same …
I ordered some out-of-stock stuff in January and it got here this week. You won’t get any updates until it shippity ships! And if you’re in the US at least, it gets there mad quick, bra.
I have several new games I “have to” try but honestly… I’d Rather Be Boning.
They’re almost ready to ship Cloudspire from the recent KS, I think. No idea where I’m gonna put that.
I have room, happy to help.
So I just concluded my first game/solo game of TMB, playing with just one gearloc, good 'ol Patches taking on Nom.
And as usual, I figure when I play a game for the first 2-3 times, I’m going to slosh some of the rules. The goal is to screw up fewer and fewer of them each time though!
But man. This was just a walk in the park. In the park in Daelore, I guess. So maybe I screwed up a bunch of fundamental rules. Thus, I have questions:
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Fatigue ignores Thick Skin and defense dice that may be on a baddie/Tyrant, right? The wording in the manual doesn’t specifically call Fatigue damage as True Damage, so I wasn’t sure – but that’s how I’ve seen a bunch of playthroughs on Youtube treat it.
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If that’s the case, my strategy with Patches solo was to basically have him outlive everyone as needed. I did get lucky early on with a bunch of bones in a single fight that allowed me to flip his chip and use his innate+1 that gave him 8 HP (I was playing on baby mode, so he started with 7.) I also got the reinforced buckler as loot, which seems absurdly overpowered.
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I went deep into the heals of the Combat Medic line with him, just in case. And I did get some lucky encounter card draws, and some really lucky Baddie Queue pulls that were all melee.
I was able to beat Nom by getting 4 bones and trading them in for a poison dart and then waiting to use it until fatigue counteracted his Recovery trait and combining that with steadily peeling off his defense dice so that I could use 2 attack dice and bonesaw together to finish him.
I enjoyed the sort of JRPG combat a lot. And really enjoyed the different character build options. I think I want to play one more solo game with a single gearloc and then take a shot at running two gearlocs in regular mode.
Also, man is that Trove Chest nifty. Makes breakdown/setup MUCH faster.
burying the lede there! :)
But yes, fatigue always does damage. If you ever got down to 1 HP, fatigue would kill you, because it takes effect before Patches’s recovery.
Also, I want that Trove Chest, but I’m gonna wait until it goes on sale. I’m comfortable waiting forever, because if it never goes on sale or they stop making it, it’s not a game that I’ll never get to play. It’s just a convenience. Maybe for their Black Friday sale… sigh.
It’s so good.
Right?
I mean, I get what justaguy2 is saying, for sure. And I’m totally sympathetic that “stock” storage/organization in tabletop games is such a horribly neglected thing. And I know that a lot of folks who love games are pretty great at making creative solutions to storing their game components, too.
With that said…I am the asshole who will happily pay for good aftermarket 3rd-party storage/organization solutions. Or in the case of TMB, 1st-party. :)
The thing is, a good organizer/storage solution adds immeasurably to my enjoyment of the game itself. As an example, I considered Eldritch Horror to be pretty much unplayable excess once you start adding sideboard expansions. But a few years ago I invested in the Broken Token crate storage thingy, and it changed my opinion completely. I can get EH set up on the table in like a third of the time with it, even with expansions. Which means I’m way more prone to play it, and I don’t start the game off with a migraine from looking for one-off setup pieces or cards or chits so much. And all of a sudden EH becomes this giant open world boardgame to go futzing around where I’m trying to win…but I don’t care nearly as much if I’m winning so much, because playing game after game is super easy to get back to the table.
And definitely same for TMB with the trove chest. Grab a Tyrant out of the chest. Grab a Tyrant. Grab the mats and cards and go. Dice and baddie chips are right there, marked. And that ease of setup means that I just wanna grab different gearlocs and play with them and fail and fail badly but have fun and kind of figure out how to get better.
I’ve said this before in other threads, but I’m getting to the point where if a game doesn’t have some sort of thoughtful storage/organizing solution, be that out of the box or aftermarket, my enthusiasm for even opening it drops off sharply. The Trove Chest is really in a class all its own, though.
Yep, feel the same way. One thing I’m happy about with all things TMB is that the PVC cards are the first cards in a game in a while that I haven’t had to sleeve without worrying about them warping. The need to sleeve to prevent warp kind of drives me to organizers, too. (So far, I’m pleased that I haven’t needed to sleeve Sleeping Gods, and the cards are holding up well.)
So I’ve looked at BGG and also official FAQs and such, and boy does the reinforced buckler seem like an OP piece of loot:
Downside: it takes up 3 of your 4 loot slots, because it’s heavy.
Upside: you get to roll an extra defensive die every round, regardless of your DEX or DEF stat. Regardless of how many times this extra roll in previous rounds has contributed defensive dice in your active skill array. The only restriction seems to be that if your four active skill slots are full, the every-round roll of that buckler defensive die can only be used to replace 1-point shields with 2-pointers, should you roll a 2-point shield.
Upside: Any bones you get rolling the extra DEF die per turn can go into your backup plan.
Upside: You never “lose” this extra DEF die roll per turn. It doesn’t matter if you have a shield from the buckler die roll in your active slot already. You get to roll another die again the next round. It doesn’t matter if you have that buckler extra die as a bones die in your backup plan. You get to roll another extra DEF die next round. Every round.
That’s bonkers. If you get into some long fights early and you have the buckler, you’re really likely to get to your Innate +1 if you want it. And though you may be tanky as hell, the defensive dice aren’t going to save you from True Damage. But even so, that’s some crazy survivability there.
Win a couple times on Real Mode before worrying about what’s OP. ;)
With at LEAST all 4 included Gearlocs…
So anyway, what’s the opinion on playing solo, multi-handed?
Is two characters the sweet spot?
Or do some of you TMB veterans who are really familiar with how different gearlocs work play with 3 at the same time? Or more?
If I recall correctly, two characters is extremely difficult. I’ve found 4 to be the best balance for me, although it is a lot to keep track of.
Wow, really? Four?
I’m gonna need a bigger table for that. :)
I found the one time I played with two much easier than my other games, which have been 3-4. (Though none have been solo.) That might just have been the pairing (Ghillie + Tantrum) or the luck of the draw, though.
3-4 characters is generally considered to be extremely easy. It’s one of the most frequent complaints I’ve seen of the game and something they specifically tried to address with some of the new Splice & Dice tyrants.
Two is definitely the sweet spot, but even then it can be easy depending on Tyrant and character combination.
That seems weird to me. The BQ escalates much faster with higher character counts and I’ve not found the extra Gearloc bodies to make a comparable impact, especially since it’s quite easy to have baddies act first and higher rank baddies can easily one-shot Gearlocs in the early days.
The BQ goes up faster, but there are only ever 4 baddiesout at a time. So with 2 gearlocs, you have a 2v4 against easier baddies versus a 4v4 with harder baddies - seems to work out to be harder overall in the 2v4 scenario.