All's Well That Ends combat preview - One Stop Co-Op Shop

0:00 Hey everybody, this is Mike with the Onetop Co-op Shop, and today I'm previewing All's Well That Ends, an upcoming campaign adventure game for one to four players. And as always, I take no money from publishers. I just want to show you the game and how it plays and let you make an informed decision. And if you like the content on the Onetop Co-op shop, consider supporting us through Patreon. You get early access to our videos and exclusive videos every month you can't see anywhere else. You can also listen to our weekly podcast for reviews and design discussions, or join the conversation and say hi on our Discord. So again, All's Well That Ends is a campaign narrative adventure game that splits between battles on a hexbased grid and narrative exploration adventure section. So think something like Oath Sworn, Aon Trespass, Kingdoms for Lore, and that kind of thing. You can control up to four heroes. Uh if you wanted to play with fewer, you can have as few as two, and you can also slightly simplify one of them and do kind of a follower character. And then as the campaign goes along, you can have mercenaries to help you out. Uh here I'm going to be controlling all four of the characters. Yes, that's a little bit more complication for me than I might usually do. But number one, I think all the four characters have some unique elements in them that are pretty cool that I want to show off. And number two, maybe the bigger one. I'm not convinced, and I'll talk about this in my final thoughts, that the game is well balanced at lower player counts at the moment, and I want to give it the best look and the best shot that I can. So, I thought a four character game might show it off better. But the setting of this one is supposed to be Earth after some huge apocalypse that has put us back in the dark ages and created monsters. So, it's basically a fantasy setting, but it's really a long time in the future. I haven't gotten very far in the narrative, so I don't know how much that

1:31 aspect is actually brought out. For this video, I'm going to just be showing you the first combat tutorial scenario, cuz it's going to take a while, probably close to an hour by itself. And I'll give my thoughts at the end of the video on just the combat mechanics. And then my next video will be of the Overland adventure exploration narrative portion, and I'll give my impressions on that aspect in that video. So, first let's get into the prologue's narrative. Three months and as many pairs of boots worn to nubs have brought America to this wobigon frontier, this sump at the well bottom of the world. Every step she trod alone through cursed hinterland, treacherous marsh and pitted canyon. Every night she clung to her sanity alone, sherking the distant cries of spirits and the too close crowing of forlororn beasts. Alone, that is, until the outposts dried up. The roads cracked and dissipated, and all signs of civilization ceased. Bass humiliating need drew her to approach this campfire in the midst of a nameless forest. She believes there is a settlement somewhere nearby, a town called Hellh Hope. But she does not know if she has the energy left to find it. Casting aside the remnants of her boots, America worries at the fresh blisters between her toes, anointing the parched earth with her blood. The thicker ones will have to wait until she finds proper lodgings.

2:44 The night air is heavy with the density of uncharted woodland and the musk of spawning coral polyps. They get everywhere, itching under the eyelids, gusting through tent flaps to foul bed rolls. A pot full of stew congealing by the campfire wears them like a phosphorescent skin. One of the other travelers lets out a sneeze that shakes the canvas of his tent, then fights his way out from within it. He shuffles toward America, rubbing at his nose. I have an allergy to something nearby, he says as if she'd asked. Every coral formation within a 100 leagues of my home is dried out. I think these live ones are the culprits. Fanning out his heavy robes, he squats beside America on her log. But you, having come from the east, are less affected. Why ought that to be? America finishes cinching a linen wrap around her foot and flexes her toes. Satisfied, she stands and puts some weight on that leg. Its entire length arches, but it'll serve. She turns back to the seated man. I'm no natural scientist, Lambbeck. But the likely answer is you're as soft as puppy Slower than she'd like, but quick enough to hide any weakness, she crosses to the campfire and ladles some of the tainted stew into her cup. Amongst the shadows thrown by the fire, she sees more figures clustered together, each hunched over a hand of cards. Those that rogue Chance gathered in the shelter of this glade are shameless wayfairers mostly. Certainly, she would not trust the vagabond gnomomen any further than she could hoof him. Grown ax's rumbled curse as he loses another hand reminds America that some here are made of firmer stuff. He might be a rancher now, but when they first met that evening, she recognized a veteran's bearing. As America stares into the firelight, some quality in the shadows around her

4:14 shifts, and her hackles dries. The old Clarion bell chimes in the pit below her consciousness. Her warp pick clears its sheath a moment before the first projectiles come whistling from the darkness. So, we set up the map. We've got icons to mark where each of our characters start, where each of the enemies start. There is no difference in the number of enemies based on number of characters, which again I'll discuss later. We also have some places we can interact with with these little hand icons and a letter. Some places we can get loot from with bags and some terrain. Uh the red terrain you can't move through, but you can see through it. Black lines like on the borders and up here on that little rocky null there, you can't move through or trace line of sight through. And blue terrain is difficult. It costs two movement points to cross over it either way. And we get a summary of which enemies we need to prepare. I've already done that. And we have our victory condition. So we have to prove our medal after the cleanup phase of a sixth round. This is a short encounter, which is six rounds. Longer encounters are 12 rounds. At least one unnointed, those are us. Or accomplice.

5:16 That would be a like secondary character that we were using in true solo. Uh must be present on the encounter map. They have not suffered collapse and must carry no days token or defend token. So basically there's a survival mission. We have to last at least six rounds. But uh a better condition, stem the tide of attackers. If you meet the encounter victory conditions and all hired roadsmen, unnointed facto and rascolan spawn points on the encounter map are covered by void tokens at that time. You also complete the secondary condition and gain encounter token too. So that's a hint of what you need to do in this scenario, which is getting to these interaction spots and using them to stop extra enemies from spawning. I've learned that fact through rough experience cuz I've already played the scenario twice. And if you don't try to get to those interaction points, then enemies will just keep on coming and coming. The next page of the story booklet has plot points which are going to resolve each round and also what the interactions do. So I don't refer to that until it's actually a time. And with that, we're ready to jump into the first round. And this first round is going to be the teaching one. So I'm going to really slowly walk through each aspect of the game. If you don't care that much about being taught, you can jump to the round two thing and everything will flow a lot more quickly.

6:22 So first we've got the plot and round tracker and our little initiative tokens here. At the beginning of each battle, you take one token for each hero and one token for each enemy type. So in this case, seven. And you randomize them. Put some of them on the left, put some of them on the right. And that's going to determine the random initiative order for the first round. After that, every round's initiative order is much more deterministic, but it is randomized here. But in the beginning of each round, I advance the plot, which means I move this token onto the next round. Again, this is a short encounter, so it's going to go up to six rounds. Ignore these little player count icons above here. That's only used uh when you go into the adventure map. And now I'm going to resolve the round one plot point, which is going to make something happen, generally negative. In future missions based on what you did during the overland adventure phase of things, you can put these little plot armor tokens on these spots. And that means that when the round reaches the matching number, that plot point is not resolved.

