My friend and I are arguing, he's saying that you should be able to decide to not defend a challenge and just suffer the consequences. I.E. if he doesn't defend he can still keep a character standing, but just lose the challenge and have the challenger win unopposed, not the best strategy but a strategy he seems to think he can use none the less. Can anyone help me out?
Do you HAVE to declare defenders?
Not only is it allowed, beginner players often make the mistake of over-defending.
There are a lot of times when you are letting an unopposed challenge through just so that you can make a powerful offensive yourself.
The type of challenge, claim value, number of power tokens accumulated, special abilities (especially those that trigger when you WIN a challenge as the attacker), etc they all factor into the equation of whether you want to let a challenge through or not.
Oh wow, I had no idea, he's gloating like mad right now. Thanks for explaining.
Yeah...3 years ago I was just such a player:
defending a power challenge in round 1 joust after successfully blocking the other two, when I could have let the power challenge through and taken it back with the still standing would-have-been-knelt-defender on my turn as the attacker (RE: he had no power for me to take on round 1 in the first case).
We all learn from our mistakes.
If I'm attacking first with a claim 1 plot card, and my opponent has a claim 2, I'll be pretty happy if I can convince him to use up all his characters as defenders, even if I don't win a single challenge. (So long as he doesn't trigger too many nasty effects off of it.)
I still sometimes make the mistake of defending power challenges when I shouldn't.
It's also for reasons like this that characters that don't kneel to attack and/or defend, along with various other standing effects, can be excellent.
My biggest problem is forgetting when Loyalty Money Can Buy has been played, so I either over-commit (either on offense or defense) to a challenge with 0 claim.
In Soviet game of thrones the defenders declare themselves!
In the early days of my play group we played that Deadly worked on defending challenges, so every game was a bloodbath and was like 4 hours long
jack merridew said:
In the early days of my play group we played that Deadly worked on defending challenges, so every game was a bloodbath and was like 4 hours long
I definitely played that way my first game. I was playing Stark, so I had Deadly to spare; everything was dying all the **** time.