ISS Vanguard vs Stars of Akarios

Going down to, or not going down to a planet. Let’s talk about how it went going down to a planet this time. And in all fairness we knew that it wasn’t likely that we’d be able to do much. It tells you that much as you are planning. But it is an interesting twist on the game.

Not A Planet

Firstly, it’s clearly a way to block off content. It gives you stuff to do over there. And I’ll be spending energy to get some of those done next time. But it basically says, this content is meant for when you are playing further in the game. So even though you tried to get to it now, you won’t be able to. But it does in a way that is thematic to the game. There is a storyline reason as to why not.

Ship Phase

And I think that is smart. Now it’s interesting because I just wrapped up a ship phase. And I did a lot in the ship phase to show off what can happen. That said, now I get to go back and do it again. I think for some people that is going to be disappointing. The ship phase, which I flew through this last session, doesn’t have as much story. So is it worth it getting through it again.

There are some areas where I feel only like kind of. Can I recruit more crew, I’m not sure. I’ll probably see about doubling up and going back to some places again, if that is allowed. But I have four command tokens, so that is what I’d prefer to do. Maybe the situation room, but for sure research and production to see what we can find. Because completing research or a new production project is kind of the most interesting thing.

This, I think, is where having more players would be interesting for the game. Planetary exploration, sure, it’d be fun to share the story and decision making. But I feel like I know what I want to do and make that part go quicker because of that. On the flip side, when it comes to the ship. I think discussing with more people would make that part feel more important. It is important, but it’d make it feel more important which would lean into that bigger feeling of the game.

Upcoming Streams

Like I said, ISS Vanguard wraps up next week. The plan is to explore some of the other options in our system and see what happens. It’ll be a bit sad to put this down, but it’s now a game that I know I really want to share with other people. 8 PM Central Time on Wednesdays. Though the easiest way to know is by subscribing and clicking that notification bell to know when I put up something new.

And then on Mondays I stream at 8:30 PM normally. That is the goal, anyways, sometimes it shifts a little bit because of podcast recording or editing. I think my plan will be to start playing through My City – Roll and Build. I’m not sure how long the games will take, so it might be a couple of games a stream or just one a stream, we’ll have to see.

And, again, 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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The Game – Sleeping Gods: Dungeons

So of course we are going to talk about the dungeons and how they work in this game. And really, they work mainly the same way that the ship does. With a few changes, of course, so that it feels like it should be an expansion. But it doesn’t make the game more complex than it is without them.

So you lose out on the ship action and the event that happens each day. Now, the event still counts down, comes off the pile, but you don’t do what it says. And when you’re towards the bottom of that event deck, it’s generally a good thing.

But to make up for losing out on the ship action, you get three actions. Those actions can be exploring, moving, or camping. And you don’t need to camp to end the day, but that kind of becomes your ship action type of thing. In that it can help heal up your crew or get rid of fatigue. Though, if you build up too much, you can just always leave the dungeon and wrap up the turn that you were on.

It’s an interesting new thing. There were definitely a number of tokens that were added to the game because of it, but it doesn’t feel like it really increases the complexity of anything.

The Drink

Back to some Scotch last night. This time a Highland Scotch, and a very nice one. I killed off the bottle, which is something that I didn’t talk about but it’s something that you want to do. There’s a mindset that I can have while drinking a good Scotch or Whiskey where I want to savor it, only bring it out on special occasions. But the longer you let it sit, the more the fact it’s been opened, assuming you opened it, the more the flavor will change.

New Content

So, a few things for new content. I talked about it at the start of the stream. I had the opportunity to show off game play for two games that are coming to Kickstarter. One was supposed to be on Tuesday and did launch but they pulled it back because of price point with Aldarra. And the other was playing with the designer of Rogue Angels a scenario of that game on TableTop Simulator. You can find those below.

Aldarra Game Play

Rogue Angels Game Play

And to go with that, I am still, obviously, keeping up with my Sleeping Gods Game Play as well. So look for that again on Wednesday at 8 PM Central. I’m not sure when my next other thing will come out, but I have a game coming to cover as well. But more on that when it gets here.

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What Are Adventure Games?

