Verified here.
Goblin Keelhaulin' ends this scenario very quickly, one way or another...
I finished the scenario in 7 turns (6 player group) the other day thanks to Feiya encountering the barrier. Luckily, she the Sapphire of Intelligence on hand and had upgraded her hex power to work on barriers. Having to bury 6 cards wouldn't have killed her at the time, but it would have made things tough had the game taken a bad turn.
While I do believe Goblin Keelhaulin' does let you win this scenario much quicker, I think I'll personally not count the plunder from it if I do encounter it during this scenario. I'll still take the plunder, but just keep track of how much came from it to adjust how much total I need to win. While one the one hand it is fun to win early, on the other I want to experience the scenarios.
I could of course house rule that if I encountered it "early" the plunder wouldn't count towards winning, I'd be left to subjectively decide what "early" is, so I'll just instead not let it count towards the victory condition at any point in the scenario.
Goblin Keelhaulin' isn't the only barrier that let's you add plunder. Would you do the same thing with a barrier like Pirate Hunting? Most other cards only add a single plunder card, so it shortens the scenario, but not as dramatically as Keelhaulin.
Not counting certain plunder cards might make the scenario more difficult, but it also means you can get substantially more plunder. There is a balance issue to consider with your change, albeit a minor one.
Yeah, Pirate Hunting shortened my solo run of this scenario a bit. I don't think I ever met the villain.
Although it can cut the scenario short, I kind of like the mental image of the heroes returning to the Lady only one day after they set out, soaked through, covered in seaweed and goblin blood, and holding a load of strange loot with a sour look on their faces.
Just Goblin Keelhaulin' for me. I haven't seen any other barrier that in and of itself could win the scenario. That is sort of the tipping point in my mind.
And I don't want to just remove it because I want the plunder!
Chief Technical Officer
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For what it's worth, we have several different ways to mess with victory conditions.
First, it's important to note that the rules only tell you how to win where there is one villain; they say you must corner and defeat him to win.
When there is only one villain, but we want to override the bit about cornering and defeating him, we say "You win the scenario only when <you meet criteria>."
When the number of villains is not 1, the rules don't actually tell you how to win, so we use the phrase "To win the scenario, <meet criteria>."
If we want to add another way to win that you could use in addition to the usual way to win, we would say "In addition to cornering and defeating the villain, you can win the scenario if <you meet criteria>. "
If we want to add an extra requirement to the usual requirement, we would say "In addition to cornering and defeating the villain, you must <meet criteria> to win the scenario."
Very interesting, Vic. Thanks for the clarification and it makes perfect of sense. I was thinking earlier today when looking at some of the threads about things like Rage, End of Turn, Daggers and such how much I would dread creating or editing a game with as many subtle complexities as PACG has. I'm always glad that you guys and gals did and also how interactive with the community you are :)
Thanks for the post, Vic. Good game design requires such specific word usage, I really like seeing you break down what exactly any term means and how you use them. Not that I plan on making any homebrew cards or anything, but the insight is really nice.