FFG: Fantasy Flight Games News

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Let Mac and PC Enter the Fray

Vote for BattleLore: Command on Steam Greenlight

BattleLore: Command is now up for voting in Steam Greenlight. Go to the game’s Greenlight page and vote now to make this tactical combat game available for PC and Mac OSX!

Currently available for iOS and Android, BattleLore: Command puts you in charge of a formidable, fantastical army fighting epic fantasy battles. The game’s single-player mode places you in command of the brave Daqan forces as they wage war against the bloodthirsty invading Uthuk Y’llan. In the skirmish mode, you can lead either the Daqan or the Uthuk Y’llan army into battle against either the computer or against a friend. Each skirmish mission tests your strategic skills with a unique objective and allows you to muster a specific set of units suited to the battle at hand. Using the 3D view with a zoom lens, you can see the action from anywhere on the field, taking in the entire battle at once or experiencing a single fight up close.

The PC and Mac versions will feature online multiplayer capability for the skirmish mode. An update will also soon bring online multiplayer to iOS and Android, so that you can go head-to-head against another commander based anywhere in the world.

Praise for BattleLore: Command

The iOS and Android versions of BattleLore: Command are already earning acclaim for intense strategic gameplay and stunning graphics. Dave Neumann of Pocket Tactics praises the “wonderfully deep strategic experience” of playing BattleLore: Command. He writes that it “can take its place in the pantheon of must-have games for  iOS or Android. It has the feel of a wargame or miniatures game, but is far more accessible and easy to learn.” Matt Thrower of Pocket Gamer calls it “a sharp, effective strategy game… wrapped up in an attractive envelope of graphics and sound” with a “peerless single player mode.” Finally, in his review for Board Game Geek, Bradley Cummings says the game is “downright gorgeous” and “cannot be missed,” naming it “one of the best of the year.”

Take Command

You can already download BattleLore: Command from Google Play and the iTunes App Store. With your support on Steam Greenlight, it will soon become available for Mac OSX and PC.

Visit the BattleLore: Command Greenlight page and vote today!

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Source: Let Mac and PC Enter the Fray

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Visions of Dawn

Announcing a New Hero and Monster Collection for Descent Second Edition

The ogres and trolls of Terrinoth have long warred between themselves, keeping them from presenting any threat to organized armies. But now, a truce has been forged, sworn on the skull of Ig’thalea, the warrior-priestess who shattered the last alliance between ogres and trolls. A foul army of ogres and trolls will sweep across Terrinoth unless a small band of heroes ends this alliance before it truly begins.

Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce Visions of Dawn, a new Hero and Monster Collection for Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition!

Trolls and ogres are two of the largest and most belligerent monsters in Terrinoth. Only their age-old hatred for each other has safeguarded the innocent from their depredations. Now, this ancient war has been supplanted by a budding alliance. In Visions of Dawn, you can lead an army of ogres and trolls to rampage across the land, or you can be one of the noble few to stand in their way.

Contains two ogres, two trolls, two manticores, and four heroes.

Visions of Dawn offers ten plastic figures previously only available through the first edition of Descent. You may take up arms with four heroes of the realm: Master Thorn, Nara the Fang, Ispher, and Sir Valadir. You may play as the overlord, commanding a monstrous legion composed of ogres, trolls, and manticores. To expand your experience as hero or overlord, this Hero and Monster Collection offers two brand new quests, Trucebreaker and Visions of Dawn, each challenging you to quest and battle for the future of the realm.

Reptilian Endurance

One hero to join your battle in this expansion is Ispher. Screams of terror are nothing unique for him: they follow him to each new town and village. He has been mistaken for a bandit, a monster, and most memorably, the incarnation of a spirit that ate disobedient children. Often attacked or turned away, only the wise find a brilliant healer with a caustic sense of humor. No stranger to irony, Ispher has commonly saved those who mocked him just an hour earlier. Now, Ispher has but one goal: to use his arts to destroy the true, unbridled cruelty of the overlord.

Ispher’s healing arts are unparalleled, even among other Healers. Many Healers are forced to take time away from healing the party to tend their own wounds, but Ispher avoids this delay with his natural regenerative properties. Ispher’s hero ability keeps him from ever becoming poisoned, and it also allows him to recover two damage at the start of his turn. With this constant healing to rely on, Ispher has plenty of time to keep the rest of the party hale.

Ispher also features a powerful heroic feat that can turn the tide of battle in an instant. Once per encounter, Ispher may use an action to choose himself or an adjacent hero. The chosen hero immediately recovers eight damage and removes all conditions! This sudden surge of health allows any hero to work towards his objectives, instead of wasting crucial actions healing. Combined with his hero ability, Ispher’s heroic feat invites you to recover an unprecedented amount of damage every turn, keeping every hero ready for action.

Hungry for Flesh

The heroes will need every bit of healing they can muster when facing monsters as terrifying as the ogres. Always eager for their next crime, ogres tend to carve out territory near small villages or deserted roads, where they can isolate potential prey. Once an ogre has cornered its victim, only a mighty warrior can hold out long against the ogre’s staggering blows. Even those who survive rarely do so in one piece.

In battle, an ogre is a fearsome opponent, easily rending a hero limb from limb. Ogres can spend a surge to deal additional damage, and they can also use surges to trigger the Knockback ability. Knockback allows an ogre to cast a hero up to three spaces, potentially throwing him into hazardous terrain or separating him from his comrades. When ogres prowl the darkness, a hero alone is often as good as dead.

Heroes like Ispher are not the only creatures that can practice healing in Visions of Dawn. Master ogres take vitality from the blood of heroes, as evidenced by the Fleshmonger ability. The first time an ogre deals damage to a hero, you may take one of his hero tokens and place it on the ogre’s Monster card. For each hero token on its card, the master ogre gains two additional health, allowing it to swell its already formidable health by attacking numerous heroes. These abilities make ogres dangerous on their own, but when they fight side-by-side with trolls, all of Terrinoth may tremble.

A Dark Alliance

For the first time in living memory, trolls and ogres have joined forces. Should they solidify their peace treaty, darkness will roll across the land. Take up your swords and fight for the dawn in this new Hero and Monster Collection!

Visions of Dawn will be available in the second quarter of 2015.

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Source: Visions of Dawn

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Secrets Bought with Blood

Secrets and Schemes Is Now Available for A Game of Thrones: The Card Game

“Any friend of Varys the Spider is someone I will trust just as far as I can throw him.”

   –George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

The Seven Kingdoms are rife with turmoil and intrigue. The Great Houses of Westeros plot and scheme, playing their game of thrones. In this world, secrets are weapons just as dangerous as swords or bows. Join the battles and intrigues with Secrets and Schemes, the first Chapter Pack of the Wardens cycle for A Game of Thrones: The Card Game, now available at your local retailer!

In this Chapter Pack, you get your first taste of the upcoming Wardens cycle. This cycle brings plenty of House Arryn cards down from the Eyrie to join the fight for the Iron Throne, while offering new support for your trait-based decks. At the same time, every House gains new Limited Responses, powerful abilities that can only be triggered once per round. Each House has new secrets and tactics prepared, and this expansion gives you the chance to use them all.

Deadly Weapons

Two of the Limited Responses found in Secrets and Schemes come in the form of deadly Weapons, wielded by renowned warriors. The first of these weapons is Red Rain (Secrets and Schemes, 6), the Valyrian steel sword of House Drumm. In A Game of Thrones: The Card Game, this deadly sword can only be wielded by a unique Greyjoy character, but its Limited Response dramatically increases the havoc the attached character wreaks in challenges. After the character wielding Red Rain is declared as an attacker, you may choose a character controlled by the defending player. If you then win the challenge by four or more Strength, the chosen character is discarded from play!

