Shadespire

[The Other Dave]

I played a best-of-three match against Asch today, and the game was good fun! Pretty much as advertised, it's quick to play, easy to pick up, and tactically interesting. I was pleased that my orcs, when I made objective decks and power decks focusing strongly on the orc faction cards, played very much like you'd expect orcs to, just wanting to get in and thump heads, concerns like holding ground and defending terrain be damned. I'm giving it a thumbs up, and again hopefully I'll be able to run some demos starting January-ish.

One thing about the game that I think bears mentioning, if anyone following the thread is hung up about this aspect, is the "Age of Sigmar factor" that the game does (or, more accurately I think, doesn't really) have. It's true it's set in the AoS, and one of the warbands in the box set is the reviled (but - apparently - increasingly interestingly-fleshed-out-in-the-fiction) Sigmarites, and the titular city Shadespire is in some ill-defined realm halfway between the living and the dead, presumably floating around in a reality bubble somewhere or something, but the great thing is you can pretty much ignore all that. Of the 8 scheduled starting warbands, 3 are strongly AoS-flavored (two Sigmarite warbands, and one of the all-slayer "Fyreslayers" faction), but the rest are pretty much Warhammer Fantasy factions we all know and love - orcs, skaven, undead, and two flavors of Khornate chaos (one marauder-ish and one chaos warrior-ish). Yeah, there's a lot that's pretty dumb about the AoS fluff, but if you just want to have Warhammer-flavored fantasy gang fights, Shadespire really does that.

[The Other Dave]

So it looks like Slayer Dwarves and Skaven are slated for a February release, which would suggest the last two warbands, Stormcast hand-crossbow dudes and armored Chaos Warriors, will be April-ish.

I got my core set in, and have been getting to work painting up the two warbands in there, and also fiddling with cards and such.

[me_in_japan]

hmmn. I'm interested in seeing the Skaven. Always liked Skaven, I did. If they turn out to be rubbish, there's always the skellies, but we shall see how it goes.

[The Other Dave]

If you just want to see the models, there's a preview video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbaxfuknZWE



Rather Stormvermin-y, all told - and surprisingly non-horde-y, with only 5 models.

[me_in_japan]

Ta for that

Well, stormverminy isn’t a bad thing, I suppose, and certainly they have a good sense of dynamic movement. I always kind of preferred the scuttly, verminous aspect of skaven (eg clan rats, plague monks) to their elite murder squads (eg stormvermin, eshin) but they’re good minis for what they are. I suppose one could consider my interest piqued. We shall see what the future brings...

[The Other Dave]

Similar to my reaction, I think - "Yep, they're Skaven all right!" They're very nice - the leader especially - but don't have quite the "holy crap those are beautiful models" factor the Undead do. The Undead warband is sort of a tough act to follow, really.

[The Other Dave]

I played a couple games up at the Ichinomiya game club tonight, good fun. One 1 on 1 battle and one 4 on 4.

Lessons learned:

Skeletons are an extremely finessey warband - with Orcs you can basically just load up on Orc-themed cards and smash face, but since skeletons are very weak, you can't really count on getting glory from killing opponents easily, and you're probably going to be giving a lot up to casualties if you're not careful (especially because, if you're not careful, you might even get the same model killed multiple times). I think they'll need the most care with deck building, and focus on territory control rather than combat. Preliminarily, I'd say the ease-of-learning scale goes Orcs (hard to kill, easiest Inspire condition, very straightforward themed objectives) -> Stormcast (elite, so a mistake will hurt you, but all your guys are equally, and very, strong and tough) -> Blood Reavers (a big effectiveness gap between the leader and the scrubs, the latter of whom are in some sense there to die and make the survivors Inspire) -> Skeletons. Having numerous but weak models puts you in a position where you have to think and plan and know your deck pretty well.

The game handles multiplayer games really well. The 4 on 4 was a lot of fun for all of us, even though multiplayer scenarios can fall flat in a lot of games like this.

The PMG group in Ichinomiya is really a lot of fun. Seriously, drop by if you have a chance some time.

[The Other Dave]

This thread runs the risk of becoming me talking to myself, but! They've put up a card database and some deck builds up on the official Shadespire site - a nice little resource, and some looks at how decks can go together, with some discussion of why's and wherefore's.

https://warhammerunderworlds.com/deck-guides/

We also got the first advertisement featuring dorfs, and while it's just one of 'em and pretty small, provisionally it looks ok t'me!

[me_in_japan]

as dwarves go, he seems ok to me, too.

And you're not shouting into the abyss. I'm here. Watching and listening...

[The Other Dave]

I'll see if I can lure jus into the thread too - I think I got the hooks into him pretty good at game day this past Sunday.