Free Comic Book Day and Mother's Day

 

For those who don't know, the first Saturday in May is Free Comic Book Day. The event is a partnership between publishers, distributors and retailers to give out specially produced free comics to anyone coming to a participating store on Free Comic Book Day. What could be better than free comics?

When I was growing up, there was a local comic book shop near my house. It was literally a few miles away and accessible by bicycle. I ask myself now why I didn't go there more often before they moved to another location. When I did go, I was introduced to other worlds like ElfQuest (which you can read online), Green Arrow, Groo the Wanderer, the Green Lantern Corps and Arion Lord of Atlantis to name a few. I have long since sold those comics but oh how I enjoyed them back in the day.

This year I woke up to Twitter blowing up about Free Comic Book Day and I took a look at what was being offered, a special Grimm comic based on the TV show that my family likes. Knowing that, I decided to go to the local store and check it out. Needless to say, I was late to the party. By the time I reached a local shop, literally hundreds of people had already been there and received their free comics (No Grimm). I took the opportunity to get a few of the comics offered as prizes for my daughter (who unfortunately couldn't go with me this year). She likes Japanese Anime and Manga but I thought I might lure her toward some other comics if there was something fun around. I also looked around for some Wonder Woman merchandise. You see, Wonder Woman is probably my wife's favorite Super Hero - she grew up watching the Linda Carter series. I was on a mission to find her something Wonder Woman for Mother's Day while looking for free comics. Here are some of the Wonder Woman items I saw:

 Not exactly Wonder Woman, it's Wonder Girl

 

This is Wonder Woman, but how do you take her away from her friends? 

This Wonder Woman is a really nice statue

 

 

None of these quite catptured what I was looking for as a Mother's Day gift. Birthday maybe but not Mother's Day. You see at our house we tend to think of Mother's Day and Father's Day as made up holidays. You should treat moms great all the time - you don't need a special day for it. Plus moms really don't like to get stuff that they later have to dust. Just sayin'.

 

What I did find (by the time I had hit three comic book stores and a Target) was this:

 

 

 

Oh and this of which the Legos go to my daughter and the Wonder Woman to my wife:



How did Free Comic Book Day turn out? Thanks to Dark Tower Comics in Newburgh, NY (the third store I went to), it went great. Grimm was obtained along with some Pippi Longstocking, Spongebob Squarepants, Simpsons, Archie and others. A good haul. Free Comic Book Day had to be a success any way you look at it. I saw tons of families and kids at the shops I went to and people were buying loads of stuff after getting their freebies. Great for the store and good for kids. I give Free Comic Book Day five Mick Happies. All these comics will come in handy for the road trip coming up next week.

Eclipse: New Dawn for the Galaxy

I have a confession. I have loved Space Opera as a genre ever since I read Space Viking (available for free here) growing up. I also love space-based 4X strategy games (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate). Over the years, I have owned and played a laundry list of them including: Imperium Galactium (old SSI game), Imperium Galactica, Galactic Civilizations, at least two versions of Space Empires and another I can't remember the name of (but never Master of Orion). Needless to say I have been watching all of the tweets, blog posts, YouTube videos, etc. about a board game called Eclipse for a while. Like many others I have hoped it would be played on TableTop so I could see it get even more exposure. Unfortunately, I don't know many people who play it nor do I have hours to go out and play it myself. Enter Big Daddy's Creations and the long awaited release of Eclipse: New Dawn for the Galaxy for iPad last week.

Eclipse the board game is a space empire building and conquest game. You take control of a human or alien species and explore the galaxy one tile at a time until the universe is built out. At that point you have come in contact with the other species (up to 6 players in total) in the game (or the neutral Ancients) and begin the real work of deciding who will reign supreme. All of the aspects you might like in a detailed strategy game are there: researching technologies, modifying ships, managing resources, moving ships around to attack undefended planets are all there. Luckily, I can report that every aspect of the board game has been brilliantly transferred into Eclipse on iOS.

Eclipse the board game can take hours to play due to the complexity of the game and the number of pieces. On iOS, Eclipse has been designed to be sleek and fluid allowing you to play asynchronously with human opponents online or against AI opponents (3 difficulty levels). Learning how to play has been simplified with a tutorial (a full game against the AI) that exposes you to the game mechanics and controls. A one on one game against the AI will take about 30 - 45 minutes after you complete the tutorial. Everything about this game should be complex (and is) but it is presented in a way that simplifies the interface (all of the key areas of Research, ship modification, etc. are kept in trays that slide in and out of the side of the screen). The game is also quick because of the mechanics put in place to limit how much you can do on any one of the nine rounds in a game.

