If anyone still wants to take me up on my offer, I have a copy I’ll farm out for less than the 50% off currently. Just let me know. It’s all 3 “books” and the Hybrid pack.
Golem missions completed. Physicians next. I’m bringing back Dr. Zeez, having Boback take a trip to the east coast, and recruiting two of the locals there to flesh out the group.
I think the Golem campaign needs some serious redesign/turning. All the Rampage modifier did was make the missions a cakewalk.
Gah, my wallet hates you guys. Ordered it today. I really enjoyed the Pathfinder card game, so I’m hoping this is at least as good.
Halfway through mission #4 in the Physicians campaign I had to leave the room in a hurry. By the time I got back an hour later my cat had pushed the door open, knocked over my water, and soaked my tabled cards and manuals/storybooks for anywhere between 1 and 60 minutes.
I just finished soaking what water I could out of them and sticking them into books. Perhaps in a day or two I’ll know if my copy of the game is salvageable.
Is the cat now homeless?
Seriously, that really sucks. I remember the time I had a brand new laptop, and put a glass of water on the arm rest while I sat on the couch with the laptop on my lap… and the dog promptly came over and pushed the glass right onto me, frying the keyboard.
I realize it’s a lousy time to say this to someone, but that glass of water shouldn’t been up there in the first place. :(
I’m super paranoid about having drinks around my games and I don’t even have any pets in the house. Even when I did have animals here, I was lucky enough that neither of them got near the boardgames while they were set up. But even then, my own clumsiness was bound to knock over a glass.
Before he died, my cat was incontinent for years. One time, he was asleep in my lap while I was at the computer. So I’m tooling along, doing whatever I’m doing at the computer, probably playing Agents of Mayhem or something. Suddenly, the computer just turns off. The cat had projectile pee’d directly into the computer, shorting it out. Luckily, after drying the insides with compressed air, it turned back on.
I hope you can salvage everything, @kerzain. That Physicians campaign isn’t going to beat itself.
-Tom
I’m sort of glad it was okay. But deep down, I sincerely wish you had had to write this up for an insurance claim.
It looks like the cards will still be readable. They’re about 95% dry right now, but still have some trace moisture keeping them from being perfectly stiff. I won’t use them for another day or two yet.
This is the only game I haven’t sleeved yet because if I were to sleeve everything (I dunno, what, 1400 cards?) it would have cost more for the sleeves (about $80) than it did for the game + expansions (about $75), but I don’t see how these cards will be easily shuffled because because they’re all still damaged enough that they’re wavy. Even sticking in books with a weight on top of them didn’t flatten them out, as the pages of the books slightly wrinkled as they absorbed water.
I think what I might do is buy enough sleeves for the base game and one expansion and just re-sleeve expansions as I switch them out. I wouldn’t be sleeving them for typical protection so much as to keep them flat and make them much easier to shuffle without further damaging them.
I’ll figure out how they’ll work out tomorrow, but the result should be a playable game, one way or the other.
Purrhaps, but I think this was 100% cat evilness.
My cat is 13 years old, and has spent every waking moment of her 13 years looking for glasses of water to tip over. It’s my own fault for:
- Not using one of our lidded tumblers.
- Not fully latching the door shut.
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Still permitting my wife to own this dumb cat.Having a cat.
You could try cat counseling, but it would probably just lay there and clean its ass.
I wish I had the patience for this. I had the original Pathfinder version and even it was a pain to try and setup and shuffle and whatnot. I enjoy the game though but only play it on my phone with the iOS version. But all this talk makes me consider diving back into this version.
Half the experience for me is unplugging from the internet, video games, and TV while I sit quietly and set a game up for twenty five minutes with my bare hands. It’s almost meditative.
Ya. I can see that. At this point I don’t really have the space to set something like this up long term. Which is why I have Gloomhaven still sitting in its box. Once we ship a few of the kids off next year after graduation maybe…maybe.
After a few days of drying out and flattening my cards, I finally shuffled everything back into the box and played my first game since the water incident earlier this week. I restarted the botched mission I left off on, and kept the same party I had going in last time, even though I knew they were woefully ill-matched for this particular mission… because I only learned that part way through my first attempt at the mission a few days ago and didn’t want to make any drastic changes since the last game was wrecked before completion.
I am quite surprised that my cards made it through as well as they did. After having seen the state of them after I’d found them soaking for nearly an hour, I didn’t think most of them would be salvageable. They were obviously soaked through, but were also sticking together and to the table, and I had to very carefully peel many of them them apart. Even the ones that weren’t stuck together were curled and rolled up and I had to carefully unfurl them when drying them as much as possible and sticking them into books.
After a couple days of care I’d say they’re pretty much back to the condition they were in before the accident without only a couple exceptions, and I just wouldn’t have believed that could have been possible a few days ago. There’s two particular cards that show some slight creasing in the ink where I did a crappy job peeling them up from the table, but they are structure cards so it’s nothing that leaves identifying marks on cards I’ll be drawing through the game.
As for my first game back, I’d been dreading going through my cards since the accident. It really let the wind out of my sails for the game, and coupled with the horrible party composition for this mission, I had to force myself to dive back in. But after seeing the state of the cards I couldn’t help but set up a new game immediately.
