Forums/ The 7th Continent/ Rules and Operating Points11 messages
Posté - Edité
It seems to me that there is an infinite combo. I'm posting to confirm that I'm playing everything correctly, I haven't missed an errata, etc. It seems unsatisfying to use it, so I won't, but I'd like the designers to fix it or say something like "we really do intend for you to use this if it comes up."

Here are the pieces you need:

1) Scholar skill that allows -1 card, +1 star to Handle actions.
2) Card 50: Terrocokus: Handle action while on Terrocokus terrain: Swap a card in your hand with a card in the action deck.
3) Be on a terrain card with Terrocokus.
4) Have the advanced skill card Restful sleep somewhere in your deck. (Rest action: 0+ cost, 2 stars required: Take 5 cards from discard and shuffle into Action deck, then discard this.)
5) Have an empty discard pile


And here's how you run the combo:

Get Restful sleep in your hand using Card 50 ability. Costs nothing and always works due to Scholar skill.
Get the Raft in your hand, then build it. (Rest works automatically for 2 successes.)
Costs 5, 4 cards in discard.
Play Restful sleep, using Raft, 3 durability left. 4 cards go back into deck, Restful sleep in discard.
Get Remember in your hand using Card 50 ability.
Use Remember to get Restful sleep back into your hand.
Play any 4 cards you want (make items, gain XP, draw more card 50, etc.)
Play Restful sleep, using Raft, 2 durability left.
Repeat indefinitely. When Raft gets used up, just get it and build it again, then keep going. As long as the discard pile never includes Restful sleep and all 3 Remember cards, you can always keep this going.

I've played 2 games so far, and I got the Scholar + card 50 combo in game 1 (which is already quite powerful to search through the deck). Now in my second game I got that combo again, plus I just drew the Restful sleep advanced action, which makes things go infinite, as far as I can tell. I can get unlimited XP, draw all of the card 50s, and build every item in any order I want.

Note that I also got the Artisan advanced skill in game 2, so I don't even need to bother rebuilding the Raft - I can just use Artisan to ensure it never goes away, which is actually relevant since I have some non-action deck items merged with the Raft at the moment.


I'm hoping this isn't intended design, and there's some proposed fix for it other than "just don't use it." Alternately, maybe it is intended, and it represents true mastery of living in the wild - you are completely self-sufficient if you manage to get that full combo assembled. Since I've only played 2 games and I've gotten part of the combo in game 1 and all of the combo in game 2, it just seems a bit too easy to achieve to me, but maybe I've just gotten lucky.

Actually, it's not hard to calculate the chances, considering the number of copies of card 50, and the number of advanced skills. I guess it would normally be relatively rare... but even a rare infinite combo could be unintentional...
Posté
Maybe you forgot that
in order to use the card 50 you mentioned, you need to swap a card in your hand with a card in the Discard Pile
Posté
Hmm. The card text is:
The active player may exchange 1 Skill card from their hand with the card of their choice from the Action Deck.


And since any non-Curse card in the action deck is a Skill card, I'm pretty sure this does work as written. Maybe the design intent for that card is to read "1 card with the skill keyword" instead of "1 Skill card" ?
Posté
Sorry, I misunderstood you. Maybe it is really an infinite combo.
However, as you mentioned, can you be triggered if you have all the needed cards (pretty rare).
Posté
That works as you describe I think. Don't have my cards in front of me.

Even without the full infinite, searching your deck at a terracokus for free with scholar is one of the most powerful things you can do. As long as there is a remember in your deck it gets any card you want. Being able to do that repeatedly basically whenever you want to sculpt your hand is ridiculous on its own.

There are alternatives to some individual parts. You can use Splint + Medical Examination instead of Raft + Restful Sleep, for example.

That is not the only infinite combo in 7C. There's another one with Dark Side that's much easier to set up -- you just have to have Dark Side in hand on a space you can sleep repeatedly for free. (You can set up on the main camp with 2 characters so you can cooperate on the sleep check and make it a 1/1 instead of a 2/0, which is covered entirely by the discounts on the camp. At some of the other sleep spaces you can do stuff with Raft or Obey, but that is the easiest way.)


