Dreamblade - Miniatures Board Game

[Morkilus]

I thought there might be enough interest that I'd start up a new thread. The game was shown at Indy, and Wizards seems serious enough about it to have already given thousands in prizes, and started a $1000 tournament series for local stores.

I played a couple games after picking up enough for two to play, plus a booster to swap out the more specialized (useless) minis. I was surprised how deep the game is both tactically and strategically. The rulebook (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dbm/rules) is published online, which gives a good sense for the rules, and you could pretty much try it out if you took the time to make some paper pieces.

Generally, the game has the element of chess where controlling movement by holding key territory is very important. On a tactical level, setting up attacks on important cells and figuring probability of success in a strike can pay off well. One of my early gripes is the randomness of the initiative roll (who goes first in a turn). Initiative is rolled d6 vs d6, and ties go to the player with the most turns won so far. With this mechanic, there can be a momentum to hitting hard and fast, and winning multiple initiatives can gain you plenty of victories; even though you don't get the advantage of seeing where your opponent is moving, you can crush a buildup of troops and gain key cells (and victory points for kills) without much fear of retaliation.

The pacing of the game seems pretty quick, though you could take plenty of time planning your moves if you were pedantic enough. We got our first couple games done in an hour and a half, including time to rebuild our warbands.

Building warbands isn't too difficult, and there is no uber-unit syndrome since the strength of the units you can recruit each turn is random + various bonuses that accrue as the game progresses. So it is vital to build a warband that has a variety of costs. The "blades" mechanic is alot of fun; each of the special dice has a blade face, which is a point you can assign to the varied abilities in an attacking group of creatures. There's a huge amount of abilities that you can utilize, and some of them don't involve the creatures in direct combat.

The feel of the game is quite different from a traditional minis game, and movement and combat is much more fluid. I like not having to use a measuring stick or having to count squares in a grid.

And oh yeah, the minis are pretty sweet looking. (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dbm/gallery)
At least I can use them in some planar D&D adventures if I ever get ambitious enough to DM again.

Here's an AAR that I posted in the starcitygames.com GD forum to get a feel of what the game is like:

I decided to go ahead and try it out; I haven't bought a new game for months. Even though I barely had enough for a warband for each of us, it was pretty easy to set up synergies and a general strategy for each, since the warbands are always 16 minis. My friend took Valor and Passion, and I took Fear and Madness, favoring a low curve. I kept trying to swarm his larger characters, but he kept winning initiative and disrupting them to the fringes of the board. Since I kept rolling 1's, we never got that many spawns and he won turn after turn.
Next game, I focused harder on the swarm strategy and went for the middle cell. After getting beat back with some amazing rolls allowing him to use the powerful Advance ability of the Hawk-eyed Instigator, I was down 5 to 0 and a powerful wall was on my front scoring cells. Then I won a couple initiatives in a row, and got a couple lucky crits to kill off his more powerful creatures. The disrupted creatures eventually made it back into the fray, and attrition started to make a difference - the Madness aspect has alot of creatures with low defense (meaning they get disrupted easily) but high life (making them hard to kill). Eventually he had no more creatures to spawn, and my win was inevitable. It seemed incredibly lucky that he didn't get just...one...more...turn. There's apparently a huge difference in the strategies you can bring to the table, but randomness is definitely a factor. The amount of options you have each turn means there is a decent amount of skill required, though. You definitely have to plan ahead, make decisions based on probability, and pay attention to cells that control movement, as "engaged" creatures (sharing a cell with an enemy) can't move w/o a special ability.

[Slainte Mhath]

I played this at the WotC booth at GenCon. It reminded me of D&D mini's with a touch of Magic the Gathering and Heroscape throw into the mix. The game concept and background were kind of silly, but the mechanics were solid and provided a lot of wiggle room for advanced strategy and tactics. I can see how it could grow even more challenging and diverse with the release of expansion sets.

My problem with it is the same problem I have with all new WotC products lately, it just seems to lack originality and staying power. A perfect example of this was Hecatomb, the horribly convoluted card game they released at last year's GenCon. It was a stacking game, with hexagonal cards made of clear plastic that you could stack on each other to build powers and bonuses. Despite spending a huge amount of money to launch and support the game up front, it failed miserably. They released two exapansions in the first 9 months party to address issues with the game mechanics and mostly to get already developed product out the door, but in the end it was actually cheaper for them to DESTROY the remaining product than ship it to distributors who couldn't sell it and didn't want it. There wasn't even a tournament for it this year, it was as if the game never existed. The running joke this year was that WotC would have you run out of the con for even mentioning Hecatomb.

I see Dreamblade as a drain on WotC's already establish D&D, A&A and Star Wars minis franchises, some of which have struggled with lame expansions recently. I honestly think they would have been better off investing the time and money into another CCG even before trying to take on Whiz Kids in the non-licensed mini's arena.

Still, Dreamblade is interesting to play and pretty intuitive even for someone who's never played mini's before. It's possible it could catch on, but without a recognizable license it has it's work cut out for it. I'm wondering it it'll still be around by next GenCon.

[Vesper]

I played in the release tournament at GenCon (sealed - you got 1 starter and 1 booster). Despite just having learned the game the day before (and practicing at the hotel with a friend), I had a great time. Sure.. I only placed 242nd.. but out of 436. A great turnout (almost unheard of numbers from what I understand) for a WotC new release. I would consider Dreamblade to be one of the hits of the convention. Everyone seemed to be talking about it. I bought some boosters on day 1 of the con for $11. By Saturday, the same booth was selling them for full price ($15). By Saturday afternoon, they were out of stock (as were most others).

I swore off collectible games a long time ago, but Dreamblade convinced me to give it another try. Boardgames have been my forte in recent years, and that's what did it for me - Dreamblade is a collectible board game. It has graet mechanics and like others have mentioned, reminds me of a collectible version of Chess. Even better is that you can have a great game with the random figures you get in the starter. Synergies between figs are great, but the spawning system really 'fixes' the issue games like Magic have with too much/too little of the resource you need.

While Hecatomb crashed and burned, it seems like WotC is really putting money and resources into this game. They gave away $20,000 in cash for that release tourny (and a ton more in merchandise).

There's a Flash demo on the WotC site, but it's not real great.. Still worth taking a look, though.

[Nathan]

I've bought a couple of boosters and a couple of starters. My problem is that I'm the only one of my friends who goes for that whole "collectible" thing.