Marion Seville - Doomtown: Reloaded

You don't want to know what happened to the guy who called him "Marian".

Marion's has a pretty simple effect, which names one of the mechanics of the game: becoming wanted. In the game, there are locations called deeds, which are marked as either public or private. When a dude has a shootout at a private deed, and that dude's player doesn't control the deed, the dude becomes wanted. Some outfits, like the Law Dogs, punish wanted dudes, while Marion's outfit, the Sloane Gang, gives benefits for being wanted. So while Marion doesn't have a standout effect, he does highlight something his group cares about. Flavor wise, I don't quite grasp how the effect works. Maybe he draws both his knife and gun when he becomes wanted.

The flavor text doesn't try any grand world building, but it does at least develop the character, signaling a pet peeve while setting up a previous incident in his life. Plus Pancho mentions that this was the "last" man, meaning there has probably been more than one previous incident. Overall though, I think the text is trying too hard to be humorous. Too be fair though, I have been guilty of the same thing with my captions.

The art has sharp linework, so everything is at least detailed clearly. The framing is nice, with the figure in the center, and the doorway centered behind him. There is also the splash of red on the bandanna, which draws the eye's attention. The one grievance I have is that behind the doorway is nothing but black. I don't want anything too over-detailed, since that would distract from the subject, but we could have had something, maybe just a few silhouettes.

A Coach Comes to Town - Doomtown: Reloaded

Santa's coach is coming to town.

So this Christmas, I got a box of Doomtown Reloaded. Awhile ago in the 90s, there used to be a TCG called Doomtown, set in the Deadlands Weird West RPG setting. It was mildly popular, but then the game folded. Several years ago, with the rise of fixed expansion games, an attempt was made to bring Doomtown back from the dead. Rules were simplified for easier, more intuitive play, and a new game called Doomtown Reloaded was released. This year, that game also seems to have folded after the game rights were returned to the owner of the RPG. So some of the cards I am looking at had counterparts in the original card game, and this is one of them.

The main difference between the original and the new one is A Coach Comes to Town used to be an event. Event cards were a hold-over from the Legend of the Five Rings, which Doomtown has many similarities to, and they took effect immediately. Doomtown Reloaded ditched this card type, and any cards they used which were originally events were modified into action cards, giving players greater control over when they activated.

The effect has remained fairly similar and flavorful. A coach comes to town with a shipment of ghost rock. If the coach arrives safely, you get 4 ghost rock. If the coach is robbed, the opponent who robbed it gets the ghost rock instead. Slight tweaks include you are now the one pulling the job, while before it was any opponent who wanted to try to rob the coach was the one starting the job. Also, when the coach was robbed, you had to pay the opponent the ghost rock, which didn't make sense since the flavor of the card was you hadn't gotten the shipment yet.

The art is hit and miss for me. I like the angle of the shot, showing the entire stage coach with your posse surrounding it. I also like how the figure leading the job stands out, with sharp, contrasting blacks. While I do appreciate the more realistic art style, I don't like the gradient filter. It makes the scene look far too red and washed out.

Because of the rules overhaul, the new version has a little more text space, meaning we get an additional line of flavor text, as one of the characters compliments and complains about Lane Healey, the scoundrel and go-to guy of Morgan Cattle security.

Johannes Broheim - Warhammer: Invasion

"I'm on a griffin! I'm on a griffin!"

I've covered several other cards with impressive mounts, so it only feels fair that I cover the guy riding the griffin. I love the art, though the background does suffer from being barely comprehensible, but it does have a neat lighting effect. Johannes's beard helps give him a veteran status, which helps with the problem Urguck had of not feeling that much higher in rank. I also love the war banner and the tassels pinned to griffin's lapel.

The one point of confusion I have is the long, stick-like object shown to the right of the griffin. To me it looks like a massive longbow, but it doesn't look attached to the griffin or to the ground. It just seems to be hovering in place. I like the effect it creates. The bow adds a greater sense of aimed direction, plus it makes the whole unit feel like the quiver of some massive weapon. I'm just still not sure what it actually is or where it exists in terms of this scene.

For rules text, you have the Hero clause again, followed by counterstrike, sans reminder text. Since this was a core set, they made sure to put reminder text on most of the cards, but there were a few exceptions, seemingly due to spacing. What counterstrike amounts to is when the unit defends an attack, it immediately deals counterstrike damage to the attacking parties. What I like most though is the final ability. In the Core Set, Warhammer didn't have a keyworded flying mechanic. Still, there are some units like Johannes who can obviously fly. I feel the final ability helps capture the feeling of flight, as it lets your unit move around very easily. And since this guy is a Hero, meaning he has the Hero limit, this makes the ability even more useful.

A Glorious Death - Warhammer: Invasion

Tis not so hard to die. Tis hard to give death meaning.

