Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #15—Improving Your Character: Cards & Traits

Thursday, April 26, 2018

This is the fifteenth installment of our strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. You can read all the installments here.

The previous article offered some general strategies for choosing cards as you build your characters; this one goes into the tactics: which cards are you looking for?

Upgrade your magic and elemental traits

Your characters will start off with mundane weapons and with subpar elements like Poison.

Prioritize grabbing Magic weapons and especially Fire magic. One of the main reasons for this is monsters like Rise of the Runelords' Troll, which is one of the most annoying banes ever if you don't have the Fire (or Acid) trait to permanently put him to rest. Every Adventure Path has cards that require specific traits to defeat, and Magic and Fire are two of the most important.

Burn it with fire.

Generally, it's good to accumulate cards that upgrade your elemental traits. Poison is the worst, because many things are immune to it. Force is the best, because not much is immune to it. So replace Poison with Acid, Cold, Electricity, or Fire when you can, then replace those with Force.

Corollary #1: Diversify your traits. When you're upgrading, don't get too focused on one trait. Occasionally you'll meet monsters like the Troll that require a specific element to defeat; more frequently you'll meet a monster immune to particular elements. So it's always good to have variety in your hand.

Sometimes nothing burns like the cold.




Offset gaps in your party

When you're gathering cards, look for ones that offset ability gaps in your party. That means if you're missing a specific skill, get cards that will help you succeed at tests of that skill. Allies are the most common card type that give you a bonus in a particular skill, and they have the additional advantage that they can usually be used to explore, which means they won't be stuck in your hand: use them to explore when there's not an obvious need for their skill bonus.

Corollary #1: If you're short on healers, get healing. To offset a lack of healing spells or powers, you can most obviously get Potions of Healing. However, there are also occasional allies or other items that can offset this deficit. Spread these healing cards out, and in particular give them to characters who are light on recharging and heavy on discarding, like Seelah or Seoni.

Corollary #2: If you're short on disablers, get toolkits. If your party generally lacks the Disable skill, spread around items that can help with traps and other barriers. Thieves' Tools and Masterwork Tools are the obvious choices, but the Crowbar can also be shockingly useful.

Sometimes the right tool for the job is a Tool.

Upgrade your skills

Sometimes, instead of filling ability gaps in your party, you want to accentuate what you already have. Hunt for items that will improve the characters' best skills to make them all the more able to close locations (or to succeed at other skill tests). Get Merisiel Boots of Elvenkind and Seoni a Crown of Charisma. Find a Sage for Kyra or a Standard Bearer for Harsk.

These might not be the best boons for these characters long-term, but improving good stats should always be a consideration.

Don't be afraid of inappropriate cards

When you're improving your characters, you'll generally want to take cards that the characters are proficient with and to avoid the ones that they can't use to their best effect. But this is not always the best strategy. Sometimes you'll want to take an inappropriate card because it's better than an appropriate card, because it helps your character (or the party) fill an ability gap, or just because it's what's available.

Corollary #1: Remember that inappropriate spells still allow one use. It's perfectly okay for Arcane casters to pick up Divine-only spells and for Divine casters to grab Arcane-only spells. They just end up being single shots. This works best for spells where you're not adding the skill's die. So, if your party really needs healing, don't be afraid to give your Arcane caster Cure. Similarly, a Divine caster could take Mirror Image to help with damage or Teleport to help with movement.

Don't fear that last paragraph.

Corollary #2: Remember that inappropriate armor is usable. Armor can be ineffective in two ways if you don't have the appropriate proficiency. First, it often gets banished when you reduce large amounts of damage. Second, it often can't be recharged at round's end. The first problem is not a problem at all: if it's great armor, keep it, and if you use it, you can hopefully replace it with something else great. However, not being able to recharge is problematic, because it clogs your hand. Still, there will sometimes be inappropriate, non-recharging armor that's worthwhile.

Corollary #3: Remember that inappropriate weapons… are probably still bad. If you don't have the required proficiency for a weapon, it tends to increase the difficulty for challenges, usually by 4. It feels like a really good weapon should overcome this problem, but that doesn't tend to be the case. You're unlikely to find an inappropriate weapon that adds at least 5 (or a d10) more than an available weapon that [i]doesn't[/i] require proficiency, and that's what you typically need for it to actually be better.

The right weapon in the wrong hands is the wrong weapon.

Corollary #4: Use inappropriate card to create voids. Inappropriate items that get banished (i.e. spells and armor) can work very well in a voiding strategy where you're trying to end up with too few of a card type so that you can choose a new card from the box. Hold onto these banishable cards during a game when you have an excess of the card type, then banish them in a later game when you're not gaining that type of card.

Plan for your blessings

Some characters get benefits from specific blessings on their role cards. Try to plan for this. Look at your role card early on, choose your preferred role, and start collecting any appropriate blessings. If you don't, it's possible you'll never get many of the right blessings, because the role card arrives relatively late in the game.

Count your blessings before they hatch. (Or something like that.)

Sometimes building your deck is as much about what you get rid of as what you keep...

Don't get hung up on banishable cards

Cards that must be banished to be used are usually powerful, so it's tempting to always put them in your deck. Don't. Consider any banishable card carefully and be sure that it's a great card that you'll actually use.

Corollary #1: Throw out banishable cards you're not using. If you didn't manage to use a banishable card for two or three scenarios, get rid of it. It might have a great power, but if you never play it, who cares? (But before you put it back in the box, see if perhaps another character would be more likely to play it.)

Don't get hung up on loot

There's a tendency to hold onto loot because it's unique and was given as a special prize. There's a lot of loot that is worth keeping through an entire Adventure Path, but some loot may never be valuable to you, and other loot may get overshadowed over time. Toss it out if something else looks better!

And that brings my look at improving characters to a close… and it also ends my series of general strategy articles for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. I've thought about writing some articles about the specifics of certain characters and about all the different sorts of cards, but for now other writing is calling me. Maybe I'll return some day.

For now, thank you to Mike Selinker and Paizo for giving me this opportunity to talk about my strategy ideas and for publishing a game that's racked up over 100 games on my tabletop. And thank you to everyone here on the forums who contributed corrections and additional strategy ideas. I intend to gather them all up at some point and use them to put together a v2 of these strategy articles, probably on my Mechanics & Meeples blogs.

Until then, see you in Golarion!

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #14—Improving Your Character: Strategy & Tactics

Thursday, February 22, 2018

This is the fourteenth installment of our strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. You can read all the installments here.

Building a party is only half the story; you also want to improve those characters over time. This article talks about how to do so in a general way, then next month's article focuses on thinking about precise cards (and traits). Most of this general advice is strategic, affecting overall play.

Start with the pregen decks




It might seem like strange advice, but it's often best to begin inefficiently. If you start with the pregenerated deck for your character, listed in the rulebook, then you have great ground to build from: you can spend the "Basic" adventures, which don't give out many feats, adapting your deck to your own liking.

(This also has the benefit of making it really easy to start your first game.)

Corollary #1: If cards aren't fun, dump them. But don't go too far. If it looks like a card is never going to get used and doesn't add to your fun, dump it. The goal of this starting advice is to make the early parts of your PACG campaign more fun, so make sure that's what happens.

Assess what characters need before each game




At the start of each scenario, review your characters' weaknesses and what categories of cards might help them. These might be group-wide inadequacies, such as insufficient healing or inability to deal with traps. More likely, they're weaknesses in your own character, such as not having leveled up your combat cards or having items that just aren't that useful. Use these needs as a guide for play throughout the session.

Corollary #1: Make card needs a priority in location choice. Once you've determined what sorts of cards your characters could benefit from, consider positioning them at locations that are full of those cards—though do so as part of a total strategy for choosing locations, as outlined in "Choosing Location Decks."

Tag-team your deckbuilding

Remember that this is a cooperative game. You should help other characters get what they need. When you discover a gap among your skills, or a character that needs a specific sort of card, your next step should be to determine who can best acquire those cards. Then send them in! You can always trade cards at the end of the game.

Corollary #1: Toss cards that are useless to you into your discard pile. You should never be afraid to toss cards that are clogging your hand into your discard pile. This is particularly true when you acquire a card for someone else, and it's not that useful to you.

Make deckbuilding a priority in play

In order to constantly improve your characters, you need to make sure that deckbuilding is a priority in your play. Send characters to locations where they can get stuff that your party needs, then consider spending blessings or playing other good cards to make sure they get that good stuff. It shouldn't be your first priority; that should be winning. But it should probably be your second priority, and something that you're always considering.

Corollary #1: Make deckbuilding the first priority if you're losing. If you're already losing, why not making deckbuilding the first priority? Talk with your group, and if you decide your current mission is hopeless, refocus on getting as many boons as you can before the timer runs out.

Corollary #2: Perhaps making deckbuilding the first priority if you're running behind. This could be controversial, but sometimes you may want to go into a game with a losing attitude. If you feel like your characters are behind the curve and haven't picked up enough of the more recent cards, then you're likely to be losing some games in your near future anyway. So, why not cut to the chase and start going after boons now? If you get lucky and close some locations, then you can reassess.

You can also play a few tactical tricks to improve your overall deckbuilding.

Purposefully void a category during play

You can improve your group's decks by purposefully creating a void in a category of cards. It works like this: one or more characters have bad cards in the category; you don't collect anything new for the category during the adventure; and you banish some of the bad cards through play. For example, you can void items by using up potions, you can void armor by using their banish effects, and you can void spells by casting them without the right skill. Some locations also require card banishment. At the end of the game, you will then be able to choose specific cards from the box to fill that void.

This is probably only worthwhile if you realize midgame or later that you're not acquiring a card type. But, if that's the case, consider taking advantage of it.

Corollary #1: Use card feats to create voids. It's even easier to create voids during adventures where victory gives you a card feat. You can take card feats in categories where you're short on cards or have just enough, and that will instantly allow you to draw from the box!

Corollary #2: Push on this tactic starting in adventure #3. This advice isn't that strong while you're working on the first two adventures, because you can only replace voids with Basic cards. But, starting in adventure #3, you can retrieve any card from two boxes earlier. That's the deckbuilding jackpot for this tactic.

