DGA brought a limited supply of air-shipped sets of the new Heroes of Might & Magic CCG & Tile Game to Gencon last week. The response was electric. DGA only had a crew of 5, so they limited the “training sessions” to 12 people in the program, however, there were at least 16 players waiting to play for most of the New Player Training Sessions. The air shipment of available product was gone by noon on Thursday (typically the slowest day). Since the demo tables were slammed until almost 2 AM, the crew had no opportunity to retrieve any more product from their hotel until that night. Breaking into the stash held back for Dragoncon (a large southern gaming convention), they opened fresh on Friday with the last remaining product from the air shipment. It was gone by 10 AM. Aaron Whiten, the operator of the Gamestation booth where the product was housed theorized that if 4 times the amount of product had been available, it still would have been gone by the second day. The phenomenon only confirms what one distributor rep at Origins suspected. Stan Sord of ACD distribution had observed that unlike other games, Heroes IV brought together miniatures players, card gamers, RPG players, and war gamers...which is unheard of in the tabletop gaming industry. He even floated the comment that the game has the chance to become the next Magic the Gathering.
Such wild speculations aside, comments like “I wasn’t sure what to expect, but this rocks!” and “This plays just like the computer game!” were commonplace among the new players. One new player who had entered the New Player Tournament but was unable to get any product before it was gone, actually bought one of the demo team’s personal custom deck (a might-life combo deck) for an exorbitant amount of money. It paid off, as he and his Order-Deck-wielding partner won the New Player Tournament...
Names of the winners will be posted on the DGA website soon (dgagames.com), as will listings for future events.
It sounds like the game got a good response and it should be interesting to see some reports from readers of this site when they get a chance to play. If you have played the game, feel free to send your comments to us here.
