also im real tempted to buy this new buffy the vampire slayer co-op right now. my wife and i are big big buffy fans from way back, and it looks like a solid game.
It definitely 100% doesn't spoil anything from season one, and it is literally the cover of the game, but I'll put it in a spoiler anyway.
Back of the box is different than the cover of the game.
The point being that this is information that anyone who picks up the box can see without opening it. Putting any sort of spoiler there would be insane.
It definitely 100% doesn't spoil anything from season one, and it is literally the cover of the game, but I'll put it in a spoiler anyway.
Back of the box is different than the cover of the game.
The point being that this is information that anyone who picks up the box can see without opening it. Putting any sort of spoiler there would be insane.
It's Season 2 of a Legacy game, the first of its kind. This is a brave new world of what could be considered a spoiler.
It definitely 100% doesn't spoil anything from season one, and it is literally the cover of the game, but I'll put it in a spoiler anyway.
Back of the box is different than the cover of the game.
The point being that this is information that anyone who picks up the box can see without opening it. Putting any sort of spoiler there would be insane.
It's Season 2 of a Legacy game, the first of its kind. This is a brave new world of what could be considered a spoiler.
There's a fine line between caution and paranoia and this is on the wrong side of it, IMO. We've always been good about marking actual spoilers here, especially where Legacy games are concerned.
It definitely 100% doesn't spoil anything from season one, and it is literally the cover of the game, but I'll put it in a spoiler anyway.
Back of the box is different than the cover of the game.
The point being that this is information that anyone who picks up the box can see without opening it. Putting any sort of spoiler there would be insane.
It's Season 2 of a Legacy game, the first of its kind. This is a brave new world of what could be considered a spoiler.
There's a fine line between caution and paranoia and this is on the wrong side of it, IMO. We've always been good about marking actual spoilers here, especially where Legacy games are concerned.
True. Like I didn't go running my mouth when the Moon colony decided to nuke Australia in September.
Oops! :P
Need a voice actor? Hire me at bengrayVO.com
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051 Steam ID Twitch Page
Got in our first 2P game of Anachrony today, this time using the B-side faction player boards. Lost that one 56-64. The Salvation board that wants Anomalies for its Evacuation condition is like playing "chicken" with Causality.
Then I took the Chronobot for a spin. It's a pretty good AI as far as solo variants go, but man does it cheat like crazy. At one point it had 9 buildings, 2 superprojects, and three Anomalies; that's 16 building locations when a human only has 12 total. The fact that it doesn't have to pay for its stuff and always builds the most valuable ones meant that it had 22 points in buildings to my 7. Even losing 6 points for its Anomalies (it managed to cure one before I ended), that was basically the entirety of the 48-58 beating it gave me.
Then again its actions are basically random so maybe next time it just sits there spinning its metaphorical wheels and I'll crush it.
No this is a new game. There's no hype or anything, I didn't know it existed until it randomly popped up as a recommendation on Amazon earlier today. There aren't any video reviews out but here's a playthrough/rules thing that should give you an idea of what's going on.
It definitely 100% doesn't spoil anything from season one, and it is literally the cover of the game, but I'll put it in a spoiler anyway.
Back of the box is different than the cover of the game.
The point being that this is information that anyone who picks up the box can see without opening it. Putting any sort of spoiler there would be insane.
It's Season 2 of a Legacy game, the first of its kind. This is a brave new world of what could be considered a spoiler.
There's a fine line between caution and paranoia and this is on the wrong side of it, IMO. We've always been good about marking actual spoilers here, especially where Legacy games are concerned.
On the other hand, there's literally no polite reason not to mark a spoiler when requested.
It definitely 100% doesn't spoil anything from season one, and it is literally the cover of the game, but I'll put it in a spoiler anyway.
Back of the box is different than the cover of the game.
The point being that this is information that anyone who picks up the box can see without opening it. Putting any sort of spoiler there would be insane.
It's Season 2 of a Legacy game, the first of its kind. This is a brave new world of what could be considered a spoiler.
There's a fine line between caution and paranoia and this is on the wrong side of it, IMO. We've always been good about marking actual spoilers here, especially where Legacy games are concerned.
On the other hand, there's literally no polite reason not to mark a spoiler when requested.
Totally, and Pook rightly did so. Nobody was questioning that.
