Since I have only played on TTS (TableTopSimulator), I am not going to do a full breakdown of how the game works. Plus, it’s a prototype so things are subject to change, though the module on TTS is very solid. And the rules, hopefully shared immediately at launch are pretty good. So instead I’m going to jump into what did and didn’t work. I do talk about that some in a video below, though.

Edgeguard Preview Video

What Didn’t Work?

This is going to be a massive box game. Now that’s not a massive negative for me. Granted, I’d likely need to find more space on my Kallax by clearing out even more games. But when I see a big campaign game, I fully expect that it is going to take up a lot of space. For some people, who maybe don’t have a dedicated gaming space, that might make this harder to get.

Also, this is going to be a game where there is a fair amount of housekeeping to it. Set-up of finding the tiles will take time, finding the enemy tokens, minis and cards, and pulling out everything for your character. I am waiting on the Kickstarter to see how much of a big deal I think that will be. Mainly because I hope they are thinking about storage and how to make it as fast to the table as possible. Because, compared to other dungeon crawl games, this one can get you into and through a scenario pretty quickly.

Neither of these things are a big red flag for me though. In fact, both are issues that I expect for most campaign games. Especially if a game is going to have minis. And I don’t know, maybe there will be a standee version, but I suspect that most people would go with minis anyways.

What Works?

The Characters

Let’s start with the characters, the characters are very generic, and now that sounds like a negative. I actually maybe should mention that in there, but I’ll say it here now, they could be more exciting. But how the characters play, and I’ve only messed around with the different ones while I’ve played true solo, is different. The warrior does what they are supposed, same with the caster, the healer, the rogue and the ranger. Everyone plays in their archetype.

And to make that work, each class is going to have their own cards that build out your hand. What I really like about the cards is that they are powerful. For a caster, for example, you play a card that uses resources to blast everyone in a row, column, or diagonal from where you are. That is a great ability, but it costs when you do that, it costs to get it back and it costs to use it again. That is very fun, and when you level up, you unlock new card abilities to add to your hand. And you have to pass on others, though you can pay to swap them in.

The last with with the characters that is fun is that you can multiclass. In a lot of dungeon crawl games, or RPG like board games, you pick and class and go with it. In Edgeguard, you can change up the class you are playing. Granted, they can never overtake your main class, but it allows you to customize your character more so. The only other one I can think of off the top of my head is a light boss battler or dungeon crawler in Adventure Tactics. This one gives you more than that seems to.

The Enemies

I also really like how simple the enemies are to operate. There are campaign games where it takes a lot of work to get the enemies up and running. And while you do need to find the minis, place out tokens, find the cards for the enemies, their actual turns are pretty simple. And the enemy AI doesn’t change that much, except for when it does.

The enemies, like the players, have a chance to get a critical success. For the players that just means more damage, but for the enemies, that changes their behavior. The Shadow, Assassin, for example, if you get it’s third critical hit option has a shot to immediately take a character down to one hit point. Granted, that takes a little bit of luck. But if you are being swarmed by a number of bad guys and get hit by that, you are in big trouble.

Combat

As for combat itself, I appreciated how fast it went. When I play solo, some games can bog down in combat and set-up. Now, the game is going to take a chunk of time to set-up. And I’ll miss being able to click a button on TTS and have it do that for me. But at the same time, the combat itself is nice and straightforward. The game is simple to play, but has depth in the decision making space it gives you. So a nice sweet spot for me.

Mainly, going back to the cards, I appreciate how good the decisions are for what you do with the cards. The resources that you need to spend to do a more powerful spell or attack off of a card, that is a good choice. I know when I play RPG’s on the computer, I try not to be the person who just hordes every ability or potion just in case there’s a time I need it more. This game could run into that issue, but only because of players, with the cards that you play. But you can get them back, it just costs. So you don’t use them randomly, but also, you don’t want to horde them.

Who Is It For?

Edgeguard is going to be a game for people who love their campaign games. If that is what you play, and you have a dedicated space for it, it’d be a nice one to keep on the table for a while. I think that most people know if they are that, especially if they are looking to back a game on crowdfunding.

