he also posted a few pics of the backer kits and the components, so far i think im gonna regret not snagging this one.
http://imgur.com/a/jsF2l
Sorry for the sideways one, imgur swapped everything into landscape mode on me.
In order:
1) bakcers, lul.
2) The inside of the freebie backers box, so many unassembled minis.
3) The actual game minis box, the inside looks quite a bit like #2.
4) Many cardboard tokens.
5) The settlement/hunting board on top, and the monster's area for card piles during battles.
6) The battle board. It's actually pretty huge, noticeably bigger than I thought it'd be.
7) Settlement record sheets, character sheets, and the character gear grids to put your items during games. The gear grid has a turn reference on the left.
8) A close-up of half the settlement record sheet. It shows the campaign timeline, and the events that are triggered each year. A year is a full round of hunt a monster -> fight a monster -> manage the settlement. The butcher shows up as early as year 4
9) A close-up of the gear grid turn reference section. You get 1 move and 1 action per turn (for each survivor), can do them in any order, but you can't act mid-move. Gear and terrain and events give you action options, and the icons tell you which type of action you have to spend to do the thing. If there's no icon, you can just do it whenever and as much as you want. For instance, an herb bush on a battle board is a terrain piece with a gathering action, so you can loot herbs mid-battle instead of punching the lion. Survival actions are the things you spend survival points on - at first all you get is Dodge, and you unlock the other options with settlement tech upgrades as the campaign goes on.
10) All the cards. Soooo many cards.
11) One of the settlement buildings, one of the first ones the game recommends you build. The top section is all the things it lets you craft during settlement phases. The bottom section, with the star icon, is a settlement action you can take. You have a limited number of settlement actions - one per survivor who returns alive after each hunt (so at most 4, but probably 3 or less). Crafting takes no actions, but creating new buildings, innovating new tech, or doing any of these special actions uses em up.
12) A sample of an event card, this is the first event card you play after defeating the first lion and creating your settlement. At any given time your settlement has a pool of unnamed survivors - as you take them out on hunts, you give them names and genders and character sheets, and they become actual people! If they survive, they keep the exp and skills and mental disorders and permanent injuries they acquire over time, so you'll gradually build up something of a stable of heroes to choose from for each phase of the game. Sometimes an injury or event will make a survivor skip a hunt, so you'll need more than 4 fleshed-out characters at a time. And as they die off, you'll pick new lucky survivors from the pool of unnamed people, flesh them out, and send them off to hunt! The campaign is only over when your population reaches 0.
13) The empty game box. It has slots to store specific things in, and the rules tell you to keep certain decks of cards persistent from session to session. For instance, the deck of new innovations you can research gets built from specific cards as your settlement advances, kind of like a tech tree, and you keep that in its own little slot from game to game so you don't have to keep rebuilding it.
From here on out it's rules and pictures of the book. Hopefully these are legible, but I'll give the jist of the rules anyway.
14) The newbie rules for the first battle, to get you playing something quickly. You can play the first game just from reading a few pages, which is nice, then read the rest of the rules for game 2. The first white lion battle has a specific setup that they guide you through, even going so far as to put specific cards on the top of each deck so they can walk you through the first occurrence of each action. You can skip the first battle in future campaigns if you want, it has optional rules for that in the back.
15) Rules for the monster's target selection and basic attacks. Against the white lion in particular, it seems like standing behind it can sometimes get you through a turn without anyone being attacked, because if it doesn't have a target it just Sniffs and doesn't hurt anyone. So once the first 2 people have died, maybe the remaining 2 can hold out if they can stay out of its way. Not all attacks have that blind spot, though, so some of its attack cards will still nail them. In future battles, survivors can avoid getting attacked by hiding behind terrain obstacles, staying knocked down, or doing things like using that Fecal Salve item from the Bone Grinder to hide from the monster, Predator-style. If you're knocked down or covered in poo you're not a threat, and most attacks only target threats - until it wastes a turn by Sniffing, anyway.
