Ulaya Chronicles: Raptor Claw Island

The great mechanics are overshadowed by extremely poor attention to detail in scenario design, making for an unappealing co-op experience.

Just a mini-review from me: I've now played four scenarios, and I'm ready to put the game away and maybe come back to it in 6 months after the rules and errata get cleared. This was clearly shipped too early. I'm not talking only about the massive amounts of obvious mistakes on cards or even on tiles. I'm actually more turned off by the obvious bad scenario design. Specifically, some of the scenarios are designed in way that makes them trivial. For example (spoilers for scenario 3 and scenario 7): [o]In Scenario 3, you can just start by clearing the map, because enemies only get added one every two turns, and there are no In Scenario 7, you can just proceed carefully, and again clear the map quite easily. Both of these would be solved with the addition of timers. There are timers in other scenarios, so I don't know why they're missing here. It's as if the game was not designed with smart strategic play in mind, and the scenarios become completely obvious and boring if you put any thoughts to what triggers the heat card, and make sure to not do that. A bit of playtesting would obviously float these problems.[/o] Overall, it seems pretty obvious that this game was pushed out the door, ready or not, without playtesting -- the amount of mistakes in the actual cards and tiles makes this clear, and then the bad scenario design can;'t be excused by "it was meant this way" -- it was obviously not playtested. This is very sad, because a lot of the mechanics are really interesting: the combat system is cool, the abilities are cool, in general, the mechanics of the game, especially of combat, are really great. But the scenario design makes these mechanics moot, since it's too broken. This ruleset would form a great basis for a competitive game -- which I assume it is already, in the rest of the Drowned Earth series. But it just fails on the particular challenges required in a co-op game. Such a shame, since I was really looking forward to enjoy this game.

There’s a lot to like here but the rules are not well laid out or well drafted. The text size selected combined with coloured text and coloured backgrounds is poor. The absence of a walk through first learning scenario that is not part of the actual campaign is….frustrating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az7yM945W7c