The Other Dave wrote:me_in_japan wrote:airtight rules
I'll believe it when I see it.

So apparently this thing actually does have really good rules! I'm hearing a lot of excellent buzz about Shadespire
as a game, namely that it's very fast to play, rewards tactical play, and while there's no customization of the figures in your warband, lots of space for customization and "list-building" through customizing the objective, upgrade and dirty tricks cards you bring along. Plus a (relatively) super-cheap buy-in cost - the core set is 8500 yen, and warbands are 4000 - helped out a bunch by the fact that you don't
really need to buy anything besides your warband if you're not interested in chasing cards*. And it's proving very popular among Japanese gamers (unsurprising given its play area and storage requirements), so getting into it may help a bit with the bridge-building stuff that some of us have been talking about lately.
*Each warband includes about half and half warband-specific and universal cards, so (as is common with these things) you may end up wanting a card or two that comes with a warband you don't really want. But still, it's not going to be as bad as, say, X-Wing, since you can never have more than 1 copy of a given card in your deck, and for casual play the cards you do get will still allow for lots of customization - you get a lot more cards than you're legally allowed to build your deck with with just the one warband.
The 8 warbands scheduled for launch are just 2 varieties of stormcast eternals, 2 varieties of khorne-flavored chaos dudes, orcs, skellingtons, skaven, and those weird AoS naked fire dwarves, but still. Seems like there's lots of space for expansion.
I've pretty much decided to buy myself an orc (orruk, whatever) warband this month, and probably pick up the core set with my winter bonus next month. For 4000 yen, why not?