Be careful what you take

If you're purposefully voiding a card category, be careful what you take. You don't want to fill that carefully constructed void with some card that you don't care about. Remember that when you encounter a boon, you do not have to try and acquire it. Just reject it if it would fill a void (unless you really need the hit point).

Corollary #1: Also reject Basic and Elite cards late in the game. Rejecting cards is also good advice late in an adventure path when Basic and Elite cards are removed from the game when you banish them. Reject them and they'll be gone instantly; this will also improve your long-term deckbuilding, because it will improve your pool of cards.

Don't give characters cards that will get stuck

Here's another way to be careful about what you take. When you're rebuilding decks, don't give characters cards that will get stuck in their hand, clogging it for a whole game. What this means is different for different characters. If a character can recharge (like Lem) or bury (like Amiri) or discard (like Lirianne), they can get anything out of their hand. But, if a character instead has to depend on the actual cards for deck cycling, then be sure to give them lots more recharging cards, particularly allies, armors, and (if it's possible) items.

I've got one more article for this series, which is going to talk about specific types of cards to acquire. I hope to see you back in a month to bid my strategy discussion bon voyage.

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #13—Building a Party: Other Considerations

Thursday, September 7, 2017

This is the thirteenth installment of our strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. You can read all the installments here.

Great Pathfinder Adventure Card Game parties will have characters in different roles and will contain sets of powers that work well together. However, there are a few other characteristics you should consider when assembling a party.

Vary your niches

Make sure you have characters who fill a variety of niches. Choose some magic-users and some fighters; some characters who help with non-combat targets and some who support fighting; some who are great when grouped together and some who are great alone. You're going to face a variety of challenges, so make sure you have a variety of abilities to meet them.

Corollary #1: Especially vary complementary characters. If you've chosen two characters who will often work together, try to make them as different from one another as you can.

Vary characters by primary skills

There are six dice-based skills in PACG: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Among your party, try to have good dice in each of these primary skills. If each skill is supported by at least one character with a d8, that's great; if your whole party tops out at a d4 or a d6 on something, consider how to fix that.

Vary characters by secondary skills

Here's a breakdown of the secondary skills and the number of characters in Rise of the Runelords who have each: Acrobatics [2], Arcane [3], Craft [0], Diplomacy [3], Disable [1], Divine [4], Fortitude [3], Knowledge [3], Melee [4], Perception [2], Ranged [1], Stealth [1], Survival [3]. (You could make a similar list for any of the other adventure paths.)

Ideally, you'll want each of these skills covered, meaning you can send someone to defeat each card and close each location. Absent that, choose characters that offer a wide spread of skills; work particularly hard not to add any characters to your party whose skills are totally redundant. Also, look carefully at the skills that are most common among the characters published with the adventure path you're playing, because they're probably the most important. The fact that none of the Runelords characters have Craft lets you know that you can get by without it. Similarly, missing Acrobatics or Stealth generally won't be a big deal in Rise of the Runelords, but you should think more carefully before voiding Diplomacy or Survival.

Corollary #1: Choose characters that have a lot of skills, especially if you have fewer players. The fewer characters you have, the harder it is to cover all the skills. So for low player-count games, consider characters who have three or four secondary skills over those who have just two.

Corollary #2: Manage gaps with cards. If you have gaps in your skill coverage, put cards that help with those skills into your deck. Just as a Masterwork Tools can cover a missing Disabler, a Burglar can help with both Disable and Stealth. (Remember which characters have those boons so you can send people where they need to go!)

Sometimes you just need friends in low places.

Vary characters by cards

There is nothing sadder in PACG than acquiring a great card and having to throw it out at the end of the scenario because nobody has room in their deck for it. This is also a pragmatic issue: You're only going to get so many great cards each game, so the more of them you can keep, the better your party becomes. So for each type of boon, you want at least one character whose deck list is strong in that type.

Corollary #1: Consider subtypes too. Covering a range of card subtypes with your characters can be even more important. In particular, if you can have arcane and divine spell users, and melee and ranged weapon users, and characters proficient with both light armor and heavy armor, then you're more likely to be able to use everything you acquire. Certain characters can even be even more specialized: If you have the sword-wielding Kyra from the Cleric Class Deck, you may want someone who can use the great melee weapons that aren't swords; if you have Lirianne, you may want someone to take the ranged weapons that aren't firearms. (Of course that way lies absurdity; there will always be some cards you can't use, but minimize them!)

Don't ask what happens if they find a card that has the Firearm trait and the Sword trait...

Corollary #2: Consider blessings too. Most characters tend to prefer specific blessings, either to complement certain skills or to overcome deficiencies in certain skills, or because their role cards provide benefits for using them. Try and spread these out too, so that you can happily use the maximum number of blessing types.

Vary characters after the fact

Sometimes, you can vary characters as they develop over time. Amiri, Kyra, and Valeros might initially all pick from the same set of weapons, but you might be able to specialize each during play, due either to power feats or to combos built by acquiring other boons.

Take what you want

You should never follow any of this strategy advice if it's impacting your fun, and that's especially true when you're picking characters. Yes, it's great to have characters that work well together, that can answer all of the game's challenges, and that make optimal use of your cards. But don't let it stop you from taking the character that you'll enjoy playing the most.

Don't be afraid to abandon characters

So you've carefully built your party... and you find out it doesn't really work. Two character powers clash (like Merisiel and Valeros) or two characters are fighting too much for cards (like Ezren and Seoni). Don't be afraid to dump one of the characters that's clashing and replace them, particularly if it's still early in the adventure path! The end result will probably be better play.

Choosing your party is just the first part of the metagame; how you improve those characters over play is even more important (and is the topic of the next article).

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #12—Complementary Powers

Thursday, August 3, 2017

This is the twelfth installment of our strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. You can read all the installments here.

Building a party of adventurers for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is about more than just selecting your warriors, your healers, and your disablers. You also have to consider the characters' most notable aspects—their unique powers—and how those powers interact.

Choose powers that work together

Powers work best when they allow characters to support each other. There are many ways to do this. They can be directly additive, or they can be supportive in several different ways. Each of these methodologies requires some discussion of its own.

Corollary #1: Don't assume that complementary powers must be used together. Even if you build your party so that certain powers help characters work together, they don't always have to be used that way. You'll usually want to put the best co-op characters, like Lem, with someone else, but you don't necessarily need to group together your other power combos until the going gets tough.

Choose powers that are additive

Some powers are directly additive, meaning they each provide bonuses to the same action. This makes them both powerful and easy to use. For example, Lem can give others bonuses when he has cards to recharge, and Lini can give herself bonuses when she has animals to reveal. This combination can make Lini able to succeed at almost any check because she'll start with three dice, and after a few power feats on their role cards, she may even have a +7 on top of that!

Lem + Lini = Lemmy? Insert joke about Lem's sideburns here.

Choose powers that support powers

Powers can also support other powers in less obvious ways. For example, Lem and Valeros can help characters at their locations, while Amiri can move characters around at the end of her turn. These powers aren't directly additive, but they're still complementary: When Lem and Amiri are at the same location, Lem can take his turn, then support Amiri during her turn. At the end of Amiri's turn, she can take Lem to another location where he can help out whoever's there.

Corollary #1: Turn order is important. The order in which players go can have an impact on how powers interact. For example, Amiri must go immediately after Lem and before other players for their particular combo to work optimally.

Choose powers that support weaknesses

Good power choice isn't just about creating power combos. You can also choose powers that benefit other characters in other ways. Best of all, powers can support other characters' weakness. For example, without spending resources, Lini's combat checks are typically limited to a couple of smaller dice, so building a party that also includes Harsk or Valeros can help to overcome that weakness.

As another example: many role cards offer improved abilities for acquiring certain types of cards. They can be used to help other characters who want those types of cards but aren't very good at acquiring them. For example, Sajan is great at using blessings efficiently, and in her Healer role, Kyra is great at acquiring them.

Count your blessings. If you don't have enough, ask Kyra.

Corollary #1: Also consider card gaps. When a character's cards list precludes them from having cards of a particular type, that can be a pretty grave weakness. So, support those too! For example, Ezren, Lem, Sajan, and Seoni don't tend to have much in the way of armor in hand. This makes them particularly vulnerable to powers that deal damage before you act, which can make them unable to fight. You can support that weakness by teaming them up with Valeros in his Guardian role, which lets him reduce damage to other characters.

Choose powers that support card usage

Another important aspect of characters is how they use cards. Are they likely to discard, recharge, bury, or banish? You should assess these patterns, and then give your party powers that support them.

Corollary #1: Link discarders with healers. Some characters discard a lot. For example, Harsk tends to discard his weapons and Seoni discards for fire blasts. A healing power like Kyra's or Seelah's can support this.

Corollary #2: Link buriers with acquirers. Amiri can be tricky to play because she buries cards to generate bonuses, reducing the size of her deck over time. Pair her with someone like Lini, who is good at all low-level acquisitions due to her animal companions, or characters who get better at acquiring cards when they adopt their roles; they can feed Amiri's burial customs.

Consider the ranges of powers

There's one last thing to consider when choosing powers. What range do they have? Do they work better if characters are together or apart?

Corollary #1: Pick a few characters who benefit from being alone. PACG generally rewards you for splitting up so that you can cover as many locations as possible. The fastest way to win is to close two locations and then sit on all the rest until you hit the villain. So, characters who benefit from being alone are quite valuable, whether that's Merisiel, who can fight better while alone; or ranged characters like Harsk and Lirianne, who can support others from afar.

Corollary #2: If you pick one character who works well with others, pick a second. Don't leave a helper on their own! Lem and Valeros are an example of a great combo: Valeros can help Lem fight and Lem can help Valeros do everything else.

Corollary #3: Don't overspecialize on either loner or group characters. You don't want too many characters who benefit from being at the same location, else you'll be discouraged from spreading out; and similarly, you don't want too many characters that are penalized when they're together, else you'll often have problems when facing the final villain, if you've closed most of the locations.

Corollary #4: Be especially thoughtful about ranges if you're playing with just two characters If you only have two characters, don't pick a pair where one player works well alone and one works well with others. Merisiel and Valeros would be a poor combo, as would Lem and Harsk.

