Dice Masters: Iron Man Review

Billionaire, Genius, Playboy, Philanthropist

Having looked a couple of weeks ago at Captain America, this week we consider his long-time team-mate, occasional rival, and all-round modest guy, Tony Stark, aka Iron Man.

Alongside Cap, Iron Man is the only character to have appeared in all 3 Marvel sets, as a starter character in Avengers vs X-Men, and a regular character in Uncanny X-Men, albeit it with a super-rare version. Once again, he boasts eleven cards*, with the dice from the first two sets distinguished only by the dice colour, and the latest, Age of UItron version, coming with a new energy type and stat-line.

*In fact, there is actually a 12^th Iron Man card available, an organised play promo, which sees the Phoenix-buster incarnation of the Iron Man suit, making Iron Man the outright leader in terms of the number of cards available, but I feel like he needs taking down a peg or two, so I decided to make him wait.

Dice

Of the two versions of Iron Man dice we have, the one from the first set is the more defensive, with 5, 6, 7 for defence and only 3, 4, 5 for attack.

By contrast, the Age of Ultron dice only has a 3, 4, 4 defence, but 4, 4, 6 in attack. Both are a 1-1-2 field cost, which is lower than Captain America (1-2-2), meaning you’re less likely to need to hold back energy to field Iron Man, but possibly more likely to get caught out if you do roll the level 3.

Cards

Avengers vs X-Men

The defensive dice in the first set are mirrored by the abilities:

Inventor – Cost 4 (Shield): Each time damage is dealt to Iron Man, reduce it by 1 (2 if he is at level 3 with his burst). This is a moderately useful ability – it makes Iron Man a bit harder to take out, but nothing to write home about. It certainly has more scope when combined with the global ability on this card “Pay [SHIELD] to redirect one damage from you to one of your characters” – if you have enough energy, all those single points of direct damage can be directed onto Iron Man and just disappear, but the problem with this strategy is that if you opponent is doing LOTS of direct damage, you’ll be spending so much energy on the global that you can’t do anything on the attack, and if they aren’t then the damage was probably little enough that you could have lived with it.

Philanthropist – Cost 5 (Shield): Each time Iron Man takes damage, you gain a life- 2 life if he’s on his burst level. It’s a shame that the burst is only on the top-level, so you’re going to have to work hard to get him there if he doesn’t start there, and pay the 2 field-cost if he does, but otherwise, this feels like a pretty good deal. He’s comfortably large enough to block things without getting taken out too often, and even a 1-point life-gain is good. Unless you have lots of dice active, you probably won’t want to attack with Iron Man, but if you do, your opponent has to decide between letting him through unblocked, or giving you another life as they block him. This certainly isn’t a card I’ve seen a lot of, but I definitely feel it’s got potential.

Playboy – Cost 4 (Shield): When this version of Iron Man takes damage in the attack step, he does 3 damage to an opposing character that it either attacking or blocking. There’s probably some utility here for removing opponent’s characters- or at least forcing them to be a bit more careful with which characters they use in attack/defence if they don’t want them knocked out, but overall this feels very underwhelming.

Billionaire – Cost 6 (Shield): Fittingly, given the title, this is the most expensive version of Iron Man in this first set, and he is immune to damage from all characters except those of the shield Energy Type. You don’t need a Tony Stark intellect to figure out that the utility of this will fluctuate wildly, depending on what characters your opponent is trying to damage Iron Man with – it might completely neutralise their strategy, it might do nothing. Given how many of the direct damage effects come from bolt characters, this one looks strong: it’s immune to Human Torch, Punisher, or Firestorm. It also nullifies damage from something like Hulk: Green Goliath, or Toad: Tongue Lashing when he forces you to attack. However, this ability only prevents damage, so it would be useless against something like Wind-Rider which re-rolls dice, or something like Hulk: Jade Giant which just KOs you.

Uncanny X-Men

Moving onto Uncanny X-Men, with the shift from Red on Yellow to Orange on Black, Iron Man got himself bumped up to Super-Rare, ensuring that people took a bit of notice of him.

This time, Mr Stark was showing a level of morality that his personality sometimes allows you to forget, with his common and Super-Rare versions interacting heavily with Villains, whilst the Rare version tapped in to the “Heroic” mechanic. As with Cap, I’m going to leave Heroic to another article another day, and just focus on the other versions.

Upright – Cost 5 (Shield): This Iron Man takes 1 (*2) less damage from villains, which is a reasonable ability that only gets better with his global that allows you to pay a shield and make a character a villain for the turn. In fact, probably the biggest argument against this card is the Super-Rare…

Industrialist – Cost 6 (Shield): For only 1 extra purchase cost, this Iron Man cancels ALL damage dealt to him by Villains. On level 3 his burst also double his attack when engaged with a villain, to a whopping 10, enough to knock out pretty much any character in the game – find a way of giving him Overcrush, and use the global to make something small a Villain, and you’ve got the potential for some serious damage. Obviously 6 cost is nothing to be ignored, nor is two field-cost, but for 6 vs 5, this definitely feels like the best option.

Promo

Phoenix Buster – Cost 7 (Shield): The Phoenix-Buster version of Iron Man came out in late 2014 as a promo-card for organised play. It uses the dice from the Avengers vs X-Men set, and is legal for most formats of the game.

Really, this shouldn’t be any more effective at stopping your opponent than Stark was at stopping the Phoenix Force…

At 7 cost it is the most expensive version of Iron Man out there, and as such the card ability seems a little bit underwhelming, allowing you to move a sidekick from your used pile to your prep area, whenever he takes damage – to put it in perspective, this is half the effect of the global ability on the Uncanny X-Men version of Professor Xavier, and rather than costing a mask energy (something easily doable on turn 1 or 2) it requires you to damage a 7-cost character.

I like the organised play promos in this game, (just being a bit OCD about complete sets), and I think it’s good for the game that they aren’t super-powerful, but I can’t really see a good reason to play this.

Age of Ultron

As with Cap, set 3 sees a new energy type, but the same character name, so you can’t mix-and-match, the dice are slightly more offensive (and bolts rather than shields).

Big Man – Cost 3 (Bolt): The only blank Iron Man so far, this essentially becomes a consideration of stats and affiliations rather than abilities.

As I started to write this section, I decided that it really belonged in a wider discussion about the utility of blank cards, which will be appearing shortly. For now, suffice it to say that I think this card is interesting, but ultimately not worthwhile.

Genius – Cost 4 (Bolt) for one more than the blank version of Iron Man, you can consider any of the other versions in this set. Genius is a simple Teamwatch version which allows you to boost his attack by 1 each time you field another Avenger. This certainly isn’t a bad ability, but even with an all-avengers build, you’re never likely to be fielding more than a couple of Avengers on a turn, so I wonder how useful it really is.

