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Anyone playing Massive Darkness?

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22 Sep 2017 17:40 #254636 by RabidWookie
Recently received my pledge and surprised by how fun it is, anyone else partaking?
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22 Sep 2017 19:11 #254637 by Michael Barnes
I'd be interested to hear more about it from you. So far the response I've been seeing is...muted. And looking at BGG, when I see a lot of posts about fixes/changes/variants...that does not exactly inspire confidence. I almost kind of feel like this might be the one too many for CMON...

What are you digging about it? Not trying to discredit your enjoyment, I haven't played so I don't know what I think of it other than it seems to be something of a dud.

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22 Sep 2017 19:37 - 24 Sep 2017 22:21 #254639 by Frohike
I'm dealing with some major dungeon crawl burnout, so take this with a grain of salt.

I've played MD a half-dozen times now and I'm going to at least play through the 9 core scenarios (& maybe the crystal & lava ones), but I think I'm going to park it after that and let the fan community do the development work that CMON decided to cut short. The system is ripe for homebrew development & scenarios... and for a 2.0 campaign

My own initial reaction to it is that it took most of the things that I found uninteresting or downright annoying in Zombicide and doubled down on all of it: loot trade deliberations (because rooms full of loot, like 6-9 cards for the whole party are uncovered nearly every turn), forgetting abilities and skill procs (because they're now scattered all over the place; character cards, character sheets, equipment cards), random TPK or scenario-ending clusterfucks (because the dice system is unbalanced AF, and random mob or roaming monster equipment can go from devastating to non-existent). Meanwhile it takes away the sense of drama that Zombicide had because the board is no longer flooded at an increasing rate. Spawns mostly occur by opening small, closed rooms separated by corridors, or through event cards which don't really scale or change based on level. You feel less like you're dealing with a bursting dam and more like you're methodically paddling your way up a mostly empty stream with occasional turbulent eddies, while passing around lots and lots of equipment. The scenarios that try to shake this up with a timer are mostly a mess. The only things that scale up are the numbers on the mob and equipment cards, and the number of skills and procs on your character sheet, all of which actually start to mechanically slow the game down as it progresses. Conversely the game ends up being more and more of a cakewalk from level 3 onward. It gives this overall sense of stuff getting busier and busier while also becoming less risky or interesting.

Ok, I'll stop griping. I pick on this game because I see glimmers of what it was trying to do but it's been frustrating to watch CMON drop the ball with it. It should have been Zombicide with just enough RPG artifacts to make it a little more deliberate and maybe a smidge more tactical. Instead, I got something that cranked up all the wrong dials and left the interesting initial ideas on the cutting room floor.
Last edit: 24 Sep 2017 22:21 by Frohike.
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22 Sep 2017 20:05 #254640 by Michael Barnes
Hmm... I don't have the time or patience for "glimmers" or "potential". There are plenty of games that are great out of the box.
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23 Sep 2017 06:57 - 23 Sep 2017 09:33 #254650 by King Grunt
I received my pledge a few weeks ago. Played it once & sold it off promptly. Great components, but the gameplay is mediocre at best. BGG is chock-full of threads on game imbalances & there are literally dozens of posted variants already...makes me think it wasn't play tested enough at different player counts. The guys from Secret Cabal liked it, but I'm guessing they only got a few games in for review purposes and these types of games aren't generally in their wheelhouse. Until future content is developed & changes up gameplay dramatically, this one's pretty weak compared to the competition.

I own KDM, Gloomhaven, Sword & Sorcery and Perdition's mouth and also have Folklore: The Affliction & Middara coming up so I'm up to my ears in dungeon crawlers. I bought Massive Darkness on the premise that it would be a light, easy dungeon romp with minimal fuss but it can be long and for lack of a better word, "fiddly". Given those factors, I'd rather play something else that gives me more bang for the buck in terms of fun-factor.
Last edit: 23 Sep 2017 09:33 by King Grunt.
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23 Sep 2017 08:55 - 23 Sep 2017 08:56 #254652 by ThirstyMan
chalk-full ??
Last edit: 23 Sep 2017 08:56 by ThirstyMan.

