Wednesday 15 May 2013

First Look: Mag Blast

As I mentioned only two post ago, Mag Blast, which I purchased less than 24
hours ago has already seen table time, and poor pun wholly intended we've had a blast with it.

It's light, fast-paced and, win or lose highly enjoyable. It's a perfect filler game, with only one major drawback that we have found so far. Your initial draw can make or break your game, with two of the three that we played yesterday lasting all of five minutes from start to finish.

So we've house ruled our way around this by introducing a mulligan style mechanic:

House Rule

If you are not happy with your initial draw of 6 Fleet cards you may shuffle them into the Fleet deck and draw 5 replacements, of which
you must choose 4 for your initial set-up.

If this still doesn't work out for you, you could theoretically drop down to 4 cards using the same method but, no more than that and even then you are really pushing your luck. That really does seem to be the name of the game though, luck.

You have to be lucky with the initial fleet that you draw, you have to be lucky with the action cards that you draw and, if you want to cause catastrophic damage, you have to be REALLY lucky! This isn't such a bad thing though (particularly in the case of the latter).

When I initially looked over the cards prior to the rules I was a little concerned just how easy it seemed to blow a ship out of the sky instantly, which can end a game just like that.

This was however an error as it's actually very difficult to achieve a "critical hit" along those lines as you need at least three cards to pull it off and, you only draw up to five every turn (unless you draw something that lets you draw more) at the most. There are still plenty of devastating attacks that you can throw out there though, for example the name-sake Mag Blast, which will happily take out the majority of fleet ships.

Overall, play is of the fast and furious variety, so if a fast-paced space skirmish sounds up your street you can't go far wrong with Mag Blast. If you're looking for deep strategy though, this really isn't going to be the game for you.

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