Back to Business

Greetings, players and fans of Shadow Era! Whilst the URL might beg to differ, it's GondorianDotCom here, bringing you a follow-up to the Design Team News forum post I made on May 3rd.

There's a lot to cover, so let's get started!

Design Team Blog

If you're reading this now, then you've found our blog, which launched whilst most of the Design Team were at the Origins Game Fair. I hope you enjoyed the coverage posted by my fellow Design Team members on the experiences they had there. Due to other commitments, I was unable to attend Origins, so that's why you've not heard from me until now!

With everyone back now, we'll be using this blog to talk about more traditional Design Team subjects like the forthcoming expansion, our design process, our vision for the game, and anything else we can think of that you might be interested in. Which brings us nicely onto ...

World Championships

Last weekend saw the culmination of a ten-week journey for more than 100 players, which began with a 200+ player swiss-style tournament and ended with a 32-player single-elimination Grand Finals where iClipse became the new World Champion, using somewhat of a surprise a hero: Zhanna Mist.





It seems like no one saw Ms. Mist coming

Whilst organising the event was not a Design Team task - I did it wearing my OOPS (Official Organised Play Specialist) hat, which is definitely the second best hat in Shadow Era, regardless of what the polls might tell you - I'd likely to briefly touch on it here, from a Design Team perspective.

It should go without saying that a thriving tournament scene is essential for the success of a TCG like Shadow Era, and, indeed, that is why so many fans of the game volunteer their own time to run events. But all their hard work can only go so far, if the game itself is unbalanced and stale, and more dependent on luck than skill.

This is why the first task we were entrusted with, when our team was formed in December 2011, was to review the 175 released cards so far, and the 25 as-yet-untested cards that had been designed by the previous Design Team, and make whatever modifications were required to end up with a finalised 200-card set that the development team and the dedicated player base could be proud of.

During that process, the expected impact on the highest-level of competition was always in our minds. Whilst I would argue that enjoyment for all players is the ultimate goal for any game, it is the competitive players who really determine its lifespan. As soon as the set was released digitally as v1.5 in March, our eyes were on the ratings ladder, the many player-run tournaments that were happening, and, of course, the Shadow Era forums, looking for signs that we'd achieved our quality aims and avoided catastrophe.

Three months on, 1.2 million games had been played with v1.5 on the live server, experienced players had had the chance to get to know the set inside-out, and we'd seen no signs of anything being broken. But if anything was going to really test whether we'd achieved decent balance, and variety, it would be the World Championships, since this is where you'd expect to see the most broken of decks unleashed.






Needless to say, Francis did not make it to the Grand Finals this year.

Thankfully, there was no such unleashing ... or table-flipping ... that I was aware of :)

Instead, as a Design Team, we have been given a lot of encouragement that the approach we took to finalising the set had worked as intended. There were a wide variety of heroes in use in the Grand Finals, and there were many closely fought games - some of them epic!

Based on what happened that weekend, and in the many tournaments preceding it, we can say with confidence that we have a solid foundation to build on, both in terms of card pool and development process. Both of which will be invaluable for ...

Shadow Era's First Expansion

This is probably the thing we are asked about most right now. Players are keen for any kind of spoilers, and we'd love to give them, but whilst we have 150 cards designed, we have not yet tested them. Therefore, giving out card spoilers at this time is just not possible. We do have plans for other types of spoilers over the coming weeks, but we are restraining ourselves on card spoilers until we have finalised versions of the cards we wish to spoil.





Many players hope the first expansion will provide an answer to arguably the
only overpowered card from Call of the Crystals that slipped through the net.

And we're trying to get to that point as soon as possible! It's for this reason we are again enlisting the services of ...

The Players' Focus Group

For those of you who don't know what the PFG is, it's a group of experienced and insightful Shadow Era players who are given early access to new versions of the game to help us to achieve higher quality than if we just went live with what we'd designed without having player input. Ideally, the PFG will help us to pre-empt all major issues that would have otherwise been found by end users instead - when it would be too late to address them. Of course, we still have the Test Server as a safety net, if the PFG and Design Team miss something, but that's really meant for implementation testing rather than finding errors in card design.

To say that the first PFG was instrumental in the success of the finalised first set would be a massive understatement, so using the same approach for the first expansion is a no-brainer. That said, you might have heard or seen that there were some effectiveness issues with PFG1, so we've applied lessons learned from there to make us even more productive this time around.

