Champions of Hara sounds really cool, although a lot of what you wrote made me think, “Wait, how is this any different from Mage Knight?” For instance:
You’re giving me flashbacks to Mage Knight’s rigid optimization puzzles!
Have you played Grimslingers? Does Champions of Hara obsolete Grimslingers in terms of improving the basic gameplay mechanics?
-Tom
I don’t think comparisons to Mage Knight are unfair. I don’t care for MK, because to this day I find the damn thing too sprawling and confusing. I felt like, a couple of minor questions aside, I understood Hara and the turns flowed better. Quicker, too.
One difference is that while the board fills up with monsters, and you generally know what they will do, the board is also filling with face down events, which add an element of adventure in there. I can try to fight monsters, in which I know what will happen*, or I can go adventuring and face a little more chaos.
All the bespoke scenarios allow for lots of variable objective based play, and battling the Corrupted gives the whole thing a gravitas that MK, which always seemed about zany fantasy imperialism, lacked for me.
As for Grimslingers, I don’t feel their actual play is very similar. GS had a combat mechanic at its center that never clicked with me- I felt like I always won until suddenly I didn’t, never feeling like I really understood what the best decision was. I also felt like I was gradually weakening as I adventured in GS, a feeling I don’t love, while in Hara I felt like I was growing stronger and, more importantly, more versatile.
I thought initially that damage would be too easy to avoid in Hara, but actual play relieved me of that concern, as while I never was forced to respawn, I was definitely pushed around hard by the enemies and that contributed to my eventual loss.
*although some have critical effects which can occur randomly, and some of those do crazy things, not all bad!
There are too many cool sounding fantasy adventuring games out there. :(
Especially when Gloomhaven by itself counts as somewhere between two and five of them on sheer content.
It helps to not like Gloomhaven! :)
-Tom
Yeah, but that’s like not liking, I dunno, cats or something.
Tom’s rating on the 7-9 scale:
Ha ha, you sleeve your cards!
-Tom
I would not do this. The game is moving away from armor sets towards more detailed “narrative” minis anyway.
I would, though, sleeve my cards!
@tomchick, you don’t even sleeve something as pricy as this!?
You want to save them until you’re fairly sure you’ll knock out an advanced AI card. It can be an unavoidable death spiral loop if you get down to an AI deck that’s only one or two advanced cards.
You also want to be fairly certain that the trap card isn’t coming up in the hit location deck.
So, count cards until there’s good odds that the top one is an advanced card, but don’t do it if you’re deep into the hit location deck.
The transition from the tutorial lion to the next level 1 lion fight is actually one of the toughest humps in the entire campaign, to the point that I think it’s a big flaw with the design. You need weapons, but out of the first settlement buildings your only available weapon choices rely entirely on bone. If you strike out on bone during the tutorial resource draws, you’re…well, boned.
They really needed to include a non-bone weapon option. For year 2.
Yeah we got 3 bones so we’re all set. We got the crit axe and the pea shooter
Hate has arrived. Seems to weigh more than Gloomhaven.
I played Outlive with the Underwater expansion last night.
This game is what it might feel like to be the Overseer of a Fallout Vault, rather than the intrepid adventurer exploring the locations. From your high vantage point, you are working on a tight deadline to ensure your shelter is well provisioned, maintained and filled with productive survivors. It’s your one chance to be picked up by “the caravan” when it next comes around. The alternative is to be left behind in a region picked clean of its resources.
Difficult decisions abound. Can you afford to recruit more survivors to open and operate new rooms and make your shelter more productive? What resources do you really need to gather this turn? How are you going to get your scouts to the locations where those are available? Should you use your sparse resources to fix some equipment, or to take care of the global event that’s crippling your strategy? Will any player take care of it for you? Should you focus on getting better at hunting? If you all do it, the prey will be hunted to extinction before the end of the game. What then?
The flow of the game is focused on 2 puzzles: Get the right scouts to the locations giving you the resources you need (working around movement and action point restrictions), then use those in the most efficient possible way to keep your survivors alive while building a shelter / gear based engine.
Underwater plays on a larger version of the map than the regular game (which adds nicely to the presence of the game). Cards wise, it adds very little: 2 new leaders, 2 new rooms, 2 new events, 2 new pieces of gear. The star of the show is the new underwater base in the centre of the map.
Another addition of the expansion: a solo mode (which was originally part of the KS deluxe edition). I haven’t tried it yet, but am looking forward to it!
The underwater base is a multi action location which lets you pick beneficial effects (feed a whole room in your shelter for a turn with 1 special harvest, gain a scientist survivor who scores you extra points when you fix pairs of gear pieces, activate a cute little robot which will give you 2 more actions a turn). In the upper left, there is also the chamber which will make the other overseers hate you. It reduces your radioactivity level (which leads to loss of points and even of survivors if it gets too high) while raising that of all your opponents. My son used it judiciously, and my wife and I were soon scrambling to try and keep our survivors alive.
All the actions you could be taking on your turn will leave you feeling stretched thin. That’s a feeling I love in that type of game.
Hi @Shieldwolf,
Apologies for completely forgetting to get back to your questions. Now that the game is fresh in my mind, I can try and answer them.
I have the regular edition of Outlive (not the monster collector’s edition from Kickstarter) plus the just released Underwater expansion.
