I've always found this to be a very punishing game. 

We were playing the other day and discussing how we thought it was very difficult because your health is represented by your cards, which in turn must be discarded to do anything. 

Need to pick up a weapon? Take damage. Need to heal a friend? Take damage? Need to run somewhere or shoot at someone? Take damage. 

We thought it would be much better if the player's health was measured sepearatly from the number of cards in your hand. 

With tokens representing health or just a d8 faceup representing your health. 

Dissasociating losing health with everything you do would make the game make more sense (especially in terms of emulating the video game) and play easier. Maybe I just suck but I've always found it to be fun, yet extremely difficult to survive. 

Any thoughts on this? 

Don't think of having to discard for an action as losing health, look at it as the COG exerting himself and getting winded (less able to perform at maximum), especially if you try to do two or three things besides just your normal action(s) for the turn.

Dam said:

eeehhh. I guess. Picking up a gun shouldn't really be that physically taxing. I don't think you shouldn't have to give up a card for it, i just think health should be measured differently. 

Everything would remain the same except health isn't tied to cards. Discard for things as you normally would. 

it still doesn't work right for me. I think the game is very punishing

Have you played the video games? Basically any time your head pops out of cover, you're taking incoming fire. Might not be physically taxing at all times, but mentally for sure.

Besides, game isn't that hard. I have a 39-16 record after 55 plays, four games with 1-COG, rest 2-COG games.

And there is of course the argument that what the hell are hit points anyway? If someone has 8 hit points, how are they measured? GoW (and MEQ, which has a similar mechanic) system makes much more sense than arbitrary hit points and losing them, but nobody seems to have issues with hit points when they are called hit points.

Dam said:

I guess I just suck at this game. I've always found it to be pretty hard. Any tips? 

Stay in cover, use Follow (esp when Dom Roadie Runs), guard. Guard, guard, guard. Screw dodge, guard, guard guard. Dodge should be the latter choice. While it might feeling like gaming the system, it's better to leave 1 Wretch alive than face the spawn 2 Wretch at each EH within 4 spaces AI card.

To paraphrase Tuco from "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly": When you gotta guard, guard, don't dodge.

I agree. I really like this game, but find it frustrating at times as you have to discard health to do anything. It does make it difficult when you have little health and have to decide to pick up an item, heal a team mate or perform an action etc. I've got a few other games that use a hand of cards as your health e.g. Level 7: Here, you don't actualy have to discard cards to perform an action (they are used to adjust stats/bonuses etc), but you do lose cards when taking hits. However, during the game there are places that allow you to pick up cards/heal to give a bit of respite.

As a variant, you could place 1 or 2 tokens on the map that allow you to draw up to your max hand limit or draw 2 cards etc. to represent a 'healing station', with each cog only being able to do this once…just a thought if you find the game tough. However, if the game was a complete walkthrough it would just be a run and gun with no real need for tactical play. Maybe just a slight tweek in the rules will make it more enjoyable for you.

I won't go into the debate of what your cards really represent (the game works so well to me that it's pointless), but I wanna comment on the difficulty of the game.

It's not a game to simply attack, roll dice and mow opponents down; it's a game to move strategically. You gotta know when to advance and when to fall back. The AI is really tough, so if you try to kill everything before trying to achieve the mission's goal, you might find yourself without ammo, surrounded and outnumbered. So you may want to game the system and go for the objective, dismissing dropped markers and "easy" kills.

And yes, I'm for Guard whenever you have a good chance of killing the Locust. Dodge is for when the chance of taking much damage is higher than killing the opponent.

RogueLieutenant said:

No way, it's an extremely challenging game. I lost my first 4 tries (2 co-op, 2 solo) before finally winning on my 5th try. I personally think the Order Cards doubling as health doesn't make much sense, but I still really like it. It makes GoW a bit different and a bit more challenging that other games I have with similar play (like Dungeons and Dragons: Castle Ravenloft and similar games).