Living Card Games

Some of you know I've recently become heavily involved in the LCG community in Sheffield so I just thought I'd talk a bit about the games that get played in case there's anyone looking to play these kind of games.

How LCGs work is that the game starts with a core set of cards and expansions are released, often quite regularly, to increase the size of the card pool. Expansions contain specific cards, there's no randomness or rarity like you'd get in Magic. The large card pools mean they're quite expensive games to get in to, but these are the kind of games where you could happily just play that and nothing else.

Games involve building a deck out of these cards, following the rules of the game, and playing that deck against your opponent's. You can netdeck by finding decks people have built online if you don't want to get involved in that part of the game. This is often a good idea early on.

There are groups at Patriot who play Game of Thrones (which I don't know much about) Netrunner (which I'll post a review of soon if you want to listen to me harping on about it) and Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn. There's also a Star Wars LCG that's supposed to be good, but I've not seen anyone play that yet. At Wargames they just play Netrunner (at the moment).

Ashes is a pretty new thing and is special in that you can play it very easily with just one core set. Expansions come out very infrequently and it was designed so that it was much cheaper to play than its siblings. It's a dueling mage game, which plays a lot like the computer game Hearthstone, but with dice. And it looks amazing!

If you're interested in playing these kinds of games then I'm happy to demo/introduce you to people who play them.

I quite like the look of Ashes, I've played Netrunner before a couple of times and I like that as well, haven't tried the others yet.

How long does a game of Ashes take Lizzy?  

Unfortunately I've got loads of card games I've only played a couple of times, too many great games and not enough time to play them all!

Played Summoner Wars with Sam, thats a good game as well.  Would like to try out some more of the factions.
Seasons - card combos with dice, would be interesting to see how it compares to Ashes
Beserk - Russian version of Magic, kind of Summoner Wars ish with deck building and army building elements
I've got Game of Thrones HBO version which is similar to the big box version but a bit cut down and only for 2 players.
Dominion - bought Seaside and haven't played it yet...
Smash Up!
etc....

Ashes is a great intro LCG. I'd say it takes about half an hour if you know what you're doing. I'll probably be bringing it with me the next few weeks so just let me know if you want a game.

I like Seasons, not played that for ages!