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This was our second game of the night and fourth play total- this scenario was Daylight Assault, where the goal was to collect 12 treasures before getting killed. There were just two of us left, so we went with the Cleric and Rogue (I was the Rogue).
The first part of the game was more or less what we'd seen in previous scenarios- explore a new room, kill the monster, curse at picking up yet another "discard this now" treasure card. One-HP monsters are easy, two-HP monsters need us both adjacent to Backstab or to be undead and Sacred Flame, repeat. Still, sfter one string of terrible rolls (nothing above a 4 for a few turns in a row), we started to regret not having the Ranger around for his auto-hit.
Tensions rose when I explored a new room and revealed the Gray Hag herself- we'd picked up the promo card at PAX last weekend. While we were spread out enough for the initial lightning bolt not to get us both, we weren't going to be able to do a good amount of damage to her without bunching up and letting her get several more attacks off- and the very next turn, the Cleric drew the encounter card that switched him and the Gargoyle we'd evaded before. Now we were totally separated, with a Gargoyle and a Fire Trap between us, and the Gray Hag bearing down on me.
So I did what any good explorer would- run away! With only two of us, the Hag's power to act every other turn made her no faster than any other monster, so I was able to get clear in time and have her only catching up one tile at a time. When the Hag was about to pass the Gargoyle, the Cleric knocked out one monster and rolled a 20- he picked up Flame Strike as he leveled up. I was lucky enough to draw the Daze treasure card (which skips an activation of a monster) and we hatched a plan from there.
Dazing the Gargoyle let the Cleric rush in and throw down a Flame Strike without being ripped to shreds, with me ready to pop in a Dagger Barrage on the next turn. As luck would have it, the Encounter card the Cleric drew on that turn spawned another monster on the same tile, just creating more targets for the splash attack. The pocket of monsters fell quickly after that.
Unfortunately, we weren't able to ride that little moment of awesome to victory. While we started with three surges due to losing the last few games badly, we still only had ten of the twelve treasures as the monsters became too much to bear. (And we'd probably misplayed the end of the Sun track as "You draw an Encounter card even if you explore a white-triangle room" rather than "You draw one more Encounter card than you would otherwise")
Some thoughts and observations:
*I like the Gray Hag as a mini-boss shuffled in to the Monster deck. While she's pretty dangerous, the 4 XP letting the team almost ignore an encounter card from the one kill thereafter mitigates it, and it makes for an interesting turn of events in play.
*This scenario is really long- we used the majority of cards in each deck, and the dungeon was starting to sprawl over our character sheets and power cards. There were just three cards left in the Monster deck when we were done!
*The sheer number of monsters we had to kill meant that we had a ton of experience to burn on canceling Encounter cards- there were times when we had a pool of 15 or more, and we usually had 5-10. Still, it seemed like we never had enough when we really needed it.
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David
New Zealand
Taupo
May the Great Spirit Bless all who read this.
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..and your thoughts on the game itself?
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Bryce K. Nielsen
United States
Elk Ridge
Utah
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I really don't like this scenario. It seems extremely hard to find all those treasures in time, and then you get hit with double encounters almost every turn and the whittling that occurs with encounters just kills you quickly.
We did beat this adventure, but basically found a kludge to that played to our advantage. We uncovered the Alarm trap before the sun set, and so rather than continuing to explore and make the sun set and causing 2 encounters a turn, we just moved back a couple tiles and let the monsters come to us. It took forever to finally get the 12th treasure. I can't imagine winning this adventure through traditional exploring.
-shnar
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