Demeo: A cards and dice digital board game dungeon crawl

Buff cards have always been permanent I believe. For ages I kept saving them ‘for special use’, then realised my hunter was hitting everything for 5 damage the whole game after a couple of buffs…

Yes, interestingly the first couple of times I reached her, she was utterly surrounded by her summoned allies who kept making her continually invulnerable, and I just couldn’t get close. Killed her in the end but it was hard work. Recently though, it’s become really easy - maybe it’s because I know what cards to bring along now. Personally I think killing the queen should just unlock the chest but you should still have to reach it to win the game.

In my last game she was surrounded by summoned allies too. However, it was the player’s allies. We had something like 3 turrets, a healing beacon, two elementals, a wolf, and a charmed Giant Slime. All of her allies were dead or killed instantly. The hunter (me) was uber buffed, the Elven Queen had Hunter’s Mark on her, and at least half the party was invulnerable. It was pretty lopsided.

The greatest danger seems to be in parts of the second floor where players are trying to hold onto the good cards but some nasty combination is behind a door or just came from behind in the dark.

I am sort of okay with this. I have experienced a WIDE range of player skill. Some folks seem incredibly new to tactical type games while others seem like they must work on Gloomhaven styled sudoku puzzles every morning. There is only one campaign now and only one boss. Thus I understand why she is on the easy side. Also plenty of deaths happen on the way to the Queen.

Still, even with incredibly questionable ally play and even sometimes intentional sabotage, the only time I have not beat the module was when a key bug kept the game from continuing. I think just boosting the buffing minions that cast invulnerability or banish would up the difficulty. If they were not so easy to kill or if they cast their stuff more often or across more targets, the fight would be a lot more intense. But then again, maybe that sort of stuff needs to be in a different module or a different difficulty setting.

I started a game. Room 1142. It is private, but also posted on Discord.

The game above is finished now. In it, I saw some VERY different layouts on this run. I don’t know if it is part of the patch or not, but the dungeons had a lot more variation and some really open/ vertical design. It made it really hard to limit line of sight. I saw bridges, collapsed tunnels, and some terrain that was 3 levels of difference between one tile and the next.

Maps are different, but I can definitely see the room bits that seed the maps. I recognize nearly every room if not every room. It is just that they will link up randomly, differently, or not at all in a given map generation. I know things like the triple staircase rectangular lowered room will never have a POI, but tends to have a lot of gold. Thus after many games, each map is “new”, yet repetitive. This is very much like Diablo.

That said, yesterday I was running into new maps with totally new room bits that seeded them. Maybe it was random luck, maybe it is tied to progression (the newer bits are more open and a lot harder to control), or maybe they did something in the patch or back end. I just know that I went from recognizing every dungeon part to recognizing none of them in a whole map.

New bits or not, the random linking of room seed bits does a lot of work in Demeo as there is a lot of tactical puzzles offered up by where everything ends up.

Yeah, the Queen’s floor is the same every time. Just where the monsters and POI’s are located vary. It is the cards you bring in that make that interesting. Although they need to nerf Coin Flip STAT. Nearly every game ends with that card now.

I anticipate playing over the weekend. I am introducing a friend to the game tomorrow 8ish AM (PST) I think.

Coin toss or whatever it’s called could be nerfed in various ways. At the moment I’d never use it on anything but the boss. It has an enormous range and you don’t even move to the target if the attack fails or suffer any other consequence. So you could nerf it by requiring the assassin to be next to the target, or by having the target get a free attack if you fail, (or just by making the Queen immune, but that would be boring).

In my last game we had no assassin and had to gradually wear down the Queen with our puny attacks. Took forever! It definitely seems easier when the Queen starts in the same section of the map as you do.

But I agree that you should win the level by reaching the chest. Perhaps they thought it was an anti climax to make players do that, but personally I see no point in having the chest on the map unless you need to unlock it yourself. Also the VO keeps referring to the Queen as ‘he’ and as ‘keybearer’ or something, which shows some confusion about what they were intending to happen with the ending.

I would be in an hour or so. Have to eat lunch first.

OK, will be ready to play in 5 minutes.

. 0644.

I have had a lot of sound issues the last several sessions. It seems some bug stops the voice element from working. As in I cannot hear others and they cannot hear me. Regular sound still works. It seems the fix is to reboot the headset for now.

I will be starting a game soon to play with my friend. Game code 6789. No, I didn’t make that number up.

Thanks to @ArenjiChaos for joining. We had a solid run.

The group had to break up just as we got to the queen. I still tried it solo. It was rough, really rough but I managed to do it. One more turn and I think I was done. I had two adamant potions, two healing potions, plus two hunters marks that I chewed through while standing in gas. The real trick was getting the invulnerable buff guys out of play as the queen was invulnerable for way too long since I didn’t have LoS or enough area effect cards since it was just me. It might have been the most intense queen fight to date.

Well played! And as a hunter too. Not the easiest class to solo!

I thought when we got there it was 40hp for two of us, 50hp for three, and I’ve never been there with one or four.

I had not played the assassin since coin toss became en Vogue. I played her a few games ago and racked up 5 coins during the game. I failed 4 out of 5 tosses which, incidentally, lines up exactly with my real world experience with chance. Still, on that last toss it felt dirty.

I don’t enjoy Coin Toss wins. While I have championed the idea that the Elven Queen (and all future module bosses) are immune to Coin Toss, I like your idea that a failed toss costs you more than just the action. Maybe everyone loses X health. Really, it should be super miss. As it is now it is a super safe miss or an instant kill on anything. No matter what, winning a 2 to 4 hour run is super anti-climatic when CT is used. I really, really don’t like it.

New game is up. 8:20 PST. Room 1647

People here may be interested in this Kickstarter

Just a friendly reminder about this form. I sent in mine. I really hope this game grows. It is so unique and still a ton of fun even though I have replayed the same module dozens of times already.