Experience report! I played a 4-player game of the StS board game last weekend, with Brian, Carl, and Joe. All four of us are fairly frequent board-gamers; Joe and I have hundreds-to-thousands of hours in StS and consider ourselves decently strong but not experts; Carl picked it up a week or so ahead of time (but “hasn’t slept much” since then), and Brian had never played. Joe and I had skimmed the rulebook, but we did very little prep or unboxing beforehand.
We finished two acts in about 5h, putting us in welllll above the “60-90 min/act” estimate on the box. The second act was much faster as we found our groove and got practice, and probably came in inside of that range.
On the whole I enjoyed the experience! I think it exceeded my expectations and I would play it again, which didn’t seem certain going in.
The game is a remarkably faithful reproduction of the computer game, with some necessary simplifications and tweaks for the format. Joe and I consulted on more-or-less every card pick for every player and found our video-game-trained intuition continued to be very strong; we spent essentially the whole game clearly well ahead of the power curve. That’s probably to be expected, since we were playing on A0; the board game also has an unlock and ascension system closely paralleling the computer game.
Implementing the mechanics in cardboard is in fact fiddly. There was a lot of bookkeeping and different tokens and phases/steps for a fight, and keeping everyone in synch and executing the rules with fidelity was hard, especially trying to do so across four players operating semi-independently during fights, and while attempting to move relatively quickly.
When you play with >1 player, each player takes a different character, and all N (four for us) characters climb the Spire as a group. For hallway combats you draw one monster per character; bosses and elites instead scale in some way with N, although may also summon minions \propto N.
The basic structure of the battle is N “rows”, with each player occupying one row, and each enemy existing in a row; players may target any enemy they want with attacks, and enemies mostly only target their own row (but sometimes do AoE to all players). This leads to – at times – strategy to coordinate to burst down one player’s foes early, e.g. to save a player who cannot block enough, or for one player to turtle (often this was me, playing the Defect with a copy of Glacier) while we whittled down the other rows first.
You play fights with open hands and simultaneous player turns, although in practice there are so many cards on the board and the situation is sufficiently overwhelming that instead of looking at anyone else’s hand, you communicate verbally – “I’ve got four additional damage I can deal, does that help anyone?” etc.
As an aside, my favorite moment of the game:
Each player draws a relic reward independently after e.g. elites. The player with no StS experience at all was playing Ironclad, since we judged that to be the most straightforward. He had been building into a decent set of Exhaust synergies, as you do – he had Feel no Pain and Juggernaut and a True Grit.
He draws a card from the relic deck and looks at it before showing it to us. He says, out loud, kind of tentatively … “It’s … a stick?? Is that good?”
Joe and I just break out laughing uncontrollably in disbelief in unison.
(Dead Branch is nerfed *substantially in the board game – the text reads something like “Once per combat, draw a number of cards equal to the number of cards in your exhaust pile” – but it’s still quite strong and still synergizes well with the Ironclad’s exhaust shenanigans)
