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Originally Posted by ShannonA
The first is the socialization, which is an aspect you often don't find in German style games. This is the working together to make the game work, the figuring out how to balance (not entirely known) resources, and the whole question of trying to discover and out the traitor.
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The socialization is obviously a key factor. I've struggled a bit with the "table talk" restrictions the rules put in place, however. First they are entirely too vague to be effective rules. Secondly they are entirely easy to circumvent "If I only had THREE more men-at-arms, I could defeat the vile Picts". And third they tend to squash the socializing as players are worried about whether their casual kibbitzing is actually violating the rule. On the other hand I can see the desire to not turn the game into a colorless number crunching exercize (which sometime LotR can become if you play it to win hard core). To what extent do you follow those rules when you play. It sounds from your "drop a card" example that you are pretty free about discussing things in game mechanics terms.
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The second is the tension, becuase you're not just trying to succeed at a single quest, but also figure out how to keep on top of all the rest. So you're having to think a couple of turns ahead at any time, and worry about a number of different problems.
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The tension has been the most memorable part of play. It is really stressfull to KNOW that there is no way you can beat a given quest and just watch it slowly tick closer and closer to another pair of black swords.
My concern there is that there may well be mechanical ways to reduce the tension. After just a few games we've already hit on a couple of ideas that should make future games easier to win (like group rushing quests to win them with as little delay as possible, putting Sir Kay and the knight with Excalibur on early catapult duty. Ignoring the Black Knight Quest as a time waster which has little penalty for losing. And doing flybys on the invasion quests to keep them primed. To what extent can you come up with "standard operating procedures" that can largely defeat the automatic mechanical opponent and deflate some of the tension by making the game too easy?
So far it hasn't been easy. I think the difficulty scales up nicely with numbers of players and a good Traitor, of course, makes a world of difference. But games that rely on tension and stress to be fun tend in my experience to have lower replay value.
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If you think about the individual unit of play not as a turn ("play a card") but instead a round of play ("the players work together to do some stuff"), it becomes more obvious why it's fun.
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That's a pretty good way of viewing it, although I think the table talk rules discourage this sort of thing by making it difficult to really coordinate a killer combo like that. Technically your excalibur trick (a good one) is against the rules (at least how I read them). I think next time we play I'll suggest relaxing the table talk limit and see if that spices things up.
All in all, lest I sound too down on the game, I'm loving it. I've been tempted to rate the game a 9 over at BGG. But I just have these niggling concerns that after 5 or 10 more plays it really won't be a 9 any more.
No solution for that but to play the 5 or 10 games and find out.
What a terrible chore...how will I ever manage to slog through it ;-)