The fact that the game is 60-70% off right now helps too :)
That’s the answer I was looking for :) Thanks!
If you’re playing today, here’s today’s Temporal Mutation.
I was going to swap out River on tonight’s run, but now I guess I won’t!
I’m playing a mission with my favorite story yet, The Best of All Festivals. It features an autonomous car that’s driving around town trying to run over a bunch of kids. Your Choir of Saints is randomly driving around town from location to location to location to location (up to 25 locations to be precise), trying to follow this car and protect any kids it finds from the rampaging vehicle. Aside from the cool story setup, I like the twist on the game’s mechanics in this mission.
Normally the game clock is composed of Omen cards that you draw and can use to investigate a few specific Nexus points (locations around town), while trying to complete the mission objectives. But instead of drawing Omen cards this time around, you’re drawing from a stack of 24 Nexus points, and replacing the current Nexus point with the drawn one before you confront whatever you find at that location. Constantly switching up the Nexus points this way had been leaving my party completely hammered from encounter to encounter because they’re all placed DOOM side up to start, and so far the ones I’ve been drawing have been doing a number on my party with each of their DOOM powers.
Anyway, I’m having a lot of fun with this mission, and it seems a lot riskier than the other Candlepoint missions I’ve played up to this point. A little while ago I stopped playing so I could eat, but I’ll be diving back in shortly.
Wait where is that?
Wait, should I ask you to answer this for real? Do I need a giant boardgame to add to my mental health-destroying apartment clutter??
Here you go:
Right? It can be so random, but it’s such a clever way to represent chasing down an evil AI possessed self-driving car that’s trying to run over little children!
He might also be referring to fact that Lone Shark games was selling the core game and the two expansions at a deep discount when the covid-19 outbreak began. They maintained absurdly low prices on a lot of their stuff from March 13th to July 1st.
-Tom
Yeah, that car adventure is really clever.
And it highlights what I think I like most about Apocrypha. The game has it’s central core gameplay loop: locations and characters are cards, you draw cards from the location decks and encounter them using cards from your character deck. Repeat.
But what’s great is the number of ways Apocrypha seems to be stretching at the bounds of the PACG gameplay loop, finding news ways to use that structure to do interesting things.
@kerzain, any recommendations for good learning resources (preferably text based)? I admit, I set this game up every year or so and just bounce right off it, get frustrated, and throw something like Comancheria on the table or solitaire a hex and counter wargame instead.
I played the ‘Enter Here’ short tutorial game, solo with four Saints. It was really good and I’m keen to play a proper game!
I found it pretty straightforward once you get the steps and symbols. Refer to the play aid, follow the steps, use the rulebook’s glossary section. Occasional FAQ and BGG search for any questions.
To learn the game, I read the manual, watched the Enter Here video it links, and also watched some of this one (at fast speed, skipping bits because I kind of had the idea already by then):
The manual wasn’t as bad as I’d heard. The worst part was the examples were hard to follow with no card images (and full of errors!). I was also confused by the sections on the use of skills and sanctification (which I sorted by watching the above video and searching BGG).
Then I notice they updated the manual, and it seems a lot better… I didn’t read it all but I see they clarified the skills section and changed the examples (now with pictures!), as well as added a page on ‘how to play the Enter Here game’:
That looks helpful. I’m playing with just the original rule book from the Kickstarter. For whatever reason, video is not good for me to learn things, so I’ll have to try the “how to play the enter here game” text section and see if that helps.
Yep, I mentioned this in the original solo games thread. The “Living Breathing manual” that you’ve linked to here is MUCH better than the original. It managed to still keep the clarity/unequivocal-ness of the rules in place, while giving you a much better feel for how games are structured and for how rules fit together.
Also, the video you linked to helped me a lot as well, even if the sound quality if horrific.
