Any official or unofficial single player yet?
- Thread starter CSlagle
- Start date
Arydis
New member
If this one is going to be played single player, you would really want to ramp up the monster difficulty. I would say that this is a game you play more against other people than against the game itself. The game has very little to no pressure or consequences without other players.
I think you could probably play single player as it is right now... the issue is that the rules would allow infinite retries if there was no 'ticking clock' of other guilds assassinating you or completing quests first. Being able to sit back and take monsters out without risk and resurrect a ton of times takes some of the game out of it. The trick is, that you are left with 1 heart after fighting smetterling, and Blue guild kills you with an axe to the face.
I think the only thing which would be needed for a single player game would be 'must beat mission before X number of rests' or something. And until multiple replays to know what that number is, no one would know. You might also need to play as a single guild of 6 heroes or else half the board would be untouched.
Also, You would need to make some rules for monster movement because allowing the player to the right to control can make them do some cool stuff which won't happen in single player play. Have to decide if monsters will move to do max damage or run away or so on.
If someone wanted to figure out a 'ticking clock' system for single player play which works on 'rest cycles', I think you might have a good system.
I think the only thing which would be needed for a single player game would be 'must beat mission before X number of rests' or something. And until multiple replays to know what that number is, no one would know. You might also need to play as a single guild of 6 heroes or else half the board would be untouched.
Also, You would need to make some rules for monster movement because allowing the player to the right to control can make them do some cool stuff which won't happen in single player play. Have to decide if monsters will move to do max damage or run away or so on.
If someone wanted to figure out a 'ticking clock' system for single player play which works on 'rest cycles', I think you might have a good system.
Just a some ideas from the top of my head.
Start: Pick 6 guild members to start the game and form a 3 hero team with them. Equip each group of 3 (active and reserve) with a set of starting items. When a hero dies they are dead for good. You can salvage a single item off a fallen hero. The rest are destroyed.
Resting: Resting would unexhaust items and respawn monsters.
Attacking/Defending: Should work the same as always, expect the monster would always attack. Can't activate a monster and move it away from the attacking hero.
Buying items would work the same as well. Items can be equip to any of your 6 heroes. Trading items can only take place during missions (to prevent super charging your starting 3). If you beat the campaign, rock on.
I can't be sure how any of that would work though until I receive the game. Custom map layouts may be necessary and tweaking the requirements to complete missions could make things run smoothly.
Start: Pick 6 guild members to start the game and form a 3 hero team with them. Equip each group of 3 (active and reserve) with a set of starting items. When a hero dies they are dead for good. You can salvage a single item off a fallen hero. The rest are destroyed.
Resting: Resting would unexhaust items and respawn monsters.
Attacking/Defending: Should work the same as always, expect the monster would always attack. Can't activate a monster and move it away from the attacking hero.
Buying items would work the same as well. Items can be equip to any of your 6 heroes. Trading items can only take place during missions (to prevent super charging your starting 3). If you beat the campaign, rock on.
I can't be sure how any of that would work though until I receive the game. Custom map layouts may be necessary and tweaking the requirements to complete missions could make things run smoothly.
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So I decided to mess around with this idea a bit last night and tried to come up with a way to play the game co-op/single player. I realize this isn't the main point of the game, but I like figuring out ways to play games with more people than intended or in different ways
Game Set-up for 2 person co-op
- We randomly drew 3 hero cards and kept 2. This is where the first problem arose. Some heroes are tailored towards PvP combat. My starting hand contain the Queen of Beggars and King of Thieves. I reshuffled the deck for the heck of it and tried again. Now there is no reason you cannot use them for co-op/single campaigns, but you lose out of special hero abilities. Out final teams were as this: Me with Zazu and Seth, My wife with Monkey King and Hitch. Seth power is useless early, but I decided I didn't want to keep redrawing.
- We dealt out the starting items and were allowed to keep 4. This may need to be adjusted, but for the campaign we played, it worked well.
- We selected the Moon Gate randomly and looked that the PvE objectives to see if they were difficult enough to complete without the threat of other guides. Having to defeat 2 Orc Captains and 2 Hammer Beastmen seemed pretty good, but the map set-up made it so there was no reason to go to certain portions of the map. We removed the door tokens from the "throne room" tile and added another objective token in that room. We also changed the Orc Marauder into a Orc Captain and added a Speak Beastman to guard it. This may not have been needed, but it ended up working well. Everything else was set up normally.
