I would love to but I don’t have space. A $40 collapsible six foot table from Menard’s has been serving me well.
Sure, but read the card. :) It has explicit instructions on how it works. Fate Cards sit on enemy generals as modifiers, not as one-offs.
By the way, I hope you’re not using the printed rules that come with the game. They’re atrocious. I can only imagine how wrong you must be doing combat if you’re working from those. The rules posted online are pretty much mandatory.
-Tom
LALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU
Those look reasonably priced.
Roll a die for every soldier you have minus terrain defense, assign each die to an enemy soldier then character, eliminate a soldier or inflict a character wound for every hit, take a damage for every wound roll or unassigned die to an enemy soldier plus (enemy character combat value - assigned dice), lose 1 health or soldier for every wound?
The cards can be confusing since they always say “character” and it’s not always very clear if they’re talking about the kingdom or empire character. I think with one of them, taken literally it sounds like a kingdom character becomes the ally of an empire one, which obviously can’t happen.
It sure is useful having the emperor’s daughter on one of the first areas instead of all the way at the end!
I got her at the end :(
Just finished a two player game of Eldritch Horror with each of us running two characters, taking on the Syzgy Ancient One with the sailor, the urchin, the astronomer, and the expedition leader. We barely, barely won despite Syzygy awakening without our having solved a single mystery. We had an incredible run of terrible luck with rolls in the mid-game, routinely rolling 6-8 dice without a single success, and only managing to close a single gate. (Since our starting mystery required closing gates, we had no chance to solve it.) We also had a terrible time with research encounters, routinely not acquiring a clue even when we succeeded at the encounter test because we just got the wrong encounters to achieve that effect. But we also had some excellent draws - for example, the astronomer managed to nab Professor Armitage (who comes with a spell and an automatic success on it), and later picked up the Book of the Dead right before the sailor went on a monster killing spree and loaded him up on clue tokens. …and then in rapid succession he was lost in time and space, when he came back had to dump all his items or die to a mythos card effect, and I think the Ancient One awoke and sharply shifted priorities to the Final Mystery, before he could ever take a chance to spend any of those clues on his special action to remove monsters from the board. And then another mythos card zapped all his clues before he could use them on the Final Mystery. The sailor, meanwhile, hired a hitman who apparently used a flamethrower to do his dirty work, hence the monster killing duties. (And then lost all that later as well.) And the expedition leader ended up the magos of the group with his (improved) lore score of 3. Why? Because a) he got the Conjuring spell, and b) he used his special action to recruit an Arcanist, who came with the Blessing of Isis. (And then saved a priest from fascists and got blessed anyway.). So he Conjured an occult grimoire, and suddenly had 8-ish dice for spells, especially in the wilderness. …and then we won before I could really break things loose with that combo. Oh well.
I never thought of playing Eldritch with each player controlling two characters - that’s probably a pretty fun way to go. You can do the two character thing with up to four players, it seems like? That would probably be a good way to reduce downtime in general, might have to try that soon.
Meeting with my BG group tonight and we’re playing Byzantio and Kemet, both for the first time (this week’s theme is Ancient History).
I don’t think the game works super well above 4 investigators and I feel like you end up spread too thin with 2. (The game does scale to a degree based on investigator count but you still get the same amount of omen moves and gate spawns on Mythos cards and don’t have the same ability to get to and close gates.)
Scaling was the ONE and only thing that Arkham Horror did better than Eldritch. The way monster limits and outskirts worked made low to high player count games different, but still fair.
Eldritch isn’t so elegant. It becomes noticeably easier as the player count goes up. The clue spawns and cost ratio remains the same, but monster and gate spawns only double at 8 players so that’s the same cost ratio as 2 players but only twice the monsters & gates for 4 times the players.
Some effects don’t even bother to scale and are blatantly unfair to low player counts (Hastur’s and Shub-Niggarath’s reckoning effects being some of the biggest). Epic monsters only add 1 health per player and are a breeze with high counts. Their newer trend for new investigators are support roles that are almost useless at low counts (secretary, butler).
We have a house rule that every time we come across an effect that doesn’t scale (like Hastur’s reckoning), we assume it was balanced for 4 players so we scale from there (Hastur’s reckoning would be doubled against 8 players, halved against 2).
and speaking of Eldritch, it was a nice surprise to discover that Unicornus Knight was only $50! After retail markup! That’s the exact same price as the total snow job Masks of Nyarlathotep expansion, and that wasn’t even a full expansion, let alone a complete game.
Most games that size would be $60-$80 these days, let alone the ridiculous overproduced mini fever sweeping the hobby.
I want to own Cthulu Wars, but screw $200 “because minis”.
Run, Fight, or Die would be perfect for my casual group, but screw $120 “because minis”.
I’m interested in the combat and settlement aspects but Kingdom Death, but…you get the idea.
Kickstarter has been a blessing and a curse. It gets more games out that otherwise wouldn’t have been made, but minis are what gets funded so overpriced minis it is. There really needs to be a standard of every base game coming with cardboard standees, then a flyer in the box advertising the deluxe upgrade where you can purchase the minis and have them shipped to you.
The Kickstarter campaign for the remake of Fireball Island is live. Looks fun, and Restoration Games did a good job with the remake of Stop Thief:
Too bad they couldn’t get art as awesome as the original cover.
http://www.voont.com/files/images/edit/corrupted/1-fireball/boxe.jpg
Which is 2nd only to Gammarauders for most awesome 80s game cover.
All I remember about playing Gammarauders is the souped up penguin. Giant killer penguins with lasers! Good times. Been probably at least 25 years since I ever thought about that game.
Wow, my sister and I used to play the old version of Fireball Island all the time. Sometimes I’d set it up just for the fun of knocking players off bridges with fireball marbles. I wonder if it went to the Great Garage Sale In The Sky?
Best to leave it to nostalgia. It really was a poorly designed game. The bioborgs were crazy unbalanced and most games dragged on forever into a stalemate.
Fireball Island was a garbage game that nevertheless made me so excited in the 80s. Restoration Games have really overhauled it, so it looks like it’s now a solid family game. I couldn’t believe it when they took it on, since it must have raised some really unique production issues. But they look to have done it. And the Kickstarter is rockin’ it at half a mil right now!
True story: I can’t figure out what I did with my frickin’ Run Fight or Die minis! I spray painted them to color-code the various types, but the spray paint still felt sticky long after the paint had dried. So I set them aside somewhere thinking that I was going to have to buy some kind of sealant to spray over them.
AND NOW I CAN’T FIND WHERE I PUT THEM!!1!
-Tom
Paizo has put all adventure paths (and class decks, as far as I can tell) of their Pathfinder Adventure Card Game on sale direct from their store through the end of April:
http://paizo.com/store/sale/adventureCardGameSale
You can get individual installments for 50% off, but unless you’re rounding out a path you’ve already started collecting, I would recommend going for the Collections that get you the base set, addon deck, and all six adventures in the adventure path for $60 (the base set alone is MSRP $60). Unless you hate the game you’d want all of that anyway.
Also, if you’re starting fresh, probably skip Rise of the Runelords. It was a fun starter for the game but the subsequent paths have more varied, balanced and interesting design, and there’s a spiffy, highly produced digital version of Rise of the Runelords that’s much cheaper (even free, if you run the mobile version and grind enough) if you want to check that story out.
Wha…? What the heck is all that??? Egad, I knew there was a lot of post-release content for Rise of the Runelords, but look at all that other stuff!
-Tom