Yeah unfortunately that updated rule book only exists digitally. :)
I much prefer text too, but I did find that teaching video pretty good to give a sense of the flow of the game, and to solidify what I’d already read. He doesn’t front-load a bunch of explanation, just goes over aspects of the game slowly as they come up. My ideal though would be scripted and a lot shorter, not a live stream.
Yeah I only really started paying attention after my game arrived. ;)
And I love reading the paper version from the box, the feel, the smell, while lying warm in bed. Loading up the pdf on a tablet just isn’t the same! (but it was good to look through after)
Oh, 100% agreed on that! I just couldn’t wrap my head around the rules, to be honest. I think if you’re only familiar with the early PACG rules – and that’s me! – it’s kind of a double-edged problem. I had to “forget” a lot of what I thought I knew from PACG and then learn the new rules.
3 things finally broke through and helped me learn the game:
- The new, PDF rules revision
- Videos. So many videos (and again, even the Lone Shark folks make multiple errors in their tutorial video!)
- Learning to play PACG Mummy’s Mask. This was a great bridge from the early PACG rules to the later rules that really inform Apocrypha.
The posts above mine pretty much cover everything I’ve watched or read. There are a couple other videos here and there I also watched in the background while doing other stuff, but they didn’t cover any new concepts or anything that the previously linked videos didn’t also cover.
This woman explains the game very clearly and close up, without forcing you to watch 3 hours of gameplay, but it still won’t be enough to keep you from having to refer to the rule book every few minutes while you’re stilling learning the game in the first half dozen missions. Also, she’s some sort of professional copy editor for non-fiction books, and spends some time near the end of the video lambasting the 1.0 version of the manual. But hey, at least the modern boxes don’t ship with that sucker in them:
What I have found to be the biggest factor in my success is time. Lots of time spent actually playing the game, and then putting the game on hold while I chase down an answer in the manual, or the fan guide, or a FAQ on the BGG forum, or a discussion about some interpretation of some obscure rule or situation. And while I’m finally getting to the point where I’m only checking the manual maybe once a game, and only because of some new situation I might encounter for the very first time, I’m not going to pretend that memorizing all that stuff is easy. Once you know all the rules the game is pretty smooth, it just flows (and by extension, the time spent setting up, playing a mission, and storage shrinks CONSIDERABLY), but I suspect that for the average person it’s going to take a minimum of half a dozen games or so before that happens. It did for me anyway.
Unfortunately, when it comes to playing group games, I suspect lots of time is the one resource most groups won’t have the patience to give up.
As for my own time spent with the game, I just completed my 7th Candlepoint mission. I have 2 left to go and then it’s on to the Skinwalkers campaign. I’m looking forward to starting that campaign because these tutorialy sample-packy Candlepoint missions are too easy, strategy-wise. I understand why there are so many tutorial type missions, given how varied some of the mission setups might be, but setting aside the actual process of learning the game’s rules, the player decisions and overall strategy are quite simplistic at this stage.
Right now the biggest challenge for me is making sure I’m always prepared to assemble/manipulate enough dice to keep the odds in my favor during a confrontation, but there seems to be very few instances where I feel like I have to make a crucial decision that will change the game’s flow or direction one way or the other. I’m sure this is a symptom of playing the tutorial campaign, but at the moment I feel less like my decisions are steering me to or from success, and more like I’m just making sure to play the one right card at the one right time, and to follow the rules correctly, so the game can more or less play itself out. Sure, an occasional bad roll might bite me in the ass, but bad RNG does not difficulty make, nor player agency give.
I fully expect this to change once the other 9 campaigns start turning the screws on me. I expect tough decisions, more emphasis put on deck building and cost discounts, and I expect to start putting some of these Death cards to actual use. I wouldn’t call the low difficulty of the Candlepoint campaign an actual design flaw, but I can certainly understand some of the 3~4 year old BGG posts (when the game first hit the street) complaining when their group is shelving the game after 3 or 4 missions because it’s too easy and risk-free to play and win when compared to the time and effort it demands of a group just to learn the rules. I do wonder how things might have changed for these people had they had temporarily put Candlepoint on hold and jumped into Skinwalkers before shelving everything, but hell I’m a grinder in video games, I can do these last two missions no problem.
