I picked up the Lion starter as I’d heard it came with 4 rares rather than the 3 most others have. I didn’t get much to help my deck except the fixed 3x card called ‘A Legion of One’, which helps my Heroes. However, over the course of the evening, I acquired a ‘Setting Sun Strike’ and three copies of ‘Dangerous Reconnaisance’.

Mike Morgan and I played another game, but this time I played Crab and he played his Spider Clan deck.

Early game I was able to buy a Secluded Outpost and put it to good use, getting ‘Hida Manoru’ and the ‘Heavenly Tetsubo of the Crab’ in play and taking a province. Unfortunately for me, he got Daigotsu in play the next turn, which make me really reluctant to go after more provinces. The next several turns were spent building up. I ended up having all three copies of ‘Advance Position’ in my hand and no scouts I wanted to bow to do the action.  I ended up going for his provinces with my whole army and ‘Hida Kuon” was able to take one on his own. However, most of my army got decimated by the Spider’s tricks. Surprisingly, he didn’t attack at my weakest moment. Eventually, he was able to take two of my provinces, so we were even on the province side of things. While most of his people were bowed out, except ‘Michio’ with a couple of attachments and ‘Daigotsu’ with a ‘Balanced Yari’, I decided to go in for the kill. My huge mistake was trying to be sly with Kuon with ‘Fubatsu Blade’ and ‘Imperial Elite Guard’ and not send him, hoping to use his Battle action to get him in the fight before Daigotsu could take him over. I had ‘Sneak Attack’ and ‘Peasant Vengeance’ in my hand. Of course, in deciding not to send Kuon in, I screwed up as he’d just wait until he did move in to take him over. This pretty much ended the game as I’d be all bowed out while his army would be able to attack next turn.

We wnet ahead and played it out to see what would have happened had I sent Kuon like I should have. I would have used ‘Sneak Attack’ to use the ‘Imperial Elite Guard’s’ battle action, destroying Daigotsu’s ‘Balanced Yari’. As a Reaction, he would have played ‘I Carry Two Blades!’ to give Daigotsu a ‘Balanced Yari’ from his hand, thus allowing him to take over Kuon anyway.

It was a good and relatively close game. I need to get a few more cards and a few more games in to help with my tactics, but I think I do okay for not having played in a while.

It seems the new edition of AEG’s Legend of the Five Rings, called Celestial Edition, was just released. Something about starting from scratch with a game I started playing back in Gold Edition is appealing. I seem to do this just about every edition since with me playing the game for varying intervals.

One of the things that drew me back in is the redesign of the cards. Man, they look really awesome now. While I have had a bit of trouble identifying some of the card types, I think I’ll get it under control pretty easily. The cards look somehow more “serious” (except for some of the anime-style art that I hate) and professional. I really dig the new look.

In the past, I have always played Crab and usually played Phoenix as a secondary choice. Back in the end of Samurai, I did the opposite. I’m sticking with that trend in Celestial as I read that the Phoenix have been redesigned a bit to allow for less loss of your Shugenja when doing the Shugenja/Samurai split. So I bought a starter and 5 boosters. In a couple of my boosters I got duplicates of a Crane Personality, which I will likely never use. I was able to build a deck from these cards, though I didn’t have enough copies of some of the more cool Actions (now called Strategies). I was able to throw down a game with one of the local guys, Mike, who had only bought a starter and a few boosters as well to build a Lion “Blitz” deck. I didn’t want to really play any of the guys who bought whole boxes of cards as I felt the playing field would have been too skewed in their favor. At 9pm, we called the game a draw with me having several more Personalities than he, yet having lost one Province.

I really like some of the rules changes in this edition. One thing is that you start with one or two Holdings in play depending on whether you are going first or not. One of those Holdings even allows you to get a new Dynasty draw. Another thing that is a change for the better, is that you start with 6 cards in hand instead of just 5. For the most part, everything else is pretty much the same.

I noticed several cards from way back making an appearance, though I can’t think of them now, so I’ll need to go through my old cards and find copies of those.

I hope to be able to play this game a bit more as I remember our old group from back in 2001 or so having a ton of fun playing this game.