Yeah, unfortunately the pricetag (especially with the expansions that seem to bulk out play into something resembling an adult-friendly experience) turned me off that one as well. It’s just way too light a game to cost that much, IMO. I guess nostalgia is a powerful force, though.
Caved and bought Kingdom Death last week. Started playing with the boy a few days ago. One piece of advice from our first failed showdown: when you’re hunting the lion, make sure somebody has a ranged weapon (bone darts are cheap to craft). If you pull the Ground Fighting hunt event and can’t attack from more than 1 square away, it’s almost for sure gonna be a total wipe. Unless your survivors are really well armored, which they probably aren’t if you’re still hunting the lion.
Another tip for playing with an eight year old: don’t let him look at the manual. That’s where 99.9% of the really horrific and/or sex stuff is.
Stop by the Official Qt3 Gloomhaven Thread!
Thanks for the link! We are at the figuring out how best to store everything stage. It’s like a puzzle game alongside the main game. :)
That thread has already convinced me to read the rules carefully once a character is ready to retire.
Game 2! I played A Spread of Rampant Green, and my wife stuck with Lightning. Thanks to two really good major power draws, I ended up with Entwined Power and The Jungle Hungers, both of which were brilliant with Green’s plant/water/moon preferences. It took us a little longer to get to the point where we could start marching across the board, but when we did, we went from a few cities and some very built-up areas to a no-cities victory in the space of one slow-and-fast cycle.
We only played with one of the two training wheels modes this time. Next time around, we’ll start at the default, and see how we do from there.
Throw your founding stones! Instant crits are invaluable.
Save your founding stones! Those crits will come in handy later!
Eat your founding stones! They’re full of vitamins.
Is that some kind of wash on the figures, or some cool lighting thing with your camera? It looks awesome!
By the way, the Kingdom Death customer support is being a real dick to me. :(
-Tom
The guy who owns it had a friend put a base coat on and a complementary wash, with the intention of them looking like marble statues. It came out well but using my mad photography skills I made em look even better.
Sorry for the distracting background
I threw my rock, everyone else saved theirs. We lost two toons in the intro scenario then lost none fighting the real white lion. We used a cheesy tactic where the lion is lying in wait for me to keep plinking it with my blow darts at the end. Apparently the creator believes this to be valid play but I’m not so sure about it.
Also, we have Randy villagers sippin on love potions now. This game is weird but I think I like it.
Not a huge fan of this send a pic and prove it’s broken and then hey it’s expensive so cosmetic… I don’t know if there is this huge black market for ebay’d parts from ill-gotten customs service schemes but I… doubt it.
Their customer support seems hit and miss. You hear stories of people having it work really well and then I have been requesting a new rule book for three years and they keep giving me the excuse they don’t have replacement parts.
As far as I can tell, their customer support is understaffed and had-hoc, so it depends who reads your ticket. Also, they seem to prioritize issues with minis.
And you bought ALL expansions???
Small. eccentric game developer is grumpy, suspicious man who lacks any organization or logistical ability to provide replacement parts or decent customer service.
This is so unusual. Hold on, I’m in the middle of buying a patch to make my copy of Combat Mission work, and waiting back to hear from them to see if I can get an email key for the game I already bought.
In other Kingdom Death news, we were feeling pretty cocky until we hit lantern year 5 last night. The nemesis fight against The Butcher is brutal. Total wipe with our 4 best survivors. The guy has 1 Hit Location card with a critical and draws 2 AI cards every round. Advice: invest in bandages because pretty much everything he does gives you bleed tokens. I think we’re gonna start a new settlement and follow that advice. In fact, the entire civilization is going to be dedicated to preparing for this fight.
Hahaha. The butcher. Try the Kong’s man and let me know how that goes!
I built that figure and he’s like 4 (scale) feet tall. He’s itty bitty! I’m pretty sure he won’t be any problem.
I’m so fully in the grip of kingdom death fever that I’m sort of considering attempting to follow this heroic genius’s really detailed instructions on how to embed tiny magnets in the survivor minis so you can build and rebuild them without glue.
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1694918/magnetizing-kingdom-death-monster-survivors-primer
I was up at TotalCon this weekend and finally got to play Scythe. I liked it well enough to get it, but I think it will bounce off my regular gaming group. I think the best description we came up with at the con is: it’s like Waterdeep and Catan, but with Mechs that don’t really shoot at each other. I think one of the guys in the group might like it, but the Battletech-loving guy will bounce hard off it.
I also ran my twice-yearly Fury of Dracula games. It’s another game that bounced off my gaming group, but I love, so I run it twice at the con to get my fix.
Played Champions of Hara (pictured: a Champion of Hara) solo today!
Very interesting gameplay, and I am looking forward to digging into it. It’s a beautifully vibrant exploration game about battling your way across a shifting landscape of monsters, events and potential allies. I guess I’d compare it to games like runebound or fallout in that you control an adventurer questing across an open world, but the mechanics are pretty different.
The key is that you have a hand of cards that you play to determine your actions on your turn. These cards do one kind of thing when in your hand, and a different kind of thing once on the table the turn after you played them, upon which they return to your hand. The crux of the gameplay is maximizing the use of these skill cards to both accomplish your goals and set yourself up to accomplish more next turn. Combat, therefore, is deterministic, and the few places where dice rolls are made on your part can be modified- sometimes before the roll, sometimes after- by spending Spirit points, allowing for a lot of planning.
Meanwhile, the game state evolves, enemies attack if you dared too near them, and sometimes mighty villains (the “Corrupted”, former Champions of Hara) wreak havoc with your plans. This is where a bit of real randomness kicks in, as the actions of the Corrupted are determined by dice rolls, and the appearance of rifts (which are mostly a source of power for you) are likewise random.
The other unusual thing is that while there is a basic competitive scenario, one can argue that the meat of the game is to be found in the many bespoke scenarios, both cooperative and competitive, that each center around a particular character. There are solo scenarios as well, and they differ from “normal” co-op play in that they are clearly designed as “challenge levels” meant to test your skills to the utmost.
I really enjoyed the core mechanic here, poring over my hand of cards to decide what constituted the perfect turn to accomplish my goals. I also found the “level up” cards to be very satisfyingly powerful, as was my “ultimate” ability and the items I found along the way. Did I mention that the characters are all unique, with their own mechanics?
It’s a beautiful game with a lot of crunchy, thoughtful decisions. My only concerns are:
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Annoyingly, a couple of the events made reference to other players even though I was playing a solo scenario. This seems to be both a waste of my time and an unclear rules situation. Boo. Some of us don’t have friends, jerks!
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Your typical “sprawling fantasy game rulebook situation” in that the answer to your question’s probably in there somewhere, but you gotta dig for it. Fortunately the game itself is not too complex, particularly if you have experience with these games. I’d rank it rules moderate-light for experienced games.
Here’s a photo I found as a reward for reading this long. It’s really a lovely game, made by the people who made Grimslingers, so you know you’re in for an artistic treat!
Edit: I keep changing the images, but I will keep this one!