When the undertow kickstarter was running they described it as a cheaper entry point for people to see if they liked the game. I think that was a mistake. I’ve only played Undertow, but it felt incredibly fiddly and overwrought and has unfortunately turned me off the series. Still haven’t listened to this podcast, hoping to soon.
Report back here! I’m be curious to hear how it goes for you and @Vesper.
Yeah, that does sound like a terrible misreading of their potential audience. Undertow adds a whole other layer of stuff to combat, as you probably know. All those mechs and fishes along the side of the mat aren’t in the core game. All the ways the grid falls apart pretty much never happens in the core game. Seems to me that stuff is only valuable once you’ve run through so much of the content in terms of enemies and characters that you want to change the whole environment. Ugh. Sorry that was your intro to the series, Mr. Napkin.
-Tom
So i’ve played 4 full games now and i have some thoughts. I’ll preface what i think is going to sound like complaints with an up front that I really like this game! I love how different the characters feel, how simple (and clean simple not boring simple) the battle and upgrade systems are, and even after a handful of plays i can already tell i will be playing this for a long time.
Now that being said I’m wondering if i’m “playing this wrong” because this game is really, really hard! I’ve been playing with 2 gearlocs (Picket and Boomer from the “tutorial”) and i’m starting to think this might be the hardest gearloc count and the game might not really be balanced for 2. I’ve only played against Drellen so far and i’ve only reached his encounter once. Yes i know you just keep going when you lose encounters but once you start losing encounters (and losing out on those vital upgrades) you quickly reach a point where you know you’ll never get strong enough to beat the boss. I’ve also been using the suggested upgrades in the manual. However with 2 gearlocs, once you get past the standard first 3 days, you’re already in trouble. I think the number of baddies you face is much more significant to the difficulty than the level of baddie, i.e. 4 1-point baddies is just as difficult (if not more so) than 2 5-point baddies, especially in the early game when you’re relatively weak. So the way BQ is calculated means on Day 4 you’re outnumbered 2-1, Day 5 the odds are even, Day 6-9 it’s 2-1 with more in reserve. So you’re almost always facing twice as many baddies as you have gearlocs which (at least for me) means more defeats than wins, which means less upgrades, which means either fighting the Tyrant underleveled or running out of time.
Now i say all that knowing i’ve only faced 1 Tyrant and only 2 characters a handful of times. It’s possible these 2 don’t work the best together or i’m still learning and things will get easier with more experience but i’m not really convinced of that. Also when it comes to upgrades it seems like the best move really is loading up on stat dice and ignoring skills for the most part, at least in these shorter games. When i only have 9 turns to get upgrades (not all of which are going to give me those upgrade points) why would i not want to just buff those stat dice to give me the most health, def and attack? When you’re outnumbered every battle you’re going to take a lot of hits and those fancy skills don’t do much to help if you’re dead within the first few rounds.
Again i know this is all coming off like complaints but they’re really not, just observations. I wonder has anyone (I guess just Tom) tried modifying the BQ formula for 2 gearlocs? I think i saw some discussion on BGG that would reduce the BQ total for 2 to make things a little more manageable. Overall i really do l like this game and its a testament to how good it is that even after getting smoked repeatedly i’m coming back for more. I really want to get into the other 3 characters i have waiting for me and try out the other Tyrants but i need to take down Drellen before i can really move on!
Well, I wouldn’t say “ignore” skills, but you have the right idea. That’s one of the reasons the longer games are more rewarding; there’s more room/time to experiment with combos on the skill trees. Otherwise, against the bosses with shorter time limits, you’ll want to get good basic stats, complement them with two or three skills, and leverage your gearloc’s innate abilities along the way. In your case, that’s Boomer’s ranged ability – you can’t fully appreciate being able to attack anyone anywhere until you’ve played without her ranged attacks! – and Pickett’s once/turn healing. It’s an easy mistake to see all those cool abilities along the skill tree and assume that’s where you should focus your upgrades. But those are the icing. The spice. The meat and potatoes are your attack, defense, dexterity, and hit points.
BTW, play with the difficulty adjustments! Definitely use the lowest level – I think it’s called “adventurer” – until you’ve got at least one win under your belt.
Two characters is definitely do-able. My issue with more characters is that the game gets easier by virtue of clogging up the battle map. Which is maybe the point? Because the one thing that doesn’t scale is the enemy “bandwidth”. But, yeah, I think the conventional wisdom is that two players is harder than three players, which is harder than four players.
-Tom
Oh I guess i didn’t make that clear last post, yeah i’ve been playing on the “lowest” difficulty with the added health and upgrade point. I think that’s a must with 2 gearlocs. I think on my most successful run so far i only picked 1 skill for Pickett (the health die) and 2 for Boomer (Frag and the Body Search) and put the rest into stats. Of course that was the run i decided to take on Drellen right at Day 6 and got smoked!
