First 6p scenario. Army scenarios suck with 6 players.
Even when we get lucky with 3-4 henchman near the top, we still almost lose on time because each army burns out your blessings. Not to mention that somehow I get to fight the villain - first time alone, second time as a pair. As Zarlova.
0/10 would not do again.
Sounds like you barely succeeded? How many of the army skills were you missing entirely?
If you'd had 2-4 players, think it would have been fine?
That's actually the problem. We had all the skills needed (Stealth was technically missing but we also had Siwar who could talk the Armies into using a second Diplomacy skill). It takes around 3-6 blessings to pass one of these comfortably (we had 1 person playing up, but it wasn't actually a problem here.) Because everyone has to make the checks, the number of blessings spent scale up with the number of players. But normally you would need some exploration blessings in 6p to get to everything in time, and we didn't have the luxury of that. I think we ended up with 2 blessings in the blessings deck at the end.
We didn't play more than 1 blessing on a player for the Armies. And still nearly lost 1 of the checks.
We were nearly spent by the time we reached the Villain a second time, because we fought Kiranda + 4 Worldwound Armies + the villain once. The villain escaped below the Army.
That being said, the 0/10 would not do again was mostly hyperbole. I would have still split the group into two tables if I were to do it again mostly because of time, and because it's harder to grab good deck upgrades while you're rushing.
We had no trouble with this with 4 players. Zarlova, Flenta, CD Merisiel, WotR Kyra. I can see how it is considerably harder with six.
Yeah, I'd almost always rather do two groups of 3 than a group of 6 (also lets you expand to 7 + 8 easier), but sometimes the table dynamics are what they are.
I wonder if the army henchmen would've scaled better if, instead of requiring all players to successfully defeat, it was something like half the players rounded up.
That would probably make them too easy for a 3-4 player group, but at least makes them feel less punishing in groups of 5-6.
Maybe it could be something like "succeed at a number of different checks to defeat equal to the number of characters, or at least 4 if the number of characters is higher than 4." That would (maybe) make it easier for big groups but wouldn't change anything for 1-4 players.
Or list more check options, perhaps 8. Not sure that would fit on the card, though.
A variant army I thought of trying would have prompted 2 checks per character, a combat check and 1 of 6 skills check, and keep that each character has to succeed at 1 check, with some minor drawback (ex: a discard) for failing a check, but it seemed like it might be too much stuff to do.
Granted, less critical 'we have to throw every blessing at it', cause you could have people do one check without assistance then worry about the 2nd only if they fail.
I like the idea that it engages everyone, and setting it to just needing 4 would mean that you'd never have 1-2 people roll, even if they themselves discovered the army.
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Well, everyone could still encounter it, and there could still be Combat damage or other consequences for failing. But the Victory condition to beat the army could be based on a certain number of players rather than all of them.
I also feel like Demonic Horde is a similar issue, in where it feels like it wasn't really playtested with 5-6 player groups. Having your spellcaster have to deal with 2-3 Demons with only one Attack spell in hand, getting pummeled, then having the barrier shuffled back in... It's a bummer that the card exists as is. It would be a lot more manageable, especially as a B card, if it was banished after the encounter regardless of the outcome.
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The first time I played this we almost ran out of time since we were playing without support (Agna, Valeros, Amaryllis) and we were playing a little too freely with the Herald and our blessing deck. But we made it.
The second time I played with it was with 2 characters, Agna and Kyra. Both times we played this scenario we mostly stacked to get the benefit of the Banner of Valor. Got lucky, wasn't punished for it.
Scenario was easy, we didn't need the Herald with Kyra of course, but we did fail 3 checks against demons (losing 3 blessings) but we still finished with over 15 blessings left in the deck.
Again, the armies (and the game in general) are really easy with 2-3 characters.
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Well, everyone could still encounter it, and there could still be Combat damage or other consequences for failing. But the Victory condition to beat the army could be based on a certain number of players rather than all of them.
This. Everyone does a check but it only requires 4-5 checks out of 6 to succeed. This would give more leeway for groups of 5/6 without burning their blessings.
And somehow the armies need to be more dangerous for groups of 1-2 characters. Maybe 2 checks each.
If only we weren't space-limited on these cards! :)
Tanis and I might play around with some options for future Army scenarios. Depends a lot on time available. Though I think that we could actually do something much simpler like giving groups a bonus based on the # of characters (/# of closed locations) which is a ton more helpful for a big group than a small group, and is thematically appropriate.
Anyhow, if folks could please keep/move future general army mechanic discussions to their own rules-thread and the OP scenario discussion to this thread, I'd personally appreciate it. At least, I think it'd be most useful in terms of hitting its intended audience and changing future cards/scenarios.
Excellent news.