September 11, 2024 • 47 mins
this week me and chris are breaking down heroscape age of annihilation and the new stuff that comes with it
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
You know.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Okay, Oh okay, that's not an empty chair.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
That's not an empty chair.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Wow. Yeah, so I have a Chris here. He does
need to be a little louder. I can also adjustice
audio a little bit. We're just getting everything still situated here,
and it always takes a couple of seconds after we'd
get started. Like, I don't know why he is a
(00:33):
dead camera.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
I'm not an empty chair. There is a person here.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yes, for some reason, it shows that he is an
empty chair. I mean he shows his cameras rolling.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
That sounds like a you problem.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Sounds like a camera problem because they were working before
you showed up. Yeah, blame it on me whatever, No,
I'm blaming it on the camera. I would blame it
on the camera too. Oh now my USB port's being bad. Okay,
well you can always do this. What are the room now?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Oh yeah, look at that.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
And that's something to work on. Is making sure that
I look into my break Okay, something's going wrong now,
audio is breaking up.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
I'll stop breaking stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
I'm not trying to break stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Are you sure about that?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Okay, maybe I am, because the audio inputs are going out. Sorry,
a lot of problems today. It seems like apparently.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Am the bane of technical issues, or sorry, not the
bane of technical issues, the cause of technical issues, which
when it sells is pretty funny.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Okay, that's why we had multiple audio input going, oh, yes, okay,
we're ready to get started. Still kind of quiet. I
don't know if that's just let's see what we can
do about that. Yes, that that's that's a problem with
(02:05):
the box, not with the actual Oh now it's bad.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
I didn't Maybe maybe it should just not start coming again,
because apparently I just cause technical issues.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Now you don't, cause it's not that you cause technical
issues that the technical issues follow you.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
For some god forsaken reason that I honestly don't know.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
You should introduce our topic for today, so before we
completely lose it.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
We're going to be covering the I guess the Return
of the King also known as the Return of Hero Escape.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, so okay, audio is perfect now, finally got it.
It was an issue the games on both and the
my box. Sorry, that's all background noise. If you see
me kind of lock camera for those of you listening
on camera and not on audio. If you see me
(03:15):
kind of going on the left here and kind of
fiddle with some stuff I'm missing with our I'm messing
with our soundbox and because of that, yeah, you'll see
me do that every once in a while. I'm also
over here pushing buttons. I'm your host, Isaiah Chris, Chris,
this is locked Blute. Thank you for joining us today.
(03:36):
I gotta give the usual you know hit that subscribes
comment whatever you're you guys, enjoy hero Escape. If you
want more of this and want more people covering hero Escape.
I don't know, do something right in the streets. I
I I don't know at this point. There's so much
(03:57):
you can do. I say, right in the street. I
don't know what Chris says you should do.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I say, just you know, ele light to the podcast,
especially the episode, if you can, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
If that's the thing. Of course, share with your friends.
That is the primary way that podcasts grow. If you
want to see more of this and want to see
more people in chat and enjoining us, share us with
your friends. That is the best way to support us.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Okay, are we done being sellouts? Now?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yes, we're done being sellouts. Time to talk about hero Escape.
Time to sell out to hero Escape.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
That's okay, it's a great game that I had not
touched in you know, like two years prior to this.
I don't remember when the last time we played, but
it has been a decent while.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Well that's partly because we played it wrong. Yeah, played
it wrong, but we had fun playing it. Yeah, and
we always made two big maps, but hey, those were
some of the those were fun making. Come on, the
gigantic mountains, the giant castle, that the swamp in the
middle of nowhere. Right. For those of you who aren't
(05:06):
familiar with hero Escape and might be seeing it on
shelves or are singing stuff in the media about it,
hero Escape is a board game tabletop that's.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
A tabletop ward game. It's a I'd almost call it
a child friendly tabletop ward game. It's very simple to play.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
What child friendly I mean, like we mean like and
and up.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Yeah, we're not talking toddlers.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
No, No, this is not that.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Like the girls have basic understandings of like board games.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
And stuff like that. This hero Escape, historically, and as
I've heard it referred to, is a gateway drug to
war games.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yeah. I think that's very true. Because you started playing
hero Escape and then we immediately got into Legion and
now Legion's kind of not doing great.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Yeah, Legion is dead now and we're back to hero Escape.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Yep, it all comes full circle.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
So hero Escape is an old game. It came out
in the early two thousands, ran till about twenty twelve,
did a bunch of expansions, had a dense lore that
is hard to find at this point, which is why
we're not talking Lower, but usually talk about a lot
of horror on Laura on this channel. And because the
(06:25):
lore is so dense, I'm like, I do not want
to get into this, because this is like heroes are
being pulled from not quite Earth and not quite other
areas of the multiverse into Valhallav to fight with the Valkyries. Yeah,
which in concept sounds like a fever.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Dream to be fair, The lower kind of is even
if you look at it, you're.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Like, what a fever dream. We're gonna talk about it later,
but can we talk about the Mecca Lich.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Legend? But it's a ecolage, but it's still it's still kind.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Of yeah, like to the kind of the history. Hero
Escape used to be the bigger game. It got canceled
in twenty twelve. A lot of it's problems with was
how it was trying to sell. Hasbro was trying to
sell it as a board game, so it wasn't in
local game stores. It was in only in your big
(07:26):
box stores, and the packaging did not support it well
to big box stores. And that's kind of where the
part of the failings came in. The other part is
of course with the parent company and the issues that
came along with it. If you see this, I'm just
fiddling with it. It's nothing. There was a lot of
(07:47):
issues with the game when it was releasing, mainly because
so how they packaged their units, honestly was a little
bit of a contributor to why it failed. So they
packed their units one package. You had your master sets,
which was where you got all your terrain, you got
everything Master sets are back, and then you had your
(08:10):
expansion boxes, which had like five minis, and those minis.
Those minis, they sold squads and heroes separately, so if
you needed squads, you went and bought the Squad's box,
and you usually needed two, three four squads. Yeah, you
only needed one of each hero, so you only picked
(08:30):
up one of those boxes.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
So it's kind of pointless.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
And so the issue is also the distributors and the
box stores and to order the waves as a whole,
which means when they ordered the squats, they had to
order the heroes with them, and they still had the
heroes on the shelves, and so a lot of heroes
got left on shelves. It led to people ordering less
(08:57):
waves and the game eventually collapsed.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Which makes sense if you're not selling like I like
how Legion does it, where they sell the heroes individually.
They don't agree with the price on them, but they
sell them individually as their own thing, so you can
just buy those and they can also just and as something.
They can buy them individually as well.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, But the fact there's also the distribution thing where
the distributor doesn't need to buy an entire wave of
leech and stuff that when they buy, when they need
more layers, they order more layers. They don't have to
order snow Troopers, cannons, and I don't know, snow rebels.
(09:48):
Snow rebels aren't a thing, but they don't have to
order the entire wave. They can just order the the one. Yeah,
And so that was a big failure of it, especially
when big box stores saw these sitting on the Shell Center,
like these aren't selling. Yeah, of course that was all
just the history of the game. In twenty twenty. It
(10:09):
was twenty twenty. Yes, we had the Avalon Hill resurrection
of the game with Age of Annihilation. They tried this
kickstarter essentially.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, it was a kickstarter and it almost got there.
But I think it was short by like what two
k or something like that or something like it was
some weird number. It was like barely short.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
No, No, it wasn't two k orders. That's a lot,
especially because they're asking case was two hundred and fifty dollars. Yeah,
for the map, for the entire set, And there was
failings along that. Marketing was bad. Marketing didn't come out
until almost the end of the kickstarter.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
It's almost like they wanted it to fail.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Yeah, and that's the problem. They very much felt like
they wanted it to fail, and there was a lot
of feel bads from the community because of it. Yeah,
Avalon Hill still isn't our favorite people. No, I know
they do other games, but they they they worked with
Renegade and Avalon's Hill's logo is on the hero Escape
(11:20):
box and they put a lot of work into Hero Escape.
But I don't like them.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
I don't like them either. They tried to kill a
really great game that finally made a resurrection.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yep, and that happened. Of course the community as soon
as Renegade came out and was like, we are releasing
Age of Annihilation, we're gonna release we're gonna release it
as a master set, and then we're gonna do waves
after it. And I'm like, yes, so you're treating it
like a.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
War game instead of a board game.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah, because Avalon Hill very much wanted to just release
the whole thing at once.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
That's that's terrible. That's just terrible business, to be honest.
