Playtest Results

I playtested a 300-point game last night at home using several proxy miniatures.

Setup

The Light was represented by Evangeline, Kronen, Tsubasa Kurokami, Janus Faith, Khaine D'Lacreu and Faust Orbatos. The Dark was represented by Dark Cheshire, Shinigami Ayl, Alessa Raincross, Bael, Dereck Shezard and Sophia Ilmora. Light was at 300 points while Dark was at 290 points. It would have been nice if I shifted out Sophia Ilmora for a Jiang Pao, but I wanted to see how Sophia's buffs would work in-game.

It was hard moving from table side to table side. I tried using Chessex glass beads like the ones I use for WARMACHINE to represent action points on the cards. I found it more convenient to just mark the cards with dry erase markers (again like WMH).

The game will be slow with two guys who are just new into the game, but I forecast a 300-point game on 10 turns to be done in less than an hour if both are already familiar with everything.

Being a low model count game, it would definitely be better to have a lot of terrain pieces on the table. As per the rules, there will be a minimum of two terrain pieces and a maximum of six terrain pieces in a game. The book fails to mention specific dimensions for said terrain pieces though. A safe assumption would be nothing larger than 12"x12" for a 4'x4' table.

Preliminary Tactics

As I was gunning (pardon the pun) for a fast and shooty Dark party, I tried to see how Light's approach to that would be. Looking back, Light has a healer via Evangeline. They also have a lot of high Armor models that can survive withering ranged attacks from Dark.

But what really screwed Light during my playtest was when Bael managed to snag Kronen with Paralysis. It was definitely annoying, it felt like being Icy Gaze'd for two turns.

At first blush, Dark would definitely seem to be a shooting force, while Light would have a tanking footslog. Well, it's still early in releases with a few models. I'm sure it'll have more variety by next year when more ANIMA models come out.

What I Heard

I was already attracted to the whole thing when I saw the Shinigami Ayl character design. Even more so when I got to surfing for them (along with the other miniatures games I planned on playing).

Larkin Vain (Joel) is already playing this with another player there at Hawaii Gamers. Evidently he enjoyed it so much he already purchased the currently released models. For sure I'll be following down that same path as well. I have chatted with him on several occasions and I have never heard a bad word about ANIMA from him.

Aggranal (Alger Lim) from Singapore says the game did not pick up in that country. He says that around the early part of 2007, they got some stock of the game there. Apparently, the models they got were of poor quality production (in his words, he said they looked like "their faces were hit by a truck").

I'll still be ordering a sizable amount of the miniatures which will hopefully arrive early January next year.

I have already pimped the idea to several close friends. Whether or not the local miniatures gaming community will come to support it, expect that I will continue to support it from my end myself ^_^