Invincible – Cost 4 (Bolt) Going it alone, this version of Iron Man boosts his own attack, by paying a bolt – this is much more predictable than the genius iteration, although it caps out at 2 (3 if you have Iron Man on his lowest level). Again, not a bad ability, and you could certainly profit from it, but I can’t see anyone building a team around it.

Tinhead – Cost 4 (Bolt) The final version of Iron Man in this set, this feels like the most useful of the aggressive Iron Men, getting +1A for each attacking opposing villain. Add in the fact that he comes with a global to turn any character into a villain by paying a bolt, and there is serious potential here, either to take out your opponent’s key defender, or to give him Overcrush and start knocking down your opponent’s life totals. Without the global, I think this would be too risky (no effect against a villain-less team) but as it is, this is the stand-out amongst the v2.0 Iron Man cards for me.

Allies

Aside from Iron Man himself, it’s also worth noting that there are other characters out there who interact directly with Iron Man – it is thematically fitting that these are War Machine and Pepper Potts.

War Machine is a decent combatant in his own right, able to attack and block with good numbers, and he only becomes more effective when Iron Man is active – my personal favourite is the uncommon version who becomes unblockable – whilst he’s not going to cause as much damage as a high-level Wolverine, (his attack is a 3, 4, 5 on the 3 levels) the set-up is probably less tricky to pull off, and having Iron Man active as either a blocker or an attacker in the meantime is hardly a downside.

Pepper Potts is a slightly harder character to appraise – on one level, a 2-cost bolt character seems like a win, however feeble the stats. However, the fact that she can never attack reduces her utility as a cheap first-strike type. The fact that she is zero field-cost on all 3 levels and has various utility powers (+2D to blockers, spin opposing dice down a level [and damage them when Iron Man is active], or fetch and field an Iron Man for free on knock-out) makes it hard to argue that she’s bad value for energy, but whether she’s really as much use as you’d like is open to question. I’ve seen the global defence boost used to good effect, either for creating a wall, or helping to neutralise a build centred around Overcrush, and this is probably the one which has the least need to be tied to an Iron Man dice.

Having mentioned it for Captain America, it would also seem churlish not to point out that Iron Man is also an Avenger in all his iterations, meaning that he can be fielded for free if you have the common Nick Fury from AvX active.

Conclusion

I think each of the sets offers an Iron Man worth bringing to the table: for me, Philanthropist, Industrialist (if you can get it) and Tinhead are the ones to go for. The War Machine synergy is certainly nice, but I’m less convinced about Pepper, as the version which seems most useless (the defence boost) effects other characters equally whether Iron Man is around or not. I think Iron Man works best in either an Avengers-themed build, or in some kind of villain-based setting, where you can use the global abilities to set up additional tricks.

Review: Wrath of the Righteous Adventure Deck 3: Demon’s Heresy

The Good, The Bad and The Heretic

A Fistful of Meeples Review of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Wrath of the Righteous Adventure 3 – Demon’s Heresy

Warning: This review contains spoilers.

Obviously, to an extent, all reviews contain spoilers, but given that this adventure has a particularly notable one, it seems only fair to flag it up at the start.

Having posted the spoiler warning, I now need to fill some space before I go into the big reveal, so I’ll start out on a more general level.

Once again there are some fairly powerful boons here that players are going to enjoying putting to use. Inevitably, there are also a comparable number of hideous banes to fight against – although I think the henchmen feel a lot more measured this time out, if not less powerful, at least relative to where your characters are: For example, the servitor demon is +3 difficulty compared to adventure 2, but doesn’t bury your melee weapons.

Structurally this adventure is also quite unusual: in a move only seen previously in organised play, players are given the opportunity to decide on the order in which they play the first four scenarios, making things a lot less linear than has previously been the case.

That said, there’s only really one order in which you’re ever going to play the scenarios (at least on the first time round), and that’s because of the spoiler…

If you play the scenario The Demon’s Redoubt, when you successfully close the second location, you can summon and build another location – close that, and you can make an addition to the scenario reward: an unlockable character!!!

Up until now, there has basically been only one type of character – they come with a card and a token, attached to a set, but playable (at least technically) across any. We’ve had a couple of promos which were Goblin characters, but again, you could basically play them anywhere, even if they were themed to a particular AP. We also had a role-card in Skull and Shackles which essentially saw a character get possessed by a dead wizard for a scenario, but they went back to normal at the end of it.

What you have now though, is a character who can jump straight in, mid-way through adventure 3, with all the skill, card and power feats of those who have already played this far – there’s also nothing to stop you from doing a regular play-through with her (although one of her role-cards is tied pretty specifically to Wrath and the Corrupted mechanic).

It’s also worth noting that this character is a Demon Succubus Spy, both a race and class that have yet to come anywhere near playable characters in the rest of the game. I have to admit, I was pretty excited to discover that we’re soon going to be able to play as a Tengu Monk – but I think this is even better!

The Good

New playable character, unlockable mid-AP, in a previously unavailable race and class. After one whole scenario, I’d say a spy feels closest to a Rogue in play-style, but definitely distinctive. She also comes with her own cohort which is a great support card, and is the owner of some loot items and weapon you pick up at the same time.

More redemption – getting all the way to the end of adventure 2, having had only the theoretical chance to redeem 1 card (and then not being able to do it, thanks to the practicalities of the scenario) was a bit of a let-down. Add to that the fact that most of the corrupted boons you see are blessings, and cannot be redeemed (presumably to do so you’d need to redeem the deity bestowing the blessing, which might be more than you can do with a skilled Blacksmith, a sanctified forge and a jug of holy water) and the whole mechanic just felt a bit underwhelming. In this adventure, there are multiple opportunities to redeem boons, which makes some cards like the Unholy Aspergilum +3 a realistic choice of weapon whereas before it never really felt playable. Non-Linear scenario progression – this was a very simple idea, but it was nice that they introduced it. The rewards for the scenarios in this adventure are quite significant (skill feat, card feat, power feat), so the variable order can make quite a difference. Even if the overall experience is not that different, it just gives things a fresher feel overall.

The Bad

When I first sat down to right this section, having just flicked through the cards and played the first scenario with 4, I was ready to launch into another rant about how over-done the difficulty was in this set.

A few days later, having cleared the adventure, without needing more than a single run at most of the scenarios, we started to wonder whether we’d done something wrong- it all felt a bit easy.

Once again then, I think the issue with this adventure is difficulty. Whereas adventure 2 didn’t feel like it scaled properly with the different sizes of party, this one just feels really swingy.

