Backlog Beatdown: Handling my Fate with Hand of Fate

I bought Hand of Fate in the summer of 2016. I remembered watching TotalBiscuit’s impression of it the previous year wishing I had a computer powerful enough to play it, then jumped at the opportunity to play it when I bought one. This was probably the reason I bought a Steam Controller as well; I knew a lot of it was an Arkham-like brawler and I didn’t fancy doing that on a laptop keyboard!

This is the best you see of either character.

Hand of Fate is a procedurally-generated Deck Builder/Brawler/Role Playing Game. You are an unnamed adventurer, across the table from The Dealer; a mysterious being of considerable power. The Dealer has a deck of cards that take you through various encounters; these purport to be memories from your adventures. These cards are laid out in a simple shape, some large and some small, some linear and some more open. You move your character onto the cards one at a time and resolve the encounters on there. Sometimes this is a decision, sometimes it’s a game of chance, and a lot of times they’re combat encounters with a variety of monsters. You have to make your way through these encounters, through various ‘levels’ of the dungeon created by the deck, manage your resources along the way and beat the boss at the end of the adventure. You’re supported along the way by equipment cards, and you can manipulate what occurs by building up the equipment and encounter deck at the start of the game. Each run takes between ten minutes and half an hour, promoting a “Just one more go!” mentality.

The combat - simple, but short and functional.

Hand of Fate appears to be a jumbled mess of ideas that shouldn’t work in a game, but it really does. The game is beautifully presented; the graphics are nothing special for the time but the theme and the atmosphere create a fantastic and slightly unnerving experience. The Dealer, in particular, is wonderful character: Primarily an antagonist with a distinct aura of menace about him, but almost friendly in nature; not above congratulating you for a victory, apologising for a harsh card, or laughing at you for a mistake. That you can only see his eyes means his countenance never gives too much away, and Anthony Skordi’s brilliant voice acting brings as much to the character as it needs to – clearly invested in what he’s doing, but no overblown dramatics. The deckbuilding is well-implemented; you can either build the decks yourself or allow the computer to do it for you. This allows for micro-managing and optimisation for those who want to, and rewards you with more cards and items if you do, but doesn’t distract from the game for those who just want to play it. Some questions have been raised about the combat system but the only major flaw for me was that I wasn’t able to control the camera, meaning that I didn’t know what was going on in some situations. Everything else is fine; it’s basic, but you’re rarely in combat for more than a few minutes at a time so it doesn’t outstay its welcome. If anything, it adds to the general effect of not quite being in control of the situation!

If you play pen-and-paper RPGs and have ever wondered
what "True Neutral" looks like, I think The Dealer is it!

Finally, one of the game’s greatest strengths is in its plot. On the surface, there doesn’t appear to be one. You don’t know who the adventurer is, or who the Dealer’s true identity, or the purpose of the game. Without wishing to spoil, the ending, while spectacular, doesn’t address any of this. But this is fine; it allows you to fill in the gaps for yourself, and you can never be so invested in a plot that isn’t there that you feel the need to restart every time you come back to the game after a time, which is usually the reason I rarely see RPGs through to the end. And I’ll happily come back for more later; some additional difficulty levels were patched in post-launch, there’s downloadable content which implies different classes, and a sequel was released not long ago.

Hand of Fate is a game that delivers exactly what I needed when I needed it. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time, and I’m looking forward to returning to it soon!

Thunderstone at Titan Games, 20/1/2014

It has been a long, long time since I've played this game. Usually when I play games with Dave, we try playing things that run a little faster than this. But it's also the game I have that supports up to five players, and one I thought would be good to play in a shop environment so I bought it to Titan games and played a game against Steve Hinnett.

It's been a while since I've posted about this so to summarise how it works: It's basically dungeon-bashing with cards. You attack monsters in a 'dungeon,' with penalties based on how deep into the dungeon you're going, with your cards that grant a certain amount of attack power. You can also visit the 'village' and spend the gold your cards give you to get more heroes, spells and items to improve your performance. The idea of the game is to get to the Thunderstone, and as soon as one player obtains it, the game is over - and the person with the most victory points wins.

