You disagree with the game being fiddly to a fault? Or that the integration of theme is superficial?
I can see those things not mattering to you as a player, that’s the whole point, different flaws make for different impressions in different people, but they are pretty objective observations.
Yes, both of those. I do think one of the game’s flaws is the amount of setup required, particularly out of the box without an additional storage situation (although the provided insert is more thoughtful and useful than basically anything Fantasy Flight has provided in many years, it’s just not equal to the task at hand), but I don’t think the actual game is particularly fiddly. I certainly don’t agree that it’s full of irrelevant detail or pieces, and it’s insane to me to describe it as having little variety. I also don’t agree at all that the theming is superficial or that it’s dry and generic at the core.
I guess I don’t completely disagree, after all, though - there are certainly a number of decisions at the campaign layer that don’t really have a lot of long term consequences. This is why I’ve regularly contended that it’s not really much of a legacy game. That said, there are certainly quite a few decisions outside of the tactical layer that do have long term impact (branches in the storyline, the choice of cards when levelling, the purchasing of items and particularly enhancements, and even some events chain). Also, while I don’t agree with your conclusion that it’s overly tuned or repetitive, it’s certainly true that you’re not able to fail in a way that really costs you anything except the time spent on that scenario. To me, that’s enough consequence right there, but that’s a matter of taste.
I’m told KDM will straight up murder your guys off camera during the choose your own adventure bits. True?
Yeah, it can happen. But remember, your guys are resources (I can’t fathom playing this as anything but solo), so it’s equivalent to losing an important piece of equipment or such, perhaps less (my latest party wipe included two survivors that carried irreplaceable -lose on death- equipment, and I was much more concerned about losing the equipment than the guys). This is a game where you can lose easily 20-25 characters per successful campaign. Also, there are ways to build up survivors to minimize that quite a lot, including a once in a lifetime reroll you can opt for, and most of those rolls are optional anyways.
It doesn’t bother me at all, and it’s part of the luck management and strategic planning aspect of the game (you need to build up substitutes, prepare for failure and can’t rely on perfect outcomes through play only). But there are places where it happens where it’s worse in a design sense (the hunt phase, which is the weaker aspect of the game). When it happens in the settlement phase (which is most instances) it’s fine.
I remember trying to get into Warhammer fantasy as a teenager, but jesus getting into that hobby is expensive enough as an adult; how the hell is a teenager supposed to afford that? So I just started using square pieces of cardboard to represent units, with a piece of paper bearing the name of the unit and a crude drawing.
That was how I played Warhammer fantasy for half a year. I could choose any army loadout I wanted! Then thrill wore off when I realized something: the actual game mechanics kind of sucked :(
There are some miniature heavy games I’m interested in but have no interest in paying for, assembling, or painting the miniatures. I wish so many games came with cheaper, miniature-free options: Kingdom Death, Cthulhu Wars, Mansions of Madness (can’t they just focus on putting out more $5 downloadable scenarios instead of $50 expansions that come with 2 scenarios and a ton of miniatures I don’t want?).
Amen. I love Sci fi modeling and had a fun time doing a quick paint job on the KDM core set, but ultimately I like keeping both hobbies (modeling and gaming) separate.
Edit: This is the quick paint job. Crappy quick pictures. Looks better in person…
https://i.imgur.com/5itmtii.jpg
It’s a campaign that requires you to play 50 almost indistinguishable skirmishes. It’s worse than Descent or Mice and Mystics or any other dungeon crawler in that regard simply because it’s longer. Mage Knight provides the same kind of deck-building puzzle gameplay, but without it being over and over and over and over again. Enemy tactics aren’t varied enough to provide much in the way of additional strategic requirements, and even if they were, it’s still one skirmish after another after another. Goal: kill all enemies. I get that KDM has some of the same thing, but a boss fight against a single powerful and scripted enemy just feels more interesting than clear this room, then clear the next one, then clear the next one, even if the cards provide some strategic options. The landscape tiles are ugly (the art design in Gloomhaven is generally pretty pedestrian) and almost indistinguishable from one another. There are at least as many fiddly components as Arkham Horror and far more bookkeeping. In KDM, I’m thinking “We need to distract the lion to draw him away from our injured comrade over there.” In Gloomhaven, I’m thinking “I should save this card because it would pair better with this other card that I’ll get back at the end of this round if I do a short rest.” In one game, I’m immersed in the theme; in the other it’s all mechanics.