The other Limited Response Weapon included in this Chapter Pack is Hotah’s Axe (Secrets and Schemes, 12). This attachment bears the setup keyword, and it also reads, “Limited Response: After you win a challenge in which attached character participated, choose a character. That character loses a challenge icon of your choice until the end of the phase. Then, if that character has no challenge icons, kill it.” Removing challenge icons has long been the specialty of House Martell, and with Hotah's Axe, you can easily kill troublesome single-icon characters, like the Horselord (Ancestral Home, 75), that oppose your quest for the Iron Throne.

Building the Realm

Of course, not every card with a Limited Response ability is an attachment. You’ll find a similarly powerful ability on Ser Kevan Lannister (Secrets and Schemes, 8), a champion card designed by the 2012 A Game of Thrones: The Card Game Chinese Champion, Bing Ouyang. This version of Ser Kevan Lannister boasts two beneficial traits: Lord and Knight, alongside a Noble crest, which enables you to protect him with The Power of Blood (Core Set, 194). But many times, you won’t even want to keep Ser Kevan Lannister from dying. As a Limited Response, whenever Ser Kevan Lannister enters play or leaves play, you may choose a Lannister or neutral location in  your discard pile and put it into play.

This ability has dozens of possible applications, but one of these potential uses is to add new resilience to Lannister decks using the House of Dreams (A Roll of the Dice, 119) agenda. Many players use City plots to counter this agenda, counting on A City Besieged (Chasing Dragons, 59) to discard their opponent’s House of Dreams location. Ser Kevan Lannister allows you to return that location to play, giving you the chance to reestablish your deck’s central strategy and forcing your opponent to find another answer to your location.

Scheme in the Shadows

Whether you take up fabled weapons or join Ser Kevan Lannister in building the fortune of House Lannister, you can join the fight for the Iron Throne in this Chapter Pack. Forge secrets into weapons and lay your schemes well: only one can win the game of thrones!

Secrets and Schemes is now available at your local retailer! 

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Source: Secrets Bought with Blood

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Unleash the Scourge

The Scourge War Pack Is Now Available for Warhammer 40,000: Conquest

“Needz Mor Dakka!!!”

   –Gubgutz, Ork Strategist

A new plague of death sweeps across the Traxis sector. Those who stand against it sicken and die, rotting before they hit the ground and leaving none alive but the servants of Chaos! Now, you can infect your opponents with new and terrible diseases from The Scourge War Pack for Warhammer 40,000: Conquest, now available at your local retailer.

In this expansion, you gain a new warlord for the Chaos faction: Ku’gath Plaguefather who wields the corrosive power of Nurgle. Beyond this new warlord and his signature squad, you’ll find plenty of cards for other factions, continuing the major themes of the Warlord cycle by introducing new uses for your warlords. You may fortify yourself in an Inquisitorial Fortress, hunt through the stars with more Space Wolves, or embrace Kauyon battle tactics with the Tau. You can even unleash a horde of frenzied Orks to ravage the sector!

Take a Hit

Currently, the Orks in the Traxis sector are led exclusively by Nazdreg (Core Set, 3), the warlord of the Bad Moons. Under Nazdreg’s leadership, the Orks are always ready to take a hit – as long as they can hit back even harder. Nazdreg grants the Brutal keyword to all of your units at his planet, allowing them to deal more damage as they take damage themselves.

This strategy has some inherent weaknesses, however. If your units have no damage, they gain no benefit from Brutal. But as your units take damage, they become increasingly more fragile. Now, in The Scourge, Nazdreg and the Orks find new ways to make their brutal threats more deadly and reliable than ever.

One crucial addition is Dakka Dakka Dakka! (The Scourge, 34). By playing this event during the deployment phase and exhausting your warlord, you deal one damage to every unit in play! Obviously, this offers an easy way to deal with weakened enemy units. More importantly, it boosts the potential attack power of every army you control at the same planet as Nazdreg, besides activating units like the Bad Dok (Core Set, 65) that must be damaged to unlock their abilities. Dakka Dakka Dakka! can also protect your units from taking too much damage. By using it as a shield card at the opportune moment, you can shield enough damage to keep your army from annihilation, allowing it to strike for the maximum possible amount of damage.

Of course, an Ork warband needs plenty of units with high damage capacity to make the most of Brutal. To that end, you may choose to take advantage of an Attack Squig Herd (The Scourge, 33). This unit features an already respectable four ATK, but its damage capacity of six is even higher. When combined with Nazdreg, an Attack Squig Herd with five damage could strike for nine damage, enough to bloody nearly any warlord in the game, even when its controller attempts to protect it with a shield card.

As your units take damage, they become more powerful, but they also come closer to destruction. In this War Pack, you gain another way to forestall the demise of your heavily damaged Orks: a Kustom Field Generator (The Scourge, 35). The Kustom Field Generator offers you an exceptional effect that can be triggered when one of your Ork units is assigned damage. You can exhaust the Kustom Field Generator to prevent all damage, then reassign it as indirect damage among your Ork units at the same planet. In other words, you can split the damage from an incoming attack among your Ork units. Not only does this allow you to keep a unit from being destroyed, it allows you to deal more damage to your other units and increase their attack power for your future attacks!

Forward unto Glory

War rages throughout the Traxis sector, even as the legions of Chaos sweeps forwards, laden thick with plague and pestilence and death. But the foul daemons and corruption vomited forth from the Warp are not the sector’s only claimants. The Emperor’s finest Space Marines, ancient Eldar warriors, and crazed Ork warbands also contest these planets. Will you rampage with the diseased legions of Chaos, or will you lead another army to glory?

Pick up your copy of The Scourge War Pack at your local retailer today!

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Source: Unleash the Scourge

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Equipped for War

Four Dice Bags for Our Warhammer: 40,000 Themed Products Are Now Available

Four different Warhammer: 40,000 themed Dice Bags are now available at your local retailer!

These stylish and thematic Dice Bags are designed specifically to help keep track of all of your Fantasy Flight Games Warhammer: 40,000 product accessories, including dice, tokens, and cards for:

   
• Warhammer 40,000: Conquest
  
     

   
• Relic
  
     

   
• Dark Heresy Second Edition
  
     

   
• Only War
  
     

   
• Black Crusade
  
     

   
• Deathwatch
  
     

   
• Rogue Trader

Enter the Grim Darkness of the 41st Millennium

Fantasy Flight Supply is committed to providing you the best materials to protect, customize, and enhance your games and gameplay experience. Each Dice Bag provides players with convenient and durable means to transport all the components necessary for your battles in the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium. Of course, you must pick sides. With these Dice Bags you can choose from an Ork, an Inquisitor, the Imperial Aquila, or the Chaos Star.

Crafted with a blend of polyester and nylon, each bag features a polypropylene draw string, and measures 6.25” by 9” (15.9 cm by 22.9 cm).

Safeguard Your Resources

Warhammer: 40,000 Dice Bags offer you the tools you need to protect your game components and keep your attention on the roleplaying, board game, or card game at hand. Look for these Warhammer 40,000 themed Dice Bags at your local retailer today!