From my time with the game, and remember it’s been on TTS, I think that Edgeguard is probably more accessible than some dungeon crawlers. Yes, there is a fair amount going on with all the different stats that make it feel like more, but overall it was easy to follow what was going on. For that reason another group it’d be good for is the person introducing new people to dungeon crawlers. There will be some RPG elements that take a bit to learn, but the core dungeon crawl game play should be easy to pick-up.

My Thoughts On Edgeguard

I always like to finish up a little bit with my opinion. When I do what I don’t like and what I do like, I try and give detailed reasons for that or explain more of it. My thoughts, on the other hand, are going to be more of my opinion.

Edgeguard is hitting a pretty crowded market, and a crowd of games that are on my shelf. Now, that isn’t a bad thing, because I know I love the campaign genre of board games. And I know that I get to playing them. Whether it’s on Malts and Meeples YouTube Channel or with friends.

What drew me to Edgeguard is the epic look at that it had. But that isn’t always going to be enough to keep me looking at it. What is going to keep me checking this one out on Kickstarter is the simplicity of the game in the dungeon crawl. I know what groups I play campaigns with, and a little bit simpler one will be better for some groups. And even for groups who might not play campaign games with me normally.

So is it one for you? Well, if the card play sounds interesting and you are looking for your next big epic adventure, join me in checking out Edgeguard on Kickstarter.

Send an Email
Message me on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here
Support us on Patreon here

The the first thing I’m going to to talk about is the size of the party. This means, how many players do you want around the table. Assuming everyone is controlling one character, which they should be, is there an ideal number?

Wizards of the Coast in their D&D books would suggest that 4 is a pretty strong number. It allows you to have the balanced party of a magic user, a healer, a tank, and a rogue-type character. That keeps you bases fairly covered for what you need in a game to do well against a lot of what a DM might throw at you.

But do you need to have four players, can’t you go above four? Critical Role starts with eight players, if I remember correctly. And they consistently have a fairly high number of players, possibly seven most of the time, it’s been a long while since I watched. So you can certainly play with a larger number. You can also play with a lower number. I ran Dungeons and Flagons with 3 players for a long time, and often without that traditional combination.

The there are two things you need to know as a DM when you do that.

First, the math for encounters will change. Basically, the more people you have, the monsters you can throw at them, the less people you have, the less monsters you can throw at them. In the Dungeon Master’s Guide, they tell you how that math works. However, I recommend not doing the math yourself, you’re going to be doing enough math in the encounter anyways. Instead there’s this very handy Encounter Calculator that I found from http://dhmholley.co.uk. This is going to do the math for you so that you can see the XP budget that you could be using for different types of encounters. I believe that D&D Beyond has an encounter creator as well, and if you have a subscription for that, it would be great to use that.

The other thing, and this is more with the larger groups, but with larger groups as a DM, you need to keep everyone involved. It’s easy to simply pull a single person’s story and make it the biggest focal point and focus on that person who will interact with you the most. But you need to keep everyone involved and keep things moving at the table. One thing you’ll probably have to do is ask someone who hasn’t spoken up in a little bit, specifically, what they want to do, or what they think of a situation. Sometimes you’ll need to pull out that interaction. And that suggestion isn’t just for the DM, sometimes as a player you will have to do that to another player as well. But there will also be some people who, in combat, take up considerably more time than everyone else, so it feels like the focus is really on them. I would suggest implementing a rule (made to be used sometimes), where players have to have an action ready when you come around and if they don’t, they have a signature action that they can use without having to think about it. The reason I say this rule is made to be broken, because sometimes you’ll have a player who wants to target a certain bad guy or wonder about a situation, but they should still have a plan and something to fall back on.

With smaller groups, you can really focus in on each players story and give them all the spotlight from time to time. You can certainly run into the issue of focusing on one players story too much, but with less people, it’s easier to move around and engage everyone. The tricky thing with a smaller party is creating encounters. You might have a barbarian who is extremely adept at killing everything, so you might throw in something that is going to be able to hold up to him, but now is that going to just murder the wizard? Or maybe it’s resistant to magic because the wizard has been mind controlling and polymorphing everything, now does that mean you ruined the druids fun who casts smaller spells? I personally have kind of rotated combats so that sometimes the magic users have the advantage in the battle, and sometime the melee combatants do.

