Duels of the Fates
Unicorn Overlord, Star Wars: Unlimited, Lorcana: Into the Inklands, Ravnica: Clue Edition — oh my!
I spent the last week slamming Unicorn Overlord when I wasn’t forcing my friends and family to play Star Wars: Unlimited or Magic: The Gathering.
I wrote extensively about my time in the trading card game gulag in this article. Here’s the condensed version.
First up, Star Wars: Unlimited, which displeased my wife and bro-in-law but left me hankering for more:
Star Wars: Unlimited comes out Friday — it’s the latest attempt to bring the interstellar franchise to the crowded collectible card game arena.
The original Star Wars Trading Card Game stopped printing only a few years after its 2002 release, even though it had the biggest name in the business behind it: Richard Garfield, the inventor of the world’s first TCG, Magic: The Gathering. Two decades later, Fantasy Flight has wholly reimagined the game in Unlimited.
The Force may indeed be with the company. It’s got an admirable track record, debuting a Star Wars card game in 2012 and a Dominion-like Star Wars deckbuilding game last year. The new Unlimited starter decks Fantasy Flight sent me ably introduce the game’s core mechanics and sketch out the design space it could soon explore. While Disney has exhausted my nostalgia for this far, far away galaxy, Unlimited’s gameplay gives me new hope.
Puns notwithstanding, the game’s sneaky blend of Netrunner and Magic’s Commander format stole my attention — and I look forward to drafting it sometime.
Next up, Disney Lorcana: Into The Inklands. The game has yet to impress, but you can read more about why here and here.
But I was rather charmed by Ravnica: Clue Edition. It’s overpriced as a Murders of Karlov Manor Jumpstart product but still added up to maybe my favorite multiplayer Magic format:
What I took to be a gimmick might be the most fun I’ve had playing free-for-all Magic. Rather than focus my efforts on offense, I used the variant’s rules to deduce the killer, weapon and room. I made my final accusation at death’s door; knowing that if I got it wrong I’d face a lethal counterattack. But my educated guess proved correct — it was Headliner Scarlett with the Candlestick in the Ballroom!
Murders at Karlov Manor strikes a balance between the game’s recent excesses and its rich history. Pairing it with January’s Ravnica Remastered in draft highlights this contrast even more — allowing you to see just how much the game has changed since 2005’s inaugural Ravnica: City of Guilds. While I’m not sure I like the future the game’s racing toward, I’m grateful it made this pit stop.
Finally, I’ve played more than 20 hours of Vanillaware’s Unicorn Overlord since receiving a review code last week. While I’m not close to finishing it, I can say that it’s quite good and also (personally) disappointing. I hope to write more about it later, but for now, I’ll say that it combines the humdrum pseudo-RTS elements of the developer’s last game, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim with a studious tribute to Fire Emblem (the blandly virtuous main character even has the trademark blue hair!).
Rather than provide, say, thirteen playable characters, Vanillaware has boasted of making over 60. This cast stretches wafer-thin over a more grounded plot than the Saturday Morning Cartoon that was Fire Emblem: Engage. But the story falls far short of the genre-spinning heights of 13 Sentinels. Attempts to inject moral grays into its black-and-white premise often fail; few characters get the time needed to display the complex motivations suggested by its many sidequests. A squad-based strategic version of The Witcher 3 this certainly isn’t.
Still, the autobattler-style combat goes down real smooth, and the art is warm and luscious (even if it occasionally indulges in anime lasciviousness). I’ll likely finish the game because it tickles just enough tactical thinking out of me, but it’s not the successor to Fire Emblem: Three Houses that I had wished for.
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