11/17/2023 0 Comments Tidal blade![]() ![]() The game is incredibly fun and overall well-put-together, but I do have a couple of gripes. The dice rolling may turn some off, but there are many ways to mitigate bad die rolls, so it becomes more challenging to manage your resources well than just random luck. ![]() They worked hard to make the world of Tidal Blades feel like a living, breathing world, and it shows. I could imagine my character trying to complete all the tasks to impress the judge, who also travels from island to island. I really enjoyed taking actions on the different islands, each having its own theme. Trying to play with a different focus each time adds to the game’s replayability, especially when you couple this with the unique abilities each character can acquire. Many of these things will give you victory points, and so you can try to focus your strategy in any direction. You can also gain fruit, which can be used to roll an extra die that you have, and to purchase things in the market and shells that can help you keep from losing dice while doing a challenge if the special challenge die rolls any Xs. These upgrades will allow you to roll more dice, refresh and upgrade more dice, get special character cards to give yourself unique abilities, and make performing stunts, which are another type of card you can acquire, more powerful. You can also upgrade your character by having successes in challenges. That will improve your chances that certain symbols will appear. Or if you use your dice to harm monsters, you will lose those dice and need to find a way to replace them.Īs you play, you can upgrade your dice along two branching paths. Once you have used your dice they become exhausted, only to be refreshed at the end of the round, or by visiting certain spaces on the board. For both of these actions, you are looking for specific symbols on the dice to match up with what is required to beat the challenge or hurt the monster. The challenges and monster fights involve you rolling the dice that you’ve accumulated and a special challenge die that makes things more difficult as the game progresses. The actions you can take might gain you some resources in the form of shells, fruits, new dice, challenges you can complete at specific islands, or let you fight the monsters threatening to invade the coastal city. While you start with only two movements, you will gain more actions per round as the rounds progress, eventually ending up with four. As your character takes their turn, they will leave behind action disks on spaces that prevent others from moving there. Each island has a special action you can always take and a few spaces that allow another action. Throughout four (or five rounds depending on the number of players), you will be moving your character to any of five different islands. You start the game with your character board which has four dials that allows you to upgrade each of your four stats as the game goes on, a secret goal that will get you some victory points if you are to achieve it, a character card detailing one of your unique abilities, and two basic dice thare are rolled to try and complete challenges. In Tidal Blades, you play as one of four asymmetric characters competing for the chance to become a Tidal Blade, a sort of appointed hero for the city. However, by our second game, I had a much better handle on how the various parts worked together. In my first playthrough, I still missed a ton of little rules because there is so much going on and so many different mechanics that it’s hard to take it all in right away. There was worker placement, character progression, dice placement, and set collection all brought under the lid of one board game box. I realized that this big game was just a combination of several mechanics I was familiar with from other games. The rulebook is well-written with plenty of examples. ![]() My instincts that this could be a challenging game to learn were only partially correct. Then I skimmed through the rulebook, saw all the rules about different in-game events, how to upgrade your dice in multiple ways, and that there are tons of ways to get points and… I decided to learn something easier until I could watch some videos of the game being played. I was instantly thrilled with my purchase. When it arrived, I didn’t waste any time ripping the plastic wrap off the box and pulling the lid off. This was going to be a game dripping with theme, and I couldn’t wait to see how they brought it all together in what would hopefully be a fun game. I had followed along with their updates and read the many fictional short stories that helped flesh out the world. More than any other game I have bought or kickstarted, I was excited to open it up and look at the components even more than I was to play the game. ![]()
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