Gameplay
- This is were we spent the most time adjusting. The biggest issues that needed to be addressed were resting and failure state. There had to be a downside to resting. If not, we would just rest every turn to unexhaust our best weapons. We also needed to add a failure state to the game to prevent us from throwing bodies at monsters until we won. We debated having a rest limit, but it just didn't seem to feel right. A turn limited or "ticking clock" also didn't seem like fun ideas. What we went with was a SDE type of life system. Each guild was given life stocks or "continues" if you will. We each had 2 extra lives between our guildmates. When a hero dies, they could be resurrected by resting and spending a skull token. No death curses would be given. If you ran out of skull tokens and a hero died, they were dead for good. A single item or token could be looted from their body. Everything else was removed from the game. As for the problem of infinitely resting, we decided to add a ramp-up system. every time you rest, a guild token gets added to the end of the monster death track taking up a spot a monster could be placed. When the death track filled with monsters + tokens, you respawned and removed the guild token from the track. We also decided that resting would be agreed upon by all guilds at the same time.
- Actual gameplay was the same. Movement, attack, and reactions were unchanged. We did institute that all monsters targeted would reacted to the attacking hero. This prevented us from targeting melee heroes in the hopes of also killing the ranged units with nova bolt.
- Potions could be handed between heroes that share a space by spending a movement point of either hero. All heroes were considered allies.
Endgame/Upgrade/Title rewards
- Coins acquired and objectives completed were hero specific. So if a hero killed an orc captain, he acquired the coins for completing the objective and the reward card if there was one. Items could be saved until the end of the scenario or switch out with current weapons if space was an issue.
- The hero with the most coins won the title if there was one to give and was the only one who could use the benefits later.
- No death curses were given.
- Each player was given 4 upgrade cards and allowed to buy 2. Players could then trade items as they wished.
- We debated whether lives should restock between levels, but noticed how many coins we had at the end of the game. We set lives at 5 coins a piece. Players could pulls their coins together and split the lives up as needed.
- Coins of dead heroes were not lost.
- If you lost a hero during the scenario, you were allowed to draw a new hero and equipped him with the items you had available.
So how did it actually play. Well, so bad early rolling, lead to the early deaths of Monkey King and Seth, putting both of us in trouble. After respawning our heroes, we move our team towards the center of the map. The respawn system provided a decent challenge as we attempted to battle out of the center towards the objectives. Thankfully, the combo of Hitch and Zazu prevented us from having to rest too many times, but also left both heroes near death as we moved north. My wife took her team through the portal to collect our first objective (We added this one in ourselves to improve the challenge) while I'll proceeded north to kill the other 2 orc captains. Some unfortunately fantastic rolling brought about Monkey King's second death but he was able to clear the path to the first objective before we went down. Hitch was able to heal to full via life drain during the process. While, some untimely respawns and not being able to overkill anything, lead to Zazu's first death with both orc captains untouched. A quick rest left us with fully healed heroes but no extra lives to spare. My wife took Hitch and Monkey King to defeat the Hammer Beastmen while I attempted to finish off the orc captains. Zazu was able to redeem himself with the flanking support of Seth and quickly dispatched the orc captains. My wife seemed to be in trouble and was 1 dice shy of overkilling the Hammer Beastmen on consecutive attacks . I somehow managed to roll 3 ranged dice and 1 sword for each of them and Monkey King proved to tanky to touch. Pop shots from Seth finished off the near dear beastmen and my wife was able to grabs the ojectives and close the gates.
The game played well, if not with a few hiccups here and there and some details that need ironing. 2 heroes each for a 2 player co-op games seems to be the sweet spot. for 4 players or more, I would suggest 1 hero each with only 2 items per hero. 3 players would be a weird number but 2 heroes each would probably work if you increased the difficult a bit.
Certain heroes would be extremely powerful in this variant. Nibbles and Pigsey could stay alive permanently without too much worry of dying. Other heroes that focus on PvP would be less useful, but could still be play with. Now all of this needs to be tested with more games and in a campaign type setting. We had some terrible beginning luck combined with fantastic ending luck to make this a close and exciting game. I've probably forgotten some things so let me know what you guys think.
Game Set-up for 2 person co-op
- We randomly drew 3 hero cards and kept 2. This is where the first problem arose. Some heroes are tailored towards PvP combat. My starting hand contain the Queen of Beggars and King of Thieves. I reshuffled the deck for the heck of it and tried again. Now there is no reason you cannot use them for co-op/single campaigns, but you lose out of special hero abilities. Out final teams were as this: Me with Zazu and Seth, My wife with Monkey King and Hitch. Seth power is useless early, but I decided I didn't want to keep redrawing.
