GenCon Day 2 – Slaughterfield!

Myth-Bugs

GenCon Day 2: Slaughterfield!

Unlike most everyone else at GenCon, I actually went back to my hotel and slept Friday night.  As a result, I was feeling pretty good Saturday.  (Yes, my day 2 was Saturday, since I didn’t arrive in Indy until Friday morning.)After doing some exploring of some other parts of the exhibit hall and hitting the auction room for a little bit, I made my way back over to the MERC booth for some Slaughterfield.

The Slaughterfield demo was set up for two players, and Brian Shotten  helped walk us through the waves as we went.  He mentioned he didn’t believe anyone else had made it through 4 waves, which I obviously took as a challenge.  Unfortuantely, as wave 5 spawned, the other player had to leave for another session, so we don’t know how far we actually would have ended up getting.  (We were sitting very good for treasure, and the Apprentice had esacped the situation that I thought would lead to his death in round 4) so I really think we could have made it through the next wave intact, but it was going to be rough.

The slaughterfield demo is based on a 10 step spawn list, and using counters to time when the next spawn will appear.  The advanced slaughterfield rules will include custom spawn cards, custom treasure cards, and objectives.  I can tell you at least one of the objectives involves infiltrating the enemy spawning zones.  (We ran into enemy spawn zones to kill faster and grab treasure, which is why the topic came up.)

After slaughterfield, I introduced myself to Brian (since I hadn’t up to that point…just blending in with the other gamers), and we talked a bit about various MYTH related stuff, as well as some of the other products MERCS has coming out in the next year.  (2014 will be a very busy year MERCS, with 3 game launches including MYTH.  I’m sure everyone was already aware of the MERCS and MYTH product lines, and Conflict has been mentioned both in my first GenCon post, as well as in my Q&A with Andrew Meredith earlier in the year.  I didn’t get a chance to learn much about the 4th yet, but you can be on it being a topic of discussion in an upcoming Q&A with designer Kenny Sims.)

A few key Myth notes:

  • The German partner has really been on the ball with this project, and should be be shipping almost simultaneously with the US release.  (Sorry, I didn’t think to ask about French translations.)
  •   Just like everything else with this project, MERCS is planning and preparing for the shipping once everything gets to them.  They should get everything turned around in a very timely manner to get the games in our hands.  At the same time, they are being very realistic in their expectations and their ability to deliver, so I don’t feel like they are overpromising.
  • Base games will be shipped separate from stretch goals.  They’ve been working on the best options for shipping the stretch stuff efficiently.
  • MERCS already has plans for the expansions for 2014, and going into 2015.  This is really important for people coming into the game after the kickstarter so that more heroes and monsters come into play for everyone.

With that, I went off for an evening of naked true dungeon before heading to bed.

(No we didn’t actually play naked, we played without bringing equipment tokens, only using whatever got picked up during the adventure.)