Hastur

You aren't losing the boon, you are just scouting it and putting it on the bottom of the location. Now you know it exists and you focus your efforts for it. When the time comes that the greatest Boon you have been looking for gets scouted with crusade, all you have to do is not close the location and go through the deck. Or find a way to shuffle the deck, like evading a monster... You'll have time since crusade has been saving you blessings anyway as you find a potion of glibness for the 300th time. Meanwhile.... Crusade gets to be ridiculous useful the other 99 times you don't find that great boon. I completely agree... unless the next draw is the villain. Then you've banished the deathsbane x-bow. Yes, Seelah is a statistical boon for closing locations. Fair enough and the 'science' proves it. However, 'fun' isn't always 'science.' I know some folks like to talk about the cold hard numbers, but if there were any one character everyone must play in order to succeed, the designers at Paizo did a poor job crafting their game. If the all knowing designers at Obsidian tweaked Paizo's game in order to make it so, then they've done a grave disservice to the intellectual property. Sure, the so called 'science' might indicate a logical path, the illogical human, which is every person on the earth, might not always take it. Strong letter to follow. I will point out, in closing, that I'm not the Pathfinder card game guru in the room, but I've been enjoying games for a long long time and I know what's fun. The strategy that ends up in victory most often isn't always the one that's most fun. ...Or, to put it another way, I might not always fight for the winning side, but I've never fought for the wrong side.

I've just gotten into the second pack with my party of six. My first party was with four characters. I still haven't played with the monk. So, there will almost certainly be things that I don't understand. After all, I needed the app to show me things that I was doing wrong with the card game. Then again, I only recently acquired the card game also. As an aside, imagine going through Perils, Offerings, and the beginning of Skinsaw rebuilding every deck with only basic cards and the cards we'd gotten as random. Add on to that experience the fact that I insisted that my group play with every character from the basic set and the character add on pack. It's a wonder they haven't killed me yet. Anyhow, my observation having played only as far as the app lets me play, but at least through legendary, is that Ezren is a killing machine. Someone mentioned boon acquisition above, which makes sense, but I've actually found that I tend to put Ezren in tough spots. This might be playing him wrong, although I will say that any hiccups haven't come from Ezren in the first place, but he's the most reliable character for putting the hammer on bad guys. He virtually always has an offensive spell and can get once quickly if he doesn't. From the beginning of Offerings, he's my go to guy for bad places. The one and only exception is the that undead chick who needs a divine check to completely defeat. Other than that, I look for the hardest location in terms of combat checks, stick Ezren in there, and use him to beat the crap out of bad guys. Granted, I'm forced to eschew allies like acolytes in order to take folks who allow me an extra exploration, which might statistically disadvantage me compared to some other players. Frankly, while I like Seelah, I just find her kind of boring. But it doesn't matter whether or not I'm playing the other characters wrong, I'm certainly playing Ezren right, because in the party that has Ezren, he closes locations fast and hammers mobs with a huge amount of damage without extra support. Then again, before I act like I know what I'm talkin' 'bout, in the card game, I mistakenly thought that only one person could use any card type in any situation. Imagine how much easier it was when I realized that everyone could use a blessing in the same battle assuming everyone had access to one! Hot damn, that's good stuff. Ultimately, it doesn't matter which character is best. As long as you can finish with the characters you enjoy playing, it's all good. As far as Merisiel, I have to say that even a noob bastard like me knew to use her in that one place that summons a bandit henchman at the start of every turn. A free evade is pretty damned awesome.

I'm not typically a play on my phone type of guy. However I was in a position today where I couldn't use my tablet and the only thing I could do other than twiddle my thumbs was to play this game on my phone. There were deficiencies I would say with playing it on my phone compared to the tablet but those were related to the the phone rather than the game itself which I thought was actually quite well done. I was hiking and I won't pretend that it was easy to play, but it's nevertheless astounding that I could be out on a hike in the early afternoon Sun on rough terrain and, admittedly with some difficulty, almost finish the scenario. In fact, if other things hadn't come up, I would have finished it easily as I already about ten turns in with a party of six and half closed locations. No, the phone would never be my first choice and probably not a choice at all, but the fact that it's even a possibility is a surprise for me. When I was a kid, stuff like this was science fiction. Literally. Great job on that and, ya never know, I might end up killing som more time with Pathfinder on my phone again. Time being what it is, I probably have to decide whether I like the game more than the boards and, as cool as the people are here, the game wins. So, to save me.some.time, pretend that I wrote a multiple page glowing review of the product!

