The Dead Marshes: Refresh

It was not my intention to turn this blog into an exercise in ranking the scenarios. It was meant to be about understanding each one better so that I’d have a reference to how to play them should I return to them at some point in the future. It’s surprising that I didn’t contemplate it until I was several scenarios into the project. And yet, when you consider that it didn’t occur to me until I had reacted badly to a particular scenario, it’s not surprising at all. The most popular restaurant reviews are those where the writer gives the unfortunate establishment both barrels.

What does all this meandering tell us about The Dead Marshes?

The Dead Marshes: Quest

Throughout I will refer to the Tactics/Leadership and Lore/Spirit ‘players’.

The Dead Marshes: Planning

Card pool at the time of writing

Speaking of the time of writing, The Dead Marshes stands alone among the 19 that I have completed at Normal level at the time of writing. Yes, I have kept count. Yes, I am a bit odd. It is the only one that I have only completed one-handed, i.e. just using one deck. It is like A Journey to Rhosgobel in that I completed it at the first attempt. It is unlike A Journey to Rhosgobel in that there was actually some strategy involved in going one-handed for The Dead Marshes rather than the pulling a Homer that was beating Rhosgobel.

The strategy was minimising the likely damage for the unique element of The Dead Marshes, the Escape test. I was going to paste the entire text relating to Escape tests in the manual that came with the scenario, but it’s probably simpler to link to the pdf. Read it? Understand it? Good, we’ll move on.

Oh, okay. To understand the Escape test, let’s look at the quest cards: