by TheGargoyle
Well, is it that much weirder than having three cards with your own character in play at the same time?

A new one of his is **Renegade** which is currently in beta at Victory Point Games to be going into print probably next year.

Can we go a bit further in the depth department? In that case: **The Gallerist** gives you quite easy to get mechanics that are even thematically grounded and so IMO easily remembered, but the depth is really beyond any expactations. There are tons of …

It is my favorite single-mission-play miniature game. It has great dungeon crawl feel and fun enemy AI that make them really feel different. I quite like it. But be aware that you don’t have any form of character progression – you have your characters …

by TheGargoyle

I decided to put my money into the S&S KS for the simple reason that in case of a game failure with S&S (which is not something I expect, but which can happen with KS games sometimes) I at least get a pile of miniatures out that I can throw in many generic fantasy settings, too. The minis in Perditions Mouth are much more thematically specialized and so not as universally useable.

The second reason is that – despite me really loving the idea of rondels for action selection and preferring the card based combat a lot over dice based combat – the actual implementation, especially of the cards, is a bit of a letdown. Really, most of the cards boil, down to just a big printed number and a selection of icons, making any check solely a “select cards with the right icon and add those numbers” thing, which I can’t see to hold up during play thematically. Sure, mechanically it will work, dice aren’t much more than just numbers to add, too. But while dice are unobstrusive, the cards stare me in the face with just a big fat number and irrelevant fluff text that tries to paste on theme.

Third reason is that while the minis are really cool, they do feel a bit thematically samey to me. Which is to be expected in a game with a much more strong thematic focus, but well, I just like variance. Going against a Gremlin+Orc group one day and against some Demon-conjuring necromancer next day and against a Dragon with some dragon-kind fighters on the third day just tickles my fancy more.

Lastly, with a game with more bare-bones and non-elaborate structure I can easily retrofit mechanics into it. For example if the dice get on my nerves, it’s easy to build a card deck that mimics the combat cards from PM in the S&S game (the main problem I have with dice sometimes is that thhey don’t remember they fucked me over several times already and continue doing so, while a stack of cards with a bunch of bad cards slowly get’s reduced and so I WILL finally get to the good stuff 😉 ). It’s harder to pull out elaborate mechanics that don’t work and replace them with simpler stuff without breaking the game than it is to replace simple mechanics with other simple mechanics. So in a way S&S is more “repairable” to me than PM.

And, of course, the cold hard truth is that my wife would kill me if I would buy both 😉

There is no hidden information worth talking about (because even in multiplayer you can easily show your hand of cards to others or tell them what is there), so you can easily play it multi-handed. Which is an accepted way to play coop games that officially (usually for balance reasons) start with 2 players. That’s not “very loose”. “Very loose” is people listing two player games without hidden information as “playing left hand against right hand”. Think about soloing chess. But so far the games Ricky listed are all good and solid solo options, even if some of them are played multi handed.

by TheGargoyle
I think one reason why some people skipped this or didn’t go all in is the more generic theme. For me that’s actually a plus, because if all fails at least I will have a bunch of miniatures I can use with many generic fantasy themed g…

I quite liked it. I had different problems than others, because I played the german version and that one just had really bad translations, up to cards where the german version actually said the opposite from the english version, which really annoyed me so much that I didn’t go for more than the base set. But I like the concept, because I usually am able to provide my own “head space role playing” to flesh out the story. But then Lone Shark came out with the Apocrypha kickstarter and I went for that, because it seems to really improve on the PACG mechanics. So I doubt I will ever go back to PACG, even if newer versions actually might get better translations.

by TheGargoyle
Well, I am in for this years list, sent my top 20. Actually was astonished that I already have a top-20 and not just top-10 or something like that. Looks like I got quite a bit of solo-able games in the last year.

I’m throwing money at my screen but nothing happens 🙁