7:16 But in this starter encounter, you don't have any of those. So let's see what nastiness we're dealing with. A horse voice calls from the treeine. Never should have come here. The strings of knife casters and crankbows snap, sending glittering shards to cut the night. America drops into a fighting crouch. Frozen all sides, she calls. Beat them back if you want to see the dawn. Okay, so all hired roadsmen take an attack action. Okay, this is the hired roadsman card. They've got a lot of stuff on here. We're not going to worry about that until they activate. But at the very bottom, you've got their attack range on the bottom right, which is four. Their potency, which is how much damage they deal on a regular attack, which is one, and their movement value, which is two. So here, each of the hired roadsmen, one, two, three, are going to attack the closest hero for one damage within range four. If two heroes are equidistant for them, they'll prioritize the one that has less health.

8:06 And generally, when activating enemies, you pick the one that is closest to a hero, but in this case, it doesn't matter cuz this guy's far away from both of them. He's far away from her. He's far away from either of them. And line of sight is from any part of the hex to any part of the target hex. And right now the only thing that blocks line of sight are the black lines. So it won't apply at all here. So this hired roadsman can shoot either Lambbe who's kind of like a magic priest or grown axe who's a big guy with an axe. They're equidistant but Lampic has less total life. You start out with eight so it goes down to seven. Man, these are the tiniest numbers. Everything here is a prototype of course, so don't worry about that. This hired roadsman can only reach America. She goes from 10 to 9. And this hired roadsman can reach either of them. But Nomomen, our archer, has less life than her. So, he goes down to seven. And that's it for our first plot point. A little nasty hello from the archers. Next, before we actually get to activating people on that track, each character is going to do what's called following their impulses. So, they have a deck of six impulse cards. The impulses you start out with are based on what's called your practice tile. So, no is an ambuscator, ambush, scatter, ambusher, which gives you a special way to earn calling tokens and also again determines your starting cards. In this interest scenario, you only have six of these. In the later encounters, you add a full 12. And then they can get to change as you level up and even change your practice tile. But no one's going to draw two. And he's going to pick one to resolve for this round and one to be held in this held impulses area over here. And how it works is he does the one in the held. He does two in the next

9:37 round. He does two more in the next round. Suddenly his deck is out. Then he shuffles the three held ones, does two of them the next round to the round after that. And then is forced to do the last one. So basically over the course of six rounds you will do every single card in your deck but you get to kind of delay the ones you don't want to deal with until later. In this case both of these have a hourglass symbol in the upper left. That means that this effect will apply for the entire round. So here he can either have minus one to every movement effect he resolves or minus one to his potency which like the enemies is how much damage he deals with an attack action but it also affects things like defense and using skills and those kind of things. I think for this first round he's probably going to be interacting. So, uh, I guess I'd rather have the move. No, I'll get the, uh, minus one potency out of the way cuz that is a really nasty one. And the other one will go in the held impulse area. All right.

10:28 Grown ax is next. He's a big melee fighter. You can like throw enemies and charge through them and stuff. Okay. And he's got also a minus one movement one. Or this one's a bit more complicated. That arrow downwards or whatever that icon is in the upper left means this is an instant one. So, he resolves this immediately. So, his ability would let him draw a tactics card. You're going to usually have three tactics cards in your hand to choose from for your action for the round. This would give him a fourth to choose from, but he wouldn't actually get to do more actions. And every other unointed character within his influence who chose an instant impulse this round would also draw an extra tactics card. And all this is simultaneous. I know I'm showing them one at a time, but I would be able to see who else has actually Yeah, you know, let's pause on his for a second and see who else has good uh instant impulses. Okay, now we have Lambbe. Like I said, he's kind of like a healer and semi-ranged attacker. Can you get minus one potency? Great. Or this one has an hourglass and it says once this round when an enemy within your range would attack you, you may attack that enemy first. And this is kind of like a triggered effect. That's what the hourglass means. It'll hang out until the trigger resolves during this round.

11:31 Huh. I mean, that sounds pretty great to start off. Hurt the enemies quickly. Yeah. So, let's put his minus one potency for later and have that one. Okay. And America's also a melee fighter, but she's really good at ordering others and giving them extra actions. Okay, so she has gez minus one movement and minus one potency. I don't think so. Or draw a number of tactics cards equal to your potency. Then return an equal number to the bottom of your tactics deck in any order. And this is the only other instant one I got. So sure, we'll have her pick that. This one's just too terrible to start out with. And based on that, I'm going to have Gronax do his as well. And sorry, I should have already done this, but we should all have a number of tactics cards in our hand equal to our current resolve, which starts out at three for everybody. And America's potency is two. This is based on the number of players, everybody's potency. What this basically means is when you are playing with fewer characters, you do way more damage. You can have way higher defense when you take a defend action. And that's supposed to be the main thing that balances the gameplay for different player counts. Again, like I said, I don't think it quite does it all the way, but still pretty cool. So, America's getting two more. I'm not going to talk you through my choices here because I don't know what these cards mean yet. I'm just going to keep uh ones that I definitely want to play this round. But then Grown X, since I'm within his command range, his influence, which is this value here, lets me draw another card. And Gronax himself has four and everybody else has three.

12:52 All right, so clearly that step would go a lot faster with fewer characters or if I was playing with multiple players so we could all do it at the same time. But now we go into the heart of the game play, the trigger phase, where we're going to resolve people's turns and sort of in a spirit islandish way a little bit. Characters will be either on the fast side or the slow side, bird and turtle of the initiative track, and you resolve it from left to right. But the action they take is going to determine which end of the initiative track they go onto for the next round, which you use down here at the bottom. So like I said, initiative is much more deterministic after this first round. All right. So, we have Lambic going first. And he's going to usually pick one card to play. There is one instance where he doesn't have to. Oh, jeez. And he actually already has that. So, maybe he won't play one card. But, let me explain what we're looking at here. So, you can ignore most of the stuff in the top and the bottom. That's important later on for ordering mercenaries and stuff. Tells you what level card this is. What is important though is in the upper right. This is a bird card, which means if Lambic resolves that one, he's going to after he resolves his turn, go down to the bird track to the left of any other tokens that are already there.

13:58 So here, he would be the last person to act on the fast side next round, but still faster than everybody who did a slow action. If instead he did a slow card, he would go to the right of every person already on the slow side of the track. And once everybody's gone, all of these slide up. So, if you pick a fast card, you're going to tend to go earlier in the next round. If you pick a slow card, you're going to tend to go later. Now, getting into what's actually on the card, you'll see three rows. Each of these are action options. And your standard turn is called a focus turn. You get to pick two of these things to do in whatever order you want. So, I could first use unsteady feet to move two spaces, then I could use determined stride to move three. Or I could reverse that. Or I could do creeping fear first, then do one of the moves. So, again, a focus turn will let you resolve two of these. Now, some focus actions have what's called a surge where you get a bonus for doing them in a particular order. So, if you see there's a little blood trail going from the top option here, vicious lash, down to the bottom option, crush the will, and then there's a plus in blood with a plus one shield icon next to it. What that means is if I do those specific two actions on the card, not whatever the third one is, and if I do them in top to bottom order, vicious lash then crush the will, I gain that plus bonus. In this case, the crush the will would use my potency plus one, would have a three strength instead of the normal two. And that's what the shields mean in general. So, the vicious lash, whether or not I do it as part of a surge, would have plus one and also give me three damage with my attack.

