Dreamblade....

Or: How not to make a presentation at a trade show.

So yeah, they spent the majority of this 20 min presentation talking about O.P. on a game that is yet to be released...but let's not start there. Dreamblade is the new 40mm TMG from Wizards of the Coast. It will debut at Gencon Indy (big surprise), so here is what I was told. The player will take the role of a "Dreamlord", who then pushes minis around the table like in, um every other miniatures game. When they did talk about the game for like 3 seconds, they seemed to want to push the aspect that the game was "Fast and Speedy." They didn't exactly explain why...but it is speedy! They emphasized this fact because they have "Pro-Magic" players on staff as part of the R&D process. Yes, that makes it speedy.
Another random point they wanted to make, but just came off as really unclear, is that the game is designed such that even against great odds, a player can make a "comeback" (even the title of the slide) in the last turn to take the game...

So yeah.

The game itself was designed by John Tweet, and uses proprietary 6 sided dice. 5 of the 6 sides are regular, but the 6th is a blade. Rolling blades triggers the special effect on the model, which (seemed) to be defined on either a card, or maybe on the base. Who knows.

The game has 4 factions: Fear, Passion, Madness and Valor. I would try and explain what those mean...but they didn't really explain it. Maybe if I had more to drink, I would make something up...
Now the one interesting thing is that the "Warbands" you create, can be cross faction. This does allow for any random booster to be valuable to all players. That's maybe the one keen thing they did talk about.

So then they spent the whole rest of the time pimping Organized play. Did you know that WoTC invented OP? Well, they think they did, and made a bunch of mention about it...woo yea! I would go into it, but honestly, I don't care. Perhaps if they hgad a real game here that people would care about, they wouldn't have to pay people off with $500k in tounrament money in the first season.

They then got to the advertising portion of the presentation...where they proudly proclaimed that "Marketing isn't that important right now...we can talk about that with you all in the booth." Uh...yeah.

So, is this post confusing? Yes, but honestly, if you heard the same presentation, you would also understand that I spent some time organizing it for them. It was HORRIBLE. Totally uninformative, poorly presented, and really, underwhelming. They did give us a "thing" that looks like a business card holder, but promptly didn't explain what it was. The rest of the evening has been booth babes tossing out free drink coupons, and T-Shirts. WoTC....you can SO do better than this, really, you can. Sigh...I need a drink, Thankfully I have a free coupon.