GAMA Trade Show 2013 Report 3
The quest continues with…
June brings a stand-alone expansion for “Level 7” entitled “Level 7: Lockdown” ($31.99 MSRP) Lockdown follows those poor souls that failed to escape before the doors locked and now must journey deeper into the mysterious, and very dangerous facility to escape. Assuming that is not enough subterranean horror for you, another supplement comes out in August called “Level 7: Omega Protocol.” (MSRP $80.00) You lead an élite unit to clear out the base. This set comes with about 40 miniatures.
“Legendary” is the Marvel Comics deck-builder game which released last year, but a new expansion is coming out called “Dark City.” It releases June 25th, with a $39.99 MSRP.
“Star Trek: Attack Wing” is a new Star Trek miniature space battle game using the “Flightpath” system from Fantasy Flight (the X-Wing rules). Here is a shot of the miniatures, cards and maneuver templates.
That is fine for a quick game, but real men play with these…
And the dice were solid resin and weighed about 2 pounds each. We had to roll them very carefully not to crush the models or nearby bystanders!
The ships have a more “Star Trek” feel like Klingons with big guns, famous characters at the helm (Picard, O’Brien, etc) and Romulans with cloaking devices (it adds an ocean of defense dice, but you lose your shields when cloaked), but otherwise it is X-Wing with different ships. I enjoy X-Wing and “bought in” to the game in a big way, but the Star Trek implementation left me feeling flat. X-wing is a dog fighting game with small ships zipping around, fighting for position. Perhaps it is a bias based on years of Trek reruns, but these mechanics felt inappropriate for huge ships-of-the-line. I envisioned slow, brutal slogs, elegant maneuvering and massive phaser volleys. This game treats the Enterprise-D like a small fighter and the entire experience suffers for it. As I said, the underlying game is amazing, but I will stick with X-Wing and Wings of Glory.
PSI is a distributor, not a publisher but they are relaunching an imported dice game exclusive to them called “Iron Die.” It is a collectible dice game from Italy that released last year, but I missed it at GTS in 2012. The production quality on the dice is impressive and they look amazing.
The packs retail for $40.00 each.
More tomorrow!
Trask, The Last Tyromancer