I'm only playing with my party of four. If that disqualifies me, then you might want to ignore my input. Hell, might want to anyway. I've done eight scenarios on legendary, and those were all with the same party, so it's not like I started a new party and had it go all the way through on legendary. I'm just a run of the mill player, so I would think that I represent more the player who likes to keep things fresh rather than one who likes to prove his Pathfinder Prowess and the Adeptness of his Arcane Acumen. I did all of Perils through legendary. I've done all but one of the second pack on legendary, and I've done some from the first pack. The upshot is that I've done 8 out of the 12 possible legendary runs so far. The short version of my assessment is that legendary is fun without being a complete chore. I still enjoy playing the scenario. I'm not just doing them for bragging rights. Rather, I find the legendary difficulty is good for when I want more of a challenge without taking away from my experience playing normally. Sometimes I want hard and sometimes I don't. So, being a more casual gamer than some here, I would suggest one thing is that I don't tend to pay that much attention. What I mean by that, and this is intentionally not reading the other posts so I can give my unvarnished opinion as one of those lame folks who doesn't want to Lem solo on legendary complete with video and an "I used Lem and made Lemonade" t-shirts. So, Driving rain, which I only cite now because I turned on the game and started the last legendary 2nd AP I need to do to see what came up. Okay, everything is harder by two. Fair enough. I don't even pay attention to whatever the difficult check is on the card anymore specifically because I've been playing hte legendary scenarios and everything just seems harder. So, the way this works in my mind while I'm playing (Since I'm clearly not going game theory on things) is that this time around the checks seem tougher. Next time, it could be the one where I have to bury a card when I get a boon. There's one that makes me bury one of my discards. The bury a boon thing isn't so bad, but it can suck. The checks harder by two is more of a pain as is the bury a discard. One thing I noticed is that Ezren can use his Sihedron Medalion and recharge it and thus escape the consequence, but otherwise that bury rather than discard can really nickle and dime you to death. The real tough one is the limited movement thing. Usually, I only look to see what the location has in it, special qualities, and how it's closed before I place, but legendary makes me at least consider which locations are adjacent to one another. Don't know if this input helps, but it does reflect at the very least how this gamer sees heroic and legendary versions.

How worst stupidity stories? I've had two people die on me. Harsk once and Merisiel once. Neither of them need have died, but at least I can say about Harsk I was disgruntled and acted hastily. It's a terrible excuse to lose someone, but at least there's some underlying reason. Merisiel I just wasn't paying attention, which in my mind is far worse. Anyhow, permadeath isn't on right now, so they weren't permanently dead. I haven't had a tremendous amount of time to play, but I've played the app enough that there just isn't any good reason to lose folks. Now, I will say this, in the card game, I never lose track of how many cards any of us have, mine or the other players because OCD takes over and I count everyone's deck all the time. In the app, even though you just have to look, for some reason I don't habitually keep track. The happy ending is, after losing Merisiel in the, whatever, crow one I think. It's the one with the long tongued undead dude. Well, after losing her and the scenario, I replayed and closed three locations in the first three turns. It was all gravy after that. Hey, I'm not the Pathfinder Paragon, more like Steve Sixpack, so I'll take whatever best luck scenarios I can get. I won't have cause to brag about any of my exploits, you can be sure.

That's more of a potential bug than the MAN sticking it to us with their skewed die rolls. Yeah, like we believe you suits when you tell us there's no shady business going on! :D I notice some weird glitches from time to time. Nothing bad enough to get me to bother posting about it so far. Some of them I'm sure were just little rules things that escaped me, although a couple were clearly glitches. I figure the same guy who skewed the dice rolls also decided to throw in tiny glitches every now and then just in case my luck was getting the better of the crooked RNG.

Yeah, Trashcondor, I have that one on Merisiel in my current party, but I didn't spend gold. I think it was a random roll or maybe a charm spell. Still, I think one of the random items you can get in those chests is deathbane, which would be really cool! Funny story: in my physical game, I was confused and so all of my characters only have the basic items and what they get as scenario rewards. I have deathbane on Ezren in that scenario and I thought the only way to give it to another character was to literally start off in the same location or meet up later when he had it and hand it off. Ironically, the game is much easier following the actual rules. lol ...But one or two items really tempt me to spend the gold, for sure!

I don't think they skewed the dice, but I do think that boss can be a pain. Not as bad as the undead chick Lesha Foxglove, I will own. I detest her. Basically, she is impervious to most folks without the extreme use of blessings and other resources and even then you will virtually never have the magic trait in your roll. I have ONCE had the magic trait in my roll, and that was with Kyra. Still, while I have railed against bad rolls at the time, I know they're simply part of any game. Still torques me when I get a bunch of bum rolls in a row, though.

