Li Shenron
Legend
We bought the OotS "board" game a many years ago and only ever played it a couple of times. Today we took it off the shelf and played it with the kids who absolutely loved it, and we'll surely play it again soon...
The game itself is a good game that hasn't aged a bit, its main strengths being:
- simple enough so that everyone can play, but with room for tactical depth if you want
- unique nature of being "mostly" cooperative, until you decide it not to be
- enormous amount of monsters cards
- looks great on the table, as long as you are on board with the graphical style
- the humour, obviously (a few r-rated words notwithstanding)
It does have two significant flaws however:
1) Not well-organized instructions.
The booklet tells you that reading the intro strip is enough, but it's not. We made the mistake of believing it and we often had to stop and read the full rules, we ended up reading half the booklet anyway. In addition, some things are not explained where you may think it would be the obvious place... finding answers to our questions was sometimes hard.
2) The game is way too long! This is explicitly by design, but IMHO it's bad design. Remembering how it became tedious for us in the past after a couple of hours, we agreed to apply the following house rules to speed it up:
- monsters are drawn only when entering a NEW room, not when stopping in a previously visited room
- no minimum amount of shtiks or loot required to enter the last level
- Xykon has only 1 wound point (but can be attacked only after killing all his minions)
With these rules and the minimum number of dungeon levels, we were able to finish a game in 1.5 hours. Next time we'll remove the last house rule however, as it made the last battle feel too easy
Have you played this game before? Are you still playing or are you interested in trying it again?
The game itself is a good game that hasn't aged a bit, its main strengths being:
- simple enough so that everyone can play, but with room for tactical depth if you want
- unique nature of being "mostly" cooperative, until you decide it not to be
- enormous amount of monsters cards
- looks great on the table, as long as you are on board with the graphical style
- the humour, obviously (a few r-rated words notwithstanding)
It does have two significant flaws however:
1) Not well-organized instructions.
The booklet tells you that reading the intro strip is enough, but it's not. We made the mistake of believing it and we often had to stop and read the full rules, we ended up reading half the booklet anyway. In addition, some things are not explained where you may think it would be the obvious place... finding answers to our questions was sometimes hard.
2) The game is way too long! This is explicitly by design, but IMHO it's bad design. Remembering how it became tedious for us in the past after a couple of hours, we agreed to apply the following house rules to speed it up:
- monsters are drawn only when entering a NEW room, not when stopping in a previously visited room
- no minimum amount of shtiks or loot required to enter the last level
- Xykon has only 1 wound point (but can be attacked only after killing all his minions)
With these rules and the minimum number of dungeon levels, we were able to finish a game in 1.5 hours. Next time we'll remove the last house rule however, as it made the last battle feel too easy
Have you played this game before? Are you still playing or are you interested in trying it again?
