I spent this afternoon playing Project Pandora: Grim Cargo with Ronnie. After some awkwardness to start with, she’s suddenly decided to behave herself. Yay!
I’ve talked before about the variable helpfulness of different game designs, and this was another variation of awkward. I could always see the game lurking within the tangle, and it’s nice to see it finally doing what I wanted it to from the start. We’ve been playing the first training mission a lot. Like the first scenario from each of the Dwarf King’s Hold starter sets I’ve aimed to make it a scenario that you can play again and again as you fine tune your tactics and (in this case) go for a high score. It’s proving very popular with the testers who keep asking for “just one more go”, and this is exactly the response you hope for. Once you move onto the other scenarios you get some extra features and the game gets a little more involved, so it’s a really good idea to get a firm grounding of the basic tactics on the training ground, before they try to rip your head off for real.
When I got back from the carnage (and after snaffling some of the splendid Mantic ghouls for my upcoming undead army project) I found an email from Foundry telling me that Tribes of Legend has survived the Somali pirates and escaped the dastardly clutches of customs, and even now is ready for pre-orders. If I’m really quick I can get one of the first 50. Apparently they’re signed by the author!
Really?
Anyway, my gaming year’s starting off nicely. It also looks like I might be visiting the Beasts of War chaps again, and heading off down to Salute. This year I’ll be trying to sneak away from the stand to have a bit more of an explore around the rest of the place and perhaps do one of my event reports. If I can smuggle in a file to get through the chains…
Quirkworthy 
Are we going to be seeing Tribes of Legend over at Beasts of War or is this more of the stuff you’re doing for Mantic?
At the moment I’m not sure about ToL. I’ll be going specifically to talk about Dwarf King’s Hold and Project Pandora, but we always end up chatting off-camera about all sorts of other stuff – it just depends on how much filming time we have as to whether this turns up as a video. It also depends on what we film. If I just do specific slots on DKH/PP then that’s one option. On the other hand, if I was there when they were filming Turn 8 or something else more general then they might well ask about other things I’m doing as well. Sometimes it’s just ad hoc and opportunistic. For example, one time I was at Beasts of War we filmed a game of SMOG we played, though in the end I don’t think it was used. That wasn’t planned long in advance, we just thought we might as well set up the cameras as they were in the same room…
To be honest the timetables for these things are very flexible so I probably won’t know till it’s happened ;P
“If I’m really quick I can get one of the first 50. Apparently they’re signed by the author!”
Might be worth going over the fine print of your contract to see what else you missed. You might find yourself running games of ToL at the next Foundry open day dressed as an Amazon!
Nah, they have staff for that. And Nigel 😉
I’m only kidding. Happy to sign stuff – all part of the service. Speaking of the next Foundry Open Day, they were going to do one very soon specifically for ToL. I don’t know if they’ve announced it yet though (or 100% fixed on a date). I’m going to try and be there both days to run folk through the game (and sign stuff if that’s what people want). The games we played at the last one were pretty god fun. One of the things about that system is that it’s easy to teach people and for players to be getting on with it on their own, fathoming out the tactical nuances, by the end of their first game.
All sounds great mate. I hope to get to salute this year. It will be the fourth year i’ve tried. Last year i was going down with rich b and rich c. But pearl had to go into hospital.
Fifth time lucky, as the saying (almost) goes 🙂
The first few pages of ToL can be seen on Amazon so with access to some of the army lists and a devastatingly successful outing with the Centaurs last time I’ll be ready to take on all-comers this time 😀
Are you sure you remember the battle correctly? You were rather drunk ;P