New Games

Despite the fact that fell in love with Battles of Westeros, it was not among those that I chose to recently order when my friend Dion Garner asked if I wanted to get in on his order. First on the list of things to get was Thunderstone: Doomgate Legion. For whatever reason, I had dragged my feet on getting this one. I finally pulled the trigger. I also finally got around to updating the online Thunderstone Randomizer I've been writing. I got Doomgate Legion encorporated (before I got the box). I also had to order a ton of new sleeves for the game. Well, it turns out that Thunderstone: Dragonspire came out this past week - I missed getting it into the order with Dion, so I just bought a copy (along with 400 more card sleeves) from the Game Depot. I have the game (and all expansions) sleeved now and I'm working on incorporating this latest expansion into the generator. I have to do the village and Thunderstone cards and maybe work in a couple of tweaks and I'll finally be caught up. Sadly, the fully sleeved game doesn't fit in any one box. The expansion boxes are fantastic for holding sleeved cards and AEG did a great job in printing dividers for all the cards - but even with leaving out all of the random game generating cards and a stack of disease cards, the game still took up the entirety of the Dragonspire box and half of one expansion box. I'm guessing the next expansion will easily fit in, but it'd be REALLY nice if they could figure out a jumbo box or something.

The second game I had in Dion's order was Combat Commander: Mediterranean. I now have the three big boxes in the series and will start gathering the smaller expansions as well. I mentioned to Robert Bolan that I heard that someone was thinking about running a CC tourney at the Geekway and he said we need to resume our weekly games. We really do. This is such a good series and we both enjoy it a lot. I forgot all about buying more sleeves for this one. I'll have to get on that. I'll also have to run my butt over to Walmart for a few more small Plano containers for the new chits. I'm starting to think I need to just swap out everything in my CC:Ancients/Battlelore bag and keep all the Combat Commander stuff in it. I'm not real sure I want to do that, but it might be an option.
The last little bit I got in Dion's order was the Ladybug expansion for Hive. I had no clue what this truly added to the game (and I didn't care in the least). Hive is a no-brainer for me and so was this. Turns out the Ladybug moves exactly two times ON other tiles, then once off. Sounds interesting.

Finally - the last of my splurges was because of Dion, but not in the same order. When I picked up my games, he told me about Labyrinth: The War on Terror. I had heard NOTHING about this. No excitement, no reviews, nada. So what is it? On the surface, it looks a lot like a "modern" Twilight Struggle with the US versus the Terrorists. It is a CDG and Dion indicated that it was like Twilight Struggle in that the more he plays it, the better it has become. Twilight Struggle is really an excellent game that has held up really well for me. Nathan Winchester and I have always managed a couple of games of it while traveling to and from the Geekway. I looked at the box at Dion's and decided to get this by the time I got back to my place. I don't know if this will replace Twilight Struggle on our trip this year. I have a travel version of Twilight Struggle we play that is easy to do in places like an airplane. I'll likely bring Labyrinth along (unless the Geekway guys get a copy out there) to play regardless.