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Source: Equipped for War

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Hit the Net in Style

Android: Netrunner Art Sleeves Are Now Available

   
       
           
           
       
   

“Always keep your gear in top shape. You never want your console to glitch when it's your brain on the line.”                  –Kate "Mac" McCaffrey                         Six limited edition Android: Netrunner Art Sleeves are now available at your local retailer and online through our webstore!             Offering a high-tech combination of functionality and style, Fantasy Flight Supply Android: Netrunner Art Sleeves combine beautiful game-related art with top-quality card protection. Take your pick of designs in the meat world or the virtual world; our six new sleeve designs immerse you more fully than ever in the high-stakes cyberstruggles of Android: Netrunner, even as their clear, 100 micron-thick, non-PVC, acid-free polypropylene plastic offers your cards durable protection that comes free of any damaging chemicals that could corrode your cards.

All Android: Netrunner Art Sleeves fit snugly around your LCG, CCG, or other standard-sized cards (card size: 2 1/2” x 3 1/2”), and they facilitate easy shuffling and handling. Each pack contains 50 sleeves to protect the cards from your favorite Corp deck, your favorite Runner deck, or your favorite deck for any of our other LCGs®!

The Best of Two Worlds

“The greatest runs are orchestrated almost entirely in meat space. It keeps the corps off-balance."

    –Silhouette

The setting of Android: Netrunner is a gritty, futuristic world filled with artificial intelligence, gestural interfaces, and virt displays. The rich benefit from custom genetics and cyberimplants while the poor toil alongside bioroids and clones in the shadows of monolithic towers controlled by a handful of megarich corporations. They host their secrets on the omnipresent network and guard their most valuable data with a dizzying of array of barriers, code gates, sentries, and traps that define the landscape of the game’s virtual world.

Both the virtual and meat worlds of Android: Netrunner come to life with the six designs for our limited Android: Netrunner Art Sleeves.

   
       
           
           
           
       
       
           
           
           
       
   

Pop-up	Deep Red	Snare!
Wotan	Inside Job	Posted Bounty

Click any of the above images to enlarge

“Goodnight, New Angeles. From all of us at NBN Nightly to all of you at home, sleep well. We’re watching over you.”

    –NBN Nightly

Whether you plan to use Android: Netrunner Art Sleeves to protect your Corp and Runner decks for Android: Netrunner, run deep against the servers of another LCG, or safeguard an entirely different collection of cards, these stunning, top-quality sleeves allow you to do so in style, all while immersing you in the cyberpunk future of New Angeles, NeoTokyo, and the all-reaching network.

Get your Android: Netrunner Art Sleeves today!

   
• Pop-up

   
• Deep Red

   
• Snare!

   
• Wotan

   
• Inside Job

   
• Posted Bounty

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Source: Hit the Net in Style

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Enter the Shadows

Between the Shadows Is Now Available for STAR WARS (TM): The Card Game

“Bounty hunters. We don’t need that scum.”
    –Admiral Piett, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

The shadows of the galaxy are home to thousands of sentients – those who prefer to avoid close scrutiny. Bounty hunters, assassins, slavers, and thieves seek the anonymity of darkness to perpetrate their crimes with impunity. In those same shadows, the last of the Jedi hide, keeping the fire of their belief alive and working in secret for the return of justice to the galaxy. Now, you can call upon both the Jedi and the Scum of the galaxy to aid you in your battle to determine the galaxy’s fate.

Between the Shadows is now available for Star Wars™: The Card Game, both at your local retailer and online through our webstore!

In this deluxe expansion, you’ll find twenty-six brand-new objective sets (two copies each of twelve distinct objective sets and one copy each of two “limit one” objective sets). These objective sets are focused on the Jedi and the Scum and Villainy, including iconic characters from both affiliations, such as Boba Fett, Luke Skywalker, Prince Xizor, and Yoda.

Of course, the Jedi and the Scum and Villainy are not the only parties to benefit from this expansion. You’ll find new cards for every affiliation in this expansion, as we’ll explore below.

A Profitable Alliance

Admiral Piett claimed that the Empire had no need of bounty hunters, but you may decide differently with the new Sith objective set included in Between the Shadows. This objective set’s most potent application may be in conjunction with Scum and Villainy sets. The Scum and Villainy of the galaxy are always looking for reliable ways to capture their opponents, and in this Sith objective set, they gain some help from Imperial Intelligence.

This objective set gives you some excellent tools for capturing your opponent’s cards with minimal complications. Confiscation (Between the Shadows, 691) is an enhancement that you attach to an enemy Character unit, allowing you to capture any light side card attached to the enhanced unit as an Action. As long as Confiscation remains on the unit, you can ensure that unit will never have beneficial enhancements. Official Inquiry (Between the Shadows, 692) gives you another opportunity to capture cards, allowing you to look at the top three cards of an opponent’s deck and capture one of those cards. With two reliable ways to capture cards, you’ll be able to fuel objectives like Jabba’s Reach (Edge of Darkness, 374) and The Findsman’s Intuition (Lure of the Dark Side, 537) much more easily.

This set also contains two copies of the Imperial Intelligence Officer (Between the Shadows, 690), a unit with a Reaction that allows you to look at your opponent’s hand when it enters play. Gaining knowledge of your opponent’s cards is always useful, and the Imperial Intelligence Officer’s ability dramatically increases the effectiveness of other cards, such as Get Me Solo! (The Search for Skywalker, 227).

The remaining cards in the objective set allow you to deny your opponent’s plans more effectively than ever before. The Investigation (Between the Shadows, 688) is an objective that, when revealed, allows you to name any card. As long as The Investigation is undamaged, your opponent cannot play a card with the title that you named. By keeping your opponent from playing the card most damaging to your deck, whether Luke Skywalker (Core Set, 92) or the Sleuth Scouts (Edge of Darkness, 340), you can minimize the risk of encountering that card with the help of The Investigation.

The set concludes with Ysanne Isard (Between the Shadows, 689), the feared Director of Imperial Intelligence. As a unit, Ysanne Isard offers a variety of benefits. She can provide a resource when needed, her combat icons make her effective on attack or defense, and with three Force icons, she can even take the Force at need. What’s more, her Reaction can allow you to drastically hinder your opponent’s attempts to build his board. After an opponent plays a copy of a captured card or enhancement, you can reveal the captured card to return the just played card to its owner’s hand, depriving him of the resources he paid and keeping him from ever playing that card as long as you have a captured copy!

A Daring Raid

The Rebel Alliance also gains more shadowy operatives in Between the Shadows. Alliance Special Forces doesn’t have the numbers to face the Empire in pitched battle, so instead, they work behind the scenes, carrying out strategic raids and targeted sabotage. In Star Wars: The Card Game, this is portrayed through the edge battle, and this mechanic is the specialty of Alliance Special Forces!

Fight for Alliance Special Forces with the Commando Raid (Between the Shadows, 657) objective set. This set is limited to one per deck, and the objective bears a potent Action ability: once per turn, you may discard a fate card from your hand to resolve its ability. Playing a fate card from your hand with Commando Raid sacrifices the opportunity to count the fate card’s Force icons for the edge battle, but this allows you to trigger the card’s ability without the danger of being discarded by a well-timed Twist of Fate (Core Set, 171).

Your strike team is most successful while led by Lieutenant Judder Page (Between the Shadows, 658). Lieutenant Judder Page once fought for the Imperial Army, but now he is the leader of the Rebel Alliance’s most successful commando team. While Lieutenant Judder Page is participating in an engagement, he gains “Interrupt: When you discard your edge stack, return 1 fate card not named Twist of Fate from that edge stack to its owner’s hand.” By recycling your fate cards for later use, you maximize their power, as well as enhancing the power of other members of Alliance Special Forces, such as General Crix Madine (Lure of the Dark Side, 520).