That's how you that's how it repeats itself and just
dies again. In my opinion, Well, it failed once.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
And so what what Renegade did is they split up
some of the releases. They decreased the size of the
master set, decreased the costs from two hundred and fifty
dollars to one twenty five for a master set, which
is about equivalent to what you'd see the master set
for before. Yeah, after inflation and everything. Yeah, and that's
for the unpainted Then they did a painted set as
(12:33):
well for like two hundred and twenty five.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
With how many minutes you got in the master set
though painted makes that's like that's a lot of aig difference.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yeah, And I guess that's a good segue to talk
about the minis because ooh boy, the minis.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
The minis are really good quality. They're like, they're not
quite Warhammer quality, but they're's so that the old school
cartoony got it shapes to them. They're still fun. But
I I enjoyed them quite a lot.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Well, and that's the thing. They're not trying to be Warhammer.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Yeah, they're their own thing.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
And they realized the cartooniness of the game is important
to the game itself. Yeah, and they're like, okay, what
can we do. Well, they took a look at the
old minis and realized the old minis don't exactly have
that much quality to them.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Yeah, they're looking at some of the old minis. You'll
We've got a he's got a big box of Hero
Escape minis and the Kyrie spears are all bent just
because it's soft plastic.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Not just the soft plastic, but the modeling wasn't great.
That the look of the unit's faces is like something
out of a horror story, like we could like blow
up their faces and put them in like a dark
clauset and freak children out. And and it's exemplified on
the cards of the old ones where the old ones
(14:01):
had like pictures of the minis, like somebody actually just
took a picture of the mini, and it's like, this
is the art for the character. And with Age of Annihilation,
they're showing their actual intended art, which.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Is like the concept art of them, instead of you know,
snapping a picture of the mini and sticking it on
the card.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Although you could snap a picture of the mini and
stick it on the card, it's still quality minis. Like
the Bears, I really like.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Oh the Bears are great. They're like I almost compare
them to the older Legion styles when it was just
a single piece and you had to hook the arms
in rather than the ones that you have to clip.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
And yeah, soft plastic versus heard plastic. Yeah, the soft
plastic ones. Another thing that I liked about Hero Escape
is all the minis can preassembled present a thres well.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
That makes sense.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
The dragon on screen now that is Na Threats. She
comes in three pieces and she is a giant dragon,
and that is why. Because she is East, she dwarfed
even the bears, and the bears are pretty large minis. Yeah,
so because of that, you know, she comes in three pieces.
You gotta clip, you gotta put the wings on, but
(15:15):
everything else comes assembled. And some painters might complain about
that because you know, as somebody who paints, you know
you want to paint the arms sometimes and then you
want to paint the weapon and then the everything else
all together versus separate, And there's arguments for that. Of course,
we can't talk about the miniatures and everything without talking
(15:38):
about some of the quality concerns with the terrain.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
I did hear about that, the warping problem been heaving
with that in train. You haven't had that problem because
you got yours at gen Con and didn't have enough
mhen your suitcase for it, so you ditched it.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
I ditched the terrain because except for the walls, I
kept the walls.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Well, the walls, yes, the walls. The new walls are awesome,
how they work. I love the new walls.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Like how they clip together and it's so easy, and
how they just whereas every the other train sits on
the on the hexes, this like snaps onto the hexes.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
So it's really hard. It's harder to move. You can
still knock it over. It doesn't fully walk in, but
it's like on the little Indent. Sorry, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah, we're talking about the quality, but the walls are great. Again,
I don't have too much experience with this because my
box has been really nice to us. The minis were
all in good quality. I guess there were some problems
with warping on the minis too that I've heard from
the community, And because I've heard that coming from the community,
we have to address it. Of course, this this was
(16:47):
probably a lot bigger of a launch than they expected.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yeah, I would agree with that. That's honestly, I'm even
surprised how big this launch was.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
And so we can expect some problems in production. I'm
hoping they kind of iron things out with the terrain
because the terrain is fantastic. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
I really like the idea of how Hero Skip does terrain.
That's one it's not necessarily new, but it's different from
most things on the war getting market.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Heroescapes terrain. So Hero Escapes Terrain is I need to
really focus on keeping my mincing from me. Hero Escapes
terrain is iconic. Oh yeah. People who find the hero
Escape train are like, this is just dn D train,
and it's like, it's perfect dan dterrain. It's in hexes,
(17:42):
it's beautiful, and you can use it for terrain for
war games. We actually used Hero Escape terrain for as
Legion terrain for the longest time because I like the
modular nature of it.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Yeah, the modular nature of it and being able to
easily set it up and take it down rather than
I don't know how describe that, but it was the
other thing that would be annoying with Legion is you'd
have millions ye stuff in the little grooves in the hexts.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Yes, you had to position them so they don't fall
on the hexes, but we mostly use them as like ledges.
But the here Skip train is like, you know, everyone
knows the hero Escape train. Even if you don't know
Hero Escape, you've seen the train. Yeah, if you're into
war games, you've seen the train before. People use it.
It's great. The new components fit in with the original
(18:28):
stuff really well.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
I that is a really good thing that they've done.
I love that they did that because I think there
would have been a massive uproar if they hadn't done that.
So I don't. I think it was a smart business
decision decision. But I also think it was.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
If that makes sense, well it does. So making sure
that the everything was balanced against everything else and everything
worked well was the only option. And they did a
smart thing where they introduced formats. Uh. They introduced the
contemporary and Battle for All now. Battle for All Time
(19:10):
is what it sounds like. It's everything and the new
stuff works with the old stuff. For instance, we have
the Guard commanders coming out of this. We have Raylen,
and we have oh what's her name, I can't remember
her name. There's another commander in there, not commander, but
(19:34):
they're not called commanders, hero called heroes in there. That
worked well with old stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
They even those two, those two heroes work really well
with each other as well, Like we found that on
our play testing.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Yeah, and I've seen people building it with old stuff
and it's like, Okay, the new stuff works with old
stuff really well. The new stuff hasn't straight overpowered the
old stuff. In fact, the hero Escape Forum positions a
lot of the units in the C plus uh, like
B two C plus here. Yeah, so they didn't release
(20:11):
everything that's that will completely annihilate each other.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Yeah. They I think they did a really good and
good was balancing the game with the stuff. I think
that was a really good call.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Yeah, and it was the only call they could make
the case. The community backlash if all the old stuff
got power crept out by an age of annihilation would
be so bad.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Yeah, I agree with that.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
And so we want to talk about the gameplay of
the gameplays.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
It's same as old Hero Escape. It's very simple. We're
also playing it wrong, but when we first started playing it,
but at we still had fun.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Yeah. So, if you don't know the game design of
Here Escape, you build the thing, You build the map,
and you set spawn areas where everybody drafts their units
and puts them in. You either bring a pre assembled
army or you draft an army, and as you draft
an army, you get it ready, you place it down,
and then everyone rolls initiative. No, no, sorry, you place
(21:20):
your order markers. Yeah, you place your order markers, then
roll initiative. That's only important because now there's a unit
that lets you change you know, to let you change
your orders after the fact, and you only get three.
So the game plays very quick. You get three in
a decoy and a decoy yep, the game plays very quick.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Oh yeah, I think we played a full four hundred
point in game in under an hour. I think it's
like half hour.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Yeah, like half hour, four defend minutes.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Yeah, that's really that's super fun. That's not that's not
your three hour Legion game where you're sitting there and
playing basically three D chess. It feels like, I know, right,
and you walk out from a game when your mind is.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
This one made me like go for another game you finished,
and you're like shuffling draft again, Yeah, exactly, or build
another army and there's so many units out there, and
the combinations within Age of Annihilation itself are really good.
The box plays really well with itself. Everything seemed to
be well balanced against each other other than Xenathrex.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Yeah, that was the one thing we didn't really allow
ourselves to play with with x Well.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
I played with that threats with Jake j Yeah, and
I ran his army over with Zenathrax. Her earthquake attack
is so strong, uh, that ability to just attack like
three or four units at once, that erupting earth attack.
(22:54):
There's some funny things with Zenethrax rules wise, like technically
nothing can be engaged behind her, yes, so so the
rules the rules state that on the tile behind her,
and you can't move her, which means what you could
do what what? What she doesn't allow because of her
(23:19):
Xenathrex has like three tails coming out of the back,
and they like cover three spaces behind her, and nobody
can stand on those spaces. The rules are she can't
displace anybody else when she moves either, and she has
to be like completely level, So there are places she
can't move through out where she causes that problems. Speaking
of these little rule changes and that zena Threx, that
(23:39):
brought up another conversation about marrow stingers. So I think
that the stingers. The stingers have big, long guts. And
apparently at one of the gen Con tournaments years ago,
somebody brought a unit of just stingers and essentially made
(24:02):
sure that when they were up against uh yes, when
they were were getting invaded, when they were up against
melee armies, they just them all in front. So the
stingers all like created a form so nothing could stand
it back. They they formed a spear wall.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
That's awesome.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Now, Zenathrax can't move. They made it so that they
can't move in the Stingers case, how they how sorry,
sorry about the back. He just realized he wants is actually.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
Home, so he has escaped.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
He's escaped. If you're watching live or anything, there's a
pupper here and we do apologie about the it's let out.
