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Basic Game Mechanics
11-17-2013, 03:13 AM (This post was last modified: 11-17-2013 10:01 AM by Odie.)
Post: #1
Basic Game Mechanics
This information was pieced together and compiled by various helpful and inquisitive people on both the SOBS Kickstarter comments section, and the SOBS forums on BoardGameGeek.

Keep in mind that these are not finalized rules for the game.

I'm duplicating it here so we can have a depository of basic game info here on TZG as well:

GENERIC MISSION STUFF

-- My estimation is the time can be anywhere from 1-2 and 1/2 hours for a game, depending on your mission.

-- You also have the fact that it supports 1-4 players with a nice scaling for Enemies and Encounters (or 1-6 if you have extra Hero Classes and/or combine Core Sets).

-- On average, you will probably go through around 3-8 Darkness Cards, 4-16 Threat Cards (various colors), 4-10 Gear, 2-6 Artifacts, and maybe 4-16 Encounter Cards (mines) and 2-12 Encounter Cards (Otherworlds)

GETTING STARTED

-- Players roll (or decide) what Mission they have taken on and the game begins!

-- Missions are designed to be stand-alone so that each mission is a single session and the campaign is really guided by the character development.

--Some missions will likely be ‘linked stories’ so that you can play them as a series.

--The Mission itself tells you what your objective is, how deep you need to go into the mines (or other worlds), and what you need to do when you get there! It also tells you what your rewards are for accomplishing the mission!

-- Some Missions are set up with an established board layout (as the Heroes have a map of the area ahead of time). most of the time though, the Map Tiles are placed by drawing cards from the Map Deck as you explore the Mines and otherworlds.

-- The Mission Packs work a bit differently because they are specifically themed missions. They almost always have specific Objective Fight Enemies and they often will have you set up the Threat Decks a certain way or have extra rules to skew the way the Threat Deck draws play out. In that way, themeing the adventure more around a certain monster type.

-- Basic setup for the game involves the Map Deck for the Mines, the Darkness Deck , the Encounter Deck, Gear, Artifacts, and the Loot stack, as well as the Enemy Threat Level Decks.

-- The figures are placed on the Mine Entrance Map Tile to start the game.

-- Each Hero gets 1 Grit Token, and the Depth Track is setup with the Hero Party’s marker on the entrance and the Darkness marker deep in the mines (at the opposite end of the track).

BUILD MAP DECK

-- There is a Map Deck that you draw cards from every time you look through a doorway. These cards show what the next Map Tile is.

-- You could add all the Map Tiles from two of the same Core Box together if you wanted to, it shouldn’t really break anything. The only thing is that if a specific mission calls for the use of a certain Map Tile as part of the mission itself, you would probably not want to have an extra one in there, just in case.
-- Missions that have a specific Objective Room would have that room card removed from the Map Decks at the start of the game so that when you find the last Clue that you need (by revealing Exploration Tokens), the next room placed would be the Objective Room Tile.

BUILD THREAT DECK

Enemy Threat Cards
-- These cards list one or more Types of Enemies and the quantity you have to face.

-- They are drawn whenever there is a Fight and you need to determine what has attacked you.

-- There are three colors of Threat cards (Green, Yellow, and Red) which correspond to difficulty as well as to the number of Heroes in the party (Green=1-2, Yellow=3-4, Red=5-6).

-- You can put all of the monster cards in the Threat Decks for most missions and it is fine.

-- You can also specifically choose what monsters you want in the Threat Decks to tailor the adventure to a specific style of monsters if you want (for more of a challenge or just to theme the enemeis).

--If you have extra sets of the same monsters, you can even add in extra cards for those monsters so they come up more often, or even make new cards that bring out more of that monster type at once (using the Blank Cards)

Tailoring the Deck

-- A lot of it depends on how often you want the creature to come up in game. I would say for bigger nastier monsters, you would probably want 1 or 2 Yellow cards and 1-3 Red. For normal fighting monsters, you are looking at around 1-3 green, 1-3 yellow, and 1-2 Red. For a mini boss type monster you could get away with just 1 Yellow and 1 Red even – if you want them to not show up that often.

-- One thing that is fun is that you can very easily tailor the type of adventure you want to have by building the Threat Decks ahead of time. If you want to play a game where it’s all about Trederrans that have come through the portals to steal Dark Stone from Earath, just throw in a bunch of cards for Trederran Soldiers, Grenadiers, Tentacles, and maybe some Void Spiders and Hellbats to represent the critters that have followed them through.

MISSION PROGRESS

HOLD BACK THE DARKNESS (Don’t Roll a “1” Wizard!)

-- At the start of each turn, the Hero with the Old Lantern rolls 2 dice to Hold Back the Darkness! This roll needs to be equal to or greater than the number listed on the current stage of the Depth Track. The Depth Track represents your progress in the adventure, regardless of your current location (in the Mines or in an Otherworld).

-- If the roll is passed, the Heroes carry on without delay.

-- If the roll is failed, the Darkness moves one step up the track toward escaping the Mines!

-- As an added element of danger, if the Hold Back the Darkness roll is ever doubles (1-1, 3-3, etc), this instead triggers a random event from the Depth Event Chart equal to that number! Some of these include being attacked!

-- Also, as the Darkness moves up the Track, getting closer to escaping the Mines, there are certain spots on the Track marked with an icon that forces you to draw a Darkness Card. These are generally bad things that make the enemies a bit tougher, have an evil effect, or cause a surprise attack!

Impact of the Darkness

-- If the Darkness ever gets to the Entrance Icon, it escapes the Mines and the Heroes auto lose the Mission. In this way, it acts as a timer for the game, keeping the pressure on!

