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AJCarrington

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« Reply #45 on: <06-30-14/0923:11> »
The runner character card-sheet-things actually *come* laminated. (The idea apparently being that you can write on them with a dry erase marker to keep a running tally of your karma.)

Interesting info - thanks. As others have suggested, a review would be awesome... ;D

Lord Cameron

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« Reply #46 on: <06-30-14/1743:51> »
Nice.  Laminate the character cards, and those should stick pretty well to them, I think.

The runner character card-sheet-things actually *come* laminated. (The idea apparently being that you can write on them with a dry erase marker to keep a running tally of your karma.)

*looks at the copy he won in one of the Origins raffles and whistles innocently*

Nice acquisition!  ;)

Are there different "mission" cards in the full game?

pmavers

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« Reply #47 on: <07-02-14/2351:20> »
Nice.  Laminate the character cards, and those should stick pretty well to them, I think.

The runner character card-sheet-things actually *come* laminated. (The idea apparently being that you can write on them with a dry erase marker to keep a running tally of your karma.)

*looks at the copy he won in one of the Origins raffles and whistles innocently*

Nice acquisition!  ;)

Are there different "mission" cards in the full game?

There's three missions that come with it, which are really closer to different modes of play.

Crossfire is the basic one, where you have to clear a number of scenes to complete a run. Scenes are cleared when all objectives in play are defeated, and new objectives generally don't show up until a new scene.

Extraction is the escort-mission-survival mode run, where you have to protect a "Client" from being killed by the objectives. Instead of scenes, you have a chart where something special happens at the end of every round. (More objectives show up, crossfire cards get drawn, etc.) You generally have to hold out for 7-8 rounds without getting the client killed to win.

Dragon Fight is the oh god why not the face run away we made poor life choices mission, and is only recommended for characters that have earned at least 75+ karma worth of upgrades. It's basically a boss fight, where he'll be throwing obstacles at you every round, and also be flying around attacking players alongside those objectives. The dragon has four aspects, two on each side. He starts on the "Covert Dragon" side, which has a Hacking Aspect and a Skill Aspect. To clear them, your team has to do either eight points of a specific color of damage, or a buttload of colorless damage in one turn. You get rewarded for clearing a aspect, and once both are cleared he flips to his Enraged side, which involves spells and weapons. Once those are done, you win.

All three missions have extra options you can turn on to increase your karma payouts for completing the run, but make the run harder. (Example for the Extraction one is the EMT GIG! option, where the client starts at 1 HP instead of five, and you go through the market deck and pull out a Doc Wagon Contract card. It's available to purchase at any time, but doesn't count as being in the Black Market. You get a extra 3 karma if you successfully complete it.)

Spectre

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« Reply #48 on: <07-03-14/1221:17> »

There's three missions that come with it, which are really closer to different modes of play.

Crossfire is the basic one, where you have to clear a number of scenes to complete a run. Scenes are cleared when all objectives in play are defeated, and new objectives generally don't show up until a new scene.

Extraction is the escort-mission-survival mode run, where you have to protect a "Client" from being killed by the objectives. Instead of scenes, you have a chart where something special happens at the end of every round. (More objectives show up, crossfire cards get drawn, etc.) You generally have to hold out for 7-8 rounds without getting the client killed to win.

Dragon Fight is the oh god why not the face run away we made poor life choices mission, and is only recommended for characters that have earned at least 75+ karma worth of upgrades. It's basically a boss fight, where he'll be throwing obstacles at you every round, and also be flying around attacking players alongside those objectives. The dragon has four aspects, two on each side. He starts on the "Covert Dragon" side, which has a Hacking Aspect and a Skill Aspect. To clear them, your team has to do either eight points of a specific color of damage, or a buttload of colorless damage in one turn. You get rewarded for clearing a aspect, and once both are cleared he flips to his Enraged side, which involves spells and weapons. Once those are done, you win.

All three missions have extra options you can turn on to increase your karma payouts for completing the run, but make the run harder. (Example for the Extraction one is the EMT GIG! option, where the client starts at 1 HP instead of five, and you go through the market deck and pull out a Doc Wagon Contract card. It's available to purchase at any time, but doesn't count as being in the Black Market. You get a extra 3 karma if you successfully complete it.)

That sounds awesome. All 3 of those are solid Shadowrun concepts, and there are so many great opportunities to expand this game in the future. Different missions could be added for wetwork, smuggling, datatheft, paranormal investigation. I'm really excited to see the direction this game is going to take.

pmavers

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« Reply #49 on: <07-09-14/1306:04> »
Couple random thoughts after a two-player game the other day:

You should totally sleeve the Black Market/basic cards. The card stock's a little thin, and would probably help out a lot. The other decks you don't shuffle as much and so aren't really a priority.

Playing a Elf in a two-player game feels like asking for pain. The extra hand size and resources starting out help, but it's quite possible that you'll get two obstacles on you. Since you only have 4 max HP starting out, and most obstacles do 2 damage when they fire... In bigger games, there's a greater chance of someone picking up a Monofiliment Whip which lets them move objectives off you to themselves.

Speaking of which, being staggered suuuuuuuuuucks. You have to shuffle your hand and discard pile into your deck, and you skip your draw & buy phases. You only draw one card at the start of your turn, and if you ever take another point of damage while staggered you go critical and the run has to be aborted.

Lord Cameron

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« Reply #50 on: <07-10-14/1922:37> »
That sounds awesome. All 3 of those are solid Shadowrun concepts, and there are so many great opportunities to expand this game in the future. Different missions could be added for wetwork, smuggling, datatheft, paranormal investigation. I'm really excited to see the direction this game is going to take.

