So, we've played through the first two Adventures a couple of times but got some of the rules slightly wrong. We decided to start again from the beginning and the first group finished Burnt Offerings last night. Another group is still working through that Adventure.
Since we've got the hang of the basics now, we thought we'd add a little spice and toughen things up. Here are our house rules for those that are interested:
1) we usually play with six characters. If we play with 2-4 characters then we add one extra location (e.g. five locations for 2 characters, instead of four locations). Rationale: puts some more pressure on the group and makes for interesting decisions about whether to close a location early or let it go and explore for loot.
2) villains and henchmen are shuffled into the bottom 5 cards of each location deck. Rationale: prevents the situation where the first card you flip in a location allows you to close the location. Also gives you some nice choices - it can be useful to lose a combat to 'flush out' the henchmen/villain, since the undefeated card causes the location deck to shuffle.
3) if a character takes damage when they have no cards in hand they must bury the top card from their deck. E.g. if you take 3 damage and have 1 card in hand, you just discard 1 card (as usual). If you take 3 damage and have no cards in hand you bury (just) one card from the top of your deck. Rationale: creates a penalty / threat for exploring with an empty hand. The Rules As Written ("RAW") mean that you're basically invulnerable when your hand's empty.
4) if the timer (blessings) deck runs out then each character must banish one random card from their collection for each unclosed location. Rationale: an in-game penalty for letting the villains have time to let their nefarious plans come to fruition. Also incentivises everyone to try closing locations right up to the last turn. I'm not a fan of the RAW in this regard since it lets you explore, find two nice things then stop, reset the scenario and go again. This variation prevents that and reminds the heroes that they're on a mission to stop the bad guys, not on a shopping trip.
This is how we play and how I play solitaire. It works really well for us and I personally have seen no problems with any of the variations we've put in place. They all slightly increase the difficulty but that's not been a problem for our group so far, and the players appreciate the slightly more involved thinking they have to do to beat the game like this.
If you have any questions about any of these variations please ask away!
One variant I've been using for a while is to replace a few of the cards in the blessings deck with random monsters - 3 monsters for 1 player, 4 monsters for 2 players, 5 monsters for 3-4 players and 6 monsters for 5-6 players. If a monster is turned up at the start of a player's turn, they immediately encounter it as a summoned monster.
Adds a lot of fun and makes you think before you empty your hand during another player's turn!
Do you use the blessing card from the previous turn as the 'top of the blessing discard pile' or is there simply no potential blessing to benefit from on a turn that a wondering monster turns up?
You know, 2 enhances Merisiel's power because of the evasion. But on the other hand, evasion may need a boost.
Chief Technical Officer
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villains and henchmen are shuffled into the bottom 5 cards of each location deck.
Moving the henchmen into the bottom of the deck may up the challenges, but moving the villains down actually decreases the challenge. The ramifications of facing the villain before you're really prepared to are kind of a big deal.
@VicWertz - an interesting comment that I'll have a think about.
I generally feel that characters often get a bit weaker as each scenario plays out. They have spent blessings, their draw deck is getting thin, some cards they like have been discarded (e.g. if Lem loses his weapon). This can be offset a bit by the things you find during the scenario but often the 'wrong' character gets the card and we have to wait until the end of scenario clean up to trade it.
In general I think I'd rather face a villain on the first turn of the game than the last! (Kyra is the exception to this, of course, since the Armor starting card is usually more of a handicap than a help!)
Even if we wanted to put the villain higher, this mechanism is the only one whereby we can put the henchmen lower in the decks - otherwise we'd know where the villain was.
The other 'benefit' (as in something that makes the game a bit harder) of having the villain lower is that you're less likely to flush him out early. When you encounter a villain early (and win) the auto-closed location loses lots of cards, which takes away a lot of time pressure it also lets you see what direction he ran in, which is very useful intel. Encountering the villains later reduces both of these and (we think) it satisfies our desire for a more difficult/cerebral game.
@GreyMaus - no, there is no chance to temp close the remaining locations. The villain has enacted their evil schemes and there's nothing temporary about that!
@JohnDavis - I've seen this mentioned before but we decided against it since it seemed a bit far from the spirit of the game for us. Our hope is that the variants we use maintain the original spirit/theme of the game, just up the difficulty a bit.
@ZerothHour - yes, it ups Merisiel's (and everybody's) evasion power but that makes for an interesting choice: do you evade (leaving the bane in the deck) in the hope that you'll 'improve' the deck at the cost of one wasted turn? Or do you face down the threat and slog through the deck? I think there's something like a 75% chance you'll move the henchman/villain 'up' if you evade once... but what about the second time?
For me and my group, interesting choices are what games are all about :)
For conversation's sake only, a theoretical (meaning untested) alternative to #2, which should remove the positive side-effect of evade or losing in combat (or any location deck shuffle in general):
Villains and Henchmen are never added to any location decks. Instead, shuffle them into a secondary location "Villain" deck beside/under each location (at the beginning of the scenario, there will only be 1 card in this deck). The Villain deck can never be targeted by player powers.
Before the scenario, choose a difficulty die: 1d10, 1d8, 1d6, or 1d4; this cannot be changed for the duration of the scenario.
When you explore any open location, roll the difficulty die; if the number rolled is greater than the number of cards left in that location (excluding the Villain deck), you encounter the top card of the location's Villain deck instead of from the main location deck.
Any time a Villain, Henchmen, or any unknown card that might be one of these (for example, Blessings when the Villain escapes) would be added to a location, these cards are instead shuffled into the location's Villain deck; then also shuffle the main location deck.