I enjoy the game. I love the art, the lore, the setting, how quickly turns are finally starting to fly by–now that all the symbols and most of the keywords are ingrained in my mind. Turn pacing finally feels right, but I’m not kidding when I say it took me half a dozen missions to get comfortable enough where I didn’t have to double-check some info resource every ten minutes.
I do have to say though, I’d actually be sort of bent out of shape if I had paid full price for this game at release, months or years before the expansions came out and added additional campaigns, because I’m almost halfway through with the base game and I’d be super irked if the only replays available were composed of 50% tutorial missions.
You should definitely not burn yourself out on the Candlepoint missions. I’d almost say they’re entirely skippable.
I still have not figured this out yet…will watch the above video and cross my fingers. Weird, because I played Pathfinder on IOS and figured this would be easy to move to. The other issue is when I found Cloudspire in stock I also noticed Too Many Bones Undertow in stock and picked that up, so right now I have Combat!, Apocrypha, and Too Many Bones manuals one on top of each other with Mage Knight Ultimate sitting on the sidelines.
I have been mostly JUST a wargame boardgamer so reading these threads about non wargame solo games is dangerous for me.
Sorry, will shut up now.
Where it belongs. :)
-Tom
Given it’s so easy, what’s the plan for Skinwalkers? Are you building up your Saints during Candlepoint for them to continue their campaign, or are you going to start them fresh, or with new Saints?
I started Taking the Plunge solo yesterday with a party of four, and got pretty lucky so far - my first two characters each sealed a Nexus in their first turn. The second win sent the Master packing to one of the remaining two spots.
I thought maybe I should slow it down, give my guys a chance to draw some gifts as there is now heaps of time left. But sounds like it doesn’t matter too much in these missions!
I also wonder how to approach splitting your team between locations (for future, since movement is locked in this mission). And whether I should be discarding doom Omens from my hand. I kind of want to since I can draw fresh cards, but it does lower my health!
I hadn’t planned on making any drastic changes to my party. I’m expecting (well, hoping) the difficulty will ramp up in the non-Candlepoint campaigns. I am currently completing the Candlepoint stuff with the idea that Skinwalkers+++ was designed around the idea that at least someone in my party will have access to a few fragments. If I do swap Saints, it will probably just be 1 or 2 at a time, and only after I’ve dipped my toe into the Skinwalker campaign a time or two with my current party to see how things go. If the first couple missions I try are also easy I will start adjusting the difficulty by using new characters and take it from there.
I’ve seen people mention on the BGG forums that when they adjust the difficulty they tend to simply add more Nexus points for their parties to clear out. But that doesn’t feel like a solution I can apply across the board. Given how unique each mission might be structured pr set up from one to the next, one extra Nexus might be fine in one type of mission, but a complete disaster in the next. For replay value alone I think it would be cool if someone compiled a list of adjustment one could make from mission to mission to customize the difficulty of each one, given each mission’s different set up or goals. For example, one mission type might benefit from extra basic threats in each nexus, while another might be best tuned by removing cards from the clock.
I’m getting ahead of myself though. I’m presuming the entire game might be a little too easy, but that’s not really what I expect. What I do know is that if/when I replay Candlepoint with a new party, I will be tweaking each of the 9 missions with unique adjustments to ratchet things up a bit differently for each. I’ve been keeping notes of the missions I play and who I played them with, so when I’m done with the campaign in a couple days I plan to take the time to sit down and write my thoughts for each mission and maybe write down how I think each one could be adjusted for my future playthroughs going forward, if needed. And for the other 80+ untouched missions I still have ahead of me, I think I’ll be jotting down notes on them as I go, so I don’t have to try to remember anything in the days or weeks following any one mission. But again, I’m expecting none of that will be necessary once I’ve completed the intro campaign.