Adventure games are going to be story driven games where you make choices, explore, and maybe even fight monsters. Both Sleeping Gods and Tainted Grail are adventure games in a fantasy setting. But adventure games don’t need to be fantasy. I game I backed on Gamefound, ISS Vanguard, is going to be an adventure game with an emerging story, exploration, and combat, but that is set in space.

In this case, both adventure games are campaign driven. Technically Sleeping Gods isn’t a campaign, but a game takes 10-20 hours on average to play. It is unlikely that anyone will play it all in one sitting. And if you do, that probably means that things went poorly for you. Tainted Grail is a more traditional campaign game where it is split into chapters. But there are adventure games, like Zona: The Secret of Chernobyl that are one off games that would fall into that category, or another game from Red Raven Games, Near and Far can be played like that as well.

Let’s Meet the Adventure Games Contenders

Sleeping Gods

In Sleeping Gods you are the crew of the Manticore, a ship taken to another world. You were brought here to search for a way to awaken the sleeping gods. To do that, you must find totems. But in a new land, you don’t know where anything is. So that means you explore around, talk to the people of the land, and find clues and quests that might lead you to totems. Some of the inhabitants are peaceful though, so you will need to fight.

Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

Tainted Grail is a grim dark retelling of Arthurian legends, where Arthur took the knights of the round table and his people to the land of Avalon. A land that is almost between two worlds or is being held there. However, Arthur is long dead. And things are falling apart. You need to try and hold back the the wyrdness which is threatening to take over the lands again. But do you know enough to be able to do that? And will the people of the lands listen to you?

Compare and Constrast

Story Books

Both of the games use story books as a way of conveying what is happening. When you explore you flip to a certain spot and read the text. In Sleeping Gods, you might be made to go down a path if you do or don’t have a keyword on a card. In Tainted Grail, your path might be set if you are in a certain chapter or do or don’t have a status yet. Both are very similar, but Tainted Grail comes with an app. You do not need to use the app, but if you do, it narrates everything for you.

Combat

Combat is very different between the two. In Sleeping Gods, you play out the monsters in front of you and then activate your crew. The monsters are adjacent to each other. Since they are, that allows you to hit multiple ones at the same time. You do that by picking a crew member to activate and then flipping a card to see if they hit their target.

Tainted Grail, on the other hand, that one is all about card play for combat. You only face off against one opponent at a time. And this isn’t always a combat encounter, sometimes it can be a diplomacy encounter. Then you try and string cards together to defeat the combatant or to resolve the diplomacy.

In both cases, if the combatant is still alive, they will retaliate. Generally that is damage, but it can be a few different things. In Sleeping Gods, the combatants also have an end of round ability for once all the crew have activated. Tainted Grail, it just activates between every characters action.

Story Progression

Let’s talk about story progression before we get into character progression. In the case of Sleeping Gods, the story is just one giant thing. But really it is a lot of little things. There is no break point in your story where the goals change. You never stop to reset to anything new. You just keep going. The closest thing is when you run out of event cards and it gives you something to read.

Tainted Grail, on the flip side, has chapters. You play through one massive story, but the story is split into fifteen different chapters. So as you progress, you goals might change. You start trying to light the Menhir, statues that drive back the wyrdness, and by the end, well, let’s just say that it changes up a lot.

Character Progression

Both games also give you ways to level up your characters in the way of experience to spend. In Tainted Grail, each character gains their experience separately. In Sleeping Gods it is one big pool. Which makes sense because you are playing as the crew.

Another big difference is that Tainted Grail has you leveling up stats and adding cards once you reach a point. Sleeping Gods is basically just giving a character a new ability for leveling up. Don’t get me wrong, the abilities are good, but it is less stat focused than Tainted Grail. So it is less granular in how you can level characters up.

Skill Checks

Finally, we have skill checks. Both of them use them. In Tainted Grail it is rolling a die and then adding in whatever ability you might have. With Sleeping Gods, it is flipping a fate card and adding that to whomever you brought into the skill check. Both of them are similar with about the same level of randomness.