15:23 Now, if I don't like or don't need one of the two options I'm going to take, I can get a brace token instead for either of them. And this will let me mess with my initiative at the end of the round and or let me swap out some items from my inventory. None of that matters yet. We don't have very many items right now. And actually, Lampic has the ability to use braces for other effects like his basic weapon, the chained blade. Each character starts out with one of these, can use brace tokens to add range to his attacks. And also, some of his impulse cards, the things we did in the previous phase, will let him use these for other bonuses. But again, that's if you don't want to use one of the two actions, like if I just wanted to attack, but didn't want to do anything else. The other option, which is pretty rare, but I happen to have gotten it, is called a rampage. So, you'll see that uh the cards on the bottom, they don't all have this. Again, I just Oh, wait, that's the wrong order. I just happen to have gotten it. Some cards don't have any blood to their left, but have a blood trail going to the right. Those are called opening cards. Some have blood on both sides, those are called sustaining cards. And some have blood coming from the left, but not going to the right, those are called closing cards. And if you can form a complete set of an opening card, one or more sustain cards, cuz you can have more than three cards in your hand, and one closing card, you need all of those, you can do a rampage turn. You have to do all of these actions. You have to do them in order.

16:35 And then the only card you discard at the end is the closing cards. You could potentially get other rampages later. Now, in this case, I don't actually really want to do what the rampage would do. It ends with a horror action. Each character has three unique skills that are summarized on their play aid. This lets Lambic make somebody run away from him. I mean, I guess the sixth movement actually would be able to get me to one of the places I want to go. Yeah. And then actually, I could make one of the annoying enemies run away. So, maybe I do want to do this. So, sure. Let's do a rampage. But to show the other options, uh the attack is a basic attack. Has to be within his regular range, which is up to two. It deals damage equal to his potency, which is two, and it has a plus one, so that'd be three. And how damage works here, I'll show you the anointed fact totem. That's the guy closest to the Lambbe. It has a damage value to change their status. So, first you have to do three damage to give them a yellow rattled status, and that means they're going to tend to be less effective when they activate. Then you got to do two more damage to give them the red wounded status. and then three more damage to defeat them. And these statuses stick with them. So once they're wounded, they're going to stay wounded generally until somebody can finish them off. But importantly, if you don't do enough damage to reach the next status, like right now, if I did two damage to this guy when he needs three to become rattled, that damage is wasted. And on the other hand, if you do enough damage to move them through multiple statuses at once, like if I did five damage right now, they would become rattled and wounded in one hit. So here, if he could get a range of that guy and do his vicious lash, which would be two potency plus one, he would actually rattle him.

18:01 But unfortunately, a three movement is not enough to get here because again, that blue difficult terrain requires me to move two spaces over it. So that's why I'm doing the rampage. But to talk through the options again, creeping fear makes somebody run away. And this last one on crush the will is called the smother action. And this basically is like an attack, but it needs to deal enough damage to fully kill the enemy, otherwise it does nothing. But yeah, we're doing a three move, then a three move, then we're doing creeping fear to make somebody run away. And he's going to get a brace because he did the rampage. Again, the plus only applies if you made the little combo happen. All right, so three movement, one, two, nothing. Three movement. End right there. And we pause for a second and do interaction C before we get to the final action. So how these interactions are supposed to work, clearly this is tough to do solo, but you're supposed to just look at the headings in bold and make your choice before you read the rest.

18:51 So, here I'll just read it quickly without looking at it. Nature plays its own games in the wildlands, but even so, you doubt this ladder belongs to the forest. Uh, I'm going to drag the ladder down instead of scurrying to the top. That sounds dangerous. The lookout tries to snatch the top of the ladder as you whip it away, but his balance fails and he crashes down into the underbrush. Gain a brace token. Oh, that's good. He likes those. Add a void token to this hex and on the closest anointed facto spawning hex. So, void tokens mean he can't interact with something again. But here it also means that this spawn hex is taken out. Like I said, you want to interact with these things to try to take out their spawns if possible. Okay, finally he gets creeping fear. So I have to pick one combatant within my influence. That's what that little like aura symbol is. For Lambic, that's a six. They take a flea action, which means they move away from me. Each hex has to take them farther away up to their regular movement. But I add the value of this actions potency, which is currently just my regular two, to the fleeing. So with six range, I could pick a lot of people. But this anointed fact totem is definitely going to attack us in a second. So, let's send him one, two, three, four. Oh, actually five cuz his movement is usually three and then plus two for my potency. And then I get a second brace token. Okay, now to end my turn, I discard the card I used or in the case of a rampage, I discard the closing card. And I draw back up to my resolve value, which is currently three.

20:07 Although, if I get my butt kicked by some enemies, it could drop down. And remember, that was a fast card, so we move there. And that was one hero's activation. We'll see that go a little bit faster except for explaining their icons. Oh, we got another one of us which is grown axe cuz he's grown and he got an axe. Um, okay. So, he cannot do a rampage. You'll see even with the plus one he drew, he has two closings, but only uh one of those. But I would ideally like to keep that card and one of the closings to be able to do stuff later. Now, he has three potency. So, if he can get next to an enemy, he can certainly do a lot more damage. He's also got the most life of my characters, so yeah, I'm not too worried about him. All right. So, what do I want to do? I think I want to move him towards one of the interaction things, but also hit somebody. So, let's go and pick this lumber card. So, I can move three and then move four if I don't want to do anything. Or I can move three or four and then attack without a bonus just for his basic three potency. Now, let's see. He can move seven. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. Ooh. So, I could just really fast track this and have fewer enemies spawning, but not hit anybody. Or 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. He could almost get to this one. Alternatively though, I could just move like one, two, three, four, or one, two, three, and with three damage, I could hit the hired roadsman. One damage would rattle him and two more would wound him, so he'd be nearly dead, which again tends to make them activate worse and like not attack you as much. Ah, this is a tough choice. Well, if anyone can survive just blindly rushing into enemy territory, it's this guy. So, let's do the seven movement and just suck it up. So, he's doing interaction A. A granite boulder perches on the

21:38 extreme lip of the overhang above the cave. Using some of the surrounding debris for leverage, you test your body weight against the rock. For a moment, it seems nothing will happen. Then the shale beneath it shifts. Okay, so I can either turn my attention back to the frey or throw your weight against the rock. Clearly, I'm going to throw my weight right against the rock. I'm a big dude. You leap back, falling heavily. Uhoh. As the boulder plummets into the cave mouth, add void tokens to this hex and to the oh, good, the rascolan spawning spot. Those are the nastiest guys here. But I deal one damage myself, so I'm down to 11. Yeah, this guy is again the roughest enemy I've got in this mission. So, not bringing any more of him in is lovely. That was also a fast card. I forgot to even check. So, that works out well. Now, Gronax's resolve is three. Yes, his impulse let him draw to four cards, but he does not redraw back to four when he's already got three. He just stays with what he's got. All right, we're going to get an enemy finally. Yep, there we go. It's the hired roadsman, the archers. And what you do whenever a type of enemy activates is you draw the top card of this intent deck. And you're going to see a few things on here. First, in the upper left is a number five. The cards in this deck go from 1 to 18. And generally speaking, cards that are closer to one are easier and cards that are closer to 18 are way harder. So this is uh going to be generally not too nasty of a card. In the upper right, you see that same bird symbol. So the archers are going to be going fast next round in front of both of my characters.

