OK, Tainted Grail, let’s do this.
After scouting around Youtube and reading a number of BGG threads on the game, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s probably enjoyment to be had here…but not by attempting the game with the rules as written. Without spoiling things too badly, I looked at some playthrough videos that showed veteran youtube gamers that I’ve come to regard fairly highly just getting their asses kicked by this unruly beast of a game.
It was Paul Grogan’s “Best of” video from a few months ago that I found him talking about the game and mentioning that he and his partner were at the point of stopping in Chapter 2 when they decided to switch to “Story mode”, and suddenly had a much more enjoyable time…though he thought it left them overpowered in the game’s final chapters (at least in the Fall Of Avalon campaign.)
So what I think I’m going to do is start by using Story mode rules. I’ll play as two characters, but scale things like re-lighting menhirs and such for 1 player/character. And though I think that in theory the T-marker for wounds and energy is a neat idea, in practice it seems to induce an unrecoverable downward spiral for pretty much everyone. So…I’ll de-couple wounds and energy and track them as separate entities, where energy can be higher than the wounds level if you get rest and food.
I’m not bothered by any sort of online epeen gained or lost by playing story mode, frankly. :)
We’ll see how it goes. Life’s too short and there are too many good games to play down a dead-end at Tainted Grail a half-dozen times before I get lucky enough to advance past chapter 3 because the designers of this sprawling, messy thing couldn’t balance and test their design properly. I think there could be fun to be had here despite it, due to the worldbuilding, but we’ll see.