Heroes of the Shire: Discussion

0:09 some viewers may find the following video disturbing viewer discretion is advised hey everyone welcome back to board games unliked and today I'm doing a discussion over Heroes of the Shire now I've had this game for a little while um and was trying to find like the best opportunity to do a review over it because uh I really don't like this game like it's it is not for me in the slightest and I've tried it many different times I've tried it 1 V one I've tried it multiplayer I've tried the scenario mode and none of it just works and whenever it comes to games like this I always feel bad because you can clearly tell that it was from a smaller publisher and it was a passer project and they worked really hard on it so like whenever I [ __ ] on games like this it's always just from a perspective of well if I'm going to praise games I also like as a reviewer it comes down to if I'm going to praise games and give them their time of day to you know help people spend money the opposite has to be true in that I need to give them my honest opinion and help them save money now there are things about this game that I think a lot of people will like the idea of a turn-based combat that with zero luck and

1:41 everything is out in the open on what could be done probably has its place somewhere for certain groups and the character classes and the spell Mastery boards that are assigned to them where each class is unique and they do something different that's really cool I think the turn-based combat for this is just so boring in every sense of of the term for me there's not a single action that anyone does that is exciting or fun in any way because it's deter not necessarily deterministic but I can see what you do and you just do that and you get and then then it cools down you wait for the cool down because you do a cool a cool ability and it's like aha I hate you for a lot and then now I have to do my free actions because I have to wait for the cool down and this game suffers from wanting to do too much because there's so many different modes and for me none of them are exceptional so everything is kind of bog standard at best and the it's just so so fiddly there's so many tokens and the idea of there's permanent Buffs and temporary Buffs but your permanent Buffs are on

3:12 this grid next to the temporary Buffs that move down over time it's just so fiddly to keep track of Health there's two d10s that you're just oh I took two points of damage okay let me find Let me let me track that let me move it let me just fiddle with these these hundreds of tokens so many conditions that you have a little sheet a little thing to to reference on what it does and because there's not enough room for how long they last oh you were paralyzed for three turns oh you were burned like if you're playing in Arena mode and you're targeted by three different conditions you have to stack those together so oh I was stunned confused burnt and paralyzed for three turns hypothetically all those little tokens like all of all of these all of these these [ __ ] tokens you have to oh well let me find them let me find which ones they are and then I okay there's that one that one that one and that one now I have to stack them in my three section for the conditions for temporary Buffs and then when it's my turn I have to remember you know look through through these little tokens to move over and rinse and repeat that's that's not fun design that's not fun battling and at least it's it's not

4:45 for me having to reference a a player aid for every single condition every single time and then remember that they're on my board because they're stacked and I can't easily see them only for all of that to just look at and be like huh all right well I was stunned so I don't get to do my di up keep I was paralyzed I don't get to cast spells um I was burned so I'm taking chip dot damage and that's it your turn oh okay you did you you did something similar so I'm just kind of stun locked it's it's just and then the the math on top of it I know they they wanted to do percentages uh which is basically 50 or 100% and they explained in the rule book how they do it but why why just to to seem clever for your game I I just really really just think that the the no Randomness no nothing makes every type of combat just seem completely dull and then whenever you get into like the boss fights which are in the in the scenario mode it's depending on if it's one verse many or fully Cooperative which I mean you have both one verse many is the guy who's the one just kind of sits there and waits for you to do something

6:15 because the scenario mode you basically just go from tile to tile and these tiles are numbered and they have a reverse side for no reason at all um this section of exploration needed to be scrapped there is no reason to have this because the tiles don't do anything you except show you where you have been so you move to a tile flip it draw a card from an exploration deck and it tells you either you fight mobs draw an action card which has options um get a loot and then you just rinse and repeat do that and you're just for the scenarios you're just trying to destroy and kill three bosses so if the trash mob show up then the one person is controlling them and just kind of picking between one of two options between the enemies and who the who the Target and then when it comes to the boss yeah he has a lot more to do but it's still like I guess I why why I have a one verse many and then you play fully cooperative and then you just roll dice to kind of randomly determine what the enemy does and what's very frustrating about the bosses is again they just have high defense and even if you're fully equipped with equipment that's a good build for your character oh I'm doing an attack that does 14 damage 20 damage oh he has eight

