Debuted Tabletop Simulator with one of my usual boardgaming group and my girlfriend (who, living several states away, can only usually join us for an evening or two while visiting). Took a little bit to decide on a game, but eventually figured Eldritch Horror is a reliable standby. I fire up the mod. Everything loads for me, I hit the script to set up, my friend goes “uh…there’s supposed to be a board, right? And these aren’t supposed to be playing cards, and…” My girlfriend is doing a bit better but there’s still a bunch of glitches and missing stuff. Try restarting the mod. A little more loads, but still a bunch of errors. Finally I throw up my hands, download the latest Tabletop Simulator Backup exe and link them to it to see if they can pull the images and such that way. Still getting a bunch of errors. So, okay, I back up my version of the mod with its essentially complete contents, and see about getting it uploaded to Google Drive. …it’s a gigabyte, and Google informs me it will take about half an hour to upload. (My upstream is a tiny fraction of downstream. Yay American internet.). Uh, so…
We break out Legendary Encounters: Alien instead. It loads in seconds and works virtually perfectly. We tackle Alien: Resurrection. I’m the Priest, my girlfriend is the Technician, my friend is the Scout. We polish off the first two objectives fairly handily, and then have to wade through piles of aliens to get to the boss enemies. 13 health? 11 health? How the hell are we supposed to manage that, we wonder? We stall, fighting desperately to get hands with that kind of attack power. The objective 3 events have shut down the entire HQ and we can’t buy cards anymore, so we’re stuck with the decks we’ve found. There’s been no way to thin our decks at all, so we just can’t seem to manage it. Right as the Newborn hits the combat stage, we manage in a halcyon moment to generate 11 attack and kill the queen his mom. My girlfriend has peeked at upcoming Hive cards using Ripley-8’s I Can Smell It, and assures us this particular unrevealed card (the final Hazard) is not something we want to reveal. So we do our best to ward off the Newborn and try, try for 13 attack. (In the meantime, I use the Priest’s special and a Ripley-8 card to fend off the Newborn on my turn using attack instead of recruit.) Finally, the hazard hits anyway. We re-read the effect. It…removes all Recruit characters from our decks, letting us draw entire hands of Attack-focused cards. Whoops. (She and I both had thought that it killed off any Barracks characters, which would have totally screwed us.)
Unfortunately, we figured this out too late, and key Strike cards knocked cards out of both the Priest and Scout’s hands to take us below that all-important 13. We all died.
(My friend now has a fully-loaded copy of the Eldritch Horror mod all ready to go. My girlfriend is on Linux, so it’s taking a bit more fiddling. Sounds like she’ll probably be good to go by next time, though.)