The discussion that spawned from that request was if the box itself is considered a spoiler, then what isn't?
The concern wasn't about spoilers for the game that was actually in the box, though.
This is akin to to the VHS sleeve of Robocop II potentially spoiling you on something from the first film.
Except for the part that says "Season 2 is a fully-contained game that does not require Pandemic, Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, or any other <boardgames?> to play."
As far as we know these two board games have nothing to do with each other besides core Pandemic mechanics and shared designer(s).
And again, we have multiple people here who have played Season 1 and ALL of us have been very diligent in making sure plot elements are properly hidden (give or take the occasional forum malfunction). There's no reason to fear that this would stop now, especially since the original is only about a year old at this point. A decade down the road someone might not be as careful but even then I'd like to think that those of us who know how valuable the element of surprise is in this experience would respect that. So far this has applied to every Legacy-style game, be it Risk, Seafall, or Gloomhaven.
The post was edited out of courtesy, but the request(s) showed a lack of trust.
Games don't typically require previous games to play. But "Season 2" of something typically builds on "Season 1" of something, usually in ways that give away events of the latter if you experience the former first. Hence the concern.
We're in uncharted territory with seasonal iterations of legacy games. As I said, I haven't played the first game. But reading through the second, it seemed to imply some very signifcant events from the first. If it's a completely unrelated thing, why even call it "Season 2" and not ": Some Other Subtitle"? It's not like Pandemic doesn't already have a history of that.
Essentially, I don't buy that the concern was unwarranted. I appreciate that a lot of care is taken around here to prevent spoilers, but it's not like we haven't had to have conversations about it in the past, either.
I understand your concern. However, in this particular case, I can state categorically that the posted picture of the back of the Season 2 box reveals absolutely nothing about either the gameplay or story of Season 1.
Tak is an abstract that's based on a fictional game in some books that a guy wrote, I guess? It's functional enough for beginners in that you can put some pieces on the board and try to advance towards winning, and I imagine there's probably enough there for it to be a "real game" when people "get good," but I can't see myself getting anywhere near that level. It definitely seems like a thing that could be used as a plot device in a book, in that there are some "surprise" wins that can be hard to spot so the wizard can carelessly dispatch the yokel, and also room for different play styles where one character could be the defensive master, one could be all-out offense, another could go all-in on making one big stack, etc. I'm not a fan of abstracts, but this one doesn't offend me.
Also played the first scenario of the Arkham Horror card game. It was fun enough, but I probably don't need to own it - replay value seems low. Usually I like constructing my own decks, but I wasn't that excited by the cards present in the starter deck I had. Maybe because I got the most boring character (Roland)?
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
Yes, but guaranteeing the fact that the outside box/description doesn't contain spoilers is, in fact, a spoiler.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
On the subject of Pandemic, I never updated the thread with our final months, so;
Pandemic: Legacy NOVEMBER spoilers;
It was a month and a half ago, or so, that we played, but I can recall the general structure of events. We went into November with a clean slate, search-wise, having accomplished each during the month they were introduced. I think October's win bonus let you generate 3 roadblocks or advance search, but we had no searches to advance and no real need for roadblocks. We decided to choose and wall off a city with 3 approaches and that turned out to be Johannesburg. And then we bottom decked Johannesburg on the first Epidemic, lol. And then we just said Fuck Johannesburg.
With relatively little to do, and with it being obvious that December held at least one last, final wrench to throw in our works, we focused on blowing up military bases and establishing vaccine factories to start rolling back CoDA. We won without a great deal of fuss, leaving three bases on the board including two in one heavily-CoDA-infested region and one nowhere near CoDA. Or maybe it was two and two.
Pandemic: Legacy DECEMBER spoilers;
We rolled right into the first half of December on the same real world day, and of course there was something new, the last big search. As thematic as it was to be in Atlanta, we didn't have any CoDA in North America except for New York (already Vaccined), and Atlanta's panic level was only at 1, so there wasn't much tension there. I think it would have made more sense for the search to be required in City Zero, but there was already a targeted Search there in a previous month so hmm.
