Book of heartfelt messages planned from Easton

Kathy Endriunas could not stop thinking of the heartbreak suffered in Newtown, Conn.,The stone mosaic series is a grand collection of coordinating Travertine mosaics. after the school massacre there took the lives of 20 children and six staffers.

After watching a mother of one young victim say she hoped that through the tragedy love would win out, Endriunas came up with the idea of sending hope, encouragement and love to the residents of Newtown through a book of messages written by Easton residents.

“I just wanted to do something,” Endriunas, of Easton, said. “It got me to thinking, if we do something as a town it would be wonderful.”

Endriunas today launches a town-wide drive for residents to pen their thoughts or simply sign their name to a special message card to remind the folks of Newtown they are not forgotten.

She has gathered card stock that will be painted with pink hearts, pens and plastic sleeves for the cards to fit in.

Once she has gathered all the messages, Endriunas said, she plans on putting them all together in a beautiful hardbound book with Easton’s town seal on the front.

“The idea is that it would be something held in your hand to look at or get passed around to families of victims to look at,” Endriunas said. “It will be a way for us to show our caring from our town to their town.”

While there are over 23,000 residents in Easton, Endriunas said she was hoping to get at least 2,000 people to turn out and write messages.

“I just hope it brings them hope that Americans care, that we’re united, and that they just feel loved,” Endriunas said. “I hope that they will know that we care about them and that we, the town of Easton, haven’t forgotten them.”

Each card has an assigned point value which adds up in the total deck value. The cards also have a set of stats and discard value as well as playing cost. There’s a description of what the card does, and minion cards will tell you what the minion’s stats will be when the minion is in play. Once you’re in and actually playing, your deck is shuffled and you always have an option of 5 cards pulled from your draw pile.Source crystal mosaic Products at Mosaics. If you do not play anything from your hand, you lose a point of health that turn. To play a card, you have to have so many points in your pool that you get from discarded cards in your hand, based off their discard value. On your turn, you can play cards or use points in your pool to tell your minions what to do specifically. Normally, minions act in a certain manner, positioning themselves to follow a set of rules. Dragons and Sorceresses will always try to attack groups of enemy minions to unleash the most amount of damage, for example. Kobolds will always go after the weakest of the enemy units on the board. They follow these basic guidelines unless you spend some of your points to order the minion to do something else, like guard a tile or a unit, or to attack a specific unit.

Minions are good against certain units, but weak against others. Terrain will also affect their attack and defense stats. Their attack chances are given and determined by a dice roll we can’t see, hailing back to the tabletop origins of the game. Your minions are summoned at your Avatar, a color-coded tower that sits on the field of tiles. As your minions die or you take damage to the tower directly, your tower will chip away until nothing remains, which means you lose. Eliminating your opponent’s tower will get you the victory. There are cards that can increase your health and your minions health, as well as special attack cards or cards that give your minions special abilities or defenses as well as upgrading them. While you can do one on one style games, there is an option to have up to six people playing at once, and you can also set up teams to play against one another, or play co-op with a friend to take down an enemy AI unit.

Being able to customize your deck to just about your heart’s content, a full blown level editor, and being able to set-up your own custom matches just about pushes this game’s replayability through the roof. The somewhat no-holds barred nature of the game and letting you mix and match minions to your heart’s content without limiting based on types adds quite well to the game. The random nature of CCG’s also adds to it, as you have a basic strategy for a deck, but its performance is also based on what you’re up against and how well you’re pulling against your opponent, making each match unique. The multiplayer aspects would be better if there were more people online to play against, but if you have a friend pick it up, it’s easy enough to pop on at the same time online and hook up that way.

As far as balance goes, as long as you don’t back yourself into a corner with how you build your deck and leave options, no one deck is better than the other. The minions have strengths and weaknesses, and as long as you try to use their tactics against them, things generally move smoothly. Deck point costs are fairly accurate, as are the points required to get the cards out and how much you get for discarding. Also, because the game is online, the developers are looking to tweak the cards on an ongoing basis, so that if there is an issue with a card being too over-powered, they can adjust it for everyone so that it’s not something that gets banned from play, as so often happens with one of the longer running CCG’s out there today, Magic The Gathering.

Overall, I’d have to say the game is solid. I never had it crash on me, the visual tweaks you can do to make it look prettier work great, and other than me having very little brains and skipping the tutorials, I managed to figure out how to play pretty quickly. I’d easily recommend this to anyone interested in tabletop miniatures, CCG’s, or both. It’s got enough depth to keep people interested in the strategies, and being able to just create your own tile layouts, coupled with the deck builder, is a fantastic experience.Like most of you, I'd seen the broken china mosaic decorated pieces. The price is good and it’s free to at least try with a 150 point deck, so you have little to lose on it. My only complaint, and this is minor, is that you can’t build your decks when offline. I understand the logic behind it, but I’d have liked that option in there.