Then I’ll join!
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Hypothesis tested and proven true. Having finally bit the bullet and acquired the game, my desire to look at other board game has dropped precipitously. The hole, for the time being, has been filled.
wall of shame
It’s basically not an action or adventuring game, but instead an efficiency puzzle that you can play in like 35 - 45 minutes. The game is played following one of several “campaigns”, which are a deck of cards containing flavor text and objectives that comprise three “missions”, with each mission being a single 35 - 45 minute session. So you could just play a campaign in three short sessions or all the way through in a few hours. The combat and decision making isn’t as deep as Jaws of the Lion, but it scratches a similar itch of “moving figures across a dungeon” with less of a time commitment and a lot less tokens and cards to keep track of. It’s a lot less stressful.
You have a starting couple of cards, one with a main objective and another with a list of side quests that can be activated by finding and standing on specific map tiles (which will then prompt you to draw a specific card from the campaign deck to get your side objectives). From what I played it’s a mixture of fetch quests, killing certain monsters, finding certain other tiles, and the like. Completing side quests will get you some new equipment or experience, and completing certain side quests can influence the results of future side quests you encounter in the campaign.
What makes it challenging is that you have a fairly strict timer. You have a certain number of turns to complete a mission, and being killed in the game does not end the game but instead advances the turn counter an additional step. The real challenge of the game is figuring out how to complete all of the objectives within the time limit. Choosing when to fight monsters and when to run past them, and how you should run without dying afterwards, is what the game is really about.
The other part of the efficiency puzzle is your hand. There’s a bit of a deck building aspect where you have a deck of 12 stat cards, of which you draw up to a hand of 3 each turn. These cards can be played during attacks to give you much needed boosts when fighting, but you also have to discard one of those three cards to do any action at all, like moving across the map or interacting the objects. So you’ve typically got three actions per turn and you need to figure out how best to spend them between moving and completing objectives vs keeping hand resources to fight monsters when you encounter them. Over the course of the game you can upgrade your cards to better versions that give better boosts (like greater attacks, or additional movement options). It makes killing monsters easier, which means you need to spend less of your three actions on combat and can use more of them on exploration. There are several different characters/“hunters” you can play, themed after different weapons from the game, who vary in combat capabilities. So some hunters might be good at tanking through enemies while other might be better at dodging and running away.
The game comes with a big set of map tiles and each campaign mission will require a set of specific set of tiles plus a number of randomly select tiles that form a tile deck, and when you travel to a new space you draw a random tile. So map formation will change depending on which direction you’re exiting a tile from, the new tile you drew, and how you personally decide to orient the new tile when you lay it down. You can use tile orientation to adjust where open paths exist between adjacent tiles to either give yourself shortcuts to other tiles or to cut off paths monsters can potentially chase you from.
The game also comes with several different monsters, and missions can either specify to include certain monsters or to use random monsters. So between the random selection of map tiles, monsters (not to mention what character you’re using), it has some decent variability. It’s definitely kind of game designed to be replayed to see how well you can optimize your decisions.
The irony is that one of the appeals of a game like this is the minis. I wanted to play with little action figures, and this was originally one of those kickstarter games that sold itself on having a gigantic amount of minis if you bought all of the (kickstarter exclusive) expansions. But this is definitely a situation where it’s more quantity than quality.
I was previously playing Oathsworn, which has a lot less minis but they were of decent quality. The characters looked nice and big, and I assume the monsters were giant and looked even better (I bought the standee version so the monsters were just cardboard). You can kind of see them in this picture.
Conversely, I pulled out a hunter from Bloodborne and this dude is tiny and the model detail is real mushy.
I imagine it’s probably a mixture of managing the costs of such a large quantity of miniatures, but also the hunters are really tiny. All of the monsters are larger than hunters and look progressively better the larger they get. But it was disappointing the hunters themselves don’t get to look as good as the monsters do.
