It’s not my job to put together a game the designer couldn’t be bothered to put together himself.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2018/03/02/kingdom-death-monster-assembly-required/
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2018/03/02/kingdom-death-monster-assembly-required/
Oh how this one calls to me! Everything I read, watch, and learn scream out to be experienced. I even bought the “more hundred dollars” box and I too failed the cancellation skill check. However, the sheer immensity of the modeling required brought me down. It has sat unbuilt in a corner of my house for a very, very long time. But it calls. Such a siren call! I think about it rather often, wishing it was already built. As I sit here now, I know the exact spot of the box which is definitely a task I would fail for countless other games.
Please let us know how the post modeling reality holds up to the seeded dreams of sifting through the manual.
For what it’s worth, you’re only dealing with one of the sprues out of the box. The four characters and the lion all come from a single sprue. It can still be daunting, but to get started, you can ignore most of that giant box of plastic parts.
-Tom
Cyborg Tom is pretty scary, but needs a laser attached to his head to complete the look.
I await further tales of your adventures with the gritty world of stabbing lions in the “ding-dong” with bated breath.
You can ignore most of the sprues even if you play a campaign to completion. Most of the sprees are for armor sets that are entirely optional (and I think look worse than the first starting survivors).
So, other than the prologue stuff, you only have 7 more monsters left, with one sprue per monster except for the Phoenix.
I’m even thinking of selling the remaining sprues. If you don’t care for painting they are not necessary at all.
But I’ve playing for many hours and still I have not seen 3 of those monsters…
All right, might be time to put my Death: Monsters and their Kingdom together too. I’ve had Gloomhaven sitting set up on my table for a month as if next time I try a scenario it’ll finally be the fun time, but maybe some things just aren’t meant to be.
That lion is endearingly derpy.
(No judgment, my attempts would result in frustration and melted pools of plastic on the table).
For a few weeks I was gripped with the same fever and bid on a succession of “NEW! IN! SHRINK!” boxes of this game on EBay, refusing to spend more that $350 on the total. ($350 is what Poots was charging during the Black Friday online sale.) I did not net a single box, and by the time the 10th auction spiraled again into ridiculous heights–they almost always sold for more on Ebay than you could buy it for brand new from the online shop–my fever had faded and I remembered that I didn’t want to glue together minis. I’ve played this game a couple of times in person by accosting people in hobby shops who were either painting minis for it or playing it. And I’ve played through about 10 Lantern Years (i.e. game sessions) using Tabletop Simulator. (I even contributed some initial coding to the huge scripted and meticulously laid out TTS mod for the game.)
I love the game. The mythology and tone are pretty great. The mechanics for the boss fights are incredible. And even the mostly binary decisions you make building up your settlement feel like they have real weight. It’s about 100x better than the similarly sized Gloomhaven. But I don’t have time or space in my life for it. And I really really don’t want to build minis.
Uh-oh, now you’ve done it. (And, hoo boy, are you right about that…)
-Tom
I’m perfectly happy with my new Gloomhaven coffee table. The cats are especially fond of their perch, and I finally have my fishing tackle boxes to organizes all those pieces!
I am a big fan of various magnifying devices. Someday I’ll show you my collection. That device that @tomchick is wearing is not yet in my possession. Yet.
It’s this supercheap thing:
It’s not very comfortable, but it gets the job done. The little supermagnify eyepiece is pretty cool when you need it.
-Tom
I bought into the original KD:M kickstarter (and all the gameplay expansions) because I wanted all those minis. Think of all the permutations! Your character always looks exactly like what he’s carrying! So cool!
And then we played. And became disenchanted with all the minis. I eventually sold all but the base minis as a lot- netted $650 for a bunch of plastic sprues, on a game that I originally paid $400 for. So that’s nice.
The game itself, with all the content? Well, I do think better of it now I’m actually being paid $250 to play it (with proxies for some minis) instead of having shelled out $400. Gloomhaven is a much better game, with better mechanics and more interesting decisions. K:DM does excel at the experience, though.
Yeah, after playing more KDM since our previous convo I do really disagree here. I don’t think the opposite is necessarily true, just that an objective statement like this is really not truthful. Both games are deeply flawed and brilliant in different ways, and they cater to very different type of players, but I don’t think there’s anything objectively superior in Gloomhaven mechanically. Actually, mechanically it is very limited (very few moving parts for such a fiddle game) and the decisions are less game-changing and have less important strategic consequences (I would say the strategic layer in Gloomhaven is insignificant despite selling itself at providing that experience).