Of course, character roles and complementary powers aren't the only thing to consider when putting together a party. There's a lot more, as the next article will discuss.

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #11—Building a Party

Thursday, July 13, 2017

This is the eleventh installment of our strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. You can read all the installments here.

To date, these strategy articles have concentrated on the gameplay of Pathfinder Adventure Card Game scenarios. However, the metagame of PACG is quite important too—and it's much of what makes the game unique. That metagame begins with the construction of a party, which depends on understanding the types of characters you're using.

Warriors are the most important characters

The two main goals in most scenarios are to defeat henchmen so that you can close locations and to defeat villains so that you can win the game. This means that warriors are the most important type of character in the game. However, don't take this to mean just weapon users; warriors include any character who can generate high results on combat checks. Amiri is a warrior, obviously, but so is Ezren, since he can reliably draw spells and use them to generate high combat values.

Wars not make one great. Warriors make one great.

Whatever their precise class, you should have lots of warriors.

Corollary #1: Be very careful of characters with weak skill/card combos. If a character doesn't have either the Ranged or Melee skill, he's more likely to end up in a bad situation, rolling small, unmodified dice in combat. But you need to be especially careful if these characters also have few weapons or few combat spells. Lini may be the weakest warrior in Rise of the Runelords because she has no Ranged skill, no Melee skill, starts out rolling a d4 in combat, has to pay a card to get that to a reasonable number, has no weapons, and will likely use some of her spell slots for healing or support.

Corollary #2: Be somewhat careful of characters with low fighting stats. It may be less obvious that you should be wary of characters who have a low die associated with their Ranged or Melee skill. Kyra from Rise of the Runelords is the prime example here, since she uses a lowly d6 for her Melee skill. This is fine for fighting most low-level monsters, but it's awful when you're fighting powerful monsters, henchmen, or villains, because in those situations you often want to lay down the blessings… and they'll be worth just 1d6 each!

Corollary #3: Be aware of your weak warriors. Just because warriors are important doesn't mean you should ignore characters who are weak at fighting, because everyone has their own advantages: Kyra is crucial for healing and Lini is perhaps the best character in the game because she's strong at everything other than combat if she has an animal present. The trick is to know who your strong warriors are and who your weak warriors are, and use them appropriately. Send the strong warriors after villains and monster-heavy locations and send the weak warriors after boon-filled locations and use them to temporarily close locations while the villain is being fought.

Healers are the second most important characters

Because cards are a limited resource in PACG, a party without a healer is at a grave disadvantage. Characters will usually only be able to use their cards once, and every one that slips out of a deck due to play or to damage puts that character one inevitable step closer to both death and loss. One healer in a party is practically required, so healers are the second most important character type in PACG.

Healers typically include any character with the Divine skill and spell card slots (and, obviously, some healing spells in those slots). A few characters like Kyra and Seelah can heal without specific spells, but spells are generally better, so those powers should be considered backups.

To err is human; to heal, Divine.

If you have no healers, then you're likely to spend a lot of your time and effort figuring out how to overcome that deficiency, perhaps with one-use healing spells for Merisiel, perhaps with healing objects and healing allies. You'll be able to make a go of it, but it'll hurt your efficiency.

Corollary #1: It's good to have a backup healer. One healer is good, but having at least one and a half is better. It might be another major healer or it might be someone like Lem (or even an advanced Merisiel) who can mix a Cure spell into his deck. The object is to have healing available if your main healer is tied down, if her deck is clogged, or even if she's not available for a play session. But don't go overboard: healing is vitally important, but you'll pay for it with lost efficiency in other areas (like fighting!), so only include the healers you need, which is probably somewhere between one and two.

Corollary #2: Make sure your main healer can recycle cards. You should make sure that your main healer has some way to get expended healing back into her deck. For example, Kyra and Seelah can both do so with their special healing abilities, while Lem can exchange other spells for his healing if it ends up in his discard pile. Another easy method to keep a healer cycling is to make sure she has at least two healing spells: if she fails to recharge the first, she can heal herself with the second.

Disablers are the third most important characters

Banes fall into two categories: monsters and barriers. Thanks to your focus on warriors, you've already taken care of the monsters, but you still need to worry about barriers. If you continually fail to defeat them, they can dramatically slow down your gameplay. If they get stuck on top of a location deck, they can prevent exploration. And if they do lots of damage, they can even kill your characters.

They're a lot more varied than monsters, so how do you defeat them? Make sure that your party has at least some disabler support with a character strong in Dexterity (possibly with the Acrobatics or Disable skills) and/or Wisdom (possibly with the Perception skill).

Merisiel is usually an optimal character to fill the disabler niche. In Rise of the Runelords, she has all three skills, with Acrobatics and Disable at d12+2. Rise of the Runelords Sajan is almost as good, with Acrobatics at d10+2 and Wisdom at d8. In Skull & Shackles, Damiel and Jirelle are good choices; in Wrath of the Righteous, Arueshalae and Ekkie are strong at Dexterity but weak at Wisdom. Mummy's Mask offers quite a few possibilities, of which Damiel and Mavaro are the most well-rounded.

Corollary #1: Be aware of your deficiency. Since they're your third priority, disablers are the character type that you're most likely to neglect in your PACG party. If so, be aware of this deficiency. Save the barrier-heavy locations for last, or be sure you have extra blessings when you visit them. Alternatively, build your decks and take feats to help you better deal with barriers: Masterwork Tools can be a pretty good solution until late in an adventure path.

Sometimes you need skills, and sometimes you need cards. And sometimes you need both.

Corollary #2: Be aware of your adventure. Also be aware that there's quite a bit of variability for barriers between the different adventure paths. Rise of the Runelords has the most traditional traps. Skull & Shackles has quite a few Task barriers that require a wider variety of skills. Wrath of the Righteous has a lot of Temptations that can (perhaps) be easily overcome without skill rolls.

Of course, knowing the types of characters to include in your group is just the first step; there's a lot more to building a good party, as will be discussed in the next two articles.

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #10—Fighting the Villains

Thursday, June 8, 2017

This is the tenth installment of our strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. You can read all the installments here.

Throughout these articles on Pathfinder Adventure Card Game tactics, we've touched on a lot of important subjects. Now we come to the subject that matters the most in most games: finding and fighting the villains. Villains are a special type of bane, and they require very special consideration. Beating the villain at the right time is how you win, after all, but facing the villain at the wrong time can cost you dearly.

Do what you can to isolate the villain

Often, you'll just stumble into the villain. However, you should also do your best to spot him in advance with Auguries, Spyglasses, oracular seeings, and any other means you can devise. Use these scouting powers as much as you can; after you find the villain, leave him alone until you're ready to face him.

Corollary #1: Use evasion as a detection technique. Evading a villain after stumbling upon him is a great strategy. Merisiel excels at this, but several spells help with this type of painless discovery.

Corollary #2: After you find the villain, try to position him in his deck. Once you've discovered where a villain is, organize his deck if you can; this is particularly helpful if he's near the bottom. Have Seelah remove boons that are on top of the villain. If you know he's low in the deck, just losing to a monster can shuffle the deck and maybe bring the villain up higher. If he's near the top, use a Magic Spyglass to make him the first card; if he's at the bottom, use Brodert Quink to move him up a little.

Shifting the villain up even a couple spots can be the difference between winning and losing.

If you're not ready to win the game, don't worry about temp closes

You may encounter the villain before you're ready to win. Perhaps you haven't permanently closed two locations, perhaps you haven't stationed characters at all the remaining locations, or perhaps you just have poor odds to win the fight. In this case, you shouldn't worry too much about temporarily closing locations.

Yes, it's always better to temporarily close what you easily can. That way there will be fewer places for the villain to escape to, and in the worst case, if you lose a fight with the villain, you'll lose fewer turns from the blessings deck. So, you might want to expend a little effort on temporary closing locations. But you probably won't want to expend too many blessings or to pay other notable costs.

Corollary #1: Consider the value of blessings. A blessing on the blessings deck is worth a turn, while a blessing in your hand is generally worth one exploration. Since a well-played turn will usually encompass multiple explorations, that means a blessing on the blessings deck is worth at least as much as a blessing from your hand. And the more capable you are of making multiple explorations in each future turn (not counting any resources you'll spend to temp close), the more it's worth to avoid losing that turn. So it's generally worthwhile to spend at least one blessing if you need it to temporarily close your location.

Be prepared to close every location

In most scenarios, defeating the villain only allows you to win when you have permanently closed at least two locations and spread the characters to cover all of the open locations. Be willing to use blessings and to make permanent expenditures (like burying or banishing cards) to temporarily close locations when you're ready to beat up the big bad. It's the cost you must pay.

Corollary #1: Plan your expenditures in advance. The catch is that you don't want to expend so many resources while temp closing that you can no longer defeat the villain. So, count your blessings and other resources and decide which you're going to allocate to closing and which to the villain fight. If you figure it out all at once at the start, you're more likely to be successful.

Be prepared to beat the villain

When you decide to face the villain, you should be ready to deal with his specific powers. Usually this means sending your best fighter to the villain's presumed location, but it could also mean sending a character equipped with just the right cards. Be particularly aware if a villain will require a specific check.

(Note that the rules remain silent on whether you should read the villain card before playing the scenario; even the Pathfinder Adventures app allows you to either read the villain or skip it. Use this to adjust the difficulty of the game for your group: If you keep losing because the villain kicks you to the curb, try reading it in advance. If you're smashing the villain the first time you encounter him, and regularly winning before the blessings deck is low, you may find it more fun if you aren't prepared for this step.)

Corollary #1: Have armor ready for before-you-act damage. Some villains do damage in advance of combat. When it's a big number like Black Fang's 1d4-1 or Nualia's 1d4, this can be crippling, preventing you from winning the fight. So send characters with armor against those pre-battle damage wielders!

You really don't want to discard all of your weapons or spells before the big fight.

Use multiple characters to kill a villain if you can

Villains are the cards most likely to require multiple checks to defeat. Although some characters, such as Valeros and Seoni, can easily draw hands that can create two stunning attacks in a row, it's harder for other characters, like Sajan and Lini. As a result, it's often best to face villains with two characters, letting one take on each roll. This means that you may want to wait until you've closed three locations before facing the villain.

