Hi, everyone.
My friends and I had our first play session of PACG yesterday, using the Mummy's Mask base set. We had a great time, but a couple of questions came up that I didn't immediately have an answer to, and I couldn't find the answers in the FAQ.
1. When a blessing says that you may add one die to a roll, we've been playing that as adding to ANY roll, even one by a different character at a different location. Is that correct, or is it only one of your rolls?
2. The item "Twitch Tonic" says to examine the top card of your location deck, and then encounter it. What's the point of that? The exploration doesn't seem to be optional, so I fail to see the advantage of examining the card first before exploring.
Also, does anyone have any advice for beating the clock? We played with four characters, and only four locations, but we still couldn't clear within 30 turns. (We just ignored the turn limit, because it was our first game and we really didn't want to have to repeat the scenario.) With four characters and six locations (per the usual rules) we'd need to get past about 2 cards every turn, which seems like a pretty difficult pace to me.
1 You are right: ANY roll, even one by a different character at a different location.
2: If the card youa re examining then encountering has a TRIGGER power, then that power will happen during the examination. If you were just encountering, the TRIGGER power wouldn't happen.
3: You need to reexplore many times during your turn (using blessings or allies typically).
To just give a bit of detail to Frencois's correct answers.
1. The blessings in Mummy's Mask actually use the word "any" as in "add a die to any check." In the earlier sets, the wording was "a checK" and people had the exact question you had, so the newer sets have used "any" to make it clear that it doesn't have to be your own check.
2. Check out the Genekin monster from the Base Set cards. And note that when you simply explore or encounter you aren't examining the card. You are only examining the card when something tells you to examine it. (And keep in mind later that there is a difference between examining and searching).
3. What characters were you playing? You do need to get a bit more aggressive with the exploring the more characters you have. How close were you characters to dying (their decks being empty)? If it wasn't very close, then you need to spend more resources exploring.
Hope that helps.
Re the clock, with four characters, in my experience you can afford to leave a blessing in your hand but should definitely be using "explore again" powers whenever it's convenient, particularly on allies.
You very rarely need to see all 60 cards. Firstly, at any particular location, you explore an average of 5.5 times until you encounter the villain or henchman, so that's an expected 33 explores. Secondly, once you've closed at least two locations, you can spread out and then all you really need to do is find the villain and make the temporary close checks, so you actually expect to see less than 30 cards. Though that said, if you want to be sure of winning every time then of course you do still need to plan for the worst case.
Thanks for the clarifications, guys.
It sounds like Twitch Tonic is a little bit of a trap. It mostly just exposes you to Trigger penalties. Is there a chance of clearing two cards with it, if the first one is a trigger?
Our characters were Damiel, Zadim, Estra, and Simoun. I think we had to completely clean out two of the locations, because we weren't able to close them by defeating henchmen; I want to say we had two or three failed close opportunities. Is that atypical?
I probably should have emphasized to need for aggressive exploring a little more with my other players. Two of the characters got their asses pretty well kicked, but the other two didn't take any serious damage.
Yes, often times triggers can be beneficial, since you can encounter a card without exploring. Not so triggers have to encounter the examined card. Some just deal you damage or other nasty things.
You probably want to choose locations based on what you can close. There early scenarios can be tough since you don't have any feats yet. Check out these strategy posts for some insight especially number 6.
One thing I often do is when I reach the half way point with the blessings deck, I decide whether to step up the pace of exploring based on how I seem to be doing. If I haven't closed any locations yet, I get more aggressive.
An important early lesson for my group was "You don't want to miss an opportunity to close a location early". This will often mean expending more resources (such as blessings; either yours or the rest of your party's) in order to be sure to defeat a henchmen and succeed in the 'when closing' requirement of a location.
Since whoever defeats the henchmen is the only one who gets to try to close the location, make sure that whoever is on a location (or at least, whoever is actively exploring that location without scouting/examining cards in advance) is well-suited to meeting the "When Closing" requirements
Don't forget that when you defeat a villain, even if they weren't cornered, you automatically close the location deck the villain was encountered in. You don't need to fulfil the "When Closing" requirement/check at all; in fact, you don't get a choice to do so.