I’m not sure I agree that HF is deeply flawed in the same way that these other two are. Its rules are a bit of a beast, but once you grok them, they make sense and hold together pretty well, particularly with the full Colonization game. It’s not as fiddly as at seems, and its only major flaw is that it permits runaway victories. If I could bring it to the table ever, it would probably be my favorite game. (I’ve only ever played solo and PBEM games.) Lately I’ve been enjoying Eklund’s new Bios: Megafauna 2, especially the stripped down Tooth and Claw variant, which I think might be the most robustly strategic game he’s ever made.
Of course it’s a question of degrees (and it is more coherent of course), but runaway leader victory, extremely long to unplayable in a single seating playing time and difficult rule book (the rules are fine, the rule book is not) are deep flaws in my book. Just ones I don’t care about that much. It’s also one of my favourite games, but I see the warts. The art direction is also not that good and I’m looking forward to the 4th edition using the much better graphic design Sierra Madre games have now.
Amen to this. I think Mansion of Madness 2e is surprisingly brilliant, not least because avoids exactly the same kind of skirmish after skirmish trap that most dungeon crawlers fall into and provides actually interesting and varied scenarios that sometimes even have zero combat. I love that setup takes less than 5 minutes, the health and sanity mechanic, and that it requires players to be invested in the story. But I totally agree–I wish they’d publish more scenarios rather than more minis. (Though at least we don’t have to assemble them. I do rebase them onto clear acrylic disks, but that’s pretty trivial.)
There are literally dozens of missions with other goals than kill all enemies, and several of the skirmishes involve boss fights. Furthermore, the combination of enemies, the map layout, and your party loadout make for huge degrees of variance in experience even within the skirmishes you write off as “indistinguishable”. You are also dramatically underselling the difference between those enemies and the tactics required. There is actually substantially less variation in experience with Mage Knight, although I also think that’s a brilliant and highly engaging game that was previously my favorite.
Art is a very matter of taste sort of thing, but I think the character art in GH is great. The landscape tiles are pretty dull, though, I will agree. I don’t think they’re all that interesting in any game of the fantasy dungeon crawl style I’ve played, TBH. There are also significantly fewer things to keep track of than in Arkham Horror, both in terms of bookkeeping and in miscellaneous components. Each player has two decks and a couple of items. And then in most scenarios there are 3-4 monster types with AI decks and one monster modifier deck. AH has the mythos deck, Ancient One effects, 8+ location decks, an other world encounters deck, swathes of different item decks and conditions and potentially 10+ completely different monsters, etc etc. Which I personally love, but I don’t blame people for finding it fiddly. Gloomhaven’s not light on that stuff by any means but I’d put it in the solid mid-range at worst. In play, of course. There’s a lot more to sort through before you get there unless you have a good insert, but most of it won’t be used in any given scenario. And I’m thinking the same sort of things you describe thinking about KD:M when playing Gloomhaven, I’m just also thinking about the mechanical side of decisions. Maybe you’re not, but I don’t agree that that’s the game not having a strong theme. At worst it’s just not working for you for whatever reason.
I absolutely agree. It’s one of my biggest complaints about modern tabletop gaming, and I would add that minis are particularly difficult to store, especially big detailed multi-piece ones that can easily be damaged if stored improperly. And that’s one of the things I appreciated about Gloomhaven - no version of the game uses minis for the enemies, and the original Kickstarter offered a version that also uses standees for the characters at a nearly $20 discount. I opted for that, obviously.
(That said, while I’m normally down on minis, KD:M’s are pretty cool, as are the ones on this sucker: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1816687860/planet-apocalypse )
I recommend the 3.5x even with the slightly reduced depth of field. I use them and love them.
If you liked the sanity mechanics of Mansions of Madness, you might want to check out Mountains of Madness. It uses a very similar system to MoM’s insanity effects, only amped up into what’s almost a silly party game atmosphere.
