Some Games I'll Never Play

There are a lot of games out there these days, and I mean a lot. Some companies have handfuls of games by themselves, not including the smaller studios and the likes. And while I've made unbearably clear that I've played a lot of games in one capacity or another, there's just no way to play them all. 

Sometimes there are games I really want to try, that capture my attention and have pondering how to make it work. There are plenty of games that fall into this category, but I ultimately simply can't play them. Sometimes it's a space concern, sometimes it's a concern of spreading myself too thin, sometimes it's a concern of simply not being convinced I could get people to try it with me and other times it's simply a cost issue.

Today I want to talk about three games that fall into that last category. Both of these games look great and have things that really appeal to me, but are simply just not really viable for a lower middle class dude in Utah to justify the expense that comes with them.

EISENFRONT

Eisenfront is the brain child of Centerfire Hobbies, a company out of Singapore, and more specifically designer Sean Suchanya. And it panders almost directly to nerds like me.

Much like how Endless Fantasy Tactics aimed to bring Final Fantasy Tactics to the tabletop, Eisenfront unashamedly aims to bring a similar treatment to one of the best video game series ever made: Front Mission. Front Mission is a series of tactical mech centric strategy RPGs (because fuck whatever Left Alive was) that first premiered in 1995 on the SNES, and eventually moved to the Playstation in the third installment. The big selling point of the games was the customization of the mechs, able to mix and match body parts and weapons to build the machine you needed most in your squad. Eisenfront emulates this game design pretty much perfectly.

Two player starter set

It's a 15mm game where each player controls a squad of mechs, customizing them from a variety of bodies, arms, legs, backpacks and weapons. Each part has a points value, with the body having a power stat that determines how much weight it can hold. The various limbs and weapons all have a weight stat that can't exceed the body's power output, so you have to be careful how you build your mechs. I love this sort of freedom, and it means you can make some pretty mean builds.

The core mechanics of Eisenfront are pretty solid, adding in skill cards that players can add to their mechs to give them extra abilities which is a nice touch. Some weapons can have you rolling buckets of dice, but sometimes that's not a bad thing. When I'm firing a mech sized rotary cannon rolling 12 dice just feels right. 

I'm a sucker for a quad-bot

What helps it stand out, aside from the premise, is that instead of models having a flat wounds value or what have you, different parts all have their own HP, and damage is randomized to different parts of the mechs so it's entirely possible to blow off someone's arm and leave them without a gun, or cripple their legs and leave them moving at a snail's pace. It puts me in mind of Battletech, but smoother. You aren't tracking armor and structure, just a solid HP stat for the body part. Don't get me wrong, I love Battletech, but this does go faster and stays true to the spirit of the game it's emulating.

The models for the game are also pretty brilliant, from what I can tell. They're a good size, decent enough detail and really capture that blocky, utilitarian charm that Front Mission had. To top it all off, they're built more like proper model kits than wargaming miniatures. These are static figures locked into a pose, they're posable with articulated joints abound like a Gundam kit. These things are basically awesome action figures you can paint up and swap parts around on. They pull double duty as gaming pieces and awesome toys, which is a win in my book.

It puts me in mind of other action figure games like Xevoz or that one Marvel series of action figures that doubled as pieces to a skirmish game (does anyone know what I'm talking about here? Because Google sure as shit doesn't).

Some people will probably complain about them being resin, but given that this is a one man operation I'm not expecting plastic here. Besides, when a model looks as cool as these I'm pretty forgiving on material (also I don't mind resin).

Robot go brrrrrrrrrrrrt

Sadly, as stated at the start of this post, Eisenfront is simply not cost effective for someone like me. The rules are free, which is great, and there is a two player starter set, but the problem is that it's a one man operation out of Singapore. That two player starter comes with four mechs, rules, stat cards, skill cards, some terrain and dice. That's a good amount of stuff for $76, right? Until you realize that shipping is a further $27.