Balance does not necessarily make a better game by itself, specially in a solitaire game.
There’s something I’ll definitely agree with- the strategic layer in GH is barely-there. It’s cool, and makes for fun, reasonably well-written adventures (compared against a lot of the drek writing in other adventure games- I meant GH is no masterpiece of writing, but it’s at least Feist’s Magician series level compared to, say, Runebound’s Eregon, but I digress), but there’s no real game there, no real decisions or long-term planning. Stuff happens to you, you react, you buy some gear, choose where to go next.
:KDM, on the other hand, at least gives you the illusion of planning your settlement, using available resources to help it grow, figuring out what to hunt to get those resources, etc. Then it ruins all that by making you roll on stupid d10 tables at random times to see if something terrible or merely something bad happens to your plans/characters, etc. Stupidest mechanics ever.
I’m curious what you think is deeply flawed about Gloomhaven? I’ve seen people cite things they personally dislike about the experience, and I can generally understand where they’re coming from on that, but I don’t see any deep flaws. Not that it’s perfect - certain cards and items are a little too good relative to the rest, that sort of thing. Also, I don’t agree that it sells itself as having a strategic layer. It advertises a campaign layer with some growth outside of your individual party and its heroes, and it absolutely has that. It isn’t a major component of the gameplay or ever intended to be as far as I know.
I’ve noticed a general trend in gamers (cardboard and electronic alike) to diminish one thing they don’t like in order to elevate a thing they do like. I don’t think it’s intentional in most cases, though.
Two things mostly.
First the disconnect between theme and gameplay. Tom has spoken a lot about that before, but Gloomhaven feels like a puzzle game with a dungeon crawling theme. There are little long term negative consequences to your choices and the progress branches but it’s 99% of the time forward. Every decision outside of the tactical layer has very little meaning long term, and thus the game devolves into a series of preset (except for the random scenarios) co-op puzzles. I enjoy the basic gameplay more than Tom does, but it does not work for me so far in terms of holding sessions together and I’d rather have had a non-campaign game with longer, more involved sessions than this approach. It feels like an accountant’s dream of what a thrilling adventure should be. It’s dry and generic at its core while trying desperately to be the opposite with the aesthetic presentation.
Second, it’s extremely fiddly to an extreme. For how basic the gameplay is, the need to dress up with theme (even if it’s ultimately unsuccessful) covers the basic simple gameplay with too many irrelevant detail and messy pieces, making it a worse experience than setting up Robinson Crusoe (and that’s something). We are talking beyond Fantasy Flight levels of useless stuff thrown into the box to create an impression of variety when there’s little. The terrain and room setups could have been done with one or two boards top, preserving the same tactical implications, and most of the other tiles are not necessary. The approach to content is the opposite of elegant and actively gets in the way of me setting up the game (for example, KDM single board with terrain on top is a much more practical solution). For god’s shake, it’s a game that basically requires an organizer to be able to play it faster than you set it up (slight exaggeration, but only only slight).
Finally, it’s too tuned (which adds to the perceived dryness I mention above). The fact that it tries to replicate an experience of just barely making it every single scenario makes the gameplay and the experience repetitive, which is damning for something so long. You are not allowed to fail badly and make that failure hurt you. Failures do little against you and you are not really supposed to anyway.
Its a game that tries to be elegant and sprawling at the same time, creating contradictions it does not solve in a satisfactory matter.This is both why it’s so successful a design (its ambition) and such a flawed one (its contradictions).
Again, I think KDM has deep flaws too (I think deeper ones, actually), and I do think most games of this complexity are bound to be deeply flawed anyway (another deeply flawed game I love is High Frontier, for example), but I am amazed at how uncritical of Gloomhaven many people (surprisingly including well regarded reviewers) can be.
I just have a problem with absolutes when dealing with evaluating experiences like these. Some games are outright, objectively, bad, but there’s no real objective measure for a great game, no matter what proponents of euro-style design try to push. But yes, this is a subject I really care for. There’s a certain philosophy of design being brought forward as the objetively best one that I feel is impacting innovation and variety. I’ve been to one too many conferences where I’ve been told the role of luck should be diminished because it makes for bad gameplay, which is a simplification that belies an inability to actually analyze what luck means for a particular design (by that school of though, Blood Blow, a 25+ year old game -that does have roll-in-a-table-and-die mechanics- still played by hundred of thousands of people is a bad design. Which is, obviously ridiculous on the face of it).
Ok. I disagree with all of that, but I appreciate that you’ve given it some thought.