I’m in the same boat! I kicked it for now but I can always cancel…
I’m in for $192. I blame all of you.
I just got my Kickstarter in for Forests of Adrimon. . . and promptly ordered the original game and expansion pack directly from the company themselves via Kickstarter message, hah.
This looks so fucking cool. Thanks for the original review, @tomchick – I’m looking forward to actually buying and playing a boardgame for once!
My kickstarter copies of the reprint and the new one are on their way from the EU fulfillment centre in Germany now. So is the Forgotten Circles expansion for Gloomhaven. Hello customs fees, my old friend.
My Adrimon + expansions arrived yesterday. Had a quick look and it all seems like a bit of a reskin. Is this the case? You can’t mix sets can you?
If so I’m unsure how I feel about their next reskin launching on KS in a month.
Several mechanics are new or modified from the previous game. Assembling power weapons instead of completing quests one by one. The villainous effects of the Magi operate differently than the Dead King. The cities and shrines are all different in various ways.
Despite that, you can combine the games, as well. Either mix and match the Role and Race cards + other stuff that stayed roughly the same mechanics wise, like Circumstances and Power Ups, or actually combine the two games into one monster game wherein you actually do parts of both before an epic confrontation.
New game (and reprint of the original) also incorporated various balance tweaks, style refinements, and gameplay nudges to the original printing of VotDK.
Lol the combo game is actually a little insane. I wanna do it!
Oh cool, so I’m totally wrong. :)
Do you know if these reprint updates are available anywhere for owners of the original?
I also received my KS rewards (both volumes w/ expansions) and am psyched to play…at some point. Look, holiday weeks are hard.
One thing I can say is I really appreciate a company that provides a full storage solution in the box. These games have inserts that have a place for literally everything without much fuss. I’d slightly prefer being able to condense the expansion content into the base boxes (some people were talking like you can put the expansion tray on top and be fine but that didn’t seem to work well for me, I dunno), but the expansion boxes are very skinny so it’s not a huge hardship.
Kiiiinda. A few specifics are mentioned but it’s a lot of “cleaned up the balance on level 3” type stuff.
https://www.hexploreit.com/vol1/changelog/
Tbh, I’d email em and ask. The owner has been super responsive and helpful for me thus far.
I have no idea why, but I just ordered this. Both sets, and their expansions, for non-gouging prices- the first and both expansions via an online retailer (Cardhaus), and the Forest base game via Amazon. I’m still taking the ‘social distancing’ thing seriously, and am looking for something to kick around, especially when considering it may get worse again in the fall and winter. I saw that I could pick them all up in pre-order with the new set, but that wasn’t shipping until late September/early October, according to their latest info, and I wanted it now. And I still have time to get in on that pre-order for the new set and ‘living card packs’, whatever those turn out to be.
So, did I make a mistake?
I think rather highly of the game, though it takes a very particular kind of group to want to play it. The game is long, almost absurdly so, and more players only exacerbates that without making things substantially easier past a certain point. Doing a solo play-through with a hero or two under your own control would speed it up considerably, which is nice, since the game-speed is largely my biggest complaint. Though, obviously, you lose the social component – sad :(
Apart from that, the heroes themselves only present so much, shall we say, tactical variety during a playthrough. Although most of them play very differently from each other, once you’ve figured out the synergies between your various abilities and gotten them all leveled up a few times, you’ve sort of done everything your character will do during the playthrough. Yes, your Numbers Go Up, and you might stumble across a rare item or unlock one of the powerful artifacts in Forests of Adrimon, but eventually combats become somewhat rote. Which isn’t to say that they can’t be hard on high difficulties, or that boss monsters with lots of nasty abilities and debuffs can’t throw you off your pattern, but you pretty much know what your hero is “supposed” to do, in what order, to win each time.
That said, the variety of quests and side-content, the high quality of production values and sheer number of characters, races, and traits to mix-and-match, and the ability to combine multiple games in the series or mix-and-match alternate rulesets to change the game (including in-rulebook achievements for winning in particular ways or using an unusual strategy) keep things fairly fresh for several runs through each game, I think. And there’s just something gloriously nerdy about recreating a wide-spanning hexcrawl-style D&D campaign live on your tabletop over the course of a few hours, meeting NPCs, doing fetch quests, taking down bosses, exploring and even shaping the world, before finally facing down against the big bad who’s been harrying you and butchering your allies all game long. It does that experience so much justice, and that element of it is substantially improved by playing with a group who are interested in hamming it up and roleplaying a bit, in addition to carefully scrubbing out and rewriting their numbers 4 times a minute :)
All that said, I think FoA is the better game, and the 2nd ed of Valley of the Dead King that incorporated a bunch of design ideas from FoA reflects that. While VotDK has way more heroes as the “core” game, the ones in FoA are way more sophisticated in design, with more clever interactions between abilities, and in general, the side systems in FoA are just cooler. It does take longer to play as a result, though, hah.
I continue to really look forward to Sands of Shurax, which looks pretty wild. (And, also, you know, the unified hero storage chest.) And then, someday, Domain of Mirza Noctis, which is looking like the Ravenloft tabletop game that I strongly doubt the actual Castle Ravenloft tabletop game is.
If nothing else, Hexplore It is unique for letting you get your dry erase marker on.
-Tom, who still hasn’t gotten Forests of Adrimon out yet
Thanks for the updated impressions, Armando. This bit right here was exactly what I wanted to hear. I’ve tried a few things (boardgames, miniatures), but haven’t been satisfied yet. This sounds like it might be the ticket.
Treasure island also lets you mark up the map with dry erase. Fun lightweight game.
Now that you mention it I have an old French game Called Discovery that you use wet erase markers on. It’s a neat thing that each player has their own copy of a map of an island that they’re both exploring… but you only know where the other person is, not yourself- that you have to deduce based on info you get while wandering around blindly. It’s pretty neat but I always felt it could use just one more system to give it some meat. Ah, well.
How much table space does this game require? I’m thinking of getting just FoA to start, to see what it’s like. But I don’t have a ton of available space right now.
It works well with at least 3-4ft square for my friends and I, and even there, we tend to hang onto our own hero placards on side tables/couch arms/etc.
That sounds promising. For solo play, could I use a standard card table, with maybe a little side table nearby for holding charts or such?