So I just finished playing the 5th quest of the campaign. I played solo, running the Ironbreaker and Bright Wizard.
Overall everything worked pretty well. I always felt I had important, meaningful choices to make each turn, and very rarely did it feel like a turn was "wasted". I didn't use the Rest actions very much, mostly because it didn't heal very many points; it is almost always better to rid yourself of enemies or aid your friend to help take down more enemies. In the first few quests I didn't use Aid that much either, as it seemed like a pretty weak move. But its importance became very clear to me halfway through the campaign and I got through many sticky situations merely because I had used one or more Aid actions previously.
The items and dungeon events cards are mostly nothing special. I like the variety of the dungeon cards more, though. Yes, a handful of items are really excellent (helloooo Lucky Coin!) and a handful of dungeon cards provide much needed help or interesting effects. But the vast majority of the dungeon events and items are pretty narrow in their situational appropriateness, and more often than not you'll draw a dungeon card that won't do much of anything or you'll find an item that you don't want.
Now, I'm not really complaining about these two decks. In fact, I think the dungeon deck especially is spot-on. Although, in future quests I'd like to see a couple special quest-specific dungeon cards that are added to the play deck (after you've selected the dozen from all the open dungeon cards). The items deck is also fine, really. It's pretty realistic to find tons of gear that you might not have a use for at the moment, but in another play through that same "useless" item might be the exact thing that saves your bacon.
It is pretty frustrating though, trying to explore and hoping you get a useful dungeon card, and possibly even a useful item, only to get zilch (or actually be harmed) 4 times out of 5.
Enemies were overall well balanced. Some of the nemeses were extremely annoying though. And I'm pretty sure it's literally impossible to kill the Abomination with only 2 characters...
Locations were also nicely designed, with effects that gave just enough flavor to make it feel like a real location, without bogging down the game with unnecessary rules or conditions. My only quibble about locations might be that a few seemed to require an unreasonably high amount of progress tokens to advance though. But that's probably related to my biggest concern with the game...
Now, I get that the game is supposed to be pretty tough. And I like that. Most of the time, it felt nicely challenging without being so frustrating as to make me pull my hair out (unlike Lord of the Rings LCG...). Still though, I am not sure about the difficulty.
It appears they tried to balance this by giving additional actions for fewer than 4 players, such that no matter how many characters you have the heroes will get a total of 4 actions per round. While superficially that may seem to "balance" things out, in reality it is not the same. The flexibility and combinations of abilities and Aid actions creates quite a bit more power and synergy. They wildly different amount of health the heroes have depending on the player count attempts to counteract this, but without having played with more than 2 characters I can't comment on whether it balances appropriately.
Even if the hit point differences and the flexibility of multiple players do balance out however, there is still the matter of multiple enemies being engaged with fewer heroes. With only 2 heroes especially, it is very easy for a hero to be overwhelmed with 3 engaged enemies. This makes it more difficult to kill enemies, and more likely a hero will be simply damaged should more enemies spawn. I'm wondering if the location spawn numbers should be lowered by 1 if there are only 2 players or something... Well, maybe it's okay as is, but I think it's something worth keeping an eye on.
Out of the 5 quests in the campaign, I only won one (#2). This gave me a legendary fortune card, but I didn't draw it during the next quest. I later lost the 4th quest, losing myself the fortune card.
Due to one of these losses, I had Snak Kraggle in my campaign pool, which made the 5th quest nigh impossible. Snak kept spawning peeps (as did the peril track) which eventually overwhelmed me. Grr. Never even got to Garrok Gorelord's lair.
The story and connectedness of the quests was okay I guess. They seemed only incidentally linked though: (1) There is a bad guy. You find his lair. Try to kill him. (2) At the end of the quest, he mentions the name of another bad guy. (3) Wash and repeat. Meh.
The reward/penalty system is nice I suppose. The whole purpose of the earlier quests is to try and obtain legendary gear, while at the same time avoiding making the later quests harder by loosing out on the gear and adding enemies and bad dungeon events to the campaign pool. While this makes sense in a way, it can quickly create a large divergence between "things are going well" and "things are going terribly". That is, winning one quest makes the next one easier, while loosing makes the next one harder. Thus, there is a chance that winnings pile up on each other, and losses pile upon losses.
While this makes sense, it also makes later quests less exciting. It seems like you could easily reach the final quest in one of two general states: (1) You lost most of the previous quests, so you have no legendary gear, and there are nasty dungeon cards and nemesis enemies in the decks waiting for you, so you might as well not even try to win the last quest it will be so hard. Or: (2) You won most of the previous quests, so you could have several legendary gear items and other goodies, and the prior nemeses and bad dungeon cards will be nowhere to be found, so the last quest will be a cake walk.
Of course, that's an extreme. But the way the system works, those extremes can be expected to occur more often than random chance would suggest.
In summary, I am very pleased with the game and can't wait for more! I'm going to try out the delve quest next, then I'll redo the campaign with the Warrior Priest and Waywatcher. Even though it appears that replayability will be pretty high, I am still a bit concerned about the relatively few quests getting stale. The number of cards and other components is pretty fair for the price, but still it would have been truly amazing if they had included just one more campaign - just five little cards would have given so much more play!
Oh well. I have very little to complain about, truly.
Edited by JohnGarrison1870