So far, things are going very well, but the fun really begins when we start play-testing! Unfortunately, that date has been delayed quite severely over the past three months, due to Wulven's focus on launching the physical version of the game.  Thankfully, the PFG members have had the aforementioned World Championships to keep them busy (iClipse clearly embraced that opportunity!), and the Design Team have been able to get stuck into ...

The Single Player Campaign

For as long as I can remember, players have been asking for an improved offline story mode, but it's never become a high enough priority to invest development time into. It's the online player-vs-player Challenge mode that really makes Shadow Era special - this is a TCG after all!

Meanwhile, for about the same length of time, the Shadow Era community as a whole has expressed an interest in finding out more about the game world and its inhabitants, and the story that sets the stage for all the bloodshed. In other words, the fans want some lore!

So, when there was some Design Team downtime due to the physical cards work, we had the option to either take advantage of the time to address these areas or slack off for a few months. Needless to say, we chose the latter, so the single player campaign and story have not gone anywhere.

Joking, of course! Driven mainly by an unstoppable stream of background story being written by NachyoChez, who joined the team to focus on story and lore in February, we have been able to devise a much-improved offline story mode which will deliver an absorbing and challenging single player experience, with generous helpings of lore and hero backstory. Work has not yet started on implementation, but we are getting very close to that point.

I can't say much more than that right now, but more details will follow over the coming weeks, along with news on ...

Other New Features

Aside from the first expansion and the single player campaign, the other high priority additions to the game that are being worked on at the moment are organized play support within the game client, in the form of automated tournament queues, booster draft and Meltdown format - so that I can finally hang up my OOPS hat! - and an auction house, for pseudo trading between players. As well as these features, there are plans to address some of the smaller lower priority improvements that people regularly request, so I have recently been collating them to feed into our feature roadmap.

I will share more details when he have clearer estimates of when these features will go live. The emphasis is very much on the first expansion now though, since growing the card pool will exponentially improve the deck-building options and gameplay variety you face, and, in turn, your enjoyment of the game - whether you play digitally or physically :)


Until next time, this is GondorianDotCom signing out!

Shadow Era at Origins: Demos, Drafts, and Multiplayer Games Galore!

Heya, Mojumbo here today to tell you all about my experience at the Origins game fair! It was truly an enjoyable experience and I had a lot of fun playing with both new and current members of the community.  In particular, I was glad to see that the game was rather easy to pick up and play for first time players. Our initial fears that the game may not translate so well over to physical were struck down and the launch was a success.

For this article, I’m going to give my impressions of the various types of games that were being played at our booth. First up, the demo games!

The Demos:

I never realised just how good Shadow Era would be for demoing. Since the game is rather simple to pick up and learn it translated really well into grabbing attention to the game. By turn 4 or so completely new players would be comfortable playing turns on their own only stopping to ask questions about slight nuances (though you would have to remind them to generate shadow energy at the start of their turns for the first game). Also, when combined with the fact that everyone always seemed to mop the floor with me on their first try (…probably due to poor sacrifice decisions on my part) they would be enthusiastically getting out of their seat to buy a starter deck and dive into the world of Shadow Era!

Now even though the physical game does require some dice/tokens to keep track of things it proved not to be much of a problem for players since we were at a gaming convention and everything you needed was readily available for sale. For example, you could use some colored poker chips to indicate status effects such as red chip = ablaze, green chip = poison, etc. To track health for the purposes of our demo we would count up damage using six-sided die until it reached our hero’s maximum health, but there are many different ways to track health I saw being used that work just as well such as pencil and paper, a calculator, or a couple ten-sided die counting down.

The Drafts:

Shadow Era Drafts were a hit! Going into the weekend we actually weren’t even sure we would be holding any organized play events, but after getting multiple people asking us if we are holding any drafts we decided to cook up a format on the spot. We tried out 6 pack drafts with no faction restrictions, 6 pack with faction restrictions, and so forth to great success.

Then Kyle, in a true stroke of Genius, came up with the Meltdown format by asking “what if we just get players to open 3 packs, remove the hero and redeemable codes, and shuffle the cards together?” Thanks to Kyle, we now have a nice alternative to drafting that is unique to Shadow Era and sure to prove enjoyable to a wide variety of players.

I’m looking forward to digital meltdown and digital drafts being implemented. It will be fun for sure!

The first ever Free for All game:

I got to be fortunate enough to watch over the first ever physical Free for All (FFA) game being played between 3 players. It was a Moonstalker, Banebow, and Majiya vying for domination of the board.