We still needed to Vaccinate around 10 cities, and all of those targets had either one or two military bases remaining in their respective regions, so we decided to plan to fail the first month gracefully. We built a party designed to move around the map easily and we focused entirely on blowing up bases and vaccinating cities. The Medic knocked down the initial areas of non-CoDA infection while the Operations Expert and Vaccine Specialist (or whatever that character's name is) worked in the CoDA zone. We blew up two of the three bases and vaccinated all but a couple of cities (deep in the CoDA zone, fully roadblocked and Fallen, with a military base), and ran out of player deck a few turns later.
For the second half of the month, we went with Dispatcher/Researcher/Quarantine Specialist/Colonel, the idea being that the first three would essentially camp out in Atlanta and draw/trade cards while the Colonel went deep into the Zone to vaccinate the last cities. This worked exceptionally well, as the trio drew into some Binoculars and the Colonel, even with the military base vaccination penalty, finished vaccinating the last cities with the help of a Grenade Belt. We cleared the search with about half the player deck remaining and won December.
Pandemic: Legacy ENDGAME spoilers and thoughts;
Oops. We won December with about half of the player deck remaining... and things were going so smoothly that we didn't even think to blow up the last two military bases. In retrospect, given the story of the game we should have thought of it, but it wasn't an objective so... ah well. Our final score was 763, so we didn't get the top ending. We were very satisfied overall, though; apart from the triangle of Fallen CoDA cities and a single Level 4, our board was pretty clean. CoDA (black) managed to spread one hop west and south from London and Madrid, and one hop south from Cairo, but we walled off the red zone completely. We focused more on Military Bases than on Roadblocks, hence the spreads.
Our diseases were as follows;
Yellow - The Trops - Stage 4 researched
Red - Pox of Unusual Size - Stage 0 researched
Blue - The Protomolecule - Stage 3 researched
Black - CoDA
We never did use that nuke card, though. Shame.
Kevin's talking about making a shadow box to display our board in, and some of the torn up cards, mission briefings, character play records, etc. I told him about glass that I'd seen that turns opaque when you add current to it, or something like that; he's going to look into it and maybe talk to folks at our city's Makerspace about making something. It'd be neat to have that on a wall but maintain a spoiler-free appearance for when people are over.
In other good news, we're finally going to have our second session of Gloomhaven on Thursday. Several participants in session 1 were at Disney last week and preparing to go to Disney the week before, so it's been far too long. I didn't want to start a second party before the first managed to finish scenario 2, either.
Speaking of Pandemic: Legacy Season 1, we did the month of May on Sunday night.
Having not bothered with any of the military sort of objectives yet, and only dropped Military Bases a few times in the previous months, we were largely unprepared for May.
Given the objectives, we brought the Colonel, the two Operations-ers, and the Dispatcher. Our initial spread of diseases was a little rough due to everything being very spread out. We had a couple infected cities in North America, Central(ish) Europe, Western Asia, 3 Faded (over 2 cities) in East Asia, and some 1-cube locations in South America and Europe. We had a win bonus from April, so Taipei only ended up with 1 Faded, which saved us pretty well.
The plan was to drop Quarantines all over Asia (our CODa is Red) while dropping Military Bases in every region, using the Colonel to clear out the Faded and the Dispatcher to make sure the Col. didn't scar and to move people to where they needed to be. Our initial spread of cards was not great either, since the cities were all spread out, and we didn't have a clear majority of a color to cure quickly.
Our first Epidemic came on the second player's turn, which sent us into panic and immediately into triage mode; just trying to keep things from outbreaking and collecting cards. We decided to try to cure Blue first because we had the most cards for it, but most of our actions were spent cleaning up the board, and we didn't have enough cards to cure anything yet. On a lucky draw, my wife was able to cure Blue after a few turns (we have 2 upgrades on Blue, so we were able to cure it out-of-turn). Then, she focused on collecting black cards.
I was able to collect a handful of yellow cards and then happened to get lucky on a draw to cure it on my following turn.
After that, things kind of went south. We had some unlucky draws and some bad epidemics. We had 3 or 4 cities outbreak and things started to look grim. Blues were out-breaking, reds were out-breaking, and yellows were spread out too far to be able to handle them all at once.
We ended up not being able to cure black until we had a couple full rounds left. Luckily, the black cubes were all concentrated around Baghdad, where we had a research station and military base. Using all of our actions as efficiently as possible, we were able eradicate Black on our second to last turn before we ran out of cards. We peeked at the next cards as well and we would have pulled the last Epidemic and run out of blue cubes to place after a bunch of outbreaks. It was really tense infecting cities in those last few turns.
