Return to Dark Tower: Covenant - Discussion

[@nipzie]

Interesting note on taking 2 corruption to beat the final boss. We've been playing it as, take a corruption then retreat, but if we can keep going yeah it'll be easier for sure.

[@BoardGamesUnLocked]

As far as I am aware, nothing forces you to stop once you take a corruption. It’s essentially “cheesing” the boss which kind of is a let down for me. Your rule would make it more difficult for sure

[@Sukotto85]

Just a thought, would it be possible to reduce the starting number of skulls to increase the difficulty?

[@BoardGamesUnLocked]

@@Sukotto85 Hmmm…certainly could be something to do!

[@mightymickey8879]

Agree on the heroes but I’m still hesitant on the reverent astromancer. He’s miles stronger than the other heroes and trivializes the final foe. This is because he has a virtue where he gains blessings per spell cast. So at month 5 you cast all your spells on one turn and gain 6 wild advantages. With those it should be easy to obtain 4 more advantages to max at 10. If you don’t win then, repeat the process in month 6. Since playing with him we haven’t lost a single game on gritty difficulty. Also, you were spot on in your criticism of the difficulty. I think that stems from luck not really being a factor as this is a pandemic style game. You make the right moves, you win. People don’t seem to realize your point about fighting the adversary with 0 corruption. You’re exactly right that if you have 10 advantages, you can only spend 4 per card. So you will “defeat” two cards, partial defeat the other, and breeze through the last two. There really should be an effect that causes you to automatically retreat upon taking a corruption. That might balance the final encounter but still it’s anticlimactic. Nothing like have an ancient one spawn in Arkham horror

[@BoardGamesUnLocked]

I think that's what everything kind of came down to; a lot of decisions trivializes the game so for me, where's the strategy. The "toy" factor of this game is neat at first but that seems to be a distraction from what ends up being a pretty surface level game. At the end of the day, if you can "cheese" the main boss every time, there's no reason to do anything else.

[@chucktelschow]

Can you just add the new characters with Alliances and skip the rest?

[@petergross7235]

Yes. The characters can be used across all the content.

[@cheesedanishable]

Agree, love the new heroes, don't like everything else. Alliances has better mechanics in every way. Regarding the battle cards, the only way you could gain more than one corruption per battle card is if it asks you to place skulls AND lose resources and you lose a building from the skulls and don't have the resources to pay. It makes the Undaunted Aegis insanely strong because she can take three corruptions from the final boss.

[@BoardGamesUnLocked]

I see what you’re saying about battle cards. I think what I meant to say was when fighting the final boss if you could tank two corruption to get through the five cards. If that’s the case, kind of anticlimactic

[@cheesedanishable]

You absolutely can, lol@@BoardGamesUnLocked

[@andyvaldes7290]

I have a question when playing with expansions; When shuffling cards together (treasures, corruptions, etc.) is there something that differentiates the cards from each expansion? Like what happens if I forget to take out a treasure card from the covenant expansion, but I'm only playing the base game? Or what if I have treasure cards from Alliances AND Covenant, but I'm playing the Covenant expansion? Is there an issue mixing all the cards together?

[@BoardGamesUnLocked]

So, you can’t play with both expansions together so you shouldn’t have treasures from both expansions. Now, for when you do have expansion cards with base cards, the expansion cards have a symbol on them that shows they’re from an expansion. The issue with mixing them all together is that you’ll have a watered down deck of cards that pertain to things that aren’t in the game

[@andyvaldes7290]

So you should never mix the decks? Basically you are saying to just play with the deck for the specific version you are playing; Base, Alliance, or Covenant deck@@BoardGamesUnLocked

[@BoardGamesUnLocked]

@@andyvaldes7290 Not quite. I'm saying that when you're playing; you can't play with Base, Alliance, & Covenant. You can play with Base & Alliance or Base & Covenant. So, mix the appropriate decks with the Base and chosen expansion

[@petergross7235]

Thanks for your thoughts on this game. We like this expansion at 4 players, because the monuments gave us more to do and work on. But 3 or less players we rather play with alliances. Playing solo with this expansion the monuments and wastelands were a non-factor. We did like the new characters. Overall this was ok, but definitely not essential.

[@BGMechanics]

Do you like this game? It doesn’t seem like it.

[@BoardGamesUnLocked]

I have certainly cooled on it. I actually don’t own it anymore. I’d play it for sure but this expansion wasn’t really all that great in my opinion