While i agree that 2 characters is “doable” (and i’m certainly going to keep at it with 2) I still maintain that the game is not quite balanced with 2. The issue you have with more gearloc’s clogging up the battle map, that’s exactly whats happening every battle with 2 gearlocs. When you’re always outnumbered and those baddies are almost always packing skills that make you even weaker things can get out of hand real quick. I remember you pointing out the Flight skill on the podcast and how it added to the authentic feel of the battles, i actually sigh in relief when i see a Flight skill come out. Yeah i can’t target it every turn but hey it’s not doing anything to actively affect me! That’s way better than seeing a Signal 3 and knowing I’ve got a long fight ahead of me, or a few Poison skills that i cant block, or a few Breaks that are going to exhaust the precious few attack die i have, or horror of horrors a Corrosive that’s going to strip Pickett’s shields every turn!
I joke a bit but I think it’s the combination of being outnumbered and out-skilled that really can shut down a run fast. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing! I want my solo games to feel challenging, i want to really earn that win so that i feel a real sense of accomplishment. So i’ll keep plugging away with 2 gearlocs for now and if i change anything I might try the BGG recommendation of changing the BQ formula to #gearlocs x progression points (instead of days).
Yeah, that’s the litany of Too Many Bones horrors, isn’t it?
For what it’s worth, I win about one out of every five games. And it depends on the boss, of course. The evil gearloc – Drellen? Dusk? I forget her name – I’ve never beat.
By the way, one thing to keep in mind is that your end goal isn’t to win the boss fight. It’s to kill the boss. The moment he’s dead, you’ve won. You don’t play out the rest of the battle! The game is all about getting two gearlocs who can get a kill – ideally a quick one – in the face whatever gimmick the boss brings to bear. It might feel cheesy, especially with certain combinations, but for me, that takes off some of the pressure. Even if my preparations go awry, sometimes a lucky beak in that last battle gets me a win.
-Tom
We’ve been playing for a few nights with two characters, and getting trounced. The default, day-based BQ formula seems to more or less ensure losing a battle snowballs the trouncing into an unwinnable situation. That progression point formula, though, seems like it might mitigate the snowball effect without making the game a cakewalk. It sounds like you didn’t invent it, but I’ll give you credit for it anyway. We’re gonna try it!
Ha no I didn’t invent it, read it on the BGG forums. And I agree, the games BQ formula makes it very easy to spiral into an “unwinnable” situation once you lose an encounter or two, especially with 2 gearlocs. I’m generally not a fan of “house rules” but I might give the progression points formula a shot just to see what kind of difference it makes. My only concern with progression is there is no penalty at all (especially if you’re playing on the lowest difficulty where you keep your locked dice after a KO) for losing an encounter other than the time penalty of losing a day. With the current BQ formula every encounter will get harder no matter what, that’s not the case with the progression formula but I guess thats the point for making the game a little easier.
Out of curiosity what 2 gearlocs are you using? Against what Tyrant?
Oh yeah for sure that’s the goal. The one time I’ve faced this first Tyrant (when I was admitittedly underleveled) I never really got a chance to focus on the boss to take him down. I wasn’t strong enough to take him out in one turn and a few bad initiative rolls meant I was going after all the baddies. By the time I got a turn I was already dripping in poison, with no armor and surrounded. And we all know how that ended.
Patches & Boomer against The Goblin King (who we haven’t actually reached yet).
Finally listened to this and still managing to resist Too Many Bones…but just barely. So expensive!! But it sounds sooo good…
I continue to be selfishly annoyed that boutique stuff like this and Kingdom Death don’t have $60 versions with crappy cardboard tokens and regular dice and the like.
I felt like Arkham Horror 3 definitely had a replayability issue. It’s a little more replayable than the card game scenarios (unless you’re super into deck build tweaking, there’s no real point in playing scenarios more than once or twice), but nowhere near Eldritch.
Once you know the static scenario objectives, they become super easy and you’re almost guaranteed a win barring incredibly bad luck. The only challenge at that point is trying to beat the scenarios using the very worst investigators (and boy howdy are the investigators tiered).
Any expansions need to not only add new scenarios, but add at least SOME kind of objective randomization to each one. It’s going to be tough given how each one is a narrative, but it definitely needs to happen.
But who am I kidding, they’re just going to add more fiddly bloat like they did with Eldritch. They’re going to bring back the separate “Skills” deck from AH2. They’re going to bring back tons of conditions and 10 minute reckoning phases from Eldritch. They’re going to bring back five dozen different unique asset decks.
I’ll be curious to see how y’all feel about Hyperspace, assuming any of the pod crew end up getting to play it. Obviously the Kickstarter just ended not so long ago, so it will be several months or more before it actually ends up in anyone’s hands outside of Sandy Petersen Games’ playtests, but based on the Kickstarter discussion and the playthrough videos they uploaded, it seems like it might be that 4X boardgame that manages a fair bit of Ameritrashy theme and asymmetry without taking anything like TI’s 8-10 hour marathon sessions. Actually, it looks like it’s fairly consistently shorter than Eclipse.
Which doesn’t mean there aren’t sacrifices - in particular, it didn’t seem like it really has much of a sense of exploration (it’s a mechanic, and there are some variances between planets and occasionally minor alien races, but it looks like that phase of the game tends to wrap up pretty early and there’s not that much difference). It doesn’t have the elaborate political system of TI or the fancy phase and secondary activation abilities. But you are still playing weird, very different aliens with a lot of backstory if you care, and there’s research both race-specific and general, and big space battles and resource production…