My Hobby and Blog in October 2017

October 2017 Reaper 25th Anniversary

October has been an exciting month for me.  Two of the most anticipated games I want, Warhammer Underworlds and Aristeia!, are either available now or available for pre-order, respectively. In a section below, I briefly compared and contrast these two games, not only against each other but also to other games that I have perused. Finally, I just discovered that the site I stored my images, Photobucket, will be eliminating 3rd party hosting to majority of their plans. This includes the plan that I currently have with Photobucket. The only plan that allows third party hosting will cost ~$400 annually. Sadly after 10+ years of using Photobucket, it is time to find a new image storage solution.

What I have been working on: 

This month I started work on the Shadespire core box models. To be more efficient with keeping my blog up-to-date (I still have not written up the archive posts for the objects I painted since 2015), I am keeping an unpublished daily log of everything that I do. Hopefully when I complete a model, I can quickly create a blog entry for it from my digital note-taking. By the end of October, I also started work on three Moonlight Tournament Trophies that came with the Ninja All-Stars Kickstarter pledges and promotional products. I plan to make them into 1st to 3rd place trophies for tournaments I organized for the nieces and nephews.

What I have been playing: 

October has been a slow month for playing games. On my spare time, I have been catching up on the rules for Aristeia! and Warhammer Underworlds. I am still preparing Season 2 Pokemon TCG Theme League for my nephews and nieces that will start in November. For the immediate future, I will be spending mpore time on miniatures for board games with customized deck components (see next section).

What has been happening within the hobby:

Board Games with Customized Decks

By the end of 2017 I will have three more board games that have a customized deck component to the game. Those games are Warhammer Underworlds, Aristeia!, and Way of the Fighter. The board game that I already owned with a customized deck component is Yashima.

Yashima: Legend of the Kami Masters have been out for a while. This is one one one fighting game using a hexagon grid tile system. There are two decks of cards. The Tome Deck is decided by what Master you have chosen to play, while the Battle Deck is a combination of Battle Cards based on your choice of both Master and Kami. Therefore, the only decisions the player needs to make is which Master and Kami she or he will use. All the Battle Cards for that Master and Kami will be combined to form the player's Battle Deck. There are a total of 12 Masters and 8 Kamis for the game.

All three games coming out this year or early next year share a common game element that Yashima does not implement- the use of dice. With Warhammer Underworlds, it also differs from Yashima as it is a team of characters against another team of characters (Warbands). So far, the size of Warbands range from 3 to 7 characters. There is an Objective Deck and a Power Deck that players can choose every single card from a pool of Warband specific cards (29) and Universal common cards (205). Of the four games, the Warhammer Underworlds allow the most customization of decks. The individual members of the Warbands cannot be altered though. It is widely expected that there are at least 8 Warbands for the Shadespire set of Warhammer Underworlds.

Aristeia! is another team versus team competition like Warhammer Underworlds. Unlike Underworlds, the players composed a 4 person team with any individual characters they have available. By the end of 2018, players will make 4 person teams from a pool of 24 characters. There is only one deck of cards, the Tactics Deck consisting of 18 cards. 10 of those cards are identical in every deck. The remaining 8 cards consist of  2 Tactic cards for each character in your team. So far each character has 4 Tactic cards for you to choose 2 Tactic Cards from.

Way of the Fighter is expected to be released for retail in early 2018 while some Kickstarter backers should received the game minus miniatures in late 2017. This is a one on one fighter themed around 2D fighting game mechanics. Unlike the other three games listed above, the game does not use a hexagon grid tile system. Instead, the board is just one lane. There is only 1 Fighter Deck for each player. The Fighter Deck is made from a pre-determined set of cards for that Character, plus 4 pre-determined set of cards from Technique Packs. The Kickstarter for this game have 20 standard Fighters and 30 standard Technique Packs to customize the Fighter Decks. This numbers does not include the 2 unique Fighters and their  exclusive Technique packs that come with them.

As these games are the ones I can see myself playing in an organized league or tournament in the near future, I will be posting more about them in the immediate future.

Hobby Holder

This is a Kickstarter for a versatile grip system to hold miniatures for painting. This shares similarity to Stephen Rath's holders and grips that I was interested in getting, but at a more affordable cost. Surprisingly, Games Workshop is releasing a Citadel Painting Handle in November. One advantage I like about the Hobby Holder is that it uses 28 mm bottle caps.