So adjusting to this new studio space. But her rules.
(25:10):
Apparently what they did with the Stingers was you can't
you can stand in front of them. They just have
to move the gun a little bit because it was
the gun that paced out and so they just formed
it with the gun. I was like, no male units,
but that that changed, Okay, Xanatha exchanged that she has
(25:32):
some stuff. There was one new faction introduced with Age
of Annihilation, which was and it's the gonna be the
forefront of the next wave as well, which is Revna.
Now Revna had a couple of units release in the
(25:54):
master set. Yeah, unfortunately the units that released with Revna
did not work well in the master set because there's
only two units and they're supposed to work with the
faction and didn't work. You might have saw that with
the Vampire where it's like, okay, well the vampire doesn't
do much because the special ability of the vampires that
(26:16):
when the vampire dies, it gives its life drainability, which
lets it restore health when it deals damage to another unit.
And because there was no other revenue units, it couldn't
really give it away, so.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
It just it was kind of a useless.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Like there's some balancing problems. There are some problems with
the master set. For instance, the Master set has a
problem where the how do I do this? There are
units that do not operate in the Master set because
they don't work.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
I will agree with that. There are definitely something that
don't work.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
For instance, there is a unit that has beast control.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
There's no beasts in the Master set.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Yeah, and there's no beast for its control.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
It does a very sun hero to play just without
the beast master. I think I played it. I could
be wrong.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
You did play it, but you didn't realize there's like
you didn't understand the beast matters. So he skipped it entirely.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
I skipped it entirely. It's still I think it's still
a fairly strong hero. It's just just among itself. I
will say, it's not like there's way more of powered stuff.
There's like small powered stuff and the old stuff. Yeah, like,
but this was pretty powerful and just the bubble of
the master set.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Yeah, and so the new fraction just seemed underrepresented, which
I kind of makes sense considering that they're like the
next focus. Revenue's rebuke for Way two is very much
focused on that faction. Mm hmm. And it's okay, you
can get away with that there. Like I said, there's
(28:02):
no beasts. They kept most of the original factions. There's
no beasts in that. There are beasts in the well Spring,
and so we should get off of the master set.
Talk about the well spring real quick. Well Spring is
well spring is well designed. It's pirates versus druids.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
That's it's fun.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
It introduces the well springs.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
The well spuncture pretty interesting. I actually like them quite
a bit.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
For the end of the round, when you land on them,
you roll a D twenty and on a like twelve
it's thirteen of both you heal a wound and on
like a one or two you take damage. So it's
an interesting like gamble that you take. Yeah, and it's
nice to hide there and you can put them onto
your army. Of course. Honestly, for balancing. It is well
(28:58):
balanced against itself. I really like that.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Oh yeah, that was That was honestly one of the
most fun tabletop experiences I've had a long time since
I very first played Armona.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, it's it's fun, and they definitely capture the feel
of the old Hero Escape. It still feels like the
same game. Yeah, and it's like, no, no, these this
is just a new expansion. This is just the next
gin of hero Escape. They didn't change too many rules
at all. Really, they just overhauled what needed to be overhauled. Yeah,
(29:29):
and that let let the game run and it's like cool,
Now where do we go from here? People are like, okay,
well we want more Valkyries. We're getting more Valkyries. Launch
Day is coming up. It has not released yet. It
is releasing sometime this next week. I believe it's the
twenty eighth of the twenty ninth, So it releases actually
(29:51):
this weekend, and this weekend is a going to be
a huge event where we have launch games across the country.
It's coming to lgs's. They sold out online.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
There was like probably a day, if not less, right, I.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Think it was online for like three or four days.
It sold out and then they made the announcement. No,
it might have been longer. I think it was a
couple of weeks because they had a ton of stop right. Yeah,
and then they announced everything sold out online gen Con
everything sold.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Out, everything, Yeah, everything sold out super fast.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Everything like their painted stuff was gone by Saturday. And
then there was a few of the unpainted Master sets
in Well Springs and all that laying around. You couldn't
get the Chiori promo after like Friday. You could get
the Alexander Drake, which I've got, but overall the Hero
(30:51):
Escape stuff and coming up with October Wave two is
coming so fast.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Yeah, that's a really fast for a wave too. That's like,
what this under two months?
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Yeah? But they've also had so much time wrapping this
did they really have?
Speaker 1 (31:07):
That's been what four years?
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Yeah, they've had four years and they already had the
majority of the minis developed. So I firmly believe that
they spent a lot of this time preparing the next waves.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
I will agree with that, because who knows how long
have Long Hill had an involvement for before they're like, hey,
we should revive this game.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
So however, honestly, the new game coming out is going
to be a blessed I can't wait to get into
some events. They introduced the battle Neet at a perfect
time and it's a very well designed army builder and
event finder.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Yeah, it's really cool and it works with new and old.
You can search by faction.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
The only thing they didn't adopt, which they might adopt later.
I hope they adopt later, is they get more into
the Curescape community. Is the uh the tar list? Yes,
so if you don't know how like Hero Escape events
go on, you've never seen Hero Escape events as the
community has kept it. They created a tier list of
(32:09):
the strongest units. A lot of tournaments aren't just every
unit goes. For instance, the Hero Escape community in Utah.
The event they're holding at the end of the month,
which is just a duo battle cut off is B
plus tire. Yeah, you can't bring your A tiers, you
can't bring your S tiers. There are, of course those
(32:33):
have their places, but that's because the initial game was unbalanced.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
It was very unbalanced. Do you look at what was
it the original eighty point Raylan at two defense dice
everything around her to everything within what was the six units?
I think four it's four. Still that is ridiculous, like,
oh yeah, the stuff is basically invincible now.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Of course they and then they reprinted her later and
re Balanster and it's like, okay, she's a hundred twenty points.
She she only offers her defense, I think to Gendar now, yeah,
and so your entire army isn't defended. It's one defense
dice instead of two. So it's not bad. And it's like, okay,
(33:18):
of course she completely changed factions between that and Age
of Annihilation.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Do you want another reason? The reason is a mind
control amulet.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
I love that because they're opening the door to bring
back old Raylan.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
Yeah, I honestly just love the absurdity of oh yeah,
it's a cursed mind control amulet. That's very funny to me.
That's what that is.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
And that's where that aeroscipe still fits into. It's like
kind of hilarious cartoony feel.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Yeah, it's like this is really wacky.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Where it's like, oh yeah, why is Rayland drying? Uh
sorry driving.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Driving riding rant camp.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Say, I'd say it's a Feladar. Yeah, that makes sense,
a giant like demon winged Felidar. It's because she's being
mind controlled. Oh I love that idea.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
I love it too. It's hilarious and I'm like.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
I honestly that idea is just hilarious to me. And
and it's like, great, you're opening the door for future stuff.
You're realizing like the game is still camp. Yeah, like
you're camp, you know. And you can't go any other
direction with this game. You can't keep you take this
game down a very serious direction. No, Like, sure, it's
(34:39):
the Battle for All Time in Valhalla, but it's like
ome on when you get the Massachusetts minute Men fighting
with a death Walk nine thousand, I ever forgot about that,
or like the Knights of Arthur fighting with a Mecca
(34:59):
li and winning the game is cam You put it
on the table and you're like, yep, you know the
World War Two Sergeant alex Sergeant Alexander Drake.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
You're beating the crap out of a dragon exactly.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
The game is like so ridiculous that they're like, we
can't keep a super serious feel to it. We can
go this is the Age of Annihilation, but we're gonna.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Have fun with it. Like it was in the original
release trailer. It was like steampunk Hamster.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
The steampunk furries. They gotta be coming up. They showed
them off a little bit with the bears with the
like armored bears.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
I honestly can't wait to see the steampunk furries. That's
gonna be hilarious.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
The same first are gonna be grey and they're gonna
fit in so well.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Yeah, that's hero Escape. Most everything fits in well. Like
like you said, you have the Massachusetts min and men,
and you have dragons, and there's everything in between.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
And cyborgs and it's like it's everything. We're throwing everything
and it works. Now we're adding drow like druids have
been there before, but now we're adding like actual like
lessions and druids. In fact, the guy from the Revenue
faction who has beast Control, I don't even call him
by his name. I just call him the Lession because
he looks like a lesson and like he's just the lesson.
