"All Together Now: 'Sellswords & Spellslingers'" Topic

All Together Now: 'Sellswords & Spellslingers' and the Pleasures of Cooperative Gaming

I've always enjoyed a good competitive match as much as the next guy, but regardless of the game, I've always been partial to team play, and the best cooperative games put all of the focus on succeeding as a team. That's one of the reasons I was enthusiastic about getting Andrea Sfiligoi's latest release, Sellswords & Spellslingers (Ganesha Games), on the table for this month's Second Saturday Scrum Club gathering.

There's much to like about Sellswords & Spellslinger, and I go into a fair amount of detail in this blog post, which can be found at the link.

link

In the meantime, here are some photos of our first game, with many more at my blog.

Again, much longer overview and many photos at my blog, Scrum in Miniature:

link

Thanks for the review. I've been interested in finding out more about this game, as I usually like Andrea's stuff.

I like his stuff, too. In fact, his Advanced Song of Blades and Heroes was my introduction to miniatures gaming.

Have not had a chance to play these yet, but picked them up when they came out, and gave them a solid read-thru. I like how the elements come together. Very much looking forward to getting in some games.

Enjoyed your write-up. I am liking your approach to the random placement of critters. Love the idea of a border with a 20x20 grid on it, so that two d20s can generate "true" randomness.

When I plotted out how "random" the placement would be using 6d6 for the coordinates, I quickly realized that the placement was far from random.

The outer 6" border would get rare placement of critters (you would need either a 6 on 6 dice to even barely get placed that close to the edge on one side, or a 31-36 to get placed that close on the opposite edge). The next inside 6" band would have uncommon placement (rolling 7-12 or 25-30 on 6 dice is tough). The central 1' x 1' square would get the most placements (rolling 13-24 on 6 dice).

Do you suppose that was on purpose? That the intent was to have most critters placed in and around the central portion of the board?

I can see how your totally "true" random placement would be perfect for zombies, as there should be no rhyme or reason to their popping up. But perhaps for fantasy cooperative play, the designer wanted the opposition to clump in the central area of the board.

Just a thought.

I plan on making a 3' x 3' border with the grid as you showed on your blog, because I like having a border, and I like having a speedier way to set-up when it comes time for placing critters.

Oh … thanks for the tip regarding an upcoming zombie rules set. I will pounce on that immediately (as soon as it becomes available)!

It is random, just biased. It just is more likely it will put monsters centrally

The deployment of foes allows the PCs a chance to get onto the table before getting too involved in combat. As we discovered in one game, if you stay too close to the table edge, bad dice can result in a LOT of foes jumping on your PCs.

Update to above:

SJ wrote a scenario that was probably balance/hard. However I rolled the dice for monster placement… I'm known for rolling 1s. Lots of monsters started too far away from the PCs

This is because just because you've rolled combos that place the monsters in one area doesn't mean you can't roll that again- dice have no memory.

Propose solution: use dominoes instead of 2d6. The extremes will be taken out without chance of coming upon again, reshuffle every 14 bones (half deck)