It works because Dark Side puts the game in a state where there are no curses in the discard, which means you can draw as many cards as you want into your next check up to the whole deck + discard pile. It is impossible for sudden death to kill you if the curses are all in the deck.

The sequence:
Sleep, triggering Dark Side
5 curses in the deck, none in the discard.
Take a non-locked action, drawing the whole deck + discard pile. This could even be the same Sleep.
Get 50+ successes and choose any card in your deck to keep.
Your deck is empty. Everything is in the discard.
Dark Side
Repeat forever, getting 50+ successes on checks and finding any cards you want from the discard.

Unfortunately most of the action cards you'd really want to use, like Remember the Notes, are locked actions. You can still use Notes infinitely, but it is a more complicated sequence.

Dark Side
Take an action, draw the whole discard pile, keep a Serenity card.
Dark Side (the deck is nothing but curses now)
Take an action, draw the whole discard pile, keep Notes.
Dark Side (the deck is still just curses)
Play Notes, draw a curse, discard the serenity card to make it a success.
Dark Side
Repeat until you run out of 050s.

So you can build any set of items you want, get infinite XP and all the Notes and buy all the advanced skills. You do have to work around the fact that it leaves your action deck nothing but curses when you want to go back to playing the game, but that's also doable.

Get Infinite XP
Buy All Advanced Skills
Dark Side
Take a check, draw the whole discard pile, keep Fit.
Dark Side
Take a check, play Fit, draw the whole discard pile, keep whatever.
Shuffle 40+ cards into the deck, one for every seven in the discard pile.
(Optional) One last Dark Side to shuffle any remaining curses into the deck.


I think of them as being like cheat codes. Most people don't want to cheat in a solitaire/co-op game, and it doesn't really hurt those people that it's technically an option. If you're the kind of person who would use a secret god mode, because you think the game's too hard or just because you think it's cool that it exists and you want to see what it feels like to be overpowered, then it's good for you that it exists.
Posté
brisingre a écrit :
I think of them as being like cheat codes. Most people don't want to cheat in a solitaire/co-op game, and it doesn't really hurt those people that it's technically an option.
But that's the problem - it's not cheating at all. It's following the rules of the game. Is it cheating to use food to put cards back in your action deck? What about hunting a second time to get more food and then putting more cards back in your deck? Can I use Restful sleep once? What about using Remember to do it again? etc.

Of course I can define "infinite loop" as off limits, and anything short of an infinite loop OK, or whatever I want as a player. But that's a bit unsatisfying to me. Instead, I'd rather like to know what the designers intended - when balancing the game and difficulty, did they account for infinite loops or not? Are they intentional or not? If they are intentionally included, then we should feel free to use them. If they aren't intentionally included, we should avoid them and ideally have errata for those cards.

My feeling is that they are probably unintentional, but I wonder about that since there are clearly quite a few. I just found another one today using music cards, and I wasn't looking for it...
Posté
ira212 a écrit :
My feeling is that they are probably unintentional

I think so too.

ira212 a écrit :
If they aren't intentionally included, we should [...] ideally have errata for those cards.

My opinion is that a erreta could break another part of the gameplay. It's hard to find the perfect minimum change when so many cards that interact. A board game is not like a video game with several patches throughtout the game's life (and even in the video game industry, many editors don't bother to provide a perfect balance...).
So, I prefere to see these combos as cheat codes that I don't want to use but I enjoy when I find one by myself. 8-)

As a errata, I would just add a rule : "If you find an infinite loop, you can use it but without any shortcut of manipulation. You must draw and suffle as expected." ==> I think you'll use these tricks less often ! :D'
resource_fire Firebird resource_fire (ma ludothèque)
T7Continent : icon_succes DV, OG, LG --- icon_curse SI, [CD+SI] --- icon_success-left Histoire, Pénitence, Funéraille --- card_type_temporary_event [SI+TS]
T7Citadel : card_type_temporary_event
Posté
I mean, 'cheating'. It works under the rules, you're allowed to do as much or as little of it as you want. It's your game, it's just up to you.

