Belated campaign update

Almost a year ago I started a "campaign" of sorts in A Touch of Evil with a friend. Idea is to beat every villain in the game with currently released heroes. If heroes lose to a villain, those heroes will be dead from the campaign.

Last time we won the Bog Fiend and the Vampire, but lost two really good heroes to the lousy Spectral Horseman.

We wanted revenge, so it was time to re-enact a hunt for the Horseman. These games were played about a week ago, so I'm keeping the writings brief.

Heroes were Maria de la Rosa and Jack Fellows.

Looked like last game versus Spectral Horseman had burned out all of the Horseman's luck for the unforeseen future. The game had just begun when the Heroes were drowning in investigation points, and one of the game-winnings items (the gunpowder keg) was one of the first findings from Windmill.

If it wasn't for the high cost of 12 investigation points to buy a lair at the first stage of game track, showdown would have most probably started then. Heroes actually had to wait for evil to become apparent enough to go and vanquish it. But then, somehow, a few unlucky rolls of Darkness Falls (shadow track drops 1d3) later the shadow track started speeding down, and Heroes also found out that two of the Town Elders had a secret of being a shadow puppet, lowering shadow track by one during each showdown fight round.

So there was challenge, after all, when the showdown began.

The shadow puppets died soon enough, but otherwise the epic battle of good and evil looked like two parties were beating each other with wet socks. Damage done to both sides was almost non-existent after the initial explosion of gunpowder keg and some holy water. But eventually it was the Spectral Horseman who couldn't take another sock to the chin, and darkness was banished from the land.

Game 2:

We randomised our villain between Scarecrow and Siren, and got Siren as our adversary.

Heroes were Anne-Marie, the School Teacher and Sara, the Bright Witch.

Villain seemed a little bit teethless in this game, too. We did forget to use one of her abilities for about half of the game, though (move Heroes two spaces closer to any space that has "Murder!" played on it), but I doubt it'd affected the game all that much, as it's not a damage dealing ability.

Harpies were really annoying to take down, and they kept Sara knocked out for many, many turns. And since neither Hero(ine) could get rid of them, we son ran out of harpy tokens, which in turn took a heavy toll on shadow track. But Sara had managed to train her Spirit stat to absurd levels, and then she got Runic Amulet from Blacksmith. Anne-Marie, too, had been purchasing every single book item from different town item decks, so our heroes did have respectable and steady damage output. What we didn't have this time, though, was one grand turn of insane amount of fight dice.

Before Harpies won the game we had to start the Showdown, and we were quite confident about winning the fight. After all the Siren had only, what, five fight dice?

Well... she does have this rule of gaining additional +1 fight die from every evil town elder. And unfortunately there were, what, six evil elders and two with Darkest Secret. Instead of five Siren rolled about seventeen dice instead and another rule caused each "1" rolled by Heros to inflict wound upon themselves. Uh, oh.

We lucked this one out.

After all wound preventing events had been used Heroes didn't really roll many 1's, and the Siren herself was unable to score that many hits either. All the evil elders went down easily enough. Statistically I think we should have lost in a big way, but again it was the villain who fell. True, heroes won last possible turn they were able to fight, but it shouldn't have been possible to survive for that long in any case.

So the miraculous campaign statistics are resting now at:

Villains defeated: Spectral Horseman, Vampire, Siren, Bog Fiend

Heroes dead: Argot Blackwell & Liliana, Lost Soul

Stashed investigation: 4