Corollary #1: Plan your battle in advance. The order of the checks can matter a lot. If you blow the first check, you're going to lose whether or not you succeed on the second. Sometimes your toughest character should go first and expend the most resources. Or sometimes the active player should go first so that if he loses his hand, he can just choose to lose again.

If you don't kill the villain, monitor your blessings

Card counting is usually more trouble than it's worth in PACG, but there's one situation where that's not the case: If the villain escapes, he'll be shuffled together with some blessing cards, then they'll be distributed among several decks. If at all possible, keep count of the blessings in each of those decks. When you find that a deck has more blessings than the location card says it should, you know the villain isn't there! You can then concentrate elsewhere.

That's it for the core tactics of Pathfinder Adventure Card Game play; in the next few months I'm going to talk about some of the bigger-picture strategies, including how to form parties and advance characters.

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #9—Fighting the Banes

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

This is the ninth installment of our strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. You can read all the installments here.

It seems obvious that you want to beat banes, because they can hurt you ... but it turns out that the calculation shouldn't be that simple. It's about knowing when to be brave.

Be brave if you have armor

Fighting monsters and leaping through barriers is dangerous, so there's the temptation to massively overinvest in a way that you wouldn't for other encounters—to increase the odds to an almost certainty.

You should avoid this temptation if you have armor. Most armor (but not shields) allows you to bury (or banish) the card to reduce all damage to you. You should consider this armor's main use: it lets you take chances when you're fighting monsters, without large repercussions.

Yes, you potentially lose a turn, because you may have to fight that same monster on a future turn. But no matter what the results, if the alternative is to use one or more blessing, you probably come out ahead: maybe you win despite the lack of blessing or maybe you won't encounter the monster again. Either way, you potentially gain a turn. And if you were going to play a couple of blessings, you came out way ahead.

So that's what being brave means: take the chance of being defeated by the bane.

Be even braver if you have no cards

Similarly, you shouldn't worry too much about losing to monsters if you have few or no cards in your hand. In this case, there's almost no downside, other than the potential to lose an exploration if you must fight the monster again. But since the alternative is usually to burn blessings ... give yourself a good chance, but don't worry about making it a sure chance.

Corollary #1: Empty your hand if you're going to lose. Sometimes, you might choose to create the situation where you have few or no cards. This is particularly applicable if you think you're going to lose the fight. Recharge everything that you legally can, so that those cards don't get discarded. Then play all the discardable cards that might give you a bonus on the check. It might seem a waste to spend cards just to give yourself a very unlikely chance of beating a bane, but if you're going to lose your cards anyway, then you might as well try. (If a bane isn't actually going to empty your hand, such as the Charmed Faceless Stalker or many barriers, then obviously this advice does not apply.)

Be the bravest if you are encountering a summoned bane

These rules about being willing to lose when faced with damage are especially true when you're fighting summoned monsters that you don't actually benefit from beating. This doesn't include summoned monsters that you must beat to close locations or to defeat barriers like Zombie Horde. But it does include those annoying skeletons that are summoned by the Skeleton Horde barrier or the bandits that are summoned at the Guard Tower. If you don't need to beat them, then don't expend any resources if you have another out (like armor or an empty hand).

The one caveat to this approach is that sometimes those summoned banes are summoned by other banes, and you usually need to beat the summoners. Getting your hand wiped before you do is rarely a good strategy.

Be less brave otherwise

If you don't have armor, if you have lots of cards, and if you're not fighting a summoned beast, then you should be less brave; in other words, worry more about beating the beast.

Still, you shouldn't consider victory over the bane a necessity. Think about what you would lose in your hand if you got beat up, add in the possibility of a lost turn if you encounter the bane again, and weigh that against the turns and other opportunities that will be lost from played cards.

Maybe you'll decide that the bane must be beat or maybe you'll decide that it's acceptable to take a chance. The important thing is to consider it as a choice—not a fait accompli— just because you're meeting a scary monster or bane.

Corollary #1: The more blessings you spend, the more blessings you should spend. Whenever you decide to spend resources rather than bravely taking the chance of being defeated by a bane, you need to make sure that you spend enough. That's because you're now spending turn-resources and you don't want to waste them. So if you're playing no blessing, because the circumstances warrant it, that's fine. But if you're playing one blessing, then consider whether playing two would increase your chances enough to be worthwhile. Every turn and every blessing is an investment: spend them wisely.

Be even less brave against annoying monsters

You should work even harder to beat a monster or a barrier if it's particularly annoying for some reason. The Enchanter is a prime example of an annoying monster, because she does 1 Force damage before then 1 Fire damage after every fight. Similarly, Collapsed Ceiling is definitely an annoying barrier, because it can do damage and sticks around. There are even more annoying banes at higher levels.

In general, if a bane has other costs every time you meet it, particularly if those costs are high, or if a bane sticks around on top of a deck or next to someone's character, be a little less brave when fighting it—not because you're afraid of it, but because you want to get rid of the darned thing!

Be the least brave against villains and henchmen

Finally, don't be brave at all when fighting villains and henchmen. They're the critical-path banes in PACG because defeating them lets you close locations and eventually win! These are the fights where you should be quite conservative, making your odds as good as you possibly can (within reason).

Corollary #1: Don't spend too much on henchmen. With most henchmen, however, be aware of what's on the other side. Usually, you must do something to close the henchman's location. If you spend your last blessing on the henchman, and then need to banish a blessing to close the location, you did all that work for nothing.

As for villains...

Next month: Fighting the villains.

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #8—Acquiring the Boons

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

This is the eighth installment of our strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. You can read all the installments here.

Though they're wholly good, boons can be hard encounters to deal with, because you must decide how much effort to expend when technically none is required. The catch is that you need to acquire some boons for the continued health of your deck. Prioritize their acquisition appropriately.

Spend the most effort to get cards for your deck

It's worth expending effort to get cards that would improve characters' decks, because improving decks is the name of the game. This means that you should prioritize the acquisition of cards from the current adventure deck, because they're likely to be better than what is currently in your group's decks. In addition, you should focus on any cards that will benefit your character. You'll know what the gaps are in your character's deck—where he's got a surplus of lower-level cards and which cards work well with his skills and powers. So it's easy to know when you should expend effort.

Don't be afraid to discard and even bury cards to get boons of this sort. Be careful that you don't expend so many resources that you take a chance of losing the game... unless the card is that good, or unless you're losing already. In the latter case, go pig-from-hell wild and start expending all of your resources to get cool stuff.

This card really doesn't have much to do with the topic—we just like saying “Pig from Hell.”

Spend some effort to get cards for your hand

It's slightly less worthwhile to expend effort to collect boons that might be useful in your current game, but which you don't plan to keep. This includes allies and blessings that can give you turns, weapons that can let you attack, armor that can protect you, and spells that can do cool stuff.

How much effort should you spend? That depends on how good the card is.

For cards that can give you an exploration, like most blessings, it's worth spending a single blessing to guarantee (or nearly guarantee) its acquisition. Healing might allow you to see the new blessing more than once in a game, so at worst it's a break-even and at best it's an extra exploration later on. But one blessing should be the limit for a card you won't keep. And if you can instead expend a card that isn't worth an exploration (like Aid) or recharge a card to help, that's better.

For cards that don't give you an exploration, it generally isn't worth spending a blessing, because you're effectively trading an exploration for it. However, acquiring a decent weapon or armor that would be helpful in the short term could be still be worth discarding a non-exploration-granting card or recharging something.

And then you get to the bottom of the heap: cards that don't grant you a turn and aren't that great. Don't entirely ignore them; take a look and see if it serves a short-term purpose, like filling a gap in your hand. For example, if you don't have a weapon and you need a weapon, then it might be worth a minor cost to pick it up.

Of course, context is always key. If you're going to have to stop exploring because you don't have a weapon in your hand, then clearly it's worth spending a blessing to get that weapon, but that's a relatively rare case.

Spend less effort to get fuel

Some characters can use cards for fuel: Lem can cycle them for spell bonuses, Lini can discard them to increase her stats, and Amiri can bury cards to get stat bonuses. For these characters, all cards are useful. As with any less useful cards intended just for your hand, it's probably not worth a blessing to acquire these cards, but it's definitely worth some effort. For a character that must bury cards for fuel, like Amiri, it's even more worthwhile, because she faces the danger of her deck decreasing in size over time (something that Lem rarely worries about).

Spend the least effort to get hit points

Remember that every card is, at the least, a hit point—something you can discard as damage. Since even the least useful card still has some value, it's always worthwhile to pick up a random card at no cost (and maybe at the cost of a recharge), even if you plan to throw it out at the end of the turn. Don't forget about your reveal and recharge abilities even when you're rolling for boons that are pure dross.

Spend at least some effort to gain trading stock

If you're playing Mummy's Mask, then you have an extra card-sink to think about: traders, who let you exchange boons you don't want (of a particular adventure deck number or higher) for something better. To avoid wasting this opportunity, make sure your party has picked up some extra boons by the time you win a scenario! You don't have to worry about this if you're just trading at the Sunburst Market, which has a cost of one boon: you'd usually be swapping something in your hand for something at the market, so no problem. But, the more specific a trader is, the higher his cost. For example, Agymah and Shardizhad require three boons for each of their items. Then you should worry!

You get what you pay for. Corollary: You pay for what you get.

To ensure that you always have enough trading stock for all your characters to trade, you need to have won a number of throwaway boons equal to the cost minus one for the trader that each player wants to visit. For example, if three players all wanted to visit Shardizhad and a fourth was going to the Sunburst Market, they'd need a total of six throwaway cards (plus the one each that they will usually be removing from their deck). However, this is probably an excessive count, because it's likely that many cards traders have to offer won't be any good for you. So, you'll only need enough throwaway boons for a few of the characters to trade — which is why trading stock is listed as the lowest priority here. If your group as a whole has already won a few non-interesting boons, you're probably fine. But maybe you need a few more if you plan to visit the more specific traders. However, if you're getting close to winning a scenario, and you don't have anything, then spend a little effort to grab some boons so that you can take full advantage of the traders at game's end.