To an extent, I think adventure 3 is always a bit susceptible to this – it’s the last point at which you’ll still have all the basic banes in, at the same time as getting some fairly advanced monsters. The difference this time, though is that it just feels like the gulf is bigger. Some monsters like the Ghoul from the base set are not only still around, but they aren’t even basic, so you can encounter them again and again, with the possibility for the combats to be comically simple.

On the other hand, monsters like the Dominion Scientist and the Drake Rider are brutal – checks in the high twenties, massive amounts of direct damage from the scientist (including to off-turn players) and multiple checks for the dragon and his pilot. It’s not so much that these are difficult, but the fact that you just don’t know which of the two you’re going to run into.

Add onto this randomness the fact that some of the henchmen in this adventure are recycled from the base set – for example Wights, who are not veteran – and you can end up with a rather upside-down experience. You can find yourself getting obliterated by a generic monster one moment, then crushing the henchman without even having to roll the check (I think the rules as written say that technically you always need to roll, but if you’re aim for a score of ten or better on 3 D8 +8, you can guess the outcome fairly easily…) It’s been commented on before that the Villains in this game can feel slightly anticlimactic, due both to the lack of development of their, and to the ease people sometimes having in beating them as they hurl everything including the kitchen sink, and the henchmen seem to be a stronger example of this. They’re supposed to be one of the defining features of the scenario, flavour-wise, but often they just get swept aside.

Verdict

Overall, I still like this adventure- I’m not someone who easily gets bothered by a game being “too easy” and I think the innovations in this pack more than outweigh the drawbacks – if you find combat too much of a breeze, it would be fairly straightforward to rule that some of the base-set banes like the ghoul were “basic” and remove them to smooth off the combat curve, but for us it felt more like a relief after the battering we took doing adventure 2 in 6-player.

Dice Masters: Captain America Review

Oh Captain, my Captain!

With the release of the Age of Ultron set a few weeks ago, we saw the third set of Captain America cards. So far, he is one of only 2 characters to have appeared this prolifically, with no less than 11 different card options for players wanting to field him.

From a thematic perspective, it’s hard to think of the Avengers without Captain America, and it certainly doesn’t seem unreasonable that he’s the character singled out for so much attention, but I feel like it’s quite rare to actually see someone playing him in a team. Today, I wanted to just think a bit about the various options players have with Cap when building a team.

Dice

First of all, it’s worth noting that there are two distinct types of dice for Cap  (as the AvX and Uncanny dice differ only in the colour ink used, I’m going to lump them together), but the Age of Ultron dice are something completely different.

Entirely interchangeable for everything except official WizKids events…

In the first two sets, Caps dice were shield energy. His defence was 3, 4, 5 across his 3 levels and his attack a 3, 5, 5, making him a fairly solid character above level 1, if nothing to write home about based on stats alone. Perhaps the biggest drawback of the first iteration of the dice was the field cost: 1, 2, 2 is a fairly steep rate to meet, and it meant that 2/3 of the time you rolled him, it was going to cost you multiple energy to get him out.

Moving forward to the Age of Ultron set, Cap is re-imagined as fist-energy character. As before, his defence is 3, 4, 5 across the 3 levels, but his attack is a steady 5, even at level 1. Even better, his field cost is 1, 1, 2 – giving you a far better likelihood of being able to field him cheaply, something which can make a big difference if you need to get multiple characters out in a turn.

It’s also worth noting that the newer version of the Cap dice have a burst at levels 1 and 3, which gives extra potential for interesting abilities, cards permitting.

In terms of energy type, shield vs fist, I don’t think there’s a massive amount of difference. If pressed, I guess I’d say that on balance, I’d say there are more 2-cost fist characters that I’d be likely to run, so getting the ramp up to some of the higher purchase costs is probably fractionally easier with Ultron Cap, but there’s not a lot in it.

Cards

Given that Captain America is never likely to appear in a two-cost version, you probably aren’t running him just for his dice, and the real make-or-break is going to be the card that goes with the dice. Inevitably, card powers are more subjective than dice numbers, but I wanted to do a bit of a consideration anyway.

Avengers vs X-Men

American Hero – Cost 4 (Shield) the first card in the AvX starter set, this lets you roll a single side-kick from your used pile when fielded. Given that (as already mentioned) his fielding cost is likely to be at least 2, a single side-kick coming back feels a bit poor.

Natural Leader – Cost 4 (Shield) Whilst active, this Captain America gives all you sidekicks +1A +1D. Probably not worth bothering with in isolation, there’s definitely potential for a massed side-kicks team, using the various characters which boost sidekick stats, and the Falcon who makes them unblockable. This one is worth a look, but only in a very specific build.

Star-Spangled Avenger – Cost 5 (Shield) When fielded, this Cap knocks out all of your opponent’s sidekicks, and gains you a life for each sidekick KO-ed this way. Again, it’s hardly rocket science to figure out that the utility of this will depend on how many sidekicks your opponent is running – if it’s a lot, then this could be a really beneficial play, not only gaining you a few life, but also doing a lot to thin out the line of defenders opposite, potentially allowing you to get through some unblocked attacks to damage your opponent.

Has anyone ever actually bought a Professor X dice, rather than just having him for the global?

By contrast, if your opponent is using the Professor X global to cycle his sidekicks as infinite amounts of energy, it could completely whiff. Realistically, 5-cost (particularly given that high field-cost we mentioned) is probably too much for this to be worthwhile against anything but a really side-kick heavy build (when did you last face a Gobby team?) but under the right conditions it could be worth a try.

Sentinel of Liberty – cost 6, (Shield) Another good one for a sidekick build, this one is more aggressive, giving yours +2A, with no added defence. Whilst this could be powerful in a side-kick deck, I think the greater utility is from the affect this has on your opponent, forcing them to pay 1 energy to field a sidekick – turning sidekicks on character faces into dead dice will certainly slow your opponent down, and could really hamper a build which focuses on having lots of sidekicks active- but at 6-cost, this isn’t an early-game die. When you reach the realms of 6-cost characters, you wanting something that’s going to win you the game, not just slow an opponent down.

Uncanny X-Men

You’ll have to hold out for this hero…

Special Ops – Cost 5 (Shield) The common Captain America from the second set allows you to move an opposing villain to the prep area when fielded. Obviously, there are significant limitations with this, not least the fact that it only works when your opponent has a villain active. This can, of course, be circumnavigated with one of the Iron Man globals that allow you to temporarily make someone a villain, but I’m not convinced that this is the best bit of removal out there. For one thing, it’s a when-fielded effect, which means it can be neutralised with Constantine, for another, the dice is only going to the prep area, so it’s coming straight back at you. Whilst her active stats are much lower, I think I’d rather have Storm: Wind-Rider if I need to knock out an individual character.