22:52 And then finally, the main part of the card shows how each of the hired roadsmen is going to activate. And it's based on their current status. If they're wounded, they're going to do whatever the wounded one says. In this case, that just means they hold. They do nothing. If they're rattled, they'll do the one next to yellow, which means in this case, they would move towards us somebody to try to get an attack range, but they would also just defend instead of attacking. The next one with a less than equal sign and a sort of bow range symbol means that if they're in range to attack somebody already, they will do an attack and then defend. And then finally, the flexing muscle means if they're healthy but not in range to attack somebody yet, in this case, they would move up to their movement range to try to get an attack range of somebody. And if they do, they would deal an attack but with minus one damage. In the case of this scenario, these guys only have one potency, so that would be zero damage. And for activating, you pick the ones that are closest to unnointed heroes first. So, this guy's within three of the lambic. And their target is always the closest person that is in range and line of sight. Remember, line of sight can be traced from any part of their hex to something else and can't cross a black line right now. So, that guy's healthy. So, he's going to attack Lambic with a regular attack and then defend himself. And just to show them again, they've got a potency of one. So, they're only dealing one damage. range, four, two, movement, all that stuff. So, Lambit goes down to six. And now this guy gets a little defense token on him, which means uh when we attack him next, if our attack is less than his defense, which is a one here, cuz that's his potency, so that's impossible. But let's say he had like a three defense, if we only did one or two damage, it would just completely plink away and do nothing. But if we do at least one damage in an attack, his defense is subtracted from it, and then the rest of the damage gets through. So like with

24:24 him having a one to become rattled, we'd have to do two damage to make him rattled, but then his defense would go away. All right. All right, these guys are doing the same thing. Attacking the same people as at the beginning of the game. So this one's attacking Nomomen for one damage. This one's attacking America. She's down to eight. And they're both defending as well, which is a little bit annoying. And again, it was fast, so they go to the left. So next round, they will go before the people who previously went with a fast card. All right, who's next? Oh, it's the Rascal. This guy's nasty. Okay, so this is a slow card, and he's definitely not hurt, and he only has one range. So he's going to be moving and doing a regular attack, but his attacks hit really hard. Yeah. So here he is. So let's see. 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 to America. 1 2 3 4 to get to Gronax. So, he's wants to hit America. And unfortunately, he can't cuz he's got four movement, four potency, and one range. Oh, and you might see all these special abilities. Those are only used if the activating card says they are, which is not the case here. So, he goes one, two, three. We can use whichever way we want to go. And he hits her for four damage. Oh man, she hasn't even got a chance to do anything yet. And then that was a slow card. So he will go slow but still before everybody else in the rest of the round who also goes slow.

25:28 Oh, the last enemy. So other two heroes will go later. This is the anointed factotem. Now the one that's next to Gronax is starting in range. So he's just going to attack whereas the other two are going to move and then use their red ability if they can. I'll show you what that is. We have this guy just attacks Gronax for his regular potency two. So Gronax is down to nine. The other two want to move up to three to get within range one of the closest person. And then they're going to use belt daggers. The unoided fact totem deals two damage to all characters within range two. Yikes. Oh, wait. There's only two of these, not three. All right, so unfortunately this guy is two away from both of them. So he wants to go right in there and then he's hitting Nommen and America for two. Nomman's down to four life, and America's down to two life. Good thing they're about to finally go. And yeah, that's it.

26:15 I was going to say that had to be a slow card and it was. Uh, next is America. really want her to go fast because otherwise she's going to get beat up a whole bunch. So, she also has four cards. She's got two openers and two continuers, but no closer, so she can't do that. And let's look at her special abilities and things she's got. So, she's got two that show this little heart icon. This ability is awesome. It's called transfuse. It says lose your defend token if you have one. So, when you're defending, I'll explain that in a second. It's a lot like the enemies defend, but basically this counts as an attack cuz when you attack, you lose your defend. Then she deals damage equal to her potency to one combatant within her influence range, which is five. And then she regains health equal to the damage that she dealt. Heck yeah. Then she also has this plague of boil symbol, which is a hexing ability. One combatant within your influence gains your anointed affliction token with value equal to this action's potency. When damage is next dealt to that combatant, add the value of the token to the damage. Then remove the token. That's awesome, too. Now, I also ideally want to get Nomomen or her onto this D to interact with that. I guess Nommen would have an easier time. Uh, so I guess if she can get all the way around to the B, good luck. That's pretty far, but she could at least start walking that way.

27:26 Yeah. So, with all that, although I really want to do her uh healing like life stealing thing, I know she's going to go first next round before any of the enemies. So, I think I'm going to use this card because I can do a really nice attack bone cracking swing for plus one against the enemies that are next to me cuz her range is only one. And then I can follow up with a very long move to start moving towards that objective token. And it helps that that is literally the only fast card she has in her option. So there we go. So bone cracking swing first. She's got two potency plus one from the attack action. Uh this guy needs four to hurt the first time. Good luck. But this guy needs only three. So wham. We rattled him. Taught him to be afraid of us. And then she can move four. So she's within four movement of the other interact spot. And again, fast action. Very nice. And like grown axe, uh, she does not draw anything. She already has three cards. All right. And final act is Noman. He has range up to four, which is great. What's not so great is his at arms length ability. If he attacks someone that is next to him, he can only deal one damage cuz that unnointed fact totem only needs two damage to be wounded. Oh, dang it. I forgot that he had minus one potency.

28:32 So, that's not going to work too easily this time. All right. So, what do I want to do? I've got two continuations. I don't really need those. Uh, both of them are fast. I don't really want to look at this since I want to go fast right now. All right. And the only special one he got is slip through the cracks. There's a fun one. He gains one coin for each enemy within his influence up to a max of his potency. And then he moves to an unoccupied interaction or loot hex within his influence. Moving through combinance and ignoring difficult and deadly terrain. Wait, I mean, there's a plus one. 1 2 3 4 5. You could have gone straight there and then moved to the interaction thing. But I mean, she's already halfway there. I might as well let her finish it. See, I'll definitely play this card and rather be farther away from them. So, for the slip through the cracks, he robs. What's his influence? Four. So, these two guys, that's the max you can get. Two coins. Picking creature pockets. That's what we do. And then I get to teleport to the interaction and do that. You see the shadowy forms of more effect totems through the trees.

29:28 The forest on this side of the clearing is too sparish to open much protection from new arrivals. Okay, focus more pressing problems. No torch for trees. You scald yourself fetching brans from the campfire, but soon the underbrush is choked with blinding smoke. Okay, we lock off the other anointed fat totem thing. Oh, we take two damage. No man's down to two. No, man. That's okay. We're getting the job done. So, we've covered up everything except the archer spot, which clearly is what be is going to do. Okay, then for his other action, I could do fire and forget, which is a minus one attack. And remember, his potency is already reduced by one. Oh, shoot. So, he could have only stolen one gold from that cuz that's right. His potency is reduced for the slip through the cracks as well. Oh, wait. No, no, but it's plus one. So, I think he does get two. Never mind. Now, Fire and Forget has this little command icon next to it. This is one of the coolest things. And uh yeah, America tends to have these the most. It means that after he does this action, he can let anybody else within his influence range also take the action with the same modifiers, but of course using their stats and stuff. So, if he was in within like four range America, she could also do a minus one attack with this. Not that impressive when it's minus one, but kind of cool. Yeah, I'm going to do a spritly step since uh I did both of them in order. A surge, it's up to four movement. I don't need it.

