Which Characters Did I Start With In Gloomhaven Digital?

So, I decided that to get back into the game, I wanted to start with a couple of what I consider the simpler characters. I don’t think that any of the starting characters are overly complex (you get to some complex ones later) but I wanted good synergy and an ease of play to get back into the game. So which characters did I pick?

The Brute: The Brute is going to be your tank character. He has the ability to be next to another character and draw aggro from that character and take the damage instead. He is also going to have more hit points. It’s not that he can’t hit, but he’s there to more control the area with affects that I’m stacking onto him. He’s got affects like disarm and stun that I’m putting into the modifier deck.

The Scoundrel: To pair with the Brute, I went with the scoundrel. She is a fast character who is about dealing damage by backstabbing people. And when she hits doing that, she can absolutely lay waste to people. Especially if she uses her ability to become invisible and then deal double damage coming out of it. I’m focused on making her as fast as possible and our main damage dealer in the party.

The only issue I’ve run into thus far is keeping the Brute close enough to the Scoundrel. I did need to split the party for one combat and that worked. But for a bigger boss fight, I sent my brute one way to catch up to a target that moves in a loop whereas the Scoundrel could just keep up with the target just fine. It’s fun to see how the different characters play, and this feels like a very balanced party.

Upcoming Streams

Just a reminder on my streaming schedule. It’s not just all my Top 100 Games (of all time).

• Monday night, time varies, is when I am going to keep on playing more of Gloomhaven Digital. But look for other streams to pop-up as well for that. On Monday nights it’ll normally start between 7:45 and 8:15 PM Central time.
• Wednesday at 9 PM central is right now for my Button Shy solo games. I still have a stack of them go go through.
• Friday at 9 PM central my wife and I are streaming a playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3. Join us for the adventure of Nina and Kaerok and see what choices we make.

The best way to know when we go live, though is to subscribe and click that notification bell. I can’t promise, and in fact it’s pretty unlikely, that I’ll have events to click on ahead of time. Though I do want to get better at it. I hope that you can join a stream and hop into the chat. And let me know what games in this list are your favorite or that you want to try.

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Slay the Spire and other games like it

Let’s instead of talking about Slay the Spire, let’s look at my Steam collection, or I will, and I’ll see what other games I should also get into the mix.

What works so well is that Slay the Spire is a quick run for the game. I got in two runs, and if you made it past the video, the second one I won to unlock the bonus ending stuff for next time I play. But what else could give me that sort of speed. And I have two games in my collection that could work as well.

Inscryption

The first is Inscryption. Now this one is weirder for sure, and the first part of the game is great. You play a battle basically then have a weird interaction and repeat. It’s basically a head to head card battling game. It’s the time between the games, because the games are short, that is so weird and dark and creepy. Then you get to go to another area, unlock more things and play more games, but the style has changed up so much that it lost me at that point as to why I wanted to keep playing it.

Gloomhaven

The other is Gloomhaven. Of course it is a Gloomhaven but a scenario in digital Gloomhaven, even controlling two characters isn’t as long. Mainly because I got all the setup taken care of for me by the computer. Which means once I get into the game I can just get going. I am considering streaming Gloomhaven as a Monday stream, but we’ll see.

So what other games are out there good for a short run, that hour or less stream where you can get in a full game or scenario and have a good spot to stop at the end? Let me know in the comments below.

Upcoming Streams

So, firstly, vote for the campaign game that I should play next. I suspect I know which one it will be, but vote to help me know what you want to see.

The plan is to start this game next Wednesday, March 29th. So come join me for the start of whatever adventure is going to be waiting for me. That stream will be at 8 PM Central time.

But before that I will have my Monday stream. Monday it is at 8:30 PM Central Time. So join me then to see what smaller board game I might play. Though, I do have an idea for maybe a second campaign game, and just play through some of those other campaign and smaller campaigns faster. We’ll have to see, I can think of one situation where it is going to be work well if I try, so I might.

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Slay the Spire Kickstarter

So I teased that it’s coming to Kickstarter soon. More that they have put up a Kickstarter page and that it should be coming sometime this fall. But this isn’t the first time that there has been a date set for the Slay the Spire Kickstarter. in 2021 it was first Spring and then Summer of 2021 and clearly that didn’t happen.

Now, I do appreciate that they are trying to have the most polished product going forward. But it’s not a great look to have all of these false starts. And I think it is going to hurt their hype and push. Because they were advertising it before, now when people see advertisements it’ll be a “let’s wait for it to actually launch”. And one thing you really want with a Kickstarter is people to be ready for the moment it launches.

Now, this is going to affect it more, I think, in the board game space than the general Slay the Spire fan space. I saw a board game was coming out, I like Slay the Spire a lot, so I followed the company’s Facebook page. So I was privy to the changes happening, without much detail as to why. But if you just saw and add in 2021 and now see adds in 2022 and that’s it, those people are apt to get more excited again. Plus the release this year of the fan expansion for the video game means that it’s in people’s mind.