Prioritize boons over banes

There's a big coda to this priority list of “boons to get”: You should generally work to encounter more boons than banes. Some of this is already covered in Choosing Location Decks and Moving to New Locations: you might choose to start at a location because its boon-heavy, or you might choose to move to a location because a boon is on top of a deck. But be aware that you can also manipulate your decks to maximize boons. Use Auguries to push monsters and barriers down to the bottom. Use a Magic Spyglass to look at the top three cards in a deck, and if they're all banes, find a way to reshuffle the deck—perhaps even by leaving a bane undefeated! Mind you, if you're playing Mummy's Mask, Trigger cards can make explicit examination more difficult, so in that game consider other means to maximize your boons, like moving away from a deck when you've cleared out most of the boons. Just remember: To acquire boons, you must encounter boons. (Some restrictions may apply; always worry about closing locations first!)

Next month: Fighting the banes.

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #7—Attempting Your Checks

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

This is the seventh installment of our strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. You can read all the installments here.

The heart of PACG is attempting checks to acquire boons and defeat banes. And every check starts with dice that need to be rolled.

Know Your Dice Results

Checks are all about rolling dice, so the heart of managing a check is knowing your dice. Obviously, if the results of a check aren't that important, you should just throw your dice and see what happens. However, if you really want to gain a boon or defeat a bane, then you should understand your odds.

You can calculate the odds of your dice in a number of ways. This listing goes from least conservative (you might lose!) to most conservative (you won't lose!):

• Count dice + sides then divide. Add up the number of dice and all their sides, then divide by 2, then add the modifiers. For example, if you're rolling 1d8 + 1d6+2, add 2 (the number of dice) + 8 (the number of sides on the first die) + 6 (the number of sides on the second die) to get 16. Divide that by 2 to get 8 (that's the expected value of your roll), then add 2 (the modifier) to get your expected result: 10. If the difficulty of your check is also 10, your odds of succeeding are a bit better than 50%. (The example given has 48 possible die combinations. 21 of them give a result less than 10, 6 equal to 10, and 21 higher than 10, so the odds of succeeding are 27 in 48, or just over 56%.) So if your expected result is the same as the difficulty of the check, you will succeed more often than not, but you will still lose often. This method of calculation is also a bit cumbersome for quick counting.
• Count half the sides. This author's preferred technique is to just count half the sides on each of the dice, then add the modifiers. For the 1d8 + 1d6+2 example, add 4 (half the sides on the first die) + 3 (half the sides on the second die) + 2 (the modifier) to get an expected result of 9. Not only is this quicker to count than the dice + sides technique, but it also underestimates a little bit: You'll be under the average by half of the number of dice, so it's a bit more conservative. (Using the example above, you'll want to look for a way to add a +1 to reach the difficulty of 10, which would increase your odds to 33 in 48, or nearly 69%.)
• Count every die as a 2. It may have been Obsidian's Nathan Davis who suggested that you should assume every die you roll comes up a 2. With this method, our 1d8 + 1d6+2 example gets you an expected result of 6 (2+2+2), so if the difficulty you're looking for is 10, you'll want to add 2 dice (of any size) to make up the difference. (Adding even 2d4 improves your odds to above 95% in the example.) This is a very conservative method, but if you use it for the most important stuff, you're rarely going to fail.
• Count every die as a 1. There's only one way to be 100% sure of success: your number of dice plus your modifiers must be equal to the target you're shooting for. Yes, this is ridiculously conservative, but you might want to use this criteria occasionally, particularly at the end of a game.

It's easy to use these methods as a basis for an even more conservative estimate without requiring much more work. Just look at the results in a more ad hoc manner: "I estimate these dice will get me a result of 12 and I need 11 to succeed, so if someone could throw in one more blessing, I'd feel a lot better about it" or "I need an 11 and I expect that from 3 dice, so an extra 2d4 will probably push me over.")

Corollary #1: More dice move things toward the average. If you're rolling just one die, the odds are spread evenly across all the possibilities, but if you throw a whole bunch, the odds will cluster toward the middle. For example, trying to get 5 or more on 1d12 has an 8-in-12 chance of succeeding (almost 67%). But trying to get that on the seemingly similar 2d6 results in a 30-in-36 chance, or just over 83%, while 3d4 gives you a 60-in-64 chance, or almost 94%. So if your expected result is a just a little bit above the difficulty, but you're using a lot of dice, you're more likely to be okay.

Corollary #2: Rerolling dice changes the average. Some monsters, like the Giant Hermit Crab, force you to reroll on success, while some weapons, like those that have the Polearm trait, allow you to reroll on failure. The math is tricky, but if you're going to have to reroll on a success, you want to be sure you can succeed twice in a row. In such a case, an average only a teeny bit over your target probably isn't going to cut it. On the other hand, when you get to reroll failures, you can be more comfortable with marginal averages.

"So... best 2 out of 3 then?"

Know What Blessings Can Do

Checks involve not just the dice that the cards say to roll, but also the benefits applied by various players, which often come in the form of blessings. Some checks are hard, so blessings can be the difference between having a poor chance of success and a decent chance.

The trick is that blessings also usually represent a potential extra exploration. Don't be afraid of using them, because you don't necessarily need a lot of extra explorations to succeed. But do ask yourself, "Is using this blessing to improve the odds on this check more valuable than having an extra exploration?" Often losing a card, losing a hand of cards, or losing out on a chance to gain a boon turns out to be less valuable than an extra exploration, in which case it's not worth spending a blessing for that check.

Corollary #1: Keep an eye on the blessings deck. Many blessings recharge if the same blessing is atop the blessing deck. Keep an eye on that and the blessings in your hand. If they match, be much more willing to use your blessing. It defers your extra exploration, as you usually have to go through your deck to get it into your hand again, but if you're playing aggressively, it's not lost to you.

The exception is, of course, late in the game. If you're not going to cycle through your deck and you're not going to get your deck shuffled by healing or some other means, then you should treat discarding and recharging the same (and burying too, for that matter).

Corollary #2: Don't bless low skills. Don't waste your blessings on d4 skills unless things seem quite dire. A blessing just doesn't add much to a bad skill. (To be precise, it adds an average of 2.5 to a roll, where spending that blessing on a d12 skill can be over twice as good, adding an average of 6.5 to the roll.) Heck, it can feel wasteful to spend a blessing on a d6 skill.

If a low skill needs help, look instead to powers and spells. If you need to help someone with a bad skill, it's more effective to use certain spells and abilities. Lem can often add up to 1d4+3, while an Aid spell can add a d6 and a Strength spell might add a +3.

Corollary #3: Don't bless excessively (or otherwise overcommit). Whether you're playing blessings, spells, ranged weapons, allies, or some other boon, you don't want to overdo it, yet there's a tendency for players to put too many dice into a pool. When you roll two or three times your target number, and the check wasn't to close a location or defeat a villain, you probably wasted resources that could have been used to take extra explorations or to give a player better odds on another check.

If you count your expected value and you're over your target by more than half, or you've got more than a few extra dice, consider if you really need everything that's in the pool, especially if getting there required discarding or burying cards.

Next time: Managing your encounters.

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #6—Closing Your Location

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Before we jump in to Shannon Appelcline's latest strategy blog, we'd like to let you know that we're now offering promo cards from Rise of the Runelords and Skull & Shackles for sale here on paizo.com. These cards are not reprints—they are the very same printings that we shipped to subscribers a couple of years ago (so the cut and color of the RotR promos in particular is slightly different from the cards we print today). (So, why haven't we put up promos for newer sets? Being a subscriber has its privileges!)

This is the sixth installment of our strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. You can read all the installments here.

The main goal for almost every Pathfinder Adventure Card Game location is closing it. Though you may send characters to locations due to other challenges or benefits inherent in them, closing conditions should weigh heavily in your decisions. But there's a flip side to closing locations: abandoning them. Sometimes you'll realize that a location just got much harder to close, and that should make you consider moving away from it. Closing and abandoning: they're the final yin and yang of working with locations in PACG.

Visit the Hard-to-Close Locations First

It may seem counterintuitive, but it's usually helpful to visit the hard-to-close locations first. If a character is going to need a high roll or a blessing to close out a location, go there first.

This is because you only want to close these locations, at whatever high cost or low odds, once. And you don't want to do it when you're concentrating on other things. If you visit a hard-to-close location first, then you should finish with it well before you're fighting the game's final villain, so you won't need to mess with it while you're also trying to collect together blessings to fight the villain, and you won't need to temporarily close it multiple times if the villain manages to escape.

(Yes, you might still face the villain early in the game, but if so he's going to get away anyway, so temporarily closing that hard-to-close location isn't a do-or-die requirement.)

Save the Impossible-to-Close Locations for Last

If a location is nearly impossible to close (because it doesn't correlate to the skills of your characters) or if it's undesirable to close (because it requires you to do something like banish a card or take damage), then follow Paul McCartney's advice: Let it be.

The reason is that you are less likely to find a villain in the early locations: at the start of a standard scenario, the odds of finding a villain at any random location are 1/(n+2) where n is the number of players. As you close locations, a random open location will be more likely to contain a villain, either because that's where the villain started or because that's where he fled to; by the time that it's possible to actually beat the villain, the odds of the villain being at the impossible-to-close location are 1/n, and the odds continue to increase as you close locations. And, if you defeat a villain at the location in question, then you don't have to close it via the normal means!

(Yes, you might still have to try and close that nasty, nasty location, but you're minimizing the odds as much as possible.)

Don't Close Locations You Don't Want to Close

Hold on a second, though. Do you actually want to close a location? There's no choice when you beat villains, but when you defeat a henchman you can decide whether or not you want to try.

Warning: No lifeguard on duty.

There are only a scant few situations where the answer might be no:

• You might defer closing a location if you have no chance of closing it or if doing so might cause characters damage. For example, you might not close Junk Beach if you're unlikely to defeat the Poison Trap, because failing would damage you, and possibly your friends.
• You might not close a location if you really want a type of card or even a specific card that you spied at that location.

There are also some situations that might strengthen your resolve not to close:

• If a location deck contains just a few cards, there's less concern about finishing it off.
• If you've already decided that you've lost the game, you might as well keep the location open if there's any reason to do so.

