I really really want to like AToE

[LabRat]

I think I'm getting what wisdomknight is saying now. This weekend, I managed to play 4 games of ATOE, 3 of them with my nephew. The first was a competitive game where my Inspector Cooke tried to defeat the Spectral Horseman before my nephew's Thomas the Courier. The game was easy in the sense that it didn't hinder our progress that much and I think that's how it's supposed to be. I mean, it's competitive mode, the challenge is not supposed to be the game but each other right? If the Villain becomes too hard, we'll just end up working together instead of competing against each other, and there were times when that actually happened (especially when cooperating to move the Shadow track away from Darkness).

The second game that we played was Cooperative, with his Heinrich Cartwright working with my Karl against the Werewolf. We got our asses handed to us. And I think the key difference here is how the difficulty scales depending on the number of players. There were just two of us, TWO. Based on how we read the rules, the only things that scaled were the Villain's wound markers and how much it costs to investigate Town Elders. Look at the Cooperative Mystery Phase chart and ask yourselves, how hard is it for TWO players to divide 5 wounds (if someone rolls a 1) compared to FIVE players? If there were 5, just take one wound each and each pays 1-3 Investigation to heal up later, no worries. Me and my nephew? I take 3 wounds, and man it'll cost me 9 to fully heal. There was a time when he took 4 Wounds and I took just 1 because we were so badly beaten up.

In our game, every Mystery Phase was a potential for the Shadow track to move as many as 4 steps toward darkness, and we could be averaging as many as 1 step toward it. Just imagine how bad it would be if The Hour is Late was in play. And honestly, what makes the cooperative game really hard for us is the Cooperative Mystery Phase chart. We're planning on playing a cooperative game but with two characters each just to test this theory out, but I think if there are tweaks needed to the rules, it would have to be how the Cooperative Mystery chart penalizes the party based on the number of players/characters working together.

On a side note, we played another Competitive game after this, with my Katarina against her Anne Marie. Rather than having a truce at important times, my nephew decided to be a little more cutthroat and kept the Book of Lore to boost his Honor rather than to discard it to move the Shadow Track away from Darkness. It ended up getting burned a few turns later. We then blocked each other's attempts to start a Showdown thanks to "I Think Not!" and could only watch as the Shadow reached Darkness.