But will I back it? Obviously this is just speculation at this point, but I need to see what is going to be exclusive to Kickstarter. And I need to see how the game plays. I think that parts of it will work well, but as a 1 to 1 with the video game, I’m worried that some things will translate poorly. Or that the game will be too fiddly. So I want to see how it handles that. I also think it’s likely to have a solid retail release that might keep me from backing it.

Upcoming Streams

Wednesday, and the link is already up, more Stars of Akarios. I’m at least dipping my toes into Act 1. I still love playing the game and the story, but I might take some time off to just play it myself and then stream non-campaign games for a little bit. But that’s still up in there air and I do still want input.

Then next Monday the plan, yes, it’s always the plan, play another game, probably a roll and write, as always. But I do have coffee roaster which I might try and learn over the weekend. If I can learn that, I think it’ll be a fun game to get to the table. But Hadrian’s Wall, which I forgot about, also needs to get played and I’ve heard that is an amazing roll and write to play solo. Which game should I play solo next Monday?

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Tabletop Simulator (TTS) is a digital gaming system. It is basically an “engine” that can drive any type of board game from simple card games to something as complex as Gloomhaven. To play a game, you have to first get and install the module, but only the person who is hosting the “server” will have to install the module, the other people playing will be able to connect. Then, if the game is scripted it’ll help set-up the game and get you ready to go, if it isn’t, you have to set-up the game. After that you can hop in and start playing the game.

Now, that sounds pretty cool, but I want to talk about scripted versus not scripted because that is an important topic. Scripted games are pretty enjoyable on TTS. It gets you up and running fast, and while there can be some hiccups with how they work, for the most part it isn’t bad. I’ve played Clank, for the first time ever, on TTS and it was easy to pick-up and work with, even with some hiccups in the scripting. I’ve played multiple games of Dice Throne through their official module on TTS and that worked extremely smoothly. On the other hand, we were playing the Forgotten Circles expansion on TTS for Gloomhaven and that was not scripted and set-up was over an hour, some of it was learning the system but some of it is that without scripting there is a ton more work for the set-up. And scripting is often beyond set-up, Dice Throne has a button for the upkeep phase when you start your turn so you don’t have to remember to draw a card and get a CP (combat point).

Game play, I’d say, is generally a little bit slower. Some of that is just the technology. The commands are a bit slower to do as compared to playing in real life as well. Scripted again is faster, but a scenario of Gloomhaven took us, without set-up, around 2.5 hours to get through the whole thing in two nights versus about 1.5 hours if we’d played it in person, or possibly even less than that. Playing Dice Throne, however, was only marginally slower than it would be in real life. I’d say that it would be pretty similar for Clank as well. But it is slower and if something gets messed up, it can take a little while, even with the rewind functionality to fix it. And some of this depends on network speed as well. The processing for everything is kind of jointly handled, so if someone has a slow connection, it can really make the whole thing lag.

There’s another issue with TTS that I want to address. Some of the modules that you can install are fan made and not official. Things like the Gloomhaven one have become officially licensed, but it wasn’t originally. Dice Throne one is official as well. Now, even the unofficial ones can be great to use and will give you an idea about the game, but understand that the company hasn’t signed off on it and technically it is illegal for that to be there, a direct copy of the game. But when companies do use it for a game it’s great. I was able to teach Dice Throne to someone who has been interested in it for a while, but hasn’t had a chance to play my copy. Even for the official ones, I would strongly recommend, if you enjoy the game on TTS to pick it up or at least someone in the group to, so you can continue to support the actual businesses and game designers directly.

With that said, there is something great about it as well. It gives you a chance to test out a game to see if you’d like it before you buy it. And there are some companies that will put out a module with a first scenario or a bit of the game when they launch a Kickstarter or release the game so that people can test it out. So in that way, it can help drive sales to release a limited version, shorter, smaller, however it might be limited, for people to try out and really get an idea of game play. I might be hard pressed to put $100 into a campaign game (I’m really not), but if I could try out an intro scenario that is just made for teaching the game on TTS, that would be great and give me a better idea if I’d like it or not.

So, as a system is it worth getting? I would say, kind of. I think it works well when you want to play a board game as a distance. There are some good modules and a good number of scripted ones. But, it does lack the same feeling as playing across a table from another person. And for me, the little bit of added time, or a lot of added time in the case of Gloomhaven without it being scripted was disappointing. The best way I can describe it is that because the system was made to handle any game, it can’t handle any game extremely efficiently. It works in a pinch, and if you don’t think you’ll get out gaming for a while and you want to game, it’s worth it.

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https://www.vg247.com/2015/12/17/steam-winter-sale-dates-leaked-by-paypal/

This year’s winter sale, according to PayPal’s email, starts Tuesday, December 22.