30:39 I'm just going to get one and get a loot. The number, a one in this case, shows how many I draw from the deck. And these are the singleuse items. So, a wet stone. When I attack, I add plus one. And then I discard this. And each character can hold up to two of those kind of items in their loot bag. So, yeah, Nommen is down to uh two life. And Nomman does draw a third card. Oh, but first, wait. Nomman actually activated his practis tile. Each character has a way to do this. So when he draws any number of loot cards, he can either draw an extra card or gain a calling token. Calling tokens are as close as this game gets to a competitive element. In that at the end of each combat, whichever of the anointed has the most calling tokens gets to get rid of these things called trauma. I'll talk about that at the end. And the ones who have the fewest calling tokens actually take trauma. But I mean here at this point, nobody has anything.

31:25 So I'm just going to get another loot. Misplaced dowy. When drawn, gain an amount of coin equal to double your potency, then discard it. Heck yeah. Oh man, does that still include I guess that still applies to this kind of effect. I'm going to assume it does. So no one gets two more coins instead of four. All right. And he is also fast, so he'll actually be first next turn, which is good cuz there's some nasties next to him. Okay, so now we go to clean up all of these. Slide up for next round. There aren't usually so many on one side. We would normally have to spend brace tokens like Lambbe's too, but Lambic specifically has a power that lets them keep them to charge his things later. So, he's going to keep both of them. But if he wanted to, he could spend them to move his token to the left or to the right, pushing other people there. Like in this case, if he spent both of them, he could make sure he went before the hired roadsmen. And then we discard our current impulses. Oh, dang it. Did I make a tap by somebody? He did, didn't he? Yeah. Yeah, this guy shot it. That's why he has six health instead of seven.

32:18 So, hold on. I'm rewinding back. When an enemy within your range would attack you, you may first attack that enemy. Oh, but he's not within my range. I don't think I can use brace tokens. It says when I attack, I can spend an arrow of brace tokens to increase my range for that attack. But this is like if he's within my range, then I can attack. So, I think I just waste that card. That sucks. All right, that was one entire round. Things should go a little bit faster now because you know most of the powers and things. We can just try to kill some people. Let's go to round two. Claws scrabble against loose earth. Too many claws. It won't be long before more rascalins pour from the soil. I'll take almost any death, mutters the rancher grown ax. But I'll not end in their rancid guts. Spawn a rascalin at the rascalin spawn point. Now that only happens if it's not covered up by a character or in this case by a void thing. Haha, we dropped a boulder on you, buddy. You ain't coming out nowhere. So yeah, nothing happens from that plot point. That's what happens when you play the mission twice and you know what you're supposed to do. All right, so let's get to our impulses for Nommen. He can gain coin robbing an enemy near him or gain coin based on my allies who take instant actions within my influence, but nobody's within his influence right now. So, we'll save that. And he gains coin equal to the uh coin value of an enemy within his influence, which is up to four. So, just that guy. Coin values in the upper right here. Six. I am rich. But he'll share, of course. Maybe Gronax has an interesting choice. So, he can do a thing where when an enemy would attack him, he gets to move towards the enemy for free. Or he can lose one resolve, which is going to make him draw to a

33:48 lower hand size and bring him closer to death, but it would let him deal damage to his potency to one adjacent enemy immediately, which would let him already get the anointed facto next to him into the yellow, and then he could very easily on his turn probably kill him or at the very least get him into the red. So yeah, let's do it, baby. So Groness goes down to two resolve. The immediate effect is that his new hand size is two. Not now, but when he draws at the end of the turn. And also when you lose all your health, you start kind of like crawling around and dying and you lose resolve from that. And if you go all the way out, I think you're like actually out out and that ends the scenario for the characters. Might be misremembering a little bit of that. I don't want to go and look at all the rules right now, but certainly losing resolve brings you closer to death. I know that. But he just like spits some blood in the face of this anointed fat totem who dared to run up on him and he's ready to kill him in a second. America got one focus on giving orders but nobody's close enough or one that lets her either heal one resolve which would be awesome but she's not down or regain one health and if another anointed did an instant multiple of them did she can instead regain health up to her potency so she'll heal herself two which gets her back to four which still ain't great but it's better than the nothing she's got now and finally Lambic can move three immediately ignoring difficult terrain and enemies or gain a brace token let other people gain a brace token he already has enough of those so I'm going to do the movement cuz first of all I'd like to get within two range of somebody to actually attack. And I'd also like to get closer to Nomman so I can help him not get hit by all these people that want to take away his last two life. So let's go. One, two, three. Again, that special movement ignores the difficult terrain. All right. And with that, we're ready to go. So, yep. Nomen's first. So,

35:18 what's he got? His potency is back to two. So, he could injure the anointed fact totem next to him with a regular attack. He can also do a sorific dart. That icon means that he gives an affliction token to an enemy, which means the enemy moves less equal to his potency. And if it's high enough to make them not move at all, they just keep on not moving for most of their turns. Or you could do a nail bomb. Oh, fun. You put a token down and then during cleanup, everybody who's adjacent to it takes damage. Ah, but him going so early. That's probably not going to work very well. So, honestly, I kind of just want to do this regular attack that's strong enough to hurt the guy. And hey, it'll get him a loot, too, if he moves after. So, first he'll resolve the lung burster. Uh, this guy needs two damage to go to red. So, he's now wounded. Then I can move up to three and I get to get a loot. Uh, but honestly, he's fine with his limited health. I don't really want to move him, but let's get a loot. Dubious vial. Deal damage equal to your potency to yourself and to all adjacent competence. Well, the yourself part I don't love. So, let's not do that. And at the moment, he can't hold any other loot. So, he will take his first calling. He is now in the lead to not get traumatized later. And that was another fast card. So, there we go.

36:20 Okay, America is up. So, she's still pretty hurt, but I really want to get to that last interaction to close that down. So, swift leap seems like it's probably the one to do. And then I could give one of them that plague of boils. I wish I could do the bone cracking swing, but if I'm going to move on to the interaction spot, I'm not going to be adjacent to them. I could also do this one that lets me jump and do that healing like life stealing thing. Or I could block. So how blocking works for a character, it's a lot like the enemies. You take a defense token equal to your potency plus any modifier. So in this case be two plus one, three. And again like the enemies, if somebody does one or two damage to me, it does nothing. If they do three or more damage to me, I subtract three from the damage dealt. But then the armor goes away. And the second I attack, this also goes away. But I'd rather hurt these archers and heal myself than just block. See, I'm going to do this card. Even though it is my opener, so that part kind of sucks.

