AToE Game Balance: Too Easy or Too Hard?

[loremasterstl]

For the record, I've played "Touch" about two dozen times. The villain only won (track reaching zero) twice. This has me concerned that the villains in ATOE are too easy--at least the ones that come with the basic game. I cannot speak for the Something Wicked expansion, since I don't have it (...yet), but the downloadable Nutcracker is significantly tougher. I can think of several reasons why the villains "might" be too easy.


For one, most of the games that I have played were cooperative NOT competitive. My wife in particular, dislikes the competitive backstabbing and takes it personal, so we try to stick to games that minimize that. But if the other players that usually play cards to assist you (like to prevent wounds or to trade items) are playing cards to help the villain kick your butt, that's a whole different story. But it still seems like villains don't have enough life, even when say, four people are playing; numerous times have we knocked out a 23-Wound vampire or horseman with hardly a death.

Another reason may be our familiarity with cards. Since I play with gamers who customarily play games like Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft and Magic: the Gathering, our groups are experienced in finding unexpected advantages and "gaming" the system, learning of the likely variables and having a plan in place to respond to them. The token minions can be difficult, but the villains themselves seem not to be mighty enough when a team of players has had time to rip through the Event deck at least once, stockpiling goodies until the town goes into the red, then totally crushing the villain. We have had games where we introduce all four villains, one after another, but there are enough resources for all four to go down in quick succession (uh, I believe we called that a Major Victory).

[loremasterstl]

(continued)

A third thing is that we ignore the 2d6-roll tables in the book that varies the Showdowns: the Showdown Chart and the Cooperative Mystery Phase Chart. (Looking it up now....) Duh! As the text says, "To make things a little more challenging for the Heroes...." then you can have Darkness Falls, Creeping Shadow, a Minion Attack, or Scattered Clues. So, one-third of the time, Heroes are taking a stack of wounds, but at least they can decide as a team how those are distributed ("Give 'em to Von Took, she's got all of that Investigation stacked up"). But the likelihood of faster progression of the Shadow Track is what I was looking for. Well, the Cooperative Mystery Phase Chart will hurt two players much more than it will hurt four or five players.

I had already been thinking about House Rules for cooperative play like, "Every Mystery Phase, the Shadow Track goes down 1" or "Every Mystery Phase, draw an extra Mystery card". But this table sort of does that as well. We had considered making the Event deck non-shuffable, so that they actually can run out and force the game to closure, but that's not much help when you can get through half of the Event deck before the town hits 13. We thought about an Event card hand-size limit....

Back to the point: the game seems difficult in cooperative only when players are new and not familiar with the cards. And I think the expansion cards really step up the game difficulty a notch, so I'm looking forward to getting my hands on them. OK, time for somebody else to sound off.

[gavindowning]

I mostly play cooperative as well: my wife is a twin, so she prefers cooperative games as well. The basic monsters are pretty easy, though I find that the werewolf stages upward for cooperative play pretty well. The additional monsters in Something Wicked are much more difficult, particularly the Unspeakable Horror. The Bog Fiend also helps prevent gaming the system in the way you describe, as locations start vanishing. In addition, the cooperative table in Something Wicked is far more interesting and challenging.

Really, if you're looking for the extra challenge, I'd look at getting the Something Wicked expansion, and using the optional "additional challenge" rules like the Showdown Chart. If you're playing cooperative, you SHOULD be using the Cooperative Mystery Phase chart regardless, though. That's not optional for a cooperative game.

I can tell you that, even with a familiarity with the system and cards, and a really talented team of hero-players, taking on the Unspeakable Horror has a win/loss ratio of 3/2. The Bog Fiend is about the same.

[loremasterstl]

Yes, the Nutcracker's Toy Cannons (in the Advanced Game) can also destroy locations; haven't encountered that yet. And I will be implementing the Cooperative Mystery Phase Chart in the future.

Perhaps I will begin a thread about making custom villains....