The set also includes two copies of Page’s Commandos (Between the Shadows, 659), giving you more power to manipulate your edge battles. After this unit enters play, you may return the topmost fate card from your discard pile to your hand, giving you yet another way to recur your fate cards and ensure that you are always a force to be reckoned with in edge battles. Of course, the set would be incomplete without some fate cards, so this set concludes with a copy of Heat of Battle (Between the Shadows, 65) and Target of Opportunity (Between the Shadows, 133)!

Light or Dark?

Dozens of new options open for every deck as you enter the underworld in Between the Shadows. You can fight alongside the secretive Jedi to restore peace and order to the galaxy, or you can take up arms with the Scum and Villainy in a gamble to snatch more credits. Whichever affiliation you support, you’ll find shadowy units and objective sets in this deluxe expansion.

Pick up Between the Shadows at your local retailer today!

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Source: Enter the Shadows

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Worlds of Iniquity

Preview the Locations and Modular Events of Lords of Nal Hutta

“Let the Empire think they control the galaxy – we know where the true power lies.”
   –Jabba Desilijic Tiure, Lords of Nal Hutta

Home to lethal political posturing, high-stakes smuggling, and decadent luxuries, Hutt Space is one of the most dangerous and profitable regions in the galaxy. In Lords of Nal Hutta, a supplement for Star Wars®: Edge of the Empire™, players venture into this lawless sector where the Empire has little power, immense wealth lives side by side with terrible poverty, and any deal might result in terrible pain or tremendous profit. You’ll find ample descriptions of several Hutt planets and countless details about Hutt culture in Lords of Nal Hutta, enabling you not only to create complex Hutt PCs and NPCs, but stage an entire campaign in Hutt Space.

Today’s preview surveys three of the many locations featured in Lords of Nal Hutta: Toydaria, Nar Shaddaa, and the Hutt homeworld, Nal Hutta. It also looks at the modular encounter that takes place on each planet. Modular encounters are flavorful set pieces that provide a sample of the experiences your group might have in Hutt space. GMs can easily incorporate a modular encounter into an existing campaign, use one as the launching point for a campaign of their own creation, or make one the focus of a single-session adventure.

Markets, Mushrooms, and Swamps

Although a few cities dot its landscape, most of Toydaria is covered with putrid swamps and pastoral villages that remain untouched by technology. The shrewd, avian Toydarians have resisted being enslaved by the Hutts, but they have allowed the Empire to station a garrison deep within the swampland. You might venture to Toydaria hoping to pick up exotic food items to sell abroad, open up a trading contract with King Maalva, or relax in the luxurious gardens of the royal palace, but you’ll have to be careful to avoid any Imperial entanglements.

In “Toydarian Grocery Shopping,” one of the five modular encounters in Lords of Nal Hutta, players are tasked to find rare Black Gabaki mushrooms to be served at the king’s banquet. Black Gabaki mushrooms only grow inside dank swamp caves, where voracious grabworms and other deadly predators dwell, and their high value on the black market is partially owed to the peril involved in obtaining them. Characters might take on this task in order to work their way into court, or as their first job within a Hutt kajidic – either way, it could prove as lucrative as it dangerous.

The Smuggler’s Moon

Nar Shaddaa is a massive, smog-filled city, filled with ports, cantinas, markets, slums, smuggled weapons, and slaves. It is a haven for the lost, downtrodden, and hunted, where an operative of the Black Sun smuggling ring might buy you a drink, or you might discover a former Jedi knight living on the streets. You might go to Nar Shaddaa in order to quickly make some credits, or just to see for yourself the magnificent mixture of luxury and depravity.

Each sector of the city has a uniquely sordid character. In the Corellian sector, you’ll find posh restaurants and trendy nightclubs alongside fighting pits and public housing. The Red Light Sector is notorious throughout the galaxy, and on its streets you can find any temptation imaginable among the slave dealers and bio-enhancement shops. The Undercity is an expansive and polluted processing district inhabited by murderers and mutants, so vile and dangerous that even the hardiest bounty hunters avoid it.

The modular encounter “A Deal Gone Wrong” takes you to the streets of a busy Nar Shaddaa market district, where players will encounter a down-on-her-luck Twi’lek smuggler fighting with a  a Trandoshan weapons dealer over some merchandise that she failed to procure. The situation is so explosive that players have no choice but to become involved. Taking either side will likely earn them some credits… and get them into some serious trouble.

An Invitation You Can’t Refuse

Like Toydaria, Nal Hutta is a humid and swampy planet. Unlike Toydaria, Nal Hutta has synonymous with heinous villainy and ruthless subjugation ever since the Hutts invaded it and almost eradicated the native Evocii. The capital, Bilbousa, is home to both the Hutt Ruling Council and the most profitable weapons smugglers in the galaxy. Nearby are the Guarja shipyards, where starfighters are manufactured and secretly sold to the Rebel Alliance, not because the Hutts want to overthrow the Empire, but purely for the sake of profit.

The modular encounter “Rubbing Slimy Elbows” takes place on Nal Hutta. Players are invited by a mysterious Hutt patron to attend a lavish traditional dinner called a Granee Noopa. Refusing the invitation is impossible without causing serious offense, and attending means a chance to earn fame, fortune, and opportunities for further advancement among the Hutts. However, clear information about Granee Noopas is difficult to find. Some say that no one who has ever attended one has lived to talk about it. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t be the first to survive and spill all the details.

Peril and Profit

You may enter Hutt Space looking to make a profit or resolve a debt, to acquire some illegal weapons or rise in your clan’s crime syndicate. Whatever your reason for venturing into this lawless territory may be, you’re certain to encounter supreme luxury, dangerous intrigues, and all sorts of illicit activities.

Pre-order Lords of Nal Hutta from your local retailer today!

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Source: Worlds of Iniquity

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Tigris & Euphrates

Announcing the Return of a Classic Game

The king surveyed his territory, wondering where to build a temple to the goddess Inanna, a promised reward for her help in ending a rebellion. The city was crowded thick with houses and markets, bounded by the Tigris River and ringed by the bright colors of cultivated land. His eyes finally came to rest on a flat-topped hill looming over the city’s northern edge, long held by another king. There had been decades of peace between the two kings, but the temple must be built or else the goddess would exact terrible vengeance for the broken promise. The king had no choice. It was time for that peace to end.

Fantasy Flight Games is proud to be publishing Tigris & Euphrates, Reiner Knizia’s award-winning tile placement game, in which two to four players take on the roles of rulers building civilizations in ancient Mesopotamia.

This edition of Tigris & Euphrates maintains the game’s original mechanics while giving it an updated look based on the art of ancient Sumer and Babylon. It also features all the components necessary to play advanced variations, from a double-sided game board and civilization buildings to a wonder tile and accompanying idol.

Nascent Civilizations

Tigris & Euphrates takes you back in time thousands of years to the moment that humans began building permanent settlements. As a ruler amid the chaos of this rapid urban growth, you have the chance to establish a civilization that will endure for centuries. But Mesopotamia is a narrow region, an island of priceless arable land surrounded by vast deserts with only enough space for one dynasty to flourish. If you want to make a mark on history, you must subjugate your opponents and develop the region’s strongest, most magnificent civilization. Only one ruler can dominate the fertile crescent!

You begin your civilization by placing a leader and a tile – either a blue farm, red temple, green market, or black settlement on the board to form a kingdom. Each type of tile has a leader token of the same color, and when you place a tile in the same kingdom as its corresponding leader, you earn a victory point.

                                         

The Euro Classics Line                           Our new Euro Classics line is dedicated to making select Euro-style games widely available and introducing new audiences to them.                            Its immense popularity and elegant marriage of mechanics to theme make Tigris & Euphrates an excellent game to launch this line. Stay tuned for news about the games that will follow it.