With that, we had accomplished 3 of the objectives (cure 3, eradicate, and military base in each region) and won! We upgraded Black a third time, and added a starting military base in Tokyo.
Probably one of the closest/hardest end-games I've ever played.
If it's a completely unrelated thing, why even call it "Season 2" and not ": Some Other Subtitle"? It's not like Pandemic doesn't already have a history of that.
After considering this for a bit while I had work to do, I think I've nailed down the analogy that was escaping me earlier. See how this works for you:
Yes, but guaranteeing the fact that the outside box/description doesn't contain spoilers is, in fact, a spoiler.
Only if you consider "Final Fantasy 2 has nothing to do with Final Fantasy" a spoiler.
Because that's what we have here until something says otherwise: two completely unrelated plots that share a system of base mechanics and broad themes.
Tak is an abstract that's based on a fictional game in some books that a guy wrote, I guess? It's functional enough for beginners in that you can put some pieces on the board and try to advance towards winning, and I imagine there's probably enough there for it to be a "real game" when people "get good," but I can't see myself getting anywhere near that level. It definitely seems like a thing that could be used as a plot device in a book, in that there are some "surprise" wins that can be hard to spot so the wizard can carelessly dispatch the yokel, and also room for different play styles where one character could be the defensive master, one could be all-out offense, another could go all-in on making one big stack, etc. I'm not a fan of abstracts, but this one doesn't offend me.
I am a big fan of abstracts and Tak is amazing.
Re: plot device, the thing about Tak in The Wise Man's Fear is that Rothfuss didn't really have any rules for it. Those came long after, via James Ernest. In the book it's mostly just something a couple of characters do while exploring courtly behavior, where the objective isn't necessarily to win, but rather "to play a beautiful game".
Tak was literally just a word-drop in the Kingslayer Chronicle series. It's mention once or twice but is never engaged as an actually plot device in the narrative. It's mostly used as a world building tool, used to help describe the thought process of a people whose culture is extremely alien to the protagonist and us.
If it's a completely unrelated thing, why even call it "Season 2" and not ": Some Other Subtitle"? It's not like Pandemic doesn't already have a history of that.
After considering this for a bit while I had work to do, I think I've nailed down the analogy that was escaping me earlier. See how this works for you:
Yes, but guaranteeing the fact that the outside box/description doesn't contain spoilers is, in fact, a spoiler.
Only if you consider "Final Fantasy 2 has nothing to do with Final Fantasy" a spoiler.
Because that's what we have here until something says otherwise: two completely unrelated plots that share a system of base mechanics and broad themes.
Yeah, sure. And that's fine. If there's no real crossover between the events in the two games, then there will be no spoilers.
This was not at all clear for those of us who could still be spoiled on Season 1 when we looked at the image that was posted.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds.2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
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CaptainPeacockBoard Game HoarderTop o' the LakeRegistered Userregular
General question for those that have played past April in Pandemic Legacy, season 1:
We've just finished April and holy shit do the Faded seem scary. Without spoiling anything to come, how difficult is it going to be from here in a 2p game where we each just have 1 character? Should we consider running 2 characters each? I'm thinking ability-wise, only 2 characters in play might come to bite us when we need more specialized skills in a single game.
Cluck cluck, gibber gibber, my old man's a mushroom, etc.
General question for those that have played past April in Pandemic Legacy, season 1:
We've just finished April and holy shit do the Faded seem scary. Without spoiling anything to come, how difficult is it going to be from here in a 2p game where we each just have 1 character? Should we consider running 2 characters each? I'm thinking ability-wise, only 2 characters in play might come to bite us when we need more specialized skills in a single game.
I'd like to think the game was scaled correctly for all player counts, but we only did one month with anything other than three (we had four for April, coincidentally) and the shift absolutely destroyed us. Without funded events the player deck just gets burned through too quickly, and you should expect an Epidemic on average once every trip around the table, thus providing little chance to actually do anything about them.
Two players, I suspect, has a much longer lag time between Epidemics that should give you more time to maneuver. I can definitely see a lack of skills being a problem though.
Honestly I'd just keep on doing what you're doing and see where the ride takes you.
In Pandemic Legacy, as in the base game, I think fewer players makes the game easier, not harder.
