so i just played a match against the AI as Triss and here's my detailed-revew-after-1-game for those of you that have that feeling that you just can't wait to play the game but are worried about the game being some sort of con.
TL:DR
This is a fun board game and anyone that likes board games should probably pick this up and support it.
The actual explaination of the game in my experience during 1 round, since the info given is kinda bare-bones
This board game involves you playing as 1 of four characters and completing various objectives on a quest card to score points. The objectives often are either:
1. go to some area and spend resources to get points
2. Just go to some area and you get points
3. just spend resources and get points
4. go to another person and spend resources to assist them with THEIR quest and get points while they get half as many points
It's simple enough but what makes it difficult is the board itself and two kinds of setbacks.
the first setback is drawing a misfortune card. There are 3 ways to get misfortune cards.
1. An effect of another card/monster
2. fast travel (moveing 2 spaces for the price of 1!!!)
3, move to a space and be forced to draw a misfortune card.
The misfortune cards have various effects from getting hurt, monsters and bad guys spontaneously spawning out of your rear to paying some sort of toll or even choosing between the last two options as I never really encountered the first with either of the other two.
The second setback is monster cards. Monster cards are ranked from bronze, to silver, to gold, each with increasing lethality each time. Monster cards can have various, previously mentioned effects as well, but they mostly just injure you. When you're injured you're incapable of using the action that's injured until it's healed. Some cards can heal you or you can heal yourself for the cost of one of your 2 actions. some monsters can make a quest much harder to deal with, with an example being a troll that kicked the AI's butt and I conciously avoided until i got strong enough to deal with it. You fight monsters by rolling a hero die, and a number of regular dice. the hero die tends to resonate with your development cards (next paragraph) while the regular dice have either a defense, an attack, or a blank face. meet the required amount of attacks or defenses and you succeed in either attacking or defending. attacking a monster successfully takes it off the board and can possibly yeild rewards while defending averts a bad effect from taking place. Monsters need to be killed in a single roll, their damage does not stay on between turns.
Speaking of getting stronger, you do so by drawing development cards. Development cards have various effects as well, in my case they alll had to do with rolling a hero die just right during combat, (i didn't encounter any development cards that ouright added the number of dice i roll or anything). you can choose, for an action, to draw 2 development cards and keep 1. Some development cards are much stronger than others and their effects seem to vary, (though as triss i only drew development cards that aided me in combat, which was lucky for me in this case, but each character has their own development cards by my understanding, though i think other characters CAN use other character's development cards. I'll edit this later if i'm wrong). Development cards need to be charged before they can be used and you can put a charge on a development card by using an action to charge it.
You cannot use the same action twice on one turn.
Finally i'll touch on resource gathering. you gather things called clues which come in the colors of blue, purple, and red. you get clues by either:
1. moving to an area and drawing 1 clue of one of the colors on the area
2. investigating for an action and drawin 1 clue of 1 of the three colors
3. getting cards which boost the number of clues you get. These cards tend to happen when drawing clues and can sometimes have negative effects but often have traits which resonnate with other traits and get you lots of clues in 1 go, if you're lucky enough.
There's also some war tick thing that never came into play when i used it either that or i didn't notice its effect... sooo i guess i'm lucky.
I don't think i missed anything, so i'll now move on to the impression the game gave me.
I enjoyed the game. somewhere along the line the whole thing started feeling very natural to me and i started making strategic decisions on where to go, which rout i should take to get to a destination, and what actions i can afford to spare preparing myself for what's to come and which actions i needed to use to collect resources or get the hell out of rivia (where the freaking harpy just landed!) Overall it's a very fun game and if you're a fan of board games i think you should get it. it's only about a day old so i haven't found a multiplayer match yet but I dabbled in the multiplayer options and i found a small chatbox on the top left of the screen, which is vital for games like this where playing the player can be just as important as playing the game.
The downside to this game that i can see so far is that the tutorial consists of a bunch of videos as opposed to a hands-on experience, so that may make it just a little annoying for some people to get into it but i found that once i started playing i eventually got the hang of it.
Also the visuals aren't too impressive. it's really just a board with pieces on it and some music in the background which actually bugged out on me once and just stopped. it didnt hinder the game at all, it was just less musical.
I could give some arbitrary numerical score but overall i reccommend it and i definately hope a community grows around it so it can see further development.
arbitrary score:
pi x the square root of negative x where x is the number of sex cards available in the first game / something of slightly higher value... like actually getting laid.
... dang this revew ran long, hope it was helpful...