I got off to a good start by drawing some hands powerful enough to overcome some low-level monsters at the start of the game, however we quite quickly became stuck at a Sphinx and a couple of Oozes. They both had a relatively large amount of hit points and the Sphinx can only be harmed by magic. Getting bogged down like this is nothing unusual in Thunderstone, and we had to spend a while building up our decks to the point where we could at least take out some of the Oozes. At this point I had two options: Build up a magical attack to take on the Sphinx myself, or wait for Steve to do it and build up a party of fighter-type heroes to follow up with some of the smaller monsters. The trouble is I never really decided which of these I wanted to do, with the result that I never really built up a powerful-enough attack to be much of a threat to the other monsters, and my magic was taking far too long to build up. Steve killed the Sphinx in the end and took a whopping 7 victory points from it.

We had to call time on the game because the shop was closing, so we took stock of what we had achieved up to that point. Steve had beaten me 19-14, largely due to the Sphinx, so well done to him for coming up with a game plan and sticking to it. Could I have pulled it back had the game gone on? Well, it's a possibility, but Steve had a huge amount of damage coming out by then, so the race would have been on.

Either way, we had a lot of fun playing it. It is a refreshing change from Magic The Gathering, where games are often won and lost on deck construction before you've even started playing. It is a balanced set of rules and cards, at least with two players, but one thing we've not been able to determine yet is how the game would play with more players. I suspect a larger level of resource-rush, because you'd have 3-5 people all going after the same resources which would be a lot more limiting, and of course there is always the possibility that this could de-rail the whole game, but we'd really like to check it out and see what happens.

Lets hope we can, in the not-too-distant future!

Resident Evil Alliance: 18/9/2012

There's not been much going on with games with Dave for the last couple of weeks because we've been busy building and painting some of our models. It's been a laugh doing that as well but we decided to take a break from that today and go back to playing some games. In this case we went with the expansion to the Resident Evil Deck Building Game: Alliance.

Fundementally the game works the same as the old one so I won't go too much into that. The difference is in the actual cards. The weapons are a lot more powerful, and allow for more risky manuevres into the mansion. This version also encourages a degree of teamwork; I guess that's why they call it Alliance but with only me and Dave playing, we were never going to use that particular aspect of it.

Everything about this guy suggests badass...

One thing I really like about the Resident Evil games is the random character selection. Rather than picking your favourite and spamming their tactics, the game forces you to decide how you can best use your character for any given situation. Dave drew Carlos Olivera, and I drew Jack Krauser. I didn't pay too much attention to Carlos' special rules, but Krauser...

You see it's a bit funny, because I don't actually know enough about the Resident Evil mythos to know who Krauser is. However, most of the characters who I recognised from the video game have special rules in their card counterparts that fit the theme for their character. The one that immediately springs to mind is Barry from the original Resident Evil game who is quite tough and an ace with magnum weapons. The rules for Krauser suggest that he is a complete and utter madman. In the old game his rules related to adding extra power when you use kives. However in Alliance he is absolutely deadly. He doesn't start off that way, as his rules prohibit him from using more than one weapon. I'm not sure whether it means per turn or per explore, hopefully that's been FAQ'd, but the fact is you cannot safely go into the mansion unless you buy another couple of weapons first. But when you manage this and get 6 commendations, his other rule kicks in, where you get +10 attack for each card in your hand. Combine that with what I think is the Fierce Battle card that allows you to draw another 4, and this makes Krauser unstoppable...

I bought a load of assault rifles as well. These work slightly differently in Alliance; the amount of damage you do is dependent on the amount of ammo you have, up to a maximum of 20. It doesn't make much tactical sense given Krauser's rules, but I was looking for the Signature Special that brings that limit up to 60. This took up lot of ammo cards and we really did need to flush out some of our other cards to speed up the deck, but this combined with Krauser's rules meant that I was often going into the mansion with 130, 140 attack power, which is more than anything could stand up to in there. I found Wesker quite quickly, dispatched him, and won the game easily, we didn't even count the score.

So, I really do like Alliance. If you're getting into it for the first time it's probably better to go for the core game first, but I do like the extra depth the rules give the game. I also like the more kick-ass versions of the weapons, and I'd love to be able to try the partner rules as well, although as it's still only me and Dave after more than a year I'm not holding my breath for this. All in all, Resident Evil is a really good card game, and there's enough depth and tactical variety in there - thanks largely to the characters - to keep me coming back for more for a long time yet.

