More adventure happens for Grigory and Alek as they reach a new location on the map. There is combat, story, and, well, a lot that happens this time. Join me on Malts and Meeples YouTube as I play The Isofarian Guard. See what this big adventure game from Sky Kingdom Games has to offer as we continue the adventure.

The Isofarian Guard – Story vs Grind

The Isofarian Guard has a common problem to a lot of bigger board games. And I talked about it some last week, but let’s talk about the ratio of story to grind. Because, I think it’s an interesting conundrum for a lot of games.

There is a balancing act of how hard you make the game and how much of the game is effort and what level of reward you get. I like my games to be hard, especially cooperative games. If a cooperative game just leads to easy win after win, I lose interest in the game. But sometimes the difficultly is changed to grind in a game.

The Grind

Grind, if not a familiar term, is doing busywork to level up a character, get new gear, something like that. And that is often done at expense of the story of the game. Players can spend all their time grinding out levels without progressing story and just doing the same thing over and over again, which isn’t fun.

Grind, in some games, is a natural part of the game. In The Isofarian Guard there is some grind built into the game. As you travel you fight monsters and level up. And every node, if you are unlucky, you might fight every time.

Player Inflicted Grind

Now we’ve seen how The Isofarian Guard has that grind in the game. And it took me two sessions to get to the next piece of story. Well, that is kind of true. I chose at one point in time to pass on story. And that is a choice that I made to do more story. But, if I want, I pick more side story or I pick more fighting.

Players, from what I know, often play out so many side quests and get into so many combats that they over level for the game. It is a game of getting everything first. Then, once all the leveling up is done, then they explore. So when you level all the way up, then exploring the story is going to be very easy.

Story

So it is part of the game to have this grind. But in The Isofarian Guard, you end up getting things just from the natural grind. I know that the nature grind doesn’t always give you the best things though, which is where players fell into the trap of doing all the grind to level up everything through side quests.

The game itself tries to keep the story going. I expect that I will run across the map. And I expect that with that, I will grind out a number of combats. But, I also think that it’s likely that it won’t be too much of a grind. Going from Fort Strahz to Fort Istra wasn’t too much work. And the next spot they want me to go is not far away either.

So the balance here, I think, comes from the choices that players make. And if you want to over optimize and grind early in the game to get everything, you can. But that is not an issue with the game, then. If you select that, or if I select to do that to build up Fort Istra, it is a choice I make for the game.

Upcoming Streams

I stream on Monday and Wednesday. Wednesday is normally a campaign game. So I expect at least 5 more sessions of The Isofarian Guard. Then when I feel like I have shown off the game well enough, I like to switch over to a new campaign game. And you can be a part of all of that by joining me at 8 PM Central Time.

Monday the stream is later 9 PM Central Time. And I like to play one off games on that streams. So often a roll and write games or a smaller solo game. I generally don’t know what I’ll play, so come join me for a surprise game.

But the best way, if you want to know when I go live or a new video goes up (it’s basically always live), please consider subscribing. You can do that here. And click that notification bell on the channel and you’ll always know when I go live.

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