16-17) Survivor attack rules. In general attacking is roll to hit -> roll to wound, all with d10's. It's pretty straight forward, with the wrinkle being that each attack targets a random hit location you draw from the monster's hit location deck, and those cards really vary up how the attacks resolve. They change what critical results do (rolling 10+ to wound, with your Luck stat as a positive modifier), whether a crit is even possible, they modify how hard the monster is to wound at that location, they give the monster reactions, and sometimes they get you owned. Critical hits seem awesome and can make the fight take new paths. I can see how two fights would end up being quite different just based on the hit locations you draw, and when the crits happen.
18) This page explains gear affinities on your gear grid. Basically you match colored symbols on the grid like a lil puzzle minigame to get yourself bonuses, in this case completing 2 blue squares gets the guy +1 Luck (aka now he crits on a roll of 9-10). +1 to any stat seems like a pretty big deal.
19) First page of the Hunt Phase rules. Each year your team has to hunt a monster before they can fight it, and random events will happen along the way, some of them specific to that monster. Things will happen, your dudes may get owned along the way, the monster may escape or ambush you, you may ambush it or find new loot before even reaching it, may get bonuses for the next battle, etc. You may end up not even getting to fight the thing, which causes bad times for your town (Starvation, tho I don't know what that actually does yet).
20-22) Settlement phase rules, my favorite part <3 The survivors come home, you stash all your loots, craft new gear, then choose an action for each returning survivor - build a new thing, innovate a new tech, or do some other star'd action (called endeavors) available from your upgrades. Also there's a settlement event each phase, which seem both good and bad. When story events happen from the timeline or triggers (like your first death causes an event, your first birth causes another, etc.), you resolve them immediately. If it's a Nemesis encounter, like the Butcher showing up at your doorstep, you finish the settlement phase then go fight him. There's no Hunt phase, because he came to you and your survivors are defending their home. If you win or lose any battle, the encounter rules tell you what happens - in the Butcher's case winning gives you exp and rewards like normal, and losing means he ransacks your town while everyone hides - no one dies other than the 4 who were fighting him, but he takes all your unspent resources.
23) Mannnn why are these upside doooowwwwn... this is the severe injury table for the Body hit location, as an example of injuries. When you take damage, it first ticks off armor points (but the armor isn't destroyed, and it will refresh after the battle), then one point ticks off a light injury, then the next point ticks off a severe injury and knocks you down. Getting knocked down means the survivor loses a turn, but is off the monster's target list generally. Any further damage past severe will make you take a Severe Injury roll on these tables, a different table for each hit location. A 1-2 always kills you, so any severe injury roll has a 20% chance of death. The rest of the time it just horribly maims them xD You also gain bleeding tokens from these, and once you hit 5, your survivor's dead. If you survive the fight, you heal to full and anything non-permanent goes away. There's an important difference between, say, "gain a -1 strength token" and "gain -1 strength permanently" - the token only lasts until the end of the encounter.
24) The brain damage severe injury table! You can't equip armor to your brain, but your survivors do gain Insanity points which act like armor. You gain Insanity from events, and keep it forever until something terrifying hurts your brain, and you tick off the insanity as damage. Getting 3+ insanity means your survivor is actually insane, and that has an impact on some events. So your poor dudes seem to be running a bit of a balancing where being a little crazy helps you survive, but going off the deep end isn't so great either. You only ever take brain damage when a card, event or attack specifically says you do - usually from the monster doing something like roaring and being scary instead of clawing your face off. Physical damage is the norm.
I've just about finished reading the rules and the game seems great! It works with 1-4 people, but it doesn't have to be the same people each session because each game you're just grabbing survivors from your pool of fleshed-out characters and going off to battle. There are optional rules to adjust the game for 5-6 people as well, taking 6 survivors onto hunts. I'll be looking to start a campaign soon, not necessarily on Wednesdays. Just playing at my place or wherever.