Thunderstone, 23/2/2012

Our most recent foray into the dungeons of Grimhold was a little one sided on my part but it's worth mentioning how it all went down. Udead - Doom, Enchanted and Doomnights were our enemies for this game, and the heroes were Lorigg Thieves, Redblades, Clerics and Amazons. This was an interesting set of heroes actually because they're all relatively low power, and with almost no magic power going around for the first few rounds, we were going to have to rely on wit, guile and cunning in order to secure victory in the dungeon.

We had quite a lucky draw of monsters as well in a sense, because our first few opponents were relatively low-powered. This gave me the opportunity to get into the dungeon early and rack up some kills, even though in some cases I hadn't even got a hero. (I'd got militia, but you know what I mean.) It did also mean I got some disease cards; you can't avoid it with Undead - Doom, but in the Thunderstone game you can at least get rid of that card in a round so it didn't bother me too much.
Dave hadn't cottoned on to this and spent the first few turns trying to build up some forces, so when he did eventually decide to venture into the dungeon, most of the easy monsters had gone...

We found our way blocked by a couple of high-powered monsters that needed a very strong attack before they would go down. A couple of them also had the added effect of killing one of the fighters. The obvious tactic at this point was to go into battle without a fighter - after all, it was only the Redblades that counted as fighters. However, it became apparent to me that there was no way we were going to manage this, as the thieves, clerics and archers we had left couldn't come up with a powerful enough attack. I was well ahead of Dave by then and I knew it, so I had to make an uncomfortable decision that I could afford to lose a Redblade Assassin (as good as it gets, and the top level heroes also grant victory points) to take out some of those high-powered monsters.

We also came up against a monster that could only be hurt by magic; I got around this by drawing a top level Cleric who is strong enough to use a polearm, which brings their attack power up to 6, then drawing the arcane energies card that converted all attacks with weapons into magical attacks. It was  a tricky manouvre but I'm quite pleased that I pulled it off!

Nasty little beast, this...

The other monster that gave us some grief was Blink Dog, part of the Enchanted set, that can't be attacked if any light penalty applies. I'd stocked up on torches and lanterns but this is really where the Thieves became useful, as the higher level cards come with light bonuses. That way, I managed to use a combination of Thieves and Amazons to take out the Blink Dogs. The Amazon's thing is their attacks become more powerful in the second level of the Dungeons. It doesn't really work if you don't have any light because the penalites would negate this anyway but all of the hero cards in Thunderstone are best used in combinations, and Amazons are no exception.

By the time we found the Thunderstone, it was a bit late in the day for Dave to pull it back, but fair play to him for making a fight out of it. By then, I had so many monsters that I was drawing one in almost every hand, and very few of them worked to my advantage so I found myself having to deal with this. This might have given Dave some room to rack up some points, but it was too little too late for him, as I found the Thunderstone. The final score was 54-15, so quite an easy victory for me.

That's twice I've won it now so I'm at level pegging with Dave. I think for this game, you really need to be aware of what everything does together so that you can use it to its best effectiveness. That's not easy, since it changes each time, but it's working a damn sight better than picking a strategy for the game and sticking to it (a popular wargaming effort, but it's not a wargame!) Also, it's a good idea to remember that if you can go in for an attack, it's a good idea to do it, otherwise you leave the other players open to take their own spoils!

Then again, Dave also plays Resident Evil, which works in a similar way but rewards caution to a certain extent because you don't know what you're going to be attacking from one round to the next...

29/11/2011: Thunderstone

We were meant to be playing Dungeons and Dragons with Dan tonight, but he had to work, so...

This was an interesting game. For Monsters, we drew Undead: Doom, Humanoid and Abyssal. A lot of those guys - and certainly the first 3 that we drew - were horribly powerful. However, for Heroes we drew Dwarves, Outlanders, Feyans and the wizards that begin with S, I can't remember the name now. We didn't use them all that much. We also drew two Edged weapons and Goodberries, amongst other things...

Now, remember last game where I promised myself I wouldn't make the same mistake of trying to equip Dwarves with Edged weapons before I'd actually bought any Edged Weapons? So do I. I remembered it so well that the first chance I got I went straight for one of the Outland Warriors, who's effect is significantly different: 3+ for a basic attack, and then you can destroy a Food card for an additional 3+. As I rarely use Iron Rations in any game, I had no problem with destroying them, and the added Militia and Dagger combos that I drew - to be fair I had some good hands - meant I took an early lead with killing monsters. Careful use of the subsequent experience points meant that I got to upgrade the Warrior card, which was great because subsequent levels rely on drawing monsters in your hand to give the Outlanders a bonus to their already substantial attack. Combine this with the fact that by then I'd already got a some Dwarves and Edged weapons, and there were small times when I couldn't do a huge amount of damage in the Dungeon.

