Thunderstone Quest Review

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Grace said Flesh Wound! Pretty sure she backdoored a Monty Python reference Great review, my wish list is getting way, way too long.

I've played all three version of Thunderstone and I've noticed the same odd effect from all three -- I enjoy them as I'm playing, but I don't have any interest in breaking them out again afterwards. I don't know if that means I like the game or not.

I like the building aspect and I like some of the additions to Quest that make it a little more challenging to go after the baddies, with need for light, etc. I think the thing that is missing is that there's no die roll. It's really cut and dried -- if you can beat the baddie you do it. If not, you go shopping. Not much of a decision to make especially later in the game. On occasion you get a crap draw where you can't fight or shop particularly well, and Quest offers a rat or something that you can step on for a consolation prize. That's an option to take at the risk to your personal self-respect.

I think the game could be improved by adding a single d6 or even a d4 to it, and some level of punishment when you are defeated, maybe trash the next card in your deck. Add the roll to your attack. That would give the game a little more emotion for me. It would put a little skin in the game and let you take your chances.

As it stands I'll probably play again but Alderac hasn't exactly knocked it out of the park for me, with the exception of the best game they ever published, The Adventurers: The Temple Of Chac.

"Ramboing" is a verb that's seriously underused.

I liked Thunderstone, liked Thunderstone Advance even more, but I'm not buying into it a third time. I'm done. I'd rather play Core Worlds.

Thunderstone Quest does sound like an improvement, but I'm still not interested. I played Thunderstone once and won, and hated it. I played Thunderstone Advance once and lost, and hated it just as much. They were empty, stupid, tedious games. There were times when I wanted to fight monsters, but I had a handful of just gear. Or a handful of apparently naked dudes. It's stupid. Nobody shows up at a dungeon with just gear or just dudes. The early deckshuffling games appear to have theme and setting, but they were just procedural deckshuffling.

I pretty much agree with the review on the merits of Quest. Having played original TS once (twice?) and Advance a great many times, I do agree that Quest is the best of the three, for the reasons given. Yet I do find my enthusiasm for the whole thing has gone down somewhat, and I think and hope it's not just because my wife consistently beats me at this game (one of her favorites, in either of the last two iterations).

You can't really argue with the package AEG has provided--at least to the Kicksterers (who knows about retail?). If anything, the higher, champion-level pledge is so sufficient that it's left me, someone not particularly interested in coop or solo, surprisingly indifferent to the currently campaigning expansion. If I haven't played four of the five "quests" yet (and, really, the difference is card mechanic, not really flavor), why should I get a sixth quest? Advance's board was a nice addition as an organization tool, so Quest had to go and make it bigger and add room tiles. The tiles are nice, adding some sense of physical movement, but they also contain one or more damn more things to keep track of that amount only to additional pluses and minuses. (Elder Sign remains my poster-child game for the one I always screw up some significant rule or application of a rule to, but TSQ is in the running if we're counting on missing an important modifier.) The minis are weirdly scaled relative to each other and are nearly entirely superfluous. The age of the underlying game system still shows through, and its "Dominion-but-with-a-theme" concept will pretty much be lost on any new players as a virtue. And the whole thing is just freakin' heavy--I mean, literally, with boards, minis, and approximately two thousand premium-sleeved cards (my choice on the last, of course), I barely want to drag it upstairs.

And yet it's still quite good. The card art is much improved and more consistent than in the past. The whole presentation is a lavish, perhaps to a fault. AEG has solved or at least reduced some of the aforementioned problems with dead turns ans slow buildups.

In the end, I still like it quite a bit, but I'd almost rather grab Dominion and one expansion and play that.