In our game, my son and I were familiar with the game, my wife was learning it. The explanations can feel a tad overwhelming at first. You are trying to introduce the concept of the shelter, its rooms, gathering resources, movement around the map, … That said, you can pretty much get away with only explaining the day phase (the resource gathering phase) with a few added pointers. Once the night phase (the resource usage and survivor recruitment phase) arrives, you can explain it as all players go through its steps without any new players missing out on anything.
My wife was a tad worried listening to the explanations, but she was comfortable with the game mechanics well before we had completed the first day. It’s easy to pick up once you start playing. It mainly comes down to: move to a location and collect resources.
Alternatively, if a new player wants a nice in depth explanation of the gameplay mechanics, this video explains all you need to know to play the base game:
Downtime is low. Each turn, players will sequentially go through 4 / 5 (with the expansion) moves + actions. But you take those in turn, moving only 1 of your workers at a time. There is room for a bit of analysis paralysis when you have to move. But each round is ultimately fairly simple. And as you need to react to the changing conditions on the board due to the other players moving around and possibly picking a location clean, taking a coveted spot or hunting prey, I think you are likely to stay engaged while they play. Your turn to move a piece comes back quickly.
The first game won’t be noticeably longer than your second (excluding the rules explanation). That said, the expansion adds more choices and that robot worker. I think it can turn a 90’ 3 players game to a nearly 2 hours one.
As for the paths to victory, I maybe have half a dozen games under my belt, 1 with the expansion. Gear is powerful. Once fixed, it helps you power your quest for resources and score at the end. If you can fix it regularly for cheap, all the better. The question might not be whether you want gear, but which gear you want and how it will synergise with your rooms and strategy. Does it help you recruit / feed survivors, multiply your resources, intimidate the other players?
My son ended the game in second place 4 points behind my wife (37 to 41). She had 6+ pieces of gear, he had 3. I was left behind, also with 3 pieces of gear, because they managed to thwart my strategies and dose me with radiations several times.
Be aware that the game is not super high on player interaction. It is mainly focused on the scarcity of resources as each turn progresses, the way stronger workers can intimidate weaker ones (to potentially steal some resources) and the new base spot.
I don’t know exactly how many viable paths to victory there are. I feel like the expansion adds a few more variables that might open them up further. Regardless, I enjoy the experience of managing my post-apocalyptic shelter. I can’t wait to bring it back to the table with @Lykurgos and try and beat him next time. The main issue is the max player count of 4. But the game would run too long with more players.
Any other questions, let me know. I’ll try and be a bit more timely in my answers.
Tried out Nemo’s War (2nd edition).
I like it, except for the rolling for your action points mechanic. I loathe it. It’s not like War of the Ring where every die gives you something you can do even if it’s not the specific action you want, but you just flat out get screwed with nothing available to do if you keep rolling 0-1. There’s no way to alter the rolls. It feels way too much like roll to move which is the worst mechanic possible.
Re: the podcast episode, everyone seemed to get the ship placement wrong. You do not lose the game if you have to place a warship and there are no empty spaces. That only applies if you’ve reached step D: Go hunting
A. Place hidden ship tokens on empty spaces
B. Replace hidden ship tokens with drawn ships
C. Flip over white non-warships to their grey warship side.
D. If there are no white non-warships during step C, draw a warship (flipped to grey warship side if it’s a white non-warship) and place it in any empty space in the world. This immediately initiates a stalk attack if placed on the Nautilus. Only during this step do you lose if there are no empty spaces in the world.
During step B, warships replace hidden ships as normal without any loss condition. Step D is the only one that breaks that norm.
Certain adventure cards let you alter dice rolls. Sacrificing some crew members (3 out of the 6 do this) add points to your action total. Some treasure tokens have the option to re-roll die. I admit, it’s frustrating to roll a 0 or 1 action point, but after the 3rd act, when you are rolling 3 white dice (and 1 black), you choose which 2 white dice to use for your action points. Also, it helps to save 1 action point at the end of each round.
I play boardgames solo, and I find Nemo to be one of the best.
So as part of being a store owner, I get lots of emails from distributors soliciting new games. I just got this…
Outlive sounds like it could be in my board gaming sweet spot. Thanks for posting this.
How much table space does it demand? That is unfortunately a real consideration in my apartment, where our biggest table is 2’ x 4’.
Hey, thanks for finally posting something that I have zero desire to buy!
-Tom
So, when do the review requests start back up?
No, I’m not asking for any particular reason. I just want you to have many, many fun times…
Our local bar has copies of Jenga out. When we play it we call it “Trump’s America”. When it’s your turn, you have to announce which vital American institution you’re ripping out in order to build the wall higher, until the whole thing collapses.
“Here goes public education!”
It can take a fair bit of table space, but I’ve found that using one or 2 small plano type boxes to hold the resource and survivor chits will save you a ton of space compared to spreading them all over the table. It’s what I’ve started doing as it also simplifies set up.
The dimensions of the Underwater board are 50 x 61cm / 20" x 24".
The base game board takes 2/3 of that (16" x 20", I think).
The shelter cards are fairly compact. Maybe 10 inches wide, I’d say (I’m not home to check).
And you’ll have a few equipment cards on each side of your shelter depending on which are fixed and which aren’t.
Then there is a similarly sized card to hold the events.
All said, I think its space requirements are very reasonable. I believe it should fit on your table. But I’m not the best at visualising inches and feet.
