I don’t hate playing AZ or Fanatic, but I used to be really bad at it, because I was always mis-estimating how much risk I could handle before getting myself killed. More practice has made me better with Zero, but not as much with Fanny, who I still usually have Incapacitated well before a game ends. Nightmist, however, rarely actually damages herself all that much, since she can hide behind the Amulet and send all her self-damage at someone else’s face (which is why I always equate her to John Constantine). She’s the closest to invincible of any hero in the game IMO.
Finally opened mine and setup the pieces last night! Taking a cursory look through the decks has me pumped to try them all out!
One question from someone who has yet to play the physical game: do you just stack the 1/5/10 tokens on a non-character target to represent the damage it’s taken, then destroy it once they meet the max HP? I didn’t see that addressed in the rulebook. I can only foresee a little difficulty with this method when looking for lowest HP target. Seems like a pile of tokens for their current HP would have to be changed much more often.
Speaking from my immense experience with playing SOTM at the table, we started out by placing the tokens on a target to represent damage, but it didn’t take long for us to figure out that this made it very hard to determine highest/lowest HP status quickly and repeatedly. So we decided that putting in the extra effort up front, of counting HP onto each target and then taking it away when damage is dealt, pays off big time and is totally worth it.
3 Likes
Yeah, I don’t know why they insist on telling people to put the tokens on to represent damage instead of taking them off to represent HP. It’s so much easier to do everything that way.
2 Likes
Yeah. I usually use them to count hp, then take them off as damage is taken. But if you do it this way and say bring Captain Cosmic to fight against Voss, you may run out of the 1 hp tokens. This did make me wonder if they were intended to be used as damage.
1 Like
It does sound much better for quick HP at a glance without doing math. Only drawback would be making “change” in the token bank every time damage is dealt.
Oh man! I bet CC and Unity vs. Voss or Dawn in Insula Primalis makes you break out the coin jar for extra tokens!
2 Likes
Whatever my gripes about AZ in DE are his flavor text is still hilarious. I particularly like the new Isothermic Transducer quote.
4 Likes
CC’s constructs, at least in early game before you have certain cards out, seem to be quite fragile, especially if there’s any global damage boosts (like in Atlantis). they tend to either be full health or dead. But, yeah, in general having both minion maker heroes in there could be a bookkeeping nightmare…
1 Like
You’re definitely meant to take HP tokens off as things get damaged. That’s why HP can’t drop below 0 in DE. It remains to be seen if anything will be able to gain HP beyond its max in DE, like Akash’Flora did, but it’s possible to represent using tokens this way.
1 Like
Well, six games in, we’ve tried all the heroes, most of the villains and environments, and an event, and I think I have a pretty good handle on my impressions of the Definitive Edition.
What I like
-
Overall smoothness with which the game runs. The clear breakdown into phases and elimination of some annoying concepts we used to have to keep track of (like making sure there are no effects from cards no longer in play).
-
Overall production values are terrific.
-
The art. Wow, fantastic, they/Adam could definitely publish an art book based just on his work from this game and it would serve as an excellent showcase, and probably sell pretty well. (Some of it’s also really funny. I love Baron Blade surreptitiously bringing up a welding torch on Platform Bot.)
-
The recalibration of the villain decks is fantastic. Voss actually feels like the epic event he was supposed to, but it’s well-gauged to the heroes so that the game still feel achievable. (And indeed, we did win!) Omnitron got an excellent thematic upgrade; battling it really feels like going up against a machine - and you can use its programming against it, by looking at which set of effects the next round will trigger! Baron Blade has some extra minions and devices in his bag of tricks. And overall, scaling back some of the “that card” effects that would eliminate all the players’ tableaus was a good choice, so you can hang on just enough to keep feeling useful.
-
Same with the environments. The “peril” really does feel more like peril to everybody than the environment trying to hit the heroes just as much as the villain does.
-
Some of the heroes got major revamps that make playing them feel like you get to really lean in to their theme. I love that there’s a way to build Haka out now where he just gets in there (Defender + Sudden Utu + throw in Dance in the Fray and a Haka for good measure). Bunker feels much more focused on setting up and firing his guns. Tempest looks really interesting, but I haven’t had a game last long enough to get a payoff from him yet!
-
Making concepts like Reactions operate consistently between heroes (and cards).
-
The lore ties into each character’s deck so much more strongly now. We actually see Tachyon’s wife, and get a glimpse of how that story went. Captain Cosmic and Galactra actually seem like a recurring thing in his deck.
-
The events! I don’t particularly feel like having the Event cards or the Critical Event alternate character cards is a better or worse way to achieve the effect than the old method of character card variants, but I like that now we have all the lore tie-ins laid out explicitly. And everybody has been clamoring for a set of definitive campaign games!
What I don’t like
Okay, first of all, I feel extremely weird that there is a thing about the Definitive Edition that I don’t like. And I also feel like the specific thing I don’t like is quite unexpected, given where GTG is both as a company in general and as game designers. It kind of bugs me that, with all the improvements made, there is something that I like better in the old edition. It boils down to this: overall legibility on the table.
-
Fonts are small, and headline fonts have bubble letters that reduce contrast. I have a hard time reading any cards that aren’t in my play area; often I end up standing up to lean over the table to read villain and environment stuff. I’m 37, I’m not old!
