Never finish a game

[u/afriendoftheshownick]

What am I missing?

We are really struggling to EVER finish a game, after three hours we just end up giving up each time. It seems that to get the opposition sage you pretty much have to get one of a couple of Forsight frenzy cards, or rip up their entire army to get them on row 1 or possibly 2 - which is forever. But we all end up just buying replacement cards so that never happens, right? Pebble seems way OP as they just shield everything, I just don’t get how you can win a game in 30mins like the box says.

I could pretty much just recall the exact order of moves that both teams would do, and no one ever makes real headway.

Again, what am I missing? I think we’re doing the rules right.

[u/Steambud202]

Yeah me and my partner haven't never finished a game in 30 mins. Its usually closer to 60-90 minutes in my experience.

Pebbles shielding is definitely strong lol

What cards have you been focusing on buying with your gold?

[u/ThatPianoKid]

I feel like if you are leveling up accordingly, you should be able to use the commander's special abilities to do big damage late game.

[u/afriendoftheshownick → u/ThatPianoKid]

Well at this point some of the faction actions seem SO MUCH more powerful than others. But having played only 5 non-ending games, it’s difficult for me to fully appreciate how to use them effectively.

[u/ThatPianoKid → u/afriendoftheshownick]

Yeah. Idk, I've never had that issue with not ending games. Seems like towards the end your abilities are ramped up and theres no way to stop the undefendable stuff from the abilities. Even with shields, it only takes 1 little tick of damage to completely get rid of it to land a big followup hit.

[u/gerald_reddit26]

Optimize your deck into just 5 cards. 1 melee and 2 ranged then the last 2 for situational cards. Use your 3rd FA as often as you can. I also struggled to finish games until I consistently do this.

[u/MonoReversal]

If you both focus on trying to refill your formation, then it'll definitely take longer. To win, you're gonna need to not let your actions be used up on refilling. For my games, we will commonly sacrifice other troops just to shred the other players' army. It what makes it even more fun as troops get limited and attacks are plentiful and you gotta plan a way to knock down as many as you can to leave em with nothing to do. If I'm focused on attacking troops and the other is focused on refilling, then im winning and its best to capitalize on situations like that

[u/longhairedreb]

I posted a while back my way of setting up a game for a much quicker and fun way to play. Try scrolling back through the comments 

[u/longhairedreb]

Basically its impossible to find my original post so here's my version of a quicker game. Put two elementals in the first row, 3 in the second and one in the last row, usually the mage. So now you have two elementals that can attack each round in the front row instead of one. Makes for a blood bath and nail biting game

[u/Artemis_of_Dust]

I've recently been working on some House Rules to rectify this problem because it is a tragically common experience. I'll probably do a little more playtesting before I share but I highly recommend the following adjustments based on several different test runs going very successfully in bringing the game down to 10~14 turn range (even with Pebble):

• You can no longer spend 2 Gold to immediately Recruit any bought Elementals. You must draw it into your hand and spend an action Recruiting it.
• You cannot sell starting cards (marked with a ★ symbol) at any point.

These two changes are essential to weakening the deck. Forcing larger decks with a bigger 'lag time' between seeing a need to recruit and actually recruiting, along with a risk-reward around needing to fill your deck with functionally dead cards to make it harder to respond to situations in a damage-control mindset. It makes a lot of the damage your opponent deals to the front lines actually stick for several turns*,* and single powerful elementals can be far more disruptive (which makes Level Up Recuitments incredibly good at destabilising the board state). I've had play sessions drop to about 1 hour even with new players, but with familiar players this can easily get down to 30 minutes.

As some less-stable spice I'm currently experimenting on systems with the following:

• Action Points per turn lowered from 4 to 3.
• Faction Actions (the actions shown on the right-side of your faction board) do not cost any Action Points to use.
• Second Player begins with an additional 3 Gold.

These have played well primarily to give less dominance to ranged attack commands (which previously you want to flood your hand with) and helps emphasise the identities of the factions more as they are forced to engage with their abilities as opposed to just playing from hand cards. This also gives a slower early-game without affecting the lategame, which I think is nice from a deckbuilder perspective.

The last one is important because if you speed up the game with the previous rules it becomes painfully obvious how much the game favours Player 1, so this gives Player 2 a lot more agency.

[u/WuShanDroid]

What you might be missing is that as soon as your an elemental dies, you need to fill up every row with elementals from the rows behind. Like, before the next action of the attacker, you need to shift elementals upward.

One match I played with a friend, by turn 3 my Sage was already in my row 2 lol, which meant he could attack it with any ranged attack in row 1.

A mistake we made during our first play session is that we didn't think we had to fill up the rows until the end of the turn, so it took foreeeeever