However, the answer should almost always be yes: you should usually close locations given the opportunity. Quite simply, if you choose not to close, then you've massively increased the odds that you're going to lose this session of play. So make sure that you understand that it's probably a trade-off versus winning the game.

Abandon Your Location If You Fail to Close It

Absent some of these reasons to stay at a location, when you beat a henchman and fail to close the location, you should also beat feet. That's because there's no longer a way to close the location early, which means that you're going to have to dig through the whole deck. Unless you really want the boons there, don't bother. You'd do better to go to another location that you might close easier, then return to the hench-less location only (1) when you need to be stationed there to temporarily close it to trap the villain or (2) after you chase the villain there, making it possible to close the location easily once more.

Abandon Your Location If You Chase Away the Villain

You should similarly abandon a location if you fight a villain there and lose. Yes, the fleeing villain could return to his original location, but unless it's the only location that was open, he might have gone somewhere else instead—and if he did, your current location just got really hard to close.

Imagine that you have two other open locations when you lose to the villain. Each of those other locations now has an average of 1.33 cards that can close the location: the deck's original henchman (there's your "1") and the 1-in-3 chance that the villain fled there (there's your ".33"). However, since the villain's original location didn't have a henchman, it now has only the possibility that the villain fled there, so it has an average of just .33 cards that can close the location. Obviously, that makes it less desirable, barring other factors.

Abandon Your Location If You Temporarily Closed It

There's one other closure-related reason that might lead you to abandon a location: when you temporarily closed it during a fight against a villain, and the villain fled somewhere else. Clearly you don't want to leave your temporarily closed location if you have enough coverage to close everything down again next time you fight the villain. But if you've still got one or two extra locations, then you'd do better to visit the locations that weren't closed. That's because the location you temporarily closed has just one card that can close the location: the henchman. But the n locations that were open when the villain fled have a higher average: the henchman and a 1/n chance of a villain.

Of course, you need to decide if you actually want to encounter the villain or not, and either go to the unclosed locations or not based on that decision.

Next time: Rolling your dice.

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #5—Moving to New Locations

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

This is the fifth installment of our strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. You can read all the installments here.

There is a tendency to go to a location and then to grind through it until you've closed the location. Don't give in to this! If there are reasons to move, then move. You're not stuck at a location just because you went there. (Unless it's the Shimmerglens, the Cell, or a similar location. Then you might be stuck!)

Move to a Location Based on Your Hand

You might move to another location based on what's in your hand—and specifically based on your desire to rapidly cycle your hand. If Valeros has a handful of weapons or Kyra has a handful of attack spells, then it makes sense for them to move to locations with more monsters to kill, while a character with Thieves' Tools should move somewhere with barriers (or to Junk Beach), while a character with a Crown of Charisma would do well to move somewhere with allies (or to the Prison).

In short: If your hand clogs, see if there are locations that would help unclog it.

If you can't find the right tool for the job, find the right job for the tool.

Move to a Location Based on the Deck's Top Card

Sometimes you might get to see the top card of a deck, thanks to Harsk or Alahazra or courtesy of boons like Augury, Scrying, or even the humble Spyglass. If this reveals a difficult bane or a valuable boon, and a specific character can make quick work of it, send them there to face just that card.

Corollary #1: Move to help with a check on the top card. You might move just to help someone else with the top card of a deck—either to take one of the checks on a two-check bane, or to provide support against one of the wackier villains like Erylium or Justice Ironbriar (who summon a monster that someone must face) or the Skinsaw Man (who gets tougher if you face him all alone). Or you could be a character like Valeros or Lem who can offer support with character powers.

Two swords are better than one.

Move to a Location Based on the Deck's Undefeated Banes

Precognition isn't the only way to learn what's in a deck. Sometimes you fight a bane that you just don't have the right cards or attributes to defeat. This calls for an emergency intervention from another party member. Sure, that newcomer will probably have to grind through the deck to find the bane in question again, but it's still worth sending Seoni to burn up the Troll or Lem to disable the traps, lest you have to keep facing those banes again and again.

Corollary #1: Move to a location to sort the deck if the undefeated banes are undefeatable. Sometimes you'll get really unlucky and face a bane that no one can deal with. This is a problem for smaller parties that don't have every skill represented, but it also is sometimes an issue when a flammable monster shows up and you don't have any fiery spells or weapons. To solve this problem, send a character to the location to sort the deck. The Augury and Scrying spells do this best, though there are also a number of less efficient methods to get cards to the bottom of the deck, or at least reshuffle them.

Sometimes the way to win is not to fight.

Move to a Location Based on the Number of Cards Left

Abandoning locations leaves decks with fewer cards in them. That's fine when you're bouncing around early on, but later in the game it can become a missed opportunity. If you're at a point in the game where permanently closing a location with just a few cards in it would allow you to temporarily close all of the locations next time you find the villain—or if you think a villain is in one of two decks, or something similar—then it's worth moving to the smaller deck. A deck that has 9 cards gives you an 11% chance of hitting the villain or henchman with each exploration, while a deck with 5 cards ups that chance to 20%!

Move to a Location Based on the Characters That Are There

Irrespective of what's in a deck, you might move to a location because of who else is there.

Most obviously, you might need to heal someone. Since the discard/heal cycle is a perfectly viable method to keep your deck moving, healers should always be thinking about where they can go to help other people out. This means that they should move early and often.

Alternatively, you might move to give a player a boon. This might be something you just picked up that can serve them better—but this is of limited importance, because you can usually give them the card at the end of the game. But sometimes you might be able to give them a boon that they really need right now. Perhaps they don't have a weapon and you have extras. Perhaps they could use Father Zantus more than you in this scenario. Perhaps they need Thieves' Tools because they'll be exploring a barrier-heavy deck. There's a little bit of reluctance in PACG to give up a card from your deck because it defines your character… but as long as you remember to get it back at the end of the game, all should be well.

Corollary #1: Beware of moving to a character if the location is ill-fitting. When you move to help out a character, you don't want to waste your turn—you also want to explore the location if you can. This means that you shouldn't go to a location if your character is a terrible fit for it. If you're unable to close the location or if you're going to interact badly with a location's special power, you don't want to go there. So the Mountain Peak (where you can lose a card) or the Cell (where you can get stuck) are often right out. (There's some wiggle room here. If you're bad—but not terrible—at closing a location, and it's still got a lot of cards in its deck, then you might give it a shot: You're unlikely to get to close the location in a single turn, and if you do get the opportunity, maybe you can deal with it.)

Move to a Location Because You Have a Bonus Move

Amiri gets a bonus move at the end of her turn. Items like the Boots of Teleportation, allies like the Celestial Unicorn, and spells like Teleport can duplicate this ability. This should encourage a player to move for even the smallest reasons—to reduce the number of characters at a location, to get away from a start-of-the-turn effect, or to temporarily support another character.

If a character or boon can move other characters too, then they should be even more willing to move—not just if it would benefit them or the state of the game board, but also if it would benefit the other character, for any of the reasons described herein.

Move to a Location Because of Where the Villain Is

Of course, another reason to move is to find the villain—or to get away from the villain. More on that next time.

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #4—Choosing Location Decks

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

This is the fourth installment of our strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. You can read all the installments here.

When you start playing a Pathfinder Adventure Card Game scenario, the first question you need to answer is which locations to send your characters to. You must decide whether to congregate (group the characters together) or separate (keep them apart).

It's usually better to keep your characters apart, to avoid the multiplicative effects of barriers and monsters that either damage everyone at a location or that cause everyone at a location to fight monsters. Spreading out also gives you the opportunity to temporarily close more locations when you find a villain. This is critical at the end of the game, but it can still be helpful early in the game since it limits the number of places that a villain can flee to, and limits the number of cards removed from the blessings deck if you lose the battle.

It's also better to keep specific characters apart from others if they're built to work on their own. Harsk is able to help characters at other locations, and Merisiel is a better fighter when she’s alone. Characters that have the Ranged skill generally tend to be better by themselves.

Does not play well with others.

It's sometimes better to keep your characters together, particularly if they have cards or powers that allow them to help other characters at their location, or if they need to face a monster or barrier that requires multiple checks to defeat. In particular, many villains require two checks, so it's often helpful to attack a villain with two characters.

It's also better to keep specific characters together if they're built to work with others. Valeros and Lem are the prime examples of this, since Valeros automatically adds to combat checks at his location, and Lem can recharge cards to add to any check at his location.

One is the by-the-book veteran one week from retirement. The other is the wise-cracking maverick with nothing to lose. Together, they fight evil.

Corollary #1: Consider splitting up when you've closed two locations. If you have been keeping your characters together, consider splitting them up when you've closed two locations, because you should now have one character per open location—enough to temporarily close everything when you find the villain. Otherwise, really consider splitting up when you've closed three locations, because you now have enough characters to double-team one location or to keep helpers like Lem and Valeros with someone else.

However, the question of choosing location decks goes beyond whether you should congregate characters or separate them: you also need to select which characters to put at which locations!

Choose Based on Your Character and the Locations' Challenges

When you initially choose where to place your characters, do it based on the skills and cards of each character and how they interact with the specifics of an individual location.

Corollary #1: Select characters able to deal with a location's closing conditions. Closing locations is one of the most important actions in the game. That's how you gain ground against the blessings deck countdown: by removing a location deck before you dig all the way through it, you reduce the total number of cards that you need to look at before you find the villain. This means the prime criteria for selecting where to put a character should usually be whether that character is good at closing that location or not. So you send Lem or Seoni to the Prison, because of their high Charisma skills, and you send Kyra or Seelah to hallowed (or unhallowed) ground, because of their high Divine skills.

You gotta get in to get out.

Corollary #2: Select characters able to deal with a location's effects. Some locations, such as the Mountain Peak, have really painful effects. If one character can deal with them better than the others, send that person there. (This usually also plays into the former corollary, because special effects and closing conditions are often linked.) Thus, you could send Kyra to the Mountain Peak, because she has the Wisdom to deal with both the special effect at the start of the turn (which could cause her to bury a card) and the closing condition. Amiri is a less traditional choice, but very helpful because she can disappear from the Mountain Peak at the start of each turn; as it happens, her survival skill is also good for closing the location.

