When Skeletons Come

Today I played a game of When Darkness Comes with two players. Same continuum than in couple of earlier WDC posts, too.

Scenario was the Skulls and Bones or something like that, where you need to kill a certain number of skeletons and then dump their remains in the ocean.

Now, this was first time that I used a home brew rule that I've been thinking for quite some time. In every single game report I have complained how WDC lacks pressure and feel of hurry.

This was the home brew rule that I used and I plan to have in every other scenario too (modified to scenario specific needs, of course!):

You have 12-sided die, and at the end of every full round you reduce the face number by one. When it falls below 1 you turn it up again at 12 and place the monsters on the board as if first gun had been found. If the monsters are already on board, move ALL of them their SPD stat closer to Gun Shop. If at the end of those movements enemies have LOS to player characters, resolve combat as usual. If the first gun is found before the die has spawned them, reset the die pointing to 12.

Additionally, when first monster reaches the last row of tiles, every player receives a failure token.

Now, as I have played the game, I think it will be a perfect sense of small hurry if I modify above rule so that you also get a failure token when first time monsters enter the middle row of tiles. Reason for these failure tokens is that the villagers start to slowly wake up and there is always some early bird who sees the walking dead around, which in turn raises suspicion...

Anyway, randomly picked "town" was kinda nice. I tried to take all woods tiles away from randomisation, but I don't know how I still managed to blunder the shuffling so that the shore was behind a cabin and a woods tile. Ah well. At least the mysterious ship was well hidden!

Also, one of the randomly picked adversaries was the Mega-Adversary, and to be honest, all of this summed up (difficult terrain in between the skeleton bodies and ocean, a little bit of hurry and Mega-Adversary) made the game quite entertaining. Though the only real excitement came when all the other adversaries were killed except the Mega one. My playing friend had to move the Mega-Adversary so it got a Line of Sight to my character, after which it obviously charged, not giving us enough time to plan for it and pick our own fight.

It did horribly maul my character, despite her trying to shoot it down with both barrels of a shotgun. She had just one health remaining, when it was other players characters turn to try to save Camomile's already fried arse.

And, well, that he did, though he wasn't as skilled at using shotgun as Camomile was. Fighting the Mega-Adversary cost my character 8 victory points and the other character 7-8, so it was a costly fight.

But after that it was just a race to dump the skeletons to ocean. My character had 14-15 victory points when game ended, and my friend's character had 17. Damn. Her character has now more advanced character than I do.

(By the way, which is another point I have to check a bit. Now these character have played 3 games, which means that there is quite a bit of progress under them. Is the game too "easy" because of that?)