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NOTE: I am not really looking to discuss this post outside of a designer asking me to. This is strictly trying to offer them the feedback they requested from their discussion on their GenCon panel. I hope this is what you were looking for. If not, please let me know!!
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My wife and I play PACG every week or two weeks. While I am a huge board game fan, PACG is the only game my wife will play with me on a regular basis. We have the core set and the CotCT expansion as well as the promos as I am a subscription holder.
Sofar we have played the core campaign through to the beginning of Lev 3. We have not failed and have played by the rules as much as we could. Unless we can not find a rule for something we think we are playing the game as it was meant to be played.
We play on normal mode at a medium game length. I will sometimes sneak in an additional location (the 3 player one) if I feel like a particular scenario is too short. My wife thinks the game takes too long to play while I think it is just right or slightly too short. She would like to play shorter length scenarios but I draw the line at medium length.
-We are both enjoying the game and like this new version 2 of the game (core) much more than the original set and its expansions.
-We are okay with the new art style. It is busy but it is growing on us.
-We find the game perfectly playable with two players. I played the core Lini but realllly disliked her and switched back to the original set Lini who feels so much more awesome to play (+1d4+ on a check if you have an animal.. Without that ability she feels so meh to me.) Wife plays Hakon for melee and mage spells for party balance. We realize now that we got to scenario level three, his spells are only good if he have the Harrow mechanic in play so she took the bard path with him. We felt like it was a sort of wasted pick but not a big deal.
-When we play CotCT we are going to try the game without a healer. We think it is possible and are looking forward to both being DPS.
-We like the new mechanics like avenge, danger, proxies, the new and replaced keywords, etc.
-DANGER: There are a bunch of scenarios where there is a danger but no clear way on how to activate it. Or, it pops maybe once and that is it. It feels wasted at times. If you are going to use Danger, make it pop at least 3 - 5 times in a scenario. 2C was great as we had to do it each time we closed a location and it was very clear how and when we had to fight it. Make it EXPLICITLY CLEAR on how you have to trigger the danger in a scenario, please.
-We love being together as a party. Thanks for making the game more party friendly (local check I'm looking at you) and the all cards that make all the players at a location die a horrible death cards are a great balance to it.
-I like that the story is longer for each scenario, my wife says its too long and to "RPG..." She just wants to play to move forward to the next level.
-We do NOT like that we had to shuffle all the boon cards 1 - 3 together before we started the campaign. My wife would be so excited to get something cool and then become really, really disappointed and annoyed at both the game and the designers (and said as much) when she found out that if the boon was a level higher than our current level she could not keep it. I agree with her. When we start CotCT we are going back to using only level 0-1 cards at level 1, then level 0-2 when we get to level 2, etc. Please rethink this and revert the rule back to the V1 way of playing. This is what my wife hates most about the new game and I really dislike it as well. We don't want to see all the items in the game the first time we play. It takes away so much of the excitement of going up a level!!
-We like how there is some variety in the scenarios unlike like V1 when all of the RotR scenarios felt basically the same.
-I HIGHLY DOUBT we will ever play outside of a campaign. Please make a/some randomized scenarios part of a future campaign so we can experience them. They seem like a cool idea but my wife will not do them unless we have to as part of the campaign. I also do not play games solo. (feature request) "As you enter the Shifting Labyrinth please roll a d20 and check on the random scenario table to see what is waiting for you!" Would love something like this.
-Love the +# for banes and sometimes boons. Great way to keep monsters relevant or challenging.
-Bloodfly seems to come out every game! How many are in the monster deck?? Our most hated card. Always gets a groan when it is revealed. :)
-Divider for each expansion please. (feature request)
-The Hourglass is great. It is mostly useless but sometimes it is amazing. It is much better than just flipping cards to keep track of turns with no other purpose.
-It is a lot easier for us to buy one full expansion once or twice a year over six or twelve packs per year. Thank you for ending the madness of your old way of selling expansions!!
-We do not want to mix V1 with V2 cards conversion chart or not. Please consider making new class decks or something in the V2 style. Whatever. We are selling all of our V1 stuff and starting from Core.
-Armor is so much better now. My wife had four of them on display the other night. It was funny and we tried real hard on how to explain how he was wearing that many suits of armor but we could not!) Thank you for making armor useful. Maybe only allow 1 to be on display at a time or something... or not?
-We both think that items are MUCH improved from V1. There are items we actually want in our decks now outside of healing items (potion.)