Yep—the answer to altitude is Wisdom.

Corollary #3: Select characters able to deal with a location's cards. Finally, you can send a character to a location because they're the best able to deal with the cards there. If a location is full of monsters, send a bruiser like Valeros or Seoni rather than someone like Lini or even Harsk, who isn't as good at one-on-one combat. Similarly, if a location is full of barriers, Merisiel is often the best choice because of her high Dexterity and Disable skills (though specific barriers might call for Wisdom, Perception, or other skills).

Choose Based on Your Character and the Locations' Benefits

The flip side is that you can look at the benefits at a location and send the person who is most able to take advantage of them.

Corollary #1: Get the boons quickly! Quite simply: go to the locations with the most boons first, using the characters most likely to acquire them. If a location has a lot of blessings, send someone with a good Divine skill, such as Kyra; if a location has a lot of allies, send someone with good Diplomacy, like Seoni. This way, you can collect the good stuff before you fight the bad stuff... and if the game ends early due to excellent corralling of the villain, you'll have spent all of your time encountering boons instead of banes.

Corollary #2: Get the boons greedily! You can take a step further and go into full-on greed mode: send characters who are able to get the boons at a location even if they aren't that great at closing the location. This is a calculated risk, because it might keep you from winning the game. However, if a character’s deck is really lagging in a specific type of boon, it's often a good idea. And, you might get away with it and still win if you focus most of the other characters on challenges instead of benefits.

Corollary #3: Consider other benefits of a location. Very occasionally, locations will have beneficial special effects that are great for a specific character. The Old Light is probably the best example: it gives an extra d6 to checks that have the Fire trait, so it's a great option for Seoni, who has a power that adds the Fire trait to her combat checks.

Anybody got a light?

When choosing how to match characters to locations don't use just one criteria; consider all of these options!

Next time: Moving to new locations.

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #3—Knowing Your Cards

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

This is the third installment of our strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. You can read the first installment here.

The cards in your character deck require a variety of different actions to play them. To optimize the flow of your cards, you should take advantage of these different actions to make sure you have just the right cards in your deck.

Reveal: The Worst of the Best

Cards that you reveal to play seem like the best thing since sliced goblin. After all, you get their great power, then you put them right back in your hand to use again. The problem is that they tend to be the weakest cards. Yes, a Headband of Alluring Charisma can give Lem a +1 to every Diplomacy, Arcane, and Divine check, including combat... but it's just a +1! Compare that to Lem's ability to continually pick his favorite cards out of the discard pile—including Cure spells, allowing him to quickly cycle through a lot of cards—he can do a lot better!

This isn't to say that reveal cards are worthless. You'll often want to reveal weapons instead of discarding them, particularly if you're fighting weak monsters or you need to make a single weapon stretch over a few explorations. There are even some reveal cards that are widely useful. For example, the Ring of Protection is pretty great for staving off a variety of 1-point damage annoyances. Alternatively, some reveals give a +2 or more to an important skill, which becomes more worthwhile.

However, the best reveals are those that also have another power, such as armor that can be revealed to prevent minor damage, but still recharged at the end of the turn. The Magic Shield, the Elven Breastplate, and many similar items are great examples of this.

So think before you hold onto a low-power reveal-only card.

Recharge: The Great Cycler

Recharge cards tend to be the next most powerful, and they're a good compromise between reveal powers (which tend to be weak) and discard powers (which cost you a card).

The big question with recharge cards is when to use them. My suggestion is: almost always. If a recharge card could help you on a roll, then go ahead and use it. Maybe it was necessary and maybe not, but there's little cost to using it. The one exception is when you have a card that can be recharged for a power or discarded for an explore. (Many allies fit into this category.) In this case, you should probably still use the card, because you'll eventually get the card back, and can explore then—but late in the game you might flip this assessment, since you'll be less likely to see the card again.

You might take it a step further and recharge cards whenever it's legal to do so, even if it's totally unnecessary. The goal here is to get non-useful cards out of your hand. So if you hit the last ally in a location deck, it might be worth playing your Crown of Charisma, even if your roll is a guaranteed success. It's also generally useful to recharge cards that affect singular skills; yes, you might need them on the next turn, but absent foreknowledge you're just as likely to need whatever you draw, and it's better to keep cycling to get to your good cards.

The biggest deficit of a recharge card is that it gets placed at the bottom of your deck. If you're recharging something you don't actually want, that's fine, but if you're recharging something that's pretty great, you may want to figure out how to get back to it sooner...

Shuffle: The Lost Action

The rulebook describes a variety of card actions, from reveal and display to bury and banish, but it doesn't tell you a lot about one of the most important: shuffling. You'll often shuffle your deck when you receive a major healing, such as a Cure. Some characters also have special shuffle powers, such as Weapon Master Valeros or Skull & Shackles Lem.

As long as you're not purposefully trying to keep bad stuff at the bottom of your deck, shuffling rocks because it allows you to more quickly revisit recharged cards—cards that were good enough that you already used them! After you've put a couple of great cards at the bottom of your deck, you might want to be cured primarily for the shuffle ability.

So, to make your recycling strategy that much better, think about how shuffling might enter your deck and your play.

Discard: The Standard Action

Discarding is the way that most things work in PACG. Some characters are pretty good at avoiding it, but most characters will discard over time. Don't be afraid to do it!

You should definitely discard blessings, and you'll frequently discard allies and weapons. You just need to make sure that you're not discarding too much: you should never reduce your deck below your hand size, because doing so can cause instant death if you take a lot of damage.

However, you should start being a bit more conservative a little earlier than that. If your character becomes unable to discard without courting death, he's going to be crippled for play: you won't be able to use good card abilities and you'll become afraid of facing danger. So, start going lighter on the discards when your deck is only four or five cards larger than your hand size; then you'll have four or five opportunities to play a discard card when it's really important.

When a character is a heavy discarder, be aware that he'll need regular medical attention. This creates the discard/heal cycle, where a heavy discarder gets healed so that he can discard again. It's every bit as good as the simpler recharge cycle; it just requires an appropriate healing power to get it going. Ideally, a heavy discarder should have his own heal cards, such as Father Zantus, Staff of Minor Healing, or various healing spells. Kyra is a fine example of someone who can always take care of herself: she tosses out blessings like crazy, then can Cure them back. If a character can't support his own discard habit, then make sure you have a healer in the party who keeps regular tabs on him.

When you're playing a character with a discard/heal cycle, you should also think about what's in your discard pile. If you make sure it contains great cards like nice blessings, strong weapons, or exploration allies, then their healing will be that much more powerful. So if you can, avoid discarding the random junk you pick up in the dungeons until just after you heal.

Display: The Weird Action

Display is a relatively infrequent action in PACG, primarily used by spells like Strength and Toxic Cloud. When you can use it, it's pretty great, because it tends to extend an effect over the length of a turn or longer. Play display cards when they're immediately needed or when you think someone will explore a lot during their turn.

To better assess the value of display spells, it's important to understand whom they can affect. Strength and Toxic Cloud offer a good contrast: Strength gives +3 to one person for the turn, while Toxic Cloud gives +1d6 to everyone at a location for the turn. Strength is a fine spell to use if someone is fighting alone, but when you're doing the final fight against the villain, and multiple characters can pitch in, Toxic Cloud is much better.

It's also important to know what happens to a card after it's displayed. Typically, it'll use one of the less weird card actions. Strength and Toxic Cloud are (hopefully) recharged, but other display cards might be discarded or even buried. This ultimate fate of a display card can tell you more about how and when to use its action.

Bury: The Action You Fear Too Much

Though you should try to work through your deck quickly, that doesn't necessarily extend to burying cards, because that takes them out of your play cycle. With that said, don't be afraid to bury your cards. Some characters, like Father Zantus, exist solely to be buried; sometimes Amiri will earn boons that she's happy to bury because they're no good. Even when an armor has a reveal or recharge effect, the bury is usually still its main purpose, so there should never be a qualm about using that either.

The trick comes when you need to determine whether it's worth burying something good. This most frequently comes up for Amiri, when she wants to juice her Strength, Melee, or Constitution. Then you have to decide: to bury or not to bury.

Sometimes you really don't want to bury cards:

• Don't bury cards if you think you'd have a good use for them later.
• Don't bury cards if their absence would make a big dent in a specific category of cards in your deck.
• Don't bury cards if your total card count is too low; that's a good way to end up dead.

But sometimes you do:

• Do bury cards that you've acquired and don't really need; it's a great use for them.
• Do bury cards if you've got plenty of similar cards in your deck.
• Do bury cards more aggressively late in the game; if you're not likely to get healed again, then a card buried and a card discarded are the exact same thing.

Banish: The Action You Maybe Fear the Right Amount

Finally, we come to banishment. Obviously, you want to avoid banishing your good cards if at all possible; in fact, if you will eventually need to banish something to close a location, then you should go out of your way to pick up something worthless.

However, there's one situation when you want to banish: when you have cards that specifically work when they get banished, such as Ameiko Kaijitsu and Mayor Kendra Deverin. Either use them by banishing them or dump them from your deck. But whatever you do, don't just sit on them, letting them take up space in your hand and your deck. Yes, it's tempting to save their one-use power for the perfect moment, but if you don't use them, they're worse than worthless. They're deck cloggers. Get 'em out.

Next time: Choosing location decks.

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #2—Playing Your Cards

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

This is the second installment of our strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. You can read the first installment here.

Your deck of cards is your most personal resource in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, and the one you have the most control over. So how can you make the most efficient use of it?

Cycle Your Cards Quickly

You want to move through your deck quickly. That's because you'll have some cards that are notably better than others, and you want to get to them. Even better, you want to get to them again and again. However, cards are your second most valuable resource [after time—see the first blog!], so you don't want to just toss them all into your discard pile. How do you balance these priorities?

You cycle cards, which is to say, you frequently play cards that can be recharged. For characters including Lem (recharge to aid), Lini (recharge your animals), Merisiel (recharge to backstab), Sajan (recharge your blessings), Seoni (recharge your spells), and Valeros (recharge your weapons), this comes naturally. Use their recharge powers liberally. Most of the magic users can also recycle their spells if they're careful. For the other characters, try and focus on rechargeable items and allies.