Your goal is not only to build the largest civilization, but also the healthiest one, balanced between commerce, agriculture, housing, and religion. All four spheres of civilization are entwined and necessary. Markets without nearby settlements will be empty. Without farms, a city will starve. Without temples, the people cannot appease the gods. The strength of a player’s civilization is measured in victory points, and whoever has the most points in their weakest sphere wins.

Competing Dynasties and Lasting Monuments

Growth breeds conflict. Dynasties may coexist peacefully for a little while, but soon the region’s limited resources will set even vowed allies at odds. Another dynasty’s leader may try to weaken you by inciting rebellion among your people and forcing you to fight for your own territory. Whichever leader has the most divine support – the most temples – controls the rebelling area. Wars occur when two kingdoms are united under leaders of the same color, and wars are fought using tiles of that color. If by placing a tile you unite two kingdoms with blue leaders, for example, you must muster more farm tiles than your opponent in order to win.

As your civilization develops and your dynasty persists, you may want to erect a monument to its greatness, a four-tile brick and stone edifice that your people can take pride in. You may construct a civilization building for your people, such as a library, granary, or palace, or even build a massive five-tile wonder crowned with an idol and visible for miles around. Wars and rebellions may ruin farms, destroy settlements, and close markets, but monuments cannot destroyed. They can, however, be taken over by another ruler, and building a monument may make you the target of an envious neighbor seeking to enhance his own power.

Civilization Begins

Mesopotamia was once an unsettled wilderness, its soil unbroken by plow, its landscape free of homes and ziggurats. Once its wealth was discovered, not just farms and homes, but entire cities appeared and quickly expanded. As the population grew, the region became densely crowded with competing monarchs, each trying to rule over as much territory as possible. Generations of warfare ensued, until one dynasty emerged victorious and ruled the region for centuries. Do you have the leadership and strategic skill it takes to create a balanced civilization, defeat your opponents, and found a dynasty to last the ages?

The struggle to dominate the fertile crescent begins in second quarter of 2015. Until then, you can find more information on the Tigris & Euphrates description page.

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Drakon

Announcing a New Edition of a Classic Board Game

The knight stepped quickly down the spiral staircase, his chainmail clinking as he moved. His sword was drawn and clean, and it shone in the torchlight. The knight had already overcome trials in this unnatural labyrinth. He had escaped the allure of the magical harp. He had survived the dragon’s cruel games. He had collected nearly all the gold he needed to escape. Around the corner ahead, he saw it – an unmistakable gleam. Torchlight on golden coins. Only a few more feet and he would have his salvation. But as he stepped forward a windstorm rose around him, and the golden gleam vanished…

Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce the new edition of Drakon, a classic board game of treasure and dragonfire for two to six players!

You have been caught looting the hoard of the dreaded Drakon. For such transgression, a fiery death should be the only appropriate response. But Drakon has decided to toy with you before she devours you. You and your rival heroes will each be released into the labyrinth, and the first hero to discover ten gold pieces will go free with his treasure. The rest of you will satisfy the dragon’s hunger.

In every game of Drakon, you and your opponents must fight to stay alive in the midst of the labyrinth. On your turn, you can either move your hero to another room, or add another piece to the labyrinth, placing beneficial chambers in your own path and throwing your opponents into harm’s way. But you must be cautious. The chambers of Drakon’s labyrinth are filled with danger and ancient magics, not to mention the dragon herself. To navigate these deadly corridors and survive, you’ll need to be quick and careful.

Shape the Labyrinth

On every turn, you have a crucial choice to make. You can either move forward into a new chamber, or you can expand the labyrinth by playing a new chamber tile from your hand. The new chambers that you play feature unique circumstances and magical objects that you may encounter on your adventures through Drakon’s lair.

The majority of these chambers offer powerful effects to any hero that enters the chamber. You may gain the power to destroy any chamber in the labyrinth, or call a windstorm to carry you along, increasing your movement. You may even take command of a floating chamber and fly it to the other side of the labyrinth. Other chambers force more harmful effects on those heroes unlucky enough to enter. A room may cause you to lose a coin as you avoid the dangers within, and any hero who hears the siren song of the magical harp is forced to move into its chamber. As you and your fellow heroes play these chambers from your hand, they form a cunning maze, and only the wise can find their way out.

Despite the power of these chambers, the central goal of your quest is to find gold: only by being the first player to claim ten gold can you escape the dungeon. Plenty of chambers allow you to find a coin or steal a coin from an opponent, but the gold value of coins can vary dramatically. Your most recently stolen coin may have a value of three gold or just one. Because coins are kept face-down, hiding their value, you’ll never know exactly how close your opponents are to victory.

The Heroes and the Dragon

Six heroes are trapped within Drakon’s sadistic labyrinth, and each hero has his own unique abilities to help him survive. Each ability can only be used once per game though, making the timing of the ability incredibly important. You may play as the sorceress and escape from a most dire situation by passing through a wall. You may play as the thief and collect the gold you need at the most opportune moment by preying on another hero. You may even play as the ranger and use a burst of speed to race across the maze when necessary. No matter which hero you play in a game of Drakon, you’ll need to take full advantage of your unique ability at the opportune moment if you want to grab the gold and escape from Drakon’s clutches.

Of course, the heroes are not alone in the labyrinth. The legendary dragon also stalks the halls and chambers of the maze, taunting any hero unlucky enough to encounter her. Certain chambers throughout the labyrinth allow you to move Drakon through the dungeon. If you can move Drakon into the same chamber as a hapless hero, that hero is immediately sent back to the entrance chamber and loses three coins, as Drakon toys with him before releasing him once more into the maze.

Escape the Labyrinth

You and your rival heroes are trapped. Your greatest threat may be Drakon or the other heroes. In this dark labyrinth, only one thing can save you: your own greed. Will you ruthlessly grab gold and undermine your opponent’s schemes before escaping to victory? Or will you fail and become just another meal for the dragon? You decide your fate, but only one hero can escape from Drakon!

Check out the Drakon description page for more details, and look for Drakon in the second quarter of 2015.

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It Is Your Destiny

Announcing the STAR WARS (R): Force and Destiny (TM) Beginner Game

“I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”

    –Luke Skywalker

Follow your destiny with the Star Wars®: Force and Destiny™ Beginner Game, the perfect entry into the Star Wars: Force and Destiny roleplaying experience for players of all skill levels!

With its complete, learn-as-you-go adventure, players can open the box, ignite their lightsabers, and explore their destinies as Force users in the Star Wars galaxy. Pre-generated character folios keep the rules right at your fingertips, while custom dice and an exciting narrative gameplay system advance your story with every roll.

Learn as You Play

The abridged ruleset, which is incorporated into the included adventure, allows you to learn as you play throughout your adventure. With plenty of opportunities for combat, social encounters, clever thinking, moral conflict, and more, Mountaintop Rescue, the included adventure leads you through the fundamentals of Force and Destiny even as you participate in its action-packed narrative.

High up the snow-clad slopes of Mount Tellec on the Outer Rim planet Spintir, you and your allies must travel to an ancient temple and rescue the humble scholar Hethan Romund, one of the few individuals still willing to share any knowledge of the fallen Jedi Order. All the while, the game’s mechanics are introduced incrementally as part of the exciting narrative.

Character Folios Get You Into the Game

In the Star Wars: Force and Destiny Beginner Game, you’ll choose one of four pre-generated characters and jump right into the game. Will you play as a human trained in the arts of defense, a mysterious Zabrak mystic, an agile Togruta seeker, or a lightsaber-wielding Kel Dor able to move objects with the power of the Force? The included character folios keep all the information you need to assume the role of your character at your fingertips.