37:07 So I'll do a swift leap. See what happens with this first. Lamp light gleams between the trees, illuminating a narrow path. This must be what the roadsmen are using to signal their brethren. Well, clearly I'm going to extinguish the lamp. It's an easy task, and you're pleased to hear confused cries from the forest depths. Oh, add a void token to this hex and to every roadsmen hex. So that's it. No more people coming, which makes me uh not too scared. They hadn't even moved off their spots yet, had they? Okay, then she's going to do her astral cord. So, she deals damage equal to her potency within her influence range of five. So, let's just do uh this one, I guess. So, that's two damage. His defense blocks one, but he takes the other one, which does rattle him. Oh, but I only heal equal to the damage he suffered. So, I go to five, not to six. I only healed one. But still, now that guy's way less likely to actually attack me. So, I think that's probably good. Oop, that was a slow card. And now the archers are going.

37:57 Don't hurt me. Oh, they got a one, which is literally the worst card in the deck. That part's nice. All right, so this guy's first and he's rattled. So he's holding and doing nothing. But this guy's in range of her. He's attacking at minus one, which is zero cuz his potency is one. And then he's fleeing. Oh, it says that each movement they take has to move them farther from the target. And they will only go into deadly terrain if that's the only place they can go. So, this guy just saw her suck life force from his friend. His friend frozen in fear. He's like, "Nope, nope. I forgot there was a pit." And he dies immediately. That was fantastic. Take that. All right. And this last guy, one, two, three, four. Can he get line of sight, though? Maybe like right down. Yeah, you can. So, again, he does an ineffectual attack and then runs. Their movement is two, and he wants to get farther away with each move. By the way, enemies do not, I might have said this wrong before, they do not lose their defense until you get rid of it. Uh, it does not go away when they attack, but again, for heroes, it does. Okay, and that was a fast action. Not that they're going to be too effective on their next turn either, I would think. So, next up is Grown Axe. He wants to finish this guy off, which would take five total damage. That's a lot. So, by the way, he did get my two favorite powers of his.

39:08 He got this one, which is plow. He gets to move to a hex within his influence and then he like traces a path where he's moving one farther away with each move. And if he moved through any number of enemies, he gets to deal damage equal to his potency or in this case plus one split among those enemies. And this one's kind of similar but even more fun. This is Hurl. He throws one adjacent person into a space within his influence. And again, he gets a split damage with the modifier in this case between that person and anybody he threw them through. Okay, so yeah, this will actually work great. Let's do clubbing blows and shoulder barge. and it's fast bonus. So, first the clubbing blows. I can just do a regular three damage attack, which is enough to wound this guy. And then shoulder barge. I can throw him up to four. I think he still can't go through the black. So, I don't know. Let's throw him over here.

39:54 Whatever. And he's super dead cuz even though I don't get the plus one cuz I didn't do a rampage, his three potency is enough to kill the guy. Now, when you defeat a guy, if you're next to them, you draw a card from this death throws deck. And thematic stuff happens cuz they're right next to you. sometimes will get like a final parting blow, but often it means that you'll get to steal money from them. So, kind of sad that I threw the guy away, right? But Gronax's bulldozer, a zeal breaker trait, says that after he kills an enemy that is not adjacent to him, he can gain a calling token. And I think it counts cuz the guy definitely wasn't adjacent to him when he died. So, him and Nommen are tied. Now, sadness for Gronax. Uh, he did not draw any more cards. He just stays at two, but that was a fast one. All right. And we get one more hero before all the enemies go. Lambeic. And ideally, I'd like to kill that guy or hurt. I mean, we need four damage to get through the rascalin's initial defense. Then it's three and two, so it gets a lot easier.

40:43 But four is just a lot. Oh, shoot. Or it's not. This is the best card ever. Look, strip the flesh. He gets to do a plus two attack card and then he can order somebody else to do a plus two attack. And guess who's in influence range of him? He has six influence. He can have no man kill that guy and injure the rascalin. Yeah, I mean that's that's the card. I don't even know what else who who even cares what the rest of these do. That's definitely what we're doing. And then I guess we'll move afterwards. But yeah, so he will strip the flesh of the rascalin, getting it to be rattled, which is a good start. Then he orders no men to do a plus two attack within four range, which will defeat this guy. And then what can I do? Move three or move three? Well, I guess I'll move three. Um, let's get Yeah, like more. The rascal can move far enough if he decides to attack, but let's at least get in the way of him attacking Nomomen for sure. By the way, Lambit gets calling tokens when he gets a death throws card, which means when he kills somebody next to him. So that ain't working out so well for him yet. All right. And all that's left. Oh, these guys are all dead and no more of them are going to spawn. So, bye-bye anointed fact totems. You don't get a turn anymore. But the rascalin still does.

41:43 But he's scared. So maybe he won't kill us. Or maybe he will. So with his yellow, there's a 12. So a slightly harder card. He's going to move and attack anyway. Yep. So one, two, and now Lambbe is down to two life. Wonderful. Oh, and jeez, that was a fast card. No, Lambic, you're going to get killed. I blame Nommen. I mean, it's really his fault right now. Once again, Lambic is the only one with brace tokens, but even spending all of them would only get him to go before other heroes. So, not much point. So, it takes us into cleanup, and we're ready for round three. We should be able to wrap things up. Right. So, plot point three. The armored factoms who march from the forest gloom hold their warpics with trained poise. Stranger yet, one of them sports a scarred jaw that America is sure she recognizes. This is no random ambush, she mutters. These men kill for the coin of a high house. Spawn an un anointed fact totem at each. Nope, none of those are left. Get out of here. Yeah, you can see why taking care of those things quickly is so good. All right, each of our characters are down to their last two impulses. They're going to hold one and use one, and then we'll shuffle the three that they've held in these rounds for the future rounds. All right, so Nomman's got more coins. Once during this round, you may spend any value of coins up the value of your potency to deal the same amount of damage to one enemy within your influence. Rascalin, you died, baby. or once during your turn this round. Gain a number of co coins equal to the number of enemies within your influence. That would only be one.

43:05 That's weak. Now, unfortunately, this is during his turn, which is after the rascal might have already eaten Lambic, but we can we can get revenge. That's good. All right. Grown ass can be slow to move or the first time you would suffer one or more damage this round. Ignore that damage. He's like a billion miles away from everyone. So, these both kind of suck cuz that's probably not going to happen. But moving slowly isn't going to help much. Oh jeez, looking at his cards, he's terrible at moving anyway. I guess I'll I don't know. I'll take the healing one so we can at least get close to some enemies. Or not healing, defense. Okay. America can be slow, although she's next to the only person she really wants to attack. Or this round, you may issue orders to mercenaries and allies who are outside of your influence. Does she have any order cards at the moment? Nope. So, minus one movement shouldn't hurt too much. And Lambic. Not that it matters much cuz he's going to die. This round, each time you take an ability action, you also gain a brace. During cleanup, you may be spending any more brace to regain the same amount of health. Oh, actually, this is perfect because if he gets dazed from the guy attacking him, usually you need to like crawl around and find a potion, but this would heal him. So, we're definitely doing that and not getting minus two potency. But none of it might matter because Oh, let's move him up. The rascalin's about to bite my head off. Although, hey, we got a chance. He's yellow. He might like run away or something. Uh, he's moving and doing his top ability. Huh. Oh, man.

