A Touch of Evil - cooperative game

I think it's about time I wrote about A Touch of Evil. I played the game couple times to be able to speak about it, however each of the time, I played a cooperative game. I'll devote two posts to the game, one to the cooperative mode I know quite well by now and one to the competitive mode when I get to it.

So the game's background is somewhat reminiscent of Arkham Horror. There is one big bad and the players are in roles of investigators who walk around a town of Shadowbrook and gather investigation tokens (clues) about the big bad's presence. When they feel ready, they go and challenge it in a showdown and kill it for good. In the meantime, the big bad spawns minions, kills town citizens and wreaks general havoc, slowly growing more and more powerful, so the investigators can't take forever to buff up or the evil will engulf the town.

three lone investigators

Okay, so it sounds like Arkham Horror but there are some differences. Mainly, the system is easier and cleaner. First, the investigation tokens work like money and information. You gain it on scenes of the big bad's (the Villain's) crimes or whenever his influence does something. Just imagine they are like non-human footprints or a tuft of hair or coffins with fresh soil - clues like that. You can use these to do a lot of stuff - from buying items at the town's smith to deducing where the Villain lives. They are the single currency of the game, a simpler concept than AH has. Also the designers tried to keep the number of card piles to a minimum, however they still stuck on 8, 12 if you count supporting types of a low number of cards. Next, the investigators cannot die, they just get knocked out and lose a number of items/allies/investigation, so there's little raging over that too. These are perhaps the main differences, there are many more I'm sure, but let's get on with the description of the game.

The game plan is simple - there's a town in the middle and 4 corner locations - the manor, the windmill, the olde woods and the abandoned keep. While the town is made of places like a doctor's office where heroes can heal or the blacksmith's shop where they can buy various items, the corner locations serve as the places where they go explore and investigate. Exploration of these locations can yield some cool items or get you allies but it can lead to a fight with a villain's minion too, so explore at your own risk.

Exploration of all locations is encouraged as your hero can usually carry only one item from each location, however, in my experience, there's never enough time for that. At the end of every round, after all players have played, a mystery phase occurs when the Villain does something bad - kills an NPC, summons minions or provokes a mass hysteria in the town. There's this thing called Darkness track which symbolizes the Villian's power and boldness and his actions usually push it from 20 to 0 and when it gets there, the game ends and the heroes lose. As it progresses, the Villain gets more and more powerful but he gets more reckless too and it is easier to track him down. To find where the Villain resides, the heroes must first buy a lair card which costs 12 investigation at the beginning of the game but later it can be purchased for 3 investigations - the Villain leaves more clues to its whereabouts perhaps.

there are crows everywhere

As you can understand from the previous paragraph, the game totally supports role playing. The stylized photos on every card and the level of characterization of the heroes do come a long way when you want them to. Even the Villains, of which there are 4 in the base game - vampire, werewolf, scarecrow and a headless spectral horseman, are wonderfully designed. Each of them makes a different kind of trouble - scarecrow spams the board with item-stealing crows, vampire summons packs of cowardly wolves, the horseman rides around the town and attacks everyone in his way... Each Villain has his own minion chart and a set of abilities that makes the monsters and event you'll come across during each playthrough a bit different. There is a lot to the Villains and there's a great number of fan-made villains who sometimes offer a very unique game experience if you ever get bored of the official ones (I'm looking at you, Cheshire Cat).

In the cooperative game, heroes work together to dispose of the Villain. In this mode his base health is multiplied by the number of the players, so it usually starts at 15 but I can assure you that it grows gradually. The heroes can heal each other and swap items, which kinda makes the game easy even for the beginner players. I would recommend playing the advanced version of the game which adds more threat in deeper rules for the minions and some extra rules to the gameplay like passing a skill check to gather each investigation token but in my opinion it makes it more balanced. Otherwise the heroes have no trouble getting buffed up and the Villain can only wait until it's slashed to pieces.

Heinrich and Katarina

The game has its flaws. I found the amount of dice rolling sometimes irritatingly near-confusing. Rolling dice is the main system that's used to resolve anything. In a fight you roll the number of your total attack and the enemy does the same. Then you both get your wounds and fight again (or flee). BUT sometimes you can have an item that can protect you from receiving a wound, so you roll in you've been protected and then perhaps you roll once more to see if the item gets discarded or not... Add in some skill checks that work in a way when you roll a number of dice equal to the number of your hero's skill and if you roll at least one 5 or 6, you succeed, and you'll be rolling forever. I found the final showdown, when the heroes are pack with items and abilities like this, especially heavy on rolling and it definitely helps to have at least one person in the group that supervises all the rolls that are necessary.

The cooperative game got criticized for being a bit too easy and I have to agree with that. In my group we have yet to play a game against a Villain that would be a serious threat (the DLC Dryad came closest to that), but at least we know now that the advanced game is a way to go. Also, there's a special mystery chart (special as in used for coop games only) that needs to be resolved before every mystery phase that adds a layer of danger to the game but I found the revised, longer chart that comes with the expansion (or can be downloaded here) better, more challenging. Even though it adds two extra dice rolls :D

So, that's it. The cooperative mode of A Touch of Evil. I can recommend it to every AH fan who gets a bit tired of 5+ hours session to play this shorter and perhaps somewhat sweeter game and of course to anyone else too. I'll be back soon with more on the competitive mode.