Follow Me! – Cost 4 (Shield) The Uncommon Captain America in this set is one cheaper to purchase than his common variant, and at least goes some way to balancing out his high field cost by allowing you to field another character for free. His numbers are good for a 4-cost, but this dice isn’t exactly inspiring.

Superhero – Cost 5 (Shield) – The final Captain America from Uncanny X-Men, and the only rare we’ve seen so far, is part of that set’s “Heroic” mechanic. I think that the whole concept of heroic probably needs a discussion elsewhere, but for now, I’m just going to say that I think he’s an important element of any heroic build, and fairly pointless elsewhere.

Age of Ultron

Moving to the newest set, aside from a completely different set of stats and energy costs, we have a new set of abilities. As the character is still titled “Captain America” you can’t field one of these alongside the shield energy versions (but you’re absolutely fine to field Phoenix, Marvel Girl and Phoenix Force in the same team, even if they are all Jean Grey…), so this is definitely an “instead” choice, rather than an “an/or.”

Super Soldier – Cost 4 (Fist) Whilst this new version of Cap is active, he will “prevent all but 1 damage to you from any action or character abilities” – before even getting onto the question of how useful this version is, I think it’s worth flagging this up as the first Captain America likely to provoke rules controversies.

A girl at our local Dice Masters group has recently started using an Action-heavy team that throws Power bolts, recycles them with Baron Zemo, deals extra damage with Dr Strange and even more with a Human Torch Global. I think it’s fairly clear that Strange and the Power-Bolt are 2 separate instances which would each deal you 1, but I think the human torch ability could be read either way, although I’d say that this ruling suggests that Cap would save you from Torch

Moving away from the query to the practical impact of having such a character, I see more and more control-style builds which effectively neutralise each other, to the point where the game is won buy the first person to buy all the power bolts. Having something which reduces the effect of direct damage actions or character abilities is definitely powerful. That said, the fact that this reduces damage to one means that it does nothing against the thousand paper cuts of characters like Cheetah, or Jonny Storm (although it does halve the damage of a Tsarina or a Windrider). I’ve not seen this one tried yet, but I wouldn’t rule it out.

Interestingly, in Age of Ultron, Thor is a woman, Nick Fury looks like Samuel L Jackson, but Captain America is still white

The First Avenger – Cost 4 (Fist) This Captain America is quite cheap once again (given the stats), and has the advantage that he spins up when you take non-combat damage. Obviously he can only spin up twice, and only if you field him at level 1, but if you combine him with other effects that take advantage of spinning (polymorph global) or even just want something to limit the effectiveness of a Tsarina, then he’s got the potential to be pretty useful. It’s also worth noting that he has a burst ability, which means that he gains you a life when executing the other ability. Again, I’d be interested to see how this spin-up+gain a life was ruled- whether he can continue to gain life at level 3, with nowhere left to spin up, or whether losing the chance to do the first prevents him from doing the second (there seem to be a lot of threads out there discussing this question, with a leaning towards the idea that you do gain the life regardless, but no overall consensus and no official ruling).

Man Out of Time – Cost 5 (Fist) For me, this is the pick of the bunch – the five purchase cost is a bit higher than some of the others in this set, but the ability to hurl combat damage right back at your opponent is brilliant – Cap has high enough defence that he’s hard to knock out with damage, so your opponent is forced to use the sorts of removal effects that re-roll or move dice, rather than just damaging them. He’s a solid blocker, so you’re not too worried about having him active, and if you do happen to have a spare in the field (or just an unexpected open goal left by your opponent), his ability to dive in and do 5 damage could sneak you over the line for a win. The fact that he’s while active, rather than when fielded means he isn’t neutralised by Constantine, and the only limit on the number of times you can trigger his ability is the amount of life you (or your opponent) have left.

Symbol of Freedom – Cost 6 (Fist) Whilst symbol of Freedom is active, every time you take non-combat damage, you can draw 2 dice from your bag, add one to your prep area, and return the others. Obviously, against teams that are focusing on doing a lot of direct damage to you, this could be a powerful effect, and could set you up for a real monster of a turn. However, it could also lead you to a horrendous situation where you’ve run out of dice, and are constantly dealing additional damage to yourself (IIRC this is technically “losing life” not being dealt damage, so at least it wouldn’t trigger an infinite loop) – generally I’m not a fan of forced extra draw for just this reason: I remember seeing a guy lose a game because he blocked with a beast that tried to draw a dice he didn’t have, and cost him his final point of life. Also, at 6-cost, this just seems too swingy and uncontrollable to be worth the effort.

Fury

It’s worthwhile mentioning, before this review rounds up, that all of the Captain America dice seen so far have the Avengers affiliation which means that they build nicely into the various team-watch abilities we’ve seen so far, and perhaps more importantly, that they can be fielded for free with the right Nick Fury (the common from AvX) active – this is a particularly big deal with the shield-energy dice where you’re paying 2 energy to field at level 2, but is not something to be ignored with any version. If you’re playing lots of Avengers, being able to get them out is key, and suddenly that field cost doesn’t seem so crazy.

Conclusion

Overall, even though he’s not been a big presence, at least in any of the games I’ve seen, I think Captain America certainly has potential, and I hope we’ll see more of him now that Age of Ultron is out, and people look to bring these characters into the game.

I definitely think that the Fist Energy dice are better than the Shield ones, the energy type is (very marginally) better, and the cost/stat ratios are better. Man Out of Time is my favourite, although I’ve only actually used Superhero and Natural Leader in anything beyond an introductory game.

Review: Wrath of the Righteous Adventure Deck 2: Sword of Valor

The Good, The Bad and the Valiant

A Fistful of Meeples Review of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Wrath of the Righteous Adventure 2 – Sword of Valour

Adventure two, for many people, is where things really get moving. Although the components were included in the base set, it’s also where the Mythic Path Tokens finally get some use, and therefore where I’m going to think about them in some depth.

Mythic

At the end of Adventure 1, each character was allowed to choose a Mythic Path, and from now on, they will start each scenario with a number of Mythic charges equal to the current adventure number. Their chosen path will give them boosts to checks using two chosen skills, the chance to spend charges to add a D20 to those checks, a bonus for succeeding at that check, and finally a big “spend 5 charges to do X” power. This power looks like it will be one of the most significant elements of the whole process – for example the Mythic Hierophant can expend 5 charges to resurrect a dead character – in the early Adventures, it’s going to take a lot of engineering to get those charges (you can’t keep hold of a number of charges greater than the current adventure number past the end of your turn), but the ability could mean the difference between a character being out of the AP for good, or getting a second chance at redemption.

