Warlord 4th Edition CCG - the epic fantasy card game

After intensive discussion with the Warlord Tournament Organizers the Warlord 4E Floor Rules were compiled and are ready for download.

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Here are all the Warlord Events for GenCon 2009:

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

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It all started on Monday. It had been confirmed that the product had arrived in the port of Chicago the week before, but I thought I’d rather check up on it. Calling internationally I found out the bad news: The container with the cards had been impounded by customs on behalf of the department of agriculture, since it was supposedly containing illegal seeds. WTF?

With Oliver arriving at the train station around 4 p.m. I was all busy packing the last promo cards, making all orders ready, and calling to the US at half-hour intervals to get some plan going to get my two pallets out of the special customs yard and to surpass the wall of “nothing we can do”s. What a way to start GenCon.

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Some of you might not be going to have the chance to join us at GenCon, but have friends going who you might like to pick up your cards.

Yes, you can do that, provided:

1. You note their real names in the order (there is a “comments” field in the checkout process for that)
2. They produce an ID when they ask us to pick it up.
3. and lastly (quite obviously) we have noted the correct amount of money coming in ($180 until July 15th - $191.94 after that).

For many of you it’s going to feel as weird as for me. While AEG is going to have its accustomed place very near to the main entrance of GenCon’s dealer hall, Warlord is going to be far removed. About as far as you can get, very close to the art show.

As you can see, we are going to have a very small booth, basically for selling only. We’ll start some of our events out of the booth, but otherwise we are going to be concentrating on the events hall.

The good part about it: We are about as far removed from the noisy electronic games section as possible.

So far I have been vague about GenCon’s Sunday event.

At KoHIT we traditionally do Doubles on Sundays - people want to leave early and because you only have half the number of teams a Doubles tournament usually runs faster than Singles, despite the longer rounds.

At GenCon this year, though, we do Doubles on Thursday. Also at GenCon a lot more people are leaving early, need to catch a flight or have a really lengthy drive home.

Therefore I needed a fun format that runs fast enough to be hosted on Sunday.

The solution is a Baronial Battle. It’s derived from the Battle Royale, where all players sit around one table and play simultaneously. The latter can take way too long, though.

In the Baronial Battle, depending on the number of participants, we’ll play up to three rounds. Up to eight players will sit at one table and play a standard multiplayer game. You get points for staying in the game, and for eliminating other Warlords, for example (there are more, conditional points to be won - specific rules will be forthcoming). The best players will advance to the second and then the third round, where only one final table will be played.

All members of the Ordo Phoenicis Ascendentis are automatically qualified - this is their event. Other players can qualify by winning any of the offered Warlord tournaments - including any of the pick-up sealed tournaments.

In yesterday’s post I left you with a cliffhanger. Bad me.

So what can you do with the Treasure cards? Some will be barely playable (think a Golden Long sword, below) or just in local play. Others will not be playable at all. Some of the more playable items in the base set might be Treasures.

In the end there are many uses I can think of: Just collect them for the fun of it, play them locally, do a “most treasure brought into play” tournament or buy into certain tournaments and challenges at GenCon for example.

The most important use would be to “buy” promo cards you have missed in the online shop.

Duh. If you miss a special event promo card chances are, after a certain while you might just be able to exchange the gp you have accumulated against that. In this form gp replace AEG’s XP system.

It also gives me a lot of flexibility with tournament prizes: Exclusive promo cards for winning a GenCon tournament would really be a bad idea. But getting cards with a value of 50.000 gp might really give you some headstart on buying into something you want (several things, actually).

In tomorrow’s Designer Diary Richard will reveal the first 4E Warlord.

Ouch. More than three days have passed without a fresh announcement.

If you keep wondering why: My daughter turned two yesterday, I had to find a new daycare for her, and I am into my yearly bookkeeping extravaganza to please our so-efficient financial administration (”IRS”).

On the Warlord front the Design Team is busy. The Warlords are more or less done (I bet Richard will have something to say about that in his next Designer’s Diary), now it’s time to take on the characters, items and actions. It’s quite a task - there never have been more cards available (over 3600 at last count), and never had somebody to break them down so much (to about 330 cards - including a lot of new ones). And then we have to assign them to decks.

Of course I only have half an eye on that - I am busy planning the “rest”, to make sure the product will be in your hands by GenCon for sure. Apart from the basic set that of course means planning cool events (no spoilers yet, but we have some very neat ideas) and promo cards to spice up the game.

This week we’ll do our selections for the playtesting team, so they can send in their NDAs in time for the playtest start on March 22nd. If you think you are qualified and have a good group, you can still apply!