Edition Wars: Great Fun in Small Packaging

Not a huge post, but just a quick one to discuss in brief the first offering by GamerNation Studios, aka the guys behind the D20 Radio network.

Funded via Kickstarter earlier in the year, Edition Wars has officially been let loose upon the world.  Part of the premise is it's a quick, fun card game you can throw down while waiting for the rest of your gaming group to show up, or perhaps play if the GM suddenly can't make it (which is what happened tonight).

As most of our group for the bi-weekly Marvel Heroic RPG had shown up but the GM had to beggar off to avoid excessive wife aggro, that left a bunch of gamers ready to game but no game on hand.  Luckily, I'd brought along my copy if Edition Wars so at least our gathering wasn't a total waste of everyone's time and gas money.

We only played a couple times, and the first one had some referring to the instruction pamphlet (not really a booklet) a few times just to make sure we got things right.  Nothing's worse than playing a game, not having fun, and then realizing you'd screwed up several key elements.

Well, fun was to be had, as well as laughs galore at some of the gamer types and the GMs, as well as various Critical Effect cards.  I must admit, it felt kind of odd to lose the game because my own gamer card was the 6th gamer in to another GM's group.  I'm going to want to play a few more times before I really go into an in-depth review, but suffice to say it's a really fun game and worth the $25 to pick it up at either your FLGS or various online gaming retailers.

In other news, while I've not been posting much here, I have been far busier over at the Gaming Security Agency website, found here: http://gsa.thegamernation.org/

I've done a couple of advice articles, including a warning about excessive house ruling taken from my own long experiences with RPGs and an incessant urge to "tweak" things under just about any RPG I've played or GM'd.  I've also kicked off a running series of articles called "Heroes on Demand," which is intended to provide ready-to-run characters, all of them rules-legal, for new players and time-pressed GM's alike.  I'd say about half of the offerings so far are for Star Wars Saga Edition, although I really do hope to change that in the weeks to come.  Already there's a Chest-Deep hero for the FATE-based Dresden Files game as well as a doughty adventurer for Warhammer Fantasy.  And there are a lot of other great articles by my fellow Agents that are worth your time to check out, so if you haven't scoped out the GSA website, go do so.