Catching Up on Games (9/8/25)

There is a much more reasonable number of games this time, in part due to our Earthborne Rangers campaign, which has taken up our gameday several times already. This time, there’s a mix of new and returning games and a couple of RPGs! There were definitely a couple of games that were a surprise (good or bad) for us.

Warhammer Fantasy RP 2nd Edition

I hadn’t played a tabletop RPG in a while other than some solo stuff, so when someone was recruiting for a PBF game (play by forum) of my favorite system, I had to jump in! It’s my first time getting to enjoy it as a player, so I was excited to get started. We’re playing through the Paths of the Damned campaign, which I didn’t run, so it’s totally new to me.

We just wrapped up the first intro adventure, so it’s still early, and we’re getting a bit more of a feel for our characters and the party. It must be an easy intro, because wow, I think our party has cursed dice! We rolled quite a few misses. I think between the two ranged characters (mine, a bailiff Folke Ratzinger, and our resident elf, Ingrge), we landed maybe one? two shots? Though, I had been forgetting to use my Fortune for re-rolls early on, but it didn’t help when I remembered to use them!

No deaths yet (well, in the party), though I feel like we maybe didn’t do great in our first adventure. But that’s the true Warhammer experience; you’re not heroes, you’re just crazy people trying to become heroes! I’m loving it, and I look forward to seeing what the next leg of the campaign has in store.

Anyone interested in following along, our first adventure can be found here.

Warhammer Fantasy RP 2nd Edition: 10/10 A classic.

The One Ring (solo with Strider Mode)

I spent a while considering getting into The One Ring. It would likely just be for solo (though I wouldn’t mind playing in a PBF of it), but decided to give it a try. Sometimes, I have to convince myself to treat myself to something.

There are actually two solo modes: the Strider Mode, which was released first and designed to play the normal game with one character, and a new mode in Moria, which acts as more of an epic dungeon crawl. Moria also raises the game’s complexity with new dungeoneering rules for exploring Moria and managing a party, so I decided to just keep it simple. I’m not experienced with this system, and it’s not rules-lite anyway.

It has taken some getting used to. The One Ring isn’t on the upper end of complexity, but there are just enough little fiddly rules to remember that it definitely has a learning curve, and I’m at a disadvantage of learning it by myself. To help myself ease into it, I’ve kept my sessions pretty short, around 20-30 minutes at a time, so I wouldn’t need to learn too much at one time. So far, that’s worked pretty well.

Since I’m still learning the game and getting the hang of it, the story so far has been pretty basic so I can focus on the rules, and that has also helped easing the learning curve. I’ve had enough experience with solo RPGs to know that learning a game while also worrying about coming up with a cool story can be very taxing.

I’m about halfway through the first adventure phase, roughly equivalent to a full “normal” play session. My Lindon Elf Warden, Irilde, has been helping Gilraen with some bandits waylaying travelers and merchants on the roads. Irilde learned, after interrogating one of the captured bandits, that an elf woman, Maelneth, orchestrated the attacks. Next, Irilde will be off to the hideout to confront this Maelneth.

The One Ring: 8/10? (first impressions) It has a bit of a learning curve, but the system has some really fun elements, and I look forward to delving further in.

Le Havre

We had been on a sort of Rosenberg kick (also playing on BGA), and we hadn’t actually played Le Havre yet. We had a bit of a mix of impressions on the game after playing.

For me, it’s fine, but I’d put it on the low-end of Rosenberg games (for me). I think it shows its age in a few areas (like needing several components to adjust the game for player count or half the board being superfluous component spots), and there are lots of games with resource management and engine building.

Le Havre: 7/10? (first impressions) It’s not bad, but I don’t really see myself picking it.

Heat + Heavy Rain

My friend blinged out his copy some more with standing signs and little garages for road condition tiles. This was also our first play with the water track hazard. We also decided to play with the sponsors and their cards, but not in a campaign. It adds a bit more randomness to the game, but they’re a fun addition.

Water, it turns out, was a pretty minor addition. But the new expansion cards were interesting. Overall, it’s fine, it’s more tracks for Heat, but the water played a pretty small part in the game.

Heat: 8/10 Still a lot of fun.
Heavy Rain: 7/10 Good but nothing amazing.