There some more gear/weapon cards but ALOT more obstacle cards. The full deck is 80 cards, but in a 3 round game you would only see about 15 of them. What would be neat is to see in the future is different missions with a different obstacle card deck. So if the mission profile is Chicago you'd see the Insect Spirits, Insect Shaman etc, while a Seattle mission would have some different obstacles.  ???


Couple random thoughts after a two-player game the other day:

Playing a Elf in a two-player game feels like asking for pain. The extra hand size and resources starting out help, but it's quite possible that you'll get two obstacles on you. Since you only have 4 max HP starting out, and most obstacles do 2 damage when they fire... In bigger games, there's a greater chance of someone picking up a Monofiliment Whip which lets them move objectives off you to themselves.


Pretty much no reason to play anything other than the Troll or Orc.  :-\
It would be nice to see some advantage for the Elf to offset the low hit points, the starting cards/nuyen don't make any difference beyond the first round, while the high HP for the Troll is a lasting benefit.  ???

Spectre

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« Reply #51 on: <07-14-14/0113:32> »
A more in-depth Crossfire review from the Dice Tower:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbuXYD_mI1s&list=UUiwBbXQlljGjKtKhcdMliRA


Mara

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« Reply #52 on: <07-14-14/0404:52> »
Pmavers, what is the size of the character cards? Planechase size? Or standard card size?
I was just thinking that you could maybe sleeve them, and put the stickers that are supposed
to go onto them that way.

AJCarrington

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« Reply #53 on: <07-14-14/1555:15> »
Thanks for the link Spectre...will be checking that out this evening. :D

Spectre

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« Reply #54 on: <07-16-14/1017:22> »
Developer Feedback from the BGG forums. These are slightly out of context, but they primarily will answer some lingering questions:

From Jay Schneider:

I'm the Design Producer for Shadowrun: Crossfire (Fire Opal Media is the design studio, Catalyst is our Publisher). To answer your questions:

1) There are 3 missions that ship with the base game but...
1a) You'll find that each mission has many variants and the variants can be combined
1b) They're balanced across the Karma levels
1c) There will be promotional missions in abundance occurring with the release of the game.
1d) Crossfire has the feel of a RPG with the mechanics of a Cooperative Deckbuilder. Missions = well Missions (or Modules in D&D). We expect (and will encourage) players to build their own.

2) Regarding Expansion plans, we haven't made any announcments yet. And announcements like that come from the Publisher, my counterparts and friends at Catalyst. Will it suffice to say the team has been and is still working?

-Jay

When Asked: Jay, could you clarify whether you can play this as two-players playing two characters? Or, if you have less than four, will players need to control more than one character? I've read conflicting reports on this. Thanks!

Different missions have differing number of players. IMHO in general 4 players is ideal, however we designed Escort to work extremely well with 1, 2, 3 or 4 players.

You could try to have a single player run more than one character. However, it would be hard. Really hard. Crossfire requires focus and running 2 cards would require an extremely experienced player. I'm sure we tried it with a designer playing 2 cards but it was the exception. Generally when down a person, we'd play Escort as it rocks with less than 4 players.

When asked: 1: How does the game handle differing Karma levels? Like a new player sitting in on a higher level group and playing a difficult mission?

Re characters with differing Karma Levels. You'll find each mission card has a scaling section. Here's an example - actual missions vary.

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Karma Scaling: Each runner gains the following Karma award or penalty based on how much Karma they have.

Karma in Upgrades   Award or Penalty
0–10   Full Karma award
11–30   –1 Karma penalty
31–50   –2 Karma penalty
51–75   –3 Karma penalty
Each additional +25   Additional –1 Karma penalty
---------------------------------------

This means that if the Mission awards 5 Karma for completion if one player has 100 Karma, they'll only receive 1 Karma for completion. There new player friend with 0 Karama would receive a full 5 Karma.

We found this system allowed players of very diverse Karma levels to play together in differing experiences from Power Leveling a single character to letting a single player catch up to the team. I think you'll find the difficulty holds with the rewards.

From Sean McCarthy:

Hey! I'm one of the designers. I hope I can resolve the confusion about playing with 2-3 players.

You can play the game with fewer than four players, and each player still only controls one character.

For a 2-player game, for example, I might be a Human Decker while my partner is a Troll Mage. We'll each also be given one of the other two role cards (Face and Street Samurai), because there are cards like Grenade that say "the Street Samurai chooses...", and the like. Someone has to make that choice!

I think the game is at its best with four players, because that gives you the maximum amount of cooperation and the most coordination problems to solve. There are more obstacles in play at once, and more possibilities to consider. But I still like it just fine with fewer than four. We playtested a ton of games with 2-3 players.

The Extraction mission involves escorting an NPC to safety through floods of obstacles. Since it inherently features the extra body and the extra enemies, it's particularly well suited to 2-3 player games, and we even added solo rules for it.

I think everything will become clearer once the game and rulebook are available, so I'm hoping that's soon!



P.S. If you were seeking a greater challenge, you could certainly play games where you control more than one character (like you can in many cooperative games). But I wanted to clarify that there are rules for playing with the full range of 2-4 players, and they work pretty much like you'd expect.
« Last Edit: <07-16-14/1025:50> by Spectre »

pmavers

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« Reply #55 on: <07-17-14/1443:13> »
Pmavers, what is the size of the character cards? Planechase size? Or standard card size?
I was just thinking that you could maybe sleeve them, and put the stickers that are supposed
to go onto them that way.

The runner sheets?
7 inches by 5 inches.