I've played a bunch of standalone games of this, mostly because there was never any time to do the full campaign. And I enjoyed it, it was quite fun even though it did seem broken on occasion.
So I rated it an 8, I would likely suggest it and I would surely not turn down a game.
This past two weeks however we have had a chance to run a campaign, although it is currently not finished and never will be.
Apart from a bunch of things like the rulebook being incredibly fractured, rules often ambiguous, hard to interpret, improperly explained or downright nonexistent, what I really noticed over seven quests is that the small flaws that were only trivial during a single quest makes the game so uneven and broken that even Monopoly seems like a fair challenge with some good tactical depth.
In short, this game is just incredibly broken. Possibly it is because we are too lax when it comes to doing things in the proper order or at the right time during a game round. Possibly I, as overlord, trusted the heroes too much because later on I started paying attention more and questioning when they did stuff that seemed odd. Mostly the things they did was just fine but I did turn up an error every other turn or so. Possibly we are just bad players who really need to shape up our play and be strict about what to do and when to do it. Probably I'm a really terrible OL tactician.
All these things might be true, some of them probably are true. But I don't think they change the outcome of my deduction. This game is flawed in a way that makes it uneven. But I'm not talking about the OL being over powered or heroes making Rambo look like a drunken pacifist. I'm talking about most quests being so incredibly, in our experience, weighed to one side or the other that the kitchen table almost flips over.
For all the quests I've played in total, even outside campaigns. Only on a handfull of occasions have the monsters in the first room survived past the first hero round. I would say that is quite extraordinary but it might just be coincidences, bad planning by OL or other legitimate problem.
In our campaign however I have noticed this on a larger scale so let me take an example.
The first quest after the interlude the heroes got so ridiculously massacred that they hardly even got past the first room and died a total of seven times (four heroes) in three rounds before I strolled out with my lieutenant without them even getting a shot in. I might have put that down to there being a pretty big leap in difficulty after the interlude as the quests before that had been more easily won by the heroes (another thing I don't like is the change from act 1 to 2 monsters all of a sudden).
But the second quest after the interlude was "The Desecrated Tomb" and while I was able to secure a full six fatigue tokens in the first round because the heroes didn't rush and wanted all search tokens, in the second half they slaughtered two out of three Sentinels I had in the second room the first round and then immobilised Alric Farrow for three rounds while standing one square away from him so he couldn't attack. In the fourth round they killed him, took the Dawnblade and ran for it. While it would have been technically possible for me run after with dash and take the sword back if was able to do all the damage in one round, I would then have had to spend an additional two turns doing so and then spend all the rounds I would usually spend in winning the mission while having the heroes on my heels. If I didn't even leave the starting square in four rounds, what are the chances that I could actually kill one of them in one round and then spend at least another six rounds killing the dragon?
No, I stand by my deduction, this game has good potential but is seriously flawed and I completely agree with that it is not so good but I could possibly be talked into it on occasion and therefor my rating shall be 4.
So I rated it an 8, I would likely suggest it and I would surely not turn down a game.
This past two weeks however we have had a chance to run a campaign, although it is currently not finished and never will be.
Apart from a bunch of things like the rulebook being incredibly fractured, rules often ambiguous, hard to interpret, improperly explained or downright nonexistent, what I really noticed over seven quests is that the small flaws that were only trivial during a single quest makes the game so uneven and broken that even Monopoly seems like a fair challenge with some good tactical depth.
In short, this game is just incredibly broken. Possibly it is because we are too lax when it comes to doing things in the proper order or at the right time during a game round. Possibly I, as overlord, trusted the heroes too much because later on I started paying attention more and questioning when they did stuff that seemed odd. Mostly the things they did was just fine but I did turn up an error every other turn or so. Possibly we are just bad players who really need to shape up our play and be strict about what to do and when to do it. Probably I'm a really terrible OL tactician.
All these things might be true, some of them probably are true. But I don't think they change the outcome of my deduction. This game is flawed in a way that makes it uneven. But I'm not talking about the OL being over powered or heroes making Rambo look like a drunken pacifist. I'm talking about most quests being so incredibly, in our experience, weighed to one side or the other that the kitchen table almost flips over.
For all the quests I've played in total, even outside campaigns. Only on a handfull of occasions have the monsters in the first room survived past the first hero round. I would say that is quite extraordinary but it might just be coincidences, bad planning by OL or other legitimate problem.
In our campaign however I have noticed this on a larger scale so let me take an example.
The first quest after the interlude the heroes got so ridiculously massacred that they hardly even got past the first room and died a total of seven times (four heroes) in three rounds before I strolled out with my lieutenant without them even getting a shot in. I might have put that down to there being a pretty big leap in difficulty after the interlude as the quests before that had been more easily won by the heroes (another thing I don't like is the change from act 1 to 2 monsters all of a sudden).
But the second quest after the interlude was "The Desecrated Tomb" and while I was able to secure a full six fatigue tokens in the first round because the heroes didn't rush and wanted all search tokens, in the second half they slaughtered two out of three Sentinels I had in the second room the first round and then immobilised Alric Farrow for three rounds while standing one square away from him so he couldn't attack. In the fourth round they killed him, took the Dawnblade and ran for it. While it would have been technically possible for me run after with dash and take the sword back if was able to do all the damage in one round, I would then have had to spend an additional two turns doing so and then spend all the rounds I would usually spend in winning the mission while having the heroes on my heels. If I didn't even leave the starting square in four rounds, what are the chances that I could actually kill one of them in one round and then spend at least another six rounds killing the dragon?
No, I stand by my deduction, this game has good potential but is seriously flawed and I completely agree with that it is not so good but I could possibly be talked into it on occasion and therefor my rating shall be 4.