7:47 defense guess that's four you know four damage to his 96 health so it's just prolonged dot damage pretty much the entire fight and I don't find that fun or exhilarating whenever you're fighting a boss um it has a cooldown just like the players do like there's just too much in this in this game that needed to just be completely scrapped like either make it a deterministic 1V one multiplayer Arena mode and don't have any of the scenario stuff or make it a one verse many boss thing but honestly I think this game would have been a lot more fun being I mean well the game straight up game mechanisms I don't I don't find fun but for what it is I think not having a million tokens and a scenario halfast move around tiles exploration thing just make it be a boss fight you know you do you have three increasingly difficult boss fights you fight one boss and then you get some loot divvy out the loot to then potentially go after the next boss fight and you can do it in your biomes there's four biomes Earth fire water and ice at the collector's edition and came with both of them that's not not even uh to

9:19 begin how the production of this worked the collection has both of those but they originally released two sets where you only had two scenarios to to deal with and if you wanted the other ones you had to buy the other box or get the collector's edition um like oh God I just don't like it the it's weird because I would think for my taste that I would prefer knowing exactly how much damage I'm doing versus I want to do this attack hope you know hope that works oh I needed a four I got a three dang it I guess I miss somehow it's it's like the other the the rolling to see if you hit that's frustrating the knowing how much damage you're doing or how much you're healing or whatever you're whatever you can do knowing flat out what that's going to do is boring so for other reviews and other discussions that I've done I've always bet asked the question which is worse a a painfully bad game or like or or a a traditionally bad game or a painfully boring one and I I still hold true that a boring game is worse cuz I I mean I really don't have many good qualifications for this the 1

10:52 V one is it is what it is you could see the writing on the wall you know halfway through the fight um there's no surprise comebacks if you just don't do well or there's a you fight against an enemy that is a hard counter for you it it is what it is there's no chance at least in like games like one V One games like this uh such as dice Throne at least there's the chance if you're getting your ass beat there's always the chance that you just start rolling well that you get your ultimate at the right time that you can get Buffs that help you and and your opponent rolls poorly there's always that chance here it's it it always feels like that there's a meta I'm going to do this because that's who I'm up against and this is what's going to work I'm buff myself give myself health regen for three turns and I could see what you can do all right yep I'm not surprised you did that there's just nothing exciting and then you look over at the spell masteries um and you really only get these if you're doing like the scenario I mean yeah you can arbitrarily just level up during an arena Arena mode and just kind of have players pick five uh things to go down or whenever you're playing the scenario mode You Can level up throughout through loot or certain

12:24 action cards and when you level up you get more spell masteries and there's three tracks skill trees to go down and you can mix and match kind of you still have to have prerequisites but they're like hey go pretty much go down one and they're not wrong like it's better to just go down one track and I like how they're different and I like how there are unique classes that are typically untouched in a lot of these kinds of games but once you've kind of seen what each class kind of does what their stick is that's it there's nothing more to explore because of the predeterminism or numbers there's just hard counters against certain types and and that's it and there's really nothing to be done it's not like oh I know you're a hard counter for me but maybe I can try something to make that work not really no there's not so I what what bogs this down for me one there's absolutely zero storage I've never seen a game that would make or break it so badly based off its insert and that's coming from Fantasy Flight like G owning Fantasy Flight games where they have just the trench at least with that there's almost some semblance of of storage here there is

13:58 nothing and you can almost tell when a game is not going to Vibe for you whenever you're storing the game you know you're punching everything out and you're like I don't want to play this like I remember the first time I was I was punching everything all the tokens out and putting them in bags I was immediately like nah I I really don't want to try this game um and on top of all that this might be one of the worst Rule books I have ever seen it's painfully bad there is no structure at all it's almost like they took their design notes rule book and printed that off there's it's if you ever want to look up to what you do on your turn good luck good luck finding it finding setup every single like the setup for the scenario for for example like the scenario mode it shows like the setup page and a bunch of colored squares with a basically a line to another dialogue box that says okay here's the setup for the scenario book go to this page every section references a different page to go to so you can set up the game not organized in any way trying to figure out just how to play a

15:29 mode is all over the place cuz not only it gives you like all the rules and then it tells you what how to set up it's mindboggling how and the game isn't even that complex that's the thing it's oh it's my turn okay any temporary buff tokens those slide down any dice they go down by one for the cool down then I do my main action I pick an action to do take a die I want to do my grounding ability so that is going to do this and I can heal one person give them plus three HP regen for three turns now let me dig through the tokens to be able to find that yes it's going to take me 15 minutes cuz I have to find the token oh it wasn't in that pile let me grab the other pile here you go here's the 3 HP and that's my turn and I mean the the agility uh the turn turn order stays the exact same because it's based off of agility and unless something someone gives you a debuff or a buff that modifies your agility it stays the same so if you have characters that don't have that then it's going to be me you me you me you because I'm just faster um and yeah and then if you have to reference anything it's good luck again trying to find it in the

