Pic: Empok Nor, The "Haunted House" of DS9
It's the middle of the night here at The Compound. The first guests of Texas Chainsaw Masters arrive tomorrow. Pumped full of steroids and antibiotics I find myself asleep and awake at random hours these past few days. There's even a zombie walking around the house who calls himself Ken. He looks like a guy I used to know back in Jersey....
I won't spend this blog ranting about Australia. There's nothing to say here that I haven't raged about on the boards. Instead we're going to break the 4th Wall of Design and talk about the Halloween boutique set Dead Stop. 9-card holiday boutique sets were my idea. As the new KFC Night Manager of Design (meaning Charlie has giving me some latitude in choosing which projects the Designers pitch. I facilitate now, instead of designing) I also wanted to bring these type of mini-expansions back. Going down to 27-card expansions there was some concern about the segment of people who simply like larger sets. I figured this was a compromise.
I think Dead Stop was well received. Holidays give you a theme to work with, and 'spooky/scary/murder' is one you can play around a lot with. I recently proposed we keep going, using Valentine's Day as an excuse to do a 'love/romance' theme boutique. I was surprised at the lack of enthusiasm and downright resistance to the idea from a portion of the Design Team. I don't know... we'll see. I hope it's a project we can bring to the players. Speaking of Dead Stop, let's bring two cards out for today's GCBC. Since it was a scary set, let's start with the bad first.
Why: So when I saw the first test file Charlie and Jeremy put out there was good and bad. Charlie wrote about his 'failure' (this is not a dirty word in Design) on the CC site. The 'murder dilemmas' weren't one of them. I liked the concept very much. Great synergy between the dilemma pile and the draw deck. Save cards to play, get your dilemma to hit, the play and murder. Making a planet version of this type of card was going to be a tough one, and I think we missed the mark here with Subspace Fracture. Sure, you're getting at least one stop. But since the rest of the dilemma probably won't get you kills (your opponent can simply beam any extra personnel down to the planet), that's an expensive filter. And getting it to go on the ship is a 50/50 shot. The 2 Geology and 2 Transporters is a difficult requirement, but non-hand weapon equipment is seeing more play lately, so if they have one, this probably won't hit. There needed to be some 'lock the people' up on the ship, but then we get into wall-of-text territory. I would've just ignored all the other stuff beside the stop when costing this card, since it's rarely going to pop, and that brings it down to 2, maybe even 1 cost. Then it's a little more palatable.
Why: When Charlie asked to do the first Holiday boutique I told him I wanted three things: Vulcan Zombies, the Scary chick from the Savage Curtain and Susperia from Voyager. Sadly, after testing I only got one. At first I hated this image. I wanted all the zombies coming from the door. Pure Horror. Now I kinda see what Matt went with, the suspense of some bad shit about to happen. This dilemma you can go all-in with. Play your Trellium-D's, murder. Get the dilemma to hit. Play more equipment, murder. The requirement are easier on this dilemma than Subspace Fracture, but that evens out the card. Plus, only costing 3 (this is probably undercosted compared to the overcosted Subspace Fracture) you will be able to put filters in front of it.