Dave was trying to employ a similar tactic but at the same time was throwing away all his militia cards. I can see why you'd want to do this - making your deck faster is never a bad thing - but militia can be useful sometimes, especially when you get them in numbers and can equip them with daggers. In some situations it would work, and I don't think that this was one of them. He also missed some opportunities to attack the dungeon, either because he'd missed the effect of some of his cards or there were points where he wasn't concentrating (there was a text conversation going on at the same time in the early stages of the game.) The most interesting thing he did was use the Banish spell to send the Archduke of Pain - which to be fair neither of us had a hope of beating at that point - to the bottom of the Dungeon. A risky move, considering that it's worth a whopping 8 victory points and it if' it's at the bottom of the Dungeon there's no chance we'd have been able to fight it again before we found the Thunderstone. In the end it wouldn't have made much difference, and since the game ended before either of us really got to grips with Wizards, Banish was probably the best thing he could have done at that point.

We were moving through this Dungeon a lot more quickly than we ever had before; I think this particular combination of Heroes had swung the game much in favour of the players. However, only one of us could win. And for once, that turned out to be me, simply because I'd killed more monsters. Also, Goodberries give you victory points as well, I had a couple of those. We had about the same number of top-level Heroes. The final score was 56-34. Quite a comfortable win for me, and certainly not usual; I was quite please with this!

Ah, and I misread one of the rules. 'Spoiled' does not mean that you destroy whatever it is the card is supposed to 'spoil.' It actually means you get to pick up one of the associated cards. As it happens, it didn't matter so much, as we were both playing to the same interpretation of the rules so no one was cheating. Something to keep in mind for next time though...

17/8/2011: Resident Evil

I'm actually thinking of writing to Bandai and asking them to rename their Resident Evil Card Game like this:

RESIDENT EVIL: NEW AND EVER-MORE INVENTIVE WAYS FOR MATT TO GET HIMSELF KILLED.


Not hard to see how this one went, but it's worth noting that Dave had decided to play the hard version of the game - where all the monsters do 10 more damage than they're supposed to, and any effects are applied twice. This - plus my overconfident stupidity - is what cost me in the end...

At least it won't take so long to set up now that we've got it - there's 6 core items that are included in every game, and the remaining 12 can either be a pre-set that the game suggests, or 12 of whatever the hell you like. I think Dave was all for the latter but I think that could lead to a very unbalanced game if you don't know what you're doing so I insisted that we follow the 'Classic Horror' pre-set, at least for now.

Because we knew how ferociously hard the enemies in the mansion could become, we didn't venture in there for about an hour, instead using our turns to build up our collection of weapons in to something we could actually use. My character was Claire Redfield, and her effect is making her ammunition count as 10 more than what it actually is - invaluable, as I then don't need to draw so many ammo cards in order to fire the big guns. I had to make sure I got my hands on the full-bore machine gun - you need a lot of ammo to use it, but I had the character that would have made it all the more easy.

I have a peculiar gaming mantra: while I tend to play defensively, I'm also aware of the benefits of taking risks - after all, as I'll happily tell anyone who'll listen, not taking risks is how Napoleon cost himself Russia. So after building up a sizeable collection of weapons I was the first to enter the mansion, and I was building up a good set of kills and commendations. I never got so far ahead of Dave that he wouldn't have been able to catch up if he'd killed the Uroboros plant - that monster is worth 8 commendations and as soon as it dies, the game ends. The fact that it can kill most of the female characters and a significant number of the males in one fell swoop usually decides the matter without the need to count up your commendations, and I only avoided this because I'd come across some herbs earlier in the mansion that boosted Claire's health from 70 to 90. Nonetheless, for a while it all seemed to be going my way.

This was never going to end well for Claire...

And then it happened - I went into the mansion with 45 attack points and came across a Hunter. In the normal game, that would have been fine. In the Hard game, I fell just short of being able to kill it, and it wasted me for 50 points. In a moment of intense stupidity I decided to go back to the mansion without healing myself, with about the same amount of attack points, and came across a Licker. And again, had this been the normal game, I'd have gotten away with it. But no. There was the licker with 50 attack points, and me with 45 and about half my health. The ensuing battle was very short.