Mythic Paths are a really good way to sure up a key stat. Unlike earlier APs, your characters will only have a single skill feat under their belts by this stage, so starting the scenario with a +2 bonus on top of that is only going to make things better: it’s particularly good for spell-casters, as it ups the reliability of recharge checks, typically an area you can’t afford to burn too many cards on, but a major challenge if you fail too many.

For some characters, the Mythic path can also offer an option to solidify the core stat and sure up a real point of weakness – Alain chose his path for the strength bonus, but knowing he’s got +2 to his otherwise abysmal dexterity (and the ability to grab a D20 in a pinch) can help him get out of some tight holes – or more specifically, pits.

Speaking of D20s, this is where the big fuss around “Mythic” first kicked off- the chance to roll a much bigger dice (in terms of the numbers, the physical dice is about the same size as the others), with an average roll of 10.5 instead of 6.5 on its closest rival, the D12. In reality however, rolling D20s seems to still be a fairly rare activity.

For one thing, the bonus to your rolls on the chosen checks is based on the number of charges you have, whereas rolling a D20 tends to come from charges you spend. That’s great for getting something bigger to chuck at the villain on (hopefully) the final check of the turn, but if you do it early on in the scenario, you’ll find it slowing you down. It is possible to regain mythic charges, either by spending a blessing of ascension, or by defeating a bane with the Mythic trait, but the latter option at least is going to be quite rare at this stage – it’s typically only the villains (if anyone) who are mythic. All the more reason to make sure you’ve picked up the Temptation of Big Die.

You and what Army?

Aside from the Mythic Paths, the other feature which dominates the landscape of adventure 2 are the armies. These are the henchmen in two of the scenarios (and get walk-on parts elsewhere) and they are brutal. Barriers, with six listed checks, and every character needs to make a different check to defeat them, with even a single failure spelling disaster for the players. Additional effects like banishing all boons in the location, or dealing damage just serve to rub salt into the Worldwound.

You do get some help with this task, in the form of the Knights of Kenabres. A new support card will allow you to check of skills, and add a D6 to checks for the checked skills. Unfortunately, this won’t work if you don’t have the skills! If you’ve got perception, chances are it comes off your wisdom, but if no-one in your party has perception, then the poor character rolling D4s for the check isn’t going to get an extra D6 from the Knights.

As a consolation, when you finish the adventure, you banish the Knights – but not until you’ve gained a skill feat for each medal you ticked. 5 skill feats are pretty good, even if they are spread out all over the shop.

The Good

Mythic paths are fun – and as noted, good for sureing up your key stat

5 Skill feats for a 5-scenario adventure is a pretty impressive haul – even if it does provoke nightmares about the future. (As one of the developers said on the Paizo forums- the real question we need to be asking is “why aren’t they worried about us farming for better boons”)

There are some more really good boons. Imrijka is the first character we’ve seen to really get her money’s worth for the Longbow, and the Marksman’s bow from this just makes things even better.

The Bad

With only 6 Mythic paths, not all combinations of skills will be available, meaning they work far better for some characters than others. Kyra loves being a Mythic Hierophant, as it feeds into several of the things she wants to do, but in our other party where Seelah is our principal divine character (and by default the healer), there is no option which would allow her to boost her wisdom and her strength.

“Horn of ever-so-slightly less likely to fail miserably” just didn’t have the same ring to it

Scaling has been an issue up until now with this set, but this Adventure was where it got really glaring. The siege of Drezen is so hard in 6-player that it’s just not funny anymore – and so easy by comparison with low player-counts (fewer checks to make, far fewer cards to wade through as you explore the sequential locations without banishing the cards from the last, and far more ability to pick and choose the type of check you roll against an army), that they barely qualify as the same scenario.

The Spells in this pack are a bit of a let-down: there are a few interesting utility options, and one that’s very powerful in a very specific fight, but no real chance to upgrade a generic combat spell. There are also some cards which seem to have over-sold themselves

Redemption was also a bit of a damp squib- having waited all this for the chance to redeem a card, the opportunity appeared once, at a single point in time, and required you to have a non-corrupted blessing in hand, immediately after recharging your hand and re-drawing.

Verdict

The designers have certainly done a good job of making this AP feel different, and unleashing the Mythic paths fully does make a difference. The scaling of this adventure just feels terrible though – with three or four, this is a fun, relatively challenging game, with 6 it fluctuates between feeling like an insane logic puzzle that you can’t possibly crack and just an exercise in masochism. Get this box, but play it with a smallish group if you can.

Trains – and the dangers of adding too many extra carriages…

Trains, apparently, are a good theme for games.

When I first got back into board gaming as an adult, two of the first games I played were train-themed: Ticket to Ride and Mexican Train. Ticket to Ride is often described as a “gateway” game, seen as accessible to non-gamers, and a good way to get them hooked on the hobby, before moving onto more complex, detailed, time-consuming or expensive options.

The sheer number of train games out there is difficult to estimate: a quick search on Boardgame Geek gives a mere 2 pages of games with the word “Train” actually in the title, but a whopping 92 pages in the category “Train Games” – although, given the fact that this includes a seemingly never-ending list of expansions and modules for existing games, it’s hard to be at all definitive about exactly how many distinct train games are out there.

Train games range from the general, like Ticket to Ride, which can be (and indeed has been) re-applied to almost any geographical setting imaginable, to the marvellously specific Last Train to Wensleydale, where players are tasked with ensuring supplies of cheese and stone to remote parts of the Yorkshire Countryside.

We probably all know someone (including the person I first played Last Train to Wensleydale with) who is fascinated by Trains, and find the theme alone enough to sit down for several hours, but for most of us, something a bit more entertaining is required, and I think a lot of the train games out there have done a good job at being accessible to people with little or no interest in the topic.

Expansive?

In one particular area, I feel like the train-games highlight a growing issue in the board-games world generally, and that is expansions.

Even the superficially simple Ticket to Ride provides a good illustration of how out-of-control this sort of thing can get.

Not technically the original, but it was the first one we knew…

There are roughly 4 basic versions of Ticket to Ride – the original (USA), Europe, The Nordic countries, and the Marklin edition, set in Germany. Each of these is a fully-playable stand-alone game, which contains all the plastic Trains, map-boards, train cards and tickets needed to play. There are slight variations: Stations in Europe, Passengers in Marklin, and a more compact map designed for only 2 or 3 players in the Nordic Countries, but at heart, this is the same game. (There’s also the 10^th anniversary edition, but as far as I can tell that’s just some existing versions of the game stuck in a single box together, so I’ll be ignoring it from hereon in.)