The game synopsis: going into this game the Moonstalker player was undefeated against the other 2 players in 1v1 games so they wanted vengeance on him. In true FFA fashion, this game seemed determined to be a 2v1 match. However, after knocking the Moonstalker to less than 10 hp and with 0 cards left in hand the Banebow and Majiya started to turn their attention towards eachother. The Banebow player had a distinct advantage thanks to his Wrath of the Forest (WotF) draw engine providing him immense draw power. He used this draw power to slowly but surely overwhelm Majiya whilst Moonstalker used Regeneration and Lone Wolf to try and recover from his grievous wounds. During this time I got to see Supernova hit all 3 players (yes, Supernova is king in FFA games)! Ironically, that very same WotF backfired on Banebow as after he had eliminated Majiya he decked out…giving our sneaky Moonstalker player the win and continuing his undefeated streak.

During this game I came to appreciate the value of the recent wording changes we made during the PFG process for Call of the Crystals. Having cards read “friendly allies,” “enemy allies,” “your ally,” “other ally,” etc. makes it very easy to determine how cards should work in a multiplayer environment. These players were able to play their FFA game rather seamlessly without needing my help for much. I only had to jump in to tell them how to resolve a rabid bite against multiple players/targets (we decided to roll a six sided dice with 1-5 being the 5 potential targets and 6 being a reroll). I expect FFA to be a hit amongst friends!

The first ever 2v2 game:

So, the design team was at the airport after a long week spent at origins and we decided to sit down have a friendly 2v2 game to see how it would run before we went our separate ways.

The heroes used were Elementalis (Mojumbo)  + Nishaven (Razcrux) for team 1 and Boris (Nachyo Chez) + Jericho (Soothslyr) for team 2. We decided to set up our turn rotation as: 1a -> 2a - >1b -> 2b with both 1a and 2a not getting the 7th card draw or 1st point of Shadow Energy. To win you simply had to kill 1 of the 2 heroes on the enemy team.

We found that it was too difficult to hold a team game using base hero hp values because it’s far too easy for one team to pick on a squishy hero (like a mage) while his partner is forced to watch him fall with no way to help out. A possible solution is to combine both heroes hp values into one lump sum so this “rushdown” strategy is a little less viable (for those curious, me and Raz were smashed pretty soundly). Like FFA, I expect 2v2 games to be a fun casual gametype for friends to partake in.

Going Forward:

In case you haven’t already looked we have released our official limited events at http://www.shadowera.com/showthread.php?15846-Presenting-Shadow-Era-Limited-Formats. In particular, I can’t wait to play in my next 6 pack draft. I managed to craft an epic 30 card Darkclaw deck that put Fangs of the Predator to good use! Our next stop to showcase physical product is likely to be at GenCon Indianapolis taking place from August 16-19. We hope to see you there ready to play some Shadow Era.

Well that does it for my origins experience. Hope you enjoyed the blog post, good luck in your games, and make sure you have fun! This is Mojumbo signing out.

Origins: Game Research & Discovery

Hello Shadow Era fans! This is Razcrux bringing you some personal insight into the walk of the land.

From left to right: Razcrux, Nachochez, Soothslyr and Mojumbo

This is my first solo-post to the Design Team blog, for those of you who do not know me yet, my main function in the Design Team is to develop future cards, oversee the new sets, and develop the various "Styles of Play" of each hero / class / faction.

Basically I come up with new cards, new game-features, and mechanics. To do that one needs to be very aware of the strengths and weaknesses of each class, the current meta, and what the long term vision is 10 sets into the future... (and so forth)

I feel that being good at anything generally requires a lot of learning, continual growth, and an open mind. I probably check out at least 10 new games a week, and read up what I can along the way in different places (blogs, games, forums) and stay up to date on our Shadow Era community forums (especially, but not limited to, the card suggestion threads, PFG forum, etc.).

It was really spectacular to see all the cards printed, the huge posters of art at the event and all of the positive responces we were getting at the fair. The card quality is huge, people loved the game, and it translated very well into the physical games. Every day we had a tournament, and on each day the number of people who showed up to play in the booster draft nearly doubled.

I really think everyone is going to be very pleased with the absolute high premium quality of the product, foils and cards. No corners cut here! (except on the cards which have nice little round ones)

(We had probably the best visual presentation of any booth)

(here is a Shadow Era booster draft tournament I got to oversee, people in the photo are sweating as they unpack cards to build their killer decks!)
 

