After some delays, MM #28 has hit the main server with new challenges and a guaranteed AA winning drop. Battle 1: Jugglers by @Calm_Mind This battle is all about preparation, and since there is no time limit and your monsters always respawn you have all the time in the world to prepare. In order to finish the map, you need to have one copy of Flatten on every Flying Monkey through the use of Duck (which incidentally also means the Boulders have zero copies of Flatten to use against you, neat interaction!), three armor-removing cards on the Slimes to get rid of all copies of Made Of Stone in one round and finally one copy of Energize for the Servants to allows the Slimes to use all three armor removal cards. It's a battle with a lot of moving pieces, so it can be difficult to assemble all the pieces, but patience is the key and to one who persists the perfect set-up for a winning turn will come. Eventually. I really appreciate the amount of thought that went into making this puzzle function as well as the effort into making the map look convincingly circus-like, kudos to Calm_Mind for creating it! Battle 2: Aloyzo Industries Infiltration by @Maniafig Movement is the one constant among the three infiltrators in this map, each character has an assortment of movement cards and dodging effects which will come in very useful against the rather immobile enemies who slowly shamble towards you or patiently wait for you to trigger their traps or enter their scan zones. I've playtested this map many times and rarely do things go completely as planned, on my attemt on the main server I ended up winning with my Dog on the Victory Square while Alonzo hadn't even made it past the Guillotine Traps yet! It's a good idea not to overextend with your movement cards and always keep one in reserve just in case, your character are very nimble but equally fragile, and the enemies are all too eager to make use of that! I offer a virtual reality cookie to any smart cookies who Duck a Scan or block the spawn points of the Security Cameras to prevent their respawns. Battle 3: Aloyzo's Anniversary by @Kalin Perhaps I got really lucky on this map, the Cakes completely ignored the Guillotine Trap which really sped up the process. I might have missed some intricacies, but just bum-rushing the cakes and licking, chopping, sucking and stabbing my way through the food ended up working quite well. Congrats to Kalin for making this tasty map and congrats to Alozyo for launching the 25th iteration of Aloyzo's Arsenal! And of course congratulations to @Sir Veza for his winning AA item!
This is a valid strategy but it isn't necessary, you can whittle down each boulder over several turns with ranged attacks before finishing all of them off in one turn.
I enjoyed this whole issue of MM very much. $:^ J I saw how I needed to juggle quite early on, and had lots of Ducks that amazingly succeeded for me every time! $8^ b Round 4 or so, I had everything in place! ...except one Flying Monkey was really far away with a Flatten for some reason. Wait. What? Why did I do that? $:^ ` Okay, $F^ , let's try again. I knew I could just whittle, but this is the circus, you gotta do this right. Three Flattens, three discarders, and an Energize, let's go! Suddenly, my monkeys got tired and didn't want to Duck as much. Uh-oh. (Lol.) Some 10 rounds later, iirc, I had the set up, and the crowd went wild. $:^ D (On a side note, a couple times, a Boulder or a Flying Monkey couldn't respawn. Pretty funny. I decided not to devise any way to abuse it.) Spoiler: tips Save the Dissolve Armors for all you're worth. Positioning can go wrong for the Melee discarders after all, and the four corners are Impassable -- not Blocking -- thus can be LOS'd through. You generally don't want Acrobatic Flip as a newer card than Duck in your hand. You can have one monkey juggle two or more Flattens in-hand. $F^ J Don't merely rely on Rumbling Charge to reveal those boulder Armors for Pseudopod discards -- fire Acorns! $:^ ] I thought I was gonna be in for a grueling task for the infiltration until I saw what all was really going on. First try, I made some silly mistake or two and the rock traps dumped Difficult Terrain all over the place (incidentally lowering my HP) and let a "cemetery ornament" (too funny) crush in a skull. Second try, I did better for staying out of trap LOS and killing the Tombstones more safely. From there, it was just knock out one blade trap for everyone to get by swiftly, hold the second camera's position while hacking through the terminal to deal with Aloyzo's firewalls, have Alonzo bait the idols with his Jump Backs before everyone safely killed one, get the low-health dog way on down the hall, get Alonzo and Batford down the hall next round (never even dealing with the tombstone slowly ambling its way toward us), then pretty simply finish the last camera (via dog) and blade trap (via others) to knock on the crazy ol' wizard's door. Pretty neat. $:^ J Does that mean I get two cookies? $}^ b Speaking of Aloyzo, mmmmmmm cake! $:^ } So awesome to essentially get to play with Ready To Strike tactics in MM! $:^ D The Mud Terrain was wonderful of course, and the sheer prospect of Tongue Grabbing a werecake next to a Blade Bouquet was excitement in and of itself! lol This battle was easy, but delicious. $:^ b Hoo-wee, I wish I'd had Novice Obfuscation for some of my early Misadventures of Myx'd Mess'zh: Solo Elf Wizard. Tokenless Smoke Bomb, nice Trait, good low-level control, and no bad card let alone any serious Handicap (here's lookin' at you, Magician's Hat, ha ha ha)? Sign me up! $:^ b Good news is, new players to the game will have easy (Common!) access to this new item (via The Armory if not loot drops). Good job, Sir Veza, and thanks, Aloyzo & co.! $:^ J
Jugglers I liked the idea behind it but I think it would have been fine without respawns because having basically invincible characters takes a lot of the tension away from it. I think it would still be very doable without respawns and make you think more about your moves. Still, I'm certainly not going to complain. Aloyzo Industries Infiltration I really like these kind of "infiltration" style maps, like Home Run and Run the Gauntlet. I'm surprised people got all 3 characters through the traps, I just ran to the end with the dog while Alonzo and Batford huddled in the corner sniping Tombstones that got too close. It did take some lucky rolls from those Guillotine Traps though. Aloyzo's Anniversary The usual third scenario being a fun battle, as is tradition. Like Maniafig, I didn't think too much, just hit whatever I felt like, and somehow didn't lose any characters in the process. Some flavourful characters chosen (pun intended). Very cool item from Sir Veza too. Thanks for teaching me a new word.
Hahah, I didn't realize your monkeys respawn! so I concluded that using duck would be too risky... I just used the whittle down strategy - and then save up armor removal on the slimes, acorns for the monkeys, and energize on the servents
I assumed the same, but after I killed one boulder (whittle down method) and had it respawn I decided it was worth the risk and so went after stealing Flattens once I had 2 blocks or more in hand. Was lucky enough to finish it without losing anyone.
Jugglers Lol, yes, I thought this was the first level for a good reason. If the monkeys and slimes only have one life, then there's a real tension with keeping the boulders busy with your hopefully amorphous slimes, and balancing armour/blocks/movement as the boulders slowly whittle your monkeys away with short charges. So, like mckeen, I finished this on hard mode pretty quickly. Aloyzo Industries Infiltration These are always my favourite type of MMs - long set piece battles using some of the toys we never get to play with otherwise. Again, it was rather easy - I muffed the start badly and still got all three characters to the VP, albeit slightly scorched. Aloyzo's Anniversary Playtested this. Lots of fun, although the difficulty largely rests on whether the werecakes draw that 'generate slice on hit' card in the first round or not. Mine didn't until round 3-4, so one was dead and one was wounded before I started seeing substantial numbers of slices on the board. Love the work people put into these.
The Jugglers scenario initially had a time limit, which I think was the main source of tension, but I opted to remove that since it seemed like it could be too unfun for some types of players. I hope everyone enjoys the module regardless!