Now you might say "all told that's not terrible for a two player starter set in this hobby" and you'd be right. The problem is expanding from there. Each additional mech or vehicle is somewhere between $30-40, so suddenly the shipping cost alone is almost as much as a single model. And this sucks, because this game looks good and fun but as it stands it simply isn't feasible. Maybe I could justify grabbing the starter set sometime down the road, but everything else is currently too far out of reach and that makes it a tough sell.

I want to be clear that I don't blame Mr. Suchanya for this, shipping costs are what they are. It just sucks that a great game like this will likely never see major distribution and might end up fading away with people never getting to know what it is. And that applies to all the games here, including our next entry.

ALKEMY

Alkemy is one of those weird ones to talk about because it's been hanging around and doing it's thing since 2008. It's gone through three different companies in that time, but it's still kicking despite some ups and downs. I got a very brief demo of it back in 2009 when I went to GenCon, and by that I mean a guy walked me through how some stuff worked but I didn't actually get to sit down and try the game proper.

Alkemy is a fantasy skirmish game currently being produced by French company Alchemist Miniatures. It seems like the change to the current, second, edition changed the game size? I'm not entirely sure, but the rulebook and some posts by Alchemist Miniatures mention changing the standard to the new Blitz play model. 

A two player starter with cat people fighting east Asian proxies? Cool.

The rules are free to download, so I took a look at them and they do seem pretty decent. I'm not a fan of the stats all being different colored triangles, but mechanically it looks like it would work fairly well. It would seem the big selling point/gimmick of this game is the combat system. The game uses color coded proprietary dice, and as models take damage their damage track changes colors to match the dice. So as a model loses health the dice they get to roll gradually get worse. I actually really like this sort of mechanic, and while I feel like it maybe could have worked without a proprietary dice it's still pretty cool. The only other games I've seen do something similar are Warlord and Heroclix, and even then it's not exactly the same.

The other rules mechanic that sets the game apart is the use of combat cards. You have a selection of these and when a model engages in combat each player chooses one to play, and these will grant bonuses or possibly counter other cards. This adds a nice bluffing mechanic, although it does seem a little unintuitive on first read (probably because they keep using the acronym CC and my brain is conditioned to read that as close combat).

Honestly, after a quick peruse of the rules and glance at some of the models this game sort of caught my attention. The models are quite nice, have been for a while, and that earned the game some fame back in the day before things went all sideways and it seemed nobody knew what the hell was happening with it.

Kitties!

The sculpts are characterful and have good detail, it seems they aren't too many parts and you get some nice dynamic poses out of some of them. Add in that some of the factions, like the above cat folk of the Khaliman Republic, just look absolutely dope and it seems a winning combination. And honestly, the models don't seem too bad, price wise, compared to most skirmish games.

That is until you realize that nobody, at least so far as I can find, stocks the new stuff here in the States. I can find some of the older models, but I don't know if those are compatible with the current rules. If I wanted to grab the two player starter set the only place I can seemingly get it is direct from Alchemist Miniatures themselves.

No, I didn't need to sleep tonight, thanks.

And much like Eisenfront we hit a snag. That starter set is 79 Euros, and based on the graphic on their webstore it would be a further 10 Euros to have it shipped internationally. Now, again this might not seem too bad as that's only around $97 based on the conversion rate at time of writing. And hey, $97 is actually kind of a steal for 11 models, rules, dice, battlemat, all the cards you need, terrain and so forth. It's a solid amount of stuff, but again the problem becomes expanding. This isn't as bad as Eisenfront, but the shipping can start adding up when you just want to buy a single guy or a two pack of guys to expand a little bit.

I'm also always hesitant about international, especially trans-oceanic, shipping because there's just so many things that are completely out of your hands. Maybe I'm just overreacting, but it worries me.

