02D46: Deckbuilding Queue

Tuesday - Transformers Deck-Building Game

This week, two separate deckbuilding card game expansion orders arived via our forwarding service. First from Upper Deck Entertainment, our copies of Legendary James Bond - No Time to Die and Legendary 2099. The first one is for the James Bond game that is fun to have (as I am a completist) but admittedly not our most-played version of this game line. The latter is a rare find as the expansion was pulled from retail partners for some reason and was only available on the Upper Deck Store. But buying directly from Upper Deck had a fun bonus - an exclusive art variant of the Magneto mastermind card that is waaay more intense.

The other batch was another direct order, this time via Renegade Game Studios. This consistent of the latest expansion for the Transformers Deck-Building Game, this being Chaos Unleashed. And since the pre-order was only available on their web store, I took the chance to pick up 5 other promo packs for the game (the last one was out of stock!) And now they're all here.

At least we can say that all of the Legendary games in our collection see varying degrees of play from time to time. But I have to admit that we've only played the Transformers game once - and that was during the lockdown period. I enjoyed it a bit better than maybe the Rick & Morty deck building game but the main challenge has been not feeling sure about introducing the game to more people.

But Tobie has been continually supporting this game line for me and we have the three base sets and 4 main expansions of the game despite not getting it to the table enough. Admittedly, I'm feeling rather guilty about this and I think I'm going to put more of an effort to play the game more, even if just with Tobie. What I need are more Transformers fans in our gaming circles so they can better relate to the game or just not care and subject them to these weird transforming robots.

Franchise games like this are always tricky as we always need a degree of familiarity to make the most of it. This is why our board games related to Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, and The Expanse see so little play. At the same time, I suspect that not all of our friends enjoy deckbuilding games as much as Tobie and I do so we mainly play on our own except for games based on more accessible franchises (like Legendary Encounters: Alien) or those whose themes are just more inviting (like Clank!). 

But I shouldn't sell these games short, I suppose. We have gotten a lot of play out of Dune Imperium despite most of the players not being all that familiar with the movie that helped inspire the game.

If anyone wants to volunteer to play any of these particular games with us, please let us know.

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