u/whereymyconary

I picked up Dawn of Madness on the last year crowdfund with standee only to save space. Got the storage solution with it cause I end up buying the folded space ones all the time. I been waiting to properly unpack it until the storage showed up. To yesterday it all finally arrived.

My god I haven’t hated a storage solution so much before. It’s double the size of the two boxes it should be condensing. There is so much air in this box. It also doesn’t come with any directions for how to organize it so I spent most of last night playing if it fits it sits. This is the first one that I’ll be keeping the original boxes so whenever I get a 3D printer i can throw away the monstrosity and go back to the original.

Well I hope if someone is like me and wondering where things fits this will help them. Maybe they will not spend 3 plus hours going ‘here… no… maybe here.’ Or just doesn’t buy it all together.

I picked up Dawn of Madness on the last year crowdfund with standee only to save space. Got the storage solution with it cause I end up buying the folded space ones all the time. I been waiting to properly unpack it until the storage showed up. To yesterday it all finally arrived.

My god I haven’t hated a storage solution so much before. It’s fucking double the size of the two boxes it should be condensing. There is so much air in this box. It also doesn’t come with any directions for how to organize it so I spent most of last night playing if it fits it sits. This is the first one that I’ll be keeping the original boxes so whenever I get a 3D printer i can throw away the monstrosity and go back to the original.

Well I hope if someone is like me and wondering where things fits this will help them. Maybe they will not spend 3 plus hours going ‘here… no… maybe here.’ Or just doesn’t buy it all together.

(Very minor spoilers ahead)

I think this photo kind of summarizes my feeling of playing Evershade with the minis.

I recently finished the first introductory adventure and had some thoughts. I got all the bells and whistles with the intent to maybe paint all of it someday. I’m slowly getting through all of nemesis right now.

But playing the game with all the minis seemed like a great idea. Some of the minis look amazing and honestly one of Awaken Realms best quality prints I’ve seen. On the other hand as the photo illustrates its a complete cluster for who is who and often they’re so big i have to move them to even figure out what spaces they’re standing on which can easily cause a domino effect if I’m not careful.

I think for the next adventure I’m going to try to convince myself to use the standees for the monsters and minis for my team to simply help differentiate who’s who.

Gameplay wise: I played it solo with 3 characters and 2 animal companions. Since all of their ability and keywords were in front of me at all times I didn’t feel it was difficult to run that many Individual characters at once. Though I like multi hand in general and quite bias.

I felt like I basically played a very long winded pick my own adventure book. Including unpack, organize, set up, character creator, and first adventure I have a total of 33 hours sunk into the game already. Out of that time I had 4 actual combats, one scenario that altered enough to feel different, and the rest of that time was me sitting in front of the adventure book/app going through the story. Once in a while I would level up to pick new items or power. Which meant I got to roll better, or I would possibly have a keyword I’d need to help in a situation later on. The powers on the other hand almost never came into play since as I said before I only fought 4 times.

As for choices this is where illusion and reality get a little too mixed in my option. At the beginning there was a choice I really wanted to do. Mostly to see what kind of repercussion it would have but decided against it just in case it was vastly problematic. Which is a great sign of a choice mechanic feeling weighty. Later on I accidentally killed someone which I thought would matter. Not even a single NPC commented on his disappearance. Which was ironic cause i actually didn’t mean to kill them at all and would have liked some consequence or roll to bluff my way out of one but there was none. I did complete the quest after all.

Which leads me to the character creator. I love character creators in TTRPGs and in video games. I made 3 character for my first adventure mostly to simply make 3 characters. Just like a good TTRPG the choices feel like their weight behind them and the backstory associated with it gave my characters personality even if it was only to me. It’s the only for me bit that really became apparently by the end of my run. I chose the Blank mostly cause I loved the model, the fairy, and the rat. I figured someone somewhere would call us out for being a pack of freaks or something, but nope I was let into every area without any comment. Honestly didn’t feel it actually mattered at all other than the keywords their races came with but those weren’t exclusive to them. Example my blank had Large and my rat guy had Small. So did the fairy and the orc respectively.

The combat the very few times I had it was fun. If i had less character I think it might have been more tactical but with 3 pc and 2 companions it was a traffic jam of simply swinging. The maps that I experience at least were too small to really make any choices on placement outside of making sure my ranges were set up right. That said the card system of flipping actions and reaction is an interesting mechanic and did make me wonder a few times if it was worth doing A instead of B to guarantee I’d reset my actions before the next wave of attacks. As for the baddies they load the turn order bag so I just expect them to do a lot of punching first and then if my character survived I could punch back. One of my characters was a glass canon and died in every combat but did a few good kills each time before his eventual death.

Conclusion: I have mixed feeling to be honest. Out of the 33 hours I never had that feeling of just let it be done. I enjoyed the story and the very few combats were fun. If I paid for the standee version I think I’d been properly happy with the game. But at special edition pricing I can’t say that. I felt that too much of my time was staring at a newspaper print of a book or my phone to go through story entries. When I mostly wanted to see how my characters would level up for the next combat situation. I think for the next adventure I’m going to go in proper solo to see how that works and if less is more or if i wish I had my full party still.

Ps note on set up after it’s fully organized. It took me about 15 minutes to table the game with the save system trays. Pack up was in around the same amount of time.