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Chief Technical Officer
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I generally feel that characters often get a bit weaker as each scenario plays out. They have spent blessings, their draw deck is getting thin, some cards they like have been discarded (e.g. if Lem loses his weapon). This can be offset a bit by the things you find during the scenario but often the 'wrong' character gets the card and we have to wait until the end of scenario clean up to trade it.
In my experience, when you are able to put off encountering the villain until the endgame, you're frequently able to determine which character(s) get to fight him. When you encounter him early on, there's a better chance that the character that finds him won't be able to deal with him.
Regardless, on the occasions when you can't beat him, and you haven't closed enough locations, that's a big deal.
But even when you *can* beat him, you're probably going to use at least a couple of resources you won't get back.
Even if we wanted to put the villain higher, this mechanism is the only one whereby we can put the henchmen lower in the decks - otherwise we'd know where the villain was.
When setting up the decks, you could put the villain in place of one of the monsters, and put that monster in with the henchmen. Of course, that means that you could have one deck with neither villain nor henchman, and another deck with one of each... but, hey, you want to make the game more challenging, right?
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I generally feel that characters often get a bit weaker as each scenario plays out...This can be offset a bit by the things you find during the scenario but often the 'wrong' character gets the card and we have to wait until the end of scenario clean up to trade it.In my experience, when you are able to put off encountering the villain until the endgame, you're frequently able to determine which character(s) get to fight him. When you encounter him early on, there's a better chance that the character that finds him won't be able to deal with him.
I honestly don't agree that characters get weaker as a scenario plays out. Characters can acquire all-purpose blessings, good allies, potentially spells / weapons, and all sorts of other good things. A capable healer will get all of those things back into the character's draw pile, and therefore hand. A character can suddenly and selectively discard massive amounts of cards to get exactly the right cards necessary to deal with the villain - this is a powerful thing indeed.
In addition, the positive effect on scouting really can't be ignored. Every bit of knowledge about a deck makeup gives players power. Knowing that a villain is in the last 5 cards in a deck gives players the ability to hoard an Augury card and use it when the deck gets to that point, and have a 60% chance of finding the villain (vs. a 30% chance if they use it on a full 10-card deck). And, by the power of Grayskull, that is a very useful thing to be able to do. I believe Vic's observation that "putting off encountering the villain" does have the effect where characters can decide who's going to fight the villain, and on what terms.
Hi guys - an interesting discussion here!
I think the villain comments need to be careful about separating two separate effects... for me encountering the villain early/late is not a big issue (with the villains we've seen so far - later on it may be a different story). What actually makes those big baddies relatively easy is when you scout them and know where they are.
Only then can you 'prepare your hand' or send in certain character(s). It's this certain knowledge, preparation and subjecting them to the full force of your group's powers which crushes them.
One thing we've thought about, but not tried play-testing yet, is that the villains could know when you're "on to them". It's a whole separate discussion about how that might work - if you want to discuss it, lets open a new thread - but basically as soon as you see a villain's card (e.g. scout it using Augury, Harsk's power or similar) then a countdown begins.
This could either be a fixed number, based on the number of characters or a die roll. This countdown is the number of turns before the Villain moves out - when the countdown expires you do something to move them to a different deck. (That something is the biggest discussion point) At the moment the preferred idea is to take the top card of every location deck (instead of blessings), then shuffle them and move the villain like you do when the villain escapes normally.
This would certainly have made a difference in at least half of our games where we've scouted the villain then spent ~6 turns (or more) doing some final exploration and preparing to encounter them. It's especially bad if you scout them out at the very beginning of the game since you can then just leave that location alone until much nearer the end (which is part of what we aimed to avoid by putting them in the bottom half of a location deck).
@FlatTheImpaler - a very interesting idea. I particularly like that (a) you can never scout out the villain, just stumble upon them and (b) it makes it harder to 'prepare' for any given card on a deck you've scouted. Sending in a thief to open that big chest you scouted? Be careful, because the villain might come round the corner and remind you who owns it.
@VicWertz - I had thought about doing exactly that, but decided not to precisely because of the 'problem' of ending up with a villain and henchman in the same deck.
@Calthaer - yes, you can acquire these, but you can also find junk. And depending on the scenario and how many characters you have you might not have time to heal things back. On average your hand probably improves a little during the scenario, but your deck is shrinking so you become more wary about burning through cards.
@bobot - don't worry, we do that too... We managed to roll 4 on "2d12 + 1d10" and 3 TWICE on "1d8 + 1d10" in the same scenario last time we played. Three very painful combat failures that certainly spiced things up.
When setting up the decks, you could put the villain in place of one of the monsters, and put that monster in with the henchmen. Of course, that means that you could have one deck with neither villain nor henchman, and another deck with one of each... but, hey, you want to make the game more challenging, right?While the concept might sound good, in practice this will result in the scenario being a cake-walk something like 40% of the time (depending on the number of players).
If there is a Henchman in the same location as the Villain, then there is a 50/50 chance that you encounter the henchman before the Villain. If you defeat the Henchman then you will end up with a location that contains just the Villain. Knowing this, you can spend your time looting the remaining locations and gearing up ready to take on the Villain at your leisure just before the Blessing deck runs out.
To mitigate this, if the villain is discovered in any location deck while it is being closed and there are other open locations, close that location as if the Villain was not there, then handle the Villain as if you had defeated it in this location. Since you wouldn't actually encounter the villain, there would be no chance to temp-close any other locations, so you would have no idea where it would be afterwards.
If I was a villain and my henchmen suddenly disappeared from my secret hideout, I'd wonder what was up and maybe find another hiding place.
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Chief Technical Officer
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If you defeat the Henchman then you will end up with a location that contains just the Villain. Knowing this, you can spend your time looting the remaining locations and gearing up ready to take on the Villain at your leisure just before the Blessing deck runs out.
Good point.