Hand of Fate!

The description of this game sounded so appealing, I decided to pick it up right after it came off Early Access. I might have bought the Early Access if I had come across it. (Not sure how, with having reviewed hundreds of games on the recommend daily list they set up on Steam last year, that this game failed to make one of those lists.)

Anyway. The concept of this game is a multi-genre mesh of board game, deck building card game, and small-scale action combat game. You have seven slots for equipment: weapon and shield, helm and glove, ring and artifact, and armor. You can also have an unlimited number of blessings and curses, food and gold. Opponents come in four suits: bandits, skeletons, ratmen and lizardmen. There are some special opponents of additional suits as well, but these have no bosses.

Combat is done in real time, third person, but with some simplifications that make it pretty easy to manage. Most of the opponent cards come in amounts of 2, 3, 4, or 6. 8 is possible in the late game. This means a pack of that number of opponents of that enemy type, and some encounters involve drawing more than one opponent card. There are also bosses, the Jacks, Queens and Kings of each suit. You must defeat each boss in turn, in Story Mode, to complete your deck. There are also encounter cards that award new cards, if you succeed completely during the encounter. The two types of card awards are independent. That is, you can earn new cards from encounters even if you "die" and lose the game without taking down the boss; while the boss can often be overcome by skipping many encounters rather than trying to "full clear" the board. Especially egregious is the fact that defeated bosses become part of the dealer's deck, meaning that you may encounter several of them on the way to your "current" higher level boss late in story mode. That fact, of sometimes having to beat many bosses to win, ramps the difficulty factor up quite a lot as you progress.

The story mode has four "tiers", each of which changes the nature of the game upon completion. Your starting equipment will improve after each tier, but the opponents get permanent buffs too. You can shape part of the game by expanding your deck and unlocking new cards, then choosing your portion of the game's encounter cards from your deck. Some cards are generally beneficial. Some are highly beneficial if you can beat their combat-based (skill-based) challenges. Others require you to make RP decisions, or to "roll the dice" by picking one of four "luck" cards, which have four success levels: Huge Success, Success, Failure, and Huge Failure. Some events require you to face very steep odds (get lucky, or do the event over and over many many times) to win through, and some events require high amounts of gold or health to be on hand to beat them, but most are more straightforward. New gear cards come available as well, unlocking more powerful options as you progress, with which to try to balance out the more powerful opponents you encounter both in new encounter cards and from tier buffs.

The key to this game is the combat. You must have the dexterity to beat the action combats, and enjoy this gameplay, or this title is not for you. There is also a strong amount of strategizing, including sometimes playing to beat tough encounters at the cost of trying for the main boss, or the opposite, concentrating on reaching the main boss intact at the cost of doing your best to minimize risks from encounters. Each boss in story mode also comes with their own built-in "curses", which greatly vary the flavor of that particular subsection of the game. You can change your deck each time you start a "game", and each attempt to kill one of the twelve main bosses represents one instance of the game, except your deck additions are permanent.

This game enjoys a healthy amount of simplicity, good voice acting from the dealer, combat that I find fun, and enough strategy in the board game part and the wide selection of cards involved in the game actually to impress me. This title is well designed and apparently got plenty of iteration and effective polish from its Early Access run.

There is an endless mode, which unlocks partway through Story Mode, for added replay value. This game also has high "variant scum" potential, since you could angle your deck for whatever theme you like, not necessarily for making the game as easy to complete as possible. Your tolerance for variants may depend on how easy or difficult you find the combat.

The combat is designed for a controller, but they are said to have worked on the keyboard and mouse controls heavily during Early Access and have improved them to the point where they are nearly as good as having a controller. I am playing with KB and mouse and doing fine, although I could see where a controller might make some fights (multiple bosses, with weak health or equipment) doable with the controller where they might be too long on the odds for the KB and mouse. I wouldn't let the controller thing scare you off this game, at all, if the sound of the gameplay appeals to you. Some users have described the combat as resembling that in the recent Batman Arkham series, for those of you who may have played some of those.

I like this game enough to feel compelled to come and recommend it. For those of you who try it because of my post, and like it, you are welcome.


- Sirian

Especially since I can't read the threads to see if the title is actually applicable.