- We dealt out the starting items and were allowed to keep 4. This may need to be adjusted, but for the campaign we played, it worked well.
- We selected the Moon Gate randomly and looked that the PvE objectives to see if they were difficult enough to complete without the threat of other guides. Having to defeat 2 Orc Captains and 2 Hammer Beastmen seemed pretty good, but the map set-up made it so there was no reason to go to certain portions of the map. We removed the door tokens from the "throne room" tile and added another objective token in that room. We also changed the Orc Marauder into a Orc Captain and added a Speak Beastman to guard it. This may not have been needed, but it ended up working well. Everything else was set up normally.
Gameplay
- This is were we spent the most time adjusting. The biggest issues that needed to be addressed were resting and failure state. There had to be a downside to resting. If not, we would just rest every turn to unexhaust our best weapons. We also needed to add a failure state to the game to prevent us from throwing bodies at monsters until we won. We debated having a rest limit, but it just didn't seem to feel right. A turn limited or "ticking clock" also didn't seem like fun ideas. What we went with was a SDE type of life system. Each guild was given life stocks or "continues" if you will. We each had 2 extra lives between our guildmates. When a hero dies, they could be resurrected by resting and spending a skull token. No death curses would be given. If you ran out of skull tokens and a hero died, they were dead for good. A single item or token could be looted from their body. Everything else was removed from the game. As for the problem of infinitely resting, we decided to add a ramp-up system. every time you rest, a guild token gets added to the end of the monster death track taking up a spot a monster could be placed. When the death track filled with monsters + tokens, you respawned and removed the guild token from the track. We also decided that resting would be agreed upon by all guilds at the same time.
- Actual gameplay was the same. Movement, attack, and reactions were unchanged. We did institute that all monsters targeted would reacted to the attacking hero. This prevented us from targeting melee heroes in the hopes of also killing the ranged units with nova bolt.
- Potions could be handed between heroes that share a space by spending a movement point of either hero. All heroes were considered allies.
Endgame/Upgrade/Title rewards
- Coins acquired and objectives completed were hero specific. So if a hero killed an orc captain, he acquired the coins for completing the objective and the reward card if there was one. Items could be saved until the end of the scenario or switch out with current weapons if space was an issue.
- The hero with the most coins won the title if there was one to give and was the only one who could use the benefits later.
- No death curses were given.
- Each player was given 4 upgrade cards and allowed to buy 2. Players could then trade items as they wished.
- We debated whether lives should restock between levels, but noticed how many coins we had at the end of the game. We set lives at 5 coins a piece. Players could pulls their coins together and split the lives up as needed.
- Coins of dead heroes were not lost.
- If you lost a hero during the scenario, you were allowed to draw a new hero and equipped him with the items you had available.
So how did it actually play. Well, so bad early rolling, lead to the early deaths of Monkey King and Seth, putting both of us in trouble. After respawning our heroes, we move our team towards the center of the map. The respawn system provided a decent challenge as we attempted to battle out of the center towards the objectives. Thankfully, the combo of Hitch and Zazu prevented us from having to rest too many times, but also left both heroes near death as we moved north. My wife took her team through the portal to collect our first objective (We added this one in ourselves to improve the challenge) while I'll proceeded north to kill the other 2 orc captains. Some unfortunately fantastic rolling brought about Monkey King's second death but he was able to clear the path to the first objective before we went down. Hitch was able to heal to full via life drain during the process. While, some untimely respawns and not being able to overkill anything, lead to Zazu's first death with both orc captains untouched. A quick rest left us with fully healed heroes but no extra lives to spare. My wife took Hitch and Monkey King to defeat the Hammer Beastmen while I attempted to finish off the orc captains. Zazu was able to redeem himself with the flanking support of Seth and quickly dispatched the orc captains. My wife seemed to be in trouble and was 1 dice shy of overkilling the Hammer Beastmen on consecutive attacks . I somehow managed to roll 3 ranged dice and 1 sword for each of them and Monkey King proved to tanky to touch. Pop shots from Seth finished off the near dear beastmen and my wife was able to grabs the ojectives and close the gates.