For the case of Faded containment, I'd think one player using the Quarantine Specialist would make short work of them. Accelerated Incubation will still make life difficult, but you can drop a quarantine anywhere on the board every other turn, which seems like it should keep that whole region in check easily. Use the other three actions to take care of other treating and curing responsibilities.
I guess the other factor, though, is relationships. You'd only have at most one active, so it would need to be a good one. Probably co-worker or rival, to facilitate getting cards back and forth.
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CaptainPeacockBoard Game HoarderTop o' the LakeRegistered Userregular
In Pandemic Legacy, as in the base game, I think fewer players makes the game easier, not harder.
For the case of Faded containment, I'd think one player using the Quarantine Specialist would make short work of them. Accelerated Incubation will still make life difficult, but you can drop a quarantine anywhere on the board every other turn, which seems like it should keep that whole region in check easily. Use the other three actions to take care of other treating and curing responsibilities.
I guess the other factor, though, is relationships. You'd only have at most one active, so it would need to be a good one. Probably co-worker or rival, to facilitate getting cards back and forth.
Thankfully, our Medic and Quarantine Specialist are coworkers, so we have nice synergy there. Our Medic has local connections to save an action when running around treating, and our Quarantine Specialist also just became a pilot.
Cluck cluck, gibber gibber, my old man's a mushroom, etc.
General question for those that have played past April in Pandemic Legacy, season 1:
We've just finished April and holy shit do the Faded seem scary. Without spoiling anything to come, how difficult is it going to be from here in a 2p game where we each just have 1 character? Should we consider running 2 characters each? I'm thinking ability-wise, only 2 characters in play might come to bite us when we need more specialized skills in a single game.
I'd like to think the game was scaled correctly for all player counts, but we only did one month with anything other than three (we had four for April, coincidentally) and the shift absolutely destroyed us. Without funded events the player deck just gets burned through too quickly, and you should expect an Epidemic on average once every trip around the table, thus providing little chance to actually do anything about them.
Two players, I suspect, has a much longer lag time between Epidemics that should give you more time to maneuver. I can definitely see a lack of skills being a problem though.
Honestly I'd just keep on doing what you're doing and see where the ride takes you.
This.
In our 4-player game we're very likely to get an epidemic each round of play (1/9 cards is an epidemic, 2 cards per person), so we can sorta plan around that, but it makes it tough when it comes early, especially when we keep winning. But we also go through the deck very quickly.
crimsoncoyote on
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
More Gloomhaven on Sunday.
We attempted Scenario #4 and began accumulating a positive reputation through various City and Road events, so now we're kind of locked into the good-guy track, we've decided. We also added one guy's wife as our fourth party member; my girlfriend and I are continuing our separate play at our own pace.
General discussion in the main spoiler, some nested details also spoiled for those, like me, trying to play blind re: monster and character skills that aren't in their games as yet.
So said new member decided to be the Tinkerer, whose non-Lost Card damage output isn't impressive but who saves me trouble by bearing a lot of the healing / general support weight I was carrying as a Cragheart. Our Mindthief has found a deck set-up he's comfortable with for damage purposes, and the Tinkerer helps there, as well, because he's going a status-stacking route.
Scenario #4 is pretty similar to the introductory mission - it's a kill-everyone that you're going to have to push pretty hard to get through. It also contains Cultists, Earth Demons, and Wind Demons, all of whom are a serious pain compared to the other things you'll have run into by then. We'd already encountered Wind Demons in our optional mission and hate them, but fortunately there were only two. They actually managed to force me to get exhausted sooner than we expected.
Once again we were able to pull it out on our last couple of actions, in this case by throwing open the two deeper-in rooms and letting the guys come out and chase us through some Tinkerer traps on one end and me spam-healing myself on the other. We're now three Level 2 characters and a Level 1, which should help a bit in terms of new options; I am really looking forward to both of my new cards.
This one also unlocks two more missions, at least one of which has links and unlocks three more. As we've abandoned playing with our retirement goals absolutely secret, and there happens to be pretty decent synergy between them and these missions, just following this particular plot thread makes the most sense for us.
Cragheart Level 2 attacks:
Blow up an obstacle and Melee 4 everything adjacent to it sounds phenomenal. The AoE that heals party members who're in it is also great, though that might be a Level 3 card I just got especially excited about.
