FS: Middara with everything

Reviewing this next week pretty favorably overall but man, it is a lot. 26 pounds worth of JRPG dungeoncrawling. I don’t have the space for it or the time to really dig into it’s massive narrative campaign, but you might. This is everything available for it including the base game, the promo box (more minis), artbook, alt art character cards, and neoprene mat. You need not worry about FOMO. This will keep you busy for a long time. A lot of it is unpunched because I didn’t get that far into it.

$250 shipped.

That game looks cool. It also looks like a ridiculous amount of stuff. Those tiles look amazing.

It is cool, and the production values are sky high. Just not on my dance card.

What does "pretty favorable" mean?

I am mildly interested in this, but being as I have not cracked the Gloomhaven I acquired just before being diagnosed and my KD:M stuff is still largely untouched, I am not sure I need another 20+ lbs of minis-heavy adventure gaming.

I like the system quite a lot- it’s dice, kind of derived from Wilson’s time-honored Doom system. The scenarios are varied and interesting. The narrative is REALLY developed- it goes well over the cards and stuff in Gloomhaven. There are FF-like “materia” upgrades. The monsters are all really quite unique, and have very detailed AI rules. There are some things I think are better than Gloomhaven, but it is pretty sprawling even compared to that game. I really like that one-off play is easier to handle. But it is not as solo-friendly, however, as the characters have a lot more to manage and you really kind of need to run 4. It’s doable, but heavier in general. I do like the goofy JRPG style artwork (angel wings and prescription glasses), but some of it is on the PG-13 side. Not quite KDM level though.

How is it on the "exploration" side of things, and getting cool loot. I'm curious if it spends most of its time in combat that goes on and on, etc.

To me, a dungeon crawl lives and dies on variety. I want to always be chasing that next upgrade, etc.

You know it’s funny, I think this one does the exploration stuff WAY more. When you are on the grid, it’s mostly combat. But you might be reading a lot of text between, making decisions and having certain elements cause specific decision points or changes. It isn’t like Descent exploration, it’s really more like D&D where you have RPG segments (mostly narrative story here) and then combat encounters. There are town visits, and I think you wind up with an airship at some point. TONS of loot including lots of consumables.

Also, the encounters I’ve done have been pretty short- not the 4 hour Descent ones at all. One plus over Gloomhaven- they are on square tiles. No sorting through weirdly shaped tiles and placing a bunch of overlays.

I’m now seriously considering this. When is your review going live? I kind of trust your opinion more than what is available elsewhere and want to see the full article.

Sorry man, it got snatched up for about $300...dude from Australia willing to pay to ship it. Insane.

wow. That is quite a ship.

Wow, that is not what I had expected. That at least solves that conundrum for me. Still... when is your review going up?

I popped it out of the mold last night. Next week it will go up.