Let me start by saying that I've never played a hold in the War series before, so that may skew my impression. I've always avoided them after seeing rooms with huge blocks of monsters on the H&S section. I don't usually think of myself as a fan of hoard rooms.
But I loaded this one up on a whim last night expecting to just spend five minutes poking around and spent a good 2 hours playing through most of it (I still have a few rooms left). It's surprisingly fun. The hoard rooms here are not your typical exercises in tedium. What look to be mindless rooms with huge blocks of monsters often have subtle underlying puzzles (and lynchpins even!) As simple minded as the rooms look, they are actually quite cleverly composed to force you to come up with a creative strategy. There's also a lot more variety than meets the eye. Rooms that look similar on the surface require drastically different strategies due to a slightly different placement of hot tiles, or the addition of a few mimics and a few dozen roach queens.
Every other room you enter looks to be completely impossible, and you find yourself drawn in in disbelief to just see how you could even survive a few turns. There are some really neat tricks with hot tiles, fire traps, squad horns (serious!), and bridges. Not to mention there are at least a couple of nice straight up, no hoard in sight, honest puzzle rooms.
If you've played holds in the War series before, obviously this post is nothing new. But for those of you like me who have always put the series off, consider giving this one a whirl. It's not at all what I expected.
____________________________
Links to neat forum tools that I always have trouble finding:
Click here to view the secret text
