Slandor's page

Since Mike said it, it's official ruling. But this does contradict the encounter timing rules from the faq:

•Apply any effects that happen after the encounter, if needed. Do this whether or not you succeeded at your checks. At this time, deal with any effects that were triggered by the checks. For example, If Ezren played a spell with the Arcane trait during the check, he may now use his power that allows him to examine the top card of his deck.
•Resolve the encounter. If you succeed at all of the checks required to defeat a bane, banish it; if you don’t succeed, it is undefeated— shuffle the card back into its location deck. If you succeed at a check to acquire a boon, put it in your hand; otherwise, banish it."

In my interpretation, the ogrekin is put under the deck the step before the golden scenario rule is triggered, so he cannot end up under Mammy Graul because he is already under the location deck.

This is a different question from whether you're allowed to close the location or not, though. And I can live with the ruling that his "if defeated" ability still applies even if he is already under the location deck.

We were a bit unsure how to handle location closing on a roll of 4.

When you encounter the Ogrekin, roll 1d4:
1. The difficulty to defeat the Ogrekin is increased by 2; damage dealt by the Ogrekin is reduced by 2.
2. Damage dealt by the Ogrekin is increased by 2.
3. The Ogrekin may not be evaded.
4. After the encounter, put the Ogrekin on the bottom of the location deck.
If defeated, you may immediately attempt to close this location.

We decided since the Ogrekin is put on the bottom of the location deck, the location cannot be closed since "after the Encounter" happens before "resolve the Encounter" and since he isn't around anymore during the resolve step the "if defeated"-text is gone and cannot be applied anymore.

But we were unsure if this is the correct interpretation or if the location can be closed, effectively banishing the henchman with the rest of the deck if successful.

We do use nicknames/short sentences for some character abilities, but unfortunately with some abilities nothing good has come up yet.

Harsk throws axes into <bane's> back and scouts;
Kyra heals and turns undead;
Merisiel backstabs(recharge)/backstabs really hard (discard);
Seelah trashes the place searching for enemies;

For Seelah's selfbuff it's just "I add 1d6+1", and Ezren's player hasn't come up with anything to describe his powers.

A comprehensive list with ideas for descriptions of powers would be nice, as I find it really adds flavor to the game.

Where are you supposed to put the 'removed from game'-cards with the current layout of the box?
I had no problem fitting everything up to AP3 into the corresponding slots, even sleeved (blessings are a bit tight), but I am stumped on what to do with the removed cards. So far I put them into the unused character slots, but I will run out of space there quite soon.

For me, the difficulty changes too much depending on the number of characters. I usually play with 2-3 friends, and so far (4th Scenario of second adventure pack) we haven't lost once, even when getting greedy.

However, every single game (4 total) we played with 5-6 Players, we lost. 3 out of those 4 scenarios, we had closed all but one or two locations and the last player was one extra explore short of encountering the villain. Greed/inexperience of our guest appearences does play a part though. Saving a blessing for an explore when you could instead drastically increase the odds of making a closing check is an unnecessary risk, and if the henchman was close to the top of the location deck this will cost too much time.

I also played solo (1 character) with Ezren and Kyra up to the end of AP3. Kyra lost a few scenarios due wasting too much time healing up or failing multiple times on closing checks, but otherwise she has had no problems. Ezren had significantly less than 50% winrate. He does not really lose due to time but rather due to having less than 6(7) cards left in his deck and stopping exploring. Having neither heals nor Blessings does make it extremely difficult. I did start him out with 3 cures, but eventually he was fortunate enough to find new spells and thus unable to replace them. Now, any scenario with either shrine of Lamashtu or a villian with multiple combat checks, he only has a very small chance of succeeding.

I learned my lesson about unnecessary risks with Seoni.

Solo Seoni died when she had 5 cards left in her deck, and only one open location left. She decided to explore instead of surrendering when she had a blessing matching the top of the deck, a Wand of Force Missile, an attack spell, masterwork tools and some other cards irrelevant to the situation in her hand. I encountered the villain who summons a wrathful sinspawn. So I though ok, I'll just blast the summon with the wand, won't matter if I lose a few cards, and then kill the villain. I lost the wisdom check for the sinspawn (not much bad luck there, she didn't really expect to succeed). But then I rolled 3 ones and a two for the wand for a total of 5 out of 10 necessary. So she took 5 damage, had to discard her entire hand and then failed the recharge roll on the wand. She would have survived if I had either played the spell to kill the summon (auto-recharge), or if I had played the blessing (auto-recharge) on the wand or the wisdom check. Somehow I
failed to realize that a bad roll would kill her.

Some games have several pages of glossary explaining every game term in alphabetical order in their rulebook. With searchable PDF-rulebooks available online I don't find this as important as it used to be, but it usually helps a lot getting started.

Thanks for the quick reply Mike.

When I set up Garrison for Battle at the dam I realized it says:
"If you encounter a monster other than a villain or henchman, each character at this location must summon and encounter this monster."

It neither says "instead", nor does it say "other character". So I think I played it wrong before.

With my new insight, it seems to me that garrison works like this:
1) encounter a monster
1a) summon and encounter it for each character, including the one who just explored.
2) resolve the original encounter

So does the exploring player have to fight twice (and only the second fight counts for defeated/undefeated encounter purposes)?

I am playing solo Ezren with 2 cures and just replace them from the box after each Scenario (started with 3 but replaced one with mirror image). Seems to me like he really needs those cures when adventuring by himself, too. It does somewhat hurt his extra explores, though, since I don't roll on any spell I am not planning to keep.

As I understand the rules and faq, you could replay an already won scenario as often as you want to improve your characters' decks.
Quote faq:
" Can I keep replaying scenarios to get lots and lots of rewards?

You can replay scenarios in the hopes of acquiring better boons through exploration, but a character can't gain the reward for a given scenario more than once."

Such a timesink does make sense in a mmo-game, but it seems to be very strange rule for a cardgame.
I mean, who would set up a scenario, play through a certain location looking for a specific card, and then flip over the blessing deck 20 more times to lose and do it all over again? I'd rather save a few hours of my life not doing this utterly unfun task and just add any attainable card I want to my deck.

I really think there should be some rule to either forbid this kind of replaying or to allow some shortcut, because "farming" in a solo boardgame makes no sense at all.