(...And some random fans posing as Jasmine!)

Game Designer's Paradise

Origins was not only a wonderful way to meet most of the team (Anurak and
GondorianDotCom couldn't make it), the fans, demo the game, and share our passion -- it was also "creative heaven". In-between demoing and running draft tournaments, I got a chance to explore some of the other games on show and to check them out for ideas and inspiration.

I love learning new games and you always generate ideas from exposure. I hope you will enjoy reading some of my observations and quick reviews.

Games with cards, that employ duels:

• P.O.W.E.R. (by CoreGames)
• Summoner Wars (by Plaid Hat)
• Conquest Tactics (by Zeitgeyser)
• Mage wars (by Arcane Wonder)
• Guild Quest (by Omnivers)

 Deck building games:

• Nightfall: Dark Rages (by Alderac Entertainment group)
• Ascension: Storm of Souls (by Gary games)

And some other noteworthy titles:

• Tournay (by Z-man games)
• Sunrise City (by Clever Mojo)

Out of all the duel games, I found it interesting how many of them were trying to fuse a board game with locations, and movement -- with the formula of a good card game. Most of these were not TCGs in the sense that you had to hunt for rares, but instead they were designed such that each set was a complete set of cards aka Living Card games. The fusion with a grid though demands a new term, for lack of a better term (suggestion?) I will refer to this genre as a "Tactical Card Game" or TacCG (not to be confused with TCG... sigh)

Tactical Card Games

P.O.W.E.R.

This game used modern warfare as its theme, and an interesting build-queue system. Cards can be used once, but are then exhausted until you can return them to your base. Combat involved a lot of rock-paper-scissor type interactions as well as careful use of ranges.

I liked the build queue concept, as well as the exhaustion until recovered and returned. I found the lack of dice appealing, and the game play quite chess-like. Like many of these games though I felt that the movement system with cards was clunky and the board-space constricted because of the need to accommodate wide-format cards. The level of detail on each card was semi-complex, though the lack of damage tracking was certainly appealing. Personally I'm not a huge fan of modern warfare photography, but someone else might love the subject.

I haven't been able to find a weblink to this game, sadly, so if anyone knows the link I'd be happy to include it. The creator of game swung past our booth, loved the art, and walked away with a pack of Shadow Era. If and when I do finally get the link to his game sorted, fans of modern warfare should at least check it out.

Summoner Wars

Summoner Wars, like P.O.W.E.R. uses a board to control the position of your cards, and some light-deck building options. Though in principle it is not a TCG since each deck comes complete and ready to play.

You use dice here and each card has only one special ability. The complexity was medium-low and certainly the simplest of all the games I tried in this genre (maybe too simple?). There were quite a lot of factions to play with, which I found quite nice (I think more than a dozen).

You can only recruit from wall cards, which also happen to be the only form of terrain in the game. I found the use of "walls" to represent your home base a bit weird (why not use a nice picture of a village instead?), and I also kinda wished there was more terrain than just walls used.

I'm not a huge fan of dice when a game already deals with cards, but the system was clean and straightforward. To me, dice in a game is a very serious decision, and it can become too easy to make a game-clone by just adding lots of dice effects. To a certain extent, adding dice to a game can be a simple short cut for your design process, but may or may not result in a better game from doing so. I did find gameplay somewhat linear, and a bit flat, but this might have just been the demo and first impressions are not always true.

The mechanics that appealed to me in this game was the large diversity of choices, the clear class-wide strengths of each faction (primarily due to the repetition of many similar-types of cards) and the use of "dot symbols" on each card to track damage.

Conquest Tactics

This game also has the same idea, you get a grid, you chose your cards, and put in some general buffs / spells into your card pool and battle your opponent. I should add that you can even download a full sample of the game and print - glue and cut your own do-it-yourself demo.

The game was quite a bit more complicated than Summoner Wars, with different numbers for retaliation than attack, activation costs, ranges printed in the center of the cards, health points to track, different costs for upgrades and so forth. The game has, in my mind, a lot of potential but currently still lacks clarity (numbers should always be in one place and use icons next to numbers to help rapid pattern-learning, for example) and suffers from excessive complexity (a common downfall of any game).

There were however quite a lot of things I really liked about this game, it had a nice initiative system that felt a bit like a tug of war. You can spend more points (aka resources) or save them up for later turns, and there was also a nice idea of allies with various "levels". You can put a high-level ally into play for a big price, or you can "upgrade" your lower level allies (of the same type) by paying a cheap upgrade fee.

