Thoughts after a Week's Worth of Play

[Nytmare]

Game 1 - Basically 5 hours of stumbling through the rulebook trying to figure out where to look for things.

Game 2 - A little bit smoother, though when we finished, we realized that we had totally overlooked all of the rules about NPCs and drawing three schticks when you levelled up with monster kills.

Game 3 - The first time through actually playing the game correctly. Decided at the end of it to institute the crit/fumble rules and a "you can only gain one level per turn" rule because Roy ended up cleaving his way through all of his schticks about 10 turns into the game. Also toyed around with the idea of scaling the "draw 3 schticks and choose 1" rule to "draw 2 and choose 1" just so that the characters didn't end up so optimized by the time they hit the third floor.

Game 4 - Got into Xykon's Lair and ended up dropping Xykon, Redcloak, and a Goblin Necromancer as the first 3 cards. In the end, we had every creature left in the deck and discard pile thrown into the room (96 cards), and the final Battle Size was 165.

House rules we're adopting: The crit/fumble rule is a definite, nobody likes to see the first guy who pulls ahead wander through an entire level not having to roll a die to kill things.

We're going to do something to slow down the levelling process a bit. Limiting level gains to 1 schtick a turn helped some, but I think that dropping the "draw 3" down to "draw 2" might work better.

We talked about a bunch of possible rules for the Horde problem, and I think the easiest thing would just be to institute a "no more than 20 creatures can fit into a room" rule to prevent this kind of silliness from happening. I know that the chances of it happening are kinda slim, but better safe than sorry.

I forgot about another tweak we tried. We changed Wooziness Gas to "Roll a d12 and flip that many unflipped schticks" just to cut down on the amount of die rolling. We always seemed to get hit with that trap when we had a hundred million schticks.

Overall, I'm definitely happy. I think that, especially compared to the other rpg parody games out there, it's a really good "game", and not just a loose set of rules built around a stack of jokes. The card interactions are webbed nicely together and play off each other well. My only real complaint is that I wish that the rulebook was organized a little bit better.

[bwcMD]

Particularly if you somehow managed to go through that many monsters, someone should have come up with the "I didn't know they could do that" card, letting you conveniently ignore the Assist ability, or stop a Horde mid-spawn. And of course, just don't play that many goblins/undead.

[Nytmare]

We hadn't known about the official ruling of that card till about an hour ago. The first one was drawn around battle size 90 and we assumed that the timing of the card wouldn't work because we weren't technically in a battle yet. We also didn't have the option of not dropping any goblins or undead, there were about 10 already on the board, and it spiraled to the point where we were forced to play our entire hands before the first round of discards even happened.

[Toriko]

I think that you can use Durkon's Turn Undead ability to help shrink the last battle size too. Even if it won't scare away Xykon it will chase away the undead under him.

[apegamer]

Only about 1 in 3 monster cards in the Battle Deck is a goblin or undead. Lots of folks are saying that they had no choice on what to play, which means that they all had extraordinarily poor draws, or they hoarded these cards to the end, which is definitely not the thing to do if you want to prevent Xykon growing out of control.

Plus, as another astute poster noted, there are other cards that can prevent a battle size from getting too large.

[The Giant]

Yeah, as I pointed out in the "Invincible Xykon" thread, it is physically impossible for Xykon's Battle Size to exceed 51 on the 4th level of the dungeon, so I think you must have been doing something wrong.

Re: Drawing 2 shticks instead of 3: I actually prefer that variant myself when I've been playing the game for fun. I like it when more of the less useful shticks come in to play. However, it can definitely increase game length, which is already too long for some people's tastes. The same thing for the crit/fumble rule; I like it personally, but it does increase playing time.

[Totally Guy]

Our first game had Roy, Durkon and Vaarsuvius, I was Roy and I got strong quickly, mainly because I'd drawn the Talisman in my starting loot, and I managed to get hold of the starmetal early. We forgot to check for loot and schicks to get into Xykons Lair but we probably all had enough. I won as Roy and Vaarsuvius lagged behind.

From then we played 2 player games, it's hard to get the whole family together sometimes. It was Elan against me as Vaarsuvius, we were both doing quite well but in the end game Elan pulled ahead, dumb move by me, I used "gimme gimme gimme" and got a fotune in my own loot, but I traded it for shticks and couldn't visit Xykon. V's Verbose Recitation is hard to boost, best way was with the megaphone but I didn't get that and so poor defence was an issue.

Then we played Haley against me as Roy, I got a slow start drew 2 Greenhilt swords from trading in monsters and one had to go to the bottom of the deck. Haley got everything, loot scticks, the lot.

Then I was Belkar and I was playing against Roy. I got the Snacks and Roy beat me up for it. After dying I was very weak and I had to flee the monsters on the early floors until Roy ran out of biggies. I had maybe 2 loot and Roy had already entered Xykons lair. That's when I turned it around, I drew screw this, Broken Weapon. Then when he was retreating I bashed him and killed him. Followed him up, killed him again, hung around a -1 encounter room on the third floor and then went in to fight Xykon. I had to wait for Roy to get down as I couldn't have defeated him without his help (not after what I'd put beneath Redcloak before Roy broke his sword). After a race to the top, Roy used a Gourd of speed, Belkar won by 1 point.

Good times. I hope my brother play when I'm not there. Maybe it'll be the thing I do. "Yay, big brother's home, we can play order of the stick!" I was disappointed that my Mum was intimidated by it though, I mean Monopoly and Cluedo are fine but stick man in a dungeon... doesn't understand.