This Geek's Week,,,

Thought I tasted something special...

- Blind tweaked my decks for the Star Wars LCG.  My Imperial Navy deck is still aggressive, hopefully even more so with the couple of modifications.  The idea behind my Jedi deck will still be about buffed, defensive characters, with Luke and Yoda being the 2 main guys.

- Built a Smugglers & Spies Hoth deck, and an Imp/Bounty Hunter deck looking to focus on capturing cards.  Will play around with and tweak them both once I get the latest force pack in my hands.

- Played a game of netrunner with my criminal deck vs Jinteki.  I ended up losing due to a Ronin, but it was late game and it wasn't looking like I was gonna win anyhow.  My deck was just running way too slow.  Too many wasted turns, not enough money, the usual.  I think I may need to tweak it yet again...

- Finally played my 1st game of the A game of Thrones LCG, using my Targaryen vs Lannister.  It was 9-11 in the Lannister favor, but a well timed Balerion saved my hide, and I was able to snag final 6 power due to having heir to the throne, danerys,  Balerion, and Raegal out.

- Played bunch of Skyrim.  Hurry up ESO!

- Worked on bit on the light warjacks from my Retribution starter.

Gloria Mundi Unboxing and Component review

Gloria Mundi in all its... gloria?

I recently purchased a copy of Gloria Mundi online for a really cheap price, and when it arrived, I thought I'd take the opportunity to do a little unboxing and component review.  If you're looking for a general gameplay or rules overview, you'll probably want to look elsewhere,  I'll talk briefly on the rule book, but you wont get a sense of how to actually play the game.    This is also my first Rio Grande Game, so I'm not sure what the norm for their packaging or components typically is, please keep that in mind as you read.  That said, enough babbling, on with the review!

This Geek's Week...

- Been playing a bit of WoW lately.  Did a punch of pvp on my druid, at first I was balance, but I wasn't doing a ton of damage, and dying in 2 shots from twinks.  I found myself healing more than dpsing, so I bit the bullet and specced resto.  From there, my damage still sucked, but I was doing great healing in pvp, often being top heals for my side.  I was hoping to be able to pvp in the starting bracket for longer, get some heirloom gear, as I saw lvl 20's running around in there, but I guess it did move me to the lvl 20-29 bracket, and I just can't compete at that level yet.  Thus, I rolled a Worgen Hunter, with which I plan to start pvping much earlier...

- Designed a couple of WoW tcg decks for raiding using tcgbrowser.com.  I haven't bought the actual cards for them yet though.

- Played 2 games of Netrunner using my new decks, and won both.  1st was NBN vs Noise. The NBN worked well, I scored 3 breaking news agendas one after another from the start.  I never managed to get out a sans, so I had to take a risk to score the 3/2 agenda that comes with a free advance token.  I later used that free advance token to 1 turn score a Project Beale for the the win.  Noise got unlucky, and never pulled a single agenda.  Next game was my newly redesigned criminal deck vs Jinteki, and it worked alright, better than it has in the past.  He set up his defenses pretty well, I had some money, but it never felt like truly enough.  I hit his hand a few times, never able to pull anything, and ended up going after R&D pretty often.  Eventually I was able to pull enough agendas for the win, while the Jinteki player was never in a position to safely score any.

- Ordered the "Gloria Mundi" board game off of Amazon for $10.  The first of many future board game purchases based on an Ancient Rome/Italy theme...

Finished Manticore Warjack model...

I recently finished up (minus the grass on the base) the first of the jacks from my Retribution starter box.  I initially started out with just the plain, clean, basic white for his main color... but man, it was boring!  Thus, I "dirtied" it up a bit to give it a little something extra.  I also has to find a way to place a little bit of blue onto it, to tie it in with the rest the army.  Initially, I tried painting a section of the forearm blue, but I didn't care for it.  I ended up painting the little ball/jewel in the center blue, and while it's not a lot of color, I think it will be enough to tie the model tot eh rest of the army.  Finally, I wanted to add a little something extra, so I modeled him holding the severed head of cryx jack.  He's grasping onto a few wires, and i have several more wires hanging down from the back of the head.  don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Cryx, in fact, I had a rather large Cryx in the past, which is why I had a spare cryx warjack head laying around.  Overall, I'm happy with the how he turned out...

