1 hour ago, mwmcintyre said:

So, watching some unboxing videos and figured out all the different types of terrain. It's fair to say that even if two people get the same types of terrain, they may get different map tiles and so different landmarks - so even the same terrain may not be exactly the same. The back of the box says there are 6 types of terrain available, so here are the ones I've seen:

1)Island

2)Badlands

3)Snowy Mountain

4)Desert

5)Bayou

6)Valley

I'm also assuming from the reference sheets that each type of terrain is solidly assigned to scenarios 1 and 2 or to scenarios 3 and 4 and all of them work with scenario 5

My Island terrain reference says it is for scenarios 1, 2, and 5
My Badlands reference says it is for scenarios 3, 4, and 5

The punchboard the maptiles come on is numbered, so even amongst terrain pairings I assume there’s difference.

My box came with Valley and Bayou.

We played a first scenario with four players. We could win the scenario with one casualty. The scenario was a lot of fun, with important decisions on positioning and teamwork mid-game, and a decent amount of tension towards the end.

Good parts: rule set is streamlined and mostly clear; the interaction between monsters and players becomes interesting if monsters are not defeated immediately; hunting game works as a variant of fighting monsters; deciding the clan chief for the next turn is relevant; multiple functions of campfires; managing four types of damage instead of a standard hit point count (for characters) adds both to fluff and depth of gameplay.

Slightly disappointing (only in our scenario?): visiting landmarks was mostly pointless - to make any use of the benefits, a lot of backtracking was needed. Simply gathering resources and crafting turned out to be more relevant to the overall success. Also, the final part was a straight boss fight for which previous decisions mostly didn't matter at all.

The copy I bought has Island and Bayou. I liked it, I'm just worried about the replayability issue.

Has anyone started a trade your game thread yet?

On 10/26/2018 at 11:20 PM, Duciris said:

And the rest of the game is mostly cooperative. I'm not sure that you can hurt each other, but you don't win or lose based on the survival of other players.

Actually there is at least one card in the game that will give you a "win" if someone else dies.

10 hours ago, Canopus said:

Slightly disappointing (only in our scenario?): visiting landmarks was mostly pointless - to make any use of the benefits, a lot of backtracking was needed.

That wasn't the case with mine. It's such as keys were found that allowed you open chests, etc or look at a different explore card. In cases were it says you can look at a card one or two steps higher, always take it because it's always been a better item or better result.

Two other members of the group bought copies. Between the three of us, we got all 6 terrain, but each of us got the character pack with the assassin. It seems that there are only 6 different packs of 6 characters. So the character mix isn't very random, or mixed.

1 hour ago, sabrjay said:

That wasn't the case with mine. It's such as keys were found that allowed you open chests, etc or look at a different explore card. In cases were it says you can look at a card one or two steps higher, always take it because it's always been a better item or better result.

Yes, but those were referring to places visited earlier. To re-visit them, we would have spent a lot of actions - hardly worthwhile if you trigger the end condition anyway (and still well-prepared).

Finished the 2nd scenario (Valley), two players this time. We were playing cautiously and dragged it over more than the full night deck, but it turned out that we could have just rushed it and likely won in about four days. This scenario apparently has four possible final scenes, so there is some variety for replay.

1 hour ago, Canopus said:

Yes, but those were referring to places visited earlier. To re-visit them, we would have spent a lot of actions - hardly worthwhile if you trigger the end condition anyway (and still well-prepared).

Not necessarily. The last scenario, I found key that opened a chest that was found later. Usually the only backtracking we have done is back to the final landmark because we had already found it early in the game. This last one, the trigger for the end game stage was at the furthest corner possible from the end game location.

6 hours ago, ImperialFarmboy87 said:

The copy I bought has Island and Bayou. I liked it, I'm just worried about the replayability issue.

Has anyone started a trade your game thread yet?

Not that I have seen. I would give it a few weeks. Very few people care enough to immediately trade away if they get something they don't want

5 hours ago, sabrjay said:

Two other members of the group bought copies. Between the three of us, we got all 6 terrain, but each of us got the character pack with the assassin. It seems that there are only 6 different packs of 6 characters. So the character mix isn't very random, or mixed.

You should read the design article they wrote about the process. To make it feasible they had to do sets of components and mix the sets - it probably would have been prohibitive simply from a manufacturing perspective to randomly add characters on an individual card basis.

From what I've seen, the likelihood of getting all six terrains from three copies is monumentally fortunate, I saw one double unboxing where the guy got exactly the same two terrain types in both boxes(although I'm sure there was variation on the exact map tiles he got and probably which scenarios he got). It seems more likely than not that while each mix is unique, a lot of copies will have at least one component set in common with a lot of other boxes. Basically you got really lucky on the terrain and not so lucky on the character packs. However, if the second character pack in each was different, you still ended up with four out of the six character packs, which is not that bad.

There might have also been a design aspect to character abilities that meant putting them in groups avoided issues that completely random assignment could have created. For instance, I noticed that in each of my two character packs, there was one character whose special ability was wholly dependent upon there being other people playing. The personal trainer's ability would not function at all in a solo playthrough and the missionary has two abilities, one of which is also dependent on there being a group instead of solo. They probably wanted to make sure there was a range of special abilities to choose from. Otherwise you might have gotten all combat focused abilities, or all resource based abilities, which would make for very little variation in gameplay based on character selection.

Desert

Bayou

Ecologist

Explorer

Postal Worker

Agent

Painter

Sushi Chef

Head of Surgery

Weight Lifter

Marathon Runner

Soldier

Gardner

Inventor

Very happy with what I got. ?

I got badlands and valley terrains. Looking forward to trying it out tomorrow.

19 hours ago, CaffeineAddict said:

I got badlands and valley terrains. Looking forward to trying it out tomorrow.

Played the first scenario a couple of times this afternoon. Lost the first one to wounds, but did make it to the final quest card and boss fight. Took about an hour and a half.

Second play through with a different character took about 45 minutes, and I survived.

There were a few niggles, like the token icons being quite small, but overall I really enjoyed the game. Lots of options and decisions, and different characters really affect how you play.

I had an exploration card in both games that I never found anything to use it on (a key). I'm assuming there must have been something I never encountered that made it relevant, or maybe it's relevant in one of the other scenarios. We'll see.

So far, seems worth the purchase.

Edit:

Though I did just survive scenario 2 with the construction worker on day 2, in 10 minutes. Seems like this scenario would be harder with more players, but it seemed pretty simple compared to the first.

Edit 2:

Played scenario 2 again, thinking I just got lucky. Nope, finished on day 2 in less than 10 minutes again. Probably wont be returning to this scenario much.

I got Island / Snowy and Dessert / Badlands. Played the first scenario in dessert last night "cry for help" with 3 people, we all survived but it was pretty tight. I like it and want to play more scenarios.

The inventor is crazy. I got him in my box. The game he came out we built a board ridiculously quick. I got Desert and Bayou. I disagree that visiting the landmarks is unnecessary. Most of the time I got a really good upgrade or a key item from doing a landmark side quest in my box. My critique is there was a connected narrative throughout my box but I guess I was expecting the narrative to be stronger or more pronounced. I hope if they do expansions for another round of Discover boxes they spend more time adding more narrative into the boxes. I kinda wanted more landmarks to explore in each map and more cards that you randomly excluded to give more replayability to each scenario.