On top of these base games, both the American and European games have small expansions that can be added, offering a new set of journeys for players to complete, and an additional small mechanic. There is also an expansion which offers players the chance to roll dice instead of collecting cards to claim the routes across the map.

For those who already own the America or Europe boxes (but not Nordic Countries) it is then possible to purchase additional “Map Sets” – this offers the chance to play in additional locations such as Asia, India, Switzerland, the Heart of Africa, and the Netherlands!?! But these boxes do not contain the basic plastic trains or train cards required to play, so are not viable games by themselves. As well as the new map, many of these boxes come with an additional gameplay mechanic in the box – The Asia box for example introduces multi-player Ticket to Ride, or as it’s known in our house “Divorce in a Box.” This unusual variant sees two or three teams of two players each working against each other. Each time you pick up train cards, one goes in your hand, and the other in a shared pool. You both build from the same set of plastic trains, and pay for those trains with (partially) shared cards, but the routes you are trying to complete are kept separate, and you are not allowed to tell your partner where you’re trying to get to. Some may love the option to play Ticket to Ride with 6, but we played it once, and by the end of the night, only 1 team were still talking to each other (thankfully my wife and I were not on the same team).

Because what game DOESN’T need a dinosaur?

Lastly, there is an expansion themed around a different train-based game from the same publishers, and an expansion which adds monsters (a dinosaur and a flying saucer if I recall).

Add in the Ticket to Ride Card Game, and that leaves you with no fewer than 16 official Ticket to Ride products (there are MANY unofficial fan-designed variants), taking a fairly interesting, light, family-friendly game, and flogging it to death. We own 4 if I recall correctly, but I can’t remember the last time any got played.

Sadly, this isn’t the most extreme case by any means. There are a lot of train-based games, often designated by little more than the number of a year sometime in the 19^th Century, with a seemingly endless stream of expansions. It seems impossible to keep track of, let alone play them all.

The New

Moving to the other end of the spectrum, this week, I got a chance to Play Colt Express, a newish game, set on a train, and currently entirely free from expansion bloat. It is also the recently-crowned Spiel des Jahres champion, which remains a high accolade for a Board Game. In this game, players take on the roles of characters trying to rob passengers on a train through the Old West. It comes with nice cardboard models of the train, decks of cards – for each player and to randomise the rounds, and little cowboy meeples. The characters are Wild West Sterotypes, each with a special power to reflect their unique skills: the Doc draws an extra card, the Squaw picks your pocket rather than just punching you and making you drop some loot, and you can attack the damsel whilst there’s another valid target available, because that just wouldn’t be gentlemanly.

The game is simple, but the mechanics capture the flavour well, and whilst there’s an element of abstraction (for example the question of how a player can move the Marshall in a different carriage), you generally feel like you’re doing the thing your character intended to do as you clamber between carriages, hide on the roof to avoid the Law, punch or shoot other bandits, and generally try to grab loot.

Getting shot is bad, getting loot is good – there’s also a bonus at the end for the character who has done the most shooting of their opponents, but you can’t shoot without a valid target, so there’s no use just blazing away madly and hoping for the best.

There’s certainly an amount of planning and strategy involved as you try to anticipate the movements of others, but there’s also a fair amount of luck (or bad luck, as I discovered) with which cards you draw. Each turn you draw 6 cards from a deck of ten to determine the actions you can take (typically 3 or 4), but each time you get shot, you have a dead card added to your deck, making it less likely that you will have the desired card – by the end of the game I had been shot 6 times and, fittingly, could barely move.

We played with 5, and 4 to 6 seems like it’s the optimum number, as with lower player-counts the ability to interact drops off a lot, making various elements of the game non-functional (several of the characters rely, directly or indirectly, on the presence of others to make use of their special powers)

All in all, the game is fairly light, fairly quick once you’ve done the set-up for the first game, with a bit of skill involved, but also a lot of luck. Based on a single play, I can’t speak with any authority for the re-playability, but it certainly seems like it has good mileage.

The buzz on Board Game Geek seems to be that there are no fewer than 3 expansions on the way. Whilst there’s clearly plenty of scope to add to the game, both in terms of varying existing elements of the game (new characters, round cards, stations etc) and adding new elements altogether (player-controlled Marshall, adding a stagecoach or being attacked by Indians), personally I hope they don’t get too carried away, and keep this one fairly quick and simple.

Review: Wrath of the Righteous Adventure Deck 1: The Worldwound Incursion

The Good, The Bad and the Worldwound

A Fistful of Meeples Review of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Wrath of the Righteous Adventure 1 – The Worldwound Incursion

Although sold inside the base-set box, Adventure 1 comes in its own packaging, so I figured it deserved its own review section here. Having played the base adventure (or got part-way through the base adventure and given up) you mix in the cards from this box, and launch in to the adventure-path proper.

At this point, of course, a very high proportion of the cards you encounter will still be cards from the base set, but the interesting thing is what happens when you do encounter new cards. For example, there’s a new summoing barrier, “Crazed Cultists” which will give you all Henchmen to fight, but even with the 1 combat damage on the first exploration of the turn, most players would still rather face this than the Fiendish Tree or the servitor demon, meaning that the higher level card actually makes life easier, by making it less likely that you’ll run into the Arboreal Blight or the Demonic Horde

The Good

The healing effect might be less powerful, but this comes at a point in the game where a 2d4 Attack spell is actually useful…

The art-quality continues to be high, and after the shock of the base adventure, the difficulty of this one seems a lot more sensibly pitched. There is potential for things to go nastily wrong in the early adventure which shuffles the big bad into the blessings deck, but this feels fun rather than just punishing.

There are also some fun new cards – Life Drain is a nice spell which re-implements some of the effect of Life Drain, previously seen in the Wizard Class deck, but with the power level pitched rather more appropriately (Aracane +2d4 just didn’t cut it for a level 5 spell).

Demonbane Light Crossbow is a fairly close mirror of everyone’s favourite Ranged Weapon from Rise of the Runelords. In fact, almost all of the weapons are a clear improvement on the basic ones, if you can manage to encounter them.

The Bad

There is a distinct element of “underwhelming” to this box. Given how different Wrath as a whole is from previous sets, and some of the surprises they pull out for later adventures, this one can feel a bit flat.