(36:30):
And it's like the Murph folk from from the battle
Box the Battle for the well Spring call it the squid.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
Yeah, it's it's a squid.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Speaking of the squid, off topic, the squid has a
cool ability where it can place water tiles.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
Yeah, that's so cool. It's also really annoying for anyone
you're playing against. He's just just like, Oh, I'm gonna move,
Just take take the squid, move it and then I'll
look a water tile, good luck.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Place on the choke point and you'd have a lot
of fun. Now, one one last thing before we before
we close and wrap, we got to talk about the
community outreach, not just outreach that they've done, but the
(37:25):
the party that got absolutely devastated by this that is gone,
that that's done, and that is the three D custom units. Yeah.
Now you're still going to see propsies, oh for sure.
But you've had groups trying to keep Hero Escape legacy
(37:45):
like as a legacy going by still releasing new units,
unofficial stuff. All the unofficial stuff is now out the window.
And you know it is because the new battlenet does
not have any of it. M So that group is
just out completely. It's just gone. Yeah, and so they
(38:09):
got hit hard by that. The community has been really
positive though about the Hero Skip release, other than the
issues that they've had with the terrain terrain and then
some damaged product and issues they need to fix with that.
I mean, they got stuff out quick. People were receiving
their like boxes earlier in the month. Painted stuff went
(38:30):
out first and unpainted stuff went second. It's weird, yeah,
Like normally you'd see the unpainted stuff go first, but
I think I think they were trying to get the
painted stuff out first. Honestly, I can't wait for the long,
long run. They've got so much they can do with
this game. If you have the Valkyries. Not to mention,
they could do re releases of old units.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
To be absolutely honest, I think it'd be kind of
cool to see them re release and balance some of
the old stuff.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
That would be cool to see in NAC like rebalanced Raylan,
rebalance like old Alexander Drake. Yeah, rebalanced Deathwalker nine thousand.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Death Walkers in general, To be honest, the death Walkers
are not fun to fight against.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
It's their range.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Yeah, what do they have, like a range of twelve?
Speaker 2 (39:16):
One of them has a special attacks that's got a
range of twelve and you just shoot with it. Yeah.
Death Walkers are good and bad because they've only got
one healthy piece.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
They have like eight defense dice.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
I think death Walker nine thousand has nine.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
Is it impossible to get through?
Speaker 2 (39:34):
It feels like, well, no, the game you played against
me where I ran death Walkers, you guys had a
problem because I ran it with old Raylan.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Oh that's right, I ran it with.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Like original Raylan Walkers had like eleven defense, so.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
You'd roll two defense, you'd roll two hits and they'd
be like, all right, I need more dice. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Essentially, Now for the future wave two, Revenue's rebuke because
I guess the story of Age of Annihilation is there's
a like a peace summit where they're trying to actually
negotiate some peace, and I guess like it turned into fighting.
(40:20):
Revena showed up and it caused a lot of problems.
This new Valkyrie commander showed up mm, and now I
guess this is Revenue's rebuke against I guess this piece
summit and against the Valkyrie. Now this is where we're
getting the iron Litch.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Mecha lag, iron litch, whatever you wanna call it. It's
it's a it's a mech litch.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
It's a giant mech. I wish I had a picture
of it that I had put into OBS, but it's
a giant mech. You should look it up. And then
it has like these chain wielding rolling bots that are
called wraith Riders, and then lets see I like that idea.
You get this big hero in with a swall, and
I believe the squad is a unique squad.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
Yeah, that would make sense.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
It's not a common squad, so you can't get more
than one squad. So it's like, okay, they're putting them
in together.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Now.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
The other one I have some issue with because they're
also with Revenus Rebut they're going to be releasing the
Kyrie Warrior Army expansion, which includes five Kyrie Warriors heroes.
They feel like this is that is a mistake.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
It could be, but I also looking at them, maybe
they're not. Maybe they're just well they're probably unique, but
then maybe they're like a unique squad instead of all
the heroes.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Well I looked at it. They are heroes.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Well, they're all heroes. I wonder if they're going for
different synergies with them. I wonder if this is one
of those things that they're trying to see. I know
that's probably I don't know if that's how I thought.
The old one I think was just all heroes.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
Of it was a fact, just random heroes from the way. Yeah,
and so very much what they're doing Heroes Valkyries, And
I'm like, okay, then that you're doing all that, you're
keeping them thematic. I still like they're still feel like
they're repeating mistakes of the mist I.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Feel like it's a little bit I all agree with that,
but I also see where they want to keep all
of the mouth grease together and yet.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Honestly, releasing him as a whole as a box for
forty five dollars is a great idea. You know, we've
seen other games release their heroes, like Legion, where the
heroes are individual they're like twenty bucks apiece.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
I was like, no, no, we're not getting greedy like that.
You know, the the Lich forty five dollars for the
Lich as well. But he's a big mini yeah, and
he comes with his squad.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Yeah that would make sense. Well, just looking at the picture,
he is going to be massive.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Dude, He's like as big as a zen A Threx.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
They gonna be a huge nine better than.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
About he's going to be big. But yeah, so that's
coming up in October. I'm honestly, who should pick up
this game. This is a game for everybody. I love it.
It's it's simple enough to be a family game if
the dad wants to bond with the kid and pick
up a hobby game. It's not Warhammer, it's not Legion,
(43:13):
It's not as complicated as all of those.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
No, this is like, this is honestly baby's first war game.
That's what i'd call this. It has definitely it definitely
has more nuances, Like there's a very high skill ceiling
to this game.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
There is a high skill ceiling to this game. You know,
there's things that you do, like how you manipulate terrain,
how you use the area to your advantage. Various old
units have interesting synergies, and the synergies come in steep.
I think you saw that with the Two Valkyries, the
Utgar Valkyries, where it's like as long as you got
(43:49):
another Upgar hero, all your Utgar heroes get plus one movement.
It's like flying. That's huge. Also, it's not just a
hobby game. If you don't want to pick up the
hobby game and you got some extra cash to burn,
you can pick up the unpainted I mean the painted stuff. Yeah,
And I think that was a brilliant decision where they
(44:10):
released the painted and unpainted because they realized this as
a hobby game.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
It's it can either be a hobby game or just
a family board game. Well, family war game. It's not
necessarily a board game, but a family game war game,
a family game nonetheless.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
And so I'm very much of the mind that I'm like, honestly,
it's great, the themes are fun, You've got the Valkyries.
This is great, honestly if you but if you're gonna
buy it, just pick up a master set, don't don't
pick up the pieces. If you're kind of unsure, Yeah,
check out your lgs's because a lot of them are
probably gonna have a well Spring as a demo box.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
Yeah. And even then, I the.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
Well Spring might just be worth because it's just a
forty five dollars.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
I'd almost reco I almost want to recom in the
terrain pack too.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
That's where I'm like, Okay, if you're jumping into the
great game, just give the master set. If you're kind
of unsure, yeah, the Wellspring is a good choice.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
I'm If you want to get like really really into
the game, that's when you get the terrain pack, and
that's when you make all these crazy maps, or if.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
You don't even play the game. You're a DM go
buy the train pack.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Yeah, that works too.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
The terrain's great.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
Make some weird, make some fun terrain for your campaign.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
I'm really excited for the future of hero Escape, especially
because the marketing was fantastic. Oh yes, like they got
critical role to play the game and broadcast it. Yeah,
so it's like it's huge, it's gonna be big, it's
gonna stay big. Let's let's keep the support. We're both
big hero Escape fans. We've been covering hero Escape since
(45:57):
it's like initial.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
Like, oh, we're probably we were re releasing this since
the Avalon hit. Yeah, Like I remember that was a
really fun and we were so happy about that coming back.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
And then when Renegade announced, we're like, it is back.
It is finally back for good. And then and then
I gotta see it at gen Con and bring it
back and we're.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
Like, yeah, this is the good stuff.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
This is the good stuff, especially like after the problem,
after the problems that Legion had, oh yeah, after we
fell off from Legion and the canceling of Armada, were like,
we need a game.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
Yeah, Armada is still fun to play, but it's just
a pain to get minis now three D print.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
Like, I got a three D printer, so I get
to I can they can do this kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
Minis are.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Minis aren't as hard to get for Armada. For me,
you just need to know three D printer that makes sense.
Of course, that's everything we got. We're kind of jumping
off onto different ledges. I guess I'm your game master, Isaiah.