Each eight-page folio includes a background explaining that character’s connection with Hethan Romund, the Force, and the other heroes. Additionally, quick reference guides cover the basics of the game’s core mechanics, as well as plenty of options for advancing your character during Mountaintop Rescue and into adventures beyond.

Build the Story with Unique Custom Dice

The Force and Destiny Beginner Game features a unique custom dice mechanic that provides a wealth of narrative options. Symbols for success, failure, and complications are all printed directly on the dice. Even a successful roll can place you under threat, and even a failure can create some advantage.

In this system, which takes all narrative conditions into account, players and Game Masters quickly build a dice pool for each task. Then they roll and let the dice help guide the growth of the story.

The Star Wars: Force and Destiny Beginner Game is scheduled to arrive at retailers in the second quarter of 2015. Visit our Star Wars: Force and Destiny Beginner Game description page to learn more. Then, gather your friends, clear your mind, and head into the mountains of Spintir. May the Force be with you!

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Source: It Is Your Destiny

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Fantasy Flight Games Is Now Hiring

We Are Currently Accepting Applications for Two Positions

Fantasy Flight Games, leading hobby-market publisher of board games, card games, roleplaying games, and other tabletop games, is now hiring for the following positions:

   
• Application Developer (pdf, 82.5 KB)

   
• Temporary Associate (pdf, 68 KB)

Details can be found in the pdf documents linked above.

   
• To apply for the position of Application Developer, please submit a cover letter with salary requirements and resume to HumanResources@fantasyflightgames.com; under the subject line “Application Developer” no later than end of business day Tuesday, January 30, 2015.

   
• To apply for the position of Temporary Associate, please submit your application (pdf, 106 KB) to HumanResources@fantasyflightgames.com; under the subject line “Temporary Associate” no later than end of business day Friday, January 16, 2015.

Please do not call or visit.

Our offices are located in Roseville, Minnesota, a suburb of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Candidates not already living within commuting distance must be willing to relocate. Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer committed to a diverse work force and a work environment free from discrimination.

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Source: Fantasy Flight Games Is Now Hiring

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Cold, Metal, and Evil

A Preview of the IG-2000 Expansion Pack for X-Wing (TM)

“You want me to describe the inside of IG-2000? It’s cold and metal and a little bit of evil. Just like its pilot.”
     –Dash Rendar

What makes X-Wing™ such a compelling game?

There are any number of different factors that you could cite. There are the game’s meticulously detailed and pre-painted miniatures. You have the inherent drama of dice rolls and the strategy involved in maximizing your odds. You can field squadrons from some of the galaxy’s most iconic starships. Then, you can pilot them with such heroes as Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, or with such notorious villains as Darth Vader and Boba Fett.

However, once you really fall in love with the game, few thrills top that of executing the perfect maneuver. If you get it all right, you might fly past the enemy ships, slam through a hard Koiogran-turn, and catch your target right in your sights. Or you might fly in from the side and catch your target dead-to-rights, even as you’re completely outside his firing arc.

Getting it right, though, is a matter of both skill and knowledge. When you lock your ship’s maneuver into its maneuver dial, you need to both correctly anticipate your opponent’s maneuvers and judge the distance that your ship will travel. This means that you want, at least, a practical understanding of your ship’s maneuvers and an awareness of the maneuvers your opponent’s ships can execute.

Of course, some ships have more potential maneuvers than others, making them more exciting to fly and harder to anticipate. One of these ships is the Aggressor, the starship included in the IG-2000 Expansion Pack.

 A 360-degree view of the Aggressor.

The Aggressor and Its Maneuver Dial

The Aggressor is no freighter, shuttle, or support ship. It’s a powerful assault fighter designed expressly for space combat and loaded with potent power cores and weapons systems.

In X-Wing, the Aggressor is an agile, tough, and hard-hitting fighter with a balanced stat array of three Attack, three Agility, four Hull, and four Shields. Additionally, the Aggressor’s action bar features the focus, target lock, and evade actions, as well as the boost action, making it the first large-base ship in X-Wing to feature the boost action natively.

All these stats and actions make the Aggressor an intimidating fighter to have bearing down upon you, but the real key to the ship is its loaded maneuver dial.

The Aggressor is able to perform every single straight maneuver, bank, or turn at speeds “1” and “2,” and most of them are green. Then, at speed “3,” the Aggressor features three green maneuvers, one straight and two banks, as well as two Segnor’s Loop maneuvers. Finally, the Aggressor also features a speed “4” Koiogran-turn.

                                         

The Aggressor's maneuver dial.

Altogether, the Aggressor’s fully loaded maneuver dial ensures that you’ll always have one or two good maneuver options. Your opponent will never know exactly what to expect.

On the other hand, you’re going to need all the maneuverability and element of surprise that the Aggressor offers because it only features a forward firing arc. You don’t have a turret weapon or rear firing arc to help you compensate for botched maneuvers. Certainly, you can use your illicit upgrade slot to equip a “Hot Shot” Blaster or Feedback Array. However, you’ll still want to focus on your flying, as these upgrades are for limited use only.

In many ways, then, the Aggressor is the first large-base ship that’s all about its maneuvers, and that might just make it the most “natural” of the large-base ships yet to arrive to a miniatures game that is – at its heart – all about outmaneuvering your opponent in order to get the ideal shot.

Of course, its pilots are anything but natural…

IG-88 and the IG-2000

The IG-2000 Expansion Pack comes with four ship cards, all of which present different, unique models of the deadly assassin droid IG-88. Each comes with a pilot skill value of “6” and costs thirty-six squad points, but the four models are clearly differentiated by their unique pilot abilities.

                                                                                                                                                                                          

	As assassin droids, all the different IG-88 models are excellent killers. However, IG-88A also boasts a unique pilot ability that allows him to excel not only at killing, but also at surviving. Each time he destroys an enemy, IG-88A recovers one shield.
	IG-88 earned a reputation as a bounty hunter who always delivered, and this consistency is reflected in IG-88B’s unique pilot ability, which functions almost like a built-in Gunner. Once per round, if he performs an attack that does not hit, IG-88B can perform an attack with an equipped cannon upgrade. Notably, you can use the same cannon twice, so if you miss, for example, with an Ion Cannon, you can fire that Ion Cannon again, aiming for a better result.
	IG-88C is the slipperiest of the four models, gaining a free evade action each time he performs a boost action. After all, despite all of his strength and armor plating, it was the speed and scope of IG-88’s superior intelligence that truly made him such a lethal threat, and if he’s equipped with Push the Limit or Experimental Interface, IG-88C can perform as many as three actions, easily clearing his stress token each round by performing one of his many green maneuvers.
	The fourth and final of the IG-88 models, IG-88D adds two more maneuvers to the Aggressor’s already astonishing dial. However, IG-88D’s ability goes beyond the mere addition of two three-speed Sengor’s Loop maneuvers; it allows him a choice at the moment he executes his maneuver. Accordingly, if he has a higher pilot skill value than his target, IG-88D can subtly adjust his maneuver from a three-bank Sengor’s Loop to a three-turn Segnor’s Loop. In turn, this may give him the edge he needs to catch a rival within a firing arc that otherwise may have just missed.

Finally, as deadly and talented as each of these IG-88 models are on their own, the IG-2000 Title upgrade allows them to link their abilities.

Accordingly, we’re likely to see a number of solid squad builds that feature two copies of the IG-2000. Imagine, for example, the staying power that you’d gain by linking IG-88A’s ability with that of IG-88C. Equip both with Push the Limit, and you’ll have two high-powered ships that can potentially boost, evade, focus, and recover shields round after round.

