Someone posted a question in the Home Brew threads about adding additional blessing to the blessings deck for 5 and 6 people groups. I have considered this as well. A lot of the replies talked about how having 30 turns is the intended time limit. I feel like in 5 and 6 member groups, the blessings and allies are basically only for extra explorations. I feel like I never get to use any other effects on the cards. Does anyone else feel this way? Or if not, does anyone have any suggestions or strategies?
I primarily play in large groups (6 players is the norm), and I've personally never felt that way. We throw around blessings and ally effects for their non-explore powers all the time, and make good use of scouting abilities to discover where the villain is as a time-saving measure. Pretty much everyone is already planning ahead for their next turn, which means that we as a group can coordinate actions such that we're all in ideal locations and ideally with enough support for people that are attempting things they may need help on.
When playing through Season of the Shackles, I believe we also typically finished each scenario with 3-10 blessings left in the blessings deck; only rarely did we really feel a time crunch where it came down to the last blessing. When it does come down to the wire, we know ahead of time that the next round is each of our last turns, so before we take any of them we thoroughly plan what everyone is going to do in order to maximize our chances of temp closing any remaining open locations and beating down the villain to win the scenario.
With good planning and team coordination/communication, you can complete scenarios in a 6p group with blessings to spare, so I believe that 30 turns is plenty. Sure, you have less individual turns, but that's the nature of the beast (plus you're likely interacting with the group on everyone else's turn anyway so you have things to do during the downtime).
A reply like that makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong. My usual strategy is to sit at a location I can close until it is actually closed, then move. Would you suggest moving sooner? I'm playing WotR right now. The only easy ways to scout are Lyrin (the wolf) and an extra explore with Imrijka. What other strategies could be used here?
A reply like that makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong. My usual strategy is to sit at a location I can close until it is actually closed, then move. Would you suggest moving sooner? I'm playing WotR right now. The only easy ways to scout are Lyrin (the wolf) and an extra explore with Imrijka. What other strategies could be used here?
I haven't played Wrath in a large group yet so this might not apply so much, but our strategy usually is to figure out which two locations we will blitz through to close and then disperse to locations each character can close. That way, we only need to find the villain and temp close everything else. If the villain is buried deep or key checks are blown, then this strategy can fail of course.
Someone posted a question in the Home Brew threads about adding additional blessing to the blessings deck for 5 and 6 people groups. I have considered this as well. A lot of the replies talked about how having 30 turns is the intended time limit. I feel like in 5 and 6 member groups, the blessings and allies are basically only for extra explorations. I feel like I never get to use any other effects on the cards. Does anyone else feel this way? Or if not, does anyone have any suggestions or strategies?
At home, I play solo, at conventions I've been playing 3-4 player tables, with friends 6 player tables. They are definitely different types of games with different challenges.
Yes, in 6 character games almost all blessings and allies are used to explore. You can't really hold back. Then again, we DO support other players with blessings during their turns, so it's really about how many blessings/allies we have LEFT in our hands when it's our turn again. So it's not like they are ALL being used to explore.
We still use allies to recharge key spells, but allies are not needed to close locations or defeat barriers since there are often lots of blessings available to help out. Holding an ally back and not using it to explore is a lost exploration.
You can use your allies for their recharge/reveal abilities, but a 6 character table really needs explores, and the timer is the real challenge in a 6 character game.
My 6-player group explores like Jones, we stack (as much as possible) and close out 1-3 locations and then spread out so that we can temp close locations if someone finds the villain.
I generally agree with the others here. I feel that, in general, you should never have an ally of blessing that can't explore, since you need to explore a lot. However, knowing when to use a blessing or ally for something else is vital. I like to think of every blessing/ally play as a type of cost benefit analysis. You can look at your buddy going against a henchman and say "if he wins this fight, we can close this location with 5 cards left. That's a ton of explores being saved." To a lesser extent, this can apply to any boon or bane. That great weapon will allow our fighter to win a lot more fights without help. That'll probably save 2-3 explores per scenario, so it's obviously worth throwing as many as 3-4 blessings at the check, since it'll more than pay for itself.