I'm Chris, and that's our guest Chris ED will be
seeing guys later. We're luck
You know.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Okay, Oh okay, that's not an empty chair.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
That's not an empty chair.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Wow. Yeah, so I have a Chris here. He does
need to be a little louder. I can also adjustice
audio a little bit. We're just getting everything still situated here,
and it always takes a couple of seconds after we'd
get started. Like, I don't know why he is a
(00:33):
dead camera.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
I'm not an empty chair. There is a person here.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yes, for some reason, it shows that he is an
empty chair. I mean he shows his cameras rolling.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
That sounds like a you problem.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Sounds like a camera problem because they were working before
you showed up. Yeah, blame it on me whatever, No,
I'm blaming it on the camera. I would blame it
on the camera too. Oh now my USB port's being bad. Okay,
well you can always do this. What are the room now?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Oh yeah, look at that.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
And that's something to work on. Is making sure that
I look into my break Okay, something's going wrong now,
audio is breaking up.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
I'll stop breaking stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
I'm not trying to break stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Are you sure about that?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Okay, maybe I am, because the audio inputs are going out. Sorry,
a lot of problems today. It seems like apparently.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Am the bane of technical issues, or sorry, not the
bane of technical issues, the cause of technical issues, which
when it sells is pretty funny.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Okay, that's why we had multiple audio input going, oh, yes, okay,
we're ready to get started. Still kind of quiet. I
don't know if that's just let's see what we can
do about that. Yes, that that's that's a problem with
(02:05):
the box, not with the actual Oh now it's bad.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
I didn't Maybe maybe it should just not start coming again,
because apparently I just cause technical issues.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Now you don't, cause it's not that you cause technical
issues that the technical issues follow you.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
For some god forsaken reason that I honestly don't know.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
You should introduce our topic for today, so before we
completely lose it.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
We're going to be covering the I guess the Return
of the King also known as the Return of Hero Escape.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, so okay, audio is perfect now, finally got it.
It was an issue the games on both and the
my box. Sorry, that's all background noise. If you see
me kind of lock camera for those of you listening
on camera and not on audio. If you see me
(03:15):
kind of going on the left here and kind of
fiddle with some stuff I'm missing with our I'm messing
with our soundbox and because of that, yeah, you'll see
me do that every once in a while. I'm also
over here pushing buttons. I'm your host, Isaiah Chris, Chris,
this is locked Blute. Thank you for joining us today.
(03:36):
I gotta give the usual you know hit that subscribes
comment whatever you're you guys, enjoy hero Escape. If you
want more of this and want more people covering hero Escape.
I don't know, do something right in the streets. I
I I don't know at this point. There's so much
(03:57):
you can do. I say, right in the street. I
don't know what Chris says you should do.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I say, just you know, ele light to the podcast,
especially the episode, if you can, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
If that's the thing. Of course, share with your friends.
That is the primary way that podcasts grow. If you
want to see more of this and want to see
more people in chat and enjoining us, share us with
your friends. That is the best way to support us.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Okay, are we done being sellouts? Now?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yes, we're done being sellouts. Time to talk about hero Escape.
Time to sell out to hero Escape.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
That's okay, it's a great game that I had not
touched in you know, like two years prior to this.
I don't remember when the last time we played, but
it has been a decent while.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Well that's partly because we played it wrong. Yeah, played
it wrong, but we had fun playing it. Yeah, and
we always made two big maps, but hey, those were
some of the those were fun making. Come on, the
gigantic mountains, the giant castle, that the swamp in the
middle of nowhere. Right. For those of you who aren't
(05:06):
familiar with hero Escape and might be seeing it on
shelves or are singing stuff in the media about it,
hero Escape is a board game tabletop that's.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
A tabletop ward game. It's a I'd almost call it
a child friendly tabletop ward game. It's very simple to play.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
What child friendly I mean, like we mean like and
and up.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Yeah, we're not talking toddlers.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
No, No, this is not that.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Like the girls have basic understandings of like board games.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
And stuff like that. This hero Escape, historically, and as
I've heard it referred to, is a gateway drug to
war games.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yeah. I think that's very true. Because you started playing
hero Escape and then we immediately got into Legion and
now Legion's kind of not doing great.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Yeah, Legion is dead now and we're back to hero Escape.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Yep, it all comes full circle.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
So hero Escape is an old game. It came out
in the early two thousands, ran till about twenty twelve,
did a bunch of expansions, had a dense lore that
is hard to find at this point, which is why
we're not talking Lower, but usually talk about a lot
of horror on Laura on this channel. And because the
(06:25):
lore is so dense, I'm like, I do not want
to get into this, because this is like heroes are
being pulled from not quite Earth and not quite other
areas of the multiverse into Valhallav to fight with the Valkyries. Yeah,
which in concept sounds like a fever.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Dream to be fair, The lower kind of is even
if you look at it, you're.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Like, what a fever dream. We're gonna talk about it later,
but can we talk about the Mecca Lich.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Legend? But it's a ecolage, but it's still it's still kind.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Of yeah, like to the kind of the history. Hero
Escape used to be the bigger game. It got canceled
in twenty twelve. A lot of it's problems with was
how it was trying to sell. Hasbro was trying to
sell it as a board game, so it wasn't in
local game stores. It was in only in your big
(07:26):
box stores, and the packaging did not support it well
to big box stores. And that's kind of where the
part of the failings came in. The other part is
of course with the parent company and the issues that
came along with it. If you see this, I'm just
fiddling with it. It's nothing. There was a lot of
(07:47):
issues with the game when it was releasing, mainly because
so how they packaged their units, honestly was a little
bit of a contributor to why it failed. So they
packed their units one package. You had your master sets,
which was where you got all your terrain, you got
everything Master sets are back, and then you had your
(08:10):
expansion boxes, which had like five minis, and those minis.
Those minis, they sold squads and heroes separately, so if
you needed squads, you went and bought the Squad's box,
and you usually needed two, three four squads. Yeah, you
only needed one of each hero, so you only picked
(08:30):
up one of those boxes.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
So it's kind of pointless.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
And so the issue is also the distributors and the
box stores and to order the waves as a whole,
which means when they ordered the squats, they had to
order the heroes with them, and they still had the
heroes on the shelves, and so a lot of heroes
got left on shelves. It led to people ordering less
(08:57):
waves and the game eventually collapsed.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Which makes sense if you're not selling like I like
how Legion does it, where they sell the heroes individually.
They don't agree with the price on them, but they
sell them individually as their own thing, so you can
just buy those and they can also just and as something.
They can buy them individually as well.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, But the fact there's also the distribution thing where
the distributor doesn't need to buy an entire wave of
leech and stuff that when they buy, when they need
more layers, they order more layers. They don't have to
order snow Troopers, cannons, and I don't know, snow rebels.
(09:48):
Snow rebels aren't a thing, but they don't have to
order the entire wave. They can just order the the one. Yeah,
And so that was a big failure of it, especially
when big box stores saw these sitting on the Shell Center,
like these aren't selling. Yeah, of course that was all
just the history of the game. In twenty twenty. It
(10:09):
was twenty twenty. Yes, we had the Avalon Hill resurrection
of the game with Age of Annihilation. They tried this
kickstarter essentially.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, it was a kickstarter and it almost got there.
But I think it was short by like what two
k or something like that or something like it was
some weird number. It was like barely short.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
No, No, it wasn't two k orders. That's a lot,
especially because they're asking case was two hundred and fifty dollars. Yeah,
for the map, for the entire set, And there was
failings along that. Marketing was bad. Marketing didn't come out
until almost the end of the kickstarter.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
It's almost like they wanted it to fail.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Yeah, and that's the problem. They very much felt like
they wanted it to fail, and there was a lot
of feel bads from the community because of it. Yeah,
Avalon Hill still isn't our favorite people. No, I know
they do other games, but they they they worked with
Renegade and Avalon's Hill's logo is on the hero Escape
(11:20):
box and they put a lot of work into Hero Escape.
But I don't like them.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
I don't like them either. They tried to kill a
really great game that finally made a resurrection.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yep, and that happened. Of course the community as soon
as Renegade came out and was like, we are releasing
Age of Annihilation, we're gonna release we're gonna release it
as a master set, and then we're gonna do waves
after it. And I'm like, yes, so you're treating it
like a.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
War game instead of a board game.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah, because Avalon Hill very much wanted to just release
the whole thing at once.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
That's that's terrible. That's just terrible business, to be honest.