Alternately, you could link IG-88C with IG-88D and equip both with Advanced Sensors to field a starfighter duo whose maneuvers will be nigh impossible to predict.

 In this example, IG-88C uses his Advanced Sensors to perform a boost action before revealing a three-speed Segnor’s Loop. Realizing his maneuver (shown in red) would fail to catch the X-wing within his firing arc, IG-88C uses IG-88D’s ability to perform a three-turn Sengor’s Loop (shown in green), which catches the X-wing in arc, allowing him to shoot for the kill.

No matter which combination you choose, or even if you run just a single model of IG-88, you’re certain to find plenty of tricks among the potential combinations of pilot abilities and upgrades. Then, it’s up to you to use these tricks to outmaneuver your opponent and line up the perfect shot.

An Elite Killing Machine

Every bit as deadly as its pilot, the IG-2000 is a perfect blend of attacking power, agility, and resilience. With its myriad maneuver options, it’s also the perfect large-base ship to fly about the battlefield in an unpredictable fashion. Keep your opponent guessing.

In the coming weeks, keep your eyes open for more previews of the IG-2000 Expansion Pack and the other Wave VI expansions ships, including a faction overview by developers Alex Davy and Frank Brooks!

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Make Your Money Work for You

An Overview of the Weyland Consortium by Guest Writer Andrew Grace

Few characters in fiction or cinema are quite so compelling as a truly dangerous villain, and the Weyland Consortium may just be the best villain in the world of Android: Netrunner.

This isn’t to say that the Corp will admit anything other than the fact that it has continued to improve the world by leading the development of new construction and tapping into new energy resources. However, the people who play Android: Netrunner know that there’s plenty more to the Weyland Consortium than you’ll ever find in the newsies. There’s a dark side. A considerable dark side. And whether or not this darkness is necessary to preserve all the good that Weyland brings to the world, the moon, and the exploration of space is a matter of dispute.

In the game, it’s enough for Runners to know that the Corp has very likely initiated massive neighborhood renovation projects just to create the rubble under which it can bury the bodies of those who crossed it.

Today, in the fifth of our faction overview articles, guest writer Andrew Grace dares to offer us a quick peek at the different things the execs may discuss behind the closed doors of the Weyland Consortium.

No Advertisement Necessary

Like most Android: Netrunner players, I like to imagine what the advertisements for the various corporations would actually sound like. NBN’s ads would be hyperbolic and trendy. Jinteki’s must feature tranquil music over a backdrop of streams and trees and perfectly bio-engineered babies. Haas-Bioroid’s might resemble something you would see in a German car commercial; only instead of a finely tuned sedan cruising along the Autobahn, you would have finely tuned biotic laborers constructing high-rises in a single day. Still, the reassuring baritone narration would be the same.

The Weyland Consortium, however, doesn’t need that kind of smooth salesmanship. Their ads? I imagine that they just put the WC logo on the screen and say, “The Weyland Consortium. You can trust us because we already control you, and you’re probably still alive.”

And that’s why Weyland is the best Corp in Android: Netrunner. They’ve already won, and they can afford to wait until you realize it.

Money: It’s Still Good for You

The Weyland Consortium is the old money of the Android: Netrunner world, its Tom and Daisy Buchanans, if you will. They don’t need to evolve or refine themselves in pursuit of perfection like Jinteki. They don’t need to stay up-to-date like NBN or engineer the future like Haas-Bioroid. They don’t need to steer the world in their favor because it’s already working in their favor.

Weyland’s tactics are tried-and-true, and I imagine the drink of choice at their corporate retreats is the Old Fashioned. They would rather advance the ice they trust than develop some new sentry or code gate with a list of subroutines so long and so complicated that you have to read it three times. They’re also the only Corp with cards that feature firearms, and while firearms may seem archaic compared to cerebral mapping or genetically-engineered psychics, they offer the same definitive conclusion to some future concerns as they do now. In fact, the next time I play a Punitive Counterstrike (True Colors, 79), I intend to tell the Runner his mistake was “bringing a cyberdeck to a gun fight.”

Weyland isn’t in a rush to change its ways because it knows that the best way to keep making money is to have the most money available to invest in the first place. To the uninitiated, Weyland’s Core Set identity card, Building a Better World (Core Set, 93), may not look like much. Each time you play a transaction operation, gain a credit. It seems straightforward enough, but it’s missing a phrase commonly found on identity cards, “Once per turn.”

If you play three transaction cards in a turn, you gain three extra credits. For those of you doing the math at home, that’s a whole turn’s worth of credits for the average Jinteki player, and it’s just a turn-end bonus for the average Weyland player.

Consider the net returns. As far as I can tell, Hedge Fund (Core Set, 110) may be the single most commonly played card in Android: Netrunner, and it offers twenty-five percent better returns when you’re playing Building a Better World versus any other identity. Beanstalk Royalties (Core Set, 98) is thirty-three percent more profitable, and the low-influence Green Level Clearance (A Study in Static, 70) offers fifty percent more credits to a Weyland player than an in-faction Haas-Bioroid player.

If you start your turn with a mere two credits – which seems unlikely, because you’re playing Weyland – you can play the Green Level Clearance that draws into the Hedge Fund you need to afford to Restructure (Second Thoughts, 40) and end your turn with sixteen credits.

Furthermore, if you’ve spent a few turns advancing your Ice Walls (Core Set, 103) or Swarms (Opening Moves, 18), you can recoup your expenses – and make a tidy one-credit profit, of course – with Commercialization (Cyber Exodus, 58). With Paywall Implementation (The Spaces Between, 28), you can even ensure that any time a Runner actually dares hack his way through your ice, you still make a profit. And with Sealed Vault (The Spaces Between, 29), you can keep your precious credits safe from any crafty, would-be Criminals hoping to bleed you with an Account Siphon (Core Set, 18).

Even your agendas give you credits. Government Contracts (A Study in Static, 77), Geothermal Fracking (Opening Moves, 17), and Hostile Takeover (Core Set, 94) all reward you with enormous profits, as if to apologize for forcing you to spend the clicks necessary to advance them.

When you play as the Weyland Consortium, the question isn’t whether or not you’ll have credits; the question is what you’ll do with them.

No One Is Safe

So what does the Weyland Consortium do with all its money? It buys power.

I like to think that Weyland execs plan a wide variety of different ways to use their nearly inexhaustible supply of credits to buy all the power and influence they need to look into their enemies’ doomed and terrified faces and state, cooly, “I’m going to destroy you. And possibly everything you love if it suits my interests. But definitely you. Whenever and however I feel like it.”

Then they go back to the office and spend some spare change on the PR (or extortion) necessary to assure the rest of the population that any rumors they may have heard are completely unfounded and not worth their time.

This means that the Weyland faction satisfies a uniquely aggressive, authoritarian impulse that the other Corp factions just don’t. Most Corps rely on a certain level of subterfuge to score their agendas: Is that card with two advancement tokens an agenda or an ambush? Is that unrezzed ice a harmless barrier or a program-trashing sentry? They can’t always protect their agendas, but they must always do their best to convince the Runner that the cards in their servers are, in fact, well-protected… or that they’re not agendas.

On the other hand, Weyland could play with their agendas face-up and it would make very little difference. Weyland could throw six points worth of agendas in its archives, and it would only serve to convince a Runner to leave the archives alone.

