HEXplore It: The Valley of the Dead King (Second Edition) playthough
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- Опубліковано 3 лис 2023
- HEXplore It: The Valley of the Dead King - Second Edition (2019)
www.hexploreit.com/vol1/
boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2...
#boardgame #solo #playthrough
================================================ - Ігри
Thank you sir for taking the time to make this video! I know it was not easy. I enjoyed following your adventures.
This game is incredible, it was a pleasure. It's a crime I haven't played it more. Thanks for watching and letting me know it was enjoyed!
epic game)
Excited to watch this later today. Full playthroughs of this game are few and far between (for obvious reasons).
Aye, it was... a lot! It was also my first play, so maybe I was extra slow. Tons of fun though! Thanks!
@@CeePhourI'm halfway through. Got inspired to pull out Sands of Shurax so I took a break from watching. Really well done. The pacing of it is about how I play these games, extra slow. Although I do have a basic strategy I follow for VotDK that makes it a little easier to move faster vs 2 and 3.
2:09:15 The Bandit Prince would heal 5. Then you roll the die, if you roll a 2 the Prince would block and stab, if you roll a 5 the Prince would perform greedy hand, etc. I agree, it is worded funny. Enjoying the play through!
Thank you! I wasn't thinking clearly, but it definitely could have been worded better. I eventually figured it out later (2:17:20), which was recorded the next day - at the time I was late (I had somewhere to be) and trying to find a good spot to wrap up for the day and so I was panicking :D
Absolutely epic! I know this must have taken a lot of work, but I'm really glad you saw it through; you've managed to capture the entire arc of a game of Hexplore It! What a great way to show both the game's strengths and weaknesses. I do hope you'll consider another playthrough at some point down the road, especially now that you've explored the various tools available for building up your party and managing the Dead King, the Circumstance cards, and so forth. I also think the game fares much better with more characters in play, but as you might imagine, it increases the "brain bandwidth" requirement quite a bit!
Thanks so much, CeePhour!
Way too much time! :) Two days setup/reading/testing/graphics, recording took three days, and I had to banish my wife on her lunch break :D We can thank her because that's the only way this lengthy video happened.
I really want to play this again, and soon (while the rules are fresh in my mind). I don't even care if it's on "Starter difficulty" the whole way through again; it's so much fun and tells an amazing journey every time.
It hit me the next day, which I feel like is a glaring omission for the video, but I don't understand how this scales. That or I DO, and it is "poorly". Unless I'm missing something, here's what I am stuck on:
If I had six characters (god, the admin) I'd be single-rounding every enemy with basic attacks, and have _six_ rolls on quests that are "one success required". As it is with two characters I _might_ have to drag a non-boss fight out to round two, and only have _two_ rolls on that same "one success required" quest. That makes some sense in an RPG context (you only need one character who knows what they're doing) but I feel like using the Navigation/Wandering rule for Quests would have been better - "half the party must succeed".
Taking into account the difficulty system, the party of six could bump up difficulty early and get even stronger (more of the Power Up cards) quicker! Enemies would need an equation for balance instead of a set number. Lets take the Lesser Water Elemental (0:15:44) for example. 6HP is a joke to six characters. What if the HP said "3" instead, and the rule was "per number of characters". That would give our Lesser Water Elemental 18HP for the part of six. The difficulty system would also need to be reworked a bit (also to a simple equation).
@@CeePhour As much as I love the system, you are absolutely right. The game out of the box is "balanced" around a group of two or a single hexclusive role, from my experience. More players/characters will make the game significantly easier. That is why my game group (4+ players) starts the game on normal difficulty where player scaling is in place. But this makes the game extremly challenging in the first couple of rounds. We are also using houserules in a similiar vain you have suggested already. At least if the monster deck and the peril deck is not in play (what happens not that often anymore nowadays). That means increasing the difficulty whenever the power up deck runs out, or if two bosses were slain on the same difficulty. We are also applying the wandering rule to quests. One success per two players rounded up.
But difficulty aside I have still not seen everything the game has to offer. And VotdK is with nearly 15 plays my most played volume so far. I have (especially with the campaign books) years of content ahead of me. So I dont really mind tinkering with the system as a whole. But that is arguably not for everyone.