That's how you that's how it repeats itself and just
dies again. In my opinion, Well, it failed once.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
And so what what Renegade did is they split up
some of the releases. They decreased the size of the
master set, decreased the costs from two hundred and fifty
dollars to one twenty five for a master set, which
is about equivalent to what you'd see the master set
for before. Yeah, after inflation and everything. Yeah, and that's
for the unpainted Then they did a painted set as
(12:33):
well for like two hundred and twenty five.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
With how many minutes you got in the master set
though painted makes that's like that's a lot of aig difference.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yeah, And I guess that's a good segue to talk
about the minis because ooh boy, the minis.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
The minis are really good quality. They're like, they're not
quite Warhammer quality, but they're's so that the old school
cartoony got it shapes to them. They're still fun. But
I I enjoyed them quite a lot.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Well, and that's the thing. They're not trying to be Warhammer.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Yeah, they're their own thing.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
And they realized the cartooniness of the game is important
to the game itself. Yeah, and they're like, okay, what
can we do. Well, they took a look at the
old minis and realized the old minis don't exactly have
that much quality to them.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Yeah, they're looking at some of the old minis. You'll
We've got a he's got a big box of Hero
Escape minis and the Kyrie spears are all bent just
because it's soft plastic.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Not just the soft plastic, but the modeling wasn't great.
That the look of the unit's faces is like something
out of a horror story, like we could like blow
up their faces and put them in like a dark
clauset and freak children out. And and it's exemplified on
the cards of the old ones where the old ones
(14:01):
had like pictures of the minis, like somebody actually just
took a picture of the mini, and it's like, this
is the art for the character. And with Age of Annihilation,
they're showing their actual intended art, which.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Is like the concept art of them, instead of you know,
snapping a picture of the mini and sticking it on
the card.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Although you could snap a picture of the mini and
stick it on the card, it's still quality minis. Like
the Bears, I really like.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Oh the Bears are great. They're like I almost compare
them to the older Legion styles when it was just
a single piece and you had to hook the arms
in rather than the ones that you have to clip.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
And yeah, soft plastic versus heard plastic. Yeah, the soft
plastic ones. Another thing that I liked about Hero Escape
is all the minis can preassembled present a thres well.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
That makes sense.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
The dragon on screen now that is Na Threats. She
comes in three pieces and she is a giant dragon,
and that is why. Because she is East, she dwarfed
even the bears, and the bears are pretty large minis. Yeah,
so because of that, you know, she comes in three pieces.
You gotta clip, you gotta put the wings on, but
(15:15):
everything else comes assembled. And some painters might complain about
that because you know, as somebody who paints, you know
you want to paint the arms sometimes and then you
want to paint the weapon and then the everything else
all together versus separate, And there's arguments for that. Of course,
we can't talk about the miniatures and everything without talking
(15:38):
about some of the quality concerns with the terrain.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
I did hear about that, the warping problem been heaving
with that in train. You haven't had that problem because
you got yours at gen Con and didn't have enough
mhen your suitcase for it, so you ditched it.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
I ditched the terrain because except for the walls, I
kept the walls.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Well, the walls, yes, the walls. The new walls are awesome,
how they work. I love the new walls.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Like how they clip together and it's so easy, and
how they just whereas every the other train sits on
the on the hexes, this like snaps onto the hexes.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
So it's really hard. It's harder to move. You can
still knock it over. It doesn't fully walk in, but
it's like on the little Indent. Sorry, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah, we're talking about the quality, but the walls are great. Again,
I don't have too much experience with this because my
box has been really nice to us. The minis were
all in good quality. I guess there were some problems
with warping on the minis too that I've heard from
the community, And because I've heard that coming from the community,
we have to address it. Of course, this this was
(16:47):
probably a lot bigger of a launch than they expected.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yeah, I would agree with that. That's honestly, I'm even
surprised how big this launch was.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
And so we can expect some problems in production. I'm
hoping they kind of iron things out with the terrain
because the terrain is fantastic. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
I really like the idea of how Hero Skip does terrain.
That's one it's not necessarily new, but it's different from
most things on the war getting market.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Heroescapes terrain. So Hero Escapes Terrain is I need to
really focus on keeping my mincing from me. Hero Escapes
terrain is iconic. Oh yeah. People who find the hero
Escape train are like, this is just dn D train,
and it's like, it's perfect dan dterrain. It's in hexes,
(17:42):
it's beautiful, and you can use it for terrain for
war games. We actually used Hero Escape terrain for as
Legion terrain for the longest time because I like the
modular nature of it.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Yeah, the modular nature of it and being able to
easily set it up and take it down rather than
I don't know how describe that, but it was the
other thing that would be annoying with Legion is you'd
have millions ye stuff in the little grooves in the hexts.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Yes, you had to position them so they don't fall
on the hexes, but we mostly use them as like ledges.
But the here Skip train is like, you know, everyone
knows the hero Escape train. Even if you don't know
Hero Escape, you've seen the train. Yeah, if you're into
war games, you've seen the train before. People use it.
It's great. The new components fit in with the original
(18:28):
stuff really well.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
I that is a really good thing that they've done.
I love that they did that because I think there
would have been a massive uproar if they hadn't done that.
So I don't. I think it was a smart business
decision decision. But I also think it was.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
If that makes sense, well it does. So making sure
that the everything was balanced against everything else and everything
worked well was the only option. And they did a
smart thing where they introduced formats. Uh. They introduced the
contemporary and Battle for All now. Battle for All Time
(19:10):
is what it sounds like. It's everything and the new
stuff works with the old stuff. For instance, we have
the Guard commanders coming out of this. We have Raylen,
and we have oh what's her name, I can't remember
her name. There's another commander in there, not commander, but
(19:34):
they're not called commanders, hero called heroes in there. That
worked well with old stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
They even those two, those two heroes work really well
with each other as well, Like we found that on
our play testing.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Yeah, and I've seen people building it with old stuff
and it's like, Okay, the new stuff works with old
stuff really well. The new stuff hasn't straight overpowered the
old stuff. In fact, the hero Escape Forum positions a
lot of the units in the C plus uh, like
B two C plus here. Yeah, so they didn't release
(20:11):
everything that's that will completely annihilate each other.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Yeah. They I think they did a really good and
good was balancing the game with the stuff. I think
that was a really good call.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Yeah, and it was the only call they could make
the case. The community backlash if all the old stuff
got power crept out by an age of annihilation would
be so bad.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Yeah, I agree with that.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
And so we want to talk about the gameplay of
the gameplays.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
It's same as old Hero Escape. It's very simple. We're
also playing it wrong, but when we first started playing it,
but at we still had fun.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Yeah. So, if you don't know the game design of
Here Escape, you build the thing, You build the map,
and you set spawn areas where everybody drafts their units
and puts them in. You either bring a pre assembled
army or you draft an army, and as you draft
an army, you get it ready, you place it down,
and then everyone rolls initiative. No, no, sorry, you place
(21:20):
your order markers. Yeah, you place your order markers, then
roll initiative. That's only important because now there's a unit
that lets you change you know, to let you change
your orders after the fact, and you only get three.
So the game plays very quick. You get three in
a decoy and a decoy yep, the game plays very quick.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Oh yeah, I think we played a full four hundred
point in game in under an hour. I think it's
like half hour.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Yeah, like half hour, four defend minutes.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Yeah, that's really that's super fun. That's not that's not
your three hour Legion game where you're sitting there and
playing basically three D chess. It feels like, I know, right,
and you walk out from a game when your mind is.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
This one made me like go for another game you finished,
and you're like shuffling draft again, Yeah, exactly, or build
another army and there's so many units out there, and
the combinations within Age of Annihilation itself are really good.
The box plays really well with itself. Everything seemed to
be well balanced against each other other than Xenathrex.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Yeah, that was the one thing we didn't really allow
ourselves to play with with x Well.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
I played with that threats with Jake j Yeah, and
I ran his army over with Zenathrax. Her earthquake attack
is so strong, uh, that ability to just attack like
three or four units at once, that erupting earth attack.
(22:54):
There's some funny things with Zenethrax rules wise, like technically
nothing can be engaged behind her, yes, so so the
rules the rules state that on the tile behind her,
and you can't move her, which means what you could
do what what? What she doesn't allow because of her
(23:19):
Xenathrex has like three tails coming out of the back,
and they like cover three spaces behind her, and nobody
can stand on those spaces. The rules are she can't
displace anybody else when she moves either, and she has
to be like completely level, So there are places she
can't move through out where she causes that problems. Speaking
of these little rule changes and that zena Threx, that
(23:39):
brought up another conversation about marrow stingers. So I think
that the stingers. The stingers have big, long guts. And
apparently at one of the gen Con tournaments years ago,
somebody brought a unit of just stingers and essentially made
(24:02):
sure that when they were up against uh yes, when
they were were getting invaded, when they were up against
melee armies, they just them all in front. So the
stingers all like created a form so nothing could stand
it back. They they formed a spear wall.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
That's awesome.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Now, Zenathrax can't move. They made it so that they
can't move in the Stingers case, how they how sorry,
sorry about the back. He just realized he wants is actually.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
Home, so he has escaped.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
He's escaped. If you're watching live or anything, there's a
pupper here and we do apologie about the it's let out.
