I played my first game last night. I wasn't expecting this to be as good as 2e (my personal favorite game of all time), but I WAS expecting it to be at least comparable.

In general, it was. However, I had two HUGE issues with my experience (not related to combat):

• Mobility is insanely important yet not well implemented.
• 3 actions per turn (with adventures costing 2 of those 3) means you end up having to focus on "be super efficient" instead of exploring the world and experiencing the scenario for what it is.

I intend to play one or two more games with rules as written (RAW), but I also intend to try this out:

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1. Similar to 2e, movement will be done with all 5 movement dice, unless you are wounded. If you choose to take a move action and have wounds on your hero, you roll 4 movement dice instead. You may not exert to re-roll movement dice for movement purposes. Any bonuses to speed for movement purposes only are ignored. It is 5 or 4 always.
2. In the unfortunate case of rolling no possible moves, you may still choose to move 1 hex in any direction of your choosing.
3. Whenever you are instructed to roll movement dice for any other reason (quests, rewards, exploration, etc) you use your speed stat per RAW.
4. Adventuring costs 1 action instead of 2.

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My reasoning:

Movement between adventure gems, cities, quests, and story events is absolutely crucial to success. Having such a low speed stat means you're likely only rolling 3 dice per turn for most or all of the game. With story events popping up all over the map and quests requiring similarly eccentric movement, 3 movement is simply not enough. What's worse is that it's not uncommon to roll 3 dice and not be able to move (this happened to me 3 times yesterday).

Also, when you adventure and draw a quest that resolves in the other corner of the map, you've effectively drawn a card that might as well read, "lol good luck clearing this quest and powering up and earning skills and shopping and killing the villain." Because honestly, that's what it feels like. I ended my game last night with 3 incomplete quests because they were all on the top side of the map. Act II was about over and I still had 15 gold to spend, only 3 lore tokens, and only 2 skills. While I understand the game can swing for any number of reasons, a huge issue I had was that I simply couldn't move across the map fast enough. Black Market may fix the shopping issue, but it seems insane to have one skill that one hero can have that effectively removes their need to visit cities.

On that same note, making the adventure cost 1 action means that, even if you draw a quest on the other side of the map, you can roll movement dice and still have a chance to trek across the land and complete the quest within 2 turns or so (instead of possibly wasting 4+ turns). FFG made a mistake by designing a Doom Track into the game AND limiting movement heavily from 2e. I'm hoping that removal of the movement limitation will allow you to explore the world more and experience the adventure as it appears was intended.

Keeping explore and quest actions at speed should maintain that aspect of balance. And being able to move 1 hex even if you roll poorly would still allow you to make SOME progress as it could happen that you roll 4/5 bad dice. The reason for removing the exert to re-roll movement dice for movement purposes is because you now can move 1 hex even if you roll poorly.

If anyone decides to try this out before I do, please report back your thoughts. I don't imagine these adjustments would break the game in any way. It's already setup such that you never really feel super powerful like you did in 2e.

Also, because I'm curious, does anyone know why FFG decided to implement a mandatory Doom Track AND limit movement? It really did feel like there was a LOT to experience that I simply didn't have time for due to major limitations on map traversal.

I think the point of the game now is around balancing your choices, do you decide travel a lot to quest or go for combat style quests instead. If you decide to go for quests you can certainly gain extra speed / dice from shop items and skills, plus you can exert so that is one option, and the game now makes you think about using roads a bit more, no bad thing as it should be quicker to travel by road largely than through the mountains and forests. You can always move one hex anyway. Dont worry about doing every quest that comes out, just get some on the board and optimise those closer together.

Personally i think the game has become more strategic, find best routes and combinations to get the most from your turns. The doom track tightens the game and makes your choices more important rather than having the feeling that you will get there in the end anyway. However if you simply want to explore the world in your own time and experience the story then there is no reason not to tweak the rules to suit you.

The adventuring costing 1 action rather 2 is certainly a simple and quick way of increasing what you can do in the time available and could easily be implemented as an 'easier' game version when first playing or finding a scenario too hard. I would try this amendment on its own without changing all the movement dice numbers and just see how that pans out first.

After a few games (we're hardly experts, we know) we've played a couple times with adventures costing 1 action, but you can only adventure once per turn. So far we like that a lot.

The game is well balanced as it is, no need to slap on any random house rules. Yes, you have to optimize actions and plan your route carefully

Hi all,

A movement/quest question - does the Horse, which adds 2 movement dice, also add those dice when you roll the dice for a quest card?

Thanks,

Old Man

Yes, it does

I do agree that I feel rushed. But I think that's the point. You're losing quite a lot of game if you sort it this way, as well as making aventures much easier.

That said adventure cards that force you to traverse the map makes it so that combat feels like the king of all gems.