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Origins is over, and the post-show discussions are abounding. ^_^

MMP did indeed release Few Returned. As I’m one of the later pre-orders, I figure I’ll get my copy late this month, maybe early August.

ADB apparently had a good year, but there’s a couple of things getting lots of discussion:

The Star Fleet Battles tournament once had 100-200 people in it, but has been in serious decline for the last several years. This year it was apparently in the realm of ‘tiny’. Interestingly, some of that is due to cannibalization into Federation Commander players… and some is due to cannibalization into Federation & Empire players. (The first is obvious, I would never have expected the latter. But apparently the well-organized F&E at Origins efforts I’m used to hearing about are relatively recent, and sucked in a few people who used to regularly compete in the SFB tourney.) This has sparked some discussion on how to get the tournament healthy again, which has also reached into the typical ‘get more people playing SFB‘ discussion.

One of the F&E games played at Origins lasted a record-breaking… two turns. A playtest of an updated version of the Turn-10 start of the General War (essentially untouched since the game was released in 1986), the Coalition was able to force a surrender in face of the inevitable devastation and capture of Earth, with no real prospect of even seriously hurting the Coalition in the process. The influence of Joe Stevenson, who played the Romulans, is definitely being felt.

They went on to have fun with another game, and discussions are proceeding on how to fix the scenario so it can be tested again. Most of it revolves around limiting the Coalition (mostly Klingon) setup options a bit. The F&E ‘wishlist’ has ended up with a few designer rubberstamps that I didn’t expect. The Romulans and Gorns get bumps in their construction, a couple of rules have been tweaked, and a few rules are officially looking to be ‘fixed’ (but with no obvious immediate solution).