So adjusting to this new studio space. But her rules.
(25:10):
Apparently what they did with the Stingers was you can't
you can stand in front of them. They just have
to move the gun a little bit because it was
the gun that paced out and so they just formed
it with the gun. I was like, no male units,
but that that changed, Okay, Xanatha exchanged that she has
(25:32):
some stuff. There was one new faction introduced with Age
of Annihilation, which was and it's the gonna be the
forefront of the next wave as well, which is Revna.
Now Revna had a couple of units release in the
(25:54):
master set. Yeah, unfortunately the units that released with Revna
did not work well in the master set because there's
only two units and they're supposed to work with the
faction and didn't work. You might have saw that with
the Vampire where it's like, okay, well the vampire doesn't
do much because the special ability of the vampires that
(26:16):
when the vampire dies, it gives its life drainability, which
lets it restore health when it deals damage to another unit.
And because there was no other revenue units, it couldn't
really give it away, so.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
It just it was kind of a useless.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Like there's some balancing problems. There are some problems with
the master set. For instance, the Master set has a
problem where the how do I do this? There are
units that do not operate in the Master set because
they don't work.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
I will agree with that. There are definitely something that
don't work.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
For instance, there is a unit that has beast control.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
There's no beasts in the Master set.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Yeah, and there's no beast for its control.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
It does a very sun hero to play just without
the beast master. I think I played it. I could
be wrong.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
You did play it, but you didn't realize there's like
you didn't understand the beast matters. So he skipped it entirely.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
I skipped it entirely. It's still I think it's still
a fairly strong hero. It's just just among itself. I
will say, it's not like there's way more of powered stuff.
There's like small powered stuff and the old stuff. Yeah, like,
but this was pretty powerful and just the bubble of
the master set.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Yeah, and so the new fraction just seemed underrepresented, which
I kind of makes sense considering that they're like the
next focus. Revenue's rebuke for Way two is very much
focused on that faction. Mm hmm. And it's okay, you
can get away with that there. Like I said, there's
(28:02):
no beasts. They kept most of the original factions. There's
no beasts in that. There are beasts in the well Spring,
and so we should get off of the master set.
Talk about the well spring real quick. Well Spring is
well spring is well designed. It's pirates versus druids.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
That's it's fun.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
It introduces the well springs.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
The well spuncture pretty interesting. I actually like them quite
a bit.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
For the end of the round, when you land on them,
you roll a D twenty and on a like twelve
it's thirteen of both you heal a wound and on
like a one or two you take damage. So it's
an interesting like gamble that you take. Yeah, and it's
nice to hide there and you can put them onto
your army. Of course. Honestly, for balancing. It is well
(28:58):
balanced against itself. I really like that.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Oh yeah, that was That was honestly one of the
most fun tabletop experiences I've had a long time since
I very first played Armona.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, it's it's fun, and they definitely capture the feel
of the old Hero Escape. It still feels like the
same game. Yeah, and it's like, no, no, these this
is just a new expansion. This is just the next
gin of hero Escape. They didn't change too many rules
at all. Really, they just overhauled what needed to be overhauled. Yeah,
(29:29):
and that let let the game run and it's like cool,
Now where do we go from here? People are like, okay,
well we want more Valkyries. We're getting more Valkyries. Launch
Day is coming up. It has not released yet. It
is releasing sometime this next week. I believe it's the
twenty eighth of the twenty ninth, So it releases actually
(29:51):
this weekend, and this weekend is a going to be
a huge event where we have launch games across the country.
It's coming to lgs's. They sold out online.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
There was like probably a day, if not less, right, I.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Think it was online for like three or four days.
It sold out and then they made the announcement. No,
it might have been longer. I think it was a
couple of weeks because they had a ton of stop right. Yeah,
and then they announced everything sold out online gen Con
everything sold.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Out, everything, Yeah, everything sold out super fast.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Everything like their painted stuff was gone by Saturday. And
then there was a few of the unpainted Master sets
in Well Springs and all that laying around. You couldn't
get the Chiori promo after like Friday. You could get
the Alexander Drake, which I've got, but overall the Hero
(30:51):
Escape stuff and coming up with October Wave two is
coming so fast.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Yeah, that's a really fast for a wave too. That's like,
what this under two months?
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Yeah? But they've also had so much time wrapping this
did they really have?
Speaker 1 (31:07):
That's been what four years?
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Yeah, they've had four years and they already had the
majority of the minis developed. So I firmly believe that
they spent a lot of this time preparing the next waves.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
I will agree with that, because who knows how long
have Long Hill had an involvement for before they're like, hey,
we should revive this game.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
So however, honestly, the new game coming out is going
to be a blessed I can't wait to get into
some events. They introduced the battle Neet at a perfect
time and it's a very well designed army builder and
event finder.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Yeah, it's really cool and it works with new and old.
You can search by faction.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
The only thing they didn't adopt, which they might adopt later.
I hope they adopt later, is they get more into
the Curescape community. Is the uh the tar list? Yes,
so if you don't know how like Hero Escape events
go on, you've never seen Hero Escape events as the
community has kept it. They created a tier list of
(32:09):
the strongest units. A lot of tournaments aren't just every
unit goes. For instance, the Hero Escape community in Utah.
The event they're holding at the end of the month,
which is just a duo battle cut off is B
plus tire. Yeah, you can't bring your A tiers, you
can't bring your S tiers. There are, of course those
(32:33):
have their places, but that's because the initial game was unbalanced.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
It was very unbalanced. Do you look at what was
it the original eighty point Raylan at two defense dice
everything around her to everything within what was the six units?
I think four it's four. Still that is ridiculous, like,
oh yeah, the stuff is basically invincible now.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Of course they and then they reprinted her later and
re Balanster and it's like, okay, she's a hundred twenty points.
She she only offers her defense, I think to Gendar now, yeah,
and so your entire army isn't defended. It's one defense
dice instead of two. So it's not bad. And it's like, okay,
(33:18):
of course she completely changed factions between that and Age
of Annihilation.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Do you want another reason? The reason is a mind
control amulet.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
I love that because they're opening the door to bring
back old Raylan.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
Yeah, I honestly just love the absurdity of oh yeah,
it's a cursed mind control amulet. That's very funny to me.
That's what that is.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
And that's where that aeroscipe still fits into. It's like
kind of hilarious cartoony feel.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Yeah, it's like this is really wacky.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Where it's like, oh yeah, why is Rayland drying? Uh
sorry driving.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Driving riding rant camp.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Say, I'd say it's a Feladar. Yeah, that makes sense,
a giant like demon winged Felidar. It's because she's being
mind controlled. Oh I love that idea.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
I love it too. It's hilarious and I'm like.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
I honestly that idea is just hilarious to me. And
and it's like, great, you're opening the door for future stuff.
You're realizing like the game is still camp. Yeah, like
you're camp, you know. And you can't go any other
direction with this game. You can't keep you take this
game down a very serious direction. No, Like, sure, it's
(34:39):
the Battle for All Time in Valhalla, but it's like
ome on when you get the Massachusetts minute Men fighting
with a death Walk nine thousand, I ever forgot about that,
or like the Knights of Arthur fighting with a Mecca
(34:59):
li and winning the game is cam You put it
on the table and you're like, yep, you know the
World War Two Sergeant alex Sergeant Alexander Drake.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
You're beating the crap out of a dragon exactly.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
The game is like so ridiculous that they're like, we
can't keep a super serious feel to it. We can
go this is the Age of Annihilation, but we're gonna.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Have fun with it. Like it was in the original
release trailer. It was like steampunk Hamster.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
The steampunk furries. They gotta be coming up. They showed
them off a little bit with the bears with the
like armored bears.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
I honestly can't wait to see the steampunk furries. That's
gonna be hilarious.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
The same first are gonna be grey and they're gonna
fit in so well.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Yeah, that's hero Escape. Most everything fits in well. Like
like you said, you have the Massachusetts min and men,
and you have dragons, and there's everything in between.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
And cyborgs and it's like it's everything. We're throwing everything
and it works. Now we're adding drow like druids have
been there before, but now we're adding like actual like
lessions and druids. In fact, the guy from the Revenue
faction who has beast Control, I don't even call him
by his name. I just call him the Lession because
he looks like a lesson and like he's just the lesson.