44:17 Constant coagula. The rascal gains an augment token. While it carries a token, reduce damage dealt to it to zero and would next attack instead remove the token. I was just about to blast you with money. I was going to throw coins in your face. I mean, the good thing is he's not eating me. The bad thing is he's invulnerable for a little while, but okay, we'll just focus on the archers. Oh, and it's a slow card. Although, right, we need him to go to attack again before we can do anything to him. That's going to be annoying. Well, whatever. Okay, grown ax is up. I don't think he can even do anything. Uh, we'll do the one that moves me farther. And then we'll Yeah, these don't do anything. Oh, he could force to the front. Would that get him far enough? So he can move two and then move to a space within his influence of four. So one, two, one, two, three, four. Let's go. Okay, so never mind. We're doing this because he had no point in holding on to closing cards and opening cards. Now he's only got two resolved, so he's never going to draw enough cards for it to matter. So he's going to amble and then force to the front. He's not getting the plus one. Goes one, two with the amble. One, two, three, four. Force to the front. Oh, wait. Nope. It says he can move through guys but not end his turn on them. Never mind. He'll just lumber for three. And then since he's not doing a second action, he'll get a brace token. That was sad. Wait, wait, not done. I remembered something. We're still doing this. Our weapons haven't really come up much, but this time it matters. Ranchmatic. When you assign damage during plow, assign any amount to adjacent targets. This is after you move. Instead of those you move through, then flip this card. And then each weapon has a way to come back. In this case, after you suffer damage, flip it back. Yes. So now I move two. Then I go one, two, three, four, and I end next to him. And I deal damage equal to my potency of three. So one for his armor,

45:50 one gets him to yellow. Unfortunately, he would need two more, so my last uh damage is wasted, and I don't get him to red. But cool, I'm back in the fray, and I'm slow. So be it. All right, now the archers are next, but they're both yellow, so pretty good chance they won't do much. Oh, unless it's card 18, the strongest card in the game. So, they can move up to one more than their movement, and then they attack with a plus one bonus. Great. All right, but I don't think they move at all if they're already in attack range, cuz movement just says they want to get into attack range. The exception is if they have like an area of effect thing like the guy's throwing knives. I'll try to get into his range as many people as possible. So, they're both attacking for plus one. Oh, uh, what was this thing? The first time you would suffer one or more damage this round. Ignore it. He takes none. Haha. America does take two. One plus one. So, she's down to three.

46:35 Good thing though. That was a slow. Wait, that's not him. So, now it's No. Oh, it's all of us. So, Noman's up. And now he needs to get to three damage if he gets a plus one attack or if he uses his wet stone. That's definitely possible. Ah, there we go. Head shot will do it. And then he doesn't really need to move, so he might as well put on some armor. So, okay, he'll do a head shot and stick to the shadows. So, headshot does three damage. This guy only needs two more. So, Lambic should be able to take care of that. Then he's defending equal to his current potency, which is two. Not enough to like to Oh, wait. Shoot. That guy is immune to damage. Stupid quagula. Whatever. I don't think Nommen can get into one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Oh, one, two. Oh, he can shoot that guy. But in that case, let's maybe not use the headsh shot because it kind of be a waste. Oh, but all we have is snapshot otherwise. I mean, I could throw the nail bomb down. I know those guys aren't moving anymore. Sure, that's that's kind of fun, right? So, I'll have him move three. Sure. And then he throws a two value nail bomb. We'll put it there so it can't hit America. And the guy needs two damage to be wounded, then two damage to be killed. So, if America can hit him for one, then we'll be good to go. That was a fast action, which honestly isn't great because I want to go after that guy when he hopefully is actually targetable again. Okay, America's up. Oh yikes. I guess we didn't need the bomb. I didn't pay attention to what she had. So yeah, she'll do this card. Uh she gets to steal four life from the guy. He's dead.

47:56 And heal four. That seems great. And then she'll move three towards other people. Oh, except she only moves two because of her uh card she chose at the beginning. So yeah, three, you're gone. The bomb doesn't matter anymore. I mean, it would still go off, but nobody's there. And she actually did four damage that time. So, that's great. And that's a slow card, which again is kind of what we want because we want to go after that guy's maybe targetable. All right. And Lambx's last. Let me know what to do. Well, let's see if he can get to the other archer. Um, he could move. Oh, I actually have a uh what's a meal thing. That's fine. If it's not enough to kill the archer, the crush the will is two plus one, but the archer has four life left at yellow. Oh, well, we could have done that, but instead, let's do this card, I guess. Oh, no. No, I want to go slower. Now, for this round, when he uses an ability like Crush the Will, he would get an extra Brace token to heal, but that's not going to matter much. All right, so he'll go one, two, three, and then he's uh at four range for Oh, crad.

48:50 He's at four range. So, I could use my chained blade and both uh brace tokens to get in range of that guy. Sure, why not? We won't do that. Then we do two damage to make him wounded. But then he won't have any brace tokens left to heal himself. So it goes. All right. And he's slow. So Noman's the only one that's going uh in the fast category next time. First we go to round four and read some stuff that won't matter. The horse voice shouts again. Our patrons vaults are endless as are our numbers. Lay down your killing irons and we'll cut quick. The Arcaniac Lambic looks inward for a moment. Lies on all counts, he says with confidence. If we find their means of ingress, we can stop them. We found it already, dude. See, this uh this mattered a lot more when I was playing this for the first time. So, we would have spawned an extra three archers potentially, but nope. All right. Now, we're each taking again our three held impulses and drawing two and picking one of them. Gnomomen has to move slowly or potentially gain some coins. We'll pick that one and see if that works out. Grown X has to move slowly or he can move to an enemy who would attack me. That's not going to happen. So, I Well, he'll still pick it because I don't want to move slow.

49:53 America can give people a brace if they follow her orders. Or she can order people outside of her influence. Did she get an order yet? Where are order cards? Oh, I guess the cautious approach one, but that's it. It's a bit dull. We'll pick the brace one. And Lambic sucks. We'll make him suck a little bit less. All right. No man, go. Oh man, he is far away from everything. He can't attack that guy. Doubt he can get to that guy. Oh, I forgot. What did this thing do? Oh, nobody picked an instant impulse, so nothing. All right, so what do I do? I guess I'll move next to the guy and stick to the shadows to be ready to attack him later. Move here. Two defense done. Oh, I forgot we could have been getting loot. That loot he already got. I forgot to mark it. But yeah, America could have gotten one. Grown could have gotten two. Oh well. All right. Quagula boy is next. Please just let us hit you. Move and attack with yellow. Yes. So he doesn't want to move. He attacks, but nope. Instead, his coagula goes away.