I just started playing Age of Wonders. I really don't know how I missed out on this game for all these years because, from what I can tell, it's amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x0AQ_dWTIQ

You and I have a tendency towards corpulence. Corpulence makes a man reasonable, pleasant and phlegmatic. Have you noticed the nastiest of tyrants are invariably thin?

- me, to johns

I'm playing as Hannah the Irin of the Lanun against Mardoc of the Svartalfar...

Here's the start:



Mardoc is going to have a FIELD DAY with this!


That's not all, though. He managed to secure my agreement to a Wildlands map (in exchange for a map with plenty of water). Of course, the start location is *nowhere near* the coast (and all the resources are inland), and the map will now soon be crawling with wild critters he can tame...



This is at least supposed to be a map with "Snaky Continents"- but of course, I have no way of confirming that...

Luckily, as Hannah the Irin, I at least have the Insane trait- which means after some random amount of time I'll lose my two starting traits, and gain THREE random new traits!

I am understanding this right, correct? At least Mardoc assured me that was how it worked...


Anyways, this is where I settled:



Not a bad start, but the Svartalfar start with Agriculture, which is INSANELY overpowered for this starting location (there are simply LOADS of Agriculture, Calendar, and Animal Husbandry resources nearby- and I'm left playing catch-up to gain these techs while the Svartalfar start a tech ahead...)

It looks from the Demographics like Mardoc settled near the Remnants of Patria as well- that's the only reasonable explanation for how he's already producing 5 hammers...




This should be !FUN! I'm increasingly learning, nobody wants to play fair in this tournament. Whether it's insisting on settings that drastically benefit some civilization they have in mind, or possibly even re-genning maps until they get a start that favors them (Mardoc has admitted he had to re-gen a few times because some of the starts were "broken"- but how do I know I can take his word for it?) it seems everybody wants an advantage in this tournament...

Oh well, I guess that will just make it more fun in the games I win in this tournament!


Regards,
Northstar

...Retap decided is time to move on

BIG CHIEF JOEY COMIN' ATCHA!




Now under new management. Again.

Bob's busy for the next week, so we'd originally planned to wait until March to get this going. However...I have time now, and am travelling for work next week. T0 and map generation is the most intense part for quite a while. So I'll lob the save into Bob's court and let it sit there for a while. I'm in no hurry to get it back from him. This is my sixth active game, something's going to have to slide, it might as well be this one. I'm sure we'll be capable of finishing up in a hurry if the deadline nears.

T0:



Hmm. I'm inclined to go either 1NW or settle in place. In either case, founding on a hill may be important vs. the Doviello (gotta survive against the hero and potential worldspell early). It's essentially trading two floodplains for a pig; I'm not really sure which is more important to me. We'll be heading for AH very soon anyway, en route to Horseback Riding, but Calendar for Agrarianism and the sugar is probably first.

Settle in place also gives us a near-moat. Sure, he could come from the east and/or walk around, but it's still some security for free. I guess on balance that's what I'd rather do.

The other interesting question is worker or warrior first. Normally that's a no-brainer worker, but dying to a rush would be embarrassing. I think, on balance, I still want worker first. Mirrorland, as I understand it, is a 20x40 map with us offset. Meaning we're 20 tiles away in one direction and 10 in the other. Unless he hits the worldspell T0, his units are 1-movers so we've got until T20 before he can arrive. That's enough time to get out a worker and also a couple warriors, enough to survive Heroguy + Warrior + 2 wolves, probably. And who knows, we might get lucky and have an animal eat one of his units.

Figured I'd get things started off in this forum by starting the first player thread......














......so yeah, if you aren't me or aren't myself or aren't someone by the name of me or at least in my brain, then you better be someone that isn't playing one of the other civs in the game. Because if you are one of the other civs, then look very deeply into my brain right now, so that you can get so scrambled in your own brain that I can easily conquer you.


And on that note, I suppose it's time to await the starting location to try to figure out what to do for the snake pick. Picking what to use for a Leader & Civilization are the things that I really am not good at and often don't care all that much about. I'm half tempted to take the full list, toss it into a random number generator and let that be how I choose.

Though I'm already leaning towards wanting to try something that will help me expand super fast. That supposedly seems to have been my biggest failures in past games. So I'm leaning towards putting Organized and Imperialistic as the top traits I might want. I don't usually go that route, so it would also be something new for me which I also like.