Ready To Play vs. Tournament Legal Play

I was at Fantasium a week or so ago, and saw that they had received the first shipment of the new WWE Dice Masters. They had the Campaign Box and both of the expansion boxes. And I love the Dice Masters games. They're good, and they're 100% cross-compatible. Which is nice.

It means I can field Ninja Turtles while my opponent has an army of Space Marines, and there are no hiccups or other issues.

Here's what I don't like, though:

The Campaign Box gives you three of each included character's dice.  The expansions give you two of each included character's dice.  In tournament play, you can have up to four dice for each character you include.

So, while you can play tournaments with just the base game, you might be at a disadvantage compared to someone who bought two base sets (or two copies of the expansions).  But buying two copies of these gets you a bunch of extra cards. Two copies of the base game gets you a bunch of extra cards and a couple of extra dice (and a bunch of extra Basic Action and Minion dice).

There are a few other oddities, too. Like Bret "The Hit Man" Hart has three dice in the base game, and two dice in one of the expansions. But the expansion dice are a different color.

It's frustrating. It's still better than the random distribution they were using, though. And it's dramatically better than what Fantasy Flight has done with their Legend of the Five Rings card game (L5R).

A tournament-legal deck for L5R includes 1 Stronghold, 1 Role, and then two decks of 40-45 cards each (the Dynasty and Conflict decks).  The Dynasty deck can only contain cards that are neutral or from a single clan. The Conflict deck can only be neutral or from a single clan or from a single other Clan puchased by using Influence.

I'm going to ignore the Conflict deck for a moment, here. Let's talk about the Dynasty deck:

The base game includes 20 neutral Dynasty cards and 15 Dynasty cards from each clan.  That's 35 cards for someone's Dynasty deck. There is no way to make a tournament-legal deck from the starter box. There's not even deckbuilding strategy involved, either. To play in a tournament, you need to buy more cards. And, unless you buy a bunch more, you won't have many options for deck construction, either.  Their expansions all include "play sets" (three of each included card), which is nice. But why doesn't the base set even include the ability to put together a single tournament-legal deck?

Let me put on my Grumpy Old Man hat for a second, here:

In 1993, when I bought my first deck of Magic: the Gathering cards, I paid $8 for a starter pack, and instantly had a tournament-legal deck in my hands. It wasn't a good tournament deck, but it was legal. Unless I had a banned card - but the banned/restricted list was still in the future. In fact, I played in a number of single-starter sealed deck tournaments. Because they were fun and viable.

Now, I know that a Magic starter is not $8 anymore. But it's still a whole lot less than the $40 that FFG is charging for their L5R starter. And WotC now produces non-random starters, too, so you know what you're going to get. And - yes - Magic is still mostly provided in random booster packs, where L5R (and Dice Masters now) are mostly sold as fixed starters and expansions.

It just throws up unnecessary speed bumps for new players.

With Dice Masters, you have limited options, but you can put together two tournament-legal sets from just the base game.

Honestly, it's almost enough to get me back into Magic.

Almost.

Year-End Wrapup

2008 is over, and here's a quick overview of how it went for me:

Total Recorded Plays: 351
Remember that if I play Game + Expansion, I'll record it as one play of the game and .1 plays of the expansion.

Five Most Played Games:
Mr. Jack (22)
No Thanks! (20)
Werewolves of Miller's Hollow (18)
Ca$h 'n Gun$ (16)
Neuroshima Hex (15)

Surprise Of The Year:
For me, it was Mah Jongg. I was given a set as a gift from a friend who lived in China, and made an effort to learn to play. I had expected it to be a rummy-style game, and was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. It had 14 plays in 2008.

Unsurprise Of The Year
Neuroshima Hex. I ordered this one from Portal Publishing before Essen 2007. I did not, unfortunately, get a chance to play it until this year. And I liked it.

News Of The Year
The death of WizKids. After a long series of shelf-eating flops and the loss of a lawsuit to Wizards of the Coast, WizKids was shut down by Topps earlier this year. If you don't already own Oshi or Tsuro, you'd better hurry.

Personal Discovery Of The Year
Online gaming. I'd visited GameTableOnline before, and had not been impressed. When they started putting games on FaceBook, I figured I'd give them another shot - and I'm glad I did. Five years ago, I'd visited BrettspielWelt, and had rapidly become frustrated - it was poorly translated and difficult to navigate. Not anymore!

Significant improvement on both fronts means I'll be playing more and more online to supplement my face-to-face games.

Looking Forward To Next Year
For 2009, I'll be tracking games played online, provided I'm playing human players and not AI players. This means that you can expect to see more Neuroshima Hex plays, as well as a few plays of Uno, Carcassonne, and The Settlers of Catan.

I managed to (mostly) maintain my posting schedule this year. I hope to maintain a similar schedule for 2009.

There are a lot of games coming I look forward to playing this year, and several games I picked up in 2008 that I need to share.

