David Gregg

Overview: The point of this setup is to help assure that no village setup will ever be “dead” and to give plenty of options in each game for building your deck, without needing any spreadsheets or computer access.

Prep: Replace the hero and village randomizer decks with a single copy of each level 1 hero and village card.

Setup Heroes: Shuffle your hero randomizers and deal out 4 normally, however, if none of the heroes give light, continue to flip heroes until one is found that does, replacing the 4th hero. My group also prefers no more then 1 of each type of hero (so never 2 clerics for instance), so in our case we’ll also keep flipping until we have 4 unique hero types.

Setup Village: Similar to the hero setup, you’re going to be continuing to flip cards until you reach certain goals here as well. You’re aiming for 4 weapons, 2 villages, 2 light items, 2 spells and 2 food. Sometimes you’ll have cards that fit both categories, which is fine, but keep flipping until you have 12 cards that fit these 5 goals.

Conclusion: You’ll have access to a larger variety of cards then normal and there will be less copies of each card available then normal, but you should never end up with a “dead” village. The guaranteed variety in the dungeon has never let us down and usually provides multiple decent strategies.

New players will frequently line up their cards into great runs and sets, only to find that they never get the chance to play them.

So don’t be afraid to break up those runs in order to make a bigger set, or destroy a set to create a run. Do what you have to do to get the lead.

You can’t win if you aren’t playing 😉

In games with more then 2 players, having a powerful deck isn’t always going to be enough. So unless you can handle everyone ganging up on you, it’s best to inflict little bits of damage at a time, making sure you don’t make any enemies in the process. If politics break down and you become the table’s favorite target, well, lets just say it won’t be pretty.