Sethliopod

The components are beautiful. The story is deep, enjoyable and well-fitting. The quantity and quality of the contents for the main game and expansions are very fair for the price.

Unfortunately, my gaming group could not get over the mechanics that rapidly descend into an over-simple, repetitious random dice-fest. It’s just so much rolling for combat, over and over again. Combats that you can easily win or lose purely by luck, and drastically change the outcome of the game. Yes, you can strategically place your models, and smartly use your resources. But you still come back to more rolling, comparing, rolling, comparing, keeping all your cool gear, or being captured in one of a hundred very similar rolls…ugh.

Then if you manage to perfectly run the game–or even utterly waste your time–the cheese count is going to determine your destiny. Certainly, there are ways to slightly manage the number of cheeses rolled or not rolled, but not enough. The ending felt quite like the end of a game of Killer Bunnies. No matter how much you stack the odds in your favor–or don’t–if the cheese rolled one way you win, the other way you lose.

Now, I think there is certainly a good audience for games like this, and they can be great amounts of fun for more “along for the ride” folks. This game certainly brings a heretofore unseen level of beauty and depth to the dice-fest, random win/loss game. We just did not see it coming, and did not enjoy the ride at all after trying a few times.