Cards also had icons which related to which spells and abilities they were able to use. And it didn't employ any dice to resolve combats. If my bag wasn't already full of other games by the time I tried this one, I probably would have grabbed a copy -- I'll probably try out the above "do it yourself" link myself in the following weeks to give it a proper spin!

Mage Wars

Mage wars is yet another card-based duel where you move your hero and your allies, into different sector in the game. It has a different spin though with your deck as you actually play the game with a binder rather than a hand-size. So at any time you can take any card you want out of your binder, pay its cost, and generate its effect.

I thought that the idea of having total-recall was quite novel, though I did have concerns regarding how many different cards (options) a person can realistically retain in their head at one time -- and the resulting speed-crunch of the game.

Because you can cast any card from your "deck" you want on any turn, the game uses dice to determine its effect. Which got me thinking, what makes for better strategy, being able to access any card you want on any turn, but not knowing if it will work? Or knowing that what you do each turn will always work, but not being sure exactly of which card (option) you will get on each turn? Option-complexity aside, there are certainly arguments on both sides.

The only other small thing I noticed that was new and interesting was the idea of trigger-synergies, if one of your allies rolls over a certain number when attacking (in other words does over a certain amount of damage in one turn), then various other effects also trigger.

Guild Quest

The last card-based tactical game I tried was Guild Quest. It's a small game that is entirely card based and it had a rather interesting combat system. You align all of your allies into a grid of nine, and each card's ability was determined by which position in the grid it occupied.

I like the idea of abilities being influenced by a card's context/location and was intreeged enough to get a copy of the game. It helped that the box was small enough that I didn't need to worry about it fitting in my limited space suitcase.

One word of warning though, Mojumbo and I tried the game out over dinner one night; and we did have a very difficult time understanding the rule book. I will have to write to the game designer at some point to get some clarifications, so if anyone else picks up the game based on this review, make sure you realize that the rules themselves might need a quest to decipher.
;-)

Out of all of these hybrid card-tactical games, none really stood out as being "IT". What I mean by this is that I feel that there is indeed the potential for a genre of card game here, one where you not only duel, but your allies have a real "location" on the board. It could be that cards just don't lend themselves well to such a hybrid, or it could be that we have yet to see a game really nail the missing evolved genre. I find such attempts at creating the missing link very interesting, and I'll be curious to see if in the future a title will be able to sweep the missing link up into its domain.

Whatever game that will be, it needs to be simple, but not so simple that depth is lost. Adding board-location adds complexity, so it needs to be done in just the right way to be meaningful.

Deck Builders

Nightfall: Dark Rages and Ascension: Storm of Souls are two deck building games.

I tried the expansion: Nightfall: Dark Rages at the convention out, and I liked the idea of being able to chain abilities as well as getting synergy effects by matching various cards played to each other. I did find though that the color system was a bit hard to get my brain tuned into, but this might just be something initial that goes away after a game or two. Nightfall also has the idea of "damage cards" that mess up your deck when you are hurt, and force you to draw dead cards. An interesting way to track game victory. Allies that are in play track damage by rotating them (so a maximum of four sides means 4 life is the biggest ally you can have, or at least that i saw).

Other interesting ideas were that if you play a certain card, the opponent triggers cards of the same color out of turn. Cards seemed to have a different purpose when in your hand, chained or when in play as allies. Adding at least 3 different dimensions to the game. The complexity was definitely not subtle, like it is in a game like "Go", more like Chess where there are a lot of different rules to keep track of.

Ascension: Storm of Souls is a stand alone expansion. While some people I've talked to don't seem to like the art used, personally I think it is quite good. Out of all the deck building games I have played, this one is probably my favorite. If you play with the expansion and promo cards (which are available for the iPad iOS) then every game is very different and demands a lot of "on your toes" strategy to win. the game has four different factions with different synergies employed in each one. I feel that the different factions could be further synergized or emphasized more than they are, since often a "good deck" employs several different factions rather than just one or two -- but otherwise they really have a great title in their hand.

I like that some cards help you more during the game than at the end (cards have victory point values), the idea of deck crafting, "on the fly" deck building, blocking/choosing from a common continually changing card pool, and the idea of semi-permanent "event" cards that affect all the players.

Other Games

Finally, I did also try many non-card based games, I'll list a couple below, which were my favorites: Tournay and Sunrise City.