Why? Because all of that cool Criminal confidence, all of that carefree Anarch boasting, and all of that studious Shaper preparation mean nothing to Weyland’s ruthless arsenal of meat-damage inflicting cards. Jinteki may tax your grip with relentless net damage and Haas-Bioroid’s bioroids may gradually fry your brain, but Weyland will straight-up murder you. And they will spare no expense to do so, because “expense” is only a meaningful concept if your funds are finite.

Weyland will murder you, and then they will deploy their legion of black ops cleaners and PR geniuses to make sure no one remembers you ever existed.

There are just two cards at the crux of Weyland’s murder brigade: Scorched Earth (Core Set, 99) and Punitive Counterstrike.

Cards like Dedicated Response Team (Future Proof, 118) and The Cleaners (Second Thoughts, 36) may also contribute to the general aura of terror surrounding a good Weyland deck. They can soften the Runner up or put the nail in his coffin, but Scorched Earth and Punitive Counterstrike are so potent as the faction’s core retaliatory threat that you don’t even have to put them in your deck. There’s a good chance that as soon as you reveal your identity to a Runner, that Runner’s going to start drawing cards until he finds a Plascrete Carapace (What Lies Ahead, 9), and that sort of fear can give you all the time you need to install a solid wall of ice in front of your central servers or start looking for your hardware-destruction cards.

Yes, in addition to owning all the best means of doling out lethal quantities of meat damage, Weyland also boasts the necessary tools to make sure that Runners can’t do anything to protect themselves. Not only will Power Grid Overload (Trace Amount, 37) and Taurus (Upstalk, 9) destroy their body armor and leave them praying for a quick end beneath a falling asteroid, but Swarm, Archer (Core Set, 101), and even a well-timed Burke Bugs (Future Proof, 119) will trash their programs.

As the Weyland Consortium, it’s your job to remind those impudent thieves that those funds are yours because you earned them, and you intend to protect what’s yours. It always seems to happen that, in the final moments, every single thing that those Runners see around them belongs to the Weyland Consortium. Then… The End.

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Source: Make Your Money Work for You

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Make Them Bleed

Preview the New Uthuk Y'llan Units of Warband of Scorn

With adrenaline coursing through her veins and the taste of Daqan blood on her tongue, the Blood Sister leaned back on the barricade and began chanting the summons. It wasn’t long before the earth began to quake with a low rumbling, and then it broke open as a giant, spined, insect-like demon crawled out of the ground. The Blood Sister laughed with glee and ran her fingers along its curved back. “Are you hungry, Doombringer? There are delicious humans just beyond this barricade. Go. Devour them. It is time for our people to rise.”

Lacerate your enemies with Warband of Scorn! In this Army Pack expansion for BattleLore Second Edition, you’ll find four fiendish new Uthuk Y’llan units and additional Blood Harvesters to support them. Build your own diabolical custom armies by combining these new units with ones from the core set, or use the two Army cards included in the expansion to instantly deploy balanced and ferocious armies composed entirely of units from Warband of Scorn, ready to devastate your opponent and feast on their blood.

Today’s preview introduces the four new units of Warband of Scorn: burrowing demons, Blood Sisters wielding dark magic, creatures whose very bones can deal damage, and deranged infantry troops. You’ll learn each unit’s capabilities and discover the strategic advantages of the Warband of Scorn and Bleeding Coven armies.

Blood and Bone

Centuries ago, the Uthuk Y’llan were first transformed from mere desert hunter-gatherers into vicious and relentless, warriors by drinking demon blood. To this day they continue to drink demon blood and use it in their dark rituals, but above all they crave the blood of their enemies. feeding upon it and draw strength from spilling it. Two units featured in Warband of Scorn, the Blood Sisters and the Grotesque, specialize in drawing blood. They can Bleed other units, slicing their veins and weakening them so that the Bleeding unit rolls one fewer die in combat.

The Blood Sisters are the powerful and cruel priestesses of the Uthuk Y’llan: practitioners of blood magic, demon tamers, and ritual murderers. On the battlefield they, like the Greyhaven Battlemages of Hernfar Guardians, constitute Caster units: ranged infantry fighting with magic. They have a movement value of two, a combat value and health of three, and their dark magic can harm enemy units up to three hexes away. With a lore result, they can Bleed nearby friendly units, sacrificing the strength of their own forces, in order to deal damage to the target. Yet the Blood Sisters’ magic can heal as well as harm: with a heroic result, they recover a point of health if the target unit has suffered any damage.

So much demon blood flows through the veins of the Grotesque that little humanity is left in them. Their limbs are transmogrified and their very bones have become weapons. They have the same movement, combat value, and health as the Blood Sisters, and with a  heroic result, they can Bleed the target unit and feast upon that blood. Instead of advancing, they can shoot forth sharp bone spurs from their body, attacking a target within two hexes and rolling three dice. Thanks to this Bone Blast ability, the Grotesque can lay waste to enemy units without taking a dangerous position. To come within range of a Grotesque unit is to beckon bloodshed and death.

Deranged and Devouring

Joining the Blood Sisters in the front lines are wild Beserkers driven insane by their thirst for blood. Insanity makes them unpredictable: their Deranged ability allows you to reroll a die in every combat roll a unit of Beserkers makes. The opportunity to reroll increases your chances of dealing damage or unleashing their Thousand Cuts heroic ability, which deals a point of damage to an adjacent enemy unit whether or not that unit was the original target of an attack. Such unpredictability makes the Beserkers a terrifying threat. The fact that there are four Beserkers in each unit makes them even more pernicious.

The fourth new unit is the Doombringer: a ravenous, creeping, six-legged demon drawn into war by its insatiable hunger. Its movement value of three is enhanced by its burrowing ability, which allows the Doombringer to ignore movement restrictions of hexes it moves through and sneak under the enemy without their knowledge. Wherever the Doombringer goes, its presence stops the enemy in their tracks: Elite and Infantry enemy units adjacent to a Doombringer cannot be commanded to move. In addition, with a heroic result, Doombringers devour infantry and cavalry, gnawing away at anyone or anything within reach of their massive jaws.

Warband and Coven

The Army cards in Warband of Scorn offer two armies: a destructive invading force determined to lay waste to everything in its path, and a ritual encampment ready to lash out at any attackers. Warband of Scorn is a decentered, offensive army capable of attacks on multiple fronts and litter the battlefield with the bleeding dead. It’s infantry-heavy, with three units of Beserkers and two units of Blood Sisters, joined by two of the three Blood Harvester units included in this expansion. Two Grotesque units and a Doombringer complete the army, the latter allowing you to slip beneath enemy lines and attack from the rear, the former allowing you to occupy a strategic position and prevent anyone from advancing past it.

The Bleeding Coven is an incredibly flexible defensive force that draws strength directly from the blood it has recently spilled. Again, infantry dominate: three units each of Blood Harvesters and Beserkers are supported by two units each of Blood Sisters and Grotesque. The remaining muster points are spent on two Blood Fields: magical pools of blood that nourish the Uthuk Y’llan, giving health to an Uthuk unit occupying one at the start of its turn. Well placed, the Blood Field hexes have the potential to make some of your units invincible. At the very least, they grant you extra time for killing and harvesting Daqan blood.

A Taste for War

For the Uthuk Y’llan, war is exhilarating, a chance not only to take revenge upon an enemy, but to delight in their gruesome deaths and, above all, savor the taste of their blood. The units of Warband of Scorn excel in spilling blood, in performing magic with it, and using it to enhance their own strength. Whether you integrate these units with other Uthuk Y’llan forces, or let the Warband of Scorn itself take the field, they promise to put fear in the hearts of the Daqan Lords and transform your games of BattleLore.

Pre-order Warband of Scorn from your local retailer today!

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Source: Make Them Bleed