I'm going to be honest, but I don't intend to be dismissive or nasty, merely candid. I detest apple. Not so much the products which have often been so forward thinking as to be almost prophetic, but because of the applebots who look down their noses at Android and anything non-apple. I don't like feeling like I have to grind for stuff. I'm completely done with my first party through the 2nd add-on deck and about halfway done with the heroic and legendary settings, but I'm only doing that because I want to do it. It's still fun and, when it ceases being fun, I imagine the completenik in me will throw in the towel and I'll stop. So, with that in mind, and not putting anyone else down, for me the 25 buck price for all the characters and the scenarios they already have released is trivial. I figure there are some folks who would have gladly plopped down a few hundred and some folks who feel the pain of spending the twenty odd bills. Of course, I wonder how folks who have a hard time with the cost of the bundle could have afforded the tablet to play the game, but I also know that life is funny in that you never know how things are for anyone and it's not good to make assumptions. I have accumulated about 5k in gold and I'm figuring I'll save until I have 10k or so simply because I'm accumulating gold pretty quickly, I still have yet to start my next run, and while I'm doing all this, as I start to ration my play time after playing more, there will be more releases. I might throw in the towel and use my gold more quickly, or I might decidet to wait even longer, but 10k sounds reasonable at this point. With that in mind, I would have to say that real expenditures make it a lot easier to horde gold and not feel like I have to grind. Like Convicsik says up above, I want people to put some more money into the enterprise that will pave the way for more development, but I'm not going to begrudge gold farming. Obviously, there must be some merit to the free to play idea or developers would have abandoned it a long time ago.

My initial party for the app is Ezren, Kyra, Merisiel, and Harsk. They basically made Merisiel and Harsk as an on the nose team from the start. Their abilities are absolutely synergistic. My only regret is that maybe my arcane caster should have been Seoni for the charisma, but we've steamrolled everything. There are only a couple of scenarios on the hardest setting that have been a pain, and one of them is the one with the Foxglove chick or whatever her name is. The irony is that I can deal with the many charisma checks okay if I plan it right, but that undead scenario with the haunts and the undead chick who basically needs a divine check really makes things tough. In my opinion, Ezren is far superior to Seoni overall, but Seoni is the epitomi of a glass cannon. She packs a lot of hurt, but Ezren is tremendously more versatile and after he gets a decent number of offensive spells he almost always has a couple on hand. By far, Ezren kills the most bad guys in my runs. Of course, I'd like to see how some of the melee heavy hitters like the barbarian and the fighter do. I'm not a big monk fan thematically, so I'm prejudiced against Sajan, but he can dish out a tremendous amount of hurt in a single shot, but I suspect that Ezren is simply going to be the best offensive option in the game since he Is almost assured to recharge his offensive spells and can almost always get more of them simply by casting and using his expanded spell book. His one draw back, and it's significant, is that he has no blessings for exploration, so he is forced to eschew more offensive supporting allies in order to have extra options for exploration. Kyra is clearly a healing machine. Lem is second best, in my opinion, but while he can recycle cure deftly, it requires more steps and therefore more turn. I like the little guy, though, so my next run will probably be a six party run with Lem, Valeros, Seelah, Seoni, Lini, and Amiri. I know there will be some overlap, but I think that will work out quite nicely, nonetheless. Overlap doesn't hurt so much when there are so many locations that call on the same stat anyway.

lol Sounds like something I would do. I have a similar story about a mistaken temporary closure that ended up working out okay in the end. That's the problem with playing the electronic version. If you're playing with your group, someone says, "what the hell are you doing? We still have an open location!" Gotta love the convenience of the app, however. Not dealing with cards is definitely one of the upsides of the app. Not having your buds sharing your joy and suffering would be the downside.

I question the usefulness of bypassing regular play altogether. For a minimal investment, you can permanently have the hardest mode available for all of your character permutations. You just have to show your chops. It's not unreasonably onerous for the player. This is the sort of thinking that will eventually lead to a small, rarified group of vocal players in this forum to declare that the legendary setting isn't hard enough and Obsidian needs to come out with five difficulty settings and allow new players to select any one from the very beginning. Then, when a whole slew of hapless bastards go in thinking that they don't need to get a feel for the game and get stomped, then they can come in and complain also. There are already options in the game. Want to impose a rule saying only moves to adjacent locations? Take that option. Only move characters to the adjacent location. Want to impose a rule of only 25 blessings in the deck? Forfeit if you get 25 in and haven't won. Want to say that goblins deal one point of fire damage? Discard an extra card to reflect each point at the end of the turn. Folks who love sandbox games always want more options as if perfect freedom in a game is good. Games are more about the boundaries in the first place. Options are created by the underlying mechanics and some of us are playing the game because we love the mechanics in the first place. I don't begrudge harder settings. I've been going through them myself for the fun of it, but expecting the players to finish one level with at least one party before going to the next difficulty does not appear to be unreasonable on its face. In fact, upon a more lengthy consideration, I still don't think it's unreasonable.

