| Non-Standard Rules

It's a fairly unique system, and kudos to the chap that figured and balanced it out - I THINK it's the same guy who did Warhammer LCG and Cthulhu LCG?  Definitely a smart genius.

Anyway, there are a lot of weird intertwined systems at work during the game, and once you struggle through like 3 turns, you pretty much understand wtf is going on, and then as soon as you walk away, you forget it all and need a refresher.  It's seriously not that hard of a game once you 'get it', it's just the getting it part that's tough.

The whole game boils down to not letting your threat hit 50 before finishing the scenario.  Each turn, a certain amount of threat exists via locations and enemy cards hanging out in the staging area.  If you did nothing, ALL of that threat would be added to your threat and the game would be over pretty quick.  So to minimize the threat you can match it by using characters that have questing points.  Each point of quest reduces the amount of threat you take by one.  Also, any enemies you are actively fighting (which can last multiple turns), the threat is reduced by that amount as well.  Finally, you can travel to any ONE of the locations in the queue and further reduce the threat by that card amount.

If you happen to have more quest than threat, you then can begin applying progress tokens on the active quest card.  Most stages of the quest cards require some amount of progress tokens to be placed before you can advance to the next card in the scenario.  Any active locations you may have traveled too will sort of 'soak' your progress tokens and they must be played on the location BEFORE the quest card.

*intermission*

*Let's all go to the lobby, let's all go to the lobby...*

In a nutshell, combat happens in 3 stages.  First, enemy cards that have an engagement value that meets or beats your current threat will move from the queue to engage with YOU, not a character you control, but 'all of your characters'.  Next, each enemy will attack YOU.  You can then opt to tap a character you control to block the attack.  Compare attack to defense value, PLUS the addition of a random shadow card that may or may not affect the combat, then if there is any residual attack the blocking character takes damage.  If you choose not to block, all the damage must then be applied to a single HERO you control.  Note: undefended attacks can get nasty and are generally bad news.   After all the bad guys attack, any non-tapped good guys can then tap to attack back and can even  COMBINE their attacks on single enemies if you like.

After all your combat is over, you refresh your cards, move the threat tracker up by one, and do it all again.  I left out the bringing cards into play, because on first read through the rule I understood that, I didn't understand anything else after that :)

Anyway, that's an overly long post that was probably unnecessary but once I got started, I couldn't stop. Next up, "War and Peace".