I think that is more an inherent issue with the structure of box 1 within the context of an AP – it’s a difficult place to pitch, as things aren’t really that much more powerful that the base set, and the novelty of that massive wave of content is already starting to wear off (especially if it took you a dozen attempts to clear level B). As previously noted, the boon upgrades generally are  upgrades – there’s no situation in which a melee-fighter wouldn’t prefer a Lance+1 to a Lance (unless she’s going to be banishing it) – they just feel sufficiently far scattered that you don’t get the “wow” factor of some other boxes.

Verdict

If you have the Base Set, then you have adventure 1, and I think that’s a very sensible distribution approach taken by Paizo. This box isn’t bad by any means, but I think if you’d gone out and bought it by itself, you might feel a bit let-down.

So as not to leave you feeling too disappointed, I’ll just leave you with one of the new cards from this set that is properly exciting.

One Skill Feat might not seem much, but a temporary Power Feat could do all sorts of things…

Ultron’s Rainbow

This past fortnight saw the launch of the 3^rd Marvel set for Dice Masters, the 4^th Superhero set, and the 6^th overall.

Up until now, I’ve been buying in to the Superhero sets and trying to assemble a relatively comprehensive set of cards (aside from spending money I don’t have chasing after super-rares), but due to personal circumstances, I’d already decided that this was a set I was going to have to pass on.

Fortunately, one of the regular Dice Masters players at our local shop was buying an entire gravity feed (90 boosters, or 180 cards and dice), and he decided to organise a Rainbow draft to give us all a chance to play with some of the new characters (or possibly just to save himself a little bit of time and effort opening all the packets).

For those not familiar with it, Rainbow draft is a format for Dice Masters where players arrive without a team, and build it on the spot.

• Each player opens six random booster packs, checks that the dice match the card, and place all the dice in the middle of the table, so that all players can see how many of each character are available, the cards go in a pile face-down, so no-one else can see which version of a particular character has been drawn.
• They then choose one card from their pile (now their hand), and pass the remaining cards to the next player around the table.
• Each player takes the dice for the card he just chose (drafted) and places it in his own area
• He then picks up the pile of cards passed to him by his neighbour, and chooses another card.
• This process repeats until each player has 12 dice and cards.
• Players then open another 6 packs, and repeat the process, but this time passing the cards in the opposite direction.
• Once done, players should have 24 cards with matching dice. They then have to assemble a tournament-legal team (max 8 characters, max 20 dice, within the limits stated on the cards), adding basic actions from their own supply.

There are a few reasons why I like the Rainbow draft format. First of all, it puts players on a fairly even footing – it can be intimidating for a new player to turn up to a tournament, and discover they are facing a team built on a backbone of highly powerful super-rare cards. I remember my first tournament, where I got soundly beaten by two players with Tsarina, then crushed a guy who had brought “natural”

Secondly, it’s a good opportunity to try different cards out. If your only regular opportunity to play this game is in tournaments, then there’s always an inclination to stick with something tried and trusted that is more likely to win you the prizes. (I have an odd relationship with this game: I really don’t care about “winning” but I do want to get the Promo cards, many of which are generally given out for winning/placing well in the tournament. I went to the nationals, and missed the last 8 by making a silly mistake in my last game, to go home quite happy that I could be back an hour or two earlier, but kicking myself for missing out on the alternate art Cable and the AvX starter I needed to get extra dice…)

In many respects, the skills for playing a Rainbow draft are the same as for playing any game of Dice Masters, knowing when to spend energy and when to field characters, when to attack and when to hold things back, keeping track of the cards on the table, identifying the potentials and the dangers.

That said, there are also elements which are different. A key thing to try for is to work out early on what you’re trying to do with your team – I once won a Rainbow Draft event for the Justice League set, simply by getting an Aquaman that allowed me to buy Justice League characters cheaply, and a Martian Manhunter and Firestorm who were cheaper to buy (because they were Justice League) and could hit hard, with Overcrush and Direct Damage. By contrast, my least successful Rainbow Draft event was the one where I ended up with a single “Heroic” character.

Last Sunday, the decision basically made itself for me, when I looked at my opening hand of cards. At that point I wasn’t expecting to pick up anything besides a start for this set (although I have since received a very generous donation of some spare duplicates from a fellow-player), so knew I wasn’t likely to be seeing this card again. Plus, who doesn’t want to play a ten-cost character with up to 9 attack and built-in overcrush?

Super-Rare Thanos works with “infinity” counters (aka 1p and 5p coins I found in my wallet) – every time one of your villains does combat damage to your opponent, place an infinity counter on him – his purchase cost is reduced by two for each token. My mission was simple then – do combat damage to my opponent with villains.

I picked as many villains as I could – ideally looking for those with more than one dice, or those who didn’t cost too much. Sadly, the problem with a villain team is almost always one of cost, and the draft format doesn’t help this. Still, I managed to put together a 19-dice with 7 of the 8 characters, and 18 of the 19 dice being villains. I had the maximum 4 Thanos dice, so if I could get him cheap enough, there was potential to bring a world of pain to my opponent.

In the end, my suspicions were confirmed – the team was just too slow, and needed better ramp. I made errors along the way – failing to spot the potential of the global ability on my opponent’s Iron-Man was probably the biggest, as it would have allowed me to turn side-kicks in to villains, and attack during the first couple of turns when there were no blockers out.

I think there’s definitely fun to be had with Thanos, especially with some of the lower-cost villains who you can get out more easily in the first few turns, but it won’t be me using him again any time soon.

Review: Wrath of the Righteous Base Set

The Good, The Bad and the Righteous

A Fistful of Meeples Review of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Wrath of the Righteous Base Set.

Wrath of the Righteous is the 3rd Adventure Path (AP from hereon in) in Paizo’s highly successful Adventure Card Game. This review is written based on the assumption that you already know the basic principles of how the game works – if not, see the game overview here.

Having tackled a typical fantasy adventure full of Goblins, Dragons and Giants and then spent a season Swashbuckling on the High Seas as Pirates, Wrath of the Righteous transports the players to an area of Golarion known as The Worldwound, where they will go on Crusades against armies of Demons. What could possibly go wrong?

At its most basic level, the Base Set looks a lot like the other adventures – it comes with 7 characters (a further 4 are available in the character add-on pack), a set of low-level boons and banes for introductory adventures, along with the first few locations, and the adventure/scenario cards for a basic adventure before players launch themselves into the Adventure Path proper.

There are some distinctly new elements though, and these are the first things I want to look at today:

Cohorts

Alain is never seen without his horse

Cohorts are a new thing for this AP – these are mostly people or other creatures, and a lot of them tend to function a lot like allies – although often fairly powerful ones. There are however, some differences: for a start, cohorts are added to your hand after you draw your starting hand, meaning that 1.) you need to get a card out of your hand on turn one and, 2.) you’ll always get it as well as your favoured card type, so you don’t have to worry about it sitting in your deck and never appearing, or worse – having that in your starting hand, but no weapon/spell.

