Today is another big day here at Encounter Table! With the help of NZ Post yesterday, I finally have all the components I need to assemble complete sets of Close Encounters!
Now, these are still pre-production sets – not everything is coming shrink-wrapped from a factory. But the components are all there, and the game can now be purchased.
What’s that you say? You want to see what it all looks like? Well, since you ask so nicely…
Here’s the box, and everything that comes in it. 48 map tiles, 15 highly-detailed trooper figures (with three sets of coloured bases to identify the different squads), 3 crate tokens for missions, 24 bugs, 4 dice, a rulebook, a set of campaign missions, and a mission book. You get everything you need to enjoy the game straight out of the box. Let’s take a closer look at some of the bits…
This is a comparison shot of a squad of troopers. On the left is as they come out of the box, on the right is after I painted them up as ‘Green Team’. As you can see, they paint up okay, and a better painter than I could make them look pretty good!
After I got everything assembled, of course I had to try it all out in a game! Here’s Green Team at the end of the first turn of a ‘Resupply’ mission. Things are going okay so far: most of the tile deck has been explored, the objective has already been located, and although the bugs are building a worryingly-large stack there are no spawn points near the objective. Not a bad start!
I also swapped the figures for the painted ones, just to see how it would all look. My opinion: pretty cool!
Now that I’ve got some sets available, I need to start making progress on marketing. Watch this space…
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