by Jokemeister
The other thing I would add about the difficulty is that while it feels really difficult, I think the game is better balanced than most people realise. Sure, you are constantly getting beat down by both monsters and the encounter deck. Despite this, even when I lose, I tend to find that it was a very close game and that we almost won.For example, I lost my last 2 games, both of which were against the Golem. In one game, we had 2 calm tokens already and needed just one more. My PC had 2 items but we didn't have enough experience left to see which item was calm and which was enrage. We took a guess, got it wrong and lost before I got to act again. If I had guessed correctly, we would have won that game.
In the other defeat, despite a difficult start, we were able to pull it back to within 1 die roll of victory. In that game, we initially tried to calm the Golem but realised that we weren't going to be able to do so in time and switched to trying to kill it instead. In the end, our fighter needed to roll a 9 on his brute force attack which would have killed the Golem. Better than 50:50 odds to win the game on that last die roll. For the record - he rolled an 8. :shake:
As you can imagine, while we lost both of those games, it was so close that we had a real nail-biter of a finish and we all enjoyed the game even though we were defeated.
Although that second game was really aggravating to one player as he was advocating that we kill it from the start but was outvoted by the rest of us who wanted to try saving it first. When we lost, that player was screaming "I told you guys to kill it from the start!!!!"
:D