-
There are a lot of walls of text, and I think a few more line-breaks or a set of icons or something could have gone a long way, in the way Spirit Island cards can get across quite a lot with an economy of ink. One simple example: Argent Adept’s reworked Lyra, which I had to read several times to get. Line breaks before and after that “or” would have made it much clearer what was going on.
-
Especially on the characters with mostly art from older eras, and especially in medium to low light conditions, the ‘busier’ art and largely desaturated color palettes make it hard to spot which cards are out on the table at a glance. I used to be able to glance across at a hero’s tableau or the villain’s minions and identify cards by a distinctive predominant color and shape. This comes up when, for example, you can throw a power use to another player and are trying to figure out your best option, or when you’re prioritizing targets for the next round, or when you are collecting/summoning. I just have to get closer to the cards to tell what they are (or ask someone who is closer to them to tell me).
-
Until I get the colors memorized, the only difference between the “+/-1 damage dealt” and “+/-1 damage taken” tokens is the word “by” vs. “to,” again in a low-contrast font/color combo against a busy background. I would have liked those tokens better if they were different shapes or had different background motifs. I may just play with the EE tokens, because those had a really big “DEALT” or “TAKEN” that I could read across the table.
One thing I do want to be absolutely clear about is that I definitely like the things I like much more than I dislike the things I dislike. (And I can live with the dislikes - I just feel like sharing and discussing.) Especially seeing the lore thread its way through all the characters’ decks much more strongly. It’s great to see, after hundreds of Letters Page episodes to build out all that background, it finally appears on my game table. I will play a lot of this game and I will buy the next round, for sure!
4 Likes
That actually reminds me of the biggest problem I have: all the new terms. Like, when I first started playing the Enhanced Edition I had to read the manual all of once and then I got it easily. But while playing Definitive Edition I’m constantly going back to the manual to check what things mean. Summon and Discover are particularly hard to keep straight and when my mom played Arcane Cadence it took a full minute to figure out what to do with what. I’m sure I’ll get used to it as I play more games but still.
Equipment cards being called Items now was a little weird at first too but I got used to that quickly.
2 Likes
I’d argue the EE version overall was harder to read.
3 Likes
I dunno about font size, but the 1’s do all too often look like 2’s, which is a big problem in EE. :B
2 Likes
I haven’t found the new keywords overly difficult. When to shuffle is pretty obvious, you shuffle when you just looked at some or all of the deck. There’s a little learning curve to it, but it’s not awful.
In Wayward Sun (cue rock wails), there’s a cosmic thing hanging out over Insula Primalis, empowering the Citizens of the Sun until it learns enough about how powered humans fight. What?! I don’t remember that thing. What do you all think it was?
Gathering information to find out about human conflicts could be a number of beings, including Voss or the Celestial Tribunal. But powering them first? That does not sound like a Voss thing to do. Maybe Wager Master, but again, I think he would just jump in there and start with the havoc.
1 Like
That’s fascinating, I can’t think of any cosmic entities that go around powering people up like that. Not quite Voss’ style, nor Jansa, definitely not Oblivaeon…so who could it be?
1 Like
Sounds like the kind of thing the Bloodsworn Force might do, or perhaps The Fervor.
1 Like
Yeah, I’ve had to keep looking at the back cover of the rule book, especially the collect vs discover bit.
Could just be random aliens. Comics used to do that all the time and still do occasionally.
2 Likes
I’ve only played a few fights so far, but one of them was Akash, and I feel like I have to disagree. I was using Haka, Ra and AZ and I could not clear her field of Primeval Limbs. I couldn’t get rid of Harsh Renewal which I think was part of it, but I generally had three limbs out by the end of every single turn. And that is with three heroes who can generally output a lot of damage.
Then again, I also had an oopsie with AZ, who just struggled in that game. Part of it was those freaking Brambles which nerfed everything he could do, but I also completely missed that the Modules now give you an extra card play, which likely made a big difference. Entropic Fungi also kept eating all his equipment.
In terms of biggest changes. Bunker is a big one, but even after two games with him (both against Blade, one of which I’m sad to say I lost) I don’t feel like I’ve seen him firing on all cylinders. Maybe it was bad card draw? I’m not sure. It wasn’t till the end of the second game that I felt like things were working properly.
But, man, absolute props to the changes on Cosmic. So many of his cards I used to consider bad plays are now excellent, he has a lot of ways to mitigate damage which is excellent and overall I LIKE playing him, which is a new feeling.
My last hero played was Unity (Yeah, another reason I might have struggled with my first game against blade was bringing Unity, Bunker and Cosmic, and not bringing people with less set-up) and again, there were some major changes. Modular Workbench in particular blew my mind, and I generally was playing enough cards that I never even felt the need for Swift Bot when I drew her. I will say though, I’m a bit sad about the nerf to Stealth Bot. Instead of protecting everyone, it is only Unity and her team, which is fine, but still a nerf.
Planning on playing more on Tuesday and Thursday, due to complicated reasons I have to stay after work for an extra few hours, with no work to actually do, so I’m planning on bringing this to pass the time. Looks like next on my list is…
Dawn
0_0