World of Twilight

So I'm going to be a bit cheeky here, because I have, technically, played this one. I had to test out the mechanics to do a review for it way back in the day, but it was largely just me with a small handful of proxies trying to get a vague approximation of how it was all supposed to work. I've never played a proper game of Twilight, not even a legit demo.

Despite that, I will sing this game's praises to the heavens. Twilight is one of the best games I've ever messed with. It oozes with charm and character, and it's entirely inhabited by dinosaur people which makes the dino nerd in me very happy.

Gaze upon their glory!

This game has some really innovative and interesting mechanics. It uses a random activation system with each player having six activation tokens in a bag, drawing randomly much in the same vein as Bolt Action or Test of Honor. Where it mixes things up in this regard is that most models can't fight on their own, there are two combat tokens in the bag which, when drawn, start a combat round for models able to fight. Now, some models do have special abilities that let them initiate a combat during their turn, but most guys have to sort of jockey for position and hope they're in the right spot when a combat token is drawn.

The other big thing this does different is the combat. When combat starts players choose which engaged models will fight. Each engagement will have the primary combatants, and then can also have a single supporting model each that is in base contact with another model involved in the combat. This is a nice touch that I really like seeing show up in games. But Twilight doesn't stop there, it's also diceless. Kind of. To actually fight models use combat stones, and build a pool of these using the primary combatant's combat stat and the supporting models support stat. There are two types of combat stone: attack and defend, and you choose how you want to fight. You can go all in on the attack to try get a killing shot, you can go all defense to keep someone alive, or split it and try to do both. I'm a big fan of this sort of blind bluff combat, it pops up in Bushido as well and while there it feels more like a duel between two combatants this captures that while allowing more models to participate in a single fight. Players then take their stone pool, shake them up and place them on the table to see the results. Each stone has a success side and a blank side. If you get more successful attacks than your target does defends, you score hits and the opponent takes a tough roll (I told you it was only kind of diceless), rolling a d6 and needing to roll equal to or better than their tough stat to survive. If they pass they live, if they fail they die. 

God, I love this model

Which is another thing this game does that's kind of interesting. Every model has a single wound, no matter how big and mean they are. The strongest guys will have really good tough values and special rules to let them modify the roll or just re-roll the die, but they still only have one wound. It was a bit odd to me at first, and I thought it sort of an oversight, but I've come to really respect it.

It also does a bunch of other stuff like models having stamina points to spend on certain abilities, leaders being able to do group activations so even if you have more than six guys on the table you can still activate them all and some other fun ideas.

This is up there with Relic Blade for me. Much like that game it's so clearly a passion project for designer Mike Thorp, and he's put a lot of effort and love into making the game he wants to make. The fact that it's a fucking awesome game full of dinosaur people is just all the better.

Sadly, if you're outside the UK then it can be tough to get ahold of. There's no US distributor for this one man project, and the only way to get the models, that I know of, is direct from the webstore. For a lowly pleb here in the US the prices quickly become too much to handle. The small starter comes with two starter forces, the rulebook, a ability reference sheet and the game set with the tokens and stones. That's just shy of $110, and that's without shipping. The large starter that comes with stat cards and lets you pick the starter forces you get is nearly $150 before shipping. It's just too hard to justify, sadly.

Again, I don't blame this on Mr. Thorp. Conversion rates are all over the place, and international shipping prices are what they are, that's all beyond his control. But it just means that as much as I'd love to build up a couple of forces and obnoxiously pitch this brilliant game to every person I know, I simply can't afford to.

Maybe one day I'll strike it rich and be able to justify any gaming purchases that tickle my fancy, or end up in the UK, or France or Singapore and be able to find a way to get my hands on some of this stuff at the source. As it currently stands, though, these are three rather excellent and intriguing games that I'd love to give more love to, but my wallet simply says nay. So I hope this little spot on the internet can at least expose someone to some cool games they can maybe get easier, maybe something they never knew was there and I can give these games their moment in the spotlight that they deserve.