Wyrmspan

We played them out of order, but it was time to play the one remaining game in the trilogy. I think generally, we were most excited for this one since it was supposed to be the heaviest, and while we enjoyed Wingspan and Finspan, we were excited to see if Wyrmspan would be a better fit for us.

The general feeling seemed to be that Wyrmspan is good, but it’s not quite what we hoped for. We knew it wouldn’t be drastically heavier than the others, but we felt it was only slightly heavier than the other two. And I especially didn’t find the cave mechanism to be all that interesting; it felt like a missed opportunity. The guild board was also a let-down since it’s really just a track with various minor rewards (and occasional interesting rewards).

Something that both Wyrmspan and Finspan remove from Wingspan that I actually miss having was the goal cards. I liked having an assortment of private goals to work on. And while both the other games introduce more fish/dragons with scoring on them, you might not get any, whereas you start with goal cards in Wingspan (and can choose what to keep).

Wyrmspan: 7/10? (first impressions) It’s fine but not as smooth as the others and not really much heavier.

Earthborne Rangers

When this was originally up on crowdfunding, I really wanted to get a copy but didn’t have the money. When it went up the second time around, all three of us in the game group were interested, but for one reason or another, the other two backed out. This time, I could afford it, so I ended up backing, and my friend just bought a card doubler for himself.

Just in our first play, it was a clear hit with all three of us. We didn’t feel we needed to go straight through the whole campaign non-stop like we did with the Arkham Horror LCG, since the game isn’t as tied to an ongoing narrative. But we played EBR for a handful of gamedays before sprinkling in other games.

We’ve had some struggles due to the fact that none of us really built a deck good at traversing, which is the game’s most important action! We’ve made some adjustments with rewards, and I traded a couple of cards at an elder to swap in some others, and it’s made a huge difference. We’re still not consistently great at traversing, but it’s gotten smoother.

As we travel, we also try to find opportunities to interact with other stuff and not get too focused on the mission. We know that a lot of the game is exploring the world and helping the characters we meet along the way (there’s a lot of juicy rewards out there!). There really has been an impressive amount of stuff to discover and interact with, and we’ve barely touched the bottom half of the map.

One thing that I’ve really appreciated about EBR is that while it has a massive world to explore and a full campaign and various missions, the gameplay is also great. It takes a lot of the lessons learned from years of Fantasy Flight’s LCGs and makes all the right adjustments to smooth out the experience and deepen it. It’s a great open-world adventure game and a great card game.

I’ve made a deck to play solo, but haven’t started my solo campaign yet. We’ve still been picking EBR regularly, so I’ve not felt a need to get more in yet. A very generous individual also sent me a free copy of the Legacy of the Ancestor’s expansion because they were sent two copies by mistake. I have a LOT of EBR to play through!

Earthborne Rangers: 9/10? A great game with a very fun world to explore; I could see this hitting a 10 if playing solo hits all the right notes for me.

Obsession with expansions

This was my friend’s pick, but I’m always up for more Obsession. That said, I cannot wait for the real rulebook. I hate the rulebook! One of the tiles I had turned out to be an insanely difficult time figuring out how it was supposed to work. The rulesheet from the expansion with the tile completely failed to explain how it worked.

I could go on with all the issues we’ve had in our sessions, but luckily, the game is amazing, so it’s easy to overlook the awful rulebook.

Obsession: 9/10 A really fun and unique economic Euro.

Middle-earth CCG (solo)

I felt like I was starting to get rusty already since I hadn’t played a ton to internalize all the rules, so I put together a pretty straightforward deck to play some more solo. Just some palantir collecting with some other basic treasures. I don’t have copies of the best palantirs, so I just used the two weaker ones.

The party had trouble with wolves that kept eating party members. Then Fili got corrupted and ran off with one of our swords! At least it was only a minor corruption, discarding him, but it was still a problem, and I lost points from the sword. I had 26 points by the end when I decided to call it, but the turn count was pretty bad, and my score needed to be around 32 in order to win (and I think I had about 6 points of dead characters).

I’ll probably get some more cards before long. It’ll help open up the deck options.

Middle-earth CCG: 10/10 Still an incredible experience.

Page 2

Pages: 1 2