50:40 And he's vulnerable again. You're going to die. Okay. Groax is up to mash that archer next to him. I mean, if he's got a mashing option, I guess he could just Oh, attack way too many times. Attack plus two. Yeah, I mean all these will kill the guy. So, we'll do this one. Smack him out of existence. Oh, that is a death throws card, though. Nameless peasant. No sooner do they hit the dirt than you're smacking their trembling hands aside, clawing at the left. Gain the enemy's coin. Gain one loot and kill your enemy. Sometimes they would not die in very rare cases. So, we get to loot. Ooh, a healing one to heal equal to potency. And archers have four coins. All right. And there are no archers left. I don't know if I actually take this away. Why not? All right. So, America's the second to last up. We only have one job left to do. Deal in five damage to that guy. Oh man, she actually has a great rampage here to do a ton of damage then heal herself four in this case cuz that's a healing skill which would be amazing. But uh yeah, she can't attack the guy cuz she's not next to him. So I think instead a swift leap and bone cracking swing will work. One, two, three, four. Hello. Oh, his uh defense got knocked off. And then with the plus one, she does deal enough damage to get him to wounded. And it should be the end. If Lambbe can do two damage and here, let's try. I mean, it it might backfire, but let's go ahead and get him one of his little tokens. He'll move over here and attack the guy, which does get him a death throw. Your enemy slumps into a runous heap, crying for distant loved ones. Wait, this is the rascalid.

52:07 They can talk. Your flesh crawls as you turn away. I feel like maybe you shouldn't draw a death throws card for like creatures. Okay, gain your enemy's coin reward. Yay. but gain one trauma and kill it. Okay. All right. I guess we'll just stop there because I mean I I could play out the last two rounds and I guess well I mean we can say we got all the loot I suppose cuz clearly we'd be able to. I don't know. Let's say Lambbook got the two and you got some coins and stuff. Okay. And even though she might not be able to get that far, we'll say America got the other one. But yeah, none of the other round events are going to do anything since all the enemies are dead. So we win. And because we locked out all of the spawn points, we'll get the special encounter token, too, which will change how things start in the next video where I go into the encounter phase and show how that works. And to be clear, that'll be a much shorter video because the encounter phase takes a lot less time and there's a lot less to teach than the combat phase. Here we do get our encounter outcome. The attacker's raw aggression is no match for your skill at arms. The survivors wither into the blackness of the woods, their yelps of pain and frustration quickly fading. You are left to survey what remains of the camp. Draw a location card one. And we would have started somewhere else if we had failed the mission, but you still would keep going at least. All right. Now, we go to callings and gaining trauma. And trauma influences what ending your character gets at the end of the campaign. So, I have no idea what that'll mean in the long term, but it's an interesting idea.

53:22 So, whoever got the most calling tokens loses one trauma. Second most does not gain or lose any. Third most gains one trauma. Least gains two trauma. America's easy. She never gave an order to anybody, so she gets two trauma. The next tiebreaker is resolve. and Gronax had two resolve versus three with Nomomen and Lambeic who also each had one calling cuz Lambic got a calling from the death throws on that guy. The next tiebreaker is max health. Lambic and Nomman both have eight. And the final tiebreaker is influence which actually works out great because that means Lambic gets rid of his trauma for having first and Nomman didn't have any trauma. So we end with Grown Ax having one trauma, America 2, Lambic and Nomman none. And I will end this video with my thoughts on how the combat plays out. I'll save my thoughts on the story and adventure mode for the next video. And overall, I like a lot of it. I think the initiative system is really clever.

54:13 Again, except for that first round, you are determining where you'll be. It still feels pretty dynamic, but you have at least some choices between brace tokens moving you and fast and slow cards of where you want to go. The enemy activation is nice and varied. Now, it can be a little bit swingy cuz the difference between like a one or a two card or a 17 or 18 card is pretty dang gigantic. And if you pull one of the worst cards at a bad time when a lot of guys are activating, they can totally wipe out your party. But I think the simplicity of the enemy AI, the uh special abilities to change things up, them sometimes running towards you, sometimes running into pits cuz they're scared of you, doing different stuff if they're wounded, all of that works really well and again leads to a dynamic enemy system without it getting bogged down too much or being too complex to resolve. And I love that it's one deck of cards instead of something like Gloom Haven where I have to track down a bunch of decks for every single type of enemy.

55:05 What you're doing on your turn is also pretty clever. Uh you don't have that many options, so it's not too overwhelming, but picking which card is best, picking your two actions, uh having different special abilities, but not too many to start out. Looking at these guides, each character starts with three abilities and could get up to five more, but you'll be customizing your deck and adding cards to it, so you'll know which ones they are and learn them pretty steadily. And the whole thing about getting a surge or getting a rampage for extra actions, it's not going to happen all the time, but when it does, it does feel pretty cool. And then at least in the couple missions I've played, this one and some other ones I won't show you, they do a pretty good job of mixing just straight up combat and actual objectives and things. My one complaint with the game, and I mentioned this at the beginning, is that I don't think the player count balance is right at all. Like, not even close. So, the big difference when you have fewer characters is that your potency is higher. And don't get me wrong, that does do a lot cuz most characters have four potency instead of two when you're playing with two characters. So that means their basic attacks do four damage. So with a moose, they could oneot an archer or damage the rascal with no problem. So you can wipe out enemies left and right. And then a lot of loot cards and special abilities are also based on your potency. So like you can throw darts harder, your healing items will heal you more. So I think that part does work well. It spreads the amount of damage dealt, the amount of special things used across the players, kind of diluting them. So, it tends to balance pretty well. But what doesn't are, I think, kind of the obvious things that you saw here, the objectives, right? With four characters, we were able to split up and within the first two rounds lock down every single one of these spawn points. And that's going to be the case for any mission where you

56:36 have to like run and do things. My two plays previously of this one have been with two characters. And as you can imagine, that was way tougher. Even after the first game where I knew what I was supposed to be doing, the second one was still a challenge just cuz I couldn't get around as quickly as I would want to cuz you don't get any more rounds. There aren't any fewer enemies. You hit harder and you heal harder, but you don't magically get more actions and move faster. And then the other thing is when enemies attack you, there's only two of you. You only have the same pool of life. Your life is not going up anymore. There aren't any fewer enemies spawning. Now, yes, if you get a defense card, it can be ridiculous because with four potency or five if you get a plus, enemies are going to plink against your armor over and over again because remember, if they can't at least equal your defense, they do nothing. So, like they would have to do a five attack with that plus one card to be able to injure me. But if you don't draw defense or you don't use it at the right time, you're just taking all the damage from everybody. So, in one of my plays, for example, where I had two characters, one of them was completely dazed and the other one was almost dead before we even got to act. Now, when you're dazed, you do get to crawl around. You can still like pick up items and stuff. You can still sometimes use healing so you can get yourself back in the fight. And that mission did actually end up with me surviving which was pretty cool. But still, yeah, I don't know. Like right now, I would maybe not recommend playing this with fewer than three or four characters. And they do have these simplified versions of the characters that you can use. I haven't actually tried them yet, but this would make playing with like one main character and some simpler characters a lot easier. So yeah, the core combat mechanics, the scenario design, the enemy activation, the player activation, I think all of that is really cool, really working well for me. So if they can get the balance

58:06 right, or if they just say, "Hey, always use four characters." I'd be fine with that. Lots of games do that, especially if the simplified characters are in the game, then I think I won't have any major problems with this game, cuz a lot of what it's doing is great. So that's all well that ends, at least the combat portion. Again, I'll have another video this week of the adventure stuff. And you can go check out the crowdfunding campaign. Not sure if it's launched yet cuz I'm not sure when this will go up, but it should at least be up if you want to follow it. Thanks for watching everybody. Special thank you to our biggest Patreon supporters, Matt G, Dan J. William F, Steve Ren, Andrew R, and Chris C. We'll see you at the next