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Thank you for everything you did in making PFACG so much better over the V1 edition of the game. We are really happy and look forward to starting CotCT and what lies beyond!!
PS: As always, no ships they killed the game for us. We stopped buying expansions after being so confused and disappointed with S&S.
Thanks!!
When we start CotCT we are going back to using only level 0-1 cards at level 1, then level 0-2 when we get to level 2, etc. Please rethink this and revert the rule back to the V1 way of playing.
Actually that's already the case (CotCT only shuffles Level 0-1 cards from Core + Curse). The only reason Dragon's Demand does it this way is because of a limited number of boons in the box.
Chief Technical Officer
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Thanks for your feedback! A couple things you mentioned deserve some explanation.
-DANGER: There are a bunch of scenarios where there is a danger but no clear way on how to activate it. Or, it pops maybe once and that is it. It feels wasted at times. If you are going to use Danger, make it pop at least 3 - 5 times in a scenario. 2C was great as we had to do it each time we closed a location and it was very clear how and when we had to fight it. Make it EXPLICITLY CLEAR on how you have to trigger the danger in a scenario, please.
In a Paizo blog a while back, Mike explained the design goal of the danger: "[It] allows us to play up unique thematic elements in each scenario. Before, we didn't have a good way to throw lots of skeletons at you during a haunted castle scenario, but now we just define the danger as, say, an Ancient Skeleton, and it's restless dead till dawn."
In some scenarios, we want to push the theme hard, so we'll use scenario rules, story banes, or even locations to bring the danger into play. But in scenarios where the story doesn't need that, the danger would be brought into play only by cards that could show up in any scenario, such as the Core barrier Ingratiating Minion, who forces you to encounter the danger if he's undefeated, or the Curse barrier Flanking Attack, which throws a couple of pumped-up dangers at the party.
-We do NOT like that we had to shuffle all the boon cards 1 - 3 together before we started the campaign. My wife would be so excited to get something cool and then become really, really disappointed and annoyed at both the game and the designers (and said as much) when she found out that if the boon was a level higher than our current level she could not keep it. I agree with her. When we start CotCT we are going back to using only level 0-1 cards at level 1, then level 0-2 when we get to level 2, etc. Please rethink this and revert the rule back to the V1 way of playing. This is what my wife hates most about the new game and I really dislike it as well. We don't want to see all the items in the game the first time we play. It takes away so much of the excitement of going up a level!!
When using Core by itself, if you don't add all of the higher level cards in Dragon's Demand, large groups won't have enough cards to build all their decks and populate all the locations. Adding enough cards to make that work would increase the price point of the Core Set beyond our comfort level, so we made that tradeoff. (I don't have the math at hand, but I suspect that with only two characters, you can probably make Dragon's Demand work with just level-appropriate cards.)
Curse adds enough cards to the vault that we don't have to worry about that, so we direct you to build the vault with only level-appropriate cards.
(If you add all the Curse cards when playing Dragon's Demand, I think you can use only level-appropriate cards with any party size... but if you haven't already played through Curse, you'd see a bunch of the Curse cards before you play that AP, so that may not be a perfect solution.)
-Bloodfly seems to come out every game! How many are in the monster deck?? Our most hated card. Always gets a groan when it is revealed. :)
There's only 1. Apart from some of the level 0 and 1 blessings, there are no duplicate cards in Core or Curse.
Thanks for the reply.
Bloodfly was a joke. :) You just can never get rid of it. Even when it finally goes back into the box at the end of a scenario, it somehow gets shuffled into the next scenario again and again.
I guess I want to say if you are only using the danger as, "Hay, MAYBE a card that accesses it will come up just to spice things up but odds are it won't..," please just don't put it into that particular scenario. We love the thematic aspect of it and are asking you to use it more. The game takes long enough to setup and put away. We'd rather not have to spend the time building a side deck or even a single card if the odds are that there is only a 25% that we might only encounter it once.
To sum up: If there is a reason for the danger to be there and the players are going to encounter it a few times in a scenario then please include it. If you have a scenario that only has a danger in it with little chance of it being encountered even once no less a few times then just don't put it in there.
We have not read the CotCT rule book so we did not know we don't have mix all the boons together in the expansion. We are glad to hear it was a core box mechanic only!!
Thanks again!
I think that's Giant Fly you're referring to. We also hate it with a passion normally reserved for tax audits or paper cuts.