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Paul Hackman
United States
Champaign
Illinois
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I played my first couple games last night. I think the mechanic I liked best was the terrain cards. By flipping over terrain cards it took an abstract card game and made it feel much more like an adventure spanning a large area. It also added to the replayability of the game since fighting Grimlock in the mountains will be somewhat different from fighting him in the Meadows.
I also love the idea of having the terrains intensify with each passing year.
The part of the game that failed to evoke that same feeling of adventuring was the locations. I'm flipping over cards, wondering what will happen next and suddenly I'm at a generic Blacksmith shop that offers me the exact same things as the other Blacksmith shop I just left. Now I don't have a ton of experience with fantasy boardgames, but I have played plenty of fantasy video games. In fantasy boardgames your party of heroes goes from town to town, stocks up on whatever unique items are sold there, and goes off on quests that the townspeople give you. The towns are all pretty similar, but they are different enough to be memorable.
So how could DS capture this same feeling without a map?
I propose that instead of location cards DS should have village cards. Each village would have its own name. On each village card would be a list of what stores are available in town. So "Idlewild Village" might have a blacksmith and a trader but "Riverstone" might have a spell shop and a tavern. Once a hero or party decided to stop at a village they would be able to use the services of any stores there. For stores that sell things (blacksmith) the player would only be able to choose from the first three cards of that deck. So not every village will have an axe or chain mail. Some might only have swords so now the player has to decide whether or not to pay for a sword for the dwarf, or continue to hold out for an axe at the next village.
So what's the catch? Wouldn't this make the game easier by allowing a player to visit multiple locations in a single village? Well, in these times of roving monsters villagers are not eager to let strangers into town. Whenever you stop at a village you promise to help the village by fighting a certain number of monsters before going to another village. So if my party stops at Riverstone to rest and buy some spells, I then have to kill 3 monsters before I can stop at another village. So I better stock up on potions and spells and heroes before setting out to fulfill my quest.
The main advantage I see here is thematic. It would feel more like you are traveling and questing in a specific land rather than just going from one random event to the next. But I also think this change adds new interesting decisions. Instead of always just thinking about the next monster, players now have to think 2 or 3 monsters ahead. Players also will have tough decisions to make about which villages to visit. At one village I can get more heroes but I can't equip them with weapons. At another village I can buy cool stuff but I can't rest my weary party. If I just keep traveling and traveling until I find the village with everything I need then I've just wasted a lot of time and skipped a bunch of monsters that will come back next year more powerful (if I am interpreting some of the suggested changes correctly).
I would also suggest putting in event cards called "Ambush" in which the player is forced to fight the next monster that turns up, thus making it dangerous to continue to skip over villages.
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