So, another game handed to Dave via my reckless abandon. To be fair, going in to the mansion again without healing myself was the worst idea I'd had in a long long time, and it cost me, but in all other respects I think I played quite well. Always looking forward to the next one, which won't be for a while because I'm extremely busy in the evenings and probably most of the days next week.

Painting blog coming up next, see you soon...

26/7/2011: Resident Evil

No, not the video game. Completed that years ago when my old friend Matt Marr was good enough to lend me his Playstation while he went on holiday. If you follow this blog with any degree of regularity you'll probably have guessed that this is another game that I play with either cards, dice or boards, and in actual fact it's a card game. Hence the name Resident Evil: The Deck Building Game. I should probably have put that as the title but to be honest I think I might get more views if people come on to this site thinking I'm on about the actual video game. So now that you're here, you may as well read on...

So this is something that Dave put me on to. The mechanics of the game are not dissimilar to Thunderstone: Dragonspire that we played a few weeks ago, but is just different enough to make it feel like a different game. Probably the most significant difference is that there is a genuine risk of death, as I was to discover. For another, the strategy of the game is set in place by the character you play (chosen at random from characters who appeared in the video games, though I don't recognise some of them,) and the cards you buy; there are weapons but it's not like you're building a balanced party or anything like that, it's a case of get tooled up, go into the Mansion and kill things. But it's the same thing that you have to do to win; kill the boss (in this case a plant called Uroboros,) and the person with the most points at the end of the game based on how many monsters you killed wins the game. There are other differences but I won't bore you with the details.

So how did I get on? Well... not all that well actually. The character I drew was Rebecca Chambers, who's special ability allowed her to 'trash' cards (throw them out of the game so there is no chance of drawing them again) and hand cards over to one of the other plays. Playing competitively, this skill is invaluable later on in the game when you've got a lot of cards to draw and several useless ones to get through before you find the card you need. I was prepared to use the skill, but not before I'd made a couple of foolhardy journeys into the mansion early on and nearly killed myself. I did this wondering how bad it could possibly be; in some cases I was still playing Thunderstone but the fact that in Resident Evil you can't actually see what you're attacking until it attacks you compelled me to test the water (or mansion) as it were.

Now at that point Dave and I decided to play the 'realistic' version of the game, where once your character is dead you are out of the game. The other version is basically you miss a turn if you die and come back the turn after with full health. I chose 'realistic' because there's a lot more at stake when you're about to die, and therefore the game is more fun... but it was time to regroup and it was a long time before I headed into the mansion again. I built up an impressive collection of cards to use once I got in there, and decided to risk it. After all, by refusing to take risks, Napoleon cost himself Russia... I actually managed to pick up a herb that healed me a bit, and took down several monsters, maxing out Rebecca's ability (which came in very handy later,) and giving me a nice selection of commendations (points) with which I could comfortably win the game were it to end at that point. Dave was trying to pull it back but the monsters he was fighting were of relatively low power and he wasn't getting all that many rewards for his efforts.

Then, as I prepared myself for another excursion into the mansion, disaster. I came up against Uroboros, and found myself 15 points short of killing it. It, therefore, killed me, and Dave won the game by default.

So what to do next time? Well, I won't be ne-he-hearly so quick to go into the mansion next time, knowing that the weapons you get at the start of the game really aren't up to much without at least some augmentation from some of the other cards. The Uroborus monster takes a whopping 90 points of damage before it will go down so I need to be sure that I'm capable of delivering such a blow before I venture in too many times. What I'd really like to see though, and this is very little to do with the game, is more players. The game carries up to 4 people and right now it's just me and Dave. It's great and we really do have fun playing it, but a 3rd and 4th player will lend a new element of strategy to a game like this that we just don't have at the moment.

Still, not complaining, it's been a great night and I'm really looking forward to the next one! Incidentally, I might be buying Thunderstone before too long. Games like this are really too much fun to let slide.

Off to Plymouth for a week next week, so unless I complete Final Fantasy: Tactics Advance or finish painting some models before I go on Sunday (Not likely, it's taking me ages to do both) that'll be the last you'll hear from me for a bit. See you in a couple of weeks!