Ye Olde Inn

by **Pancho** » November 19th, 2018, 3:14 am

The Yeti attack rule is completely broken. Especially in the solo quests. I have no idea what they were thinking!

I play it that the Yeti takes 1bp from his victim each turn from the hug, but the victim can break the hold if he rolls a successful hit using his starting number of attack dice, I.e no weapons.

Pancho wrote:The Yeti attack rule is completely broken. Especially in the solo quests. I have no idea what they were thinking!

I play it that the Yeti takes 1bp from his victim each turn from the hug, but the victim can break the hold if he rolls a successful hit using his starting number of attack dice, I.e no weapons.

That's just it, I don't think they were putting much thought into this at all. Many of the quests from the Original System, Keller's Keep and Return of the Witch Lord all have patterns or themes to the board layout, which is completely lacking in the later expansions (especially MotM and FH). For reasons not entirely known the expansions in the United States were rushed through without proper playtesting. In the next couple weeks I'll be running through the Frozen Horror and make some suggestions to fix some of the bugs. Asides from the solo quests there may not be that many since the heroes are allowed to hire mercenaries.
As Pancho stated, perhaps 1BP loss in the bearhug would be preferable over the 2. However there's a big part of me that likes the idea of a hero being able to fight out of the bearhug with a dagger, it makes this otherwise useless weapon much more important.
In addition, I think it would've been pretty cool for the game makers to have made an additional set of ice spells for the Wizard or Elf's use: Chill, Ice Storm and Ice Bridge.

by **wallydubbs** » November 29th, 2018, 2:25 pm

The Admiral wrote:Incomptance is not the sole domain of the US, and I think someone else nailed it in another thread that the lack of playtesting was an economic driven error.

So I checked into the economic factor and I think it brought me a bit closer to the truth:
Although there was a bit of a recession at the time, Milton Bradley was actually doing pretty well, providing Hasbro with 20% of its revenue, compared to all the other subsidiaries it was actually one of the better companies.

However i came across 2 events regarding Milton Bradley that may have had significant influence on game production. In late 1991 Hasboro bought Tonka (the toy company) and its subsidiary, Parker Brothers went with the buyout.
Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley were rival companies for years, competing with eachother on who can produce the better board games, but suddenly within 8 years Hasbro bought both of them.
Milton Bradley's American production center was in Springfield, Massachusetts and Parker Brothers' was in Salem, Massachusetts. It was convenient to merge the two and Parker Brothers spent the rest of 1991 and most of 1992 moving to Springfield, moving in with Milton Bradley. Staff at Milton Bradley would've cut back from production in order to make room for the merge. This could've prevented Milton Bradley for releasing the Elf and Barbarian quest packs sooner, but not why they were pushed without a playtest.
It wasn't Battle Masters, as I suggested before, that was already produced and the bugs had been worked on in Europe. They didn't need to spend any significant amount of time on it.
It was Disney, they pushed contracts with Milton Bradley on creating a series of board games. Disney was never able to collaborate with Parker Brothers until after this buyout.
I'm sure the game makers would have tested Mage of the Mirror and Frozen Horror if they had more time on their hands, but there was more money to be made with Disney contracts and the collaboration with Games Workshop was coming to an end... The reason though... I'm still not sure of.