[cfarrell]

I have to say that I found this product fairly disappointing, because there is no reasonable "casual play" option that brings in the specialists. But at least it's inexpensive.

The "impromptu" play mode is boring. All the decks have identical mixes of troops (same number of archers, same numbers of heavy infantry, cavalry, etc.), so you're more or less ensured of two more-or-less the same armies going at it. It's OK, but one of my issues with the core game was that all the scenarios were pretty samey because they just featured two more-or-less identically-composed armies fighting. It's one way to solve the gross scenario imbalance problems you see in Memoir '44 and Command & Colors: Ancients, but not a particularly satisfying one.

So most players, competitive or not, are going to crave the variety of the "organized play" mode it seems to me. But unless you own two copies of the game, you run into problems pretty quickly: you almost immediately overrun the figure count on Goblins and Dwarves, you still have no way to incorporate the blue promo creatures (come on guys! I want to use my Earth Elemental!), the specialist cards are extremely uneven (who's going to take the Longbow upgrade when the deployment system is only ever going to give you a couple archer units? Especially when you can get some powerful Dwarves?), and the rules for distributing those specialist cards when you "only" have one set are lame. Plus, of course, you've taken the preparation time for a game from being merely long to seeming a bit unreasonable.

So it seems to me your average player is caught between an "impromptu" mode that really isn't all that interesting, and an "organized" mode that can't really be used with only one set without some hacking around that ultimately produces only middling to fair results. While I can almost make Call to Arms work for what I want to do - play interesting and varied scenarios without buying another copy of the game - and at least it's fairly inexpensive, I was nonetheless disappointed that they couldn't deliver a system that fills the game's biggest hole, the lack of quantity and variety of "official" scenarios. A Call to Arms will not allow you to experiment and see what happens when an army based around the longbow runs into an army built around heavy knights.