It’s also worth noticing that whilst cohorts may be linked to a character that you are playing, or to the current scenario, once they are banished though, they’re gone – unlike those allies you’ve failed to acquire five times and got at the sixth attempt, or banished to close a location, once this cohort is gone, it’s gone (although note that there is a difference between “banish” and “return to the box” as can be seen in the power of one cohort in the base adventure.)

Mythic Paths and Charges

The second major new thing you’ll find in your Wrath box is actually a bit of a tease – much-hyped before the game’s release, with the promise of getting to roll a D20, these are the Mythic Path cards and Mythic Charges…

…which players will only get to use in anger once they reach adventure 2! – as a result, I’m going to leave discussion of them until I review Adventure 2.

The Good

One obvious thing that seasoned Pathfinder ACG players will notice is the art upgrade- there are still cards, both boons and banes returning for a third appearance, but these have generally been given new art, and I certainly prefer the new style: I think it’s generally an improvement, with a more detailed style of illustration. The addition of some flavour text, albeit brief, that has been added to some of the standard monsters helps to keep things fresh too. 

There are also characters and play-styles that feel fresh here. The introduction of mounts to allow characters to move around, as well as weapons like Lance that can combine with these mounts to give you bonuses on your first combat of the turn add a new dimension, and some of the new blessings like Baphomet also add a dimension to the decision on when to explore again.

In terms of the base-level scenarios themselves, this feels nice and coherent – in Skull and Shackles the move from the base scenario to the first adventure of the AP proper didn’t really make sense, whereas this seems to merge quite nicely.

 The mixture of old and new cards is also good – there are some new spells/weapons etc, and in a major departure from previous adventure paths, a different basic blessing. It’s probably a matter of debate whether the Blessing of Ascension is as good as the Blessing of the gods – it is not auto-acquire for the first adventure or two, and it doesn’t allow you to mirror the powers of cards on the discard pile – but the basic principal of varying things up like this is nice.

Corrupted cards also add a new dimension to play, with the prospect that some of these will be redeemable later: the general principal seems to be that these cards are situationally more powerful, but may well have some kind of cost attached to playing them.

Closing the cloister isn’t too bad in the base adventure, but by deck 2, it’s a different matter…

The designers have also clearly put a lot of thought in to how they can provide more variety in a game without massively upping the overall cardboard content. A good way of doing this, is through the new Servitor Demon: Various cards in the game will tell you to summon and encounter the current adventure’s servitor demon. However, depending on which adventure you are currently in, the servitor demon will be a different henchman. In a single step, using only 7 cards across the whole adventure path, they’ve given locations and the like which will present different challenges at different times –

The Bad

There has been a lot of discussion over on the Paizo forums about the difficulty level of the Wrath Basic-level adventure, compared with the previous boxes.

I think it’s beyond question that the difficulty here is much greater than in Rise of the Runelords, and – at least with larger parties – it seems to also be harder than Skull and Shackles. Obviously increased difficulty in a game isn’t automatically a bad thing, but I side with those who think that the level B adventure here has gone too far – despite serving for many players as an introduction to a new game, this is (in many respects) harder than adventure 1 is, despite the lack of the levelled up boons with which to fight.

Amongst the cards most often singled out for complaint are the barrier Arboreal Blight and the scenario Elven Entanglement – just a few thoughts on each of them.

Arboreal Blight is a type of barrier familiar to most veteran players of PACG, which causes each player to summon and encounter a monster – it also requires each of the summoning characters to defeat it, or else the barrier is getting shuffled back in to the location. So far, nothing new.

The big difference, is the question of what exactly is being summoned. At level B in Rise of the Runelords, the worst summoned monster in this type of situation would be a Skeleton – 8 difficulty, rising to 11 if you had the slashing or piercing trait.

The Fiendish Tree by contrast is a 13, so two harder than the skeleton at its most menacing. It also deals you a combat damage before and after you act. At this stage, there are only a very limited number of armours which can be revealed to fend off this damage, so even if you can pass a combat 13 without discarding a card, you’ll still find your hand 2 cards smaller by the end of the check. Realistically, a spellcaster who has to summon this tree on another character’s turn is going to start their own turn with their hand near to empty, and probably have to skip exploring.

Whilst the Arboreal Blight has been the poster child for those criticising the difficulty, it’s also worth pausing at this moment to consider the Demonic Horde. Like Arboreal Blight, Demonic Horde is a 2-copy barrier in the base set, with a third copy in the character add-on. Again, it’s a summoning barrier, pulling out the adventure’s Servitor demon this time, but rather than give you one per character, each character chose a random character to battle it, meaning that a bad run of dice could leave a single character having to fend off 3 or 4 demons. As all summoned monsters must be defeated to get rid of the barrier, this is a particularly nasty one.

The Elven Entanglement is a scenario that occurs midway through the level-B adventure, and for large groups, it is terrifying. The first, and probably the main, difficulty is that defeating a henchman doesn’t allow you to close the location. On top of that, every time you encounter an animal (typically an ally that might have allowed you to explore again), you instead have to fight another tree-based monster.

With low player counts, you can chase the villain from place to place and eventually corner him with a bit of temporary closing, but in 6-player, the odds of stumbling across the villain plummet, and you’re reduced to having to get through the best part of 80 cards in 30 turns.

It’s worth noting that, among the various suggestions appearing as to how to deal with the difficulty of this first adventure, there is the possibility to simply leave it to later – skip the Base adventure (it’s optional, although it does get you a card feat), and instead press straight on to Adventure 1.

The Verdict

Despite the relative length of the sections above, I like Wrath of the Righteous, and think it’s a good set. That said, I’d be cautious about recommending it as an introduction to the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, particularly for anyone who is going to be playing with a large group. I think the designers have got the difficulty wrong – no doubt reacting to the many people who claimed (unfairly I think) that Rise of the Runelords was too easy – and in particular, I worry about the scaling I’ll say more on that topic when I review adventure 2, as a rule, I think for 5 or 6 players, the game is just inaccessible, unless you’re assembling a SWAT team of expert gamers.

All of that aside; for experienced players, small groups ready to plan ahead, or anyone who’s prepared to take a few set-backs with their victories, there is still plenty of fun to be had here.

TLDR version:

If you like Pathfinder ACG, or just like a challenge, buy this (especially if you thought Rise of the Runelords was on the easy side). If you’re new to Pathfinder ACG, and/or want a game people can just sit down to in a big group and enjoy, buy Rise of the Runelords.