Oh, and recharge that armor at the end of every turn if you can—and if you can't, pick up magic armor and/or armor proficiency so that you can.

Corollary #1: Don't wait for the perfect use of rechargeable cards. It's tempting to wait forever so that you can use your rechargeable card just when you need it most. Don't. It'll clog your hand, and you may end up never using it. Yes, the card is gone once you recharge it, but you'll have something else just as useful in your hand, and you generally can't predict which card actually will be helpful on the next turn.

Corollary #2: If you can't recharge, discard and heal. Some characters (such as Amiri, Harsk, and Seelah) just aren't that great at recharging. But you still want to rapidly cycle their decks to get to their great cards again and again. Accept that their method of cycling cards goes through the discard pile: use their cards up, then have a healer ready to recycle them.

Discard Your Cards Quickly

When you get a card that doesn't look like it's going to be useful to you, don't be afraid to discard it. This is particularly important when you acquire a boon that's not that great. A few characters, such as Amiri (bury any card for additional dice), Lem (recharge any card to aid), and Lini (discard any card for improved skills), have reasons to hang onto bad cards. Absent that, toss those losers!

You should also aggressively play useful cards like blessings, allies, and weapons even if they're one use. Don't use them pointlessly, but do use them when they look useful, rather than hoarding them for some future day. Use what you have; you'll draw more!

Late in the game, you may even throw out formerly useful cards without using them. If you think there are no more barriers to deal with, get rid of that Masterwork Tools. If you're expecting to only support your friend fighting the villain, toss out your own weapons in the hope of drawing blessings.

The exception to this is, of course, when you're getting low on cards. You don't want your character to die! However, if you're forced to slow down, you should call over a healer so that you can quickly get up to speed again.

Don't Clog Your Hand

Cycling and discarding quickly is all about making sure that you don't clog up your hand. If you have the same cards in your hand round after round, you're not making the most efficient use of your resources. You could be using high-power cards that require discarding or medium-power cards that require recharging, but instead you're using low-power cards that require revealing... or maybe you're not using your cards at all! Amiri and Seelah are among the characters most prone to this problem, because of their lack of recharge powers, but anyone can get stuck with an immobile hand of cards.

A good rule of thumb is that if you get to the end of a turn and your hand is exactly the same as it was at the beginning, you need to do something.

Corollary #1: Unclog your hand by playing your cards. Most obviously, you can unclog your hand by using it. You should feel really free to recharge cards, even if doing so is a total waste. Alternatively, you should be discarding cards for their powers.

Corollary #2: Unclog your hand by discarding your cards. You might flat-out discard cards when resetting to free up your hand, particularly if you have duplicates of a card type—usually weapons or armor.

Corollary #3: Unclog your hand by moving your character. If the cards in your clogged hand aren't useful in your current location, but would be useful elsewhere, then move! If you've got a handful of weapons, go somewhere with piles of monsters, and if you've got a Crown of Charisma, go to a location that has a lot of allies, or one that requires a Charisma check to close.

Heal Yourself Quickly

In an ideal world, you'd save your healing cards until you were guaranteed not to waste any of their potential power. It seems wasteful to play a Cure that could heal up to five cards when you have only three cards in your discard pile! However, the world of PACG isn't ideal, and if you choose not to use your Cure, it's going to sit in your hand, wasting space turn after turn.

Sometimes you should just use your Cure to keep your hand cycling, even if you might waste some pips on the die roll. This is especially true for Kyra (who will probably recharge her Cure and who can heal it back into her draw pile with any Divine card if she messes up), for Lem (who can exchange any other spell for his Cure), or for someone else with multiple healing powers.

(You might want to be stingier if you're playing a Fighter or a Rogue that's depending on Father Zantus for a one-time heal sometime in the game.)

Hold On to a Blessing

Though you want to play your cards and cycle your deck, don't go too far. You should try to ensure there's always one blessing somewhere in your party. Kyra's a good person to be the Designated Blessing Holder (DBH) if she's in the game, since she can use it for healing.

By holding onto one blessing, you're slowing your progress a little bit, but you're also making sure that you're ready for that great boon or that awful bane that someone can't quite deal with on their own.

Take Your Time if You Have It

Sometimes you'll play aggressively enough that your location timer will get ahead of your blessing timer. This happens immediately in a one-player game, where your 30 location deck cards already match the 30 blessings deck cards. However, you can get ahead even with more players—sometimes.

When this happens, you should start playing more slowly. Don't worry about discarding or recharging as much. Dig more for good boons. Save your blessings to improve rolls, not to go again.

If you start falling behind, you can always speed up play again.

Next time: Knowing your cards.

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #1—The Three Resources

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Today, we begin a strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. As Shannon says, these are strategies for one way to play the game, based on tabletop playthroughs of all three current Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Adventure Paths, plus about a gazillion plays of Obsidian Entertainment's addictive Pathfinder Adventures.

The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is a complex game that supports extremely high replayability. That's because you can play it in many different ways. The core of playing PACG is understanding the three crucial resources that form the core of the game: time, cards, and decks.

Time is the First Most Valuable Resource

PACG has a constantly ticking clock. Normally, if you advance through 30 player-turns without completing your goal, you lose the game. It's a balance between two hourglasses: the blessings deck timer, which counts down the turns, and the location timer, which lays out what still needs to be explored.

That means that everythingshould be seen through the lens of time. If you fail to defeat a bane, that's not necessarily disastrous, but it does cost you a turn. Conversely, if you play a blessing or an ally that allows an extra exploration, or a detection spell that successfully enables an exploration, you gain a turn. Minimize your lost turns and maximize your gained turns and you'll practically guarantee a win.

With that said, running out of time and losing isn't a big deal. It just means that you need to play the adventure again. Don't put your character's life at risk to win an adventure, and if you get to the point where you decide you're losing, look toward other priorities (like improving your deck).

Corollary #1: Build decks to take extra turns. Give your character cards that will maximize your turns. This is easy for Kyra, who has tons of blessings, and Lini, who recharges her animal companions. It's trickier for Ezren, who has no blessings, and Sajan, who needs to conserve his blessings for super punching. Though most characters should give preference to allies who give extra explorations, that's particularly important for these blessing-impaired characters. Characters like Ezren also need to concentrate on gaining turns via other means, such as the Detect Magic and Haste spells.

Corollary #2: Play cards to take extra turns. This mostly refers to blessings: you want to be conservative about using them for their extra dice effect when they could otherwise provide extra turns. It's particularly easy to misuse blessings when you're trying to save a character who got backed into a dark alley by a bad combat. If you're looking at spending two or four blessings to save him, carefully consider whether it's worthwhile. Is saving the cards in his hand plus killing the monster really worth those two to four lost bonus turns? (Maybe, but you should make the calculation.)

You should even think about whether it's worth recharging a card like an ally that you could otherwise discard for a new turn. This is a tougher calculation because it's advantageous to keep cards in the deck, and you will probably eventually get to discard that card for its extra turn when it drifts back up through your deck.

The idea of focusing on cards' turn-gaining ability becomes moot if you've played aggressively enough that your blessing timer has caught up with your location timer. When this happens, become more willing to play your blessings and allies for purposes other than just pushing forward—particularly for improving your deck, another PACG priority.

Corollary #3: Don't worry about player count! When you have more players, it feels like you need to play faster, but that isn't necessarily true. Whatever your player count, you just need to close two locations, then you have the right number of characters left to spread out and be ready to temporarily close all the locations when someone stumbles upon the villain.

With that said, player count does change the way that PACG plays. Lower player counts bring the blessing timer and the location timer into balance, but they decrease the amount of support you get from other players (in the form of blessings) and the amount of coverage you have for different skills. PACG is probably tougher with a smaller party… but that's not necessarily due to the timer.

Cards Are the Second Most Valuable Resource

PACG has another ticking clock: the cards in your character deck. If they run out, your character dies. And you're encouraged to run out because playing more cards generally helps you accrue time, and that's the biggest ticking clock in the game.

This means that Cure is the most important card in the whole game. It lets you recycle 1d4+1 cards, which could easily be 1d4+1 extra turns. If you know there are Cures in the game, then you can play more aggressively and make it more likely that you'll complete the scenarios.

The other healing spells and powers are important too. Kyra is likely the most powerful character in Rise of the Runelords because of her heavy density of blessings combined with her Heal power, which gives her the ability to return cards just by spending one of her plentiful Divine cards and a first exploration. Seelah is probably the second most powerful character if you take the Hospitalizer role, because she can freeform heal by burying Divine cards. And that's to say nothing of cards like Father Zantus, Staff of Minor Healing, and others.

Corollary #1: Give multiple heals to Divine casters. Consider giving any Divine spellcaster in your game two Cures so that they'll come up frequently, and so that you can use one to recover the other if you roll badly on a recharge. At higher levels a Mass Cure or even a Pillar of Life can, of course, substitute for one of those Cures.

Corollary #2: Give healing ability to other characters! This can take the form of Father Zantus, Staff of Minor Healing, or even Potion of Healing. This lets these characters play aggressively too, without worrying about having to hook up with Kyra, Seelah, Lini, or Lem.

Corollary #3: Back off if you need healing! You never, ever want to lose your character to death in PACG. Do your best to ensure it's not a possibility. If you're getting to the point where your draw pile is the same size as your hand size, give up adventuring. Stay in a nice, safe, closed location while the rest of your fellows continue on. (And tell someone to come heal you!)

Decks Are the Third Most Valuable Resource

One of the trickiest aspects of PACG is that you're not just trying to win an individual game. You're also trying to improve your character to make it more likely that you'll win future games too. That means that you sometimes have to spend your short-term time resources and card resources to improve your long-term deck resources.

Corollary #1: Don't worry about gathering boons you don't want. If you encounter a boon that's clearly not going to improve anyone's deck, and if it's not likely to give you extra turns or other notable advantages in your current game, don't expend resources to collect it.

Corollary #2: Do worry about gathering boons you do want. If a card would improve someone's deck, expend the effort to collect it. If it's a big improvement, you should do this even if you have to spend turns (blessings) to do so, and maybe even if you might lose the game as a result.

Next time: Playing your cards.

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian