Blizzard’s World of Warcraft franchise is expanding into almost every medium. The latest incarnation is the CMG from Upper Deck Entertainment. UDE is already publishing the CCG for WoW so it makes a sort of sense using them again. That said to my knowledge UDE has never done CMGs before, so they’re breaking into new ground.
The game’s not been released yet but having played a game of it a recent Gen Con the mechanics seem to be a faithful reproduction of the MMO computer game’s combat system. Actions that your miniatures take time to cooldown and become ready again. This ‘time’ is represented in terms of ticks and each miniature is to be fitted to a base that tracks its ticks and health. There is a blog post that already explains the game system better than I can.
The miniatures themselves are a little over the top. Yes, they hold a lot of detail and have that cartoonish look that is so Warcraft but they’ll look out of place proxying creatures in other miniature games. From UDE’s FAQ, the miniatures are designed to 40mm scale… that’s a whole centimetre taller than most miniature games. I think UDE is forgetting the practicality of bigger miniatures – we don’t all have masses of space to store these miniatures and CMGs tend to invite punters to invest in large collections. I have some bias on this – I like having miniatures from several game system to look good together.
Purely on gameplay, I liked this game. It felt fair that the most powerful actions miniatures could perform, whilst causing large amounts of damage, would cause them to be sitting ducks. It feels a lot like the MMORPG the game is descended from with appropriate cooldown times and miniatures being resurrected at graveyards.
The fact that UDE has created a vast amount of artwork for their CCG and then based the models for this CMG on that gives the game a style that couldn’t be touched by other rivals.
The only major gripe is going to be the pricing – from what the guys at Gen Con were saying, this game is going to priced higher than most geeks can afford. Firstly, you must buy the base set, then each miniature pack is going to include only three miniatures (rivals include around five). Not good.
It remains to be seen if this takes off but I think it’ll be a collectors only game.
Filed under: Upper Deck Entertainment, World of Warcraft, miniatures | Tagged: miniature, wow