-- Currently, once the Hero Party marker is below the Darkness marker on the Track, all Enemies become Elite (get a single roll on their Elite Chart).

DEPTH TRACK

-- The Depth Track is a long, rectangular Counter with a track of numbers on it.

-- There is a Mine Entrance Icon at one end and the Deep Darkness on the other.

-- The Hero Party is represented by a marker that starts at the entrance and moves down the track as the Heroes explore more and more Map Tiles.

-- The Darkness is a marker that starts at the bottom of the track and moves up toward the Entrance as the power of evil grows.

DARKNESS CARDS

-- There are spaces on the track marked for you to draw a Darkness card when the Darkness marker reaches that space.

-- Darkness cards are generally bad things that make the Enemies stronger, cause a surprise attack, or initiate a hazard of some sort.

-- Darkness Cards can cause a nasty, one-time event or attack, or have a continuous effect on the enemies, making the game tougher as more Darkness cards are drawn

HERO’S TURN

-- Heroes now take their turn in order of Initiative, with the highest going first.

-- During a Hero’s Activation, they roll a die and may move up to the amount rolled.

-- The current idea is that you can move through any square that is full enough (more than 50%). We have talked about possibly putting some sort of dot at the center of ‘play-space’ squares to make it clearer what spaces are valid, but we haven’t finalized that yet.

-- No teleporting back to town. You have to wait until the mission is complete or all characters are KOed.

-- Running away is not the best plan. If you run from the hero with the lantern, you start to take "Voices in the dark" sanity hits which will eventually make you insane. Monsters will chase you until they catch up with you.

-- If a 1 is rolled, the Hero also recovers an extra Grit Token.

Grit Tokens
-- A Grit Token may be discarded to Re-roll any number of your dice just rolled (though no die may be Re-rolled more than once), or

-- A Grit Token may be discarded to move an extra die roll worth of spaces during your Movement.

-- A Grit Token may also be used to activate certain powerful character abilities.

-- After moving, the Hero may attack if there are any enemies on the board

-- If heroes end their move in a space adjacent to a doorway (an open exit from the map tile you are on), you may look down the hall and draw a random Map Card to place the next Map Tile, connecting it to the doorway you are looking through.

PLACING MAP TILES

-- The Mine tiles and the Otherworld tiles will never be connected to one another as the board is split when you find a portal to an Otherworld.

-- Each time a new Map Tile is placed, you must also move the Hero Party’s marker one step forward on the Depth Track, as the Hero Posse delves deeper into the Mines. This is important because as the Heroes go deeper underground, it becomes harder and harder to Hold Back the Darkness (the number required to roll gets higher, the deeper the Hero Party has gone).

-- If a Tile needs to be placed and it is already on the board, unless there are Heroes on that Tile or Heroes behind that Tile in the path, the Tile is just removed and placed on the opposite side for the new Tile placement. When this happens, it is assumed that there has been a passage collapse and that all map tiles before the removed Tile are no longer accessible.

-- Missions that have a specific Objective Room would have that room card removed from the Map Decks at the start of the game so that when you find the last Clue that you need (by revealing Exploration Tokens), the next room placed would be the Objective Room Tile.

-- Newly placed Map Tiles are always either a Room or a Passage.

-- Passage Tiles have open doorways on all ends and can often split the path in front of the Heroes. They do not, however, contain Encounters for the Heroes to deal with.

-- Room Tiles always come into play with an Exploration Token on them. As long as there is an unrevealed Exploration Token on a Map Tile, Heroes may not look through Doorways on that Map Tile (you can’t explore further than that room with the unrevealed token).

-- At the end of a full Hero Turn (after all Heroes have been Activated), if there are one or more Heroes in a Room with an Exploration Token, that token is revealed!


Some interesting pre-adventure party management info from Mary Beth at Flying Frog:

""Will there be allies that we can hire up prior to a mission?" - Yes, but you'll have to wait and see how they work in a bit."

""Can we use leftover/ spare hero figures as allies?" - Not that I'm aware of."


From Jason at Flying Frog:

“Will there be campaign structure to link mission together?” – Yes. The Adventure book hasn’t been fully written yet, but there are missions that form mini-story arcs when played consecutively and the intent is to have material on how to use the missions to have a continual storyline that is ongoing. This may be in the actual Core Box Sets, or it may be additional content on the website or an expansion. It kind of depends how elaborate it ends up being. I’m sure there will be at least a simple version of a running story arc in the Adventure book though.


Original Link: Basic Mechanics

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11-24-2013, 09:58 AM
Post: #2
RE: Basic Game Mechanics
(11-17-2013 03:13 AM)Odie Wrote:  PLACING MAP TILES

-- The Mine tiles and the Otherworld tiles will never be connected to one another as the board is split when you find a portal to an Otherworld.

By chance, it could be great if the connexion between tiles works with tiles from another game. For example Descent V2 (which tiles are not compatible with the tiles from Descent V1 by the way).

Players can create an otherworld more MedFan for instance.
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11-24-2013, 10:16 AM
Post: #3
RE: Basic Game Mechanics
Since the tiles between the Mines and the Otherworlds don't actually connect, you could use almost any other gaming tiles to create your own Otherworlds, as long as the tiles were the correct size for the figures.

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11-24-2013, 11:09 AM
Post: #4
RE: Basic Game Mechanics
I have all the WQ Tiles for the base Game & the Expansions which look to be about
the same size as SoB so lots of Home Brew Potential but finding Enemies in the 35mm scale
will be a problem.I got tons of figs but their a tad too small to match the SoB Heroes.

OD

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