Heh, I get the feeling this means another playthrough is impending! If so, 1) yay!, and 2) my sympathies to your long-suffering wife. : )
I don't mean this to sound dismissive, but I get the sense you're giving more through to scaling and balancing that the designers ever did. I really appreciate the way Hexplore It straddles the tabletop RPG/boardgaming scene, but it has a LOT to learn from boardgaming (my hope is that the fruits of these hard-earned lessons await us in the Adrimon and Sands of Shuraz (?) sets, which I have yet to play, although I own them both). That's part of why your stream is such a great showcase for ths game; you wrestled with a lot of the issues that should have been addressed before this game was published. And you even had the benefit of the second edition; the first edition was squarely in "hot mess" territory.
While I had your stream playing, I broke out my own Valley of the Dead King -- I've since updated to second edition myself -- and pored over all the cards, characters, and placards to get ready to play it myself. I think the best compromise between exploring balance without crippling yourself would be four characters? That's what I intend to try, but it's been years since I played, and that was back with first edition. But I do think you're spot-on about the balance issues and the weird difficulty scaling (which, to my great disappointment, doesn't seem like it changes at all over the next games). I had previously had this crazy notion that everything should be played on Moderate so the boss' special abilities kick in, but I don't think that's really a viable approach. In fact, I think you had the right idea: just start at starter, and see how you feel as it unfolds, and if you're not inclined to boost the difficulty, don't bother, especially if the only return is the possibility of a +1 upgrade card at the risk of a party wipe.
In fact, I wonder if this is one of those situations where the only reason people feel compelled to level up is because the first difficulty is called "starter". If they weren't given such loaded names, would anyone bother pushing up the difficulty? Does the occasional extra power-up really offset the added difficulty? I have serious doubts...
Thank you for the insights! I don't have the experience with the system you do, but your changes, I love them. They all make sense. Automatically increasing the difficulty on an empty Power Deck is pure genius (so much so that I'm going to struggle remembering if this is a written rule or not if the situation ever comes up). The system is fairly easy to tinker with, and if I played this regularly enough I would definitely delve into making these changes. I think that any more than two players per human would be a bit much, so I might just keep playing two-handed or with the Hexclusive classes. I'd make too many mistakes from having to juggle so much information, and I'm not _completely_ nuts :P
Four characters!? I feel like that's a quick way to drive yourself mad! Good luck, adventurer! :) I would love to hear how it goes!
Good call about the difficulty stigma! To tell you the truth I completely forgot this was a common thought. I know I saw this all the time in the video game world where, among a group of gamers, there is considered to be a mark on your record if you played a game on "Easy mode", so much so that some games now call it "Story mode". It even affected me to where at some point (twenty-something years ago) where I drew a line in the sand and just played every video game for the first time on "Normal", and bumped it up if it was something I got proficient with. Arkham Horror: The Card Game
Wow! Truly epic. Thank you for your work with this!
Such a fun game! I need to get it back on the table.
You're wrong... I did watch the entire video!
Excellent playthrough, thoroughly enjoyed it - and what an ending! Just one problem... you 'defeated' the Dead King but never read or showed us the results for doing so on page 57. Oh well, your storytelling about the aftermath was perfectly detailed and acceptable! ^_^
Haha, well done! I felt bad that it was so long, I thought it would take half the time it did! I didn't feel like I earned reading the page 57 passage... maybe... next time O_O
Thank you for this video.
I you'll do it with every Hexplore It game to end up with a series of all of them one by another, that would be quite awesome..
Anyway, subscribed!
At 22:39, the card shows "Race: If you have an ork, dwarf, troll, or stonemar in your party..." and seems to indicate that bonus happens at the time of the quest. You stated you have to return to a town for a Power card since you finished the Quest. Were you talking about obtaining that bonus requires the trip back to town? It sounds like the Race bonus happens immediately.
Love the videos, thanks. Quick question about your accessories....where did you get the card rack that holds the cards above the map board?
3D printed, www.thingiverse.com/make:1106936