Would the Cloak of Shadows helped you at all?  The wizard tower can't target you if you are more than one zone away.  The wizard won't be able to teleport you from a distance either.  If he moves close enough to teleport you, your Brutes can move in and pound him.

Wow, this past Saturday was such a great day of playing Mage Wars!  Six bold Mages braved yet another winter snow storm to come out and try to dominate in the arena.  I would like to thank them for making this tournament a truly enjoyable experience.  I also need to thank Karl at the Games Keep for allowing us to use his store to run the event.  He has a great store with an insane selection of games.  If you are ever in the West Chester area you need to check it out!  Another big thanks goes out to the guys at the Not Just Another Gaming Podcast (NJAGP).  They are a podcast about boardgames, RPGs and geek culture.  The guys sent us a ton of prizes to give out at the event.  They gave us so much stuff that I had to save half of it for the next event!  Go check out their podcast!  Now!  Finally, I want to thank Arcane Wonders for supporting the tournament by sending out a gigantic batch of promo cards.  Still got a ton of them left over for the next event too!

Here is a list of the players, their mages and the final standings:

1st  Tom L. (tom): Necromancer 13 points
2nd Rich (ringkichard): Air Wizard 7 points
3rd Tom C. (wtcannonjr): Necromancer 6 points
4th Tom J. (not on forum): Priest 5 points
5th Doug (not on forum): Necromancer 5 points
6th Ed (Roundman): Beastmaster 4 points

Here are the matchups and results:

Round 1
tom (necromancer) v. ringkichard (air wizard): tom modified win
wtcannonjr (necromancer) v. Tom J. (priest): wtcannonjr modified win
Roundman (beastmaster) v. Doug (necromancer): Roundman modified win

I was a little disappointed that none on these matches finished on time.  I am pretty sure all six of us were playing non-agro builds and that led to all of us timing out.  I know my match and one of the other matches was one turn away from finishing though so it wasn’t too bad.

Round 2
wtcannonjr (necromancer) v. Roundman (beastmaster): wtcannonjr modified win
tom (necromancer) v. Tom J. (priest): tom win
ringkichard (air wizard) v. Doug (necromancer): Doug modified win

This round saw the first full win.  Not sure how close the other two matches were to finishing.

Round 3
wtcannonjr (necromancer) v. tom (necromancer): tom win
Roundman (beastmaster) v. ringkichard (air wizard): ringkichard win
Doug (necromancer) v. Tom J. (priest): Tom J modified win

Finally we get two full wins.  I think by this point the players knew to pick up the pace a little bit and were more familiar with their spellbooks.


My experience at the tournament:

Round 1
Ringkichard and I have played each other twice before this.  We were each 1-1 going into the game so we had joked that this was the big grudge match.  Our match started out slow with a build-up of forces.  Ring spent his time pumping out 2 hydras, an ooze from his Gate to Voltaire and a wizards tower.  I spent my time putting down skeletal knights, some skeletal sentries, some deathfangs, Mort, a Deathlock and Idol of Pestilence.  The two most important factors in the game were my Cloak of Shadows and an untimely advance of one of Ring’s hydras.  The cloak prevented Ring from easily pulling my necromancer away from my horde of skeletons and into the hydra pit.  Once it became apparent that that wouldn’t work, Ring decided to advance his hydra into the zone separating our creatures.  He did it early enough in the turn so I was able to swarm it with skeletons.  I think he was counting on the hydra’s counterstrike to deter me from attacking.  Unfortunately for him I didn’t care all that much because I figured Mort would be able to repair most of the damage done by the counterstrikes.  At the end of the turn I had killed one of the hydras and wounded the other.  From there, the skeleton’s just chased down the wizard and took shots at him whenever they could.  The game ended in a modified win but I do not remember the difference in life totals at the end.  It was an awesome game and a wonderful confidence builder because I know that Ringkichard is such a great player.

Round 2
This round I played my buddy Tom J.  He is relatively new to the game and was playing with a spellbook I put together for him so he wasn’t too sure of how to play it.  Despite those disadvantages he gave me a very good fight and managed to get me down to about 10 life when his priest finally succumbed to the hordes of undead.  The highlight of the game for me was when he summoned Selesius, the East Wind in my start zone on turn three or four.  Didn’t expect that and it definitely sent me into panic mode.  Luckily I was able to weather the storm by hiding  behind my skeletal knight and using my other minions to chip away at his health.

Round 3
So it came down to the two undefeated necromancers.  My entire strategy of poisoning the enemy and wearing him down over time has been thrown out of the window.  I decided to take a page out of the wizard’s book and try to form a pit of creatures and plop wtcannonjr’s necromancer in the middle of it.  The problem was that he had the same anti-teleport protection from the Cloak of Shadows that I enjoyed.  Both of us started the match with nearly identical openings until we began summoning creatures.  His book was based around zombies while mine is based upon skeletons.  I think in the end this favored my mage a bit more because he couldn't use bloodthirsty against my creatures and I was able maneuver around more easily due to his inability to double move.  The turning point in the game was the turn my necromancer used the final action of the round to move into the zone between our 2 mages despite it being occupied with several of his zombies.  On the following round I had initiative, but wtcannonjr cast a wall of bones separating me from my legion of skeletons during the first quickcast phase.  I countered by teleporting his necromancer to the zone next to my skeletons then I stepped out of the zombie pit and cast my own wall of bones to stop his zombies from pursuing me.  After being separated from his creatures I just had to run him down with the skeletons.  It did take me a while to finally kill him as wtcannonjr had some clever plays that blocked off my pursuing creatures and I learned a couple of new tricks to watch out for.

Here are some pictures of the event:

Well, I will try to add these if I can figure out how to post them!
You can view the photos over on BGG.


If you want to see my Necromancer’s spellbook, take a look at this thread.

Will we be getting a full tournament report, along with who won and what types of books people were using?

I'd be very interested in hearing how everything played out and I'm glad it went well!

The tournament report is coming, I promise. I just need to get a few minutes to write it up! Please stay tuned!

Well it looks like Arcane Wonders has climbed up to #100 with 16 thumbs.  They have also made the Hot & Fresh list at the top of the page! Keep giving out those thumbs!

Hi everyone. I wanted to point out that I recently submitted Arcane Wonders to the publishers list over on BoardGameLinks.  BoardGameLinks is a website that compiles links to various boardgame related sites.  They are currently working on regrouping, classifying and ranking the best board game sites on the web. Publisher sites and online store sites are in specific sections.  Currently, Arcane Wonders is ranked 152 on the publishers list with only 7 likes.  We can do better than that!  Please take a moment and click this link and give Arcane Wonders (and any of your other favorite publishers and websites) a thumbs up.  You don't have to sign up for anything or even log in.  Thanks!

Hey everybody! Just want to put out a quick update on the tournament. Arcane Wonders has sent the prize support to the Games Keep and it should arrive there on Thursday. We are also receiving some prizes from the NJAGP (Not Just Another Gaming Podcast) podcast.  The hosts are also Mage Wars players and have generously donated some stuff to support us!  You should definitely check out their podcast on The Dice Tower Network.

We are less than a week away from game time! If people could check in on if they are planning on being there or not, I would greatly appreciate it.  Thanks and I will see everyone in a few days!

Tom

It is usefull to hea and protectl Acoloyte of The Bog Queen...if you want active Altar of Skulls it is very important to have livefuul Acoloyte (

Not if you bring him back as a zombie! Just hit him with a Rise Again enchantment.