17:02 rule book like I remember whenever I was first doing the scenario mode and I was trying to figure out how the trash mobs worked in the fully Cooperative um you know mode of scenario and I just I couldn't find it there wasn't like a scenario rule section it was just kind of there in the middle of the rule book and then the for the Cooperative mode it was like the very last page and yeah I mean it was a small paragraph and I was just reaffirming what I thought they did but trying to find it was a mess so I got nothing I got nothing like even the equipment I mean the equipment has like a set bonus that's kind of neat where I mean it's not like an exciting set bonus but there is a set bonus like the fact that you can get items is fine but it's basically oh you killed no Elite trash mobs you get one one draw if there was an elite in there you get two from the from the draw deck um and I really just think they needed to cut this game cut this game down this game could have been cleaner if they had stuck to their guns and decided what game they wanted to play it's almost like they wanted to do a campaign game but then also dice Throne

18:34 was popular so they wanted to do that but they were like well people hate the randomness of dice which is not true I'm the only one that hates the randomness of the dice and I don't even hate dice Throne I've just burned I'm just burned out on it probably forever um but they're like what if we took dice throne and everything that made that exciting to watch and strip that down to just the most Bare Bones of numbers and did a One V one with that but they can also do one verse many there's just those types of games where you just you can't have your cake and Eed too you can't have anytime a game comes out and it's like we have a semi Cooperative we have a one verse many we have a hidden Trader we have uh fully Cooperative we have a solo mode we have a 1V one all that is in our game it's like okay so none of those are going to be good you're you yeah you have all those modes but they're all ass so why don't you just pick one and make your game like that and that's just what I feel with this I mean even if because characters have also their own unique tokens or their own unique cards have fun setting that up oh it's the shaman you you want to play the shaman well let me find you her totem tokens the mo the tiniest tokens yeah they have a picture on the back but you have to put them in a bag there's nothing there's no unique storage it's awful I feel like yeah anyone who makes a 3D printed

20:05 insert for this game uh they should they're probably raking it in because this game needs it so badly and I know I've been all over the place talking about the game but there's just so much in this that I'm I'm just baffled by by every every design design decision um around it like I don't know and I I've seen online like I know there are people who who love it but I am not one of those people so with that being said on a scale of 1 to 10 um

21:03 I Gotta Give it like oh man I got to give it a three I really really don't like it because I find I find the combat and the actual system completely boring and I love games with cooldowns it's it's a SST like divinity original sin that cool down is fun uh o sworns cool it's not cool down system necessarily but there are you have to cycle your stuff back to you I love that that's implemented in games it's because in video games it's just so quick and automatic you don't really notice it um but in board games it's a it's an active uh a process that you have to think about while you're while you're playing but something about it being here just does nothing for me none of the none of your 10 options are exciting and it's so slow because even if you try to do things in a certain way it's like okay I'm going to do this one action everyone else go now it's finally my turn to S like if you're trying to set up a combo with your character it takes so long so I find it boring I find the scenario mode completely useless CU it's literally just a Boss Rush with a few extra you know mobs or potentially an event along the way um then rinse the repeat for a different flavor of terrain uh I think the arena mode I mean

22:36 yeah it's better if you're like in teams or something if it's like 2v2 because then your healing stuff can actually go towards other people but it just makes the game way longer and so on top of that adding the horrendously lack of storage and the the disastrous rule book yeah I I got I got I got nothing all the tokens there's just nothing redeeming really for me which is unfortunate um but that's just that's that's how I feel and I Harbor no ill will towards the designers I'm sure they were successful and some other people love this game and if you do that's great that that's great I I wish you all the best but that's it everyone that's my thoughts on Heroes of the Shire let me know what you think of the game in the comments below other than that like comment share and subscribe and have a wonderful whatever time of day is for you hey everyone thank you for watching and I really hope that you enjoyed the video if you would like to see more of my content go ahead and click that subscribe button and the bell to be notified whenever I upload any new content if you feel like supporting the channel you can go ahead and click that patreon link to be taken to my patreon and any help is truly appreciated other than that stick around for any any other run throughs or reviews or cool top 10 or whatever I feel like putting on other than that like comment share and subscribe and have a wonderful whatever time of day it is for you