Wind Demons:
These are the worst. Low health but inherent shielding and a ton of forced movement. The exhaust grind came by them pulling me out of range of the Tinkerer's recover-discarded-cards effect; I'd have made it to the end of the scenario if they hadn't tried to drag me in for a beating.
Earth Demons:
Not as bad, as they tend to go late and aren't that fast. They hit like trucks, though, if you do get caught near one, and they have a ton of HP.
Cultists:
They can summon Ancient Bones, which is awful when there are four of them on the map. Thankfully we killed one and stunned another before their turn, but I suspect this was the major reason we had such a hard time finishing the mission. We were actually pretty certain we were gonna exhaust at the point where we were nearly done clearing the second room of this one.
Our Secret Goals:
Don't have the names in front of me, but we have kill lots of demons, kill varied enemies, kill bosses, and retire after two other people do, so basically we're going to chase missions with Demons or Bosses in them and hope for the best.
throw a net on the guy with your Tinker. Bandit leader/aspiring necromancer was unsurprisingly punked easily when he couldn't unleash his adds due to immobility.
throw a net on the guy with your Tinker. Bandit leader/aspiring necromancer was unsurprisingly punked easily when he couldn't unleash his adds due to immobility.
Magic Pink and I agreed that
waiting for him to open three doors for a chance at the treasure chest was madness.
That's because I had the rules wrong.
He doesn't cause Stun. Immobilize and Curse on a hit, he's IMMUNE to them. So he should have had three doors open.
Posts
Back of the box is different than the cover of the game.
The point being that this is information that anyone who picks up the box can see without opening it. Putting any sort of spoiler there would be insane.
It's Season 2 of a Legacy game, the first of its kind. This is a brave new world of what could be considered a spoiler.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
There's a fine line between caution and paranoia and this is on the wrong side of it, IMO. We've always been good about marking actual spoilers here, especially where Legacy games are concerned.
True. Like I didn't go running my mouth when the Moon colony decided to nuke Australia in September.
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
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Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
Twitch Page
Then I took the Chronobot for a spin. It's a pretty good AI as far as solo variants go, but man does it cheat like crazy. At one point it had 9 buildings, 2 superprojects, and three Anomalies; that's 16 building locations when a human only has 12 total. The fact that it doesn't have to pay for its stuff and always builds the most valuable ones meant that it had 22 points in buildings to my 7. Even losing 6 points for its Anomalies (it managed to cure one before I ended), that was basically the entirety of the 48-58 beating it gave me.
Then again its actions are basically random so maybe next time it just sits there spinning its metaphorical wheels and I'll crush it.
I ordered it, should be here Wednesday. Will update after we play it.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruzAxHCmNFA
On the other hand, there's literally no polite reason not to mark a spoiler when requested.
Totally, and Pook rightly did so. Nobody was questioning that.
The discussion that spawned from that request was if the box itself is considered a spoiler, then what isn't?
This is akin to to the VHS sleeve of Robocop II potentially spoiling you on something from the first film.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
So maybe I'll just wait on this one.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Rules that don't sound like rules.
Which tend to end up unclear and needlessly confusing.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Except for the part that says "Season 2 is a fully-contained game that does not require Pandemic, Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, or any other <boardgames?> to play."
As far as we know these two board games have nothing to do with each other besides core Pandemic mechanics and shared designer(s).
And again, we have multiple people here who have played Season 1 and ALL of us have been very diligent in making sure plot elements are properly hidden (give or take the occasional forum malfunction). There's no reason to fear that this would stop now, especially since the original is only about a year old at this point. A decade down the road someone might not be as careful but even then I'd like to think that those of us who know how valuable the element of surprise is in this experience would respect that. So far this has applied to every Legacy-style game, be it Risk, Seafall, or Gloomhaven.
The post was edited out of courtesy, but the request(s) showed a lack of trust.
We're in uncharted territory with seasonal iterations of legacy games. As I said, I haven't played the first game. But reading through the second, it seemed to imply some very signifcant events from the first. If it's a completely unrelated thing, why even call it "Season 2" and not ": Some Other Subtitle"? It's not like Pandemic doesn't already have a history of that.
