Scape Hunting: Magic Arena of the Planeswalkers

We were so excited to read about AofP. I was going to say we haven’t been that excited about Scape stuff in years.... but of course there hasn’t been any Scape stuff in years. Fanscape is great, but for us the game is really about new minis and terrain. And wound markers. And dice.

So the prospect of getting new Scape stuff was really exciting. It was a little reminder of how things used to be.

Canada is a great place to live but we don’t get the variety of games or new releases so quickly. I live about 15 minutes from the US border so I really don’t understand how things can’t make it across that imaginary line. I know things get tied up in red tape. We understand that. We don’t cross the border because of some trouble in the past involving a toy hand grenade, but we won’t go into that. Anyway, we were excited and so I went to my LGS to see if they had AofP.

Guess what? Both LGS were closed. Not closed as in we’re at home sleeping and please come back tomorrow but closed as in we have dropped off the face of the earth and the store space is bored up and empty. When did that happen? Okay so I haven’t been there in a while, but still – I guess the internet kills LGS. Or is this part of some larger plot?

In the summer I went on a strange trip to Ottawa (Canada’s capitol) where I became trapped in a cave. Actually that’s another story. But I did hit some of their games stores, and even TRU Ottawa had AofP. I was tempted to buy it but I was on my way to the airport and where would I put it? If it’s in TRU in Ottawa wouldn’t it be in TRU where I live?

Did you guess the answer was no? It was not in the store. I even asked. They had never heard of it. They tried to tell me that I was wrong, that Magic was a card game. They looked in their computers. They had no record of it. They were so certain I was wrong. It was so infuriating, I almost peed in their Wii display. But I’m Canadian, so of course I didn’t do anything. We’re way too polite.

I opened up the internet and looked in various forums. It was suggested that AofP was only for sale at one or two stores in Canada. That’s really stupid. Canada is geographically the largest country on earth. If AofP was for sale in only two stores I’d never be able to find them.

So in typical Canadian fashion, I chose to wait a while, which is also called doing nothing. Weeks passed. I went back to my TRU and now they had AofP on the shelf. Ha! I said in the board game section! Ha! I was right! Ha! People began to move away from me. Don’t they know toys make people crazy?

The game is about twice as expensive in Canadian dollars as it is in US dollars. Everything is. That’s not fair, you know?

I was very excited to get the game home. I gave it to my oldest son and he opened and we looked at the pieces. Scape terrain. Some big cardboard pieces that could be used for quick set up maps, though we didn’t really like the way the water was laid out. The cardboard scenery -the LOS blockers- were a little weird. How do they fit on the map? We sat for a moment in silence, reappreciating those RofV ruins one more time.

The minis were okay I guess. We would have preferred them to be painted. Should we paint them? We miss Scape minis. Scape had the nicest minis. The dice seemed strange without skulls on them.

I know it sounds silly, but what disappointed me the most was the wound markers. These were little square cubes like the energy units in King of Tokyo. I miss the old wound markers. Good thing we have six large jars of them.

We set the terrain up, read the rules a bunch of times and played a game. Those rotten elfish archers got glyphs and slaughtered me. The game was over quickly. We remembered why we made our own custom game.

I’ll admit I need to give it a second look and a second try. But if you remember, my family has mostly played our own custom game and not Classic Scape anyway. We already have a magic system, one that works better with Classic play.

Now I’m sad. It was so much fun to feel that Scape hunting rush again- the excitement of hunting it down, fighting with TRU employees and finally buying it. But now it’s done. I know there’s supposed to be expansions. Will we buy them? I don’t know. Money is tight these days.

It has been said that one cannot appreciate a golden age without experiencing its decay. That makes me sad too.

It’s nice to see excitement here though, and I hope y’all are enjoying the new crack! Though this crack doesn’t seem so addictive....