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23 Sep 2017 09:34 #254654 by King Grunt
LOL, yes, it isn't pleasant to eat.

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23 Sep 2017 11:23 #254659 by hotseatgames
I've only had it to the table one time so far. We enjoyed it, but it took way too long, mainly because I screwed up the rule that you attack a mob as a whole. I was treating each member as its own fight. We still won pretty handily, but I was also screwing up mob loot, and only letting the boss carry it.

So it needs to get played again to get a full sense of it. Opinions at this point:
PRO
Components are great
Lots of variety if you got the kickstarter. If you didn't, I wouldn't waste my time.
Fun dice system, really a nice system overall. It makes sense and works well.

CON
Possibly too easy, but I can't say yet.

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24 Sep 2017 13:42 #254711 by RabidWookie

Michael Barnes wrote: I'd be interested to hear more about it from you. So far the response I've been seeing is...muted. And looking at BGG, when I see a lot of posts about fixes/changes/variants...that does not exactly inspire confidence. I almost kind of feel like this might be the one too many for CMON...

What are you digging about it? Not trying to discredit your enjoyment, I haven't played so I don't know what I think of it other than it seems to be something of a dud.


I was one of the last people to get my pledge, so by the time it arrived I'd heard all the complaints and assumed it'd be a mindless waste of time. I'd already made plans to throw the box in the basement and use the minis for my Hackmaster RPG campaign. My thoughts upon opening the boxes were that the minis were incredible and varied and the components all seemed top notch. I sorted everything and played the tutorial, which is easy and relatively mindless but serves to teach the basics of the game. To address the complaints I've read about the game:

1. It's Too Easy

I think this depends entirely on the quest being played. The tutorial is a cakewalk, Quest 1 was slightly on the easy side, and Quest 2 is brutally difficult. I haven't played the other quests so I can't comment, but I'm sure the flood of fan-created quests will solve this problem (if it is one).

2. Too Much To Keep Track Of

As the characters level up there's certainly a good amount of effects and modifiers to reference, but nothing worse than Descent 2e or Imperial Assault. Perhaps it's my background in those games and RPGs, but I never found it really difficult to keep track of anything (it just requires some thought). On several occasions a lot of gameplay depth came out of deciding which bam/diamond effects to trigger on my class sheet (heal, deal wounds to the enemy, or stun the enemy to avoid a counterattack?) For someone used to playing Zombicide it's significantly more to keep track of, but it's really not a lot for someone used to playing the average medium-weight minis game.

3. No Meaningful Decisions

This one I strongly disagree with, and I'm someone that absolutely hates games that have no meaningful decisions. On the easier quests you can play without thinking and have a decent shot at winning, but the harder quests will destroy you if you don't strategize about which gear to keep and which to transmute, which gear to use against different enemies, which zones to attack from, which character should attack which enemy, when to heal and who should heal, when to hide from counterattacks, which bam/diamond effects to trigger, which enemies to hide from/ignore and which to go after, etc. I suspect a lot of people breeze through the tutorial and then do pretty well without thinking in the first quest and come to the conclusion that the game has no meaningful decisions. The core mechanics are simple and streamlined, and the game certainly isn't a brainburner, but the challenging quests do require a significant amount of puzzling to have a good chance of winning.

4. Balance issues

I've only played with 2 players, which supposedly makes the game easier since there's more loot per player to go around, but I'm not convinced that playing with more players doesn't offset that issue by giving you more player actions to deal with enemies. I can't say at this time how balanced the scaling is, but the quests are certainly uneven in their difficulty.

The game is essentially Diablo in boardgame form, and my group is in love with it for that. The loot is addictive.
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