So, what is the right number? I don’t think there is a right number, games can work well at higher numbers and lower numbers. Personally, I like running for a smaller group, 3-4 seems ideal to me. But for you, that might be a large group and having that dynamic is what you want. If you are just starting, I’d suggest starting with a smaller group and then working up to a larger group.

Do you have a preferred number of players to run a D&D game for? Or, as a player, do you have a preferred number of other players to play with?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Follow us on Twitter at @NerdologistCast
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

The Tinkerer

This was my first character in the game. When you start the game, you have six core classes that you can choose from, but you don’t know much detail about them other than their class name. To me the Tinkerer sounded interesting because a mechanically inclined character was different than your the normal fantasy tropes that you see. It wasn’t the paladin/cleric, it wasn’t a basic fighter or a rogue, it was something different.

I figured there was a chance that the Tinkerer would be more of a support character, giving aid to allies, but it turned out to be a character that you could play a lot of different ways. The tinkerer did have a lot of gadgets that they could play around with and had a ton of fun things, especially as you leveled up higher and unlocked more cards. Early on the character was based a lot around healing and being able to protect your allies with your cards, however, that meant that you were in the thick of things. One of the coolest things that you could do was create a contraption that had it’s own turn and you could send it around to soak up damage. It made the character fairly tactical and you generally went pretty slowly.

As you got to higher levels, you unlocked more cards and faster cards. These cards also allowed for a lot more damage. They were generally one hit damage cards and then the card was gone, but when you hit, you hit hard. You also could get contraptions that would deal damage for you instead of just soaking up damage, so that made it fun to do damage just with my contraption. However, it was still mainly to soak up damage.

I mentioned it briefly in the previous paragraph, but the Tinkerer uses up a lot of cards. In Gloomhaven when you use a card it either goes to the discard pile where you most likely will get it back, or the card gets trashed. The Tinkerer has a large hand limit, 12 cards, because so many of their cards get trashed when played. When I say a lot of them, I mean most of them. I think in my end deck of 12 cards, I ended at level six, I had maybe one card that didn’t have a way to trash the card on it. That might seem less than ideal, but generally I was able to hang on until the end of the mission. Along with these cards getting trashed, they also gave you experience points, so as compared to the other characters, I was always able to level up faster which meant I got to some of the less healing focused cards faster.

For me, the Tinkerer was about the epic moments as I played him later on. It helped that my mission for retirement was about being an epic mercenary that people would remember. At higher levels, because I was using cards and putting them in the trash so often, I had to make sure that every shot counted. To give you and idea, there was one mission where we had a big boss that we needed to defeat. The boss had 36 HP, 12 per every adventurer, and I was down to my last four cards. I could have drawn out my part of the scenario by just doing basic movement and basic attacks because I didn’t have many cards left. It would be better to be alive at the end, right? Nope, not really, so instead of maybe helping a little bit against the final boss, I went for it. I trashed to cards, but one of them dealt a base damage of six, and the other dealt a base damage of five. Then I gave myself advantage, flipping two cards instead of one and taking the higher, and I ended up doing 17 points of damage in a single turn. Turns out that was smart, since I became exhausted after the next turn using up my final two cards, but that damage was enough to help the other players be able to defeat the boss.

Those are the type of epic moments that you can have with the Tinkerer. Now, I built him specifically that way. It’s also possible, if it’s your playing style to hang back and not do much of anything to engage in combat. I liked the character as a powerful character that could have it’s moments in combat and that it was still the healer even later in the game when I wasn’t focused on it. I would say that for the starting three characters that we’ve seen in our game thus far, the Tinkerer and another one that I’ll be writing about soon were the most diverse in how you could play them and had some of the cooler mechanics or if not cooler mechanics, the more diversity in playing and different interactions than just straight combat.

Complexity: Medium
Combat: Medium
Support: High

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Follow us on Twitter at @NerdologistCast
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.