One of the issues I had with this Physicians mission (#4) is that the Master, the Malady, and both Minion A & B (instances of the Malady) have Rage and Body targets exclusively. This is okay for two of my party, but the other two have 2/2 Rage and Body attack values, and coupled with the fact that neither of these two had any matching keywords with the Minions & Master, and because of my poor luck in shuffling a bunch of high Rage/Body Threats into the game at the start, I was totally hosed early on and very quickly lost 3 of my 5 nexuses.
Even though I was doing so poorly in the first attempt, I didn’t want to change my party to fit the mission, since that felt like cheating to me. I like to choose my party first and THEN see what the mission is all about, because prepping for specifics on a first run just seems cheesy to me.
Well, because of my stubbornness, my second attempt started off just as poorly as the first. I quickly lost a few Nexus points and still had 80% of the clock to go through before I could claim victory. But Once I narrowed my Nexuses down to two, I was able to get into a very nice groove. I had some razor-thin close calls with my Soul/Mind Saints, lost against several threats, and almost had one of them Fade on more than one occasion, but in the end I managed to time the final draw of the master with my #1 Rage guy, who had all the attack power, fragments, and keywords he would need to roflstomp the bad guy, and he did.
It was by carefully exploiting the Avoid power on the master that i was able to keep a couple Saints alive while healing up my Nexuses at the same time. Yea, this cost me a gift (health) every time I transferred one to the nexus in order to avoid, but it sure beat the alternative. One of the most difficult aspects of this mission setup is that there’s never a Transfer phase for giving gifts, because if you actually have gifts to share you have to use them to keep investigating… forcing more and more threats to be drawn and encountered.
Anyway, I won. I’m back in the groove. I happy with my cards, and I’m blabbering. So I think I’ll just stop this post right here.
Physicians campaign is done. I didn’t lose any of the missions so that means I didn’t have to do any of the stash/unstash mission shuffling that would have occured if I had. In fact, except for a mission or two that forced me to put out symptoms at the start, I never had to display any symptoms either, which means that entire component of the campaign might as well have not existed. I would have liked more missions to force these on players so various threats and maladies could trigger their special powers, but it never came to pass. That has sort of been a running theme for these campaigns so far, the gimmicks for each don’t seem fully utilized unless the players mess up somewhere along the way, and without these gimmicks to spice things up, one campaign feels a whole lot like the last.
I took at look at the symptoms and at first I wasn’t very impressed with them, given that they all seem to pretty much consist of raising damage and targets by 1 each. But after looking at the maladies and certain other cards, I see the real drama comes from simply having a lot of symptoms displayed so that certain card powers will trigger off them. If I ever replay this campaign I’ll probably do more to see these powers play a part in the game.
Next up for me are the Fae missions. I don’t remember the specific mission, but at some point I was forced to break open my Fae pack and fight a specific Fae true threat (A Golems mission made me do this, I think). I figure since that packs already open I’ll go there next. And I’ll probably keep doing what I’ve been doing between each chapter, boxing three of my existing Saints and setting up 3 new ones. As of right now Bobak is my favorite of the bunch, so I will probably stick with him.
I solo’d “Enter Here” four-handed last night, and I really enjoyed it. So far I’m okay with the rules. I watched about half of the Teach-and-Play video linked earlier; I found it at least as helpful than the designers’ explanatory video, and a lot more entertaining. My questions so far are more about the meta-game:
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First, how does a saint improve over time? Just by slotting fragments? Do gifts have a rarity level or such, or could one just load up a starting saint with great gifts? I don’t intend to do that – I’ll use the suggested starter desks – but I’m curious. Edit: Now I realize that I’m limited to starter or alpha cards; good. So by winning confrontations against gifts, I’ll be able to build a stronger deck. When you decide to “upgrade” by removing a card, I assume the removed card goes back to the general mass of cards in the box, not the stash?
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I may play this with my kids, but if history is any guide, I’ll end up playing mostly solitaire. I saw on BGG that @tomchick plays solo with four characters, which is what I did with “Enter Here” last night. I love the mechanic that lets you help someone depending on where you’re seated, and that would seem to shine with at least 3 and preferably 4 saints. Is that what you all would recommend? I suppose the main issue is table space?
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Finally, I read one post on BGG by a person (wkover) who’s played through all the stories in all the boxes. He suggested that for Candlepoint, players put off “Take the Plunge” until the final third of the story. Does that make sense to you guys? Do you have any suggestions on play order?
Thanks for suggesting this game. It’s fun.
For a couple of rough answers before @kerzain gets here… ;)
Yes, there are two levels - a bunch of gifts have a symbol that indicate they are ‘starter cards’, these are the only ones you can use to build your deck, alongside the cards you pick up during a game.
I play with four but I think three would be fine too for a quicker game. Two may make the game even easier, since both Saints can always assist each other with everything? It removes the cool positioning aspect at least.
Not with self-targeting effects and not with location targeting effects when not at the same location.
Question I think I knew the answer to before but have forgotten since I last played:
Ignoring damage, if a card tells you to do something (eg heal, discard) to a certain number of gifts of a specific virtue, can you only use gifts of that virtue, or is it like damage where you use the specific cards first and then generic cards?