Yoritomo Kaigen

Let’s say you’ve been pulling into a Gambling game. If you’re like me, your first instinct will be to take control of the gambling round right away but this is definitely a mistake.

If another player initiate it, chances are he has more than one gambling card in his hand. Other players might have at least one card in their hand as well. Usually, I pass on the first round and let someone else play a gambling card, then original player takes control of the round again. So by passing, I kept my card which would have just been wasted anyway.

Depending on what the other players are doing, you may be able to pass a second or third time but be careful. The longer the gambling goes, the more likely the passes will go all around the table and you’ll lose.

I’ve played this game several times now and, as far as I have seen, Physical stats are much more important than mental stats.

There are usually some sanity and knowledge checks you’ll need to do for events, opening the vault and usually at least one Mental related task during the haunt(make an antidote, remove spider eggs) but there is one thing you can almost always count on. There will be something you need to beat up or something will be beating up you.

Might is the most important stat in the game in my mind. When choosing which side of a character I want, good might and good might growth is usually the only thing I look for. I have never died from going to a skull on a mental stat. It has always been because a monster was attacking me. Might equals offense and defense 90% of the time. Everything else is secondary to me.

I consider War of Honor to still be in it’s infancy especially as a tournament format. Even for fun play, there are alot of things I feel can easily be exploited.

One thing that’s happened to me on several occasions, especially playing an honor or dishonor deck, is that I will have all three players team up and attack me. Then on the next player’s turn, all three players team up and attack me again. Then on the next player’s turn my defense is basically completely worn out and he just comes over and takes as many provinces as he wants. Going from 4 to 0 provinces in one turn is not fun. It’s also very difficult to get military decks to help you defend since all they get is 2 honor and cannot advance their victory condition. I would recommend having rules in place to protect players a little like “A player may only attack or ally to attack another player once until that player gets another turn.” This still allows all players to attack one player but stops them from ganging up on him three times in a row.

I’d also be careful about allowing legacy cards in constructed games of War of Honor. Each Arc is pretty balanced but combining two arcs can lead to ridiculous combos. The War of Honor winner at Gencon won by turn 2 with a Celestial/Emperor Enlightenment deck by dropping one ring on each player’s turn.

Any time Werewolf in a top hat is on the board, I try to go for a character that can easily go up the “Gamer” side. This card allows you to easily beat up either the Gamer or Evil boss pretty easily, sometimes in the same turn.

Much like any other deck building game, removing the starting resources from your deck helps alot, especially since this game allows you to buy multiple cards a turn. You should get at least one card that deletes cards from your deck. Faerie Candymancer is pretty amazing for this.

There are alot of tips here about not going for the highest advisor and, for the most part, I believe that’s true. I roll low all the time and still manage to get alot out of my rolls.

But the Queen…..THE QUEEN! Our playgroup as more or less decided that if you can hit the queen, there’s no reason not too. We even joke that the winner of the game is usually whoever lands the queen the most.

At the time of this post, there were two other tips for this game. One saying that Aliens are good because you can beam up your invaders and us them multiple times.

The other said that wizards were good for card draw and robots were good for playing multiple minions and powering each other up.

Well, I’m here to say that zombies and any of these three factions are incredible. Zombies and any faction, to be honest. Zombies have cards to play minions from the discard pile or bring minions from the discard pile back into your hand. This makes replaying Invaders even easier for more VP. It also benefits from the card draw of Wizards as well as the additional actions(which robots may not be able to use easily). They also have Tenacious Z, basically a free minion any time you have a copy in your discard pile. If you draw Mall Crawl, I would use that to put all your Tenacious Zs in the discard pile.

Zombies for life, because replaying your power minion from the discard pile repeatedly is good with any faction.