Relic Knights 1st Edition

When the BoW team first did their Relic Knights week a number of years ago, I was really blown away by the unique nature of the turn sequence. The minis were nice, very Anime, but the main thing that caught my attention was the turn sequence and the way the Esper deck was used for everything from scenario generation to task resolution.

I bought a few starters and additional packs for the Star Nebula Corsairs and a friend of mine bought Black Diamond. We played the game a few times in our local club and interest started to gather speed. Then the second edition Kickstarter campaign hit.

This slowed the pace of the game as many who were interested at our local club were turned off by the idea of buying into a game that they had to wait for minis to play. I still put into the kick but was soon really annoyed by the development of the 2nd edition.

The development of the rules seemed to be driven by people who liked the models but couldn’t get their head around the turn sequence. And then Ninja Division turned the game into an alternating activation turn sequence with a set number of turns….. Booooooo.

I felt that this torn the heart out of a rather unique game and essentially made it no different in feel to Malifaux. So I rage quit, which I regret now as I am a great believer in playing the rules you like rather than chasing editions. I play 4th edition Fantasy, 1st Edition Napoleon at War, Trafalgar rather than Black Seas etc.

So it’s now a few years later and my Girlfriend’s son, Jason, is a huge fan of Anime. We were watching Akame Ga Kill and it reminded me somewhat of Relic Knights and I mentioned this, showed him some of the models and he went crackers (he is already a gamer who has a massive Ultramarines army for 40k) and we decided that we would try and get some models and play the game in its 1st edition.

I lucked out with a few eBay lots and a big collection of Cerci Speed Circuit and then a random collection from various other factions. I currently own all of Cerci Speed Circuit and most of Shattered Sword and Star Nebula Corsairs with a small amount of Noh Empire, Doctrine and Black Diamond.

We split the factions with Jason taking Shattered Sword and Doctrine and me taking all the rest. And now the painting begins ?