I bought decent about two weeks ago, we played one game decided it was great and then bought all 4 expansions the next day. Believe me we have played a lot of games in the past two weeks. I am wanting to OL a game with the moving walls that have spikes however i do not want to read the quest book looking for a quest that uses them because i dont want to know any quest information that i dont need to know incase i am a hero in the future on that mission. Can one of you recommend a quest from (i think its altar of darkness that has the spike walls) which uses the walls and is fun to play thanks.

Oh, you mean THE quest that uses it? Yes, that's right, there is only one. Quest 5: Heart of Darkness.

Wow. One quest, i am speachless. I hope theres one in that new quest book.

Thanks for your help.

Haroon said:

Nope.

There's really only one thing you can do with crushing walls: "Oh no! The walls are closing in! Finish the thing within X turns or we lose some conquest!"

They move slowly and predictably, they don't cause meaningful damage if they hit you before you're pinned against the far wall, and there's no way to destroy them, rotate them, delay them, or otherwise influence them in any way other than by special quest rules. So they're really just a time limit and nothing else (unless the quest completely rewrites their behavior). And really bizarre and/or unbalanced things can happen if the heroes aren't all in one place when you activate them.

Rolling boulders are more flexible. They move faster and more randomly, their direction can be changed by ramps, and they have effects you care about if one intersects you in open space. There are at least two or three things you can do with them! (If you can get over the fact that they're randomized instant death traps and that a hero with Telekinesis will totally own your quest in the face.)

Antistone said:

Yes and no.

You can use crushing walls in your self-designed quests for some really interesting effects.

For example, I set two crushing walls behind each other (with a distance of a few spaces), but I let them both move IN THE SAME direction to create some kind of moving chamber.

In another quest, I used a crushing wall to close slowly a treasure room. This crushing wall moves four turns before it closes the chambers entry, and then it stopps forever. So the heroes have four turns to get the treasure before it is lost forever. (You will find this quest in the data bank. It's called "Der Koboldhexer", but you will have to speak German to read it.)

In another quest, I used a small crushing wall in a large room as a slowly-moving barricade which offers spawning spaces for the OL.

So you see there are another ways to integrate crushing walls into your own quests. Just like boulders, they aren't only designed to hit monsters and heroes, but to block ways for a limited time.

Graf said:

I'm fairly certain that's impossible without having the quest specifically change the behavior of crushing walls. By RAW, all crushing walls eventually hit a wall or a door, and then they're removed from the game. And they don't affect any tokens they move through other than rubble, so the chest should survive having the crushing wall move across it just fine. I suppose you could have a long dead end with a crushing wall at the end moving towards you and a chest a few spaces in front of the crushing wall, so that the crushing wall will continue moving down the corridor for "a long time" after it passes the chest and the heroes would need to wait more time than it's worth in order to access the chest again, but there's no "lost forever" scenario without a special rule.

And if we're going to count arbitrary special rules you write into the quest, then you can do anything with any component.

But regardless, both of these are examples of more slow, predictable time limits. You can't proceed into the next room until you wait X turns for the front crushing wall to get out of your way; you can't get the chest after Y turns because the crushing wall starts blocking you. If you just accumulated tokens in a pile to count turns, it'd be less flashy, but I doubt it would have any significant strategic differences, and it wouldn't require you to carefully plan out the quest's architecture to make sure that heroes can't sneak around or get trapped in weird places and that the time limit is actually exactly as long as you want it to be.

Yes - but you wouldn't have the possibility to spawn behind the crushing wall to protect the treasure room and to prevent the heroes from entering the room. A crushing wall is much more than just a dead end if you use it in a room that has a bigger width than two spaces. In my example, the chests room IS bigger than the crushing wall and the crushing wall will block the way in the moment it "exits" the chest rooms. So before the crushing wall exits the room, monsters can be spawned behind that wall to walk around it. Thats much more than just waiting some turns.

Now imagine my example with the moving chamber made by two crushing walls that are both moving in the same direction. Both crushing walls have a width of 2 spaces, but they cross some rooms with a bigger width. So there is a specific (very short) time in which the heroes may try to walk around one of that walls to go ahead - the heroes will need a very good timing to use these moments for their advantage.

Or the moving chamber is crossing a bigger room, but it is on both "open sides" limited by water. The overlords archers might shoot above that water to attack the heroes inside the slowly moving chamber.

None of those "crushing wall"-scenarios could be replaced by using "time-tokens". You have to keep in mind that crushing walls will have another effect on the game if you use them in rooms that are bigger than the wall.

I don't claim that the crushing wall is the greatest of all inventions and I agree that the boulders offer much more possibilities. But I'm sure that you can build some innovative situations if you use the crushing walls (with their un-changed rules) in exceptional constructions.

(And I wish I could add some pictures into this forum, but it doesn't work. I would offer to add some pictures in the "playtest"-area of the scenario data-bank if you are interested in the crushing-wall-constructions I talk about. I think a single picture will prove more than all my words.)