Essentially, I don't buy that the concern was unwarranted. I appreciate that a lot of care is taken around here to prevent spoilers, but it's not like we haven't had to have conversations about it in the past, either.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Tak is an abstract that's based on a fictional game in some books that a guy wrote, I guess? It's functional enough for beginners in that you can put some pieces on the board and try to advance towards winning, and I imagine there's probably enough there for it to be a "real game" when people "get good," but I can't see myself getting anywhere near that level. It definitely seems like a thing that could be used as a plot device in a book, in that there are some "surprise" wins that can be hard to spot so the wizard can carelessly dispatch the yokel, and also room for different play styles where one character could be the defensive master, one could be all-out offense, another could go all-in on making one big stack, etc. I'm not a fan of abstracts, but this one doesn't offend me.
Also played the first scenario of the Arkham Horror card game. It was fun enough, but I probably don't need to own it - replay value seems low. Usually I like constructing my own decks, but I wasn't that excited by the cards present in the starter deck I had. Maybe because I got the most boring character (Roland)?
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Pandemic: Legacy NOVEMBER spoilers;
With relatively little to do, and with it being obvious that December held at least one last, final wrench to throw in our works, we focused on blowing up military bases and establishing vaccine factories to start rolling back CoDA. We won without a great deal of fuss, leaving three bases on the board including two in one heavily-CoDA-infested region and one nowhere near CoDA. Or maybe it was two and two.
Pandemic: Legacy DECEMBER spoilers;
We still needed to Vaccinate around 10 cities, and all of those targets had either one or two military bases remaining in their respective regions, so we decided to plan to fail the first month gracefully. We built a party designed to move around the map easily and we focused entirely on blowing up bases and vaccinating cities. The Medic knocked down the initial areas of non-CoDA infection while the Operations Expert and Vaccine Specialist (or whatever that character's name is) worked in the CoDA zone. We blew up two of the three bases and vaccinated all but a couple of cities (deep in the CoDA zone, fully roadblocked and Fallen, with a military base), and ran out of player deck a few turns later.
For the second half of the month, we went with Dispatcher/Researcher/Quarantine Specialist/Colonel, the idea being that the first three would essentially camp out in Atlanta and draw/trade cards while the Colonel went deep into the Zone to vaccinate the last cities. This worked exceptionally well, as the trio drew into some Binoculars and the Colonel, even with the military base vaccination penalty, finished vaccinating the last cities with the help of a Grenade Belt. We cleared the search with about half the player deck remaining and won December.
Pandemic: Legacy ENDGAME spoilers and thoughts;
Our diseases were as follows;
Yellow - The Trops - Stage 4 researched
Red - Pox of Unusual Size - Stage 0 researched
Blue - The Protomolecule - Stage 3 researched
Black - CoDA
We never did use that nuke card, though. Shame.
Kevin's talking about making a shadow box to display our board in, and some of the torn up cards, mission briefings, character play records, etc. I told him about glass that I'd seen that turns opaque when you add current to it, or something like that; he's going to look into it and maybe talk to folks at our city's Makerspace about making something. It'd be neat to have that on a wall but maintain a spoiler-free appearance for when people are over.
In other good news, we're finally going to have our second session of Gloomhaven on Thursday. Several participants in session 1 were at Disney last week and preparing to go to Disney the week before, so it's been far too long. I didn't want to start a second party before the first managed to finish scenario 2, either.
Inquisitor77: Rius, you are Sisyphus and melee Wizard is your boulder
Tube: This must be what it felt like to be an Iraqi when Saddam was killed
Bookish Stickers - Mrs. Rius' Etsy shop with bumper stickers and vinyl decals.
Given the objectives, we brought the Colonel, the two Operations-ers, and the Dispatcher. Our initial spread of diseases was a little rough due to everything being very spread out. We had a couple infected cities in North America, Central(ish) Europe, Western Asia, 3 Faded (over 2 cities) in East Asia, and some 1-cube locations in South America and Europe. We had a win bonus from April, so Taipei only ended up with 1 Faded, which saved us pretty well.
The plan was to drop Quarantines all over Asia (our CODa is Red) while dropping Military Bases in every region, using the Colonel to clear out the Faded and the Dispatcher to make sure the Col. didn't scar and to move people to where they needed to be. Our initial spread of cards was not great either, since the cities were all spread out, and we didn't have a clear majority of a color to cure quickly.