Head to Head Adventure Games Battle

Since I did a board game battle a little bit differently this time, let’s do some comparisons and see if/which any have an advantage in any of the areas that I highlighted. Plus a few more of theme, mechanics, and ease of play.

Story Books

These are very similar. Extremely similar in fact, but right now Tainted Grail will get the nod because of the fact it has an app. Now, I don’t mind reading and reading out loud the story for the stream. I might be doing that even if it was on an app. But for game play and immersion I think that app gives.

Combat

For combat, the advantage definitely goes to Tainted Grail. Both I find interesting, and both I like better than straight die rolling. But I feel like I can be cleverer when playing Tainted Grail. A downside to that, though is that it often takes longer to get through combat. Sleeping Gods, you just pick who you want to attack and go with it.

Story Progression

This one is tougher because both of them progress so differently. Whereas Tainted Grail has a more directed story in what you are doing, how Ryan Laukat and his wife managed to create an open world story is impressive. The whole game of Sleeping Gods feels like it has an arc just from the little direction. For me, I think this one is a draw.

Character Progression

This one is also interesting, but I do have a clear winner. For me, I prefer the Tainted Grail character progression. The more free form character progression with XP spending and level-up cards, it works for Sleeping Gods. Mainly because you play as the whole team not one character. But Tainted Grail really allows you to customize your character over time. I could take a great combat character and make them great a diplomacy by the end if I wanted to.

Skill Checks

This one, like I said, they are similar, but I prefer Sleeping Gods version. Is flipping a card that less random than rolling a die, no, not really But it feels like more control. And I can bring in characters to help and make it more likely to succeed. But doing so is a cost something. And the more you do it, the more it can cost. Versus the simpler version that is Tainted Grail where the additional numbers are basically always on.

Theme

This isn’t going to be that exciting. It is a tie. I love both of the themes a lot. I don’t always want to play in a dark fantasy world, but sometimes I do. So either of them works really well for me. And I think that the theme, because of the heavy story elements, really is there in the game.

Mechanics

This one is trickier. I think that Sleeping Gods mechanics are easier, but I prefer Tainted Grail‘s mechanics. For both fo the games the most mechanically heavy part of the game is the combat. And I prefer Tainted Grail’s combat. In terms of the rest of how the game works, it’s really close. Both of them are very easy to do. Tainted Grail, overall gives you more flexibility in what you can do. You want to explore, move, explore, move, explore some day, you can. For Sleeping Gods, that’s two and a half rounds.

Ease of Play

Another close one, but I do have one that I prefer. I think that Sleeping Gods is a bit easier to play. Both of these are big table hog games. They take time to set-up, they take time to tear down. But with Sleeping Gods there is less to track between sessions of the game. And the storage system is really nice for saving what there characters have. Granted, that’s just a ziplock bag, but since the characters have less it is nice.

The Winner?

I think that I prefer Tainted Grail but I also have more time in the land of Avalon than in the world of Sleeping Gods. Mechanically it offers more interesting to choices, but I really do like both. And I think I’d play both solo, but I’d play them with different groups of people. My campaign group would enjoy both. But I’d play Sleeping Gods with my wife because Tainted Grail might be a bit too much to track. Sleeping Gods is that little bit simpler but still big and epic adventure game.

Have you played both, which do you prefer? If you haven’t, does one interest you more than the other? Let me know in the comments below.

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It was a long holiday break, mainly because it’s also generally a Kickstarter deadtime so I didn’t do a Kickstarter show, but I’m back to streaming a game. This time it’s Tainted Grail by Awaken Realms. This is a massive and immersive story set in a dark Arthurian legend.

I’m playing as Arev, a resident of Cuanacht Farmhold. I used to be a mercenary, but no more. Now I’m just a simple farmer. When the Menhir in the town started to fade, the best from the town went out to find a way to save us, but they haven’t returned. Now, even though I’m not one of the best, I’m going out to explore in hopes of savings my town and all of Avalon.

Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon is a story driven game where you explore various locations, meet people, and try and survive the wyrdness that is creeping across the lands by keeping Menhir lit. In the first chapter my goal, thus far, is to find out how to light Menhir. I’ve made it two days in, and thus far, I still don’t know.