Yes, failing to close locations can often represent multiple 'wasted' turns, depending on how much of the deck is left. Be sure to hold relevant blessings and other boons back to make sure these don't fail. Otherwise, as mentioned before, take extra explorations frequently by discarding spare blessings, allies and other cards that may allow you to do so. If someone in your group has ready access to healing abilities, then there's even more of a reason to expend cards to explore more - you can just get those discarded cards back into your deck anyway!
Yes, missing closing checks entirely explains why you had clock problems. Failing a closing check is, in general, the second most disastrous thing that can happen (the first being failing to defeat a villain). It's worse than failing the henchman - if you only have one blessing and the same odds on both rolls, bless the closing check rather than the henchman (though better yet don't let yourself get in that situation a all). Location choice should be 80% closing check and only 20% other factors.
If you do fail a closing check anyway, my advice is that unless it's nearly empty already abandon the location entirely. Only send someone back there later to cover it for temp closes. If it's a nasty location I sometimes don't even bother exploring if there's known to be no henchman or villain there, just make that the player who's the first to use their blessings to help with other people's checks.
Check which locations are the easier to close (*) and make sure you have the best suited character to close each of them located there (and only her so that you are sure she will meet the henc).
An easy to close location is a mix of the easiness of the action to actually close and the easiness to reach the hench (i. e. boons/banes ratio and the number of boons that can help you reexplore i. e. sum of blessings+allies in the location).
Example: If you have a character who is good at divine and a location with lots of blessings, put her there alone. She will win you a lots of turns.
Same for diplomacy and a location with lots of alliers.
Oh, and don't forget that if there is a closing requirement that is going to be extremely hard for your group to manage - don't be afraid to ignore it and wait to 'funnel' the villain to run away there by repeatedly finding and defeating him/her/it. Exploit the villain's auto-closing rule.
This should also be considered when you've defeated a henchmen and failed to close the location (therefore giving you no other way of closing besides emptying the whole deck). Wait until you've found the villain by examining/scouting, then move a character there to 'temp close' the henchmen-less location, or intentionally defeat the villain so that they can go and run there, so you probably won't have to go through the entire deck of cards!
Try to always keep track of what locations have henchmen or villains left. Ideally, you're never left with a location without one (because you'll succeed in the closing check by defeating them), but if something changes make sure to note it. If on my first exploration I encounter the villain and fail to defeat it, and it runs away to one of 4 possible locations (including the deck it came from), then there's only a 25% chance that there's a villain at all in the current deck, which means I'll likely only be able to close it by emptying it entirely of cards, which might represent up to 10 wasted turns! Leave it, and wait to temp-close it or funnel a villain back there later to save time.
It's in the blogs Hawkmoon linked, but just to be sure:
If you are pressed for time, remember that in most corner-the-villain scenarios, you only have to permanently close 2 locations. The approach we use, assuming we have not scouted the villain, is:
1) Close 2 locations
2) Fan out, with one character at each location, making sure each character is at a location they can close
3) Explore till someone hits the villain
4) Temp close everywhere the villain isn't
5) Defeat the villain
6) Win
7) Rejoice
This only works reliably in scenarios where every character has a solid chance of defeating the villain. We adapt the approach in scenarios where that is not true.
It's in the blogs Hawkmoon linked, but just to be sure:
If you are pressed for time, remember that in most corner-the-villain scenarios, you only have to permanently close 2 locations. The approach we use, assuming we have not scouted the villain, is:
1) Close 2 locations
2) Fan out, with one character at each location, making sure each character is at a location they can close
3) Explore till someone hits the villain
4) Temp close everywhere the villain isn't
5) Defeat the villain
6) Win
7) RejoiceThis only works reliably in scenarios where every character has a solid chance of defeating the villain. We adapt the approach in scenarios where that is not true.
We follow a similar approach, but in practice I find it better to concentrate on closing ~3 locations before making a serious effort to fan out. Otherwise, nobody can move. Which is fine a lot of the time, but there's a lot of reasons you might find you want to move. Such as give/receive a card to/from someone, or move away from a bane that you can't deal with, or from a scouted boon you can't acquire (and which the party really wants), or to go and get a heal, or even just that the card-type you were there to deal with has dried up. Also some characters just want to share a location generally.
In actual real practice it's always a little more fluid as well of course.