Quest cards are an odd, slow mechanic. What happens is you play a quest in your quest zone, then you send a unit on that quest. Each turn, the quest gains a resource token. This token is treated like a generic token and not a resource, so I guess they just wanted to use what tokens were at hand rather than create a whole new type of token for a small subset of cards. You can then activate abilities based on the number of tokens on the quest. If the questing unit leaves the quest, all tokens are removed and you must start anew.

The art is also odd, as instead of full color art like on regular cards, they instead use line art. The card background is a faded manuscript, so the idea is to make it look like the art was drawn on the ancient paper. There is nothing wrong with this, it's just another odd choice. As for the art on this card, I do like the belt of of faces.

I honestly like the flavor of this card. The dwarves in this set show a tendency toward self-destruction, seeking to destroy the enemy even if it costs their own lives. This card represents that mentality perfectly. The fact that it targets two units also gives it enough card advantage to justify the time spent completing the quest.

Urguck - Warhammer: Invasion

He can peel off his scars and use them to raise an army!

While he doesn't get to ride a dinosaur, Urguck still has a pretty ferocious riding beast, with horns and crooked, jagged teeth. His axe looks giant to the point of ridiculousness, but Orcs were never known for their practicality. I like how the artist decided to shake things up with the weather effects, including a dramatic bolt of lightning in the background. It makes the whole thing feel less like a typical fantasy portrait. I do wish we had a bit more cues to distinguish Urguck as an Orc leader, like maybe some underlings in the background. Other than the riding beast, he still looks like your typical over-muscled orc.

The card however does make sure to let you know he's special. First you have the little symbol next to his name. This marks the card as unique, which usually means you can only control one copy of it at a time. Second is the Hero trait. Only a few cards in this set get the hero trait, and they all come with the same rules. You have three zones in the game you can normally play units in, but you can only have one Hero in each of your zones. This again makes the card feel different from your typical mindless soldier.

The main thing I love about this card however is the game mechanic. In the game, you have a pool of resource tokens and damage tokens. From the names, you can probably tell what each token does and represents. This card allows you to use one type of token as if they were another type of token. That is actually pretty innovative and clever. It's also a healing mechanic that doesn't feel like you're healing a unit, since that goes a bit against the Orcs' flavor.

Nurgle Sorcerer - Warhammer: Invasion

The forces of Chaos extend to spelling.

There is one main reason I chose to do this card, but let's look at a few other things first. The art is a decaying humanoid with horns, a skull stuff, and sorcerer robes. With how dull the rest of the colors are, it makes the green shooting from its hand and glowing from the skull on its side really pop out. While I understand this is meant to be a battle scene, I really don't like that the background is just a dusty mess. I do however like the few discernible figures you can see among the dirt.

The ability is okay, the main thing I like is the the corrupted clause. It lets new players know that corruption is something this card and faction cares about, while also piquing their interest to look up what the corruption mechanic actually is and how it works in the game.

Now, to the main course. Look at the name of the card. Now look at the card's traits. Notice a discrepancy. In the name, the spelling is "sorcerer" with an "e". But in the trait line, it's spelled "sorceror" with an "o". I have no idea how this got past the editors, but it looks really awkward having it spelled two different ways on the same card.

Cold One Riders - Warhammer: Invasion

Welcome to Jurassic Empire!

This time I'm going to take a lot at an older card game, but not too old. It's called Warhammer: Invasion, which is like W40k except with the sci-fi trappings replaced with fantasy ones. It's one of the LCGs the Fantasy Flight Games has stopped printing new expansions for, but the game lasted for quite a while, having even more expansions than its space-based counterpart that was released after its retirement.

So I'm starting off with a card that is aesthetically awesome. What's so awesome about it? It is an elf riding a dinosaur! It gets even better. When you look at the name "Cold One", along with the icy backdrop in the art, the implication is this is also an arctic dinosaur! It is really difficult to cram this much awesome into one card.

Another thing I really like about this card is a little harder to explain, but it comes down to statistics. Say you have a two mostly blank cards, one with a bunch of 1s printed on it and another with 4s and 5s. Now say you have two pieces of art, one depicting a turtle and another depicting a dragon. On which card would you put the turtle art, and on which would you put the dragon? Naturally, the dragon would go on the card with the higher stats, because dragons are bigger, better, and more special than turtles are. When you make a game card with high stats, you have to make sure what you put on it feels worthy of those stats, and this card succeeds with that.

One final thing to mention is a strange quirk with the Core Set. While the game acknowledges that it has six main races, there are only decks printed for four of them: Dwarf, Empire, Orc, and Chaos. The other two, High Elf and Dark Elf, and left to stew until they get their own full decks in the next deluxe expansion. To tide players over though, there were a handful of cards belonging to these races printed in the set. I only mention this because that means, in the box, this card would have felt even more special, since it's a member of a rarer race.