Tournay uses symbols on its cards instead of text to describe the effects, which at first play seemed like a terrible idea. I was warned that after the first game the symbols would all make sense, and I must say: they were right. If you can get past the initial hurdle of having to decrypt symbols like an Egyptian anthropologist you discover a wonderful gem of a game.

The game seems to be just as fun at 2 as it is at 4, which is a rare thing. Each time you play, you have a different win condition and different war-effects that drive the players into different avenues of strategy.

I really like the idea of being able to use your opponents assets if you pay them for it; opening up variety of tactics and counter measures to you.

Every player builds their own 3x3 grid of cards that co-influence each other based on position. Cards also provide you with mechanisms to deal with, obtain or change other aspects of the game. it's a very open meta, with countless variable winning scenarios that should offer anyone interested in the "building game genre" (think Catan and other German titles) immense replay value. Until now I would say that this was by far the best game I tried at the convention. My hat goes off to the designer!

Last but not least is Sunrise City. This is a game of city building, supposedly inspired by Sim City. The game has tiles that you build upwards. Elements of bidding, and domino-style matching are employed. Players have role cards, and have to make points in various quantities in order to move ahead of their opponents.

As it turns out, after I'd bought the game and talked to one of his developers for a bit about their projects, I ended up (randomly) sitting next to Clever Mojo's publisher/owner on the flight out of Columbus! He gave me some interesting insight into the future of their games (which I can't share, out of respect to him) and the process of development they used.

I watched this game played and I must say it is visually very appealing and has really good inter-player interactions. I like the various phases of the game and how your actions in one phase help/hinder your progress in subsequent ones. It was also interesting how you need to score exact numbers to hit double points, creating a sub-strategy, and how different mechanics were integrated (bidding, card play, domino matching and objective cards).

I haven't played the game enough to say if it could be even better than Tournay (which would be quite an accomplishment) but I do plan on testing it out here over the next few weeks at my local gaming group to see how it pleases the fans.

Conclusions

While I can't say specifics yet about future mechanics, playing all kinds of other games is great for inspiration and at least half a dozen new cool card ideas / mechanics have come from my exposure with these games.

As we get closer to the first expansion's release it will be great to go deeper into depth regarding the process and background information related to such choices.

From post-game discovery bliss, this is Raz signing out. I'll be back again with news, info and other tid bits from the Shadow Era game design and development process.

In the meantime, maybe you will check out some of the above games!

May the deck-gods shine upon you.
;-)

Raz / Sebastian

The Origins Effect

Well hellooooooooooooooooo my darling Shadow Era peeps!
It's Nachyo here, reporting in about the wonderful events from before the flying machines we amazing humans have created whisked me home!  (Note: Maybe we should have an 'inventor" mechanic at some point?)  Origins may be over, but believe you me, the age it's begun for Shadow Era is just beginning.  I know that sounds a little dramatic, but that's what you get when you let the writer of the DT explain things!  I'd also like to note that just because I'm stating things dramatically doesn't they're untrue!

In fact, the Wolverines (explained in a folowing link) appeared in a number of interviews:

1. Origins by night
2. State of the Era
3. A brief interview with Kyle

We also got to spend a LOT of time officiating tournaments, and coming up with the rules and ways to handle everything.  Heck, we stayed up waaaaaaaaay too late testing the last of the booster drafts out, and then I was the last person on my flight because of us testing the 2v2!

My biggest thrill was logging onto the forums and seeing the work I'd written posted there for everyone to see.  The past few months have been AMAZING for me, creating the world of Balor and expanding the original vision for Shadow Era into something entirely unseen before.  The excerpt in the quick start guide is the first glimpse into the world we've all been playing in for so long.  I'm beyond excited to see the reaction of that reveal!

I also got some chances to plunge into the stories of a few other games, and see how the story interfaced into mechanics of the game.  They definitely gave me some ideas on how I can add a little more depth to the upcoming single player campaign!

And since no 'summary' is complete without vids and pics...

Here is a video introduction of the team present at Origins:  

(note: GDC and Anurak couldn't make it to Origins)

From our Shadow Era youtube channel

More videos:

Our VERY FIRST TRADE (Part 1) (Part 2)

And of course, the VERY FIRST GAME!  (Kinda long)

And Pictures:

The whole crew

Out first booster draft!

From right to left: Razcrull (Sebastian), Mojumbo (Trevor), Nachyochez (Kevin)

A rare sighting of AnAdolt with the booth art

The now famous Jasmine Rosecult artwork

A very tired Wulven team at the end of Origins