Winter 2012 Holiday Bundles: Warmachine

As you may already know, Privateer Press has put out some 25-point holiday bundles for purchase on their online store.  They've been doing this with increased frequency the past couple of years and this time it's good to see that these bundles include warcasters outside of the normal battlegroup boxes (kinda).
It's cute that they're including metal ornaments with the bundles, but I'm sure most people will be glad to have a good starting point for adding another faction.  Also, each bundle includes a mini-copy of the rulebook (40k fans have been calling for this for their game for literally a decade) and the tokens for the faction.  On top of the discount for the models themselves, this is a pretty nice chunk of stuff to receive for free, so keep that in mind with my value rankings.  I will include the tokens in the discount calculation, but there's currently no $-value attached to the mini-rulebook so keep that in mind.  Also, it's worth considering that with the exception of the Retribution and Mercenary sets, each of the deals includes the battlegroup box for the faction, meaning that you do get 2 warcasters out of the deal so you have some options.

Like I've done in the past, I will be reviewing these boxes for their monetary value, power level on the table, and longevity (how good it is for building a force in the future) and instead of giving an objective score, I will instead give them rankings relative to each other.

War Room: A history and review

So I posted on the Steam-Powered Gamer facebook page this morning that I will be going on hiatus this week due to a last-minute move between apartments, but something special happened today that I had to break my hiatus for:
Pretty much everyone in the Warmachine/Hordes community should be aware by now that War Room has officially been released!
There's been a lot of drama swirling around the War Room release and the numerous delays.  Well, the wait is over!... sorta.  Let me provide a brief history for those who might not be aware of what has happened leading up to this historic release and my impressions of playing with the application itself for the past few hours.

Review: Privateer Press Summer Deals

For those who are not following www.3plusplus.net, I wrote two articles recently reviewing the Privateer Press Summer Deals because Kirby asked me to.  I must apologize for those who've already read these articles because I will be recycling them here today, but at least I'm combining them into a single article (which will be found in the future under the 'Review' tab above) and I have downgrading a couple of ratings after some discussion and reconsideration.  While Games Workshop is raising prices on 200+ items, Privateer Press is offering special 25 point deals on products through their online store.  I'll be rating these on a 1-5 scale on Longevity (how often you'll use the models in the deal), in a similar style to when I rated the Battlegroup boxes on my own blog, but I'll also rate these based on the Power of the 25 point list in the deal.  Just to clarify, I do mean the 25 point list created from the models you get in the deal itself compared to any other 25 point list you might come across.  This means that I'm not so much ranking them relative to each other, but more sharing my opinion on whether it'll be a solid list playing against anyone at 25 points.  Since each of these deals has a savings of about 25%, you at least know that you're getting a pretty good deal here.  Lastly, at the end of my review I'll include my [brutally honest] concluding thoughts about the deals themselves.