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Prepare for fantasy battles beyond your wildest imagination with the onslaught of BattleLore Second Edition. Set in the fantasy realm of Terrinoth, BattleLore Second Edition is a two-player board game focused on squad-based battles between the hardy defenses of the Daqan Lords garrison in Nordgard Castle and the unleashed ferocity of the demon-worshipping Uthuk Y’llan. You must strategically command your troops and use the power of lore to tip your battles in your favor.
In every game, you will create new maps and scenarios, before mustering a new army for each game, so you can tailor your army to suit your favored play style. Command armies of fearsome warriors and deadly creatures, and lead them against the enemy in this intense game of warfare and military strategy. By seizing victory points from objectives on the battlefield and by eliminating enemy units, a skilled commander can raise his banners as the victor over the borderlands of Terrinoth!
FFG announced this title on August 14, the day before Gen Con 2013 opened, and FFG CEO Christian Petersen talked a bit about the design in his annual InFlight Report at that convention, explaining that ever since FFG had acquired Richard Borg's BattleLore from original publisher Days of Wonder in 2008 and discovered that it could not reproduce that game's starter set with a reasonable price tag, it had been trying to figure out what to do with the game system.In every game, you will create new maps and scenarios, before mustering a new army for each game, so you can tailor your army to suit your favored play style. Command armies of fearsome warriors and deadly creatures, and lead them against the enemy in this intense game of warfare and military strategy. By seizing victory points from objectives on the battlefield and by eliminating enemy units, a skilled commander can raise his banners as the victor over the borderlands of Terrinoth!
One result from that effort was Battles of Westeros from designer Robert Kouba in 2010, and Kouba is similarly credited with design work on BattleLore Second Edition, taking Borg's original "Command" system – in which players play cards to give orders to units in specific parts of the battlefield – and merging it with FFG's fantasy world of Terrinoth. With that latter change, BattleLore loses the real-world historical setting it once had (albeit a setting that also had magic and giant fantasy creatures) in favor of widely variable, more bizarre fantasy creatures. That change removes the straightforward nature of units in BattleLore, which were almost always composed of multiple figures in one of three strengths for more customized creatures that each have an info card to detail its stats and abilities.
Another change involves how scenarios are created, with each of the two players choosing one of seven scenario cards for its army, then combining those cards to determine the landscape and special conditions in which battle will occur. After revealing the scenario, players then muster units from the armies in the box based on this game's victory conditions and the player's personal style. Thus, the game swaps the simplicity and fixed start nature of the original design for more variability and complexity.
During dinner and games with FFG employees at Gen Con 2013, I learned that this new edition has been through multiple iterations dating back to at least 2010, and while this "Fantasy Flighted" version of BattleLore might not be the right cup of tea for some players of the original game, it's precisely how the publisher wants the game to look and play.
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Game display at Gen Con 2013 (Image: midnightmadness)
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Set amid the constant warfare of the Old World, Warhammer: Diskwars is a game of ferocious, fast-paced tabletop battles for two to four players. At the heart of the game's conflicts are its disks, which represent heroes and units from across the Old World. During the game, you activate these disks, flipping them end over end to move them across the battlefield, position them to attack, and interact with terrain and other disks it overlaps. When one disk covers another disk, the disk on top is considered to be "pinning" the disk below it; this prevents the pinned disk from activating, and at the end of the round, overlapping disks must fight one another. By maneuvering carefully to pin your opponent's units, you can strike them down, seize control of the battlefield, and win the day!
Warhammer: Diskwars has been updated to its new setting within the Warhammer world and features flexible rules for hero-centric army-building. Additionally, whereas the original Diskwars was a collectible game, Warhammer: Diskwars has moved away from the blind buy model, and the Core Set includes everything you need to play the game: a host of terrain cards, objectives, command cards, and more than sixty disks for the game's four races.
In Petersen's InFlight Report from Gen Con 2013, he mentioned that Diskwars saved the company in 1999, and with FFG now having a good relationship with Games Workshop, the Warhammer fantasy world has replaced the generic fantasy setting of the original game.Warhammer: Diskwars has been updated to its new setting within the Warhammer world and features flexible rules for hero-centric army-building. Additionally, whereas the original Diskwars was a collectible game, Warhammer: Diskwars has moved away from the blind buy model, and the Core Set includes everything you need to play the game: a host of terrain cards, objectives, command cards, and more than sixty disks for the game's four races.
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Then Brenner revealed the new Legendary standalone game that he's been teasing about since at least April 2013 when I interviewed him during ACD Games Day. At some point he released the clue word "green" and people speculated that the set would feature Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or GI Joe (although Joe hasn't worn green fatigues since the 1970s, I think) or Shrek (but always in a "I don't think it's possible but I'll say it anyway" voice), but in fact the set will be Legendary: Encounters, which is based on the four movies of the Alien movie franchise. (The 2012 film Prometheus is not part of this series, and I'm going to pretend that the Alien vs. Predator movies are merely a figment of my imagination.) Legendary: Encounters will be a fully cooperative game with original art, and while it can't be integrated directly with the Marvel heroes version of Legendary, the two games will be compatible. As Brenner said to me after the announcement, "Ripley and Wolverine together? You can do that..."
Apologies for the glare!
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