(36:30):
And it's like the Murph folk from from the battle
Box the Battle for the well Spring call it the squid.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
Yeah, it's it's a squid.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Speaking of the squid, off topic, the squid has a
cool ability where it can place water tiles.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
Yeah, that's so cool. It's also really annoying for anyone
you're playing against. He's just just like, Oh, I'm gonna move,
Just take take the squid, move it and then I'll
look a water tile, good luck.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Place on the choke point and you'd have a lot
of fun. Now, one one last thing before we before
we close and wrap, we got to talk about the
community outreach, not just outreach that they've done, but the
(37:25):
the party that got absolutely devastated by this that is gone,
that that's done, and that is the three D custom units. Yeah.
Now you're still going to see propsies, oh for sure.
But you've had groups trying to keep Hero Escape legacy
(37:45):
like as a legacy going by still releasing new units,
unofficial stuff. All the unofficial stuff is now out the window.
And you know it is because the new battlenet does
not have any of it. M So that group is
just out completely. It's just gone. Yeah, and so they
(38:09):
got hit hard by that. The community has been really
positive though about the Hero Skip release, other than the
issues that they've had with the terrain terrain and then
some damaged product and issues they need to fix with that.
I mean, they got stuff out quick. People were receiving
their like boxes earlier in the month. Painted stuff went
(38:30):
out first and unpainted stuff went second. It's weird, yeah,
Like normally you'd see the unpainted stuff go first, but
I think I think they were trying to get the
painted stuff out first. Honestly, I can't wait for the long,
long run. They've got so much they can do with
this game. If you have the Valkyries. Not to mention,
they could do re releases of old units.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
To be absolutely honest, I think it'd be kind of
cool to see them re release and balance some of
the old stuff.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
That would be cool to see in NAC like rebalanced Raylan,
rebalance like old Alexander Drake. Yeah, rebalanced Deathwalker nine thousand.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Death Walkers in general, To be honest, the death Walkers
are not fun to fight against.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
It's their range.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Yeah, what do they have, like a range of twelve?
Speaker 2 (39:16):
One of them has a special attacks that's got a
range of twelve and you just shoot with it. Yeah.
Death Walkers are good and bad because they've only got
one healthy piece.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
They have like eight defense dice.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
I think death Walker nine thousand has nine.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
Is it impossible to get through?
Speaker 2 (39:34):
It feels like, well, no, the game you played against
me where I ran death Walkers, you guys had a
problem because I ran it with old Raylan.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Oh that's right, I ran it with.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Like original Raylan Walkers had like eleven defense, so.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
You'd roll two defense, you'd roll two hits and they'd
be like, all right, I need more dice. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Essentially, Now for the future wave two, Revenue's rebuke because
I guess the story of Age of Annihilation is there's
a like a peace summit where they're trying to actually
negotiate some peace, and I guess like it turned into fighting.
(40:20):
Revena showed up and it caused a lot of problems.
This new Valkyrie commander showed up mm, and now I
guess this is Revenue's rebuke against I guess this piece
summit and against the Valkyrie. Now this is where we're
getting the iron Litch.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Mecha lag, iron litch, whatever you wanna call it. It's
it's a it's a mech litch.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
It's a giant mech. I wish I had a picture
of it that I had put into OBS, but it's
a giant mech. You should look it up. And then
it has like these chain wielding rolling bots that are
called wraith Riders, and then lets see I like that idea.
You get this big hero in with a swall, and
I believe the squad is a unique squad.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
Yeah, that would make sense.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
It's not a common squad, so you can't get more
than one squad. So it's like, okay, they're putting them
in together.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Now.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
The other one I have some issue with because they're
also with Revenus Rebut they're going to be releasing the
Kyrie Warrior Army expansion, which includes five Kyrie Warriors heroes.
They feel like this is that is a mistake.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
It could be, but I also looking at them, maybe
they're not. Maybe they're just well they're probably unique, but
then maybe they're like a unique squad instead of all
the heroes.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Well I looked at it. They are heroes.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Well, they're all heroes. I wonder if they're going for
different synergies with them. I wonder if this is one
of those things that they're trying to see. I know
that's probably I don't know if that's how I thought.
The old one I think was just all heroes.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
Of it was a fact, just random heroes from the way. Yeah,
and so very much what they're doing Heroes Valkyries, And
I'm like, okay, then that you're doing all that, you're
keeping them thematic. I still like they're still feel like
they're repeating mistakes of the mist I.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Feel like it's a little bit I all agree with that,
but I also see where they want to keep all
of the mouth grease together and yet.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Honestly, releasing him as a whole as a box for
forty five dollars is a great idea. You know, we've
seen other games release their heroes, like Legion, where the
heroes are individual they're like twenty bucks apiece.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
I was like, no, no, we're not getting greedy like that.
You know, the the Lich forty five dollars for the
Lich as well. But he's a big mini yeah, and
he comes with his squad.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Yeah that would make sense. Well, just looking at the picture,
he is going to be massive.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Dude, He's like as big as a zen A Threx.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
They gonna be a huge nine better than.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
About he's going to be big. But yeah, so that's
coming up in October. I'm honestly, who should pick up
this game. This is a game for everybody. I love it.
It's it's simple enough to be a family game if
the dad wants to bond with the kid and pick
up a hobby game. It's not Warhammer, it's not Legion,
(43:13):
It's not as complicated as all of those.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
No, this is like, this is honestly baby's first war game.
That's what i'd call this. It has definitely it definitely
has more nuances, Like there's a very high skill ceiling
to this game.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
There is a high skill ceiling to this game. You know,
there's things that you do, like how you manipulate terrain,
how you use the area to your advantage. Various old
units have interesting synergies, and the synergies come in steep.
I think you saw that with the Two Valkyries, the
Utgar Valkyries, where it's like as long as you got
(43:49):
another Upgar hero, all your Utgar heroes get plus one movement.
It's like flying. That's huge. Also, it's not just a
hobby game. If you don't want to pick up the
hobby game and you got some extra cash to burn,
you can pick up the unpainted I mean the painted stuff. Yeah,
And I think that was a brilliant decision where they
(44:10):
released the painted and unpainted because they realized this as
a hobby game.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
It's it can either be a hobby game or just
a family board game. Well, family war game. It's not
necessarily a board game, but a family game war game,
a family game nonetheless.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
And so I'm very much of the mind that I'm like, honestly,
it's great, the themes are fun, You've got the Valkyries.
This is great, honestly if you but if you're gonna
buy it, just pick up a master set, don't don't
pick up the pieces. If you're kind of unsure, Yeah,
check out your lgs's because a lot of them are
probably gonna have a well Spring as a demo box.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
Yeah. And even then, I the.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
Well Spring might just be worth because it's just a
forty five dollars.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
I'd almost reco I almost want to recom in the
terrain pack too.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
That's where I'm like, Okay, if you're jumping into the
great game, just give the master set. If you're kind
of unsure, yeah, the Wellspring is a good choice.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
I'm If you want to get like really really into
the game, that's when you get the terrain pack, and
that's when you make all these crazy maps, or if.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
You don't even play the game. You're a DM go
buy the train pack.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Yeah, that works too.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
The terrain's great.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
Make some weird, make some fun terrain for your campaign.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
I'm really excited for the future of hero Escape, especially
because the marketing was fantastic. Oh yes, like they got
critical role to play the game and broadcast it. Yeah,
so it's like it's huge, it's gonna be big, it's
gonna stay big. Let's let's keep the support. We're both
big hero Escape fans. We've been covering hero Escape since
(45:57):
it's like initial.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
Like, oh, we're probably we were re releasing this since
the Avalon hit. Yeah, Like I remember that was a
really fun and we were so happy about that coming back.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
And then when Renegade announced, we're like, it is back.
It is finally back for good. And then and then
I gotta see it at gen Con and bring it
back and we're.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
Like, yeah, this is the good stuff.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
This is the good stuff, especially like after the problem,
after the problems that Legion had, oh yeah, after we
fell off from Legion and the canceling of Armada, were like,
we need a game.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
Yeah, Armada is still fun to play, but it's just
a pain to get minis now three D print.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
Like, I got a three D printer, so I get
to I can they can do this kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
Minis are.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Minis aren't as hard to get for Armada. For me,
you just need to know three D printer that makes sense.
Of course, that's everything we got. We're kind of jumping
off onto different ledges. I guess I'm your game master, Isaiah.
I'm Chris, and that's our guest Chris ED will be
seeing guys later. We're luck
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