You trek up a mountain trying to overcome challenges a lot like the crises checks in Battlestar Galactica, only there’s no traitor, only madness. Communication is key because the group needs to play an exact amount in or else you fail the check. You have 30 seconds to discuss without giving away your exact cards, then everyone plays and no one is allowed to talk. You accumulate madness cards that each have a wacky effect on communication. “Can only talk while singing”, “Can only talk when someone is looking you in the eye” are how they start out. Level 2 actually hampers communication “You must high five everyone each discussion round before you are allowed to speak”. Level 3 are a real pain “You can only speak in rhymes”. It’s a lot like the Tower of Babel where your quest to reach the top breaks down as no one can understand each other anymore and your entire party are a bunch of gibbering loons.
Very simple mechanics that casual players can get into. Would probably make a fun casual party game that people can quickly pick up and laugh at.
Grrrr. I hate this thread and what it has done for, uh, More Hundred out of my bank account.
What have I done?
I doubt I’d have time to play both this and Gloomhaven with my son before he goes off to college, but I love the minis here. Well, plus I’d hate to drop that kind of dough on another big-box campaign style game while we’re smack in the middle of another one anyway. Still, this is exactly the kind of board game I love! So maybe some day.
I had an opportunity to play the prologue as a demo, and I have a question for those who understand the game or at least the rules.
The monster dies when he has no AI cards left. Every time the AI deck is empty, you shuffle what’s in the discard and make that the new AI deck. We got the AI deck down to one card – Terrifying Roar. We resolved a couple of rounds of that before it became apparent that it was a lock with no way out of it. The ability kept knocking us all back and knocking us over every turn, while dealing brain damage.
Was that scenario actually unwinnable at that point? I guess we could have relied on the monster rolling a 1, or the brain damage causing deafness on someone, but those seem super unlikely.
There are lockups in the game (both player benefiting and monster benefiting, setting them up as a player is great for farming or dealing with really difficult enemies) but this one is not one of them. You are missing a couple things:
1- You can’t be knocked down when you are already knocked down. This is a tremendously important rule. It means the timer for standing up does not reset when you are hit by a knockdown effect and are still knocked down. So, in the scenario you describe: you get Terrifying roar, all your 4 guys are down, the monster attacks (basic action) nobody since everybody is knocked down and therefore not a target. Next turn you can’t do anything (you are knocked down). Next turn you get another Terrifying Roar, and you might suffer additional brain damage and knockback, which would push you away from the lion but won’t retrigger the knocked down state (you remain knocked down from the previous turn). this time, because of the sniff in the previous round, the Lion will attack one guy. When the monster turn ends, your survivors stand up since it’s the end of the next monster turn since they were knocked down. At that point you better damage it.
2- The monster dies when he has no AI cards left and it suffers an additional wound. When there are no cards left it performs i’s basic action.
3- A particular scenario might be unwinnable, but that doesn’t mean game over. you just lose all 4 survivors and move over to the build a settlement phase (with a very rough start, that’s true, since unless you pick cannibalism and get very lucky you will not have much needed weapons to fight the real Lvl 1 Lion -the prologue is more of a level 0-).
4- On average every two/three Terrifying roars the monster will fail an attempt. This might not be of much help if the guy is out of range, though, but it’s not a horrible chance, specially if you still have a founding stone. If you don’t well, that’s an issue. Throwing your stones really hurts your chances of damaging the lion.
5- Speaking of unwinnable scenarios, certain nemesis are for me still unwinnable scenarios before I even start fighting them. I still haven’t grokked how to prepare for their fights.
Juan isn’t quite right. The card specifies all non-deaf survivors, not all threats or all survivors in range or anything. That said, Terrifying Roar causes knockback, not knockdown. Knockback only knocks your survivors down if they collide with someone. So most of them should still be able to attack every round. If they have a founding stone, now is the time to use it. If not, the closest survivor should use their survival to dodge the attack. If you’ve got none of that, yeah you’re kind of hosed, but you’ve also kind of put yourselves in that situation.