You can join me again probably next week as I’m going to continue the story again. I plan on streaming every other Thursday around 7:30, but, because I’m really enjoying the game thus far, it might be more often than that.

And, of course, it’s Malts and Meeples, and while there were no Meeples showing up in the episode, I of course had a malt. That is, I had Dragon’s Milk White Stout from New Holland Brewing. This is a very enjoyable beer. It has a good flavor to it, but I do think that compared to regular Dragon’s Milk which is a very big beer, 12% or so, barrel aged beast of a beer, the White Stout, while barrel aged doesn’t quite hold up.

Bottoms up!

In The Lost Expedition, you are trying to traverse of a number of land cards, number depends on difficulty, while keeping your guides alive and not being killed by a venomous spider or fall into a ravine. Your travel is split into two phases, morning and evening. Each player is given a handful of cards, in depends on number of players, but generally four. During the morning phase, you go around playing cards from your hands and placing these cards in numerical order. While the game is cooperative, you can’t talk about the cards you have in your hand, you can however, talk about the cards you are traveling on during the day. This allows for some strategy and planning but doesn’t let a single player drive the game. Then, as a group, you discuss your options and work your way down the path of cards played. You do the same thing in the evening, but instead of the cards being played in numerical order, you traverse them in the order that they are laid down.

These cards are the way that you win the game. However, you always are trying to balance the resources on the cards, so that you don’t use up the health on your guides. When a guide dies, they are gone, and when all of the guides die, you lose the game. The cards give you a few different resources, like shelter, bullets, food, directions, and jungle knowledge, as well as advance you. But these cards are generally a lot worse than they are good. Most of the time you are spending a resource that you want to keep for later in the days travels, but it’s better to do that then to spend the health and exert a guide. But it could be more than that, some of the cards give you an option to just kill off a guide, maybe to advance on the track to the lost city of Z.

The cards have some other interesting mechanics as well. They might add random cards to the end of the half days travel, but they  might also remove a card, allow you to reorder a couple of cards, or even skip over a card. But will they be in the right spot that you need them? Or maybe you end up having to add two cards to the line because you need the good affect the card offers, or because it isn’t optional.

That’s the other fun mechanic in the game. There are three different sets of instructions on the cards. The yellow boxes are always required (with one exception, but for the swap ability, it is never required to be done). There are red boxes on cards, and whenever there are red boxes, there are multiple red boxes. These you pick one to do and you don’t do the others. Which is good, because if you had to do all of them you would die. Finally, there are the blue boxes. Blue boxes are completely optional, so you have to determine if you spend a resource, is it worth it for what you’ll likely be getting back from a blue box?

Finally about the game itself. It is a fun game to look at. The art style on the cards is reminiscent of the Tintin comics and has an older feel to it. The components have also been done really well in this game. Which is nice, because beyond the cards, there isn’t much to this game. A few cardboard pieces to keep track of resources, the bullets, health, and food and a couple of meeples to mark your progress on the daily trekking and your progress in the game.

So, is this a good game or not?

The Lost Expedition is a fairly simple game with nice mechanics behind it. Easy mode for this game is actually quite easy, so I don’t recommend it on easy besides for learning the game. While the concepts are tricky, the game has a nice light weight puzzle like aspect to it. It also allows each person to have to puzzle everything out themselves, there can’t be an alpha gamer running the show for everyone. That is really nice as well, because that can ruin the cooperative experience of some games. And a final thing that I like about the game is the speed that the game plays. Because the rules are light and simple, it’s quick for people to pick up, and while you do have some choices to make in the game, generally you have a good idea of what you are going to do, and there isn’t much downtime between playing cards. Then working your way through the days travels is also a group puzzle activity.

Overall, I think this a good game, and very good game for the mixed level of gamers. It allows, during the travel phase, a chance for the more logic focused players to really be able to puzzle out how to get through the whole track without spending resources too poorly. But at the same time, the playing the cards and the concepts of the game are simple enough that people can pick up quickly. The artwork is also huge in this game, it can also pull people in a whole lot more that might not be big gamers.

Overall Grade: B+

Gamer Grade: C+

Casual Grade: A