[Tarislar]

So my girlfriend got me Crossfire a couple years ago after hearing me talk about the SR books & letting her read my copy of Wolf & Raven.

70-ish games later, its still fun for a bit of change & can still be just brutal when the cards don't fall your way.

A recent game was so horrid that I felt the need to share with the community.


There were 2 house rules in effect.

1.  A single round delay in the Crossfire deck.  (We had 4 players so the deck started on Round 2 instead of 1)

2.  Nuyen tracking  (In addition to Karma we tally ending game $NY & you get to start your next game with 50% of any surplus over your starting amount rounded down, so a Human starts with 3, but if they ended their previous game at 6 they would start their next game at 4  (6-3=3/2=1.5 round down to 1 + starting 3 = 4)
The 3 of the 4 players started with a total of 8 extra coins.  They also all had 5-10 points of upgrades on them.


Player order was as follows.
Elf Social Adept + 1 extra coin & Shock Frills
Ork Samurai + 4 extra coins & Bonus HP
Dwarf Decker + 3 extra coins & Early Card Purchase
Troll Mage w/ 0 extra coin & Bonus 1 $NY


Round 1,  Draw 4 Normal obstacles.
The Ork & Dwarf both draw "Wrecked Vehicles" so we end up with 6 targets to take down (only 4 do damage to us, but still its a delay which means more crossfire cards)
Everyone starts chipping away at different targets.
Round 2+  The Crossfire card for everyone draws another obstacle & if it matches your color you set it to face you comes up.
     The Elf & Troll both end up with a Red & Blue respectively.  8 Targets now still in Scene 1.
Round 3+  We have 2 targets dead & all 6 remaining down at least 1-3 levels when the "Reinforcements" crossfire pops.  All 6 are replaced w/ Fresh targets that actually attack v/s 2 of ours that weren't.
Round 5+  We are all heavily damaged but finally get down to a single obstacle left then Bam.  Next Crossfire is draw another obstacle.  So we are on our 15th target and its STILL Scene-1.
We knew we would probably die when "Reinforcements" had popped.  But we kept playing just to see if we could pull it off.

Finally with 5 or more discards in the Crossfire pile the last guy is down.  Everyone heals 1 point.  Buys what we can.  & then flip over 5 Hard Obstacles for Scene-2

We actually managed to kill 1 of them before they steam rolled through the few HP we had left.

20 Obstacles, 15 Normal in Scene-1,  5 of them Hard for scene-2 & we had not even gotten to scene-3 yet.

Even with 8 bonus NY to start out & a 1 turn delay in the X-Fire deck & 5-10 karma in upgrades,  this was just a BRUTAL selection of X-Fire cards, and I didn't even touch on some of the abilities on the mobs we faced.  LOL.

Anyway, I just felt the need to share.

I really like the game but man can it be unforgiving & just plain mean at times.

[PiXeL01]

When I was introducing it to new players I would remove some of the nastier obstacles like the drones.
Also, we would always start with an amount of karma, sometimes as much as 30 just to dial the game difficulty back a bit.

[Kiirnodel]

I'm going to guess from the "a couple years ago" that you have the original print of the game. They've released a Refit Kit that updates the original box to be in line with the recent re-release, called the Prime Runner Edition.

From what I know, it updates the rules a bit, might make it a bit better.

But yeah, those first couple of runs can be pretty difficult. Personally, I think it ties into Shadowrun's gritty theme.

[Tarislar]

I have the original boxed set & the High Caliber Ops expansion with the extra cards & 2 new hybrid classes.

The last 2 times I've been to my FLGS they were out of the Refit Kit for the 2nd Edition but they said they will put on aside for me when the next shipment comes in.

It might be there waiting now, I have not been there in like a month.

I'm curious to see what the changes for 2E will be.

We are long past the first few runs,  my karma tracker (I use Excel for everything), has us at 43-17-8 record for games I remembered to enter. 

So we have over 50% wins, but its still funny to see how brutal it can be at times when the right, or wrong in this case, set of cards all combine at once.

I mean, 15 opponents just to get through scene-1,  LMAO.

[Michael Chandra]

My brother invented a term for that years ago: GHYJB. God Hates You, Join Buddhism.

[Tarislar]

LMAO!

That is about how it felt too.