This Geek's Week...

Happy Father's Day to all the fellow dads out there!

- Played more Hawken.  I actually went 11-0 in one game and got accused of hacks for the 1st time since I started.  All I can say is "New player right of passage: COMPLETE!"

- Played several games of World of Warcraft again, this time against several Dungeon decks, and we got owned! (with the exception of the 1st one we played)  I actually picked up an Alliance, Human Death deck of my own and played it several times.  Honestly, despite being a starter box, I held my own.  I also played a round using a draenei priest deck.  As I said before, the game is fun, when played as a co-op, with a similar feeling to games like Sentinels.

- Picked up "A Dark Time" for the Star wars LCG, and "Future Proof" for Netrunner. 

- Reworked my criminal deck from the ground up.  I also dismantled my Weyland deck, and replaced it with an NBN: The world is yours* fast advance deck.  I've also got an interesting NBN tag-n-bag deck in the back of my head if this one doesn't work out, and I've plenty of past success with a previous NBN TNB deck.

- I broke down and downloaded the WoW trial, rolling a Worgen Druid named "Wuhsawbe" on the Dalaran pve server.  Can't say I'll play it all that much, but maybe it'll hold me over till 2014 and ESO.

- Finished painting my manticore warjack from my retribution starter.  Moved on to painting the two light warjacks.

- Working on designing some cheap to build WoW decks for raiding.  I plan to build a Scourge Death knight deck, an all-Worgen druid deck, and a Blood Elf warlock deck.

This Geek's Week...

- Been playing a ton of Hawken.  As much as I enjoy the Battletech universe, Hawken is by far my favorite of the mech-combat games.  The gameplay is fast paced, and has a real tactical feel to it.  Most importantly, it feels balanced!  AND IT'S 100% FREE!  No "Pay2Win" issues either, as real cash only buys cosmetic upgrades, and/or saves you on grind time.  I just cannot not hype this game enough!  If you haven't done so, head over to www.playhawken.com and try it for yourself!  Currently, my Bruiser is level 20 (25 is max) and I finally had enough money, after fully kitting out my Bruiser, to buy a Scout mech.

- Played a game of Marvel: Legendary.  I ended up building a deck around Spider-Man and 2 cost stuff, allowing me to cycle through my entire deck each turn.  I ended up in 2nd place, a mere 2 points behind the leader.

- Played several 5 player "Raid games" of the World of Warcraft CCG.  It was pretty fun, almost like playing a WoW version of Sentinels of the Multiverse.  First game we played, I used a Worgen Warlock against Deathwing, and we wiped the floor with him.  Next game, I played the same deck vs Deathwing, but we tried him on a hard level, and although it looked rough for us at first, we pulled it off.  Next they switched me to some monster-druid-centaur chick and we fought the Caverns of time bosses, and got owned with about 2 bosses left.  In our final game, I played an Alliance Rogue named Edwin VanCleef.  I didn't realize till late in the game, but the whole game I mucked up my damage output with him, as using the axe I had in play, I should have been attacking for 2 instead of just one the whole game.  All but 2 of our player got wiped out as one of the bosses dealt every player 12 damage upon her arrival, but we (I say "we" but it was really the last 2 guys) managed to kill of the remaining bosses.  All in all, it was pretty fun in that raid style, multiplayer format.

- Reworked both my Criminal and Weyland decks.  I hadn't had a chance to try either of them out after my last changes, but in my head, I just knew they wouldn't work.  Thus, I swapped stuff around a bit.  I still need to pick up the last 2 data packs, at which point, I'll get the couple of cards I'm missing to solidify my overall deck idea.  I'll probably post my decks up on here when I get those few key cards.

- Played a bit of Skyrim.  I'm itching for a GOOD fantasy MMO, I wish Elder Scrolls Online would hurry up and get here!

- Hung out at the shop Saturday night.  One of the few redeeming qualities of the shop is that you can freely drink up their, and the alcohol was flowing that night.  Not just beers either, but whiskey and 15 year old scotch too.  Late in the evening, the guys decided to fire up a grill out front and we all ate burgers, brats, and hotdogs.  But it wasn't all just booze and drunken fun.  We played 2 games of the DC Deck Builder, 2 games of Quarriors, and a game of netrunner.