Hi, has anyone been at Gencon and had a Demo of Defiance? How does it play? Is it fun? Tactical? Or more a beer and Bretzel game? Thx
Both. Hex based movement so it's easy. Still a fair amount you can screw up, you won't require absolute precision for best results. Also: Fun. My only real complain is there are a couple of piles of tokens (wounds, aggro, etc) that could probably be condensed into a track on the character board.
It's a cool dungeon crawler, definitely still needs a bit of polish. I wasn't a huge fan of the fact you can just walk away from CC.
Hellboy boardgame has a nice mechanic for that, if you leave CC either you take the enemy with you (like a fighting retreat) which you can use tactically, or you simply take a wound but the enemy stays, or a friendly can spend an action to help you and you don't take that wound.
What was the mission structure like if you don't mind me asking? Is there one overarching mission as a win/lose or multiple objectives to accomplish?
They didn't cover that during the demo, just one scenario. At this time, it is to ship with 12 scenarios. I didn't ask if they were one long campaign or if there were shorter arcs. You clearly earn some kind of points to upgrade weapons and obtain additional gear though.
Its campaign style. If you like dungeon crawlers or think you will than a great game. Lots if cool arestia dice interaction, ai is solid and can really be played in a 2x2 space.
The demo mission has a main objective (get Valkyrie onto the shuttle and launch it) and a secondary objective (get as many of the PCs onto the shuttle as well).
12 missions? So it's more of a "play again the same campaign many times" type of game than a narrative one in the likes of Gloomhaven or Middara? (just to be sure, not criticizing here). Some games do great with 1 mission (like SDE), so it's not necessarily a bad thing
I am curious if there'll be alternative play modes for when you're done with / in between campaigns. Right now I'm staring down my birthday, and if I get some spending money/gift cards I might put some aside for a new game. I'm not sure if Defiance will be one of them or not. If there's a versus mode type thing that might be interesting. I'd love to see an Aristeia-style take on Infinity, and wondering if this could do it.
I think this will depends on the kickstarter, more money more expansions, each expansions 5-6 new quests, etc etc (it's just an example, don't thake the numbers seriously)
I think it'd be a good engine to reskin as the RPG myself. Run it on an infinity board with a hex grid over it and play is an an RPG encounter. Bit of GM magic to create the mission and layout, should be golden
Just curious, because I really like the idea: How crucial is the hex grid? Would 1 hex = 1 inch work to play on already existing terrain? Otherwise I feel that even a game mat with a hex grid on it would just be covered by the buildings.
Yeah you'd have to fudge it in buildings, think a hex is about 30mm, so not far off an inch or so which is "near enough"
There was a conference this morning at Intercontinental. No versus mode is planned yet, though if what you want is an infinity-style aristeia game, then you can probably use the Defiance tiles with your Aristeia characters ;-) For the replayability, 12 mission campaigns play in 12 hours, there's random activation orders and random AI cards assignation, which give some replay value, and each ennemi has at least two profiles for difficulty.
It would require some adjustments for the Infinity RPG since it uses zones rather than cases for movements. I retooled it myself and it would work with hex.
October or November, depending how quickly things get finalised. Bostria was fairly confident of late October at Gen Con.