Good-Bye, WizKids

While I haven't always agreed with their decisions, I'm still sad to see WizKids go.

They gave me Tsuro and Oshi, two excellent games.

My wife gained a lot of her gaming confidence playing Pirates of the Spanish Main.

For these reasons, they will be missed in our household.

We (my wife and I) wish the best for any WizKids folk who are suddenly finding themselves in the job market.

The Sky Is Falling! The Sky Is Falling!

Okay, not really. But Mayfair Games recently announced that they are requiring a 20% cap on discounts for their games.

Retailers who sell below that line will suffer "sanctions" and may be cut off from their supply. It'll hurt online retailers more than brick-and-mortar

Tom of Boards and Bits broke the news here. There's some good discussion mixed in with the ranting.

Here are my scattered thoughts:

It's not new to gaming. Games Workshop has done this for a while. They even go after eBay sellers.

It's legal - there was a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on this that didn't change the law, it adjusted the interpretation of the law which put more more power in the hands of manufacturers.

This sort of price control has been going for a long while in other industries.

I currently work in car audio. Various manufacturers have "Authorized Retailers." If you buy product from a non-Authorized retailer, then you don't have warranty coverage. MTX Audio has a page all about it: MTX - Unauthorized Resellers.

In order to become an Authorized Retailer, you get to jump through all kinds of hoops and sign a number of contracts. One of these contracts concerns "MAP" - depending on who you talk to, MAP is "Manufacturer Authorized Pricing" or "Minimum Advertised Price."

This gives the car audio-buying public a choice: Buy a speaker without a warranty and hope it doesn't die, or more and get a warranty backed by the manufacturer.

And there are ways around it:

1) Buy Product X, and we'll throw in Product Y.
2) Here's a Coupon Code for X% off your entire order.
3) Free shipping for all orders over $X
4) Buy Product X, save $Y on Product Z

So why would Mayfair do this?

1) It supports the FLGS. Internet retail is hurting the FLGS. I've ranted about this before. This levels the playing field a bit.
2) They can. Mayfair is the US publisher for The Settlers of Catan, arguably the best-selling Eurogame of all time.
3) It won't hurt internet retailers as badly as people think it will, because it means higher profit margins on Mayfair items (and because of the numerous ways around it).

There was discussion a few months ago about game companies possibly doing something like this. A ICV2 interviewed a few industry insiders:
Jay Tummelson of Rio Grande Games
Joe Hauck of WizKids
Loren Greenwood of Wizards of the Coast

... and that's all I have time to say.

WizKids vs. Distribution

I'm sure many of you have seen this news.

I'm not sure if you realize how much this will directly impact you.

See, it's all about the supply chain. Your local game store gets its games from a distributor. In some cases, that distributor gets the games from another distributor. In some cases, that distributor is direct with the manufacturer.

The closer your store is to manufacturer direct, the lower the prices they can charge and still turn a profit. Since your local game store is a business, profit is important.

If your game store is like most, they probably give you a discount if you're a regular. A higher profit margin means they can give you a better discount without cutting into their bottom line.

Exclusive distribution contracts are bad for small game stores, as it costs them some flexibility and can cost them more money, as well.

I'll use my local game store, Phoenix Games as an example.

There are several distributors that Phoenix can go through for any given item. They each have their own pricing scales, and (in general) it's better for Phoenix to go through a smaller local distributor, because they can get better prices and there's no shipping time involved.

Diamond/Alliance Distributors are a tiered distributor. The more you buy, the greater your discount. They also have a sizeable minimum order size – one that smaller game stores may not be able to afford.

With the exclusive license, Phoenix can no longer go to a smaller distributor for WizKids products. Not unless they want to pay more for the same products (this is without accounting for WizKids' continual alienation of its own fanbase – another story for another time). Phoenix also can't just run to a local distributor to pick up a box of Pirates of the Spanish Main when he runs low. He has to order it (hoping he has enough to meet his minimum order size) and wait for the shipment to arrive. He also has to order enough in advance to cover (theoretical) demand while hoping that WizKids hasn't released yet another space-eating dud that doesn't sell.

Or that they haven't alienated their fan base with dramatic rules changes yet again.

In short, exclusive distributors reduce a game store's ability to react to a changing marketplace, and make it more expensive for them to get the games that you are asking for.

I've got a rant from Brian – the proprietor of Phoenix Games – that I'll post sometime, but he sums this whole situation up nicely:

So now I am forced to choose – pay more for WizKids products or snub my local distributors who have championed my success, and buy all my products from Alliance so that I qualify for the price I already get. I don't believe I'll give my local guys the finger, just so I can continue to carry (at my existing price) the products of a company that has, over the last couple of years, done everything they could to make selling their products as difficult as possible.

WizKids, it's been great dealing with your products. I even enjoyed a few of your games. But when you hurt local game stores, you hurt the industry as a whole. I can't – and won't – support that. I love my hobby too much.