turn and just outpaced Rich to 10 Glory. I’ve been playing a good amount of M&M recently: a lot of my friends love it, and I’m the only one who has a copy. There are a few games out recently that are pretty “hot” but are very hard to acquire. (Alien Frontiers is another, but we haven’t seen it yet).
I’ve been playing a bit of the new Lord of the Rings LCG, but I’m going to abandon it for a while because, while its a good game, it sadly doesn’t have enough cards to make building decks an enjoyable experience. Magic, when it came out, had 302 different cards from which to make decks. The Lord of the Rings LCG has 73. This is nowhere near enough, especially when you consider the structure the decks need to be in. With each additional “adventure pack” only adding 9 new cards for deck construction, possible resources for deckbuilding are going to be very limited for the foreseeable future.
I’m not a huge CCG player anymore (though I play a bit of UFS and Pokemon with my girlfriend) but even so….. 73 cards?
300-odd cards as a base always struck me as something of an industry standard. (This may be my imagination, but certianly I know the Star Trek CCG was a similar number and am pretty confident Star Wars was too.) For a random miniatures game or something more fiddly than plain cards (like, say, the press-out models in the Pirates game) I realise this isn’t practical but if you can’t spring for the art and printing for a large base set, your card game is going to be stuffed.
What might make this more acceptable is if the deck structure was such that there were lots of basic cards you used – if, ala Magic’s land, there was something you used 20 or 30 of in each deck and so the repeats didn’t ruin anything. From your description, though, the opposite is the case.
George Q