I think of it like chess. Once you roll, your finger is off the piece and it's a move. Once you banish a card, it's banished, once you discard, you've discarded. However, saying that you're going to temporarily close a location by banishing a card, deciding not to close the location in such a manner BEFORE you actually banish the card, and then allowing you to say to your buddies, "no, I'm not going to banish a card. I'll take my chances rolling my wisdom" is not unreasonable nor is it cheating. I completely agree about the cheating idea. The idea is to simulate the card game, not allow muligans in the app where they don't exist in the rules.

I don't mind them letting players start off on harder settings if they want, but there are some players who will automatically set the settings higher sight unseen because they don't want to play on 'easy.' Then, if we're honest about it, some of them, being unfamiliar with the game, will get their asses handed to them and complain about the difficulty or, even worse, simply stop playing because they find it too hard. The basic game following the basic essential rules of the physical game is the most important thing. If you love the physical game, them you should be able to trounce the normal mode in record time and unlock those harder settings anyway. There's not a truly signifiant upside to changing the set-up and, moreover, the convention of going through easier modes to unlock harder modes is well established and works pretty well. Like the dude said up above, you can unlock the harder settings with any party and then play from there on out with whatever party, new or experienced, you desire.

The game truly is excellent. I have some small beefs, but overall I've enjoyed the hell out of it. I like that my account is linked so I have access to everything on my phone and my tablet, although it doesn't track my current party so I have to play each device independently. Of course, that's a pretty meager complaint as far as I'm concerned. The artwork is beautiful and I think they really captured the feel of the cards. ​The dialogue and narrative is mostly goofy, but I still like it. I make my group wait while we read the flavor text on the cards out loud the first time we use them in the physical game, so having more story is good. Incidently, I think they're planning to shiv me over that. Music is good. The sound effect annoy my significant other so I had to turn them off. I'm impatient about the visual effects, but... meh... I'll get used to them. As far as I can tell, the app follows the card game in splendid fashion. In fact, I realized things about the physical game by playing the app. If that makes me look stupid, well, frankly my dear, I don't give a damn. I'm at the locked scenarios which is really frustrating because I thought I could continue until I tried to play it. The game has been stable, but I did have it crash once. There are some things I think could use improvement, such as the cancel button when you're closing a location temporarily. Great game so far. Too bad we're getting everything on the installment plan. However, I'm sold if they do the other sets in the line.

I haven't replayed scenarios with the same characters in the physical game yet, but I was playing the game wrong anyway. The distinction between banish and bury makes a hell of a lot more sense when you realize that you keep the cards you acquire during the scenario. Banishing is more painful now that you realize you lose access to the banished card, but the fact that you get to choose from the cards you acquire means replaying scenarios is handy for access to more cards and the ability to switch in the new cards instead of resetting to basic and reward cards each new hand. Let me tell you, Ezren is much more fun when you can keep those non basic offensive spells in your deck. We've played through the first two scenarios in the physical game with all of the characters so far. I hope the team doesn't balk at starting all over again, but I'd rather play the real way. It's much more interesting.

In the tutorial, I thought the two starting characters were male and female. They both end up being NPCs and I think part of the ally deck. I bought the bundle straight away, so I had a choice of all of the characters, but I'm curious now. Do you get stuck playing the characters they choose for you if you don't buy the bundle? That would have been irritating. I took Ezren, Kyra, Merisiel, and Harsk for my A-team and it's been a blast. When you get enough offensive spells on Ezren, he really mows mobs down like chaff falling from a wheat thresher. Harsk is the ultimate support character, and it's not like he can't bring down the big game too. My understanding is that the basic set characters are available immediately, which make sense.

I'm on a Samsung Galaxy S2 and it's run with much of a hitch. It did dump me out to the desktop once, but when I restarted I was simply at the start of the current turn I'd been taking, so no big deal. I've had things I thought we glitches, but those turned out to be operator error. So far, it's worked very well and the artwork is astounding. The music is good if perhaps monotonous after a while. The sound effects had to be turned down and soon the effects will be turned off, but that's typical of sound effects in my games unless I need them for clues or other information. Since the sound effects don't yield warnings or intel, no need to have them. I don't know if I can get rid of the visual effects or not, but I'd probably dump most of those. The art, though, it's splendid.

I completely agree with this. I hit the x on a temporary location close because I'd forgotten it was specifically a blessing banish and I wanted to rethink it. It took that action as my forfeiture of the temporary close, which was maddening. The true irony is that I would have gladly banished a blessing of the gods to close the location and it was the only open one. If only I'd had greater mental acumen, but it was not to be. Still took out Xanesha (I think it was that one) before time ran out, but there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. I don't mind living with actions I've taken, such as not using blessings or other optional stuff before a check. Hell, that's the players responsibility. Likewise with forgetting to use abilities available to the player. That's the players fault. However, I do think the x on a temporary close should not default to forfeiture, especially in situations with multiple methods of closure. Now, if you decide to close by banishing a blessing and actually banish one, there's no going back from THAT.