Our first Epidemic came on the second player's turn, which sent us into panic and immediately into triage mode; just trying to keep things from outbreaking and collecting cards. We decided to try to cure Blue first because we had the most cards for it, but most of our actions were spent cleaning up the board, and we didn't have enough cards to cure anything yet. On a lucky draw, my wife was able to cure Blue after a few turns (we have 2 upgrades on Blue, so we were able to cure it out-of-turn). Then, she focused on collecting black cards.
I was able to collect a handful of yellow cards and then happened to get lucky on a draw to cure it on my following turn.
After that, things kind of went south. We had some unlucky draws and some bad epidemics. We had 3 or 4 cities outbreak and things started to look grim. Blues were out-breaking, reds were out-breaking, and yellows were spread out too far to be able to handle them all at once.
We ended up not being able to cure black until we had a couple full rounds left. Luckily, the black cubes were all concentrated around Baghdad, where we had a research station and military base. Using all of our actions as efficiently as possible, we were able eradicate Black on our second to last turn before we ran out of cards. We peeked at the next cards as well and we would have pulled the last Epidemic and run out of blue cubes to place after a bunch of outbreaks. It was really tense infecting cities in those last few turns.
With that, we had accomplished 3 of the objectives (cure 3, eradicate, and military base in each region) and won! We upgraded Black a third time, and added a starting military base in Tokyo.
Probably one of the closest/hardest end-games I've ever played.
Can't wait for June!
After considering this for a bit while I had work to do, I think I've nailed down the analogy that was escaping me earlier. See how this works for you:
Only if you consider "Final Fantasy 2 has nothing to do with Final Fantasy" a spoiler.
Because that's what we have here until something says otherwise: two completely unrelated plots that share a system of base mechanics and broad themes.
I am a big fan of abstracts and Tak is amazing.
Re: plot device, the thing about Tak in The Wise Man's Fear is that Rothfuss didn't really have any rules for it. Those came long after, via James Ernest. In the book it's mostly just something a couple of characters do while exploring courtly behavior, where the objective isn't necessarily to win, but rather "to play a beautiful game".
Yeah, sure. And that's fine. If there's no real crossover between the events in the two games, then there will be no spoilers.
This was not at all clear for those of us who could still be spoiled on Season 1 when we looked at the image that was posted.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Two players, I suspect, has a much longer lag time between Epidemics that should give you more time to maneuver. I can definitely see a lack of skills being a problem though.
Honestly I'd just keep on doing what you're doing and see where the ride takes you.
I guess the other factor, though, is relationships. You'd only have at most one active, so it would need to be a good one. Probably co-worker or rival, to facilitate getting cards back and forth.
This.
In our 4-player game we're very likely to get an epidemic each round of play (1/9 cards is an epidemic, 2 cards per person), so we can sorta plan around that, but it makes it tough when it comes early, especially when we keep winning. But we also go through the deck very quickly.
We attempted Scenario #4 and began accumulating a positive reputation through various City and Road events, so now we're kind of locked into the good-guy track, we've decided. We also added one guy's wife as our fourth party member; my girlfriend and I are continuing our separate play at our own pace.
General discussion in the main spoiler, some nested details also spoiled for those, like me, trying to play blind re: monster and character skills that aren't in their games as yet.
Scenario #4 is pretty similar to the introductory mission - it's a kill-everyone that you're going to have to push pretty hard to get through. It also contains Cultists, Earth Demons, and Wind Demons, all of whom are a serious pain compared to the other things you'll have run into by then. We'd already encountered Wind Demons in our optional mission and hate them, but fortunately there were only two. They actually managed to force me to get exhausted sooner than we expected.
Once again we were able to pull it out on our last couple of actions, in this case by throwing open the two deeper-in rooms and letting the guys come out and chase us through some Tinkerer traps on one end and me spam-healing myself on the other. We're now three Level 2 characters and a Level 1, which should help a bit in terms of new options; I am really looking forward to both of my new cards.
This one also unlocks two more missions, at least one of which has links and unlocks three more. As we've abandoned playing with our retirement goals absolutely secret, and there happens to be pretty decent synergy between them and these missions, just following this particular plot thread makes the most sense for us.
Cragheart Level 2 attacks:
Very possible.
@Magic Pink and I agreed that
That's because I had the rules wrong.