Since this is one of those kickstarter based games, there are lots of expansions. There are a few “big” expansions that come in large boxes and comes with new monsters, new campaigns, maybe new hunters, and new map tiles, while the several “small” expansions that get you new monsters/characters and a campaign but not new map tiles. So the big boxes are the ones that should be the coolest because they give you additional map themes to use and design campaigns around, but for some reason the designers decided one of them should be themed after the Forbidden Forest, with it’s star, biggest monster being that giant hog.
Byrgenwerth? Small expansion. Yahar’gul the Unseen Village? Small expansion. Mergot’s Loft, Upper Cathedral Ward? Small expansion, small expansion. But those giant hogs you see like maybe twice in the game? Give them a big box and big models!
I’m also remembering how little I remember about Bloodborne. Like who the heck is “Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos”?
And I don’t think I ever figured out what the Moon presence was.
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lol I was going to pontificate about the Nottingham pewter belt’s magic touch & how model design doesn’t translate from 3D graphics to resin minis
but Mike McVey is the senior mini producer for CMON. so yeah it’s probably manufacturing limitations
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Oooh, what’s this about? I’m not sure what you mean here.
TO be fair to the Hunter minis, I probably should have taken some pictures to show just how small they are. So maybe it’s unfair to expect high detail from something so small. Apparently they’re 28 mm. I don’t know what the average board game mini size is. But it looks like it would be very challenging to paint!
These are regular sized cards.
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Games Workshop has a whole asteroid belt of companies in its orbit formed from ex-staffers, all based around Nottingham. some call it the Pewter Belt because the old minis were all lead-based white metal. Mike was the lead artist on GW’s ‘Eavy Metal painting team, did loads of 25mm minis for photos in catalogues & White Dwarf.
there’s a skill to exaggerating model features at that scale to bring out the spirit of the mini & make it easier to paint, and the old sculptors had it.
taking a PC model out of a game and exporting it as an STL removes the sculptor’s touch. and that’s what I think the pipeline was for those minis
take Hexbane’s Hunters (a Warhammer Underworlds faction) in comparison:
totally missing the Prague masquerade feel of Bloodborne but not too far off
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Whoa that’s crazy, and those are even smaller than Bloodborne!
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lol I should have qualified that with a year, Mike was painting back in the mid-90s. GW scale creep means minis get bigger every year, these hunters are over 30mm, but still nominally at Heroic 28mm scale
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what a wild ride that was, the only 18xx bingo spot missing was someone going bankrupt and still winning the game
@vodselb I hope you had a pleasant introduction to puffing with the Billys
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when my attention isnt totally cat filled im down to get in on a game. im ready now but she is my WORLD
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surely I would. fine to do 1889 again, or one of the other recommended intro games (18Chesapeake, 18MS)
18AL is pretty quick too!
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Let’s do 1889 till I win
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The other night, the opportunity arose for me to play Dunc: Imperium with both expansions included. All four players had played the base game but none of us was familiar at all with the expansions.
It fell upon me to quickly read both instruction booklets and explain all of the new stuff in real-time as we set it up. It went smoothly enough, though. It almost felt like there were too many different things to focus on, and I wondered whether it might be better with just one expansion at a time. But I don’t know which I’d choose because I liked some of the new things from each.
I guess I particularly liked the weirdness of Immortality, where you throw your soldiers in the Axolotl tank and then fish them out to use as currency, “graft” cards together, etc.
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think it’s too slow with both expansions, fine to mix it up with one or the other
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I played my first Uwe Rosenberg game last night, a light, highly interactive card game called Nottingham. It doesn’t seem to be fondly thought of among his works, but I really had a good time. I can see it fitting a certain niche in a collection since it plays seven, has some fun mechanics in the way of reaching your goals, cool interaction.
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Anyone want a game of ark nova or feast for Odin on boardgame arena?
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Yeah feast for odin has interested me, but I’d need to learn how to play it.
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Do you mean asynchronous or meeting up at a set time? I like Ark Nova better than Feast for Odin (Patchwork did it better), but I’d play either.
Speaking of BGA, I know I talked with a couple different people at the meetup about doing another SB game night on BGA to play Race for the Galaxy, etc. We should do it, though I’m bad at being the one to organize things involving other people.
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