Under Falling Skies unfortunately lives up to its name

That sentence is the example, or rather some further explanation on the rule. The rule itself is stated on the line directly above, in the blue box:

After placing a white die, reroll all dice not yet placed

oh man, I must be blind. I read the blue box several times, totally did not see the rule. Strange! Thanks, I feel better now, knowing the rulebook actually had the rule covered.

No worries! :)

I had my first game this evening. Managed a win with one more mothership turn left. Next up, the campaign!

it is a pretty clever rule, to be forced a reroll can really destroy your plans.

More often, it’s helpful! You get to pick and choose which numbers you want, and which lanes to prioritize. You basically look at your first roll and decide what you want to keep and which lanes you can leave to chance. It’s a pretty elegant process once you get used to it.

-Tom

Small correction:
“towards you[r] base“

I hope you’ll be posting your preferred house rules here, Tom.

One question: how does the difficulty of Under Falling Skies compare to One Deck Dungeon? I’ve got to the stage where ODD is a bit too easy now so a new challenge would be good.

Under Falling Skies is definitely more difficult. It’s a bit of a brain burner, and you can adjust the difficulty level for a higher score. There’s also a system for scaling difficulty with the standalone games. You’ve got a ton of options using the various components, and they’re all rated for difficulty level.

-Tom

Excellent. I shall check out the print & play on TTS to get a feel for the rules.

Yup, exactly! You’re not making “plans” with a die you know you’re going to have to reroll, are you? That would be weird! You know you have 1-2 rerolls, so “plan” to time those rerolls to help yourself out.

Played 1/2 a game tonight. Like that it’s easy to learn, like that it takes a decent amount of thought, like that it plays quickly. I rarely ever play campaigns, I like games with individual scenarios so will play this mostly as one off games. It seems there will be a lot of replayability with all the setup possibilities.

Tired of trying to learn Enemy Action: Ardennes so this will be a nice break for a bit.

21 posts were split to a new topic: Difficulty levels in games

I bought it new for 45€ + shipping (German version), because it is out of print, but a new print is supposed to come in February/March. Didn’t want to wait.

It is a great little puzzler (so far I didn’t start the campaign), that you could leave on a table, if you don’t have a cat. Alas, I have a cat and live in constant fear of her screwing up my meeples and tokens when I am away.

Don’t put a robot in a fighter (red) room, even if you put a 6 in it, it will decrease to an almost useless 3. I find it better to put it in resarch or energy. Even +2 energy can help, I find it wasteful to remove a robot when not all pips are used.

Maybe in a multi-box fighter jet room. But Washington was a tough fight until I made better use of robots.

Now lets start the campaign. It is kind of an addictive system. Everything works so well together, amazing.

Well, everything is super situational, so there aren’t any hard-and-fast rules, but there are definitely times a robot fighter pilot can be very helpful. It will free up other dice and buy you time to shoot down aliens. And when you’ve got the white ships added to the mix – remember, these guys will keep attacking you until you shoot them down, even after they’ve damaged your base – you really need to do whatever you can to get them out of the sky. Also, even as the robot spools down to lower numbers, you can still pick off the occasional straggler!

But, yes, robot electricians and robot scientists are great. Keep posting as you play the campaign. Are you just doing the default difficulty? Where you only flip one sky tile?

-Tom

(yes, and it was soo hard to beat the 3 starting cities). But I think there is a learning curve, that’s good!
The only “negative” I can hold against the game is, that there is so much counting and re-counting of spaces.

With robots and fighter rooms, it is more of a rule of thumb. If the situation arises, I might do it again.
But wow, how effective 2 robots were in 2 research rooms.

(hush @tomchick while nobody is looking, what’s the incentive here to increase the difficulty beyond default one tile?) What difficulty were you playing?

You get a score at the end of the campaign based on the difficulty you played (i.e. how many tiles you flip). Each level of difficulty is a point when you win the scenario. But each failure is -1 point. And the finale is replaying a really difficult scenario over and over, losing a point each time you fail. So – spoiler – your score is probably going to be zero or less.

-Tom

So, finished chapter 2. I have the game always on the table, but it is nerve wrecking. You always need to push hard to win a game (so it feels). You never get a win gifted to you. You are stuck on the lower part of the research track for a long time, it feels like you never get anything going. At some point you need to take hits to your city in order to push the research.

I am always under pressure in this game. I never felt that kind of tension in OneDeck Dungeon, even if you do not do well in a battle, you always get the reward.

Map tile E seems overpowered. As soon as I dig out the research/attack-room+1 I can win in the next few rounds. Researching and shooting down aliens with at least 6+ feels really strong.