You can probably guess what the Summoner does, it summons things. Now, that in itself is pretty cool, you get to control a lot of creatures and your cards either summon creatures or you can make them do things. However, it really seemed like it’s a bit tricky and a bit focused. The issue with it, is that until you’re at higher levels, you basically summon small creatures that might get off one round of attacks and then die. So if you don’t set it up correctly, you’re going to have a lot of time where you aren’t as powerful. It helps that summoning creatures though gives you XP.

Some of the reason, though, it might have been tricky at the start is that we had the Sawbones and Quartermaster starting at the same time. So we didn’t have a strong character that was really a tank yet. At the end, some of the animals that were able to be summoned could tank a little bit, but not that much. It did however, save us several times being able to swarm an enemy or having meat shields that protected us from enemy attacks. Again, they tended to be one hit and done, sometimes two hits and done, but soaking up a large attack really helped us stay alive longer.

Once you kind of figure out the strategy for the deck and get some of the stronger summons, it is interesting. You get summons with ranged attacks and summons with pierce. This made those summons very effective at higher levels when monsters might not have many more hit points but they have shields. They really do offer a nice utility, and if you are facing off against weaker monsters, you can sometimes just send a couple of summons off in their own direction, as long as there isn’t a door for them to open.

Overall, I think that this character is fairly complex, not because of complexity of actions, but because of the amount of management that you need to do for this character. And the fact that your summoner needs to be in the mix with their summons to give them additional actions makes it good that the character isn’t too squishy. There’s also the aspect of balancing out the use of cards, because when a summons dies, it burns the card. If you aren’t careful you can run through cards too quickly.

I’m ready personally to play not a support character, and while the summoner definitely is more combat focused, through the summons than a lot of characters, it does still have that feel that it doesn’t do too much for itself. I think if you’re someone who likes battlefield strategy and tactics, it’s going to be a strong character for you to play. You definitely can set-up what happens on the battlefield with where you place your summons and who you have them attack.

Complexity: Medium
Combat: Medium
Support: Medium

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Now, I didn’t play this one, but it was played in our games and was our first mercenary to retire. The Scoundrel is a rogue type of character that moves fast, hits for a good amount of damage and can get extra damage if the conditions are right.

The Scoundrel, like the Tinkerer (and I didn’t mention this in the Tinkerer review), had a lower number of hit points than some of the other characters. Where as the Tinkerer has 12 cards to play around with, the Scoundrel had considerably less with nine cards. This gives it a different feel in a game where your cards are generally what determine if you make it to the end of a scenario or not. Whereas the Tinkerer would end up with a lot of it’s cards in the trash, the Scoundrel’s cards didn’t give out as many experience points, and didn’t get trashed all that often. Those that did get trashed, our player never really had those in his deck with the exception cards that he could use without the card ending up in the trash.

One of the other differences that I saw was that the Scoundrel also had the disadvantage of being in the mix always. So with fewer cards and less health than some, they had to do other things to stay alive. As they got to higher levels, they started to get cards that would let them go invisible, but adding gear quickly was key for the Scoundrel. There other advantage was the amount of damage that they could do, and the speed that they could go at. The other two characters had basically a similar speed, but the Scoundrel had several single digit cards that generally allowed them to go ahead of the bad guys. Two things came form this, they were able to potentially kill a threat that would do damage to them, or it would allow them to hit the person they were next to and then run away.

A cool thing about the Scoundrel was how their damage would increase depending on the situation. There was at least one card that damage would go up for the Scoundrel if the enemy was next to an ally, so it would go from a base 3 damage to a base 5 damage. Then, if the enemy was next to none of it’s allies next to it, it would be an additional 2 damage added to the attack, so the base damage would be 7. Now, it sucked if the base damage was 7 and you got the damage cancelled, but because of how you can build the Scoundrel’s modifier deck, there was almost no chance of that happening or chance of pulling a negative card. While the Scoundrel was in place, I definitely left the Tinkerer more as a healing option versus the damage option it became later, because the Scoundrel was so good at fast damage.

We didn’t end up seeing some of the higher levels for the Scoundrel as they were the first character we had to get retired. I would assume that those cards would have continued to enforce the trend of acting fast and doing extra damage in various situations. I should also point out that the Scoundrel, as compared to some of the other characters we’ve opened, does not have a ton of area attacks or ranged attacks. It’s an  up close and personal fighter who deals their damage that way.

I think one of the things that can be the most fun with the Scoundrel is the speed. If I were to go and play the Scoundrel, that would be why. You get to set the battlefield, you get to hit for a lot of damage and determine who attacks who, because you go before everyone else. The more straight forward nature, seemingly, of the Scoundrel would also make it strong for a player who might not be ready to tackle a character with more moving parts. It’s also a good one for a person who plays more video games than they do board games and might need more time to learn a character. They are going to understand what a Scoundrel is doing if they’ve played rogue characters before.

Complexity: Low
Combat: High
Support: Low

Have you had a chance to play the Scoundrel, if so how did you like it? Do you generally like to play rogue type characters?

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