A big part of 7c is discovering new strategies, some of them will make the game less fun if you use them. It's 100% your call how much you exploit them. There's a much bigger grey area than infinite combos, it wouldn't be possible to patch away all the bullshit you can do no matter what.

For example,
one of the curses is mostly a big XP grind where you spend increasingly-large piles of XP to advance. You're supposed to get this XP from, like, wandering around, visiting the guardians, making little sacrifices, basically playing the game normally with a slight focus on XP gain. But, obviously, there are strategies to do it much faster which leave that curse with pretty much no gameplay.

You can sail back and forth from Turtle Island over and over, doing the blood sacrifice for 3XP per character, drop the bloody statuses when you sail away, and then come back (with either the raft or the stool) to do it again. with 4 people in the party for max efficiency you get 12 XP per trip. Trips barely cost you anything and you only need 4 or 5 to do the whole quest at that rate.

You can also ignore spending XP on the quest completely and just buy advanced skills. Once you have a dozen or so purchased, you can go to the Goddess and sell them all back for 5 (or 6) each (using Remember to get the ones in the discard and drawing extra cards on checks to get the ones from the deck) and just do the whole quest there. You've got to be a little careful not to accidentally kill yourself doing this (the XP grind is not the end of the quest) but only a little, and you can finish the quest by spending less XP (if you buy cheap skills) and without the penalty of having to sink XP into the quest instead of advanced skills.

The former strat turns that curse into a very short repetitive grind. The latter turns it into a pretty much objectiveless exploration run where you can do the whole quest pretty much whenever you feel like it at the Goddess. So, what's intended? What's cheating? What's fair? What should you do?

The obvious thought is that the curse is meant to be an endurance run and the fact that there are more efficient xp sources to exploit is mostly accidental, but I don't think that's necessarily true. I think perhaps the actual challenge of the curse is to evaluate the efficiency of the various XP sources and come up with a cheesy strategy to get a ton of XP.

Nobody would call either strategy cheating. Clearly you're allowed to take those actions, no rule prevents you from taking them repeatedly. If you are trying to beat the game quickly or efficiently, or even just trying to beat it at all for the first time, they are fair.

Should you use them? That's up to you. I think most people will have more fun with that curse if you use it as an excuse to explore instead of trying to set up and execute a loop, but everybody gets their own enjoyment out of games. It seems you're like me and you enjoy finding broken/cheesy strategies in games, and that's 100% a legitimate way to enjoy The Seventh Continent.


Another example of something cheesy that not everybody agrees on the use of is the save feature. There are several places where you can save repeatedly to loot a treasure table, for example,
In the room in the dungeon with the cages,
you can save repeatedly to get the two bug cages and the tribal stool every run. Which is a pretty big deal, because it's Tribal Stool.


I support doing this. They gave you a button to unload events, it is fine to use it, I say. But a lot of people think you should only save if you plan on stopping your session.


Once I've spent some time with the expansions I'm going to try to make the most efficient/broken route I can to do every curse at once as quickly as possible. Stuff like this features pretty heavily in that route. I don't recommend doing some of the more game-breaking stuff like the infinite combos on your first casual playthrough, but really it is up to you. They make the game pretty easy, but it's always been pretty easy.
Posté
Thanks very much for your thoughtful reply, as well as your recommendation at the end of your post. I think a lot of what caught me off guard here is that I found 2 infinite loops in effectively my first curse (though I did do the PnP). So, I was wondering how other people felt, just to get a sense of the game and design intent.

In case you're curious, I decided that:
- The Terracokus card only allows switching a card with the skill keyword. This could have been design intent, and it breaks that loop.
- For the other music-related loop, I'll use it as much as I want on that specific terrain card, but once I leave, I won't come back to use it again. I also won't get any more copies of Card 50, since that's some of the most fun exploration/new content, and I don't want to spoil it all for myself on my first game.

Thanks again for your thoughts! Out of curiosity,
what's the name of the curse that deals with the XP grind?
Posté - Edité
Those decisions sound reasonable.

An Offering to the Guardians

is the XP grind. It is generally thought to be best-played alongside another curse, any other will do.
Forums/ The 7th Continent/ Rules and Operating Points11 messages