Now that the crunch of Popcorn Press’s d6xd6 CORE RPG Kickstarter is over, I’ve returned to taking brief sanity breaks (ironically) with Fantasy Flight’s Elder Signs: Omens game on my Nexus 7.
If you’ve not been following my blog, I rave about this game from time to time. Having beaten all the “demon Gods” several times with various parties of four investigators, I’ve taken to tackling them again with single characters—which gives some surprising insights into those characters’ abilities, the game design itself, and the structure of each threat.
So far, Yig, Tsathoggua, Hastur, Azathoth, Cthulhu, The Dark Pharaoh (Nyarlathotep’s avatar), and Ithaqua have each fallen before the lone efforts of Jenny Barnes, Joe Diamond, Wendy Adams, Gloria Goldberg, and Luke Robinson. Jenny, Wendy, and Luke were particularly effective against them all.
More recently, I’ve been trying to defeat all those Ancient Ones with Leo Anderson alone. All but one have been bested fairly easily by Leo’s ability to equip heavily with his extra trophy reward; and The Dark Pharaoh in particular succumbed readily to Leo’s constant powering of allies.
Ithaqua is proving a harder nut to crack. Three times now I’ve made it to the very last battle then run out of steam. Even little Wendy Adams had less trouble surviving the Alaskan wilds with enough gear to give Ithaqua a smack-down. And considering her tiny health rating, the penalties for starvation, and how likely one’s horses are to fall into a ravine with all supplies near the end, that’s saying something.
Leo’s ability just doesn’t serve well here. He needs time to shop, and time is in short supply when wolf packs are multiplying on the board.
I’m tempted to just set him aside and start over from Yig with Ashcan Pete (my next planned solo adventurer). But the completist in me says “Give Leo another try or two.”
Wish me luck!
(Cheat Note: I’ve just discovered that you can lock up to three dice on one spell, simply by clicking more than one. This seems an unintentional bug, but I’m now using it as a feature!)