I backed it. Got a good feeling about this one.
As opposed to the other one, Dawn of the Zeds 3rd Edition? ;)
In news on that front, the print run is ready to go but is currently likely to be delayed by Chinese New Year - shipping should start sometime in March.
I wasn’t sure whether to back either, mainly due to the price of shipping, but as you say it might be difficult to get in Europe, which would mean even higher shipping costs, as well as customs. I then executed a maneuver I’ve come to know as the crack’n’back. You should, too. :)
wow, that is good news… I think I am tipping over ;)
Through this thread I became interested in solo board games. I bought Dawn of the zeds, Onirim and Darkest Night. At the moment I’m trying out Darkest Night without expansions. Can it be that it is incredibly easy in this form? I search the mountains and the forest for keys, gather my heroes at one place and wait for the necromancer. Normally one hero can use more than one die and one has a low enough secrecy to attract the necromancer. There is no real reason to go somewhere else. I know that the expansions introduce quests. I just wanted to ask if maybe I’m playing it wrong. I started without expansions for learning reasons.
To defeat the necromancer, you have to roll a 7 or better on one die - you don’t add them together, you just take the highest - you have to initiate the attack as an action on your turn, not win the roll when he attacks you, and there can’t be any blights on that space or he kills a blight instead of dying. If you’ve found that you regularly defeat him in combat you are probably missing some part of those three rules.
Looks like the Warhammer Quest Adventure Card Game is back in stock after being hard to find (or crazy expensive) for the last few months. Got my copy on order.
Any opinions on this here? I really liked the idea of the LotR card game but in execution I just couldn’t dedicate enough brainpower to ever really get into it, and the LCG nature of it eventually turned me off as well. Is this better? Worse? Do you have to enjoy the theme to enjoy the game?
Did all that. When I gathered my party it’s easy to defeat all blights in that place. Then the hero that may attack with the most dice gets the relic. If he may roll three dice there’s a good chance for him to get the seven.
It’s less complex due to your decision space being much smaller. There’s no deckbuilding. You only have a set of 4 abilities per character to keep track of, and each character has the same set of abilities each time you play (though there is an upgraded “Advanced” version of each ability that you can level up between quests). You can add a few pieces of gear if you play through the campaign, but that’s it.
It’s a bit like comparing the massive toolbars in WoW to the much more streamlined Diablo 3. They both have things to recommend them, but if you just want to start it up and go, WHQ is much quicker.
Do you have to enjoy the theme to enjoy the game?
I don’t really know anything about Warhammer and I haven’t found that to be an impediment. It seems like fairly typical fantasy fare. Dwarves, wizards, trolls, orcs…like that.
I haven’t found that easy at all, but I’ve never played without at least the first two expansions, so I guess there’s a good chance that they do increase the difficulty.
Hey, fancy that. My copy is on the way as well!
I find the challenge in Darkest Night is partly a matter of the character mix. All told, there are something like, I dunno, 20 characters now. The way to play is to randomly pick four of them. If you just choose a particularly efficient set of four characters (including the Seer, of course), yes, it can be pretty formulaic. Especially if you’re playing without any of the expansions. That said, there are some variants to make the game harder if you find it too easy. I think they’re in the base rules.
-Tom
Well, I will try the expansions, now. It isn’t that I don’t like the game, just wanted to make sure I’m playing it right. And like I said at the start: it’s a completely new gaming experience for me thanks to this thread ☺
29, in point of fact - 9 in the base game and then there are five expansion boxes with four new characters each. (“expansion” #5 is just a bundle of promos including four promo characters and a few artifacts and events, but the characters mix things up enough that I snagged it anyway).
I posted some thoughts in the board game thread after my first play through the campaign in the box. Short version: I really like the game despite a few very minor issues. One of which was the theme but didn’t really hurt my enjoyment of the game.
The decision making and planning is an order of magnitude deal easier than LotR, and it’s somewhat less random. In LotR, a couple rounds of bad card draw can mean instant loss. In WHQ, a couple rounds of bad dice rolls can be bad, but you can still recover.
I hesitate to call one better or worse though. They’ve got a few similar mechanics, but overall they feel very different. LotR is very much a deck-building card game, but WHQ is a dungeon-in-a-box style game that just happens to use cards (and dice).
So what’s the current groupthink on a solo game that’s about 45 minutes or so including setup/teardown? I’ve had a few nights recently where I was looking for something shorter than usual which didn’t take a lot of work to setup. I’ve got Friday and Space Hulk: Death Angel, but I’ve grown a bit tired of Friday and SH:DA hasn’t really grabbed me. I think the Oniverse games are probably what I’m looking for, but not sure which would be best to start with (Onirim is also in-between print runs it appears). Any other recommendations?
Something from the Oniverse is absolutely what you want. Shame about Onirim being unavailable, but Castellion and Sylvion are both good, too. If you don’t mind relatively obscure historical nooks and crannies, I really liked Ottoman Sunset as a quick-playing solitaire game using the state-of-siege engine.
I got Warhammer Quest a few months ago, but haven’t gotten around to trying it. That also might fit your requirements. As for other recommendations, I recommend you steer clear of Mage Knight, which – as we all know – is the worst boardgame of all time.
-Tom
That is to say, the best. But it sure as hell isn’t 45 minutes including setup/teardown.
I think it’s fairly clear that “Betrayal at House on the Hill” is the worst game of all time. Mage Knight runs a close second. At least in Mage Knight you don’t play for an hour before you find out what the rules are, at which point the game usually immediately ends. Unless the rules are so broken you can’t continue.
It is if you skip the bit in the middle where you play the game. :)