Don't worry those trays slide away to give you good view of the map

Each action you take in Eclipse from exploring to moving ships will cost you influence. You need money to pay the upkeep on the influence you have expended each turn. Additionally you have to gain science and materials to research and build ships. This means you can never do everything you want in a turn and have to carefully choose what you go after. Combat is handled at the end of each round when ships are together in the same system tile. Ships face off against eachother and depending on who has initiative they fire one at a time until one side retreats or is destroyed. How you have equipped your ships will determine how well you do against your opponent. Victory is achieved based on who has accumulated the most Victory Points which are earned through combat or controlling different sector tiles at the end of the game. It's not easy (see below) and you will need to learn quickly to take on some of the alien species controlled by the AI.

There are a couple little tweaks and things needed but nothing that seems to be a consistent bug. The developers are very active on Touch Arcade, Twitter and their own website and respond quickly to user comments. They are also planning an expansion (the board game has one) and some additional features in the future. Plus this is about the best looking game on iOS.

I can't say enough good things about this game. It is, as the man says in Christmas Vacation, "A real quality item, Clark". You should download this immediately - why haven't you already? Eclipse is $6.99 on iTunes and very easily rated 5 Mick Happies. Now if only I could figure out how to win.

Magic: the Gathering Dragon's Maze Pre-Release Tournament Review

That may be the longest post title I will ever have on the site. Last weekend, I joined about 45 other people of various ages for a pre-release tournament for the latest expansion set for the popular deck building card game, Magic: the Gathering: Dragon's Maze. For those who don't know, Magic has been around for over 20 years and is played all over the world (there is even a Pro Tour with cash prizes).

The game pits two players against eachother with a deck of cards they have built consisting of lands and spells. The lands provide the resources to cast the spells, which allow you to attack your opponent or defend yourself. The cards are mainly sold in packs of 15-cards each (common, uncommon and rare or ultra-rare varieties) or in most stores you can buy individual cards to construct the best deck possible. Magic is played for fun or competitively for prizes. The pre-release tournament is a way to get familiar with a new set of cards when they are released and play others for prizes (free promotional cards and packs of cards).

At the tournament, I plopped down my $30 (it isn't a cheap game) for a tournament pack:

Inside the pack were two packs of cards from earlier Magic sets and four booster packs of 15 cards each from the new Dragon's Maze set. With these cards (and lands from the store), I constructed a 40-card deck to compete in the tournament. Here is one of the rare cards in my deck:

Nice card, but suffice it to say I didn't do all that well in the tournament. I was 2 - 3 overall and well out of the running for any prizes. That being said, I will give some thoughts on the latest set for Magic. I have been playing Magic off and on for 20 years and it is amazing that they have continued to evolve and refresh the game (and make loads of money off of players, Magic is made by a subsidiary of Hasbro) over that time. Playing in the Dragon's Maze tournament did make me nostalgic for the days when I opened my first beta game pack and pulled my Mox Sapphire and Serra Angel. Back then we didn't make very functional decks to play and just enjoyed playing with the cards we had. That is one of the appeals of pre-release tournaments, you get a pack of cards and build from what you get. Yet some of those simpler times have been lost. Over the years, the game has become more and more complicated with wild effects incorporated in the game to keep it fresh (like Extort above). Some are very novel and interesting while others can almost make your head spin with how complicated they can become in play.

I found that Dragon's Maze, being a small set, did not yield a lot of variety in the type of decks that were successful in the tournament. To add another level of fun to the tournament, players were asked to select guilds (certain deck colors) at the start and as players won for their guild they progressed through a "maze" to get a special prize for the guild that was the first to rack up 10 wins (a promo card). At our tournament, the Selesnya guild (Green/White) with help from Gruul (Green/Red) won after the first round (maybe they knew something I didn't about choosing the best guild). Most of the games I played were won by use of only a few effects like bloodrush and evasion (allowing you to attack without being blocked) and due to the limited card set it was difficult to deal with those effects.

If you like Magic, I won't convince you that Dragon's Maze is great or not. I think it is definitely the weaker of the sets released in the past year (Return to Ravnica and Gatecrash being the other two). I would recommend that Wizards of the Coast (Magic's publisher) stick to two larger sets a year if having a smaller is going to yield Dragon's Maze. A further indication of the weakness of the set is how little value the store I played at is giving to the cards. You see, I have sold all my Magic cards a couple of times over the years and so to off-set the $30 cost (and cut down on card clutter at home), I sell my rares back to the store. This time I was able to get $15 back from the cards I got in my tournament pack. All in all I got my money's worth from the tournament - 6 hours of play for $15 (plus gas to get there, of course) - Magic tournaments can last a long time. Yet I don't see me running out to play in another Dragon's Maze tournament. Maybe I will do one online when it is released on Magic: the Gathering Online on May 13, but it's hard to say so right now. I give the Dragon's Maze pre-release tournament 2 Mick Happies. The card selection just wasn't varied enough and the effects are getting a little too complicated for my taste.

My pre-release promo prize