Barnes on Games- HABA's Family Game line-up in Review, Return to Hoth, Talon, Healthy Heart Hospital

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I think vehicles could work and be really cool in Imperial Assault but you'd have to have different maps all together. I can see how in a skirmish, with large open territory, they'd be great fun to use but the way the maps are designed right now doesn't leave them any real room to move around and do stuff. They're just too big.

The only thing I really want for Imperial Assault is a designer series scenario book like they did with Tide of Iron and Decent. That would be an incredible platform for one off scenario's, something this game sorely needs right now. If they're worried about not making enough money off of just a book they could even package it in a box with some extra terrain tiles and a few figs just to up the cost. I would still buy that so long as it had the scenario's. I don't see that happening at this point though because they can pretty much just follow this campaign system for the foreseeable future and continue to sell tons of copies. There isn't any incentive for them to do it differently at this point. Such a shame though because that's what I want the most from this game.

Yes, that is the issue with the tank and the AT-ST. THey don't work in corridor-based maps. You wind up with them in these...rooms. Even on the outdoors tiles, they are still in small rooms. I guess the thinking is that they are analogous to large monsters/dragons or whatever, but I think they just don't really work at the scale the game is at.

A scenario book would be GREAT. That would immediately make me like the game a lot more. Frankly, I think it's kind of shitty that the game is SO geared toward campaign play....like, if you only want to do Skirmish, you are buying Hoth and over half of the components you may as well throw into the recycling bin. I think it was kind of a mistake to make everything SO separate...like the items/equipment cards, why aren't those used at all in Skirmish? I prefer Skirmish mainly because I don't really think the campaigns are all that great. There are some cool missions, and they are fun to play, but they are also something of a burden unless you've got folks focused on playing through it. It's almost like when you buy a game and find out that it's really built for multiplayer...and you want to play single player and the content that is there for that is compromised by where the focus lies.

But if you're all in on the campaigns...not much to complain about.

I think the game's not for you. While the Skirmish is not a tacked-on feature (since they had a dedicated team of playtesters for that only), it's pretty clear that the game is pretty heavy on the campaign since the onset, particularly because it's a redesigned Descent 2.0. It's pretty great that they managed to cram a campaign and a skirmish mode into one box. I like it that they go full throttle with the campaign instead of just making single missions and then patch a campaign in.

Very much looking forward to Talon arriving. Should be any day now.

They recently released a NEW campaign book for Descent 2.0, just for use with the base game. So taking a cue from that, it could be what's in store for IA down the line. The Heroes/Monsters boxed sets add a couple of one-off scenarios featuring the stuff in the box if people want standalone variety, though the price is high if you only want the scenarios and don't care for extra minis, which are mainly new sculpts of D1 monsters/heroes and updated stats differing from those offered in the conversion kit.

That hospital game, it's a pretty unusual setting! My 5 year old is obsessed with medical anything, and were she older I'd probably get it to play with her.

I agree that based on the handful of skirmishes I've played vs the campaign that the latter has more interesting gameplay. I have not played the big expansions but hope to soon. If nothing else, they offer varied starts to a campaign; even with using different character combos, the base game campaign initial scenarios would get tired after a few plays - I've done them 3-4 times in some case . The variety coming in the side missions.

If they had some sort of system for adapting the latter campaign encounters into standalones - " the Rebel player draws X random gear cards, spends Y credits, and each character gets 5 XP ) that would allow this sort of thing . Probably not hard to figure out for experienced campaign players after reviewing a few completed campaign logs to see how much of each you average per mission.