The game played well, if not with a few hiccups here and there and some details that need ironing. 2 heroes each for a 2 player co-op games seems to be the sweet spot. for 4 players or more, I would suggest 1 hero each with only 2 items per hero. 3 players would be a weird number but 2 heroes each would probably work if you increased the difficult a bit.
Certain heroes would be extremely powerful in this variant. Nibbles and Pigsey could stay alive permanently without too much worry of dying. Other heroes that focus on PvP would be less useful, but could still be play with. Now all of this needs to be tested with more games and in a campaign type setting. We had some terrible beginning luck combined with fantastic ending luck to make this a close and exciting game. I've probably forgotten some things so let me know what you guys think.
Neat information! I like the idea of giving heroes 'lives' and when they 'die for reals' you deal out another from the deck. This could balance out the issue of PVP heroes. You basically make due until you burn through them.
Faster respawns for more resting seems plausible, but it also makes you seem like you can never fail the quest except from over-dying.
It might even be worth 're-writing' some of the scenarios for single play to make better use of the board. Like a single player campaign pack.
Faster respawns for more resting seems plausible, but it also makes you seem like you can never fail the quest except from over-dying.
It might even be worth 're-writing' some of the scenarios for single play to make better use of the board. Like a single player campaign pack.
Unless you do something about ranged weapons (or resting), there is nothing stopping a player from staying out of range of a monster and picking them off with ranged attacks.
Honestly, if you want to try this game out solo, you need to introduce enemy guilds that have some sort of AI imo. It's a key part of the game and to not have it makes for a dull and unbalanced game.
Honestly, if you want to try this game out solo, you need to introduce enemy guilds that have some sort of AI imo. It's a key part of the game and to not have it makes for a dull and unbalanced game.
rrrrupp, the idea had crossed my mind, but I didn't want to add too many things to keep up with. Ranged weapons were not an issue for us neither of our heroes benefited from bow weapons. We thought about adding an extra movement to enemies as well so they could close the gab easier. Like I said though, we were just messing around and threw some rules together. Would require a lot more games to get something solid. And currently, I'm more interested in playing the actual game and painting. I'll look at testing this all out some more later. Thanks for the input both of you.
How about this.
1.) Each time you rest your guild, all monsters activate. If they cannot attack, they take the shortest path to you. If they can, they attack the closest hero. If multiple targets, lowest health first followed by lowest defense followed by player choice. If you survive the onslaught, carry out resting as normal (I would resurrect any heroes that died in the onslaught).
2.) If you are wiped off the map, you lose.
It would require some testing, it might be too brutal
1.) Each time you rest your guild, all monsters activate. If they cannot attack, they take the shortest path to you. If they can, they attack the closest hero. If multiple targets, lowest health first followed by lowest defense followed by player choice. If you survive the onslaught, carry out resting as normal (I would resurrect any heroes that died in the onslaught).
2.) If you are wiped off the map, you lose.
It would require some testing, it might be too brutal
We thought of that. The problem becomes you have to institute a bunch of rules that are not a part of the game. I would rather stick as close to the actual rules while doing this for simplicity sake. And considering that a single monster can kill you at any point, I feel that is too high a cost. I mean, my wife rolled 6 hits with a goblin archer in our first game. We barely won the game we step up with a mixture of good and terrible luck. Most monsters are in a place that prevents too much abuse of the range strategy as well. Throw in a rule that allows all monsters to react when targeted and AoE is less appealing.
I've had more experience with the game in general and the more I play it, the less I think a single player game would work... at least in a campaign setting. We are currently on the final mission and each team has 1 hero that can't be killed by monsters. 1 guy has 18 defense. Another guy has 10+ and the amulet of retribution (so any monster that attacks him dies pretty much).
Maybe that's more of an issue with 2 items in the game though (the item that doubles your defense and the amulet of retribution). I'm thinking at the very least, the ammy needs changed in our game group... likely to having only crits do damage.
Maybe that's more of an issue with 2 items in the game though (the item that doubles your defense and the amulet of retribution). I'm thinking at the very least, the ammy needs changed in our game group... likely to having only crits do damage.
I will receive the box on Monday, then I will give a try on the solo rules (my bro doesn't like games...). I think that from I have read until now, AQ can be played in a solo mode with minor mods. For an AI, I think to use the one used in Zombicide as this boardgame has an official solo mode. I will write logs after each plays so it may help other users.
MAJBrown
New member
Check out Riddle13's solo rules. He put them out last fall and lots of folks have tried it and given positive feedback.
